4

Who was Henry Lawson anyway?

At some point in his life, his dad had called him Hank. And then something happened and he never let anyone else call him that.

And then a time and circumstance came when he became known as Hando.

And even his best mate claimed to never knew why or how.

I have been home for three weeks now. I stare at pictures of Mark and feel badly about Hank, as if he was a child I had and frittered away. It does not seem possible to me that I met this man named Hando and that there was no reason in the end.

No grand design.

And that all I am left with again is an empty bed where there used to be life.

Perhaps ... perhaps if I search harder? Nothing in the Time Dweller's Handbook points me in the right direction. What would Mark do in this situation?

He would turn me in the direction he knows I want to go in anyway. He would applaud my curiosity to understand.

I fly to Australia the next week. I am determined to find Henry Lawson in my own time, not in the past where I met him. I want to look in his older eyes and find out whatever happened to him after I left his past. I want to help him make his life better. But I will not affect his past because his past was his to live in the way it first came at him. What I will do is help his present and then let him write his own future.

As I walk off the plane in Melbourne, I am struck by changes. The hotel I stayed in is now owned by another company and has been refurbished. It is newer, more streamlined. The quay is a bit too clean.

Why I didn't do the initial name searches for Henry Lawson when I was back home in the U.S. is simple. This is a trip of mystical proportions. If I am to ever make sense of the original trip I made here that took me into the past, this search for Henry Lawson of my present time must be done with due reverence.

I walk to the library against the advice of the woman at the front desk. She is right, of course. The roads are far busier. The sidewalk I take leads past shops that have degenerated in appearance since my last visit. But this is how I feel it should be done.

The library's computer system is not that modern. But I use it to search for a phone number or address that is current. There is none. I do a more extensive Internet search; it fails to hit on any Henry Lawson I think could be this man I seek. I search on the name Hando but it turns up nonsense references to computer software from a firm in Hong Kong.

I search the library's own records and they lead me to a digitized reference list that includes databases of police records, newspaper articles, death notices, marriage certifications, reverse directories. I find his criminal record. It stops in 1992, when he was wanted for murder. It was maybe six months after I left him.

Murder.

It should not surprise me this is where his trail leads. I had expected any crime from theft to assault to murder. But it still shocks me that someone I'd held a few weeks earlier would take someone else's life six months after nearly taking mine.

The police records do not show disposition of the warrant. I wonder if he is still on the lam, all this time later? Has he really not committed any other crime in all this time? Is he in prison? That seems more likely.

Next, I search the newspaper index. It is impossible, really, as none of the articles from 1992 are digitized, when I would presume coverage of the murder he apparently committed happened and might have been written about.

I flick on the recorded death statistics section. I type in his name.

It takes me a long time to stare at the screen and see the name. To comprehend I have come all this way, again, for nothing.

He died.

That is why there is no disposition for this arrest warrant. Because he died and never came to trial.

I study the date of death and then go off to search through microfiche of the newspaper, to see what might have been reported. It is a small blurb. It probably only made the newspaper because he was a Skinhead and was killed by another Skinhead before a busload of Japanese tourists and after murdering a gas station attendant the day before his own death.

At my hotel, I am violently ill.

The next day, I go to the police department to ask about what happened to the person who killed Hando. It was Davey, as I learned from the newspaper, who was arrested. I want to know what prison he's in. I want to go see him. I want a reason for me being here.

Davey, though, is also dead.

He'd killed himself in jail about three months later. Hung himself with a sheet made into a noose. 

So there is no answer in the end. Only a fruitless life with no one to mourn him.

Or did Hando leave anyone behind to mourn him? He is buried in a pauper's cemetery with no headstone. Who is left? Does he have family?

The police officer I talk with wants to understand my interest in this old case. In something no American should care about; a life of no worth.

But he had worth. I know he did. At some time in his life, he had worth.

I look over his file, left open on the officer's grey metal desk where I dropped it when the officer handed it to me initially.

