A Tailor as Old as Time

Unlike the Universe, Michael Perdita's narrative does not unfold in time; it unfolds in space.

T    e    s         t

Test i    n    g

A B C                                    The letters are still.  

Hello.  Can you read me?

My name is Michael Perdita (the label of my jacket says so), and I’m trapped in space.

Perdita is not my surname. It was given to me; I lost mine… somewhere. I want you to know so you don’t waste time looking for a Michael Perdita.

I lost my surname… somewhere in Tuesday… a Tuesday…

Perdita: You can look that up; it means something in that way only words can. Ever changing. The weight of their meaning carves visible channels in space. I forget what it means; maybe I haven’t been told yet.  I needed it though, need it though. A name is important when you are writing. The words are important, and the name is important.

It’s important to get these words down out of all the words that surround me.

To fill a space. So, they can be found. I was given this name to help. I was given this name by the Tailor.

A name to mark my place in space.

Words to mark a space. Me.  Here for you to       find

Sorry

To be clear… by space, I don’t mean the black void, stars and satellites; I’m not an astronaut… I’m trapped in regular, everyday space. The kind of space you find under your floorboards, at the back of a cupboard, inside the inside of things.  Inside that.

Does that      help?    

Sorry                     be patient

This is harder than it looks. Hard to get things in the right… order.  

Hard to move words in space.            A start             I need to begin.

A beginning. There are many, but this one follows my heart, not my head. I don’t know why that matters, but the Tailor told me it does.

“Have to stay connected to the heart!” he said, will say, I’m not sure.

“Don’t lose yourself in your head,”                     less          space in the heart. That’s important.

Sorry…  Start           

now

London, Tuesday 17th December.

Stories should never start on a Tuesday, but don’t let that put you off – it’s just Tuesday, not the end of the world.

Except, of course…it is… was…                      for me.

It was a bright, clear Tuesday morning, fresh and crisp. The new air snapped in my lungs like Christmas crackers.  That first cold breath of a new winter. The one you take when you step out of your door. The one that tells you Christmas is coming. Air to tell the time. Temperature to tell the time. I never realised everything told the time… before.

Before, when there was a before and an after.

Weird how little space Christmas took up in my head. Weirder how much space it takes up now.

     Trees, Turkeys, people and presents…so many presents.

Sorry. It’s hard to stay focused. You must learn, retrain, retain, and reprogram to survive in space.

Hard to stay focused          on        one present.

Imagine a street with infinite houses in all directions. I mean, all of them, even the directions inside the directions. Inside, inside, and inside again, forever. Clocks and compasses fold in on themselves endlessly. Time is fractal.  Is it?

No! Time is the exhaust fumes of a car called space, which runs on gravity.

Its Tuesday              sorry!

This Tuesday morning, I stepped out of the tube station—it was my regular one -Piccadilly, the one with black statues above and gold trim below. There are tiles and tiles of white, blue, and red. The space inside is round, round like a… merry-go-round filled with people, not horses—everyone leaps into the whirlpool, gets spun around, and spat out onto the street under the black statues. The regular wash of routine and human traffic leaves a stain in space.

The statues above are black. I like them. They’re solid. Around them, the stains of people stretch thin. There is a hum here… I’m told that’s music—a deep resonating wave, unchanging yet constantly modulating. I can’t listen for long; my brain mourns what it’s lost. Music is hard to lose.

I like the tube stations. The round tunnels and tubes. They have permanence.

Built into the deepest foundations of London. They are spaces I recognise. The walls flicker and fade, tiles dissolving and reforming. The posters jitter, giving strange life to the people trapped selling toothpaste for all space.  But the tunnels are solid. I can pass through them. It keeps me grounded in the bad spaces between the good ones.

Sorry. I’m Michael.

I’m Michael. I’m good at IT. Actually, that’s not true. To be good at something, you have to have passion, and by default, passion is something I was not programmed for; ironically, this probably saved my life. Passion drives emotions, which fill the heart, which lacks the space of the head and breaks easily.

I read science magazines for fun. Again, this was probably at the root of my survival. I hate sports except for an irrational love of Manchester United, which I have frequently tried to give up, but when I was small, I needed something to care about, and that sufficed. It's amazing what we fill the spaces in our minds with without even knowing.

Now I know.

There is so much space in there filled with so much junk. We are all hoarders. People can’t stand the echoes from the space in our heads. That’s what drives us. Cats, dogs, and dolphins all luxuriate with the space inside their heads. They float around in it, celebrating the joy of empty shelves.  They aren’t driven to fill them with…. things.

