We took the London Underground into the Ministry. I gave him foam earplugs. In fact the tube journey didn’t faze him, even before he put the earplugs in.
But I was forced to explain a joke used on an advert for a mattress provider, which in turn required me to explain the concept of “dating”—not a subject I would have liked to broach when it was necessary to shout above the sound of the train. The expression on his face, once I’d outlined the fundamentals as pertaining to the advert, suggested that he wished that he hadn’t asked.
Once we arrived at the Ministry, an escort of subtly armed suits took Gore to meet the other expats. I was expecting he’d go through a group therapy session, but Gore was in a sunny mood, so he must have been envisaging something closer to a salon.
I sloped up to see Quentin, my handler. The handlers had offices in one of the Ministry’s inner sanctums. They were all glass-walled and made me feel like a lackluster 1sh in an aquarium.
Quentin treated me with an impatient familiarity, as if we were both sticky and were leaving streaks on each other. He was a former 1eld agent. I couldn’t decide if his job as my handler was proof that he had been a good or bad one.
“Hi, Quentin.”
“Ah. London’s notorious toilet exploder.” “Okay, well.”
“No, honestly, I’m glad it wasn’t anything more serious. Has he exhibited any other violent tendencies?”
“It wasn’t violent. It didn’t even wake me up. It was just very thorough.” “Any sign of cognitive impairment?”
“Mm. When the Wellness team released him, I was told he’d been informed about the fate of the expedition. He didn’t know anything. He’d assumed they’d survived.”
“Ah. That’s… a problem. He was told. Three times. The 1rst two times were followed by his second and third escape attempts. Both times he was… disorientated. Seemed a bit damaged in transit. When he didn’t make a break for it the third time, we assumed it had sunk in.”
“Has this happened to any of the other expats?”
“Nineteen-sixteen keeps asking when he’s going to be sent back to the front. Can’t keep it in his head that the war’s been over for a century. Anything else? Depressive or manic bouts?”
“He’s the calmest man I’ve ever met.”
“Nice for you. All right, I’ll raise it with the Vice Secretary. Might be a good idea to get the expats in an MRI scanner. Keep a close eye on any changes in his behavior. Report any signs of physical or mental deterioration immediately.”
“What’ll happen if they start going insane?”
Quentin grimaced. “Back on the wards,” he said evasively. “If the ePects of time-travel severely impact their quality of life, they’re better oP in an—an enclosed environment where they can be—cared for.”
We let that sit on the table between us.
I said, “Did you get my email about the budget? And getting a cleaner? Not a Ministry ‘cleaner.’ Someone who does the hoovering.”
“You can’t make him clean?”
“He thinks it’s inappropriate for people of ‘our class’ to scrub Aoors. I tried to explain that I’ve never had a cleaner in my life and my mother had been a cleaner. No luck. It took him half a day to get his head around the fact I have a degree, but now he thinks I’m professor emeritus. You know he went to sea at the age of eleven?”
“He’s made quite an impression on you,” said my handler dryly.
“We’ve been in each other’s pockets for two weeks. Hard for him not to.” “Is there not enough leeway in your current budget?”
“Not at the rate he’s going through cigarettes.” “You should discourage that.”
“What? And impact his quality of life?”
That got a cool laugh. “Touché. I’ll look into it.”
After I met with Quentin, I went to the bridge meeting chaired by Vice Secretary Adela, who didn’t improve with familiarity. She was a small, tough, wiry woman who put me in mind of an elegant alligator. Since joining the time- travel project, I’d learned she was a former 1eld agent—one of the old school— and had lost her eye in Beirut in 2006. Her dashing black eye patch almost distracted from her face, which had an uncanny architecture that suggested reconstructive rather than cosmetic surgery.
The bridges were all wound up. No one else’s expat had had a polite nervous breakdown and dissected a toilet, but the other bridges described an expat trying to address God through Radio 3, another picking a 1ght with a parked car.
“Complex PTSD,” said Simellia, “is—”
“Complex,” said Adela. “Thanks for your input. Given their histories, mental trauma is to be anticipated. I remind you that we are interested in the actual feasibility of taking a human body through time. Our concern is if the process of time-travel has major implications for the expat or the expat’s surroundings.”
“Can we send them back?” asked Ivan. “I’m asking on behalf of my expat, not because—”
“No.”
“Why not? Ma’am,” Ivan added.
“We can’t risk the temporal repercussions,” said Adela. “They are supposed to be dead. As long as they’re here, it’s functionally as if they are dead in their own time. Again, I must emphasize, you are focused on the long-term prognoses of the expats in our era. Your remits really could not be clearer.”
“What happens if they survive?” I asked.
“Then you will have the lovely warm glow of having contributed to a humanitarian project.”
“And if they die?”
“Then you will have contributed to a scienti1c project. Atoms unsuccessfully split and so on.”
“If they survive, what will we do with the door?” asked Simellia.
“The use of the door is not your concern,” said Adela, all honey-coated arsenic. “It is no one’s concern until we have established that it can be used at all. You will earn your place in the history books, Simellia, as long as we can guarantee that history continues.”
I walked down to the central lobby with Simellia, who’d left the meeting room like a diver kicking free of a kraken. Simellia’s expat was Captain Arthur Reginald-Smyth, who’d been extracted from the Battle of the Somme. The expatriation team who’d fetched him had said it was the worst pickup—more viscera than the Battle of Naseby, more howling than the guillotines. When the door closed, one agent had a human eyeball clinging to a crease in her combats. The force of a mortar explosion had bounced it through the portal.
“How’s it all going?” I asked her.
Simellia proPered a look that was all eyebrow. “Oh, it’s going. We can certainly say that it’s going.”
I matched her pace. Simellia was a little older than me, but far more senior. Before she’d joined the project, she’d held a director’s position in the Behavioral Sciences department. I was somewhat in awe of her, and I translated this into arti1cial aplomb, because I imagined her a woman impatient with another woman’s self-deprecation. As we walked, I kept hearing the wet cluck of my foot unsticking from the sole of my brogues.
