Second, it wasn’t Matilda that had growled, it was the Shiba Inu, back at the fence, and he hadn’t growled, he had barked. He was fighting with one of the other dogs. I turned and looked and all four of them were in a sudden, ferocious brawl.
Third, a security guard entered the enclosure and called out to me. Light from a torch flew across the meadow. The eyes of the deer flashed yellow and red and I couldn’t stop and explain what I was doing there because I had to turn back, I had to run back to the fighting dogs.
And fourth, my phone wouldn’t stop ringing and chiming with angry dog owners, internet providers, boyfriends, lawyers.
Every one of these things happened at once like the artful dropping of four synchronized divers from the sky, causing no splash, just undulating ripples. A chain reaction of paradoxes. I had to stop the dogs from fighting but they were on the other side of the fence but I couldn’t let go of Matilda because shewas spooked and lurching forward, trying to escape, turning and biting my hand gripping her collar, and I tripped and fell. The policeman yelled. My phone rang. And all this time I couldn’t stop thinking about my misaddressed internet bill, the shit flat I couldn’t afford, the job I had lost, and the gig work I had found myself lost in the middle of. I fell and kept falling through these things, the world becoming liquid, slipping out from under me.
I didn’t land on the ground. But I felt pain—it was Matilda’s teeth gnawing at my wrist but then it wasn’t. Sensation—pain, sounds, the night air—it all flushed out of me. The policeman’s voice was farther away. The snarling dogs were somehow above me, as if I had fallen down a well and for a second I thought that I had, that I had fallen down a hole in the ground, but that couldn’t be true because everything was white, flashing, iridescent, and somehow below me, not above, looping and inverted. Matilda’s fur swirled out like grass as we careened into each other. The policeman was below me. The dogs were above me. The park was spherical. The sky was inside me. I felt sick and vomited but the only thing that came out was myself, flipping over myself, regurgitating my own body like the flipping panels of an old alarm clock. Bells ringing. My hearing blurred. My vision split. My nervous system, my fingernails, my hair, my skeleton, all displayed themselves like jars of separated herbs, sealed off, naked, preserved, then shattering back together again, too fast, too hard and somehow, in a way, disgustingly sour.
When everything finally settled, when the tingling across my body stopped, when my mind unclenched its pulsing and my lungs gasped for life, it was as if whole days had gone by. But in reality, they were yet to come.
1
Your body knows where you are, it’s your mind that needs convincing. In hindsight, I knew exactly what happened to me right when it happened, I just didn’t have the words, I only had the sensations.
I was lying flat on my back and the first thing I noticed was the silence, or maybe I should say the noise. The world was so noisily silent. Quiet enough that I could hear my blood moving through my body like a big sloshing bag of water. My heart a propeller. Tubes, valves, and holes opening and closing, contracting, sliding around. My eyelids opened and shut too loudly, like two heavy wooden shutters, so I kept them shut. My body recalibrated. I could hear actual sunlight filtering down around me like pebbles scattering across my body. It was daylight. That was a change. It had been night and now it was day. (Again, your mind wants to jump to easy conclusions like this, make connections, despite the body knowing inherently where in time and space it exists, knowing where it’s not meant to be.) I must havepassed out, I thought, and sure, that had happened for a moment, technically—my body granted my mind this bit of recognition.
There was birdsong above me. The loudest thing I have ever heard. Screaming into me. A chorus of birds sang as populous as the leaves in the trees. My eyes opened again, wide like jaws agape. There was so much greenery. I squinted and blinked furiously. Flip, flip. Slamming shutters. The light was like water to look through. I sat up and my surroundings tightened their grip on me. Greener than green.
I was in a thicker, denser part of the park. (But we have not moved an inch, my body said. It’s the woods that have grown denser, and how might that be?) Above me: canopies, leaves, the sky like a vaulted ceiling, held up by wood beams, trees all adorned. Beneath me: moss, grass, bugs, dirt, thick ropes of weeds and brambles, truly the softest bed I have ever laid in; grass like jade feathers, like the earth itself was still miles beneath it all.
