Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 by Various Page B

I had watched Adolph Eichmann die, so many decades after his well documented execution in Israel.
    At dinner with the guide I asked, “So how do you do it?”
    He rubbed his unshaven face, sipped some wine, and said, “Not to be missed, eh?”
    “Is it some kind of…therapy?” I asked foolishly. You could do as much with a story, play, or movie, but not in reality…
    He acted as if he knew me better than I knew myself; but I could only imagine actors and marks. The guide’s business was built on vivid staging, I told myself, nothing more.
    “How often do you do this?” I asked.
    “As often as anyone wishes,” he said. “You’ll see tomorrow.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Better you’ll see for yourself.”
    “Will I have to pay to go again?”
    “If you wish,” he said, “or not.” He seemed to have forgotten that I had not yet paid him anything.
    We went again early next morning. The cooler air was transparent. The old couple was once again with us.
    My own stirrings began to struggle, and I wondered whether there would somehow be someone for me today. The guide did not know, but sooner or later there would be, he had told me, even though I knew no names beyond the famous.
    “I saw no one in the mugshots,” I had told him.
    “Not to worry, they were all guilty.”
    He gave me his binoculars and I saw Eichmann fall for a second time, bloodying the brown dust of the trail; this time the old couple shot the fleeing guide.
    On the hike back the guide said softly, “Well, you see. The variants may be endless, but these old ones feel it may be a set number.”
    “How often have they shot this one?” I asked.
    “Six times, but they hope to get them all.”
    “They might always be there,” he explained to me at the hotel, “to die in one variant and wait for death in endless others.”
    They did die, it seemed, and I felt that by the logic of the assumptions we would not confront that individual again, only new variants, however many; a large number, or an infinity, bestowing the happiness of endless revenge on the deserving.
    A useless task, except for a punctuated satisfaction, sufficient unto the moment, which I could not quite accept when I learned this much. Today, in 2016, I told myself, most of the hundred thousand or more who had never been caught were either dead or near death, as were the thirty thousand…
    In my time, my history…
    But not elsewhere, where they could still die, continuing to suffer without oblivion; except that they suffered only momentarily. Did they feel anything, somehow joined to all their dying others in their degrees of guilt, if they felt any, perhaps as a passing uneasiness of premonitions as they hiked through the pass to their exile, dying in some and escaping in others…
    I thought of the hundred thousand or more who had escaped to live out their lives when I saw the old couple in the lobby the next morning, sitting with hands folded, with their lost ones alive in their brains, waiting to be avenged again…
    Our guide was in the bar. I slid in next to him in the booth and asked, “Tell me, are the bullets fired into the past?”
    “They would have to be,” he said, sipping his coffee out of a chipped porcelain cup decorated with a mountain scene. There was a chip in the matching saucer. “Into one kind of past,” he added.
    “Can we walk into it, the past, I mean?”
    “Never really went that far,” he said.
    “But if you let them walk on toward you,” I said, “wouldn’t they walk into the present?”
    “It never comes to that,” he said, “since shots are fired before it can happen.”
    He sipped some more, touching the chipped part of the saucer.
    “You know,” I said, “that you’ll run out of clients.”
    “Nearly so now,” he said.
    “How long have you been at this?”
    “A long time.”
    “And you know how it has to end?”
    “Unless I find younger clients. Grandchildren. I’ve been researching some.”
    “You checked on