I work, worked… in a Private Equity Firm in London. I do, did statistical analysis. That’s not true; nobody does statistical analysis. I make computers do statistical analysis.  I force numbers down their throats until they spew out the right information, like numerical Fois Gras. If people understood what information really is, they would be as outraged by the sight of a bloated hard drive as they are at a goose’s liver.

Sorry          it feels important to say          be gentle with information.

I’m Michael Perdita; I force-feed computers information, then get paid to keep them alive. I used to.

In my office, I’m the guy who tells everyone to switch it off and then back on again. Not because it’s my job, that’s Ian, but nobody likes Ian. He’s cultivated an air of such disdain and disregard around himself that someone scratched out most of the word support from his office door, so it reads Ian FSuckson IT …….t .

They may have focused harder to get the spelling right if they only knew how permanent that was.

Maybe I’ll fix it when I’m in that space.

Maybe I already have.

If my last name was Suckson, I would have become a teen suicide statistic… Ian is, was, hard.  I lost my surname… it wasn’t Suckson. I wouldn’t have survived that.

I was on my way to the office. I had just got off the train, the underground train. Piccadilly with the tiles…up the escalators, to the black statues, in the street.

Outside in the street, the people were bustling and charging along their paths towards their destination. Briefcases and bags, shopping… who shops at 08:42 am? The clock on the massive screen tells me it’s 08:42 am - I remember thinking, “Who shops at 08:42 am?” She was laden down with bags from a shop with a blue logo, a cold blue on brown - colours stay, words do too, but only in books because books sit for a while in one space. Bags travel then disappear- I could find out which shop, but then I would have to retrace my movements and follow hers. Her with the bags, remember, who shops at 08:42 am?

I don’t know who she is, was, or will be, but she is the last face I saw, so she’s burnt into my mind - our paths crossed. Our paths collided. It’s all of a blur. Her bags with the blue logo blur as they flew, fly, flown upwards and sideways, backwards and forwards all at the same… time. As I tried to sidestep, I accidentally passed through her leg, which was trailing behind her. I could see it turn a corner; it went for miles. A spaghetti leg that, if I followed it would take me all the way to her      breakfast.  

Too fast, slow down; you need to understand the        moment.

This moment, my last, or first or just another of the many that I was pre-destined to experience, happened at 08:42 am in London on December 17^th… Tuesday. Fuckin Tuesday.

Nothing good ever happens on a Tuesday.

She was, is, and always will be middle-aged. Blonde, attractive, in a busy way, a way I always liked. There was something pleasantly angular about her; if we had met under normal temporal conditions, it’s safe to say I would have fancied her. Or it's safe to say, as she is the last woman I have ever seen, I have grown to fancy her. She has grown in my mind; she has a special place in my heart. It’s safe to say she would have ignored me.

I am bland in a new house magnolia, choose from one of these three options for your unique kitchen experience kind of way. I am part of the masses, the great unnoticed. The invisible millions who make up the non-player-characters of the world. We blend in and spread out, staining the world off-white with our vanilla snail trails of apathetic banality. That’s why she didn’t see me.

That’s why we collided.

I apologised in the way Englishmen do—some Englishmen did—without thinking, like the apology was in front of the thought; it left the mouth long before the rational understanding or conception of the incident formed in my brain. I read in a magazine that your brain can 3D scan a space before your eyes have registered the objects within it. In the same way, an Englishman will issue an apology before the incident has finished. It’s a scientific fact.

It’s called an autonomic reaction. It’s more autonomic to an Englishman than breathing. I didn’t know this … but now I do.

It's programmed into us by parents (from my experience, the more northern, the higher the sensitivity) who always apologised to their parents for never quite achieving everything their parents didn’t achieve for themselves. From where I am, it looks like so much wasted energy. But that is now, this was then, or maybe it’s the other way around and I hadn’t learned anything yet. 

I turned, and the woman was already moving away, her arms flaying around, like propellors on a plane, painting the air with colours, yellow from her bright, bright coat, brown and blue from the bags…where are those bags from? I remember something… I watched, fascinated. Had I ever done Hallucinogen’s, I would have recognised this: the distillation of photons through space causing trails. But I wasn’t that kind of a Michael; very few of us are.

