“Sorry,” was all I could say again and again. I held up my hands to show passivity. “I truly don’t understand what you’re saying. I’m out of my mind right now I don’t—” Then the man touched me. He reached and grabbed my shirt. I flinched out of fear, but also out of awe—at the physical sensation, at reality proving itself. This was a human touching me, as real as anyother. I saw the faint wrinkles in his face, the coarseness of his hair, and a sense of custom, a sense that there were principles of tailoring and hygiene and self-determination built up inside him. He grabbed my shirt because he wanted to inspect it. He seemed almost aghast at it, running his hand over the fabric. I gently pulled away but he grabbed me again. He pulled harder on the shirt.
“Where are you from?” he asked. Or at least his intonation sounded as if he had asked something to that effect. He repeated himself. Whatever he was saying was aimed at me and demanded an answer. He was impatient.
“My name is George and I live here,” I said, carefully. “I’m a dog walker and last night—or an hour ago, or something I don’t know—something happened to me when I was at the park. Two of my dogs ran away and something happened. I passed out, I think, or something else. I fell. And I woke up here. Or well, I woke up at the park, in the same place, but here. Here in London but at a different time. Because this is like, what? Medieval times?” I laughed. “Time traveling isn’t a thing but this is what’s happened to me and I’m here and I’m just as freaked out as you are.”
Recognition flashed across the faces of the men when I said key words. London. Dog. Time. They kept looking at my trainers and shorts. By now, another man had walked up from the settlement and joined us. He wore a thing—a leather sort of armor over his chest. He also held a long knife. You could call it a sword. There was an older woman farther away leaning against the same fence, observing. I was becoming an attraction. I was disrupting the flow.
The man who was keeping hold of my shirt this whole timesaid something to the man in the armor. While they spoke to each other, the second man pulled at my running shorts. His hand groped at the waistband and I tried to step away from him.
“Stop,” said the man holding my shirt, or something like it. He jerked the fabric to get me to hold still. The armored man said something, a sort of command, or a permission, addressing everyone in the group. Tension ran through everyone’s voices now. There was a hierarchy.
“Please,” I said, trying to lean back. The neck of my T-shirt was stretching out. “I just need help, I’m not going to cause any trouble, I’m a nobody.” But I struggled too hard and the man yanked me back with equal force. Panicking, I ducked my head down and tried to back up, but he kept his hold on me and I lost my footing. As I stumbled, he grabbed more of my shirt, pulling it up my back and over my head. He laughed. With the shirt slipped off, I was free for a moment, but the armored man grabbed the back of my head by my hair. My scalp exploded with pain.
“Stop!” I yelled.
The armored man yelled instructions to the two men, who proceeded to strip off the rest of my clothes. I yelled and thrashed about, but they had me firmly detained. There was a sense of methodology at play here, as if the men were sentries and had done this before, but there was also marvel in their voices. They pulled my shorts off and awed at the fabric. They tried to grab my underwear but I twisted away and fell onto my back, hard against the ground. They pulled me back up and one of them grabbed my arms, twisted them up. I tried to kick the other but he grabbed both legs, laughing, and had my feet, amazed at my shoes. His voice reached a delirious pitch as he pulled them off my feet,then my socks, then finally reached and pulled off my underwear. I flailed around and tried to elbow the other man, but he put his hand across my entire face and put me in a twisted headlock. I bit him and he forced his whole fist inside my mouth, gripping my tongue. My jaw sprang open. I screamed and gagged, spitting, realizing all this was happening while we were walking, we were on the move. They were forcing me along. I was gagging, hunched over, moving forward, struggling to breathe, my bare feet on rough, packed earth.
They walked me into Greenwich, but of course it wasn’t the Greenwich I knew it to be. The church was like a lone farmhouse, fenced in and rough-hewn. Gone was the market, theCutty Sarkmuseum, the housing estates, the McDonald’s, and Starbucks. There was only a greenery encroached upon by wood and stone structures (buildings? houses? It was incomprehensible.). There was an order to the land, but not one I could make sense of nor see through my tears, the dust, the pain and exposure.
