"The Ministry of Time"

[fiefoe]

Kaliane Bradley's debut novel was giddyingly fun in the first third, but sadly got bogged down by the sheer weight of the cloak-and-dagger plot later. I would have settled for a simple "Victorian naval officer time-travels to meet complicated girl" story.

• Maybe because he’s so cold he has a drunkard’s grip on his mind. When thoughts come, they’re translucent, free-swimming medusae. As the Arctic wind bites at his hands and feet, his thoughts slop against his skull. They’ll be the last thing to freeze over.
• * Usually people asked it with an upward lilt, expecting me to correct them, because no one’s from Cambodia... People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like one of the late-entering forms of white—Spanish maybe—and also like you’re not dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.
• the second reason that it was important to pick people who would have died in their own timelines is that they might well die in ours, like deep-sea fish brought up to the beach. Perhaps there were only so many epochs the human nervous system could stand. If they got the temporal equivalent of the bends
• Assuming that the “expats” survived, that meant they would be people, which is a complicating factor. When dealing with refugees, especially en masse, it’s better not to think of them as people. It messes with the paperwork. Nevertheless, when the expats were considered from a human rights perspective, they fit the Home Office criteria for asylum seekers. It would be ethically sparse to assess nothing but the physiological effects of time-travel.
• “Lunatic asylum” and “asylum seeker” both use the same basic meaning of “asylum”: an inviolable place of refuge and safety. <> We were told we were bringing the expats to safety. We refused to see the blood and hair on the floor of the madhouse.
• Regrettably she also drilled the karmic repercussions of gossip and lying into me—the fourth Buddhist precept is unambiguous on this—and thus at the age of eight my political career was over before it began.
• said Adela, dry as a filing system. / your enslaved lightning / in a wincingly tight voice,
• * I saw an imposing nose in profile, like a hothouse flower growing out of his face. It was strikingly attractive and strikingly large. He had a kind of resplendent excess of feature that made him look hyperreal.
• the shock of his impossible presence catching up with me. The more he was there—and he kept on being there—the more I felt like I was elbowing my way out of my body. A narrative-altering thing was happening to me, that I was experiencing all over, and I was trying to view myself from the outside to make sense of it.
• I launched into a preplanned speech about class mobility and domestic labor, touching on the minimum wage, the size of an average household, and women in the workforce. It took a full five minutes of talking, and by the end I’d moved into the same tremulous liquid register I used to use for pleading with my parents for a curfew extension.
• I slept with unpleasant lightness, my brain balanced on unconsciousness like an insect’s foot on the meniscus of a pond.
• “And who found the Northwest Passage?” he asked. “That was our original intention.”
  “Robert McClure, in 1850.”
  “Robbie?!”
• I stopped talking. He’d said “oh” as if I’d pushed a needle through his clothes. All these people were history to me but still felt alive to him.
• * “Will you please instruct the machine to play Bach’s Sonata in E-flat major?”
  I hit play on the first version Spotify suggested.
  We settled back, if “settle” is the right word for the stiff, wary way we offset each other’s weight on the cushions. After a while, he covered his eyes with his hands.
  “And one can simply… repeat it. Infinitely,” he mumbled.
  “Yep. Would you like it again?”
  “No. I don’t think it’s very respectful.”
• * I’d had a gristly time translating “internally displaced person,” which, during this project, referred to people who had been forced to leave their villages because of logging work... I’d sat with the term “internally displaced person” until I’d broken it down semantically. I was wrestling with a ghost meaning: a person whose interiority was at odds with their exteriority, who was internally (in themselves) displaced. I was thinking about my mother, who persistently carried her lost homeland jostling inside her like a basket of vegetables... He told me stories as if he were trying to catch himself in amber. Just like my mother, though I didn’t tell him that.
• “You can send dioramas through the ether,” he said, “and you’ve used it to show people at their most wretched.”
  “No one’s forcing you to watch EastEnders.”...
  “Or deformed monstrosities against the will of God—”
  “What?”
  “Sesame Street,” he said. Then he had to busy himself with looking through his pockets for his cigarettes, his tongue tenting his cheek as he tried not to laugh.
• Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household. It was the literary equivalent of playing with fire—I’d delayed my explanations of the world wars, much less given context about why an unnamed English crack shot and sportsman would want to try shooting a European dictator in the 1930s.