There are few details still left to provide me clues. Date of birth. Place of birth. Mother's name. Father's name. Mother's last known address as of 1985 when he'd been arrested as a juvenile for shoplifting. No one ever claimed his body so there's no telling where she is now but something tells me that starting with her is the place to begin to understand. I just don't know how to find her in this time.

That night in my hotel room, I take out the key and go back to Melbourne 1985. I go back to 1985 to find answers I won't find in files. I go to the last firm lead I have to Henry. To find out when he became Hando, if I can. To understand why I ever met him.

I would wish I was invisible. But I am not.

It is a rough neighborhood of tenements, odors, kids running wild, toughs on the corners who walk behind me and stand waiting as I walk into the building where Henry's mother lives in this time.

She calls him Hankie. I call him Henry Lawson and tell her I am a court appointed social worker. She is mostly drunk. She asks me about my accent; I lie; she is too drunk to do more than look at me with puzzled eyes when I tell her I am there on a foreign exchange program between the courts of our two countries.

It is a blessing she is too drunk to think clearly enough about how outrageous all this is. It is a damned shame she is too drunk to do more than numbly answer my questions about his schoolwork problems and turns belligerent when I ask about his childhood and his father.

But it doesn't take much to get the picture. 

Hando is the child of disadvantage.

I was once a sociologist. This is what I was when I met Mark. It was why I was first recruited for my Time Dweller collective. We had started as scientists but we ended up absolving our curiosity in traveling to other times by cloaking our dalliances as research. Mark had always been more clear-eyed than me. It was why he worried over what we really sought and when we would ever feel we'd found something that could benefit any intellectual understanding of the human condition or any other science.

He had spent the last year of his life encouraging me to truly think about the research again. To not be seduced by the pleasure of Time Dwelling. To have a reason for it all in the end.

As a sociologist, I don't need much to take the putrid facts I gain from Hando's mother and see through her lies to understand his background.

Is it enough to say he is a member of the "underclass" of this society? To know his father died a violent death, leaving behind a child and wife who'd been clinging, like him, to a hard culture of unstable family units sustained by social welfare? To know Hando was formed even when he was known as Hank, when he was living with people whose sense of social citizenship had already disintegrated?

To know that as he grew older, he was incubated within a group that felt a stigma attached to their class and who had a marked loss of pride for what it meant to them to be Australian in a country in which they felt such alienation? To be raised in a family environment where the impoverishment was material, physical and psycho-social?

I can cite the pattern as well as any of my past profession: Hando the Skinhead fit a symbiotic pattern of marginalized background compensated for by conduct that intensified his underclass status.

His mother's hard face spoke volumes. There were no pictures of Hank anywhere in the cramped and sullen apartment. She listed for me chapter and verse of his transgressions. I imagined her rage-sotted drunken voice railing at Hank all these years of childhood. I imagined what he'd been drawn to in the absence of a father and living under the control of a mother like this.

She had no idea where he was just then. She did not know the name of his friends. She had no concern about his schooling. She said he was the same kind of bastard seed as his father.

Her boyfriend, she told me, believed Hank needed discipline. He had a handle on the rat, she slurred with a wink in my general direction. I got a rough picture of Hank's home life. He was living on the margin of his last blood relative's life. With this example of woman, was it any wonder he found the softness of a female's touch to be a thing to be feared?

Not an excuse; it isn't. He was just a child in this time being formed into the man I was to meet, the man known as Hando.

Others overcome rough beginnings.

What else had driven him?

Unwilling to face the toughs lurking outside Hando's teenage residence when I am ready to leave his mother, I use the key the moment she leaves the room. I go back to Melbourne in my time. I spend a few hours thinking about what I know and what I want to know.

I know the generalities; I want to know the specifics.

Davey had said he did not know the story of Hando's youth. I decide he was lying to me. He would never have told me with Hando lurking about the pub. I must catch him at time and place when I knew Hando will not intrude on the conversation.

I use the key to return to 1991. I find Davey in the library. I know it's the day after he told me Hando's birth name but then said he did not know about his childhood or how he got the nickname Hando. Hando will have told him that he rejected me in that alley.

"Is his mother still alive?" I ask Davey as I sit next to him.