“Did you notice that Adela’s face has changed again?” asked Simellia.
“Yeah. I don’t know what 1llers she’s using, but I think they’re alive. Swear to God her cheekbones were on the move.”
“She’s an interesting woman,” said Simellia, which could have meant anything.
I tried another topic. “Bets on Home Office absorption?” “What’s that?”
“If they make it through the year without dying of a time-travel disease, then the Ministry falls under the Home Office. Cross-historical immigration is still immigration. I’d put a 1fty on it.”
One of Simellia’s eyebrows did something semaphoric. “I don’t think we’ll be bringing over enough of them to require Home Office manpower.”
“England’s closed, is it?” “Yeah, hostile era policy.”
“Fuck oP back to the Dark Ages if you don’t like it.”
Simellia emitted an enigmatic smile. “There’s your boy,” she said.
We’d arrived in the central lobby. Gore was standing in a shaft of sunlight, staring up at the steel-and-glass ceiling. He looked dazzled into boyishness by the half sky of the building’s skull.
“A snaky-hipped lady-killer,” said Simellia dryly. I laughed.
“I’ll see you at the next working group,” she added. “Sure. See you.”
I clucked across the shining Aoor until I reached his side. He looked down at me and said mildly, “Someone told me oP for trying to smoke indoors.”
“Yeah, you can’t do that in this era.” “Send me back to the Arctic.” “Ha!”
We went for lunch at a small bistro near the Ministry. Gore came from an era of service à la française, private dining rooms and putting everything into jelly. When I began to explain, in tones of motherly patience, how twenty-1rst- century restaurants operated, he said, “I’ve eaten kangaroo on the uninhabited shores of the Albert River. I understand how a knife and fork work. Please sit down.”
He pulled out the chair for me, then settled back and regarded the menu with exploratory interest. I don’t think I was wrong—it’s just that he approached all uncertainty as a challenge. I couldn’t remember my 1rst time in a restaurant as an unsupervised adult, but I could vividly remember my 1rst time ordering a drink in a bar that I was too young to be in. I ordered a pint of Guinness because it was what my dad drank. It tasted like angry Marmite; I hated it, and I didn’t
order anything else for many years because I’d got served that one time and didn’t want to break my streak.
“What are the other expats like?” I asked.
“Overwhelmed. The pair from the seventeenth century loathe each other. I suspect the young lady—Margaret something or other—has blossomed under the appalling liberties of your age, and Lieutenant Cardingham does not approve. I found Captain Reginald-Smyth very sympathetic, however. He reminds me of Lieutenant Irving.”
“How so?”
“Soft-spoken, shy, awash in a grand quantity of private torment.”
This made me laugh, even though I knew the expatriation eyeball story. I didn’t ask him if the captain had explained the First World War, or maybe he’d been told and then failed to retain the information. I didn’t know to what extent his brain, behind that broad white forehead, had been shaken and bruised like an overripe peach.
Our food arrived, and Gore speared a falafel speculatively on the end of his fork.
“I thought it might be a good thing to make a proper friend of him,” Gore continued. “He said he would arrange for his bridge to take us to”—here he raised his eyebrows—“a public house. I am looking forward to seeing what visions of sin this era has concocted for the humble tavern.”
“Wow. Maybe you’ll go somewhere with Sky Sports.” “I refuse to 1nd out what that is.”
“And you’ll meet Simellia.”
“Is that the name of his bridge?”
“Yes. She’s an interesting woman. You’ll like her,” I said, with no idea at all if he would like her. “So. Captain Reginald-Smyth. You’re currying favor with your superiors?”
He took a bite of falafel and gave me a dimpled smile while he chewed. He swallowed and said, “A Royal Navy commander has the equivalent army rank of lieutenant colonel. I outrank everyone. I don’t think Lieutenant Cardingham much likes that either.”
Back at the house I was still struggling to think of as “home,” Gore shyly asked me if I would also “come for a drink.” He had done well, at lunch, to hide his deep embarrassment over my payment of the bill (with a Ministry expense card); he was adjusting with gold-star alacrity in recognizing that it wouldn’t be a reputation-detonating act for a respectable woman to be seen in a public house in the company of bachelors.
In response, I made a noncommittal noise. Nineteen-sixteen—Reginald- Smyth—was not a well man. I was told he’d wept in the street the 1rst time he’d heard a car back1re. He’d picked up the use of a modern washing machine very quickly and compulsively washed his sheets. Simellia thought it might have something to do with survivor’s guilt manifesting in the anxiety that the (long- dead) lice that plagued him on the western front had followed him to the future. Either way, I wasn’t sure if I ought to burden him with a third face to which he had to play polite. I emailed Simellia to ask for her opinion, and she suggested we meet for a pre-drink drink to discuss the having of drinks.
The next evening, I went to meet her at the pub she had suggested, an old- fashioned watering hole close to the Ministry, poky and bizarrely fuggy and upholstered in leather. It was like being inside the elbow of a patched jumper. There was only one other customer, sitting in the corner, lugubriously posting crisps into his mouth. The drinks menu was a hand-scrawled chalkboard over the bar. At a squint, it appeared my choices included mmllmmT, suaauug, and wwij.
“Can I get a half of Guinness?”
The young man behind the bar, who was polishing a glass hammily, gave me an encouraging smile.
“Right you are.”
He poured it as if he was an extra in Casablanca. Do you actually like your job? I wanted to ask him, but instead I crept to a corner table and drank some of the establishment’s 1nest angry Marmite.
While I was waiting, I started work on a core report. Bridges had to 1le core reports on a weekly basis, via their handlers, to Control. There was a separate protocol for alerting Control to time-travel emergencies, such as our expats
turning inside out, but it involved such an unwieldy number of codes and permissions that Quentin had told me just to ring him if Gore began to play hopscotch between dimensions. He’d even given me his personal number for the purpose, which was excitingly unauthorized.
