by Ian McDonald
The shop closed late, but I stayed later, chasing the readers, the sitters, the chatters and the trysters, the old men aching to take the weight off their feet and the ones so deep in their books they had lost all notion of time. Before I locked up I checked the E.L.s. I had safeguards in place: I was to be informed if anyone inquired about him. He sat in his careful place, in the middle of the third row from the top in a narrow rack of shelves at the end of a stack. I could keep an eye on him from both the till and the performance space, the parts of the shop where I was most occupied.
My apartment was as small and full of books as my vile rooms in Clapham but the voices of a different city entered it and engaged my senses: children protesting, television, arguments, electronic dance music and instrument practice. Doubtless the same banalities, misapprehensions and rages I heard in London, but in Italy, in Rome, they were the lexicon of life. I ate hastily: spaghetti with oil, garlic and chilli with a glass of wine. Then I would step out. On Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays I went to the Campogiani. The other days I would visit L’Oasi della Birra. I took my customary tables—both with views of the shop—and drank wine commensurate with my Wi-Fi use.
I stayed until one, one thirty, then slept until the light through my sagging blinds woke me. Espresso at Linari. Three sips watching the shop, always an eye on the shop.
Every day for two and a half years now.
I had doubted Rome. I saw myself as a Paris type, a haunter of cafes and bookstores, a latter-day flaneur. La Sauterelle closed, followed by Candide in Brussels. The age of the general bookstore, when serendipities lay in corners that smelled of cat piss and the dust bags of vacuum cleaners, was closing. Grubby little dealers like me with my eBay store and my business run out of Thorn’s barn were the small assassins.
We’d come to an agreement over the business, amicably worked out on social media, but I didn’t friend her and didn’t go to the funeral when Gram Leland died that December: a wander too far, too late, barefoot on a frozen road, drowning by hypothermia in Doverhirne Drain.
I doubted Rome, but both Paris’s and Brussels’s copies of Time Was went to the dead drops in Testaccio. It seemed like a sign. I went in the early autumn, when Rome is unspeakably lovely. Autumn sun charmed me, seduced me, woke me; low sun, the kindest sun. I went to Vivalibri, went straight to the Time Was, lifted it, took it to the till. I could feel no additions or insertions. I told a fearful, wonderful lie.
“I know you are not allowed to sell it to me,” I said. “Le Istruzioni. I am an agent of the Instructions, and I have been instructed to watch over the books and ensure that they get to their intended recipient.”
Signor Manzoni’s eyes bulged; then his face broke into a monstrous grin at my sheer chutzpah. I started the next day. The pay was lousy. Whoever said it is easier to be poor in a warm climate never lived in Testaccio in the middle of gentrification. Had I arrived five years before I could have lived cheaply, in the manner befitting a British bibliophile. The non-Catholic cemetery off the Via Caio Cestio was full of low-rent English, from Keats to Richard Mason. Now rents were spiraling, and I faced the additional nonsense of post-Brexit residency paperwork.
My first night, after I chased the readers, sitters, chatters, trysters, sore old men and the book lost, I went online to do the thing I had neglected all the years I had been chasing Chappell and Seligman across the centuries, the obvious thing I had overlooked in my intrigue at the world the Alexandria letter had opened up: the what happened next?
It was easy to find.
* * *
A glass of wine at the window, an eye on the bookstore, Wi-Fi and the papers. There was a ritual to this too. You start with the online quality dailies—la Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, your lips moving as your Italian strains at the copy. You read the headlines, the front pages, the international news. You search out the matter of Britain, does England stand? With time you turn first to the sport—never less than entertaining in Rome—then you add the celebrity gossip. Time again, you drift away from the big papers to the evening press, the local news. Buried treasure lies here. The school graduations, the masses and novenas, the pilgrimages. The stoic reporting of dreadful micro-league football; the court reports, made piquant by the possibility that you might have witnessed or overheard the incident. The joys and heartbreaks folded inside every classified advertisement; the deaths, marriages, births. Accounts of strange and unnatural occurrences from distant regions, like a freak storm in Cyprus; a ball of wind and lighting and dry thunder that clung to a valley side just outside Polystipos, defying wind and nature. It hung there for three days, said a priest. Every animal fled, said a local horse breeder. “My olives and fruit trees have been blighted,” said the boardinghouse owner. “I heard voices coming out of it,” a taxi driver said. “I saw the face of the devil in it,” said the local eccentric.
