1965
Roberta picked up the morning paper and skimmed over it for any headlines that particularly jumped out, and she found one right on the front page and took it in to show her husband. Kronos was seated at the kitchen table trying to figure out why every time he turned on the radio now he got electrocuted. Roberta came in and spoke to him but her words were a muffled mess of mumbo jumbo. Kronos looked up and saw the reason why and said, "You want to try taking that screwdriver out of your mouth and say it again?"
Roberta opened her mouth and dropped the small screwdriver on the table and slapped the paper down and told him, "See that? That crook Johnson signed off on a new law, anybody found burning their draft cards spends 5 years in prison."
Kronos picked up the paper and asked, "Now what the hell does he think that's going to do?"
"Beats the hell out of me," Roberta replied, "They burn the cards because they won't go to war, and the answer is instead of sending them to war they put them in American jails…and 5 years, hell, by the time these guys get out, the war'll probably be over and then what will this pony show have been for?" She leaned over the table and poked her husband repeatedly and said, "Hey, explain something to me."
"What?" he asked as he looked up from his paper.
"Okay," Roberta counted off on her fingers, "John F. Kennedy gets his head blown off, Johnson comes into office, Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy, so this bum, this Jack Ruby or whatever the hell they call him, he comes up as they're loading Oswald into the prison van and blows him away, and now good ol' Jack is sitting in prison instead of Harvey, waiting for the death penalty, so he's going to be killed next."
"So?" Kronos asked, already lost and losing interest in whatever she was saying.
"So when is somebody going to come up and kill Johnson next?" Roberta asked, "Isn't that the way these ugly cycles are supposed to work?"
"Give it time," he said, "Nobody ever gets away with an assassination of the president, but that never stops anybody from trying."
"I wish they would, I get tired of seeing his ugly puss on the TV, every time this guy sneezes they feel a need to broadcast it for the world to see, and then we can't watch Gilligan's Island."
"Well, we trade one idiot for another," he told her.
Roberta sat down beside him and asked, "Got the radio fixed yet?"
"No," he answered.
"You know, I still can't believe that somebody actually killed that guy Kennedy," Roberta said.
"You just can't believe it due to the circumstances present at the time he was shot," Kronos told her.
"Yeah," Roberta recalled, "You and me in the middle of all those people watching the motorcade, and I can still remember saying 'what do you think the odds are when the car comes by I can spit on his head?' and as the car comes by, his brains are splattered all over his wife, what're the odds?"
Kronos was laughing so hard by that time that he slammed his head against the table, "You're just lucky they never found out, otherwise every time you sneezed everybody would be running for cover."
"Alright, so explain something about this situation in Vietnam to me," Roberta told him, "We drop two bombs on Japan in World War II and that's good enough to end the war and bring the Allies home. So why don't we just drop another bomb on North Vietnam and get it over with?"
"Because you forget, my dear," Kronos answered, "As far as the government and those twits in Congress are concerned, this isn't a war, first it was training, and then it was advisories, and then it was a police sanction, and now it's a conflict, but they're not willing to admit it's a war."
"But all the same without calling it a war it's fair game to go over there and shoot them all and blow them up on a smaller scale," Roberta pointed out.
"Exactly," he responded, "That's always been the beauty of war, it never had to make one damn bit of sense to exist."
"Alright, I've got another question for you," Roberta said, "Why do you think this military is so stupid it only lets women be doctors and nurses, not soldiers?"
"Beats the hell out of me," Kronos answered, "If the Army thinks women are incapable of killing people in warfare then they're in for one rude awakening."
"You mean they used to let women join the armies before," Roberta said more than asked.
"Well, whether they allowed it or not is irrelevant," Kronos told her, "They were there…believe me, as ugly as some women used to be it was very easy for them to slip in without drawing any attention to themselves."
"Very funny," Roberta dryly remarked.
"I mean it, believe me you would've gotten in with little trouble," Kronos said.
Roberta kicked him under the table.
"Believe me if I'd had the choice I'd rather have gone to Korea and helped blow their soldiers to hell, than stay behind here playing night watchman and spending my nights with you," she replied.
"Oh good, I thought it was just me," Kronos said with a small chuckle.
"Hey," Roberta reached over and jabbed him with the nail of one finger, "You remember what tonight is, don't you?"
"Night we put the trash out?" Kronos asked. Roberta picked up the glass pitcher of orange juice to break it over his head when he moved to stop her and said, "Alright, alright, of course I remember our anniversary, how could I forget…worst day of my life."
Roberta stomped on his foot under the table.
"And it gets worse all the time," he added.
Kronos turned over in the bed and felt a cold pillow under his hand. He opened one eye, and then the other and saw that the other side of the bed was empty. He pushed back the covers and pushed up on his knees and looked around the room. The balcony doors were open, tiredly, he got out of bed and went over to the doors and stepped out on the balcony and found his wife slumped back against the railing, wrapped up in a sheet from the bed.
