Darwinia

I won’t dwell on my reaction. Enough to say that the days that followed are vague in my mind. I sold my horse and spent the money on some of what had been salvaged from the High Street distilleries.

Oblivion is a dear purchase in London, Caroline. But maybe that’s always the case, everywhere.

After a long time I woke to find myself lying in an open heath in the mist, brutally sober and achingly cold. My blanket was soaked through and so were my filthy clothes. Dawn was breaking, the sun just lightening the eastern sky. I was at the perimeter of the refugee camp. I looked at the few fires smoldering unattended in the gray light. When I was steadier I stood up. I felt abandoned and alone…

But I wasn’t.

I turned at some suggestion of a sound and saw -

Myself.

I know how strange that sounds. And it was strange, strange and disorienting. We never see our own faces, Caroline, even in mirrors. I think we learn a tan early age to pose for mirrors, to show ourselves our best angles. It’s a very different experience to find one’s face and body occupying the space of another person.

For a time I just stared at him. I understood without asking that this was the man who had paced me on the ride from New Dover.

It was obvious why I hadn’t recognized him sooner. He was undeniably myself, but not exactly my reflection. Let me describe what I saw: a young man, tall, dressed in threadbare military gear. He wore no hat and his boots were muddy. He was stockier than I am, and he walked without limping. He was clean-shaven. His eyes were bright and observant. He smiled, not threateningly. He carried no weapon.

He looked harmless.

But he wasn’t human.

At least not a living human being. For one thing, he wasn’t entirely there. I mean, Caroline, that the image of him faded and brightened periodically, the way a star twinkles on a windy night.

I whispered, “Who are you?”

His voice was firm, not ghostly. He said, “That’s a complicated question. But I think you know part of the answer already.”

Mist rose up around us from the sodden ground. We stood together in the chill half-light as if a wall divided us from the rest of the world.

“You look like me,” I said slowly. “Or like a ghost. I don’t know what you are.”

He said, “Take a walk with me, Guilford. I think better on my feet.”

So we strolled across the heather on that fogbound morning. I guess I should have been terrified. I was, on some level. But his manner was disarming. The expression on his face seemed to say: How absurd, that we have to meet like this.

As if a ghost were to apologize for its clumsy trappings: the winding-sheet, the chains.

Maybe it sounds as if I accepted this visitation calmly. What I really felt was more like entranced astonishment. I believe he chose a time to appear when I was sufficiently vulnerable — dazed enough — to hear him over the roar of my own dread.

Or maybe he was a hallucination, provoked by exhaustion and liquor and grief. Think what you like, Caroline.

We walked in the faint light of morning. He seemed happier, or at least most solid, in the deep shadow of the mosque trees bordering the meadow. His voice was a physical voice, rich with the human noise of breath and lungs. He spoke without pretension, in colloquial English that sounded as familiar as the rumble of my own thoughts. But he was never hesitant or lost for words.

This is what he said.

He told me his name was Guilford Law and he had been born and raised in Boston.

He said he’d lived an unexceptional life until his nineteenth year, when he was drafted and sent overseas to fight a foreign war… a European war, a “World War.”

He asked me to imagine a history in which Europe was never converted, in which that stew of kingdoms and despotisms continued to simmer until it erupted into a global conflict.

The details aren’t important. The gist is that this phantom Guilford Law ended up in France, facing the German army in static, bloody trench battles made more nightmarish by poisonous gas and aerial attacks.

This Guilford Law — “the picket,” as I’ve come to think of him — was killed in that war.

What amazed him was that, when he closed his eyes for the last time on Earth, it wasn’t the end of all life or thought.

And here, Caroline, the story becomes even more peculiar, even more mad.

We sat on a fallen log in the cool of the morning, and I was struck by his easy presence, the solidity, the sheer apparent heft of him. His dark hair moved when the wind blew; he breathed in and out like any other living thing; the log jostled with his weight as he shifted to face me.

If what the picket told me is true then Schiaparelli and like-minded astronomers are correct: life exists among the stars and planets, life both like and unlike our own, in some cases different in the extreme.