“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “The lord took the collar, I’ve got nothing to offer you now. And I’m not a soldier. If I had any sort of status, I’d have used it by now.”
“I want freedom just as much as you,” he said. “And I know you’re not a soldier. I believe you.” His voice was calm but pointed. His words qualified multiple things at once and he sounded asif he had thought this all over. He looked at me again. “I believe you,” he repeated. “Everything you said. I believe it.”
How? A chill ran through me. I barely believed what had happened myself, and as much as I wanted someone else to believe me, Simon doing so would only create an external witness to my situation, a separate consciousness operating outside of what I could otherwise, on my lowest of days, convince myself was all a nightmare or a hallucination by just another Londoner gone insane. Saying he believed me made it all the more real.
“You haven’t been very convincing, I’ll admit that.” Simon smiled. “But lucky for you, I found a stronger argument.” He reached into a pocket inside his tunic and pulled out a worn, damp bundle of knotted twine and burlap and handed it to me.
I stared at it. Sickly, I knew what it was right away just from its subtle weight, the feel, the smooth blackness that revealed itself as I unwrapped it.
It was my phone.
“It fell out of your pocket the day you were—or I guess—the day we found you. I picked it up and kept it. Wulfric noticed but he thought it was just a piece of charcoal. We thought you were an illegal collier at first, stealing wood for burning. But it’s not charcoal, is it. It’s glass and something else. How is it so flat and smooth?”
“No idea,” I said, turning it over in my hands. The smoothness was overwhelming. “Factories in China. I’m sure charcoal’s involved at some stage of the process, so you’re half right.” It was strange to see my reflection so clearly in the black screen. I felt my hollow cheeks, combed through my matted hair with my fingers.
“It glowed blue,” said Simon.
“I bet that was terrifying.”
“I thought it was on fire. Some kind of super-charcoal that never burned out, but of course it did.”
“It ran out of battery.”
“What is it?”
For ten boring minutes I explained a phone, a phone call, a smartphone, and touched lightly on the concept of the internet, and realized simultaneously that these were the most boring, fruitless voids of inventions, and where in my previous, contemporary world these had ruled all facets of my life—my employment, my lack of employment, my love life, friendships, economics, education—here they were of lesser value than dirt. Dirt could be dug up, compacted into bricks to form kilns, makeshift infernos for creating charcoal or pottery or metalwork. My phone, which couldn’t even turn on because the battery was long dead, was only a mirror held up to my people, showing how much we didn’t want to talk to each other and how much of this enormous world we would rather consume through a siphon. Nothing that had been inside that phone was in my head now. No practical skill had been passed down. In fact, I was certain it had degraded key aspects of my humanity.
Simon couldn’t be less interested and I agreed, stopping myself midsentence.
“No way to charge it anyway,” I said. I halfheartedly tossed it, let it drop to the ground.
“We can sell it for some coins,” said Simon. “Which we’re going to need sooner rather than later.”
“Want to bust it open?”
And so we broke the phone open. We smashed it with a rock. The screen cracked and shattered, the metal casing popped apart, revealing thin sheets of circuitry and metals. Copper, zinc,lithium, aluminum, glass. Simon was more impressed with these and together we carefully gathered them into his burlap pocket. His plan was to walk to London, stopping at merchants along the way, hopefully generating enough money to find a place to stay for the night once we reached the city, then we could chart a course farther north. He reckoned we could afford one night in London—it was too early for alarm bells to start ringing back in Greenwich, and even then it would only be Wulfric who would raise them. If anybody came chasing after us, they wouldn’t come until their hangovers had eased up.
But something about Simon still seemed hesitant, as if his decision to help me escape hadn’t been such a point of no return, that he was still teetering on the precipice of it. And it didn’t make sense after all. Even if he believed wholeheartedly that I had traveled through time, I had nothing of real value to offer him. I was physically weak, had no idea of where to go or what to do next, no wealth besides what we could barter with the phone parts. I sensed a marked shuddering come over him, a crescent-shaped opening that demanded silence and careful, cautious prying much later, so I said nothing. Years spent under the thumb of Canary Wharf finance lads had given me a heightened awareness of another man’s charms, and Simon had many. He had an earnestness built into his face—blue eyes too round, too open, hugged by cheerful, heavy lids—the same kind of earnestness I had once been afflicted with. It was an innocence but a calculated one—there was always something to be gained, no matter how selfless you tried to seem. I had to stay away, but I had to let it draw me in.
Before the time traveling, before the dog walking, before the breakup, when everything was more than swell, I had been a midlevel software engineer at the venture capital risk management department of a giant hedge fund. The job was techy and complicated-sounding but ultimately just glorified data entry and accounting with a fancy veneer. A job like that comes with its own void of nothingness, which I wholly expected when I got it, excited mostly about the salary and looking cool on LinkedIn—maybe I’d become the kind of person who posts, be clever and witty, not too climby, not too sarcastic.
