"The Story of My Life" · 4:19am Jul 13th, 2018
This is the autobiography of a fictional character from my novel On Getting to the Bottom of this “Equestrian Business”. It contains spoilers for roughly Chapters 18 - 27 of that story.
Appendix: “The Story of My Life”, by Kimiko Guiseman
I have no memories of my birth parents.
I have no memories of life before the War.
These two facts are not unrelated.
My earliest memories were of the orphanage, and of being hungry. The war was not going well. Every day the grown-ups would obsess about the results of one battle after another. Over time, the number of adults having any part in our lives grew fewer and fewer.
Nobody explained anything to us orphans. But we were not stupid. The boys believed the propaganda, and blamed everything on the Americans. The girls obsessed with the here and now. Keep the menfolk happy, we believed, and that would be enough to fix everything.
I didn’t think much of anything. After all, I was only six years old. I thought the bomb shelter was there to get us out of the sun when it got too hot.
August 9, 1945 was a sort of blur in my head. Most of what I choose to call memories are careful reconstructions, the result of thinking and imagining what happened tens of thousands of times.
I was out playing when the sky suddenly turned red. The sandbox I was in was now cobblestones. I had no idea where I was. Surrounding me were three menacing figures. I started to cry. But then one of the three kneeled down and offered me a gift.
I certainly remember the umbrella, given that I kept it for the rest of my life. I probably saw grown-ups using them way back in the winter months, but for whatever reason the memory I’m positive popped into my mind when it was first offered to me was of a propaganda film shown to us dozens of times as a substitute for entertainment. Each of the stereotyped enemies in the film acted like fools, so that film was the closest thing to a comedy that we ever got to see. The Englishman was there, under a permanent raincloud, hiding under his umbrella.
But this wasn’t an Englishman offering the gift. No, it was an American Markist, another stereotype appearing in the film. That one was a coward who kept getting in the way of the American Texan. Which to six-year old me meant that she wasn’t threatening.
The three of them were talking in English, which I didn’t understand, and pointing at me. There were some words I made out, or thought I made out. The only foreign word I recognized was “English” itself. The umbrella was accompanied by the Japanese for “message”—it turns out that it’s nearly identical with the English. I definitely heard “Nagasaki” and later “Hiroshima”—I was too young to know about the bombing that had occurred a week earlier.
And then I heard the most important part: “time loop”. Again, the Japanese and English versions of that phrase sound nearly identical. The three people were now arguing—one of them took back the umbrella. That one was another Markist.
The last of the three—an old “Texan”—ended the argument and gave the umbrella back to me, saying something “samurai” about it. That idea stuck with me, stuck really hard. From that moment I stopped thinking of the umbrella as an umbrella, and saw it as a sword, a magical sword designed to protect me so long as I just held on to it. The fact that it was stuck in the closed position did a lot to encourage this belief.
While I was still ecstatic over my “samurai sword”, the old man pulled out a strange device and took a picture of us. I clearly heard him call it an “instant camera”. The name was a perfect fit, as the picture developed itself in his hands. I demanded the new toy, and he handed it over. After photographing everything in sight, I managed to get a picture of all three of these strange people. The old man said my name and reached out for the photo. I relinquished it with reluctance, and he wrote on it before returning it to me. Since the writing was in English, I ignored it and tucked the photo away. I had already figured out that I wasn’t going to be keeping the “instant camera”. Out of the corner of my eye, the trio joined hands, the same pose they were in when this strange adventure began. I ran towards them in panic…
…And the whole world exploded around me.
I woke up in the shelter, days later. I eventually learned that I was found under the cobblestone bridge where the impossible scene had played out. Both my face and hands were badly burned. With nothing in the way of medical supplies to treat me, those burns soon turned to scars. And that was when I was rejected by my fellow survivors.
With the benefit of hindsight, I cannot blame them. Their world had fallen apart—for those believing in Shinto, the Emperor was their god, and He had failed them, signaling the utter collapse of civilization. In those dark times I witnessed once-revered old ladies being mugged in broad daylight, priests stripped naked of their golden clothing. As for me, my ugliness made me a living symbol of our defeat. The one time I dared to tell anyone of my tale, of being rescued by Americans, I was beaten and left in a ditch to die. I exaggerate—in my pitiful condition, I was merely pushed very gently. The fall was enough to generate the bruises. Someone tried to take the umbrella, but I held on too tight. Although it is a fact that nine hours passed before anyone bothered to fish me out of that ditch. After that experience, I stayed away from the other children as much as possible.