CORE REPORT: 1847 (Graham Gore, “Franklin expedition”)
Standard [x]
Special measures [ ]
If this report includes cross-expatriate material, please indicate expatriate
1645 (Thomas Cardingham, “Battle of Naseby”) [ ] 1665 (Margaret Kemble, “Great Plague of London”) [ ] 1793 (Anne Spencer, “French Revolution”) [ ]
1916 (Arthur Reginald-Smyth, “Battle of the Somme”) [x]
Observations on subject’s physiology/physical appearance
On closer examination, blushes easily. Not previously noticeable because he speaks so calmly. As per last week’s report, face shows evidence of broken sleep or sleeplessness (dark circles, puffy eyes). No longer bolts meals as if he’s been starving in the Arctic for years, though still very quiet and intense around desserts. No weight gain; I’d value the opportunity to discuss nutrition plans with the Wellness team. No further discomfiture with clothing. Some chapping at knuckles and backs of hands, which may be eczema or may be due to overcautious handwashing; please could the Wellness team tackle the subject of germs in a noninflammatory manner.
Observations on subject’s mental state
Calm, pleasant. Adjusting well. Has demonstrated levity, humor. Keen to befriend other expats (especially 1916). Recent report from Wellness team (see email from April 14) appeared to suggest that bridge work has failed to create a foundation for meaningful therapeutic work. May I counter that asking 1847 about his relationship with his mother when
he has been almost continuously at sea since he was eleven is an unproductive place to start. **FLAG TO CONTROL** His short-term memory has shown some signs of damage or deterioration, particularly re: information imparted on his arrival—
“What a charming picture of conscientiousness,” said a voice above me. “Simellia! Hello.”
Simellia looked, as always, chic. She often wore architectural jackets and skirts in stained-glass tones and their palette improved the room. She was unlikely to get called “miss.” She would probably be “ma’am” if the lad behind the bar knew what was good for him. She came back with a glass of chilled red wine, which I hadn’t realized was a drink you could get on purpose.
“Do you think the guy at that table is a spy?” I asked.
Simellia Aicked her eyes to him. “No,” she said. “He’s an alcoholic. The boy behind the bar is though.”
“Yeah? Is it the way he’s wiping down surfaces like he’s being choreographed?”
“It’s that apron. That’s a costume if I ever saw one. Also, Ralph trained him.
Back in Defence.”
I coughed at my half-pint. Ralph, a snide and etiolated former 1eld agent, was my least favorite bridge. He had somehow managed to get assigned the only young woman expat.
“Wait. Kidding?”
“No. Apparently it was very awkward when Ralph came in here for a lunchtime gallon of merlot and spotted him. He’s part of Defence’s tracking team. You know they don’t much like the fact that the Ministry is a separate institution. They thought the time-door ought to fall under their remit.”
“Forgive me my density, Simellia, but if you know this place is run by spies, why are we drinking here?”
“Because I want to see what happens.” “Oh. Wow.”
“Now drink your beer and look suspicious.”
I laughed, and the spy carefully did not look round. “Okay,” I said, “okay, let me pop my shirt collar. How’s this? Hang on, let me hunch up a bit. How’s this?”
“Great. You look like you’re about to sell me dirty magazines from out of your raincoat, and you’re not even wearing a raincoat.”
She took a sip of her wine and adjusted my shirt collar to a more furtive angle. “You know what he’ll write about us anyway,” she said calmly, “no matter what we do or how we dress. ‘The biracial woman and the Black woman who work at the Ministry.’”
I straightened my shoulders hurriedly. “Ah. Well. Of course, I have the privilege of passing as white—”
I paused. I 1nd that people usually want to tell me whether they agree with this assessment or not. Simellia, however, waited for the end of my sentence.
“So he’ll have to write about my pornographic raincoat instead,” I 1nished lamely. “Er. How are you 1nding the, er—the whole—Is he all right, your expat?”
“He used the word ‘Negro’ until I stopped him, but I don’t think he meant it with two g’s, if that’s what you’re asking me. How’s your expat managing the news of your miscegenation?”
I took a big swig of Guinness. “Well. He isn’t. I haven’t told him.”
Simellia nodded slowly, as if I’d asked her to do some long division. When she next spoke, I could hear a smooth change in register from backchat to professional counselor. “I understand why you’ve held oP discussing it until now,” she said. “But I don’t advise leaving it much longer. It’s psychologically important—for both of you—that you’re able to inhabit your identity, and that he’s able to accept you gracefully and wholeheartedly. We mustn’t adjust for them. They are here to adjust to the world. A person at a time. That’s how you do it.”
“Do ‘it’?”
“Make a new world.”
She had a soft light in her eye, a sudden distance in her gaze. Gosh, I thought,
she really believes it.
Personally, I believed that I had the bridge job because I was an exception and not a rule. If I’d got it by lionizing my marginalization, peeling back my layers to show the grid of my veins, I wouldn’t have put it past the Ministry to use the layout against me at a later date. Never tell a workplace or a lover anything that might cause them to terminate your relationship until you’re ready to leave. I try not to give too many context clues early on and I didn’t like to draw attention to little harms. Why would I want to point out the places where my Aesh was soft, my organs vulnerable? If my white friend casually called sushi “exotic,” couldn’t I be pleased she was eating something other than unseasoned red meat? Anyway, I could be a little exotic—just enough to bring up in my annual appraisals if a raise or title change was under discussion.
The spy behind the bar, who had been conspicuously checking the till and polishing already-gleaming glasses, put some music on. Simellia brightened up.
“Hey! ‘Electric Boogie’!” “Eh?”
She laughed. Simellia smiled all the time but she almost never laughed, so I remember this moment clearly. I suddenly saw how much of a facade was the elegant, highly efficient government professional—behind which was someone who, maybe, had too many texts from a wayward sibling that she hadn’t dealt with, someone who was giving up on dating for the 1fth time in as many years, someone who had to smother her impatience when Drunk Elephant–shopping beauty evangelists tried to explain the miracle moisture properties of cocoa butter to her. Before, I hadn’t really been aware that other Simellia was there, but now, I felt her barricades.
