[Sometimes I write the beginnings of stories, without really planning to end them. This is that kind of a beginning.]
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There are people who are born at a place and time which rubs up against another place and time in the unseen folds of the universe. If you have ever felt a strong nostalgic yearning for an era in which you weren’t born, that is because you are a time traveler, but you don’t know it.
Only a few people do know it, and even fewer of them can really travel back in any meaningful way. When you hear TV personalities talk about past lives, it’s this phenomenon to which they’re referring, although they are most likely unaware of it themselves. They talk about a “deep spiritual connection” to Joan of Arc — but in fact, it’s a simple matter of physics. The specific hospital and date and time of day at which they entered this world happened to lie on a crease in space and time abutting the crease in space and time we call the 30th of May in the beautiful fifteenth-century town of Rouen.
If you’ve ever laid on your bed in the afternoon and known a rush of blood pounding through your fingertips as you almost feel the leather of reins, or hear the ping of submarine sonar, or smell the scent of some long-extinct tree burning around a primeval campfire, it’s not magic and it’s not imagination; it’s the awareness of time lying like a discarded shirt on the floor. If you’ve ever felt you were born in the wrong decade, or century, or millennium, you weren’t. You’re just conscious of the existence of another decade, century, or millennium, and almost — but not quite — know how to get through to that other one, like a button through its particular hole.
A few people know how to get through. Leo French was not one of those people, not at first. He didn’t start to be one until he met Cara, who smelled like Babylon.