Against my better judgment I became motivated and self-starting, and volunteered to take on development projects with our billing software, more so to impress the boys who worked in account management and sales, the wolves who were hired in droves, fresh out of uni. They were incubated and there was a trajectory for them at the firm. Eager-to-please interns became showboating full-timers, became father-figure managers—all possessing a zeal for predatory economics and a flair for making it all seem cute and innocuous, perhaps even brave and noble. I fell in love with them at every stage and rooted for them. Most, if not all of them, were stunningly beautiful.
I got to know these boys because they’d saunter over to my desk with their fat asses stuffed in their tight trousers and ask me for special favors. They’d roll a chair over too close to mine, lean back, stretch, let me watch their pecs, their nipples hard under thin white shirts, and ask if an adjustment could be made. They would beg for it. Could a tweak be made here or there. It was sick how fast I would say yes. Oh yeah I can tweak a few things for you, Callum, I can insert something right there for you, Jack, I can fuck something—a number, a formula, a date—or not fuck,Ollie, just gently nudge it, soothe it, try a different position until a new total came and everyone left satisfied. “Thanks, mate, I owe you one.”
In moral terms, all I was doing was painting grayness over an already gray canvas of numbers. The companies, firms, and trusts we worked with were already hell bound and dirty to begin with, so whatever new arrangements I concocted of their sins was simply water made wetter. Anyway, in a world of trickle-down economics, what difference was I really making here, perched on my midlevel rung, pissing numbers? What was a misplaced zero but another pawn of speculation that ultimately gave everyone the same, satisfying result: a paycheck.
I knew the job would be a void but I didn’t know the void could move. I didn’t expect it to migrate like it did and become a void that was then inside me. Which was all the more titillating of course, because a hole was a hole, and I was the bad boy entrusted with secrets, aloof but worshipped by a lineup of reckless men wanting me to service them. And that was ultimately what I wanted. Those fat-assed banker bros—I wanted to be inside them. Not sexually (although yes, sexually), but anthropologically, observationally; assimilate enough to be accepted into their fold, to become one of them. And I did.
They took me out for drinks, dinners, some even shared their commission bonuses with me but nothing ever went far enough. None of the men were gay, as far as I could tell, but that didn’t stop our interactions from building up layers of flirtation, a kind of straightness that ends up being gayer than actual gayness. We’d chat each other up—the banter!—nonstop over work, lunch, texts, drinks, trips to the bathroom, my voice mimicking their posh bellows, echoing off tile walls, peeing together, herdmentality, become one—become one so that I might be worshipped the way I worshipped their posh suits, hipster backpacks, ankles skinny enough to snip, snip, snip, their minoxidil hair, their fitness-corrupted bones covered in HGH-assisted slabs of muscle, beef, pork, their pissing dicks at the urinal, and me with my glorious peripheral vision, a stained glass window of their warm fleshy hooks.
I worried about how reckless I was being, how empty-headed, and about the growing distance between me and my boyfriend—a man who actually enjoyed my company and the extra money I was bringing in, but hadn’t anticipated the kind of vapid Canary Wharf whore I was becoming, with my £300 gym membership, £300 lunches with the lads, the sloppy abandon with which I went about tinkering lines of code, fueled more than once by lines of coke. Little baggies turned up everywhere. I was in fearful awe of myself. If I was turning into this horrible creature, where was the me I had been before? That shy, sarcastic, jokey boy who took life in sometimes too-earnest stride, with a smile and a sense of charity—or at least a sense of law—where was he beneath these new layers of corporate circus orgy? The answer was left unfound. The void was left exposed, and into it went a rushing wind.
The boys, my apostles, they sensed this happening, this hollowing out of my core. I simply didn’t have the guts. They sniffed it out and noticed my hesitance, my growing reluctance, and similarly to how a fever breaks, the bromances intensified. That whiff of rot turned them on, and they went further. The innuendos became more radical, more tempting—the hands on the shoulder, the bathroom breaks, boundaries crossed, drunken cheeky kisses, showers at the gym, the shape of a bulge betweenlegs, and the financial dares became more risky in tandem, and my depression—which was what this had been all this time—bloomed into its formal, blackened flower, and it aged me, crisped me up like a weed. Suddenly I found myself having worked years at this job, becoming the kind of brain-dead charlatan I had always hated, dripping with lies and bitter venom, and as for the boys... when I began to wear this all on my face, they abandoned me. There is no better explanation than to say that I was simply no longer beautiful. I had lost something irreplaceable and I was finally left alone. I wanted to blow up Canary Wharf.
I became hateful in a typical way. Another year went by. Another crop of boys, each one paying me less attention than the previous. Of course I still wanted to be them. I still wanted to be inside them, but now I understood that that desire operated from a deeper, primordial place, not just to be worshipped. My lust was decrepit and cavernous. I wanted their organs. I wanted their eyes so I could see what they saw when they looked out at a London that no longer felt liveable to me. I wanted their hair, I wanted their skin, I wanted their ears so I could hear their phone calls with their mums and girlfriends, how they FaceTimed with them in the street, oblivious to traffic, how they spoke so loudly, so unafraid. I wanted their families. I wanted their weekend plans, their voice notes, their nude photos, their salaries. I wanted their brains because I no longer had my own. I wanted their faces because I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like me.
Do I look like you?