“It’s very funny to me that anyone can get to auntie age and not know what ‘Electric Boogie’ is,” she said. “You don’t know the Electric Slide?”
“Excuse me. Auntie who? Ralph’s protégé called me ‘miss.’” “Get up.”
“What?”
“I’m going to teach you.”
“Simellia. In the pub? What will the boy put in his report to Defence?”
“He’ll put, ‘The biracial woman and the Black woman who work at the Ministry.’ Trust me on this.”
In the end, we decided that Captain Reginald-Smyth’s 1rst time in a pub and 1rst public get-together with another expat would be overwhelming enough without adding a new bridge. So on the evening Gore was out with the two of them, I sat with some friends in their gray-and-yellow kitchen with a bottle of mid-price wine. I spent the visit pretending to be normal—I was in fact contractually obliged to do this—but my entire being was wired to wonder what he was doing, what he was seeing, what he was asking. When I burned my tongue on the pizza my friend had heated in the oven, I bizarrely imagined that somewhere, he had burned his tongue in symbiotic sympathy.
The Ministry provided purportedly voluntary therapy sessions for all bridges, as our work was emotionally involved and psychologically taxing. I hadn’t signed up. I felt that human connection shouldn’t be professionally managed, or that I was somehow quali1ed for personal pain given a family history of pain. Fear and tragedy wallpapered my life. When I was twelve years old, I’d sat at the dining table with my mother, peeling the skins oP garlic for her. She was telling me about one of her sisters, who had been beautiful and married rich. They’d killed her, of course—the cadres who sacked Phnom Penh—and she mused out loud, “I wonder if they raped her before they shot her?” Yes, thought twelve-year-old me seriously, I wonder if they did? And I would always be a twelve-year-old who had wondered that about her aunt at the dining table. An underrated symptom of inherited trauma is how socially awkward it is to live with.
When I got back to the house, I found an open packet of cigarettes at the dining table and settled in to smoke one, listening to my mind bleat. He returned about halfway through the cigarette.
“Commander Gore?”
“Good evening. After-dinner smoke?”
“Mm. My friends aren’t smokers, and they don’t know I’ve relapsed.” “Ah. I will keep your secret.”
He spoke with grave clarity, slightly louder than usual. He was drunk, and hiding it well. If I wasn’t cohabiting with him, if my paycheck wasn’t dependent on recording his every move, I might not have noticed.
He opened the narrow drawer that contained bottles of spirits. They rattled lushly. The Ministry had resisted providing these, but as I kept pointing out, he’d been in the Royal Navy at the height of the rum-ration years; no doubt he drank.
He selected a whiskey, wandered to the freezer, then paused. “Will you join me?”
“No, I—Actually, yes, please.”
I was also quite drunk, but he’d never oPered me anything stronger than tea before.
He came to the table with two iced glasses and the entire bottle, which he set down in front of me. I slid the cigarettes across to him, and he lit one briskly.
“We must get a decanter. I feel like a lushington, pouring from a bottle.
Here.”
“Thank you. Did you have a nice time?” “Yes. I like Arthur.”
“And his bridge?”
“I like her too. She is a Negress—”
I choked. “Uh. We don’t use that word anymore. We just say ‘Black.’ As an adjective. You would say, ‘She is a Black woman.’”
“That sounds rather rude. Or brusque, somehow. ‘Negro’ is derogatory?” “People will assume you’re racist.”
“‘Racist’?”
“Oh. Uh. That you have prejudices against people of other races.”
He frowned. “Does not every race have this?” he asked. “Having exposure, in the main, to the customs and habits of their own race, and being unfamiliar with the customs of others?”
“Well. In this era we try to look beyond a person’s race and consider them by their merits alone.”
“We?”
“The Ministry, for example. The civil service is an equal opportunities employer.”
He murmured “equal opportunities employer” back to himself, and I Aushed so deeply I could feel it smearing across my sternum. He said, “She is a doctor.
Of the mind. I forget the term—” “Psychiatrist? Psychotherapist?”
“The latter, I think… But she said she was the only person of her race in the entire department. Not only the sole Black—as you say—bridge, but the only Black… mind doctor… in the… mind doctor squadron.”
“Oh, yeah, Kooks and Killers is super white. Obviously, at intake, there are fewer Black candidates, you know, structural reasons, uh, it starts at school, even, there are barriers in their way from the start, and then by the time they’re school graduates, university graduates, uh… It’s an ongoing process. We’ve had only about 1fty years of thinking about it seriously, and every generation sees that the last one wasn’t doing enough. They’ll probably 1nd us criminal in a century or so.”
I stammered this out hurriedly. Simellia felt so present that she might as well have been there, invigilating our conversation. Gore was pondering his whiskey, and nothing I’d said would have made sense to him, but I wanted to get a good mark from Simellia for my anti-racism (totally normal to want, totally possible to achieve).
Gore stared into his glass, turning his wrist to give the ice cube a tour of the perimeter.
“‘Kooks and Killers’?” he said at last. My shoulders unknotted.
“Ha. Ministry nickname for the Behavioral Science department.”
He raised his eyebrows at the ice in his glass, tipped it back and forth. I pulled a second cigarette, and he lit it for me with automatic politeness.
At length, he said, “When I was a younger man, I spent some time on the Preventative Squadron. It was set up to suppress the West African slave trade.”
He threw back half his whiskey, set it down. “I was thinking about the Rosa. That was captured when I was… 1ve-and-twenty. On Christmas Day, I remember that distinctly. It was Aying under Spanish colors, with some three hundred—mm—Africans aboard. I was on the Despatch, under Commander Daniell. We brought them to the port at Barbados. At that time, I was quite thick with the assistant surgeon, John Lancaster. We were of an age, and he was
excellent company. He spoke Spanish, which none of the other officers did. He was determined to make me eat a coconut. Have you ever eaten a coconut?”
“I have.”