The sensation of being disconnected hit me like a whip. One second, millisecond, nanosecond … is it weird that inside each second is an infinite amount of time… divisible for an infinite amount of … whatever you want to call them.. infi-seconds. It’s not something that ever bothered me… now… some…times it's all I can think about.

I have so much space to think now. That moment of disconnection was, on reflection, my true birth into this new…space.

I am disconnected.

Around me, the world was blurring forward. Backwards, it was a blur, whilst also being stationary. A trail of light in the air like breath… which was, in fact, a trail of light in the air stretching backwards to the station with the statues… Focus. 

I tried to stand and succeeded easily. Which surprised me; I was clearly concussed. I had hit this woman who was shopping at 08:42 am and been knocked to the ground. I turned my head and waited for someone to grab my shoulders; in that way, I remember people do…did, in films. When they fall to the ground, someone grabs their shoulders. It’s an anchor; they hold onto you, and you onto them. Together, you slide through time, entwined briefly, and then they release you when the spinning has stopped.  When your eyes can catch up with your mind, they release you, and you are still… in time, together.  But nobody came.

Nobody…well somebody… but nobody …

He was a…Tailor, I didn’t know how I knew, but instantly, the name was in my mind like it had always been there. I could no longer imagine a time when I didn’t know who he was. I tried to work around it, to remember when I knew, when I had learned, but the truth was I had always known, and that was immovable in my mind. The Tailor filled a space; it was his space, and it was inside my head and outside of my body and everywhere.

He stood in front of me, mostly. His presence was more in front of me than anywhere else, but it was also clear where he had been and where he was going. I could see the vague impression of him, a ghost, arriving and departing even as he looked at me. He said nothing; he had all the space in the world to wait for me to catch up. His long grey jacket fluttered in a breeze that wasn’t there. It evoked something Victorian in its cut, but equally, it could have been a heavy woollen trench coat or a light silk French frock coat. It was, like him, shifting in space, settling and reforming. He was clean-shaven and had a full beard simultaneously. His face was one of the things that took the most getting used to. Faces, in general, had always been difficult for me to look at.

I was an averter. I could avert so fast that a face would barely register with me. I found the world to be a more manageable place, that way.

His face was contorting, transforming, blending. His whole body was flickering.

If I blinked, I could capture him as an eleven-year-old boy, a fifty-year-old man, a spotty nineteen-year-old maybe, hard to tell… he would look good for his age… if that meant anything here. He had the face of everyone and nobody all at once. But there was kindness and concern in the features. He was not a threat, I knew that.

The only thing that stayed the same was his eyes. Our eyes locked, the world went still. Suddenly, his voice was in my ears. It felt invasive, like he had pushed the words into my head and force-fed them to me—words like Corn. My brain, just so much, Fois Gras. Information… be gentle with me. The words came again, making my eyes vibrate. This time, however, I understood them.

“It’s easier if you look at my eyes.”

He wasn’t wrong. I focused on his eyes, and I saw they were constant; apart from a flash of blue, they were hazel, sharp, intense, and kind. The rest of him became peripheral. Over time, no… in space, I learnt to see them better, but it was hard to hang out with a Tailor for more than a few… well, I have no idea… but I kept our space together limited; the headaches are a bitch and getting a whole headache pill is more luck than judgement.

“Munuphle..bf..u..klgh…”

I tried to talk, but my mouth didn’t work properly and the sound got caught up in my throat. Like a ball of chewing gum, it filled the back of my throat, blocking it. I couldn’t breathe… it occurred to me I had no idea if I had breathed since I bumped into the woman, but right now, I was positive I couldn’t breathe. Instead, I panicked. Filling my throat with more sound gum.

“Naa..glar..ack..cufk..”

Rolling noises that knotted my windpipe and restricted it. I was definitely not breathing, and I couldn’t scream or make more sounds for fear of drowning in my fear as it filled my mouth, throat, my lungs… The tailor struck me with a sharp blow in my stomach.

The sound fell from my mouth and dissipated immediately, spreading backwards like Ink in a fast-running stream, stretching away from me. A single tone rang clear momentarily, but the Tailor swiftly, expertly… swept it away, leaving an empty space that he stitched deftly with one hand.

The Tailor held up a finger as I was about to speak again.

The universality of a raised finger for silence, a point of order, or to gain attention has never been appreciated more by anyone than me in that… moment. In that space. I knew that now was a space for listening, not panic. My focus was aided, of course, by the not-inconsiderable pain from the sharp blow to my stomach.