It was the general consensus that when the Americans arrived, the whole of Japan would be shipped over to the enormous country of America, there to become their slaves. The Emperor would probably get the job of using his tongue to polish the boots of the American President. It was thought that those who learned English might be spared the jobs reserved for animals.
The way that the children in the shelter were taught English was that we were each allowed to select from a small library of books in English, and then we recited the words together. One of the books was Peter Pan—its cover showed some children flying away from a city, never to return. That’s what I wanted to do: to fly away to America and find my three friends. So Peter Pan was the book that I chose.
Slowly, one word at a time, I got my teacher to translate the note on the back of my photograph. I spread the questions out so that I would never be asked the fatal question of why I was asking for the translation of those particular words. What I eventually ended up with was this:
Kimiko,
You are not alone. I will come for you, but it may take several years. And if not I, then someone I trust.
Be strong until then.
Gus
A few months later, the Americans arrived. They came not to enslave us, but to help us put Japan back together again.
Some of the children were re-united with their families. Of the remainder, most decided to go with the Jesuits—there was a history of Jesuit missionaries in Japan. There was also a history of the Jesuits keeping all other religious groups out, so now those groups found that few of the survivors chose to go to them for help. I was an exception—as soon as I found out about a Markist group camped outside the city, I marched right out to join them, with my photograph, my umbrella, and my copy of Peter Pan.
I made my goals very clear. I was going to speak English without an accent, and learn enough “American things” so I could go right to school in America as soon as I was adopted. The Markists of course took one look at my face and tried to prepare me for the possibility of spending the rest of my life with them. But I wouldn’t hear it.
Two years passed, which was just what I was told would happen. I welcomed new kids as they found themselves leaving the overcrowded Jesuit camps and trying out the emptier ones. And I made my way through the Markist library of books.
One day I picked up a book with a plain cover and the title The Time Machine. Up to that point, I had dismissed much of my experience on the bridge as a fever dream. Yes I had a photograph, but I never had much time to look at it, as I was convinced that being caught with it in public would lead to its loss, and without the picture how would I recognize my new parents when they finally arrived? So I just assumed that the light in the picture was the sun. I had bumped my head on the playground equipment, some American spies rescued me, and then I must have collapsed or something and they put me somewhere where they hoped I would survive the bomb that of course they knew was coming. But then I saw that book, and the title alone was enough to bring back a rush of memories.
“Time loop”. “Timestream”. I had heard both of those phrases being spoken. And then The Time Machine introduced me to the idea of time travel. The trio had spoken not only of Nagasaki, but also Hiroshima. By now the camps were being invaded on a constant basis by reporters, who said “Hiroshima and Nagasaki” so many times it blurred into a single word. More than once I heard one of them wish they could have been here when the bomb went off, to “witness history”.
Late that night I snuck out of my dormitory. I hid in a bush located next to a street lamp, armed with a stolen map of the city. I took the photo out and consulted the map, to find that the “sun” in the photo was in the north instead of the east. It was right where the Bomb was; in fact it was the Bomb, frozen in the act of exploding. My visitors were time travelers—tourists—here for the thrill and nothing else. Their promises were all lies.
In a rage, I tore up the map. I threw the photo to the ground, and tried to impale it on the tip of the umbrella. Then I swung the umbrella at the light post. I saw an “8” printed on a flap of fabric. In all this time, it had never occurred to me that there might be something printed on the umbrella as well as the photograph—I just assumed it was a decorative border.
Working my way around the umbrella, I finally deciphered its message: “All Prams Come from Kensington Gardens. 1735-1985.” For a moment, the far distant date further enraged me, being yet more proof that my rescuers had no intention of ever returning to this moment in time. But then something else struck me.
I raced back to my bunk and retrieved my last possession: my dog-eared copy of Peter Pan. There I confirmed my suspicion: Peter Pan had come from Kensington Gardens, a real place in the city of London. He had escaped from his “pram” when he decided that he never wanted to grow up. It was in Kensington Gardens that he met Tinker Belle, and it was from Kensington Gardens that he had found his way to the Neverland.
This was Fate, it just had to be.
My faith was rewarded the very next day. The Markist camp was visited by two Americans—the Markists had taught me to call them “white Americans” instead of “Texans”. They were going down the line of us orphans, looking at a strange picture. They both looked like they could be related to the “old man”.