“I’d never experienced a fruit that fought back so hard against being eaten. Where was I? Yes. Commander Daniell and the chief surgeon went ashore in February, and left me as acting lieutenant, just as the Rosa’s case was being tried. John and I had to go aboard and count the Negr—captives. They’d been provided with such provisions as they needed, and con1ned to the ship, along with the Rosa’s crew, for the duration of their detention. But they couldn’t leave the ship, you see, and…”
He stopped, drank the other half of his whiskey, then reached for the bottle. “I was, I think, a little giddy with my own power. I had never been handed
the command of a ship, regardless that it was docked, regardless that its captain would return soon enough. Riding beside that giddiness was the dread weight of responsibility. When I saw the captives, I recognized that their berthing was— inadequate. That they had undoubtedly suPered greatly and were exhausted and sick. Two had died since we captured the Rosa. But my chief thought was, I had better get this head count right. Or perhaps I might have thought, brieAy, Poor wretches. But there was more obligation than Christian compassion in my heart. Whether I saw men, or women, or children…”
He trailed oP.
“You’re thinking about Simellia.”
“I’ve had Black seamen under my command. That’s a diPerent thing. Those unfortunates in the hold… I don’t know… Would she have behaved so pleasantly towards me had she known that I’d looked at them and seen a tally?”
“She’s familiar with the era.”
He nodded, rather gloomily, and lifted his glass to his mouth again. This time, he didn’t drink but regarded me over the lip.
“I hope you do not mind me making this observation,” he said. “But I think I am right in saying you are not, yourself, wholly an Englishwoman.”
“Well done,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “What gave it away? Shape of my eyes?”
“The color of your mouth.”
The ice hit the bottom of my glass with a frigid knock. I’d never heard that one before.
He didn’t like twenty-1rst-century language. “Victorian” was his greatest descriptive enemy, and to be fair, I’d heard people apply the word miscellaneously to any period 1710–1916. But much of what I thought of as quintessentially “Victorian” was in his future and, to him, gargantuan, disproportionate, ungentlemanly, unpious. He didn’t understand my use of the term “classical music,” which meant something to do with formal classicism to him and meant, to me, that it had violins. He hated “text” as a verb, “sex” as an act, “tomato” as a salad product. One afternoon he came in from a walk and asked me, very thoughtfully, “Some charming young women—out on the heath
—addressed me quite boisterously—what is a ‘DILF’?”
It goes without saying that he called me half-caste. Perhaps it goes without saying that it took a while for me to correct him. I’d used it myself, before I learned not to. People forget how recent an invention “mixed-race” is, and by the time I was at the Ministry, we weren’t even supposed to write that. We were supposed to write “people with a mixed ethnic background.”
I’d taken my time correcting him because I wasn’t sure what I meant to myself. “Mixed-race” people don’t technically belong to either of their heritage spaces, but they don’t necessarily belong in a “mixed-race” space either—there’s too much Aex in the term. I used to think every mixed-race person was an island, composed of a population of one. Maybe that’s because the Cambodian diaspora is so small here, or maybe it’s because I wanted, willfully, to be an exception.
Graham used other words too, not wrong, exactly, but not right, like “your people,” or “your culture.” When I said, in a wincingly tight voice, that we had the same people and culture, he replied, mildly, “But I don’t think that we do.” Then came the image searches about Cambodia, on food and dress and customs. I had to do those for him, in the early days, because he still didn’t know how, and the English-language internet was not on my side. Exotic, friendly,
conservative, resilient. The way he couched his questions, too, was imperfect. I had to correct “ancestor” for “grandparent,” “sacred” for “polite,” “tribal leaders” for “farmers.”
Eventually he asked if he would meet my family, eyes full of hopeful curiosity. This was forbidden, but I reluctantly showed him a picture of my parents and sister on my personal phone, the screen supernovaed with cracks. He pointed at my sister, beaming. “Oh! There’s two of you!” he said in a voice so full of naked delight that I hurriedly put the phone away.
One of the many hypotheses coagulating in these early days of time-travel was that language informed experience—that we did not simply describe but create our world through language, like Adam in the Garden of Eden calling a spade a spade or whatever happens in Genesis. At its heart, the theory promised that the raw stuP of the universe could be carved into a clausal household, populated by an extended family of concepts. In retrospect, we might have devoted more time to explaining to the expats why they couldn’t use what were now considered slurs. Some of them never really got the hang of this.
The expats, loose as dust in narrative time, were schooled mercilessly in description. According to the hypothesis, the more accurate their vocabulary, the more likely they would temporally adjust. “Assimilate” is actually the word we used—they would assimilate if they said “phone” instead of “unholy device” or “car” instead of “horseless carriage”—but we meant survive. The bridges were expected to be day-by-day dictionaries. For the expats, Simellia and I were contextually so unusual that we were asked more questions (“Will your women’s brains not overheat?” from Sixteen-forty-1ve; “When did you throw oP your chains for these—how do you call them—‘pantsuits’?” from Seventeen-ninety- three). I was discom1ted by this stilted forbearance of our sex and our skin. It’s not that I wanted to be someone like Ralph, any more than I wanted to develop a crust, but I’d fondly imagined authority as an equalizer.
Twice a week, we would sit the expats in a room with a comfortable chair, a desk, a screen, and a pot of tea. The tea was not essential to the experiment, but they were more inclined to cooperate if they were given nice tea with a china cup and saucer—even Sixteen-forty-1ve and Sixteen-sixty-1ve, who didn’t have the
manufactured appetite for it. Embarrassing stuP, something for a Punch cartoon about Englishness, but it worked.
The bridge would sit behind a two-way mirror, with the members of the Wellness team running the experiment. We’d stand and watch as images from twenty-1rst-century life appeared on the screen in front of the expat, who would then describe aloud what they could see. Anachronisms, malapropisms, and total ignorance would be noted but not pointed out; it was up to the bridge to actively correct them in future daily routines.
To begin with, the language experiment had a chilly, near-sensual thrill. There’s something vengeful about agreeing on an interpretation. Set your narrative as canon and in a tiny way you have pried your death out of time, as long as the narrative is recalled by someone else. I certainly understood better why people became writers, and why jealous lovers force so many false confessions, and why the British history curriculum looks the way that it does.