I forgot to say… I forget to say it often… so bear with me. I don’t remember seeing the tailor move when he struck me if he had struck me at all. There was just a … time when I was unpunched, before punched, BP if you like, then a time after punched, with no real sense where one began and the other ended. The deft stitching, the tear in space…and the punch all occurred, but I could not tell you in what order.

“Look at my eyes.”

I looked hard into the eyes of a Tailor. They were sharp, intense, and kind, but most importantly, they were Immutable and permanent in a world that felt like it was endlessly expanding and contracting. His voice was like no sound I had ever heard because I felt it, like a physical object, rather than sensing it through my ears. The sound came all at once, neatly wrapped, tightly bound. It has to be that way. Otherwise, your words dissipate in space.

“Breathe… slowly.”

I focused on the only thing that made sense to my brain. The phrase fragile grip on reality was invented for just this situation. No other situation would come close to how unflinchingly fragile this grip truly was. On reflection, as an afterthought, or perhaps a premonition, his choice of words was purely to help with my acclimatisation; obviously, the speed of my breathing is irrelevant when the speed of everything is irrelevant.

“Focus. Breathe”

I dug deep into my animal brain. I needed to jump-start my amygdala, the primal core of whatever quantum biotech we have rattling around inside our skulls.  Sorry, when you have time to think… when you have space to think when your think-space is so large…, then you do a lot of thinking about whatever you like. But what I have learned in my space is that at the root of all of us is a… bios… a set of information that is core to our perception of a set of rules and space… things… sorry, it made more sense when I was coming up with it later… anyway the point is. Deep down there is a bit of you that can figure just about anything out. It can change the program. The fundamentals, if you let it. Or you die, choking to death on your own, accumulating soundwaves in space. Given the choice, I chose to crash the system, unplug and reboot. Had I known it was so hard to reconnect, maybe I wouldn’t have done that. Weirdly, as soon as I did, I knew the truth, but that was, is the irony of this whole situation—the unwavering massive enormity of knowing everything, when you need it.

The Tailor snapped into focus as a spotty teenager. I was so surprised. I blinked, and he was 45 with a good beard that had just started to go grey. I focused on holding my eyes open.

“Eventually, you will be able to hold me as you wish to see me. It comes with… space to practice”.

I was about to reply when he flicked up his suddenly old, gnarled finger. The surprisingly yellow nail caught my eye. Did he smoke? Had he just raised it, or was it always there, just waiting for me to see it?

“Get the breathing right. Your lungs are a space, and the air is more space. Just put one inside the other, like a box, inside a box, inside a box.”

I frowned at him. So much to unpack in one sentence.  I had been here for many… minutes at least… I knew that… so much had happened. One breath… it made no sense.

I chose not to follow that thought. Making sense was a luxury item around here.

Snap... Sorry!

“Take as much space as you need,” said the toddler in front of me, wearing shorts and a cute T-shirt depicting a robot making pizza.

A robot…programmed … to make pizza?

When I was a boy, I am a boy. I had a dream that when I was a man, I am a man, I would open a restaurant where Robots would make Pizza. I drew pictures of it. I hung them in my room. I stuck them to my bedroom walls with blu-tack. They left tiny grease stains on the paint, which offended my parents so much that they destroyed three years of creative endeavour and threw away my paper dreams so we wouldn't be embarrassed when my Auntie visited at Christmas. The great re-paint took less than a day. Auntie never came into my room. The family was suitably unembarrassed. Now, I work in IT and have never programmed a robot or even made a pizza. Dreams are just as fragile as reality. Paper dreams, paper-thin reality.

The edge of the world went dark.

My face stung.

The Tailor slapped me. My face stung and unstung; it had always been slapped and not slapped.

Snap… Sorry!

“Hey! Follow my hands.”

It stung. I watched him slap me.

“Back in the room”

“Follow my hands”.

He watched me carefully, our eyes locked together. His hands, attached traditional style to his arms, flickered from tiny and thin to muscular to thin and back to tiny, conducting my lungs. As he raised his old gnarly, pale, strong, soft, delicate small hands, my lungs filled their space and emptied them.

“Good. Again…”

Old hands, up… space filled…. Young hands down…. Space emptied.

“Good. Again…”

Baby hands, up… space filled…. man hands down…. Space emptied.

The programming was rewritten, and new functions were imprinted. We sat together in an ever-expanding world, and I learned to move space with my body. To move my body in space.