• This had once been a convivial wardroom. A story couldn’t start that wasn’t met with an opposing tale, like an arch bridge made of chatter. But even speaking the obvious is like massaging wax from granite these days.
• 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.
• Simellia proffered a look that was all eyebrow. “Oh, it’s going. We can certainly say that it’s going.”
• 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.
• 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.”
  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.
• * 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 off 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?”... An underrated symptom of inherited trauma is how socially awkward it is to live with.
• Have you ever eaten a coconut?”... “I’d never experienced a fruit that fought back so hard against being eaten.
• 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.
• 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, .. 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-five;... I was discomfited 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.
• 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.
• I had limited experience of charm—that twinkly old-fashioned thing that afflicts the eccentric—and my brusque defenses against similar attributes (flirtation, 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 off-the-rack fashion, a horse in an Apple store. He was funny, that was the problem.
• * 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 rifle. <> I came down one morning to find he’d killed all the squirrels in the garden. He’d piled them in a grotesque furry cairn.
• 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 afford to age attractively.
• “We should have had this stuff 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-first century that you approve of, Commander.”
• Then the sky, hysterically blue. / she said with brick-wall calm
• His skeleton has become navigable below his skin, which he dislikes, because he doesn’t like to think overmuch about his body, in case it remembers him and begins to make demands.
• * I never knew this woman, though my mother thought of her with pity and a little scorn. There were things the young woman forgot to do, or didn’t think were necessary, and my mother had to live with her mistakes for the rest of her life. <> My family lived inside proof of ourselves like crabs in shells.
• Once a week, the expats were examined for empathy and the bridges were examined for honesty—or so the joke ran. Another hypothesis about time-travel was that it might reduce a person’s capacity to feel compassion. Forcibly removed to a new epoch, meeting all places and people therein as foreign, would lead the expats to defensively “other” the people around them;... The empathy theory drew on sleep science. When we sleep, we enter the hadal valley of REM, and through our dreams we process the day’s events.... Just as the right continuous conditions were required to experience good sleep, the right continuous conditions were required to experience temporal actuality with the requisite level of empathy.
• Adela smiled with about a third of her mouth. Her face had changed again. She looked pinched and hungry, and hauntingly as if her skin was held in place by a bulldog clip at the back of her skull.
• Today my overgrown son put metal in the microwave, deliberately, even though I had told him not to do that, because he wanted to see what would happen. We’d sit there trying to decide if his actions demonstrated alienation or acclimatization. Often I thought that they demonstrated that he was Graham Gore. I began to think of him as his own benchmark, which was dangerous.
• It didn’t take us long to dash up against another issue with acclimatization, which was that the expats didn’t make sense to each other either. Nineteen-sixteen was as incomprehensible to Sixteen-forty-five as I was. Everyone was paddling in their own era-locked pool of loneliness.
• so beautiful that light seemed to obey unique physics around her body.
• * “Have they a base? Mayhap a uniform? If not, I will design it. Ah, you laugh! But would we not look well in thigh boots and tabards broidered with FEMINIST KILLJOY? It sends a sturdy message.”
• I swung my leg over my bike. Since living with Graham, I’d started wearing skirts with hemlines that fell below the knee, so this was a performance.
  “Very unladylike.”
  “Don’t worry, my womb is firmly strapped in.”
• I whizzed back down the hill. Behind me, he said, “Huh!” I counted to five, and I knew that I’d judged right. Nothing made him work harder than the sense that he was getting irritated. He simply refused to be irritated. He would learn to ride a bike so that he could go back to being “a man of great stability of character” as soon as possible.
• We had battered fish ’n’ chips, another grand British tradition that he predated by two decades.
• “History is not a series of causes and effects which may be changed like switching trains on a track. It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening...
  “So we’re not going back in time to strangle baby Hitler.”
  “You’re a stupid girl.”
  “Yes, ma’am.”
  “History is what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future. It’s an important semantic differentiation in this field.”
• For the rest of the day, Graham treated me as if my recipe had been changed and my flavor was unpleasant.
• *  made the dish I thought was most likely to symbolically kill a Victorian child with the ingredients I had on hand, which was mapo tofu with a belligerent amount of garlic and mala. It had an effect, though not the quasi-fatal one I anticipated. He stopped morbing and started touching his lower lip with amazement. He had a second helping.
