Chapter 3 #2
ran past drunks and revelers, the caravan was gone, there were no more horses. I mumbled something about it, slurring my speech.
Slipping on this or that. I was fading. We were in darkness. Black trees folded over us and grew darker. Slippery slipping.
I could no longer see, hear, or feel. Slipped away. I was gone.
I woke up to a fully blue morning, everything either pure white or pure blue, no gray to ease the contrast. Blue leaves were
wet and shivering. White sky was brisk and all-seeing. My breath emitted a weak curl of fog that barely obscured the figure
seated next to me.
“Simon,” I said. The whisp blew away and revealed his face as it turned to me. He had been waiting. He smiled but it was an
inverted smile, hesitant, more like a grimace. It was daybreak, but barely. Less time had passed than I thought. I tried sitting
up and felt immense pain all over.
“Careful,” he said.
I stayed on my back. I lifted my head and looked under the neck of my tunic.
I was bruised everywhere. My limbs all seemed to move as they should, but there was a sharp pain in my chest. I felt my ribs, unsure what to be feeling for—they felt normal, incredibly painful in places, but not broken.
I was shocked at how skinny I had become, my ribs just sitting there, wrapped in paperlike skin.
One, two, three, four, five I counted them.
The heaviest part of my body was my head, which I struggled to keep held up, scenery blurring. Blues and whites.
We were in the middle of a dense forest, huddled together under two twisting trees. There was no trail anywhere that I could
see, just shrubs and wet, wet woodland so wet it seemed to only be raining under the trees, water cascading down stairways
of branches. I asked where we were and Simon said Deptford, but he said it like Deep-ford, which made sense to me only much later when I realized we had forded the deep River Ravensbourne to get to where we were. That was why we were wet. We had swum across it, Simon pulling me along against
his chest.
“Thank you,” I said. I felt embarrassed for being unable to defend myself against Wulfric’s blows and passing out. Simon was
no bigger than me, formed of slender, utilitarian muscles fit for his daily grunt tasks, nothing more. I was slightly taller
than him and even though I was malnourished from the past three months, my body still had pockets of vanity muscles strapped
to it—those archer’s shoulders—serving no real purpose than to look attractive to a demographic that was centuries away. Simon
had forded a small river with all that in tow.
He shrugged off my gratitude and was awkward and coy in his own way. He gazed off into the trees. His dark curls dripped with
water.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “The lord took the collar, I’ve got nothing to offer you now. And I’m not a soldier. If
I had any sort of status, I’d have used it by now.”
“I want freedom just as much as you,” he said.
“And I know you’re not a soldier. I believe you.
” His voice was calm but pointed. His words qualified multiple things at once and he sounded as if he had thought this all over.
He looked at me again. “I believe you,” he repeated. “Everything you said. I believe it.”
How? A chill ran through me. I barely believed what had happened myself, and as much as I wanted someone else to believe me,
Simon doing so would only create an external witness to my situation, a separate consciousness operating outside of what I
could otherwise, on my lowest of days, convince myself was all a nightmare or a hallucination by just another Londoner gone
insane. Saying he believed me made it all the more real.
“You haven’t been very convincing, I’ll admit that.” Simon smiled. “But lucky for you, I found a stronger argument.” He reached
into a pocket inside his tunic and pulled out a worn, damp bundle of knotted twine and burlap and handed it to me.
I stared at it. Sickly, I knew what it was right away just from its subtle weight, the feel, the smooth blackness that revealed
itself as I unwrapped it.
It was my phone.
“It fell out of your pocket the day you were—or I guess—the day we found you. I picked it up and kept it. Wulfric noticed
but he thought it was just a piece of charcoal. We thought you were an illegal collier at first, stealing wood for burning.
But it’s not charcoal, is it. It’s glass and something else. How is it so flat and smooth?”