They walked me naked through the settlement. Men, women, and swarming flies of children gathered and watched us pass. They spoke among themselves in that chewed-up language of theirs. Someone yelled something, the armored man replied. Someone threw something. More instructions, hurried voices, laughter. The man tugged at the rope I was tied to—they had tied me up; when had that happened? It rubbed dry and rough around my wrists. More men joined us, they carried my clothes and shoes, ecstatic at their new treasure. With a sting of ultimate shame I suddenly worried about my phone—I was being dragged through the street and that was what my mind went to—worrying if it had fallen out of my pocket during the assault, worrying about the screen cracking, the battery life. I realizenow this was my brain scrambling its autopilot, clinging to the last vestiges of modernity it knew, just a mental by-product of time traveling, but of course how could anyone know that when I was the only person this had happened to. I was alone. I felt the painful awareness that I was the only human being on the entire planet worrying about his phone at this moment. The worry echoed out across the land, into space, noticed by no one. Loneliness was too trite a word. This was banishment. Exile. I began to weep and howl.
They took me to a large stone and brick building. They threw me in a dirt cell.
They kept me there for days. Then weeks.
Darkness and solitude compounded on itself.
Time.
Itself.
Zero. Then One. Starting over.
At first, there was only brutality. My memories of those early days blur into a single dram. I remember the sunny awakening at the park, the assault, but then there was a period of darkness andsilence during which I underwent a sort of prolonged mutation, with no clear moment when I knew I was out the other side.
Men visited my cell and questioned me. They pushed me around, hit me, demanded answers in a language I couldn’t understand, each visit ending with me bloodied and barely able to move. I vomited and shook. I was given no food or water for days, and darkness, pain, and cold was all I received, abandoned and never checked on, never spoken to. After a week, they finally poured a grayish slop on the floor for me to eat, which tasted of nothing. I kept bleeding. They poured my cold meals directly over my body as if I were a plant taking water, twitching. I lost the ability to sleep. I lost the ability to stay awake. My toilet was the floor. Fever rattled through me. Physiologically, almost electrically, I’m sure my body remembers exactly how long I stayed like that and exactly what was done to me, but my mind struggles to recall with any exactness, only dark blurs of pain, a steep downswing into agony, and perhaps, most horrifying, an adjustment of expectation. Acclimatization.
What I came to feel was a pure grayness I had never felt before. The idea of joy had not ceased so much as it no longer felt applicable to my existence and so it was moved elsewhere. Everything was pain and so nothing was pain, there was no sense of contrast. I felt immutable. I simply dripped.
Then suddenly, momentum shifted. One day I was naked and one day I was finally given clothes—just a square tunic, but at that point I was a roach, deadheaded and almostthankfulin a desecrated sense of the word. The fabric was coarse like burlap and frayed all over, but I treasured it. I thought about my old clothes—of course they had spooked these people. Surely theyhad never seen cotton fabric so tightly refined, machine-woven, mass-produced. I remembered the drawing of the cartoon octopus on the T-shirt, the rubber insoles of the trainers. Alien technology. I couldn’t imagine what they were doing with them now. I ran my fingers over the new tunic with recalibrated awe. I cried, in fact, at these people’s generosity. Something was happening inside me and I allowed it.
Captured and held in a cell, stripped, starved, beat—I didn’t feel the sort of terror I knew I was supposed to feel. I felt the freezing bite of night and the musty heat of day—both sunlight and moonlight cutting between wood slats, striping my sores—but this wasn’t suffering. This was abject pain, I could note, but a greater shock cushioned the blows, a new validity that was coming to my senses, a new benchmark, a new degree of aliveness that I can only describe as being able to hear things I had never heard before. Seagulls called from what felt like miles away. People swept, negotiated, hammered, dug, simply walked—whole lives were happening outside my cell and their sounds were of such a pure, undiluted crackle.
What would have been (or would be?) my old flat was just down the road from here. And if I closed my eyes and listened to the seagulls, it truly felt as though I could leave this cell, walk down the street, and be back at home with the same seagulls singing the same songs as if nothing had ever happened. Maybe my ex would be back there too, complaining about something—the rubbish needing taken out, the weather, the birds. A family of seagulls lived on our roof back then. They had made nests on the roofs of the buildings in our development. They would caw all day and my boyfriend hated the noise but I thought theywere fun to watch, silly when their screams bubbled up any odd hour of the day, their little wars. They were drawn to the “green” roofs on all the buildings in the development—a tax write-off that mostly grew pollen-rich weeds in spring, burnt and dead by summer, and it was that barren greenery that made an attractive nest for the birds. They shit everywhere and swarmed the sky in the mornings. Sometimes I’d hear the gentle swoop of one passing the window in the middle of the night.