The time storm had come, and with it a traveler.
I gave him time. He would have to find out where he was, when he was, learn that there were only three dead drops left in the world where he might find a message, or leave a message, and make his way around them. In time he would come down into Testaccio and make his way across the piazza to Vivalibri.
Summer flowed into autumn.
I was having lunch at Linari when my phone played Thomas Dolby. Since I learned there was a piece of music called “Cloudburst at Shingle Street” nothing else could be my alert that a traveler had stepped out of time into my bookshop.
Tazia had given him one of the leather club chairs in the performance space, and a coffee. I studied him from the across the shop. An Englishman in his late thirties, experience lines beginning to set around his eyes and mouth. Tanned. About my age, I realized. Not so much older than my last image of him, in his private, patchwork chronology, smiling at the pyramids, his arm around the shoulder of his lover.
I died inside.
He looked as if he wanted to run, if there were anywhere he could run.
I had been rehearsing my words for three years.
“Tom Chappell,” I said.
He looked up. I saw astonishment, terror, wonder, but most of all recognition, on his face. He knew me.
My prepared speech evaporated.
“Emmett?” he said, eyes wide with awe. “Emmett Leigh?”
* * *
The shop unfolded around me. The books sprang from their shelves and took flight on broken-spined wings. The shelves tumbled like Rome itself falling. I found myself sitting on the floor in a wheel of impossibilities.
I may have stammered, “W-w-what?”
“Time was,” Chappell said.
People were staring at me: the readers, the sitters, the chatters and trysters, the aching old men and the book lovers.
I had said to Thorn, Maybe there are more than two time travelers!
Emmett Leigh. E.L.
Tazia had sat me up and was glaring at Chappell.
“Is this man bothering you?” she asked me.
“No,’’ I said weakly, waving my hands at the reality beyond the rows of books, the polite, peering faces.
“I saw him fall down,” said one of the old men.
Now Signor Manzoni had a hand on my arm.
“Did you push him?” he demanded of Chappell.
“You don’t understand,” I raved. “There were more than two time travelers. The man with the book, it was me. All along.”
“The signor is unwell,” Signor Manzoni said as he and Tazia helped me to the staff room. Chappell followed me. Tazia firmly barred entry.
“We have to talk,” Chappell said.
“Sir, I think it would be better if you left,” Tazia said. Her English was better. The world reeled around me, punch-drunk as Signor Manzoni seated me. I saw Chappell write a hasty note and give it to Tazia before she closed the door on him.
A time and a garden.
* * *
On the Aventine Hill are two gardens. The Giardino degli Aranci is gracious and spaciou
s, shaded by umbrella pines and orange trees. Tourists flock to this garden to take selfies on the parapet with its heartbreaking views along the Tiber to St. Peter’s. The Giardino di Sant’Alessio is smaller, quieter, more restrained, tucked in beside the Basilica of Saints Boniface and Alexius. Its views are constrained, its prospect less spectacular, its shade less generous, but it is quiet and gracious with space and time. I spent much time here, immuring myself with the present against a past I now understood as mediocre, vacillating, insignificant. If I died today, no one would know I was gone from the world.
We sat on a stone bench. An elderly lady, rocking with arthritis, ambled with a tiny dog. A young woman in sportswear performed a sun salutation at the parapet. Two men in hi-vis sat on the matching bench across the main path and frowned at their phones.
“You told me about this place,” Chappell said. “The gardens of the Aventine: there’s the one the tourists go to . . .”
