| abstract
| - Back to Deja Vu's Character Sheet. One of the hardest lessons in life is learning that the older you get, the more you lose, until eventually you lose everything. Sounds simple but, learning this is not easy until it starts happening to you. You lose friends and family, wealth, your health; anything that is precious to you is just one more thing that will eventually fail. No one can simply tell you this; it just isn’t understood until you lose something precious. I grew up in the Midwest, small town called Benton Missouri. I was the youngest of 6 children. Two brothers and three sisters, on a decent sized farm. I was born June 28 1905, Armistice Day, well at least in 1919 it became Armistice Day. My brothers went to the Great War, and I remember working twice as hard when they left to try and keep the farm running. My sisters and mother helped, and my father would too, when he was sober. Mostly he drank all night and would get up around noon, hung over, and looking to hurt something. He was a mean drunk and that’s where I got this crooked nose. One night my mother tried to hide the booze from him, and told him he drank it all the night before. This had sometimes worked in the past, but he didn’t believe her, so he made a fist and swung at her sideways across her face. By then I was 13 and thought I could take the old man in a fight, I ran at him from behind and he spun around; before I knew what hit me, I was staring blurry eyed at the ceiling, my face was wet, I couldn’t breath through my nose, and the pain had me on the edges of blacking out. He leaned over me, threw a towel at someone outside my vision, my mom I think, and said clean him up. My nose never quite set right. On December 22 1917, we got a letter notifying us that my brother Jason had died in the war. Followed 5 days later by another letter, my brother Matt was also dead. What can I say about this? I was sad that they were dead, but really I was more saddened to see how much it hurt my mother. My brothers always picked on me, bullying me, but when I saw how my mother crumbled, it made me understand just how terrifying death can be, not for those that died, but for those that have to continue on alone. The following year was of course the dreaded Spanish flu. What the war had started the flu had finished, my mother died, and my sister Alice died along with her. 100 million people died in that epidemic, even more than the Black Death. It was the greatest medical catastrophe in history. I was at the funeral, I felt the world had ended, my grief was a millstone around my neck, and it paralyzed me, and crushed me at the same time. My father was stone faced and grim, and I could swear I saw a single tear roll down his cheek. After they were laid to rest, he came over to me and gave me this. A silver pocket watch with an inscription on the inside “Time is the king of all men, he is their parent and their grave, and gives them what he will and not what they crave.” He said it belonged to his father and was made in 1835. He told me he made a promise to mom to make sure I was taken care of, and he said he would quit drinking. The next 5 years were difficult, but rewarding. My father managed to quit drinking, and since my 2 other sisters had gotten married, just the two of us worked the farm. The farm was doing well, my father managed to hire ranch hands, and saved some money for me. He wanted me to go to college. In 1923 I enrolled at the University of Missouri and studied the law, and crime. I then went to the Police Academy and was recruited by the FBI. I eagerly accepted and relocated to the San Francisco field offices. In San Francisco, I met Lara. We had a brief relationship, but I didn’t really love her. She was too demanding of my time, and I wanted to make a name for myself in the FBI. We broke up after dating for only a few weeks. Of course when she came back a few months later I was surprised to find out she was pregnant. I was trapped. I would not allow my child to be born out of wedlock, but was not really in love with Lara. I proposed to her formally and we got married quickly. Then December 25th 1930, my daughter Caroline was born. There were problems from the start though. She had a low birth weight, and was sickly. Added to that I had the stress of being in a marriage I did not want, and I was suddenly transferred to the new FBI taskforce for prohibition. It seems the old prohibition agents with the Dept. of the Treasury were corrupt, and Hoover was going to have the FBI take over to end the corruption. I did well as a prohibition agent and was making several high profile busts. Then when my daughter was 3 years old, her health took a turn for the worst. She required surgery, and I just did not have enough to pay for the operation. Somehow word had gotten back to the Mafia, and they gave me a generous offer. I would turn down the heat and mislead a few investigations, and they would provide me with the money I needed to take care of my daughter. I accepted. A few deceptions were all it took, and it didn’t take long for me to get caught. My partner in the office Michael Sanders knew that information kept disappearing and he followed me to a meeting with one of the mobsters. He exposed me, and I was arrested and shamed. I had betrayed the FBI, and my daughter ended up passing December 25th 1934 despite the operation paid for with bribe money. It was all for nothing. My wife left me while I was in prison. I was segregated from the general population and I had a light sentence and was out in 6 years. 1939, I started over from scratch. My old life was gone, and I had nothing left to live for. I went back home to find the farm abandoned, and went to visit my mother’s grave. I then saw that my father had also passed away while I was in jail. There was nothing to go back to, just a dusty worn out farm. I drank myself into a stupor and wandered from town to town. I became homeless, a drifter riding the rails. One night while sleeping near a rail yard a group of kids came by for some fun, a favorite past time, beating up the hobos. I was assaulted by a group and beaten into near unconsciousness. They found my pocket watch and were going to leave when out of the corner of my bleary bruised eye. I saw a black man intervene. He was outnumbered but he moved so fast. He made quick work of the kids and took the pocket watch from them. To my surprise he gave it back to me and called an ambulance. I never would have thought a black man would save my life. I remember waking up in the hospital and I asked the nurse what became of him. She said I was alone when they arrived. I looked to my left and saw my pocket watch on the stand beside the hospital bed. I reached for the watch and saw that it was broken during the fight with the minute hand stuck at 11:42. I tried winding the watch when I was suddenly overwhelmed by visions, smells, sounds all my senses were immersed in a different scene. I could feel the rain dripping on my skin and I saw the fight in rail yard again. I watched again from outside myself as I was beaten and saw the watch thrown to the ground where it stopped. My senses returned and I was in the hospital again. Was that a dream, I looked at the watch again, 11:42. I twisted the date now forward as the day was set wrong. Suddenly I saw events of the hospital room pass before my senses. It was clean and sterile and life burst into the room I was being transferred from a gurney to the hospital bed I was now laying in, several hours passed in seconds as I watched myself rest in bed. My hands shacking and soaked with sweat, I twisted the knob faster and faster and moved several years into the future. I saw countless patients come and go, many recovered, some died. I watched the nurses age before my eyes, saw young doctors fresh out of medical school, grow old and then my hands rattling looking down at the watch saw the date, March 3 1999. Then I remembered to breath and I was back in my room again. “What year is it, I asked the nurse.” She gave me a pathetic look and said “Mr. Brown it is 1940, you were beaten unconscious last night in the rail yard.” That was when I first realized I was a talent. This brings me back to my original statement. Although I have these powers over time, I know that these too are a loan at best, and that it is just another thing for me to lose. I feel I have been offered a second chance to make a difference, and maybe I just might have a spot back at the FBI after my service is over. At the moment though it still seems like a pipe dream.
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