As he walked the streets of London; the railway station was busy this morning, like the others, I suppose. The streets were completely dirty, dirty with the manure of his countless horses. It made my walking fetid and dangerous. There were countless bikes everywhere. He was thirsty, but knew that if he drank water without boiling it, it would be dangerous. The poor of the city lived and looked like sick horses.
I found a public pump and filled my hands with water, which is not unusual for poor people in London. I hadn’t bathed in weeks as I was getting to the point of having to remove lice, fleas, and other parasites from my body and clothes every morning. The air was polluted by coal smoke; This was the London mist, I suppose, how poisonous a city could be, I wondered, and when could I get out of this city; Towards the field.
As I had walked around London strangely for three weeks, I noticed that in some municipal areas, the gas lights were on. Horse-drawn carriages were the main means of transportation, in addition to the personal mode which of course was the bicycle.
But what a marked difference from my city in the Midwest, in Minnesota in 2005, to this 1895, London; because I had read a newspaper that said it was 1895, so it must have been that year.
Children have what I would call inappropriate clothing: appalling; They must have lived in a chicken coop, I concluded; because I’ve seen them scattered here and there. Also, every morning when I woke up on the side of a building, wherever the building was, because I had no money, alcoholics also roamed the city, countless.
I enjoyed walking along the Tames River in the afternoons, people were cycling by, seemingly so carefree. But how I got here was my question that I have been asking myself every morning when I wake up; and late. I mean, it’s 110 years past my time, backwards. It was 2005, the last time I knew about it, when I was at my home in St. Paul, Minnesota, United States of America. When I tried to fall asleep; I’m not kidding, I’m in London now; well I guess there’s more to it than that. I was exploring the area, reading about Old London, its past, its romantic past, and I guess it was all fading. Not in a vision, but it seems that I have become part of a vision, but it was the article that I was doing for the magazine “UK”. It was an old London article that I wanted to do. I was trying to recreate his painful past, his dirty sides, when I fell into a kind of dream, or something like that, not knowing what to call it. Maybe a magic spell, yeah, yeah, maybe a magic spell and I was transported to 1895, and I’m in a dream, but I can’t wake up and jump out of it like most people do. So it can’t be that, right?
I remember sitting next to my bed, walking away from the area as I often do; looking at the walls and seeing shapes, movements and shadows, and blue lights were approaching me like rays. I paid little attention to it, and just allowed it, and it seemed like I was suddenly watching a movie on the wall. I guess London configurations appeared. I seemed to remember a window of some kind, fantastic as it sounds, here I am; whatever that means, or ascend, because there has to be more to this than meets the eye.
Could the mind transport more than the soul through that window between time and the past? I mean I’ve traveled in time before, but without ending up in the physical part of the past, physically. Yes, people have felt my presence and even seen me, but I could never alter anything by my physical appearance; it was more like a rerun, but with some eyes looking at me to make it a little more real. And here I am now; Can I alter the future because of my physique now? These are crazy thoughts for a man about to go crazy.
How could I end up in this depressed stage of a great work, what I call a demoralizing situation? It may well be that you can learn from this, but who would you tell? And how? So am I walking on an empty page of a book, or one that has been written, and am I about to modify it?
Five years later
Five years have passed and I am still among the population of London. How scary can it get? I stopped trying to find out. I need someone to tell me. Find out what, I end up wondering, and it always is: get out of this dilemma. I see the Industrial Revolution coming, which I read about in college. Oh, times are not as bad as five years ago, I mean, I have had many jobs, too many, but people keep asking me to work and it seems like I accidentally run into them just in time; before starving.
I have taught at the university, I have been a street sweeper. I worked in a bicycle wheel factory, I mean they have so many bikes and horses here, they are countless. I’m amazed that the harmful bacteria didn’t paralyze me. I feel like they are using me, sometimes, in strange ways; by whom, I suppose, is a third party, an alien of some kind. But I wonder what my purpose is, and I never come up with a complete answer. It’s taken me five years to realize that I’ve gotten into this somehow, like a projectile being launched and you end up on the other side, so many neurotic possibilities.
The voice
“It’s not that complicated, Mr. Snaitram. You are part of a writer who dreams; just not yours. Writers need to dream to write. And while you were living, we gravitated toward you to open doors for other writers. It’s all just (the Mr. Snaitram looks around him and wonders where the voice is coming from, because now he is standing next to the Tames, looking out over the water from a railing; he sees the image of a man with a small hole for a mouth, a creature of strange in the reflection of the water). Everything is done from a spaceship that you see. You are what dreams are made of, dreams intervened by us that are for writers, and designed to help them develop what we need written on earth; then we provide the characters as you represent it, and we transmit that game in symbols to our clients, or clients, or better yet, to Ginny pigs. But we need a reflection, and a place, a machine, which is you. Gravity is More f Strong on Earth, so we need someone like you on Earth to pass our dreams through and you are the coin, in the bubble you could say. His willingness to draw blue lights into his eyes without blinking helped us pass quickly through a porthole. No one will miss you. And if they do, it’s only for a while; as they say, life goes on. And you become a cartel of the “Disappeared”.