The Tailor smiled. I blinked and caught him at around 42. I liked this; it was … older than me… but not so old that I felt disconnected from him. He felt right for me in this space. I needed the reassurance of someone with more experience than me; the toddler in the T-shirt didn’t work at all.

My body felt more controlled. I checked in. Nothing was hurting now. Years of being bullied had taught me that any day that ended with nothing hurting was probably fine. From experience, it's extraordinary how many viable options there are for hurt compared to a non-hurting situation. Equally, it's extraordinary that a non-hurting situation occurs at all when you consider the way the world is, actually is, deep down, in between the cracks in between the cracks. There is so much stuff there!

This was, by de facto, a good day then, despite the visual stimulus to the contrary.  I looked at my hands. They were flickering. Not dramatically like the Tailors, it was subtle, just at the edges. As if they were resting on top of my mum’s old twin tub (that’s a washing machine), it had a spinner next to a top-loading washing machine and a pipe that went into the sink. It was an extraordinary contraption, squat, loud and angry, like my mother.

Snap… Sorry!

“What has been done to you is unfortunate, but it is what it is. I can assure you it was not supposed to happen. It was unplanned, so be assured that there isn’t a nefarious plot against you…”

Up until then I had not considered this to be a possibility. Now it seemed obvious that I was at the centre of some multi-dimensional struggle between good and evil.. Tailors?

“…so be assured that there isn’t a nefarious plot against you… and you haven’t accidentally endangered civilisation, yours or mine.”

I had never considered the human race as my civilisation. I had always felt distant and removed from the rest of the world, partly by my choice but mostly by theirs. What would they all think now that I was basically an ambassador for the Time people in the world of space? That would be a very shitty title for a book.

Had the tailor paused, or had he just continued talking, moving sound through space? However he did it, it worked; I could run off on thought tangents and still hear every word he said. 

“No, this was an accident, like being struck by a… thing… from your world that travels…red, big… yes?” He smiles expectantly at me, waiting for… I nod. He was waiting for a nod. He maybe wanted me to say the bus, but I was fearful this would involve the ejaculation of most of my intestines by accident; I held back.

I nod. This seems to reassure him that I understand anything that has happened to me in the last… I have no idea how to measure …because I have no frame of reference to measure… whatever it is against. Before I am tempted to vomit up a question, the Tailor continues.

“You were caught in a battle between me and another Tailor. She is angry at me, and this…” his arms turn into wheels attached to his torso as he indicated, everything, then settle back into their more traditional form. “…and you, well, you are the consequences of her anger, her actions. She swung her shears at me, I dodged, and she split the fabric of time. A tear must be stitched up; that is a Tailor's function, and that is what I did.” The Tailor appeared to look around and shifted uneasily. Like he was afraid he was being watched, or he knew he was being watched and felt the need to assert that he had done everything he could to fix the problem. He was a good Tailor; there was no need for Mummy to be angry.

“However, now it’s stitched up, your place in time has disappeared…”

I open my mouth. Again, he extends his finger to stop me from speaking before I open my mouth; perhaps it was always extended.

“Not yet. Breathe some more. Moving sound through space is harder than moving air, although it is the same principle. I will try to explain as best I can; however, I am not a creature of time, so my explanations are likely to be more confusing than helpful. But I know you will get the hang of this. You were doing well the last place I saw you.” The Tailor smiled again.

His smile was reassuring when I held his face still. It felt less reassuring when it was the smile of a child or baby. A baby should never smile with so much knowledge.

I focused on holding the Tailor in my mind, looking into his eyes at 38…42…somewhere around there.  My head was aching. Deep inside my cavernous brain, the ancient animal was so busy focusing on what it does best, (keeping this lump of meat alive long enough to decide if keeping me alive was the right course of action) it was struggling to process anything additional like functioning eyes. Simultaneously, some other long-dormant part of my brain was trying to figure its way through the twisted tenses of my current (if that is the correct tense) predicament.  I was trapped in an English grammar nightmare!

We sat in that space until it wasn’t silent, which is when I spoke. I wasn’t speaking, and then I was; there was no difference between the two states except they were diametrically opposed, but both possible states at any…place.

“I’m Michael” I managed.

The Tailor was pleased, in a knowing way. He knew I would speak, and he knew I was Michael. He has spoken to me somewhere else, in another part of his world, no universe.

“Hello, Michael. I’m a Tailor…for simplicity, we don’t have names.”