"Hey," he said quietly as he knelt down beside her.
"Hey," she replied even quieter.
He didn't have to ask what was the matter, he knew, it was a recurring subject that each tried to avoid bringing up with the other, but it still worked its way into their daily life.
"Kronos, how long we been married now?" Roberta asked.
"Ten years tonight," he answered.
Roberta nodded and said, "You know, I don't think I believed you at first, but you were serious, you mean it's going to be like this from here on out? And we're never going to have kids, none of us will?"
"I'm sorry, but I tried to tell you when this all started long ago," he replied.
Roberta tightened the sheet around her and said, "You know, I'm not sure I'd even want kids, but who made it their right to see to it that none of us ever had the chance? It sounds like something the Nazis came up with."
"Unfortunately this precedes them by about 9,000 years," Kronos told her as he sat down beside her and put his arm around her and pulled her towards him.
"And you're 5,000 years old, you've never had kids?"
"Well…that's all in how you look at it," he answered, "Of course any Immortal who's been married to a mortal is going to have kids, just none of their own, get them is more like it. Widows are always a good place to look, or were, you could always expect to find plenty of brats there."
Roberta nodded quietly and stared straight ahead at nothing; rather she seemed to be looking past the railing on the balcony, past everything straight ahead as far as the eye could see, towards something so far off at another time or place that even Kronos couldn't see what it was, and he didn't bother trying either. She leaned further back against the wooden rails and asked, "So how long do you think this damn war's gonna last?"
"Consider the competency of the people in charge of it, or lack thereof," Kronos told her, "I can see it carrying on for 20 years easily."
"Canada's going to get crowded long before that," Roberta said, "Okay, new question, who do you think's going to win it?"
"Well it won't be this side, you can be sure of that," Kronos answered.
"How do you know?" she asked.
"What're they over there fighting for? Nothing. Wars are only won when there's something at stake for the soldiers involved," he told her, "But since this government is incapable of even admitting it is a war, they can't even tell the soldiers why they're there, or what they're there for. Now a truly good war has to have a reason to exist, it has to be something more than just 'kill and win', otherwise it'd be like a stupid football game."
"That said, would you define yourself as being a good soldier?" Roberta asked.
"I was better than a soldier," Kronos corrected her, "Soldiers answer to a higher rank."
"Generals," she said.
"I answered to no one," he told her.
Roberta yawned and rested her head on his shoulder and murmured, "Must be nice."
"It was," he said, and shoved her back, more an exaggerated action than anything, like the overdramatic pantomime of the silent films, "Today the weapons are more advanced, but the methods of war are downright sloppy."
"Hmmm," Roberta said as she leaned against him again with her head down and her eyes closed.
"They had the right idea in maximizing the number of casualties per hit, saves a lot of time, but it's become so damn impersonal, what fun in destroying an enemy you never even see face to face before disemboweling him?"
"Mmm-hmm," Roberta hummed groggily.
"Are you even listening to me?" Kronos asked, and laughed as she shook her head no. "That's what I thought, come on," he grabbed her and pulled her to her feet and walked her back into the bedroom and pushed her down on the bed.
"Kronos," Roberta tiredly said as she lifted her head an inch from the pillow and opened her eyes to the tiniest slit, "You aren't really sorry you married me, are you?" she asked with a knowing smirk on her face.
He took a minute to answer her and when he finally did he said, "I could do worse."
"You have done worse," Roberta replied with a small laugh.
Kronos laughed in response and leaned in to kiss her, once on the mouth and once on her forehead, and he told her, "Go to sleep."
"I will if you're staying," she said.
He pulled back the covers and slipped in beside her and asked her, "Where else would I go? I'm stuck with you after all."
"What about your brothers?" Roberta asked.
"Oh…not that again, don't start tonight," he said warningly.
"Come on, Kronos," Roberta said as she reached over and grabbed his arm, "Why won't you tell me about them?"
"Roberta, I haven't seen any of them in over 70 years," Kronos told her, "I know how they are, when they don't want to be found, they aren't…when they decide to disrupt my life again, then I'll tell you about them."
"All about them?" she asked.
"All about them, everything you want to know, and plenty of things you probably don't," he answered.
"That's all I ask," Roberta said, then leaned over to kiss him and said, "You need to get some sleep, you're starting to turn into an old grouch."
Kronos growled in response and grabbed her by her shoulders and flipped her over and was on top of her, Roberta laughed and said, "I suppose there's one good thing about not having kids."
"What's that?" he asked as he let go of the sheet she was still wrapped up in.
"Think about it, we've been married for ten years now, by now we'd have at least a dozen of them," she told him.