We moved away to Boise, where we tried to hide from the worst of it. We kept a low profile, got an unlisted number, and basically stayed out of sight. Evan went on medication for his depression. On the weekends we went hiking in the Sawtooth Mountains, and Evan took up charting abandoned mining sites and ghost towns from during the gold rush. That was a happy time for us, and I thought he was feeling better. The sojourn in Idaho reminded him that sometimes the world is a kind place, and all is not darkness and denial.
But he was feeling lost. He felt that he was hiding from the truth. I knew that he was feeling torn between his sense of duty to the past and his sense of loyalty to the present, to me.
I could not bear to see him being torn apart, and so I asked if he wanted to return to the fight.
We flew back to Boston, and things had grown even worse. He had sought to end history as mere history and to give the past living voices to speak to the present. But it did not work out the way he had intended. The past did come to life, but when faced with it, the present decided to recast history as religion.
The more Evan did, the more he felt he had to do. He would not come to bed, and fell asleep at his desk. He was writing, writing, constantly writing. He believed that he had to single-handedly refute all the lies and take on all his enemies. It was never enough, never enough for him. I stood by, helpless.
“I have to speak for them, because they have no one else,” he would tell me.
By then perhaps he was living more in the past than in the present. Even though he no longer had access to our machine, in his mind he relived those trips he took, over and over again. He believed that he had let the victims down.
A great responsibility had been thrust upon him, and he had failed them. He was trying to uncover to the world a great injustice, and yet in the process he seemed to have only stirred up the forces of denial, hate, and silence.
Excerpts from the Economist, November 26, 20XX
[A woman’s voice, flat, calm, reads out loud the article text as the camera swoops over the ocean, the beaches, and then the forests and hills of Manchuria. From the shadow of a small plane racing along the ground beneath us we can tell that the camera is shooting from the open door of the airplane. An arm, the hand clenched tight into a fist, moves into the foreground from off-frame. The fingers open. Dark ashes are scattered into the air beneath the airplane.]
We will soon come upon the ninetieth anniversary of the Mukden Incident, the start of the Japanese invasion of China. To this day, that war remains the alpha and omega of the relationship between the two countries.
. . .
[A series of photographs of the leaders of Unit 731 are shown. The reader’s voice fades out and then fades back in.]
. . .
The men of Unit 731 then moved on to prominent careers in postwar Japan. Three of them founded the Japan Blood Bank (which later became the Green Cross, Japan’s largest pharmaceutical company) and used their knowledge of methods for freezing and drying blood derived from human experiments during the War to produce dried-blood products for sale to the United States Army at great profit. General Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731, may have spent some time after the War working in Maryland, researching biological weapons. Papers were published using data obtained from human subjects, including babies (sometimes the word “monkey” was substituted as a cover-up)—and it is possible that medical papers published today still contain citations traceable to these results, making all of us the unwitting beneficiaries of these atrocities.
. . .
[The reading voice fades out as the sound of the airplane’s engine cuts in. The camera shifts to images of clashing protestors waving Japanese flags and Chinese flags, some of the flags on fire.
Then the voice fades in again.]
. . .
Many inside and outside Japan objected to the testimonies by the surviving members of Unit 731: The men are old, they point out, with failing memories; they may be seeking attention; they may be mentally ill; they may have been brainwashed by the Chinese Communists. Reliance on oral testimony alone is an unwise way to construct a solid historical case. To the Chinese this sounded like more of the same excuses issued by the deniers of the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese atrocities.
Year after year, history grew as a wall between the two peoples.
[The camera switches to a montage of pictures of Evan Wei and Akemi Kirino throughout their lives. In the first pictures, they smile for the camera. In later pictures, Kirino’s face is tired, withdrawn, impassive. ??Wei’s face is defiant, angry, and then full of despair.]
Evan Wei, a young Chinese-American specialist on Heian Japan, and Akemi Kirino, a Japanese-American experimental physicist, did not seem like the kind of revolutionary figures who would bring the world to the brink of war. But history has a way of mocking our expectations.
If lack of evidence was the issue, they had a way to provide irrefutable evidence: You could watch history as it occurred, like a play.
The governments of the world went into a frenzy. While Wei sent relatives of the victims of Unit 731 into the past to bear witness to the horrors committed in the operating rooms and prison cells of Pingfang, China and Japan waged a bitter war in courts and in front of cameras, staking out their rival claims to the past. The United States was reluctantly drawn into the fight, and, citing national security reasons, finally shut down Wei’s machine when he unveiled plans to investigate the truth of America’s alleged use of biological weapons (possibly derived from Unit 731’s research) during the Korean War.
Armenians, Jews, Tibetans, Native Americans, Indians, the Kikuyu, the descendants of slaves in the New World—victim groups around the world lined up and demanded use of the machine, some out of fear that their history might be erased by the groups in power, others wishing to use their history for present political gain. As well, the countries who initially advocated access to the machine hesitated when the implications became clear: Did the French wish to relive the depravity of their own people under Vichy France? Did the Chinese want to re-experience the self-inflicted horrors of the Cultural Revolution? Did the British want to see the genocides that lay behind their Empire?
With remarkable alacrity, democracies and dictatorships around the world signed the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium while they wrangled over the minutiae of the rules for how to divide up jurisdiction of the past. Everyone, it seemed, preferred not to have to deal with the past just yet.
Wei wrote, “All written history shares one goal: to bring a coherent narrative to a set of historical facts. For far too long we have been mired in controversy over facts. Time travel will make truth as accessible as looking outside the window.”