Workmen would come out on the roofs and try their best to make a hostile environment for the birds. From our top-floor flat, I’d watch them out on the lower buildings trying everything just shy of outright extermination. I’m sure the birds were a pestilence to people of consequence tied up in property values, hygiene concerns, but not me, barely able to make my half of the shared rent. The men erected tall poles onto which they fastened kitelike fake birds that fluttered dark and menacing in the wind to scare them away. This caused a week or so of chaos and screeching, but it only took one calm summer day, when the plastic crows hung flaccid and motionless, for the gulls to realize they were nothing to be afraid of. Other days the wind would blow so strong that the decoys would get wrapped up in their own tethers, knotted and stuck to the poles, and the gulls would cackle, victorious. Eventually the workmen stopped coming out to reset them.
I’d watch the seagulls from my balcony on days I wasn’t working (i.e., couldn’t find work, gave up on finding work, content to walk dogs forever) and smile at their tribal infighting, their comic dawdles, their fluffy new chicks flapping limber wings learning to fly. I’d hold my breath if one of them came too close to the roof edge. I applauded when I saw them soaring highabove me one morning, little gray feet splayed out with joy, then gone only a few days later, flown away.
Our balcony developed a spider problem that summer. The seagulls would eat flies and other bugs, but when they were too busy fighting the workmen and the plastic crows, the flies proliferated and attracted spiders who wove enormous webs all over our balcony in order to catch them. My boyfriend refused to step outside, refused to open the windows despite the heat, would scream with great charade when one of the spiders crept inside the flat. One day I killed them all, sprayed bug spray all over the balcony, swept away their webs and mummified meals, totally ignorant to their purpose—and the next day we had a fly problem. The day after that, I had a boyfriend problem. We had a blowout fight over cleaning and the recycling, over the spiders and the flies, and everything became barbed in the way these things tend to, seagulls screaming all the while, refusing to be our metaphor for domestic neglect and elemental incompatibility. When our breakup finally happened it happened immediately and without fanfare. When I received a vague text from him the day after the night he had walked out and not come back, my first thought was oh, this is going to be a thing, but it should have been oh, thiswasa thing and now it wasn’t because it was already over. He never came back. My boyfriend had also had a boyfriend problem, and he had taken care of it.
It was very London how we broke apart via admin, like defaulting on a loan, deleting a spelling error, sweeping away a cobweb. It didn’t feel real when I half read the long, wordy email from him—he had never sent me an email before, why start now? He sounded so contrived and not himself that I googled thewhole thing to see if he had used a foolproof breakup template or AI, but he hadn’t, he really was that wordy and contrived. I tried replying with my own screed but only regurgitated the same shallow phrases, sounding like the back of a cereal box. I deleted the draft. I deleted the email and blocked his.
A few months after that, I traveled through time. Now there were centuries (I assumed—I didn’t know what year it was) between me and the breakup. Actually, technically the breakup hadn’t even happened yet. If someone were to ask me why I was feeling gloom (aside from the imprisonment, the beating, the gruel) I wouldn’t be able to say “I’m getting over a breakup,” because that wouldn’t be true. “I’mgoingto be getting over a breakup” would be more accurate and that sounded like nonsense, that sounded like nothing. “I’m going to go through a breakup many years from now”—of course I would, that was no surprise. Everything broke eventually.
But the truth was I didn’t feel gloom at all now. I could say these days imprisoned passed like nightmares, but like the nightmares of a newborn, who wakes each day with tremors and shrieks not from any logical pain or need, but from his body simply being just-born, unfolding like a leaf and trembling, knowing not which way to move. I held spiders in my hands now. I watched them weave and sew all night in the corners of my cell, understanding the patterns of their days more than anything else in this world. I wanted to know what their secret to the universe was, how they had managed, as a species, to stay the same for so long, content to weave the same patterns unchanged. I whispered to them my fears and asked if they had ever met a time traveler before. If they had, they certainly didn’t make itknown, just as God had left my desperate prayers at the park unanswered. I had slipped through time itself and not a peep. But this was no longer loneliness, I realized. This was no longer abandonment. The spiders carried on and so did I, and in the darkness, their leggy movements felt like instruction, the calls of gulls sounded like guides.
2