But after the 1rst few sessions, the Voight-KampP neo-noir charm of the language experiment wore oP, and it became boring for bridge and expat alike. Gore played up. He started describing the images on-screen via caricature—what a mermaid would say about a coPee shop, for example. It charmed me, and I resented his ability to play drawing room games in the laboratory. I had limited experience of charm—that twinkly old-fashioned thing that aAicts the eccentric
—and my brusque defenses against similar attributes (Airtation, civility, servility) didn’t work, because Gore’s charm was undirected. I might as well have tried to catch fog in a jar. And he’d go on and on: Anne Boleyn discovering oP-the-rack fashion, a horse in an Apple store. He was funny, that was the problem. Funny men are bad for the health. Please just tell us what you can see, someone from the Wellness team would wheedle over the microphone, and Gore would coal up his Victorianisms until I was chewing at my 1ngers.
One pedantic Tuesday he was placed in front of a screen which showed a blond, frowning female soldier in combat fatigues, carrying a machine gun and kneeling in the undergrowth. He went quiet and considered her for a while over the rim of his teacup.
“Commander Gore?” prompted the operator from the Wellness team. He turned to face us and sighed.
“A woman in the workplace,” he said.
The operator laughed, though she shouldn’t have, and covered her embarrassment by giving me a thumbs-up. I only saw it out of the corner of my eye because I was trying to meet Gore’s and to remember if I’d told him that the mirror was two-way.
In the 1rst couple of months, I watched him 1ll out with attributes like a daguerreotype developing. Take Sunday mornings. One Sunday, I rose before ten (unusual) and wandered the kitchen, too unfocused by the clementine-sweet spring sun to consider breakfast. He came through the front door while I was gazing blankly at the kettle.
“Good morning.”
“Morning. Have you been out for a walk?” “No. To church.”
I felt strangely embarrassed, as if he had just told me that he spent his Sunday mornings at a soft play center.
He smiled at me and said, “I have noted the dreadful secularism of this age.
You may assume a less guilty expression.”
He went for long walks and came back with sketches of pylons and dismantled gasometers: black ink, exacting and melancholy, with a fastidiousness of line I recognized from his archived sketches of ships. I wondered if he saw glorious visions of industry or broken metal monsters. Perhaps he saw nothing but shapes. He gave me the best of his gasometer sketches and I put it up in the tiny office.
At the insistence of the Wellness team, the Ministry granted the expats access to the staP gyms and pools. Gore took up boxing, often with Sixteen-forty-1ve, Lieutenant Thomas Cardingham. I understand some well-meaning dimwit on the Wellness team had tried to persuade them to join the fencing troupe (currently comprising a total of one member, viz, the dimwit), as they were both familiar with sword warfare. Cardingham, when presented with a foil, laughed so hard that his nose dripped. Gore was more polite—Gore’s weapon of choice
was charm—but I’m told he mentioned the Battle of Navarino and some graphic stuP about disembowelment. Neither of the men were classically trained fencers. They just knew how to kill someone with a sword. The dimwit let the matter drop.
Gore couldn’t understand the simultaneity of stacks of meat in supermarkets and our anxiety around hunting. Someone on the Wellness team taught the expats the term “quality of life” and somehow, grumbling about his inability to hunt and the paucity of countryside to hunt in, he parlayed the term into an air riAe.
I came down one morning to 1nd he’d killed all the squirrels in the garden.
He’d piled them in a grotesque furry cairn. “What the hell?!”
“There is no need to swear. I have heard you talk to them in the roughest way about the lawn, so I thought I would dispatch them.”
“They’re dead!”
“Of course they are. I’m a very good shot. How do you feel about pigeons?” “Leave the pigeons alone!”
“As you please. Would you like these? You could make a lovely hat.” “No!”
Later, at dinner—a now-unidenti1able meat he had charcoaled into submission and limp green beans—he said: “I think it would improve my quality of life if we got a dog.”
The expats weren’t allowed pets. They were detained at the generosity of His Majesty’s government and could not, themselves, take on a caring burden. Wear and tear, also, of the furniture; an insinuation, never expressed before them, that the expats might die of mutations and leave the animal parentless.
I murmured, “It’s quite a small house for a dog.”
“They are only so big,” he said, indicating with his hands the dimensions of a very large dog.
“Where would it sleep?” “Where he lay down.”
He’d had a dog on the expedition, I knew, a black Labrador so ancient that a number of letters from the other expedition members remarked on the animal’s
decrepitude. It must have died, along with all the men he’d served with. I said, with the intent to get oP dangerous ground, “Cats are smaller.”
“We do not need a cat,” he said. “A little creature who sleeps for hours and plays with her prey? We already have you.”
I almost pushed a green bean into my lungs. He watched me, let me bar my shaking throat with my 1ngers, gargling vegetable, before he poured me water.
Gore was bored, that much was clear. Despite the amenities and pleasures of the twenty-1rst century, he was bored. He had been handed a plush-lined life, with time to read, to pursue thoughts to their phantasmagoric end, to take in whole seasons at the British Film Institute, to walk for miles, to master sonatas, and paint to his heart’s content. He did not need to work, to exchange the sweat of his brow or the creak of his mind for board and bed. And yet, he was bored of having no purpose. He was getting bored of everything. I was afraid that he was getting bored of me.
Toward the end of May, the expats were summoned for MRI scans. We took the tube to the Ministry together.
The medical staP hustled me into the observation room while they prepared him for his scan. Three men were already waiting at the controls. One was a radiographer I’d seen around the Ministry. Another, tall and tan with peppery hair, was in uniform with brigadier’s pips.
The third man was the Secretary for Expatriation. He had a presence as mild as salad and the beautiful crow’s-feet of someone who could aPord to age attractively. He seemed like he shouldn’t have the job—not just that of Secretary of Expatriation, but any job at all—as jobs are not very chic. I expect he had been given it because someone’s father knew someone else’s father. Although I was a bridge and therefore a key member of the project, I’d had barely any contact with him. Adela acted as de facto rod and crown.
