“A few times,” he eventually replies, which isn’t especially illuminating. How could you not know exactly how many times you’ve bought drinks at a pub in eighteen forty-four? But then he adds, “It was terrifying the first time I came here. To the past. I took a right up that alley instead of a left, and that was a very bad idea.”
He leans in a little closer, talking by my cheek in a familiar way, like we’re old friends. “It’s a rabbit warren of sketchy pubs and knocking shops up there.” He tilts his head towards the door, stretching his black sweater across his chest. It looks invitingly soft. And unnervingly expensive. Kelly was right. He does have nice clothes. “I got into an argument, very easily, with a drunk man with one tooth. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked me. ‘London,’ I told him. ‘You ain’t from ‘round these parts,’ he informed me. And what was I to say? No, I wasn’t. So I told him I’m from up north, then his friend pulled out a butcher’s cleaver and chased me all the way back here.”
He’s chuckling, and there’s something contagious about it. Even if I’m shocked, not entirely sure I believe him, I’m caught up in the story. “Holy shit. Are you serious?”
“Dead serious. And very nearly dead too.” He laughs again and sips his beer like it’s one of a thousand outlandish tales he has to tell. I’m beginning to wonder if that’s the case.
“But you’re comfortable here now? Knowing your butcher is out there, only a few blocks away?”
His glance towards the door betrays a slight nervousness, which adds more believability to his claim. “More or less. No one looks like they’re carrying, at least.”
A jovial shout goes up at one of the tables over some joke or other, and he drops his head to the other side, watching the people. Something melancholic dims the eyes that were lit with humour only a second earlier.
When he speaks again, his tone is gentler than I’ve heard it before. “All these people will be dead soon. Relatively speaking. So whatever rumours go out about us—our clothes, the way we look—they’ll peter out long before they could reach our time. Before they could change anything in the future due to someone connecting those dots.”
A bittersweet idea. All the faces, the fingers gripping beers or coins, the cheeks flushed with mirth or alcohol, the strands of hair curled and placed, the fondness in the eyes of people who care about those they’re with today, who would grieve their deaths. Yet they’re all dead. All of them. Already. In a sense.
My cheek brushes his when I turn to speak, and it throws me a little to find him so close. I try to stifle whatever that feeling is that’s a bit like going down too fast in an elevator.
Probably some time-travel sickness thing.
“What is it?” he asks.
But the feeling isn’t alleviated at all when I find his eyes so near to mine, intent. I manage to mumble out, “It’s sad. All of this gone. This moment in time disappeared.”
His brow dips, and he takes a slow, considering sip of beer. “It is, and it isn’t, I suppose.”
“What do you mean?” For some reason, his reply makes me kind of nervous. There’s a coldness to it I wouldn’t have expected from, well, from myself. “You don’t think this is a touch…” I pause, searching for the correct way to explain. But there’s only really one word for it. “It’s heartbreaking to me, if I’m honest. Look at them. Probably not a single one of them will even be remembered a hundred years from now. But they’ve lived these full lives, fierce with passions and longings, love stories andtragedies. So real and so important to all of them. Then it’s nothing to us, or to nature. Not even a memory. They’re dust.”
I catch a hardness in his eyes before it morphs into a frown of perplexity, as though he can’t understand why I’m saying this. “They’re still here. You’re here, in it, right now. They still exist.”
“Maybe for a while. But where I’m from, this is untouchable. You can’t just come here and visit them.” But that’s when it clicks. For August, this isn’t untouchable. This is something he’s done more than once.
Where else can he go? How often? How far? Can he control this? Come here whenever he likes?
I’m just about to throw a barrage of questions at him, trying to sort through which is the most vital to ask first, when he turns his whole body towards me and surprises me with, “August, please tell me you’re a quantum physicist.”
Another laugh rips out of me, this one deep and genuine.
But August’s face, which is still very disconcerting to look at, being that it’s mine, drops. It drops slowly but surely and takes my smile with it. He has another sip of beer, but even behind that copper mug, I can see the colour fading from his cheeks.
I haven’t given him the answer he wants.
“Why would you think I’m a quantum physicist?”
And why do I have this queasy feeling?
He’s talking, but the noise in here has suddenly become overwhelming, with a few people breaking into song. That’s amplified by the pounding of my blood in my ears with the surge of anxiety from what he just said. I hear fragments. “I hoped you were on holiday all this time… assumed you were working from home… thought you could help me fix this.”
I cut into his ramblings. “Do I look like I have the salary of a quantum physicist?”
He smirks. “Just how much do you think we make?”
“We?” Like the urge to see the monster under the bed, I can’t help but confirm, “You’re actually a quantum physicist?”
“Yeah.” Another sip. “And I really needed to use your lab.”
“Well, that’s too bad, because I don’t have a lab.”