• The sunny days also induce snow blindness, as the summer rays bounce up from the ice like a tossed knife.
• He becomes, along the hallowing earth, a moving point of muscle and sinew, quite clean of thought. If he sees a quarry, he does not reenter his body. He bends all his thoughts to the bullet. If there was someone with him, he’d have to remember he was fully inhabited by Graham Gore.
• Fitzjames had once asked him how he could approach life-threatening peril and minor annoyances with the same mildness, and he’d shrugged.
  “It doesn’t improve my mood to catastrophize, so I don’t.”
  “And what about hope? Have you ever been in love, Graham?” Fitzjames had asked. “Ever lived for the bestowment of a fair smile?”
  “Ah, love, life’s greatest catastrophe.”
• * Another time-travel hypothesis from the early days of the project was that the dimensions of time and space were linked, not inextricably but like a lymphatic and circulatory system. Both were needed for the universe to function in a way hospitable to human survival, and both could be fatally damaged at discrete points while the rest of the “system” appeared to function. We needed to see the expats move through broader geographical space without atomizing into the scenery (or the scenery atomizing around them) to know for sure that the twenty-first century had accepted their presence. <> The expats were envisioned as either foreign bodies against which the universe might launch an immune attack, or cells that could be recognized and incorporated by the “systems” into the body of the world. .. To belong, the hypothesis suggested, is to have a stake in the status quo. <> So I was anxious about Graham’s disdain for the twenty-first century, because never mind that I felt rejected by it, I was worried that the universe would feel the atemporal sting of his contempt and take him away. _My England wasn’t like this, he’d told me—but this was the natural evolution of his England. I was the natural evolution. I was his lens if he would only raise me and look with me.
• the erotic charge of his bare forearms was giving me a headache... He filled the room like a horizon.
• I had the feeling that I thought must afflict parents when their children start to grow apart and answer back. He was moving outside my observation, graduating from my guidance, fitting this new plastic world around him.
• In their much-edited correctness, their placid-voiced hectoring, they bankrupted the energy in the room. Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.
• * “We have rehearsed a little,” said Graham, “but not, I would say, copiously.”
  “We’d be telling you a tall one if we said ‘copiously,’ ” said Reginald-Smyth.
  “Indeed. Or, in fact, ‘well.’ ”
  “Yes. We have not rehearsed well, or much. We are fairly dreadful.”
  “We are,” Graham confirmed solemnly. “Godspeed to you all.”
  They launched into a hornpipe, one that I’d heard Graham occasionally playing in the morning around the hour that he thought I should get out of bed (I didn’t), but after a few bars the song morphed into a Jackson 5 song. They were very good.
• I never did read the Fanon, though I don’t think I would have understood it. I didn’t understand that my value system—my great inheritance—was a system, rather than a far point on a neutral, empirical line that represented progress. Things were easier for me than for my mother; things were easier for me than for my father; my drugs were cleaner, my goods were abundant, my rights were enshrined. Was this not progress? I struggled with the same bafflement over history, which I still understood in rigid, narratively linear terms. I should have listened more carefully to Adela about history.
• Anne Spencer—Seventeen-ninety-three—was a failed experiment and probably dying. Her blank MRI scan was one of many examples Ed had glumly filed of her body failing to register with modern technology
• Arthur was happy and flushed. He was one of those unusual extroverts who have all the attributes of an introvert, save that they like being around other people. He had a gift for gentleness too, one of the rarest virtues in any gender... retraining as a doctor... The profession makes a man hard in the heart, or it did in my time. They get rather superior. You can’t be superior about other people’s pain. 
• Autumn set in like a decorative inlay. The trees wilted and dropped leaves. Leaden clouds enameled the sky,
• “Fun fact, the average cloud weighs about five hundred and fifty-one tons.”
• I was always on high alert, minimum, when people asked about my heritage with any taxonomic specificity. I never knew what they were hoping to do with it. My sister described these interactions as “microaggressions,” as if she didn’t talk about her Cambodian heritage at every possible opportunity.
• said Simellia, still smiling, though increasingly looking as if the smile was being operated by winches inside her skull. “God, Ministry bias training has a lot to answer for,” she said. “I don’t want to drop a piano on your head, but believe it or not, I already know I’m Black. You don’t have to roll over and show me your belly about it.”
