April is the Cruelest Month
It did seem almost like a vacation with an old friend, at least at first. Loki had supplied our backpacking backpacks using my income card and I packed a few things, just enough for a five day trip. I had stashed a few books in the top for easy access, and I settled into the train ride just fine, flipping pages and digging into stories, recalling poems to myself as I stared out the moving train window.
Every so often I’d stare at the seat across from me where Loki sat in our compartment. He stretched out, long legs sprawled out over his seat and the seat next to him, armrest up, tray down, looking over his lists and maps, and papers, until they had been committed to memory. His hair would fall in his face and he would push it back, tuck it behind an ear, and it would fall again. He would repeat the process over and over and it seemed as if he was turning the pages of his thoughts, thinking them through like a book.
It was strange to sit by this man, to have known them only a few days, and yet be bound to them in some sort of clumsy mission, half of it to save them, and half to maybe have the chance to figure out why my twelve poems were embedded in the fabric of who I was and maybe figure out who was when I died, and how that shaped me here, now.
Loki never had much to say, we were mostly quiet and business like when we did speak, talking about lunches and dinners, passing cities and towns and fields, and the occasional observation of the world outside our moving windows.
That night, when it was time to sleep we slipped the armrests up of our respective seats, turning them into uncomfortable beds, covered ourselves with the thin train blankets. The train car had settled for the nights, and the noises outside our compartment had hushed as the rest of the train went to sleep.
“Autumn,” a quiet voice whispered across the compartment. “What do you remember?”
“Do you mean here? Or what I brought forward?”
“What you brought forward.”
“Not much, Loki. You know I have twelve poems. That’s it!”
“Do they have an order? A way they seem to line up?”
“No.”
“Do you remember what sequence you remembered them in at first?”
“No. I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at.”
“Maybe they are clues?”
“To what I was before I died?”
“Yes. Like each poem was a section of your life.”
“Maybe. I guess I haven’t thought of it that way before. Do you think you’ll ever know who I was before I got here?”
“I’m not sure. But I know if I can get out of this realm I’ll do my best to figure that out for you, to tell you want you want to know, if you want to know. You’ve always told me you don’t want to know anything about yourself, that you consider yourself fortunate that you didn’t bring much forward, but I’m not convinced.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s just something I see in you. Like you itch or ache because you don’t know. It’s not a sharp pain, it doesn’t stop you from functioning like it does for some people, but it wears on you. Tugs on you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I think he had pointed out the struggle that every single one of us who brings so little forward has to learn to cope with. I know that if I wasn’t curious at all I would never have been on that train, taken the risk of heading through Hel with him. He needed an escape route. I needed answers. There was no way to downplay it now that he had found the root of my motivation.
“How long have I been here, Loki? You say that you understand time in the way we can’t any more. Sometimes I feel brain damaged, like I have always existed here, and at the same time I have only been here a minute. I haven’t lost that sense of needing time yet like some people have and I want to quantify my existence, break it down into minutes and hours, but I can’t any more.” I paused, struggling to explain how some things I knew made sense no longer worked any more here in Hel. “And it’s not just me, it’s all of us here. We have no time by the design of this realm.”
He turned his head to face me, and his eyes flashed in the dark. “It has been seven years, seven months, and sixteen or so days since you died.”
“And you know that for sure?”
“I’m within three days one direction or the other. I don’t have the tools with me for a perfect calculation but I could give you one if I were home.”
“How?”
He flipped on the little light above his seat, and took out the notebook he had been writing in for the past few days. “Ok, Autumn, look here.” He held a strange calendar, and somewhere in the back of my mind something clicked, as if I had seen it before, had known it and had flipped through the pages, watching time go in a circle for years and years.
“Do you remember this?”
“Vaguely. It seems like there’s a shadow of something like that in my mind. I know I’ve seen it before.”
“This is the calendar that you used to use. On earth time is linear. Things count up, months pass in a circle, but the years forever tick upwards. 2012, 2013, 2014...”
“Ok. I think I remember that.”
“But here in Hel time is circular, it spins like a top, slows, wobbles, falls over, and then has to be set spinning again. Over and over. Someone has to make sure that things keep revolving here.”
“And who is that?”
“That is Hel.”
“Um?”
“Is this making sense?”
“Yes, in a way. I understand the analogy. I know what it feels like to have the days wind up faster and faster, and then slow to forever, and then fall over stopped. So how can I ever correlate this calendar, that works as if it was a top, and the one I knew before?”
“You’re not supposed to correlate it. It makes things miserable if you count.”
“But you counted for me. How did you do that?”
“Averages.”
“Explain.”
“I know that time is cyclical, circular here. I know that it takes an average of two linear earth years and four months to spin the top, wind it up, set it going, and watch it slow, wobble, and fall, give or take. I saw that you had recorded the days in that notebook in your kitchen, the speed of them, and I saw the pattern. I recognized it and I knew what spinning top to reference, so to speak.”
He switched off the overhead light, and we went back to our silent attempts to sleep, but I tossed and turned, as if this piece of information had somehow sparked a thought. I had only been dead seven years. I wanted to know if I was remembered. Missed. Maybe they loved me. Maybe they were thinking about me right now. How much did it hurt them when I died? For a minute the ache was unbearable, the knowing making the unknown so much worse. I took a deep breath and began to recite to myself, quietly.
“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm,”
“You can say it out loud, Autumn.”
I continued, “Covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee with a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, and went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, and drank coffee, and talked for an hour.”
“You don’t remember any of that, do you?” He asked quickly, cutting into my quiet reccitation. “You don’t remember summer or the whitewashing of snow or the seasons?”
“No”
“Watch for them. They’re here too, now that you know what to look for.”
“The spinning top? Variable time?”
“Yes.”
“I feel like I’ve been here forever.”
“Only seven years, seven months, and sixteen days.” He smiled, and I could tell even in the dark that he was proud of being able to tell me that, and that thankful I finally had nibbled at the bait he was offering me for helping him. At last we were on equal footing, and he was no longer simply taking from me. In his mind, it seemed to me, that for each piece of information about myself before I got to Hel I would take from him the more he could take from me without feeling in debt.