His eyes flicker to mine and then away, down to his book. He shrugs his shoulders. When I don't say anything, he speaks without looking at me. He speaks as if he's telling the book a secret. "She kicked him out when he was 15."

"Before the shoplifting arrest?"

He nods. "He hasn't seen her since."

"You're sure?"

"Yeah."

"Did she hurt him?"

He closes his eyes. Shakes his head but not in denial; it's in sick realization that I'm going to learn the secrets he's been hiding from me and everyone else in the world. "She was the fucking town bike. How you think that made him feel?"

"She had boyfriends who lived with them?"

"Sometimes."

"One of them ... one was the reason he never went back to her place, right?"

"Don't ever tell him ..."

"Never." I reach over and touch his arm, stroke it slowly. Wait for him to calm. "How'd you two meet?"

"School. He used to sleep in my Gram's garage when things got ... bad with his mum or one of her blokes. He'd stay 'til Gram'd kick him out. Then when things got bad at home again ... he'd come stay with me again."

We don't say anything for a while. I am still formulating my questions; he is unable to not want to tell me what he knows. It is power for him - that he has something I cannot get from any other person but him. We both know that Hando would not tell me. He may tell Davey; Hando would never tell a woman this.

I pull Davey away from the carrels. I take his hand and walk him back to the far reaches of the stacks. The Egyptology section. Where I've been before with Hando.

Davey leans with his forehead against books on the far case. He says he used to draw pictures of Cleopatra and her asp when he was younger. It makes me smile to think of him when he still felt like drawing a boyhood fantasy figure of the Queen of the Nile. I would bet anything she had huge breasts and a pouting mouth.

"When you met him, was he known as Hank?" I ask him.

"He made us call him Henry. Told me once only his dad ever could call him that."

"What did you like about him?"

"Dunno." He shrugs as he walks away from the book he's been resting against. "He just always knew. Y'know? Never had a doubt."

"I can see that."

"Looked out for me. Never stopped looking out for me."

When he'd been kicked out of his home, Hando'd dropped out of school, wandered wherever he could make a buck, steal a meal, sleep where he could make it through a night. And then ... and then ... he found a new family.

He found a man named Simon Dinsberg. By then, he'd also talked Davey into dropping out ... or, maybe Davey was telling the truth when he claimed it'd been his idea to run with Hando once Hando made living on the streets sound so much better than the life he'd had with his Gram. But in any event, Hando and Davey'd been living out on the streets for a few months. Running with other young toughs, petty crimes, drinking rotgut vodka and gin ... growing more and more degenerate.

They'd been recruited into a gang that set up robberies of Asian shops. And torched them if they couldn't steal from them. The gang was loosely made up of skinheads ... and punks like Hando and Davey's group.

This was a time when the neo-Nazi movement was around like an undercurrent. Hando had a particular dislike for the Vietnamese merchants who'd moved into the neighbourhood around their school before they'd left. He made fun of the Asian kids, always studying, working after school in their parents' restaurants or corner stores. He resented that they had money when he was held down by his mother's reliance on alcohol and social welfare to scrape by barely.

Simon Dinsberg was just founding the White Aryan Resistance, organizing the group of skinheads in Melbourne into a more lethal army to strike terror. He came around, befriending their loose gang of petty criminals as he recruited the skinheads among them to join his more organized group. Dinsberg talked about what was due them. He talked about the Aryan concept. He talked about how the Aryan was the true authentic warrior. How Australia had the potential to host the ingathering of the Aryan people, how they were poised on the brink of a Golden Age but that if they didn't stop the influx of Asians in their country, they'd be on the brink of disaster instead.

Hando soaked it all in.

Dinsberg noticed Hando. He liked his intelligence. I suspect he liked his alienation and rage most of all.

Hando had found his religion. His calling. The mythical world every boy wants to believe is there, somewhere, where he will matter and where he will rule. Where instead of living on the fringes, he will be the core.

He's the one who called him Hando. 

"He put his arm around him. Called him Hando. Told him he did good," Davey said of the occasion, a successful raid to terrorize a Jewish banker.

Dinsberg was the leader, the guide, their master. They'd never met anyone so charismatic.