“And the one the Romans go to,” I said.
“Shingle Street, 1937,” Chappell said. “November. Filthy weather. Five days before you disappeared. I never saw you again.”
He left the until . . . unspoken.
“My uncle was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of forty-seven,” I said. “He smoked and he smoked and he smoked and cancer came and killed him quickly.”
“I’m sorry,” Chappell said.
“I always wondered how he felt when the doctor told him he had weeks to live. I think I know now.”
In the Giardino di Sant’Alessio the two workmen got up from their bench and shambled past, plaster-spattered boots crunching the pink gravel, nodding greetings.
I was the mentor figure who had given him the book of poems, poems that had always seemed to the seventeen-year-old Tom to speak to him personally, to address his particular hopes and fears and confusions. I was the figure who had been waiting by the Martello tower as he made his lonely, searching walks up the street of stones. The figure who first exchanged nods, then greetings and observations on the weather, observations that became deeper musings on the state of the world. That became conversations that explored the boy’s hopes, mysteries, dreads and dreamings, the things that made him different from the other boys in his village
“‘Storm’s coming,’ you always said. Even on the clearest days,” Tom said. “I didn’t understand.”
“I could have told you,” I said. I gave a small, sour smile. “It’s a linguistic offense, finding a grammar for talking about a thing long since said that have I have yet to say.”
“You couldn’t, though, could you?” Tom said, and I understood the paradoxes of time through which he had lived. Time protects itself. To have warned Tom would have unmade whatever lay ahead of me that would send me through the doors of time.
Everything came back to the grey stone road of Shingle Street.
In my Testaccio exile I have refined my theories of time travel. My best theory for what Ben Seligman and the Uncertainty Squad attempted at Shingle Street was to manifest quantum effects in the classical universe, to apply Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to a macro-scale object by entangling all of its atoms into one quantum state. All the components of that single state remain connected, however far removed from one another in space and time. What affects a single part affects all others. What Seligman could not have known was they would be drawn into the entangled state. Might indeed have become the entangled state, by some misalignment of the apparatus. What I could not have known was that I too was entangled with them, through an event that lay before me, which I could not avoid, as immense and final as death.
The sun shone on us on our stone bench, time traveler and time traveler to be.
“Do you know how it happens?” I asked.
“It’s complicated,” Tom said. “There is the historical timeline and there are our timelines through it. I’ve only ever met you once. But we may meet—will meet—again and again further along our timelines. What I can say is that when I met you—meet you—on Shingle Street, you look the age you are now.”
Soon then.
“I went to Rendlesham,” I said. “There’s some story about a UFO—”
“Nonsense,” Tom said.
“I know. It was some afterglow from the original event. I felt it.”
“It resonated through time and space, like harmonics in a plucked string. We are carried along the nodes.”
The yoga woman ended her routine, rolled up her mat, rolled past us with an exhibitionist swagger.
“I’m scared,” I said.
“When I came out of it that first time, not recognizing where I was, then realizing that I didn’t even know when I was, I was terrified,” Tom said. “You learn. There are tricks. You cache things across time. You become an expert in false identities. We’re like spies. Those are the practicalities. The important thing, the true thing, is that I know I’m not alone.”
‘Tom.”
He looked startled by my use of his first name, the shift of my tone from apprehension to tenderness.
“I have to give you something.” Since I heard of the time storm opening, I had kept the Alexandria letter next to my heart. Now I handed it to Tom.
“I found it in the closing-down sale for The Golden Page.”
He read it, folded it, held it in two hands.
“I wrote that only a few weeks ago, in my timeline. I flew to Malta, then came back to London by ship. I half-expected to find The Golden Page bombed to rubble. It was still there. Hawksmoor’s Christ Church still stood. It’s a strong place; time snags around it. It protects Spitalfields. I left the book and that letter. I waited. War is the great uncertainty. Then I felt the tug—you’ll learn this—like electricity in the brain, like a hand around my heart, pulling me. So, the next one, I thought. He is dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
Tom sat still, straight, his hands flat on his thighs, looking ahead over Rome.