“No idea,” I said, turning it over in my hands. The smoothness was overwhelming. “Factories in China. I’m sure charcoal’s
involved at some stage of the process, so you’re half right.” It was strange to see my reflection so clearly in the black
screen. I felt my hollow cheeks, combed through my matted hair with my fingers.
“It glowed blue,” said Simon.
“I bet that was terrifying.”
“I thought it was on fire. Some kind of super-charcoal that never burned out, but of course it did.”
“It ran out of battery.”
“What is it?”
For ten boring minutes I explained a phone, a phone call, a smartphone, and touched lightly on the concept of the internet,
and realized simultaneously that these were the most boring, fruitless voids of inventions, and where in my previous, contemporary
world these had ruled all facets of my life—my employment, my lack of employment, my love life, friendships, economics, education—here
they were of lesser value than dirt. Dirt could be dug up, compacted into bricks to form kilns, makeshift infernos for creating
charcoal or pottery or metalwork. My phone, which couldn’t even turn on because the battery was long dead, was only a mirror
held up to my people, showing how much we didn’t want to talk to each other and how much of this enormous world we would rather
consume through a siphon. Nothing that had been inside that phone was in my head now. No practical skill had been passed down.
In fact, I was certain it had degraded key aspects of my humanity.
Simon couldn’t be less interested and I agreed, stopping myself midsentence.
“No way to charge it anyway,” I said. I halfheartedly tossed it, let it drop to the ground.
“We can sell it for some coins,” said Simon. “Which we’re going to need sooner rather than later.”
“Want to bust it open?”
And so we broke the phone open. We smashed it with a rock.
The screen cracked and shattered, the metal casing popped apart, revealing thin sheets of circuitry and metals.
Copper, zinc, lithium, aluminum, glass. Simon was more impressed with these and together we carefully gathered them into his burlap pocket.
His plan was to walk to London, stopping at merchants along the way, hopefully generating enough money to find a place to stay for the night once we reached the city, then we could chart a course farther north.
He reckoned we could afford one night in London—it was too early for alarm bells to start ringing back in Greenwich, and even then it would only be Wulfric who would raise them.
If anybody came chasing after us, they wouldn’t come until their hangovers had eased up.
But something about Simon still seemed hesitant, as if his decision to help me escape hadn’t been such a point of no return,
that he was still teetering on the precipice of it. And it didn’t make sense after all. Even if he believed wholeheartedly
that I had traveled through time, I had nothing of real value to offer him. I was physically weak, had no idea of where to
go or what to do next, no wealth besides what we could barter with the phone parts. I sensed a marked shuddering come over
him, a crescent-shaped opening that demanded silence and careful, cautious prying much later, so I said nothing. Years spent
under the thumb of Canary Wharf finance lads had given me a heightened awareness of another man’s charms, and Simon had many.
He had an earnestness built into his face—blue eyes too round, too open, hugged by cheerful, heavy lids—the same kind of earnestness
I had once been afflicted with. It was an innocence but a calculated one—there was always something to be gained, no matter
how selfless you tried to seem. I had to stay away, but I had to let it draw me in.
Before the time traveling, before the dog walking, before the breakup, when everything was more than swell, I had been a midlevel software engineer at the venture capital risk management department of a giant hedge fund.
The job was techy and complicated-sounding but ultimately just glorified data entry and accounting with a fancy veneer.
A job like that comes with its own void of nothingness, which I wholly expected when I got it, excited mostly about the salary and looking cool on LinkedIn—maybe I’d become the kind of person who posts, be clever and witty, not too climby, not too sarcastic.
Against my better judgment I became motivated and self-starting, and volunteered to take on development projects with our
billing software, more so to impress the boys who worked in account management and sales, the wolves who were hired in droves,
fresh out of uni. They were incubated and there was a trajectory for them at the firm. Eager-to-please interns became showboating
full-timers, became father-figure managers—all possessing a zeal for predatory economics and a flair for making it all seem
cute and innocuous, perhaps even brave and noble. I fell in love with them at every stage and rooted for them. Most, if not
all of them, were stunningly beautiful.