Hey the deer were still there, a short distance away, watching me. Again the noise! I could hear their breathing, like one organic, festering dough, munching their grassy meals, jaws moving in silly circles, their blinking as loud as my own, my barn doors flipping open and shut. But the deer were larger in number than before, and they were grander-looking, more sturdy and golden. Matilda was nowhere to be seen. The brick wall and chain-link fence surrounding the deer enclosure were also gone and my mind continued its charade of wondering where I was, if I had perhaps stumbled into a deeper reach of the enclosure, my body clock tsk-tsking me all the while.
I stood up. I walked. The deer moved away from me. Their hooves clattered in heavy parade across the grass. I walked in thedirection of the fence where I had tied up the dogs, but I walked too far, I had to have walked too far because I never reached the fence.
I stopped.
“OK,” I said. That was my first word. My voice rang loudly in my head.
I never met the fence. I turned and walked in the opposite direction but never met the brick wall, nor the main road beyond, always choked with car traffic on the Blackheath side of the park. I heard no cars. I turned again and walked back, walked south, past the place where I had woken up, past a dense thicket where I knew for sure the deer enclosure ended and the rest of the park continued, but still no fence, no dogs, no park. There were no gardens, no pathways. The bandstand gone, the café gone, the parking lot gone. I walked into another open meadow, but it wasn’t easily navigable, the grass wasn’t shallow and thin, it was thick and riddled with shifting earth. There were rocks, holes, sticks, branches. Field mice appeared and disappeared. There were gnats everywhere and birds everywhere eating the gnats. I reunited with the herd of deer and they skedaddled again, still wary of me. Those aren’t the same deer, I thought to myself. Something about this isn’t the same.
I followed the natural slope of the meadow to where I knew would be the crest of the hill, where there was an overlook by the Royal Observatory, with a statue of a general, some benches, always filled with tourists taking in the view of the river and Canary Wharf, and what a fine day for it. But my body continued to mock me, laughing and shaking me with a sudden nausea because there was an overlook, yes, but no Royal Observatory. No statue. No bench. Not even a road or a hint of pavement or a sign.I knew I was in the right place because there was the river, there was the view—I had been to this overlook a hundred times and I knew I was in the right place, but I was trembling, I was sick, because—there was no—yes no—there was no Canary Wharf. It was missing. What wher- whe—I looked around. I looked again. The buildings were gone. The Isle of Dogs was completely bare. Greenwich was gone. Everything was only trees as thick as marshland, right up to the edge of the water, checkered in places with lime-green and yellow fields, but no buildings, no roads, no streetlamps. No university, museum, or market. My whole body shook.
“What,” I said. My second word.
Only the bright blue dome of the sky was still the same, sculpted and heavy like lead around me, and I wheezed. My legs buckled. I fell to my knees. I stared at this view for a long time, unbelieving, hunched over on all fours as if in a trance, watching alien things in the distance pass by like banners that hinted at my whereabouts, my whenabouts. There was a boat down in the river, moving slowly along. It was a large canoe-like thing, with a covering over it, like a barge. Wooden. People rowed it forward. There were more boats farther up the river, where it bended and turned, closer into central London—a London that wasn’t there, or wasn’t the London that should be there. The Shard, the City, all the faint landmarks you could spot from the top of Greenwich Park were gone and in their place was what could only be called a shantytown, dusty and yellow-green, smoke rising everywhere and fading into a pastel horizon. It was a beautiful summer day, but it wasn’t my day, it wasn’t my season. It was a joke.
My stomach walloped and moaned, my vision went teary and flushed. The delirium of green all around me and the noise,the non-noise, were like sudden, irreversible maladies, and I heaved with sickness. Everything I knew was gone. Everything had been replaced with woods and smells and noise. I wondered for a moment (my mind’s first crude attempt at understanding what my body already knew) if some horrible apocalypse had occurred. A nuclear bomb or an earthquake had simply washed away the city. Then I thought of drugs—maybe I had accidentally inhaled something or brushed up against a toxic plant or mushroom and this was some wild confusion, but every explanation only served to dull and cheaply nullify what was ringing its blaring truth in front of my eyes, deep inside my ears: this was a world that was clearly existing and I was contained within it now, physically, as real as ever. I could concede that moments ago (hours ago?) I had not been here and now I was—but actually that wasn’t true either because I had been here before just not in the here that was now and so what was here had to have transformed, but not transformed because the river was still its shape, the land was still its form, the air was air, the sun was sun, so what had to have occurred was a sense of age. Of changed time.