His words found a soft landing in my brain. They nestled down to soak in as I tried to understand everything the statement revealed… about this place I was in.

Everything he said felt like it had already been said; it was being said and not being said simultaneously—always there, yet never there. Everything fitted perfectly into a space waiting to receive it—inside my brain, inside my skull, inside London, inside the world, the universe, and beyond. The air fitted the space in my lungs; the words fitted the space in my brain.

Each piece making the whole, wholer? See, grammar!

He watched me process the sensations; it’s easy to watch when you are not in a hurry. The Tailor was not in a hurry. He was not waiting; he was moving on and staying still. He was here, and he had gone, and he would arrive very soon, all at once. I knew all of this as soon as I thought about it. I knew it like it had always been there. I never got used to that until I did.

“Where…am…I?”

This standard survivor’s question has served mankind studiously for thousands of years. Many shipwrecked souls have found safe lodging by a warm fire with stories using these words. This is, of course, a hugely naive worldview born out of the dumb luck of being born at a certain place in a certain… place. I shake my head; I can’t focus or track a thought; too much input; something isn’t working any more like a cog has come loose. Something fundamental in my programming, something basic.

The Tailor shifts uneasily, which is frustrating because he is constantly shifting uneasily, and it is taking all my concentration to hold him at a constant appearance in this space.

“You are exactly where you were before you were here. Precisely, no further…for-ward… or back-ward” 

He was trying on the words for size.

“For-ward or back-ward”.

He said them like words he had heard his older brother use to get free drinks in a bar but had no idea what they meant or how I would respond to them. I frowned. In fairness to the Tailor, he took my reaction well. He was happy to guide me through this, whatever this was. It was clear he felt bad about what had happened. I knew he would say it, maybe he already had, someplace else. He felt bad, probably a lot worse than I would expect him to feel unless I somehow understood the gravity of my situation in so far as the whole, stuck here for the rest of space issue, which I didn’t.

What? Something missing… a measurement….

What?

Again, like a line of code had been deleted somewhere deep inside my head. Something was missing.

I closed my eyes, reducing my overloaded brain's input. I needed to focus. I needed to formulate a question to… help before the Tailor moved on and left this space.

Left this space…what does that even mean?

I opened my eyes. The Tailor was still there, mostly. He was shifting form casually like it was more effort not to… which it probably is. Why else would all versions of you occupy the same space simultaneously? As the thought entered my mind, the Tailor smiled and nodded. He knew as soon as I knew because he knew I would know here.

I forced myself to focus hard. I had to ask a question; I needed to know.

“What time is it?”

The question wasn’t the one I was hoping for but it was the one my brain felt needed answering.

The Tailor looked blank as if I had just spoken Finnish in a Spanish oral exam.

It just occurred to me the Tailor spoke in English. On reflection, this was far from a given; again, it's just an assumption because where I …exited from and where I arrived are so geographically similar… but in truth, about as far apart as two things can be. I mention this should you find yourself here and you choose to reply. English works.

“What time is it?”

Unless you ask this question, as there is no answer to this question here, not in English, German, or Maths, the question is meaningless. Time does not exist here.

The Tailor smiled many smiles. It was his preferred method of reassurance.

“I can explain,” he offered.

I considered that the right response here was to ask him not to, that, in some way, ignorance would make this situation easier. It’s plausible that the more I understood the place I was in, the less likely it was that I could get out. My very human desire for blissful ignorance to keep the status quo undefined was almost as real as the smears of human existence spiralling around me. 

What was it, he said. A tear that needed to be repaired. A space where I was but was no more. My brain registered the words again, as it had known them all along and just heard them for the first… time.

Time.

“A tear in… what?” 

In the fabric of time. A tear that needed to be fixed. A tear made by a Tailor’s angry girlfriend that somehow severed my connection with London at 08:42 am on the 17^th of December, Tuesday…

“I can explain,” he offered.

I accepted with a nod and immediately offered my own ill-thought-out explanation… “Time does not exist?”

The Tailor flickered, confused.

“In simple terms, the fabric of space protects us from the flow of Time; I’m a Tailor…” he responded.

“A Time Tailor?” I postured, hopefully.

He furrowed his many brows. For a moment, I lost my mental grip on him, and he flickered quickly between a disgustingly handsome 28-year-old and a tired but well-lived-in 70-year-old before settling again at a disappointed 42.