• She took a deep breath. All the emotions I normally watched her puree into professionalism were churning on her face. <> “I came here,” she said, “because you—because—I thought you would understand. Don’t you? Being the experiment. Being the pioneer they break the concepts on. The first. Are there any other Cambodians on the core team?
• “Simellia,” I said, “I’m not a victim. I don’t give people an excuse to make me a victim. I’d advise you not to give them the opportunity either.”
  Simellia stared. The emotion in her face spiraled away, water down a plughole. She stood up. “Thanks for the tea,” she said coldly.
  I let her leave without saying goodbye and sat in the pool of silence that followed the crash of the front door slamming shut. This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.
• “He was absolutely dead?” Le Vesconte asks again. He sounds like someone’s peeled the skin off his voice.
• Graham was wearing his motorcycle leathers. The first time he showed them to me—twisting his shoulders in the jacket so that the leather creaked—I thought I was having an allergic reaction because my tongue went heavy and my fingers started prickling. I glanced at Arthur. He looked like he was also allergic to leather.
• My dad was undeterred. He was determined that his bit was going to win over my mum’s bit, which is at least half of successful co-parenting. He described Missus Legs as a fine old spinster,
• I took the lessons of the patient Missus Legs into my adulthood. I rarely hustled, was indifferent to grind. But I kept careful tabs and a great many secrets. When, at the Ministry, I found myself briefly professionally isolated—with Adela absent, Quentin missing, Simellia cold in the corridors, Control’s focus on the “readability” experiments run by the Wellness team—I sank back on my web.
• * I always thought the story was about something else. Of course I was still afraid of spiders. I was eight years old. Missus Legs had a dozen eyes and sucked the life out of the living. Yes, I was still afraid of spiders. I had simply found the only way my child’s mind could conceive of placating the fear. Join up. Take a wing. Get to work.
• Nothing exposes the seams of a group faster than the fraught world of care. More than death, care reveals too much about a personality to ever be discussed neutrally. Vaccines, palliative care, capacity to consent to treatment, what constituted serious illness, the use and abuse of a taxpayer-funded system: try them on a dinner party and watch the pack animal bite its way through the skin.
• *  It was so hard not to treat the expats like blank slates onto which I might write my opinions. I understood the adage “knowledge is power” whenever I looked into Margaret’s face, the sultry peach color of her mouth and her acne glowing with unprinted newness. There was something hauntingly young about all of them, a scarcity of cultural context that felt teenaged, and I didn’t know if my fascination with it was maternal or predatory. Every time I gave Graham a book, I was trying to shunt him along a story I’d been telling myself all my life.
• * You’re angry, maybe, that I could have been this callow. You think you would have seized the lever here, swung the tram over the empty track instead of toward the row of bound prisoners. You ask me why I wasn’t more suspicious. But naturally I was suspicious. Adela was shifting, elusive—her very face was inconsistent. Her reasons were bad, half-veiled. Then again, whose upper management am I not describing? Who trusts their workplace? Who thinks their job is on the side of right? They fed us all poison from a bottle marked “prestige,” and we developed a high tolerance for bitterness.
• I wonder what the winter of the bridge year would have looked like if I hadn’t frosted Simellia, or if I’d been less skeptical of Quentin. I hardly dare linger on the ways I changed Graham, forcing him down strange tracks as I uttered a new word or concept with accidentally Edenic significance... You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression. You’ll find the weak joints, the things you can kick in.
• God, he was a dreadful dancer. Stiff and keyless. Victims of hangings kicked with more vim... “You’re a musician. How can you have no sense of timekeeping?” “You are a larger instrument than a flute.”
• Margaret: She’d had a two-week stint as a “Swiftie” but ran out of energy for the speed at which the discourse mutated and her basic disinterest in the music, much to Ralph’s relief.
• When Graham got online, as he did not call it, and learned to peck at the keyboard with the elegance and speed of a badly burned amphibian,
• the following search terms: “Hello horrible cat”; “Do you see all that I see?”; “Or do you read my mind for recipe ingredients?”; “Will you bring home coconut cream?”.. When I got home, he asked me, “Well? Did you bring the coconut cream?” and smiled with real warmth at the way shame changed my posture. I could never eat miso anything again without tasting failure.
