excerpt from
JUSTIN ARMSTRONG’S
Wyomings
Bergen, Norway, 1970
It’s too late. Everything changed in the valley tonight. Whenever you’ve been able to decode this message I hope you were able to outrun the last of the Clouds.
Did we get out of the loops? I’m not sure why 1970 was the end point. The Two were here. I saw them just before I got pulled back in.
I can’t remember when it started. Seventeen years from now? A hundred? When are you reading this?
It happened so slowly. Do you remember? Or maybe you don’t know yet. Time started evaporating in little pieces. Then our Doubles started slipping into the corners of our consciousness. Their eyelashes were different. Hardwired arrows instead of bird wings. They didn’t move the same.
People didn’t just look like the Doubles. There were two of them, a Dreamer version and us, the Firsts. About the same time the Doubles found their way into our world we started discovering openings to other times, rips like heat waves in reality. Once we were inside we didn’t know how to get out. And when I lost you in some smashed-in version of North Dakota I had to go deeper to find you. All those hurricanes of years.
I might be the last. I haven’t seen another First in a long time. I hope that isn’t true but I think it’s unlikely there are any of us left.
Most of us never saw it coming. They just melted into themselves as the Doubles devoured them at night. Those of us who could hide from our twins sought refuge in these new time slips and the cast-off places in between. Slits in the continuum coveting our blood. Hoping to find each other once we were lost, looking for clues in undead curves in the road. Hoping to catch the beginning, the point when and where that world started seeping into ours. Bandages to keep it hidden, remember? No.
Still I don’t know which world belongs to them and which is the one I’ve traveled for longer than I know.
We watched it roll in across what was left of North Dakota. Slow like a drugged-up dream too dizzy to stand up by itself. Then it was over. We were shadows on the run.
No one knew where it started. In the beginning we missed a few seconds here and there. A clock slowed in an office in Rapid City. Glitchy delays in Gabon’s phone lines. It crept in like forgetting, some sort of diseased rotten time.
We saw ourselves beyond mirror frames catching glimpses of ourselves on the edge of our vision. Flickers of people with faces almost like ours. No one said anything. No one was falling apart. Until we started murdering ourselves in our sleep.
Those who hadn’t yet seen ourselves—at least not in the daylight—looked for a way to hide, for an escape to Before. The Dreamers knew we could smell them. Their sweet low scent like bleach and rosewater. They knew we shouldn’t be here. Back from other Befores. Some of us were still here running down the present, a wayward scratch on the eyes of the future.
Memory and the things that were real. Dreams and broken codes. Not much sense in all of these back-and-forths jumping from then to then always trying to untie ourselves from this knot of loops looking for the real Before and not these wrecked dreams of never-before that hold us at length.
We got separated outside Fargo. One of their Clouds caught us out on the highway where we stopped to sleep. My turn to watch, and in a moment I’m not there anymore. I’m here. You’re gone and I’m bleeding out in some place with two suns.
The Dreamers made the Clouds in another place and brought them to our time. The Clouds helped them find the remainders. Last lives lived in half-light. They sent them through the Befores looking for us—the other versions of themselves the them-before. Our presence was too unpredictable too dangerous. We were like paper cuts to them. We couldn’t smell the Clouds until they were on us—hot dust and mineral air. At that point, I’d only ever seen one other Cloud. In a dream of my father’s death.
I kept this notebook as the world broke. Flaking off in narrow crystals, fragments of our splintering time. Reading over my words I find it hard to believe I wrote them—warped memories held too close to the fire.
As I write these words I wonder if they’ve already been written and erased somewhere else and rewritten in a dead language not yet born.
This is a document of the last year of my life. Diamond-tipped cursive looping and etching.
Translator’s Note
The preceding ‘introduction’ and the narrative that follows form a rough translation of the only surviving written document from the Old Era. The text is taken from a book found wedged into a crevice in a rock wall on St. Matthew Island, the small islet off the West African coast, one of the many ‘phantom islands’ people from this time period believed to be nothing but geographic mythologies.
The original language of this document is a previously unknown pidgin situated somewhere between Old Era Newfoundland English and Late Icelandic with several instances of a puzzling language with a marginal similarity to pre-Shift Livonian. With all of these languages extinct, reassembly of the text proved rather difficult, taking a team of several linguists almost four years to complete. I was given the raw texts to organize into a narrative formed out of hundreds of loose, hastily handwritten pages and a few decaying photographs.
I have done my best, given the circumstances, and I believe this document provides valuable insight into the last several months of the Era and the dire psychological conditions many of the Remainers experienced before the Shift.
The sequence of these pieces as they are presented here offers only a suggested, speculative reading.
The forever now,
Justin Armstrong
Lecturer in Old Era Studies,
New Worley College,
Boston, Northern America