“I can explain; please, let me explain.” He had a gentle patience about him. I wasn’t used to people being patient. In the… other world… patience comes at a cost. Time is a currency we all deal in. We work to buy time, we spend time working to buy time… not working. Here, that currency has no value. Patience is free.

I accepted with a nod. I overrode my very male urge to show how clever I was and how I had already figured out the problem. Resisting the need to assert to the only person I had met who knew more about this situation than I did because it was their reality, not mine. I have always been the cleverest in the room. I thought this would bring me joy and companionship. But it seemed to do the opposite. People don’t want facts; they are far more interested in the people who know what to do with the facts. The kind of creative mind that can take two ideas and come up with a third, fourth, or fifth. My brain never worked like that… never… until now. Now, I feel unshackled. Ideas loading as fast as I can think, unbidden, converging and combining. The sensation of freedom, freedom of thought, is extraordinary. Imagine never experiencing this… I just did.

I reprogrammed my brain and managed a second, more definite nod. Or that may have been my first nod. So, I added a third for good measure.

Three nods, only the order was unclear; the message was not.

“I’m a Tailor. I repair the fabric of space so time may pass over it. Space undulates, moves, expands, and contracts, bending and stretching time. We are in space but outside of time. Here…” he moved his arms in a theatrical blur. I waited until all of his arms arrived back together before nodding… ‘Here, you move freely, untroubled by the flow of time, protected by the fabric of space.’

The way he said space made it feel like the whole world. It was everything. I suddenly felt the unlimited connectedness of it all. I explored using the words unlimited connectedness for the first time.

“Space is infinite?”

The Tailor gave a knowing smile like a schoolteacher confronted with a question from a precocious 7-year-old that was outside the curriculum by about twenty years. The Tailor was very good at moving with his responses; he spoke physically as much as he spoke with words. Considering how difficult it is to move sound in space, this was not a surprise. He had the physicality of a mime artist or a street dancer. He was all flow, everywhere. It was mesmerising to watch.

“Time does not exist here?”

The Tailor considered this for, well, a measurement of space, let's say, three cubed.

“Better! Time does exist. In the same way, the sea exists in a submarine; you don’t want it rushing around inside the submarine… it's better on the outside, where it can’t drown you in all its… big wetness”.

He lost me. My brain tried to grasp everything and failed. I felt nauseous, elated and lost all at once.

It’s hard to follow a train of thought when separated from time. Have I mentioned that? If not, I’m sure I will.

My hands flickered; the many versions of me grew more intense as I occupied more space.

The Tailor was smiling patiently.

My brain caught up with my body.

Snap… Sorry!

“I’m going to be late for work…”

The Tailor responded with a face shrug—the kind where you push your cheeks upwards and your ears down. It has infinite meanings, but they all lead to the same place. It means the same everywhere. Whatever you just said that elicited the face shrug is not relevant to your current situation and should be disregarded and replaced with a more important and urgent question before I, the shrugger of faces, leave.

“Work doesn’t exist?”

“Work as you know it exists out there. Here, work has no beginning or end; it’s real but occupies space, not time. I travel to work.”

“I don’t need to go to work?”

“No, but you may find it helpful to find something to do, to fill the space.”

The way everything was measured in space, not time, felt both obvious and completely surreal. How does one find something to fill the space of the entire universe? What kind of roles are available in space for a disgruntled IT supervisor? How do you even find a job? You search for it… it will be exactly where you look. Once again, the knowledge fitted into the space only recently discovered. With the right question, in space you could always find the right answer. Time had been removed from the equation, and suddenly, everything was… relative.

It occurred to me, or had always been there, but was now in the correct space in my head for recollection that I was no longer part of the world I had been born in. I had disappeared from that time.

“I have disappeared from my time?’

The Tailor gave an encouraging look. He was keen for me to discover the truth for myself. It was part of my training. It was how I would learn to live here.

“I existed out there, but now I only exist in here. What will that look like out there?”

The Tailor considered the question.  “There is no easy answer to that; this is theoretical as it's impossible to prove. The oldest of my kind, the original Tailor, they would say, you have exited time. That means all that knew you will never know you.  You have vanished, forwards and backwards, in time. The space you once occupied, will occupy, has been filled by everything but you”.

Of all the things I had learned in this space, this was the strangest. To know that I still existed but also disappeared from existence was… mind-blowing. My body rejected the information as it cannoned around my brain, unable to find a space to rest. A searing pain shot across my eyes, and I tried to throw up. But I didn’t know how to move food out of the stomach space into the world space, so I retched hard, and blood splattered out of my nose.