“Mr. Secretary,” I said.
He turned pleasantries onto me. The Brigadier, who was already standing very straight, stood a little straighter.
“Ah,” said the Secretary, “have you met—?”
“Ma’am,” said the Brigadier. He had an exquisite broadcaster plum I thought had died out in the seventies. “You are Commander Gore’s bridge?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Congratulations on your new role. Where were you before? Special Branch?”
“No, sir. Support ops.” “Behavioral Science?” “Languages.”
“I will watch your career with interest,” said the Brigadier.
I disliked him instantly. He said it like he was chewing on it.
Lying inside the scanner, Gore said, over the intercom, “This is like being inside a gun’s barrel.”
“Just relax, sir,” said the radiographer.
“I’m horizontal. I’m as relaxed as I can be. Can you read my thoughts with this machine?”
“No, not at all.”
“Oh, in which case, I am very relaxed. And I can assure you that I’m thinking friendly things toward you.”
After he’d been barked at by the magnets, Gore came through to the observation room. The Brigadier’s uniform had an incredible, immediate ePect. Gore snapped, rather coldly, to attention.
“At ease, Commander,” said the Brigadier. “I am just on my way out.” “Sir.”
Even the Secretary relaxed once the Brigadier had left. “Defence deputation,” he said to me con1dingly. “Big brother watching over little brother, you know.”
Gore said, “May I con1rm that I am a miracle of medicine?”
“We’ll get the results in a week or so, but I don’t think you should be troubled,” said the radiographer. “Here. No signi1cant abnormalities that I can see.”
“Oh, you truly can’t see my thoughts….” “Sorry to disappoint!”
The next expat up for scanning was Arthur Reginald-Smyth, who arrived bridgeless and did not look quite as blasé; in fact he looked green. He was a tall man, with close-cropped hair and a 1ne, clean jaw. He had to remove a signet ring from his 1nger before he lay down, and once he lay down, his hands began to shake.
“Just relax, please, sir,” said the radiographer. “I can assure you that you’re in safe hands.”
Gore leaned down over the radiographer and said, into the microphone, “It’s great fun, Sixteen, you’ll get a dag of your thoughts.”
“You won’t—”
“Forty-seven?” said Reginald-Smyth, in a hoarse, anxious voice. “Is that you?
What are you doing there?”
“Reading your thoughts, old chap. That was a very nasty one. I’ve never seen such obscenities. Good grief. How many sugars do you take in your tea?”
Reginald-Smyth’s hands had stopped shaking. “Someone needs to put you back on a bally boat,” he said, almost amused.
“We’re going to begin now, Captain,” said the radiographer. “You may 1nd the machine a little noisy….”
“Oh!”
“It’s all right, sir.” “Oh God!”
“Good thought you had there,” Gore said. “Something about, hmm, elephants. Waltzing elephants.”
“It sounds like bloody tank 1re!”
“Which may also be the noise of waltzing elephants. Having not had the pleasure of meeting one, let alone dancing with one, I can’t con1rm.”
Reginald-Smyth’s bunched 1sts uncurled with an ePort. “I can’t imagine you dancing,” he said, with a shaky attempt at humor.
“According to this wonderful map we have of your thoughts, that is exactly what you are imagining.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“We really can’t see anything you’re thinking,” said the radiographer, but he was grinning.
“You tell that to Forty-seven,” said the captain, then, “Jesus,” tightly, through his teeth, as the MRI scanner thudded again.
“We don’t have to stay for the… results, or anything?” I asked the radiographer.
“Oh, no, not at all.”
“If you’d like to return home, I can make my own way back,” Gore said to me.
“Oh. Right, then.”
He gave me a broad, pleasant smile, then patted the radiographer on the shoulder and began to calm Reginald-Smyth down again. There was a loosening in his demeanor, the unfurling of some pennant that I hadn’t realized had been coiled and tucked. But of course—he was an officer of a bachelor service, who had spent most of his life at sea. He had missed the company of other men.
I stepped through the front door in a mournful mood. My breath was shallow. My stomach was airy, empty. Every time I thought about him, I felt as if I were overstretching a pulled muscle, but in my mind. I decided I would email the Wellness team, immediately, and arrange to begin therapy.
But I couldn’t write the email. My 1ngers seemed magnetically charged to repulse the keys of my laptop. I had a shower and unloaded the dishwasher. I tried to read. Words slipped up.
In the end, I opened the drawer in the bottom of my bedside table and pulled out a tin that once held a fountain pen. I had most of an eighth and some rolling papers. I disemboweled one of his cigarettes for the tobacco and rolled a loose, sloppy joint with my magnetically repulsive 1ngers before going to sit on the back porch. A stupid wood pigeon made its idiot way through the clover.
“Hello, pigeon. You don’t know it, but I saved your life.”
Coo, coo.
I heard his key in the front door. “Hall-oo.”
“Hello. Big pigeon here don’ttryandshootit.”
“Is something wrong with that cigarette? Smells odd.” “Ah. Ahaha. No. Captain okay?”
“He had a horrible time, but it ended soon enough. We had to talk Miss Kemble through it afterward. We weren’t sure what experience she’d had that might compare to the machine. Arthur thought a stage coach journey in a very narrow coach? In any event, she called us both plague sores and said that she understood it to be an instrument that paints pictures of the brain using the power of magnets.”
“Ha!”
“She’s very unusual. She reminds me of you.” “Is that good?”
He smiled. “What is the matter with that cigarette?” “Promise not to tell anyone at the Ministry?”
“Oh. Forbidden tobacco. Full of germs.”
“It’s called—well, cannabis. But it’s got a lot of names. It was legalized a few years ago, and now it’s very uncool.”
“What does it do?” “Would you like to try?”
He raised an eyebrow but came to join me on the porch. The pigeon, who had seen what happened to the squirrels, took oP.
