Chapter 1 #3
“I live here,” I said slowly. “I live here in Grenwych. Actually, I think—” I stuttered and laughed at myself. “I think I traveled through time.” I figured I might as well just
say it, not that anyone could understand me.
But the man didn’t like what I was saying. He shook his head and stepped closer to me—too close—and said another long string
of words. He pointed to the old man and to the other guy with him. He asked me something, then repeated himself.
“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 any other.
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 time said 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, the Cutty Sark museum, 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 realize now 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 and silence 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 almost thankful in 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 they had 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