Hours ago? Years ago? That was what my body felt innately. It felt like years ago I had been walking the dogs, chasing after Matilda and Ryley, years ago in the sense that years were measures of distance, in any direction, years ago in the sense that I had moved away from the time with the dogs and the fence and the wall and the phone calls into another time without them. I had stepped across these units of measurement. I had traveled time. That was what I could call it.
I felt painfully, piercingly alone. I was the only person in the entire world this had happened to—that was the prevailing, insane feeling.
Along the banks of the river there was actually a version of Greenwich still—a small settlement of stony buildings and dusty lanes, thatched roofs, some tiled, rising smoke. In the center of the town there was a church but not the one I was used to seeing, and there were more trees surrounding it, more trees than ever before, peppered throughout the town. This is psychosis, I thought. I have lost my mind and this is what I am seeing; I am doing something worse than dreaming, oh my God.
My instinct was to pray so I prayed. I wasn’t a very religious person, but the entire world had shifted—or I had shifted through the entire world, like a sieve, and from what I could tell, I was the only one this had happened to, everything was continuing at pace with or without me, and I felt the pressure of cosmic attention. I hadtime traveled—I held the thought for the first time, consciously, seriously—and surely that was indicative of some kind of irreparable breaking. If there was a Creator then surely he or she was watching me this very moment, watching this creation of his or hers that had dripped through a hole in what was supposed to have been an impenetrable net, was already trying to fix this, was saying a holy “oops” at the least and would make amends, would answer me and put things right. I didn’t say anything in my prayer, just sort of wallowed and cried, said “God” both as an address and a curse in vain, felt dizzy and stopped, felt embarrassed, like I was getting ahead of myself, being too dramatic, and I laughed. I closed my eyes. I waited for the world to change back, for myself to wake up. I can wait on top of this hill for a long time, I told no one. Surely the disrepair will repair itself if all I do is wait.
Here are the things I was wearing and had on my person: a pair of white Reebok trainers, white socks, black running shortsand underwear, a white T-shirt with a navy blue line drawing of a cartoon octopus printed across it, my wallet which contained no cash, just two credit cards, a debit card, and various rewards cards; the keys to my flat; the entry fob to my building; my phone; and a tangled pair of headphones. I no longer had Matilda’s lead in my hand, nor Matilda obviously, but there were long strands of her hair stuck to my shorts, which I brushed off.
I checked my phone. It still had 10 percent battery, but no cellular or Wi-Fi signal. Like a freak, I took a photo of the view from the hilltop and the photo on the screen looked modern and normal, like I was out on a hike at a nature reserve somewhere—and you would believe it if the Thames wasn’t right there, bending the same way it always bent, like a familiar guide smiling at my lostness, saying hello, you’re not supposed to be here right now, please kindly could you leave.
I started to panic again. I walked downhill, I had to move. Everything was so loud! My feet roared with every step and kicked up dust. I pushed through bulky shrubs and stubborn, slanted trees, and soon there came signs of development, but nothing I could understand. I passed small enclosures built from rocks, wooden posts, a faint trail carved across a clearing, ivy that had been cut back, and crude hedgerows. These were signs of life but not my life, not anything close to it. I was trespassing. Surely I was out in the country or something. I had had a psychotic break and wandered all night.
A woman and two children appeared on the path in front of me—I saw them and they saw me and we all froze. I gasped. It was like I was seeing humans for the first time in my life. Their clothes were brown and goldenrod. The woman wore a sort of tunic with deep pockets, sleeves, and a cap on her head. The twochildren wore similar tunics, which were essentially rectangular tubes of fabric fitted to them. But it was their faces—their bodies—that shocked and made me stop. Their faces were normal. I don’t know what I mean by normal, but that’s the best I can describe it. Their expressions, their eyes, how they darted, the way they breathed as any other human would breathe, how they blinked—they were like me, like anyone else. I struggled to speak.
They stared at me but kept walking down this simple dirt trail that cut through the thicket. The children looked over their shoulders and stared longer, until the woman said something to them I couldn’t understand, ushering them along.
“Hey,” I called after them, but the woman pretended not to hear. They walked faster and disappeared. I listened to their footsteps trampling down the dirt path until they were far away, and yet I could still hear them and their voices, echoing through the trees as if we were sharing a small, private room. “Hey,” I said again, but quieter this time. I exhaled.