• It was full dark and starting to rain by the time I was about two miles from the house. Thunder sounded. The big cutlery cupboard in the sky had fallen off the wall... Blitz spirit, the newspapers called this sort of thing, as if either climate catastrophe or the Blitz was a national holiday. This stoic jollity was how we’d introduced the Second World War to the expats, by the way
• People liked him and so they imagined that he agreed with them—all likable people know how to be a flattering mirror—and he could make himself a perfect man of wax (I recalled, once again, Captain Fitzjames’s pen portrait of a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers). I had a vague sense that his belonging was conditional, and that it suited rather than behooved him to be allied with the navy or the empire or the Ministry, but I didn’t think about this much further.
• The landscape abbreviated. Then I was home and the feeling of home closed in on me.
• My sister maintained that her work was a sort of reclamation, a space-taking practice in protest of a childhood spent in squeezed spaces. That all she was telling was the truth, as if the Truth was a sort of purifier that turned mud and plasma into clean water by judicious application. I didn’t know who read her writing, other than people who already agreed with her. To me, it felt like she’d chosen to hang a target around our necks.
• It was a Christmas gift from him. The note that accompanied it explained, in his idling cursive, that it was chicken necklace, friend to chicken bag. I’d given him a silk aviator scarf and a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, since he was on his twelfth reread of Rogue Male.
• * The great project of empire was to categorize: owned and owner, colonizer and colonized, évolué and barbarian, mine and yours. I inherited these taxonomies. This, I think, was the reason I played fuck-about-Fred with my ethnic identity as much as I could. “They” are still in charge and even when “they” are saying marginalized instead of mongoloid they are still acknowledging that we are an issue to be dealt with. When would it be my turn to hold the carrot and stick?
• Loyalty and obedience are fostered by stories. The Ministry and its satellites were staffed by people who believed they’d smoke one last jaunty cigarette in the eye of a gun. The truth was that we were shackled to the idea that the orders were good and the job was good.
• I had a non-internalized relationship with my face... Oh, England, England! The thing you do best is tell a story about yourself. Graham Gore went to the Arctic believing that a noble death is possible because of all those stories and then he became a story. Oh, England, you wanted to make stories out of me.
• Her mouth is very beautiful, a color that Gore will remember and try to name for a long time afterward. She looks at him. It’s a look that puts him against the horizon: not insignificant, but like something that can be pressed up by thumb.
• I should have developed tinnitus from the alarm bells... “That’s still a tell,” said Adela, but she did a DVD-player motion with her mouth and chin that was probably a smile.
• * To have access to a file on someone is a simultaneously erotic and deadening experience. When you study a person, as I studied Graham, you enter a pornographic fugue state. All the things that should be intimate become molecular. Their body, which you have never touched, lies against the back of your eyelids every night. You begin to know them, except time always leaves you one moment behind, and so you have to know them more, more and more, chasing them through time, at the limit where their life meets their future
• Margaret was too much of a liability—she sounded too bizarre, and she ran her mouth. Besides which, she picked up antiestablishment lesbian anarchists (whatever she or they thought those words meant) with suspicious frequency.
• I started to laugh, a real, happy, unglamorous laugh. As true laughter does, it summoned smiles from the others. Margaret leaned toward me, grinning, and I saw Graham catch Arthur’s eye and roll his. It was a moment among moments, but everyone was held in it, captured in a small and easy joy. I return again and again to this memory. It’s proof, you see. Not everything I did was wrong.
• There he is—that magnificent topmast sail of a nose—There he is—I saw him in the highlights that the sun picked out—the sword at his waist, the shiny black shoes—There he is, there he is. I wish I could tell you how it felt to see him. He’d always lived inside me, years before I’d known him. I’d been trained to love him.
• * As a ministry we were small, we made consistent eye contact with most of our colleagues. Our personal lives were our work lives. We were that awful thing: a family. One doesn’t unionize in a family, because from whom would you be making demands?
• I went at the pace of an unhappy thought / Cold air barked at my legs.
• A news announcer dryly described the Australian wildfires. I say “Australia” with cavalier non-specificity because most of the continent was on fire.
• She became a stone in a shoe, a hole in the road. She became, in that slow domestic way, hated.
• When I was still a teenager, building my personality from the films and the books and the songs I later tried to give to Graham, the chief monk of one of Cambodia’s largest wats announced that he could not rule out that the victims of the Khmer Rouge were not the final link in a chain of karmic cause and effect.