They passed me right by.
“Wait, Gus!” I cried out as they were about to leave.
“How do you know…?!” he demanded of me.
I handed over my photograph.
That was enough for them to take me out to lunch. They were brother and sister, and they certainly weren’t time travelers. But his name was Gus.
Gus spent the lunch asking me questions I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.
Meanwhile I bonded with his sister, Goanna. And in the end she was the one who adopted me, not Gus.
This also took several years. It turned out that Goanna was single, and single American women weren’t supposed to adopt. She had to first marry the man she had been going out with for years, and then convince him to adopt me when he could have easily had natural children with her instead. In fact he did end up doing that in the years after my adoption, so that’s how I got a younger brother and sister.
I was ten when I arrived in America, although I was acting a lot older than most American ten-year-olds, especially ten-year-old girls. My mother was fine with this—she was just as atypical as I was, since she was trying to become a scientist. She supported me as I tried to fit in, and I supported her as she tried to stand out.
In school, I was treated as an outsider, but it was nothing compared to what I went through in the first months after the Bombing. I made friends by dint of being more patient than my would-be tormenters. My best friend was another outsider…a Markist named Sweet Winds. She always knew the right thing to say. Even though I didn’t tell her my biggest secret, she could easily tell that I had one, and that I needed to tell it to my new mother.
At first I was very guarded with my mother, worried that I might say or do the wrong thing and get sent back to Japan. As far as I was concerned, the guarantee that I would be safe really only applied if I was adopted by Gus (either one of him) or one of his two Markist friends from 1985. But eventually, when it became clear that she trusted me more than her own husband, I finally showed her the umbrella.
We had a long talk, where she made an effort to separate certain fact from speculation, but in the end was finally forced to accept that time manipulation had to be involved in my survival. She told me that her photo had come from an anonymous correspondent in Brazil. She got the P.O. box from Gus, and wrote a letter.
In return we got some magazines and a letter apparently written by the elder Gus. Mother didn’t want to show it to me after she read it, but I insisted. And that’s when I learned the stakes of my rescue—the fate of the world itself depended on a precarious chain of events that passed through Nagasaki in August of 1945. As I owed my life to that chain, I declared my readiness to do my utmost to serve it.
And so I pushed ever harder at my English skills, worked through college—to much less opposition compared to Mother, having picked a more traditional role for an American woman. I graduated, made a reputation as an English teacher for multiple age groups, and then packed up and moved to London, where I’ve lived ever since.
In my years growing up, I was visited by Gus and his second, then third wives. Uncle Gus never really got along with me. He once called me “the one problem he could never figure out”, and appeared to hold me personally responsible for that failure. I got along better with the wives, and later Gwen’s children by Gus.
In London I had to work extra hard to earn the respect of native-born English teachers, but I eventually managed to win everyone over with my enthusiasm, both for the intricacies of the English language as well as the achievements of English literature. Especially children’s literature.
And I visited Kensington Gardens a lot.
I thought and planned constantly, trying to work out the best way to get Captain Bridges arrested and prevent Pan Am Flight 103 from ever taking off. I thought I might buy a ticket and bring a dog in a carrier to get put next to the bomb, then make a fuss and get into the baggage area with a home-made version of the Captain’s transmitter—only that would get me arrested instead of him.
Another possibility was making an anonymous phone call, but what could I say that would lead to an emergency investigation instead of being dismissed as crazy? Dare I submit all the evidence I had, and hope somebody was willing to believe in time travel?
And then in 1978 I got the Captain’s daughter, Ruby, in my class. So I decided to do this the Markist way: I befriended the Captain, stood with him as his life fell apart, and made it clear that there was at least one person who would not let his family fall into poverty after his inevitable death.
It took six years for him to fully trust me. He told me where Gaddafi had relocated his family, and I showed him that they were in the line of fire, as I had known the entire time. And we laid our plans to turn the tables on the North African dictator. We enticed him into leaving recordings on the answering machine, letters with his signature, the whole plan laid out. And we got the address of the cottage on the Solway that Muammar Gaddafi had rented under a pseudonym and equipped with a telescope, so he could glory in the death of the American president from as close as he could get without suffering radiation poisoning. Our plan went without a hitch, meaning that his plans went all to pieces.
And that is the story of my life so far.
I do love it when a plan comes together. When a decent chunk of that plan is dumb luck and fortuitous coincidence? I like it even better. Sometimes it's nice to think the universe is on your side.