“You have to inhale it. Properly. If it makes you cough—There.” “Erk.”
“Try again.” “Erk.”
He handed the joint back to me, his eyes watering, and fumbled for his cigarettes. Languid spring heat papered the garden. We smoked companionably in the dimming light. The pigeon came back and eyed us both, in case our constituent parts had collapsed into bird seed.
“What would you call the color on that fowl? Lilac?” “Lilac?”
“On—there. Is that lilac? Lavender?” “What?”
“What?”
“What?”
We stared at each other. Then we creased toward each other and began to giggle helplessly.
I retreated inside to make a pot of tea. He found a packet of unopened chocolate digestives. We settled in to demolish them.
“I think we should get a dog.” “Mm. No.”
“We should have had this stuP in the navy.” “Chocolate biscuits or weed?”
“Both. ‘Weed’? That sounds very whimsical. Something that fairies put in their pipes.”
“If the Royal Navy had a weed ration in the Age of Sail, your Arctic journey would have ended up in Rio de Janeiro.”
“Good!”
This made us both start honking weakly again.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve found something about the twenty-1rst century that you approve of, Commander.”
He smiled, dimples curving. “I think, as we are ‘housemates,’ and also, I hope, friends, that you should call me Graham.”
“Who is Auntie?” he asked me, the next morning. He’d come down from his bath barefoot, with his hair still damp—another 1rst. His curls had grown back in.
“I’m going to need more context.”
“After you returned home yesterday, the Brigadier came back to see Arthur. They had a conversation about television, which Arthur seems to think is a wonderful invention. The Brigadier mentioned ‘Auntie’s output.’”
“Oh. It’s a very old nickname for the BBC. Hasn’t been in use since the sixties, I think. The 1960s, I mean. How odd. He asked me if I’d been part of Special Branch too. Can’t remember the last time I heard someone call
counterterrorism ‘Special Branch.’ Well, maybe it’s not so weird. The top brass all live in the past anyway.”
“As it ever was. Why ‘Auntie’?”
“It was considered very staid and fussily benevolent. You know. Educational programming for the beloved workforce.”
“In the 1960s? And one could smoke indoors?” “Yes.”
“Why was I not taken there? Did the fashionable still wear hats? I notice that only the very religious appear to preserve this decorum.”
“Fashion,” I muttered. I pulled out my phone, googled a picture of a girl in a sixties miniskirt, and held it up to him. He blushed with his face on mute.
“Well, that looks very unhealthy,” he said.
Much later that day, he asked, “What is the handheld machine called, the one that projects a white, 1lmy grid with information on it?”
“A 1lmy—? It wasn’t a smartphone?”
“No. It was quite a diPerent shape, and the projection stood out from it.
Here. I made a sketch from memory.”
“I don’t know what this is. Where did you see it?”
“Outside the Ministry. There was a person waiting by the staP entrance and projecting it into the air.”
“That’s. Hm. I don’t know what that is. You’re certain that’s what you saw?” “Yes. It was projecting.”
I leaned over the table and stared at his sketch, or at least, I aPected to. Really, I was looking at the willow line of his lashes, curving downward as he frowned at the drawing.
3
Gore lies in his cabin, contemplating his palm.
Debility, Stanley had called it. They all knew what that meant: scurvy. Men ravaged by melancholy, bleeding from their hairlines. Teeth loosening like petals of a dying rose. Weeping for home—more than usual. Joints aching. It was said that the scent of an orange could drive a debilitated man mad. The word “Mother” felt like a knife to the ribs. Old wounds reopened. He stretches his fingers wide, as if trying to span an octave on a pianoforte.
Hot, dark pain binds the bandages together.
This old wound, once healed, he’d received in Australia with Captain Stokes. A gun had exploded in his hands. They were rowing up a river in the captain’s gig, charting its course. The cockatoos on the opposite bank were so dense they looked like clouds, shifting from tree to tree. He’d taken up his fowling piece and aimed along the barrel.
“Bird for dinner,” one of the men had said. “If Gore doesn’t miss,” Stokes had added.
“I don’t miss.”
After that, his memory blurs. There was a thunderous report. He’s sure he saw a bird drop. Then the sky, hysterically blue. He found himself on his back at the bottom of the boat. His hand seemed to hurt, but he wasn’t certain. It felt wet. He sat up. Stokes, pale and trembling, reached out to him.
“Killed the bird,” Gore had said softly. Stokes had started laughing.
He misses Stokes. He misses Australia. He longs to feel the amniotic heat of the continent’s interior. He can’t even recall what it was like to be comfortably warm, let alone unbearably hot. He misses newness, freshness. He wishes he could look at a tree or pick his way through undergrowth. Even accidentally poisoning himself with the wrong berry seems like a welcome adventure from his current position. Here, there’s nothing but the most barren and desolate landscape imaginable. He supposes he’d like to see his family too, in New South Wales, but he doesn’t dwell on that, just as he doesn’t examine the wound in his palm.
He shifts on the narrow bunk. He’s thinner these days. His hip bones have become prominent landmarks. His skeleton is now discernible beneath his skin, which he dislikes, because he prefers not to think too much about his body—lest it remember him and start making demands. But he’s always been thin. No use lamenting that God didn’t choose to build him in the Apollonian mold of James Fitzjames and James Fairholme.
No use either in lamenting the day’s poor hunting. He’ll go out again tomorrow and find bigger game. The last time he was in the North, he killed a reindeer on his hands and knees. The beast had been served at Christmas dinner. He’d been twenty-six at the time. Robert McClure had been a mate alongside him. Still handsome then, Robbie, with his hairline just beginning its retreat. Those big sad blue eyes when Captain Back raised a glass to toast absent friends. Robbie, who never wrote, who would have heard about the expedition in a months-old newspaper at whatever remote Canadian outpost he’d been stationed. Absent friends indeed.
Yes, tomorrow Gore will go out hunting again. One thing God has blessed him with is an excellent aim. He is very good at killing things. Things, sometimes people. He pulls a trigger and knows he is loved.