It was Mein Kampf that Hando read first. His eager mind scooped it up. Next came The Turner Diaries. Then Hellenism Versus Christianity by van Tongeren in which he was absorbed in Greek philosophy and the musings of the Roman's Philosopher Kings like Marcus Aurelius, stories of Celtic lore and even astral events.

In the end, though, it was the particular aspect of anarchy espoused in The Turner Diaries that changed Hando into a skinhead capable of raw acts of brutalities against Asians, Jews and any part of society he felt held him and his kind down. It has always been a book considered a blueprint for genocide by neo-Nazis.

When they were firmly in Dinsberg's skinhead group, Hando rose through the ranks to a position of leadership over his own small band. Arson. Theft. Intimidation. Assault. A bizarre underworld of provocation, confrontation and petty violence. Hando's band had been set free to target a reign of terror on Vietnamese they felt were taking over their little corner of the universe and had to be driven out.

This was when I met them. As this reign of terror had been conceived.

This is when I left them. Before it had hit its zenith.

And I'm going to leave again. I know this. I am unsure if when I leave, however, whether or not I want to understand the details of what happened in their lives between the first time I left them and when they died.

When I leave Davey on the steps of the library this time, he looks like nothing so much as a lost, starving puppy who wants more than anything for me to take him home.

But it isn't his fate to come home with me.

Should I have 'saved' him if I could?

I honestly do not know.

But I do not even consider it.

Instead, I sleep soundly that night. Is that harsh to admit? 

No, it isn't. What I realize is that if I wasn't willing to go into Mark's past and save him an early death ... if I still know deep inside myself that that would be wrong and would rob Mark of the life he was meant to have before his death, then I could never justify saving Davey from an early death. I could not rob him of freely living the life he was meant to live.

In the morning, I use the key to go to the one time and place I wish to visit before I leave Australia.

I go to the one date I know when I can most safely preordain a part of Hando's future that must happen if he is to live his life as it was meant. It is a date Davey has given me. It is Hitler's birthday in 1990. It is the date when Hando takes Davey with him to a speech that Dinsberg is giving in a tattered pub miles from where I first met them in Melbourne.

They do not know me ... yet. And that is the point to this. I must preordain our meeting in the next year because I am convinced that meeting did not happen unaided. Not when I think of how Hando first looked at me ... he knew me already. That was why I'd thought he'd been a Time Dweller sent to find me.

So I have to go back before the day we see each other in 1991.

It's why I'm in the year 1990 waiting by the bus stop that is near their squat. I know exactly which bus stop they will go to, which bus they will take. I know how they will travel to the Dinsberg speech because the details of that historic night are etched in Davey's mind.

I am in line before them. On the bus, I go as far back as I can. I know they will sit in the back, just as they did when I knew them. I watch Hando get on the bus. I watch him stroll down the aisle. He sits near me. I gaze at him until I am sure he notices me looking. He is sitting with Davey.

Our eyes meet. He stares. His eyebrows rise. He licks his lips slowly, letting his tongue loll long enough to be crude and sexually suggestive. I feel hypnotized and yet I meant to hypnotize him instead. I need him to see me before he meets me.

I have to prime him to stop outside that flower shop when he sees me inside there in about a year. I want to prepare him to recognize me even if he doesn't know it. I need him to see me in that flower shop, to draw to a stop and then to stare at me through the window. I need him to make me think he knows the future.

He did make me stay not because he was a Time Dweller. He made me stay because I made it happen.

Just as I now realize that I made Mark prime me for meeting him, I have primed Hando for meeting me. But in the end, when that time comes, it will honestly be up to him whether or not he does stop to stare at me. It will still be his choice.

Just as it was my choice to love Mark. It was never a trick we played upon each other; it was always a free choice.

I have come full circle. I understand now that even in the vagaries of time and fate, I still have options and with those options come responsibility to make active choices for my own future.

And I can go to my own time now as I stay in my seat on the bus and watch them get off, heading to their fate.

Some day, I whisper to the wind as Hando walks away. 

Some day you will tell me you'd planned for us to meet.