• I was callow with youth and ready to commit to obsession. I picked up my first book about the golden age of polar exploration, and I coalesced around it. I came to believe in the possibility of heroic death, and from there it was easy to believe in heroism. Heroism laid the groundwork for righteousness, and righteousness offered me coherency.
• * The most difficult stories about the Khmer Rouge are the ones over which hover almost and maybe. She almost made it, but dysentery took her at the end. He is maybe buried in the mass grave at Choeung Ek, so we will pay our respects there.
• “ ‘Every love is an exercise in depersonalization.’ Deleuze. Wrote my doctoral thesis on him.”
• He was diminished in some way; he’d seemed to hold his charm close to his body, like a broken arm.
• “Yes, Mai.”
  We sat in a rubble of silence. “A joke,” I mumbled. “It means ‘Mum’ in Khmer.”
  She rocked back like I’d spat at her, then got up quietly and left the room.
• I don’t understand what you want, nor what any woman of this era wants. I don’t know what I have to offer you. You are perfectly independent. You’re occupied to an almost violent degree by your own career. But, well, I thought, you do eat everything I cook… so perhaps…” <> “You were planning on feeding me until I… what?”
• “I want to ‘make you come,’ ” he murmured, and it was exciting even with the inverted commas around it.
• If you are surprised that, so soon after a secret agent tried to kill me, I was wondering whether the man with whom I’d had sex liked liked me, remember that being in love is a form of blunt-force trauma. I was concussed with love for him. I bent my head to the cudgel.
• It was another dank toothache of a day, barely qualifying in its chromatic dullness for “gray.”
• * The time-door, explained Adela, supported a limited number of what the Brigadier called “free travelers.” That was why the Ministry lost two of the seven original expats—there wasn’t enough capacity for them to be moved through time, it was like they’d tried to breathe through oxygen masks after other people had depleted the tank.
• There were some things about sleeping with a Victorian naval officer that didn’t surprise me, and there were others that astonished me. He kept trying to touch the edge of license, but my parameters were so much more capacious than his. I didn’t have the same sense of shame of it, but I don’t think I ever had the same sense of holiness either.
• Within the action of this story, these memories mean little. After the first time Graham and I went to bed together, they are symbolically all of a piece. I could have written to you without including them; after all, the things that happen between lovers are lost to the work of history anyway. But I wrote it down because I need you to bear witness to it. He was here, by and with and in my body. He lives in me like trauma does.
• “I can’t manage it exactly without a sextant,” he said. “But I wanted to be able to orient myself.”
  “So that, in the event of London flooding when the ice caps melt, you can sail to safer waters?”
  “So that I will know where I was when I met you.”
• The landscape looks like something suspended in glass. It is like walking through a perfect, terrible illusion. Their tiredness is an omnipresent thing, God of the bones and the sinew.           
• “Someone tried to kill me,” I said. “The Brigadier.” <> Watching what happened on Simellia’s face was like watching a paper cut fill with blood. I saw the shock of impact, the brief beat of perhaps nothing, the welling.
• I was shy of Arthur. Most friendship quartets don’t function in squares but in lines, and Arthur and I were the furthest away from each other.
• But… you know, I’m not Forty-seven, I stay awake through everything I watch, and I can see what your era likes. You use the same patterns as we did, as Gray’s people did and Maggie’s too. You just expect women to do more of it, that’s all.”
  “But you’re not a woman, Arthur,” I said.
  He threw me an amused look—not in one-upmanship, but playfully, for me to catch—and said, “But I’m not the blueprint for the perfect man either.”
• It was a trick of his, as expertly wielded as his perfect cogency with his “hereness” and “thereness.” He would build sentences around the rooms where burnt and broken things squatted, and I would never be able to see the damage for the bars.
• “How curious that I have survived to watch my obsolescence grow old enough to be celebrated as legendary.”
• The time-travel project was the first time in history that any person had been brought out of their time and into their far future. In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique. But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history. I’d seen it happen around my own life. <> I knew Graham felt adrift on treacherous waters. He desired me—that much was obvious now—but either he wished that he didn’t, or he wished we could have done it his way.
