Chapter 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 have passed 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 the direction 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 had time 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