After a long silence he said, “It was always my great fear. Sometimes we would fail to find each other and there was always that terrible, chewing dread that the other had died. What happened?”
“The Carmarthen Castle was attacked and sunk by Italian torpedo bombers one hundred and thirty miles north of Algiers. There were two thousand five hundred men aboard. Five hundred and twelve survived.”
Again, silence. I knew he saw nothing but that ship, sailing beyond the arms of the harbor, into grief beyond words, beyond expression.
“Can I have any hope?”
“There’s a list of all the survivors.”
“He’s not on it.”
“No. No one knew for years. Decades. The War Office embargoed the information for fear of its effect on morale.”
“The British love of secrecy,” Chappell hissed suddenly. “Stupid, stupid, stupid boy. Stupid way to die.” He looked up at the shading canopy of the pines. “We adored this city. We came here in 1944 after the American liberation. You can’t imagine the place. The streets were empty. We went to St. Peter’s. The Pope was still addressing the faithful on Sundays. The Vatican was like a little bubble in time. All of Rome was, like a hole in the war. It was strange; it was magical. We came up here. How could I not? I wonder if sometimes Ben felt he was following in your shadow.”
“I was following in his shadow.”
“We will cross lives. I know it. I’ll see him; on the Rialto in 1918, in the walls of the Kalemegdan in Belgrade in 1993. Saigon, 1969, across a bar. I won’t say a word. I can’t say a word. I can’t even let him see me.”
He took the letter from his jacket and unfolded it carefully.
“I can still see the lights of the Western Harbour. The sound of guns carried such a long way, all the way from El Alamein. The lake does strange things to sound. The night was so still, I could hear the sound of boat engines long after it disappeared from my sight. So little time. So little time!”
Now the old woman was leading her dog up the gravel path to the gate. The garden
was ours.
“Don’t leave me,” Chappell said, reaching out a hand on the warm stone of the bench. I rested my hand on his. I couldn’t leave him. We were the lost men, the bereaved men, the loneliest men in the universe. We were entangled.
* * *
I saw figures among the trees at Rendlesham. I saw myself, shattered across time. Nodes, harmonics, resonances up and down the timeline. I had touched an echo, basked in the afterglow of the Shingle Street event when Ben Seligman and his Uncertainty Squad brought the quantum, probabilistic world into touch with our world of discrete space and distinct time. An insight came to me among the trees and mountain-bike runs: that quantum events may occur and recur spontaneously. Everything is possible.
I’m afraid. But I won’t be alone.
* * *
I check my kit every morning. It all fits into one small leather bag—leather. Plastics, artificial fabrics, rub up against the grain of history. Classic shoes, also leather. A hat, timeless. Rainproofs. Sleeping bag, matches. I still must find a natural-fiber sleeping bag. Penicillin and other over-the-counter antibiotics. Tinned food, water-sterilizing tablets, a multitool. A sewing kit. A couple of gold coins, stitched into the lining of the bag. Two watches: one to tell the time, one to sell. Jewelry. Rings, blings, glittery things. Wearable wealth.
I hate the look of myself in jewels. I console myself that somewhere, out there, perhaps in this city, perhaps in a dozen cities across Europe, my precious things are earning interest, have perhaps been earning interest for over a century, in those discreet banks and financial institutions that serve quiet money.
That thought, that I might share a world with my money without knowing, have shared it for all my life, makes my stomach knot. I might be an unknowing millionaire.
Books. A couple—books are heavy; people ask questions of books. I cannot travel without books! I fretted for days before my piles and stacks. Finally I settled on an illustrated Blake and a Herodotus. The best books are the ones I have yet to buy, the ones I will buy out in history. Cheap books made rich by time. I have my eye on a first-edition Ulysses, and I know exactly where to find it.