• “There was a breach!” she said. I’d never heard her talk in exclamation points before. It took a decade off her. “The time-door’s location was leaked! And I still can’t find the Brigadier! I’ve looked everywhere he ought to be!”
• * My sister and I grew up, as many children of immigrants do, half parented and half parenting. Our mother needed our help to navigate her new country. Her need pinched us in different ways. My sister became invested in cataloging, in retelling and remembering, in what she called the truth. I became obsessed with control, which I suppose is another way of saying I wanted command of the narrative.
• * “I don’t need to shoot you,” replied the Brigadier. “I will shoot her, and that will be the end of both of you.” <> “Wrong again,” said Adela. “She’s already on a different timeline. She told Eighteen-forty-seven about the Holocaust instead of 9/11, and I think it’s sent him down a different path. The link’s broken.”
• * I was too intent on the weapon to turn to Adela, but I said, “You’re me?” <> “Don’t parrot. Yes. I’m amazed you hadn’t worked that out already. I’m from, let’s see, twenty-odd years in your future. These two are from the twenty-two hundreds.”
• It was very like a gun, or what a gun might dream about becoming. I understood, instinctively, the sight and the trigger.
• “Ah. It turns out time-travel does come with side effects. Even your body forgets your ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness,’ if you do it often enough. We thought it would be a tactical advantage, but I suppose the same claim was made for crop-destroying chemical weapons.
• “We married not long after all this happened the first time round,” Adela said. “After the—funerals. It was—hard. Graham put Arthur’s ring on my finger. That was—too much. I gave up wearing it. I think he understood, but it was—difficult. I really thought I might be able to spare you all that, if I got the mole this time.”
  “What about all the stuff you said about not changing history?”
  “People aren’t history,” said Adela scornfully. “Good grief, why didn’t I listen to anything anyone told me when I was young? As long as the Ministry rises to power, then history happened the way we said it did.”
• She shrugged tiredly and said, “I was worried when you said you hadn’t told Graham about 9/11, because in my timeline, that immediately converted him to the Ministry. Highly trained mercenaries attacking civilians. The necessity of belligerent tactics to prevent another attack. Neo-Crusades following the collapse of the empire. And so on.
• “Because I’ve been a company woman all my life and look where it’s got me. The Ministry had Arthur and Maggie killed. No one ever told me. He didn’t tell me. If I’d known—”
  I said, “Maggie’s still alive.”
  Another origami of emotion creased her face. “Oh, Maggie,” she murmured.
• The day cracked open around me. I waded through its rancidly vivid yolk, feeling damaged by the sheer color and depth of normal vision. In a spy movie, this would have been done in a montage. Instead, I had to clamber to my narrative conclusion, step by staggering step.
• “No! Is it going to kill us?”
  “I don’t bloody know!”
  Just as abruptly as it started, the alarms, the clamor, and the shaking stopped. The machine made a noise like a sinister burp. The Brigadier scrabbled at it. There were a series of questioning beeps, a burst of red. I saw a screen—an operating system, I assumed. Then something absolutely god-awful happened to the Brigadier, a form of implosion-explosion, a rip in the air as if the whole room was scenery and a knife had been plunged into it. If a black hole could sneeze, it might have looked like this.
• *?? “You had orders,” he repeated. “How fascinating that you should have been born and raised in the twenty-first century and not hear how you sound. All that ambition, all that maneuvering, and it amounts to ‘following orders.’ I used to find you so extraordinarily subtle, a tactician, a magician. To think it was because you were a coward. Do you understand that Arthur is dead because of you?”
• “I am happy that you have the luxury of thinking that. It means your life is so safe you are pleased to play with the notion of individual morality. Individuals are not important. A country is.”
• His poetry was terrible, and I think that he must have known that—he could never have been Rupert Brooke or Siegfried Sassoon—but he couldn’t stop himself from writing it. There was something impossibly noble in that, quintessentially Arthurian.
• I’d thought Graham was a scion of the empire, and he’d thought I was a radical nonconformist by dint of my very existence. If only we’d seen each other clearly—
• As far as you know—or as far as the you that is me knows—the time-door is broken. You may never receive this document, which tells you what you will become if you follow this version of yourself. But if this falls into your hands, then I want you to know how it happens, step by step, so that you can change it. I exist at the beginning and end of this account, which is a kind of time-travel, but I hope you’ll find a way to contain me... It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better.
• * Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.