Apparently, my nose knew how to move blood in space.

I dropped to my knees. My arms, my many arms, lifted my shimmering hands to grip my head.  I was close to passing out.

The Tailor slid through space to me and gripped my hands. I wasn’t good with being touched. I had always found it too revealing. The weight of expectation that comes with a touch, to be followed by another, how long to hold, how quickly to let go. The rules were so opaque to me. I avoided being touched more than I avoided anything. The Tailor took my hands. His touch was firm and gentle; it tingled and fizzed; it went beyond my skin; it was inside the space between the space in my hands, in the atoms of my hands. Our atoms vibrated against each other. It was the most intimate of feelings. I had never felt so connected to anyone.

That might be the saddest thought of my life.

He gripped my hands. We were one.

“Focus, Michael, focus on my eyes”.

Focus. I tried to pull away, but the tailor's grip was strong and light—gentler than my mother’s… I don’t have a mother.

“I never existed?” I splutter. “Everything I did, everyone I knew, every moment, all gone”.

The Tailor’s focused eyes softened.  He nodded. My body stopped straining; I relaxed and fell back on my heels. Kneeling in front of the Tailor who gently, firmly held my head.

He released me. I felt the change. I would never feel the same about being touched.

I took some space to reflect. I was never what you would call an active member of society. My existence had been one of minimal impact. I had parents; My mother was still alive, and my father had died when I was nineteen. Lung Cancer. It was a hard time for us; I got closer to my mother. We became reliant on each other. She cared for me, and I forgot to learn to care for myself. Now, how old am I? The numbers slipped through my mind like sand. The numbers mean nothing here.

“Focus on my eyes Micheal Perdita.”

He gave me my name.

“Who?”

“A new name for this new place. You’re a baby here; you must learn to crawl, walk, and talk. A new person should have a new name.”

My Father gave me a name… it’s lost, he’s lost, I’m lost. I searched hard, and it had gone. It was a name born in time. It had no place here. It was the same name he gave to my mother.

My mother.

My mother is all alone. Or she had another child, a brother or a sister. She wouldn’t feel the loss or the empty space I occupied. It had been filled by someone else.  My invisible life is gone, if something can be gone that never existed. It's nothing but dreams now. It’s a relief, for me, for them, whoever it wasn’t, that I had never had a meaningful relationship and no kids.

Who’s it a relief, too, though; nobody I knew now knows they knew me!

“You have a name; you exist, just here rather than there.” He smiled reassuringly. “That’s better than dying.”

“Can I die?”

“Death and decay result from the flow of time over atoms. Here, time cannot touch you.”

Do you remember the moment you found out you were immortal? You can take it from me; it’s a big day, we’d probably send cards to each other. Happy Immortal Day, love Michael Perdita.

“I’m Immortal?”

“In a way, but only because time does not affect us here. You are omnipresent in space. All places, all at once. Everything exists; every moment of you exists, but only here,” he offers encouragingly.

“But time exists?’

He nods. “Yes and no. It's not real like you; there are no atoms of time; it’s the result of a complex interaction between gravity and space that becomes a very powerful force to beings like you. Tailors work hard to control it; we are charged with maintaining the smooth flow of… time. It's very dangerous stuff. It’s always trying to age things, sweep things away. We like everything to stay exactly where it should be.”

“But I can… no longer… be late…”

He nods more enthusiastically…

“Because… I am…”

The Tailor could see the penny dropping… in truth, he had been able to see it dropping since we began. The penny, the idea, the thought had left a stain on reality as clear as the brown bag. That’s the power of a Tailor. They have the… design… a blueprint for space. They know every fold and wrinkle, they move freely, smoothing, shearing, crimping, pleating, stitching, patching and pressing the fabric of space. A symbiotic relationship, perfectly balanced perfect… until… me.

“…stuck.”

“Yes, that’s unfortunately true. I will speak with the other Tailor; she has become edgy and erratic, and her work has suffered.”

“I have so many questions.”

“I can appreciate that, but I must go; I have work to do; the fabric of space is, as you are now aware, a fragile thing, and it must be tailored to fit.”

The Tailor stands as if this was enough of an explanation.

“How do I get back? Can you cut space again? Let me fall through and be on my way.”

The Tailor knew this question was coming.

“I have worried about this since I saw the tear and your fall. I have considered the problem for many square miles. And sadly, the answer is no.  There is no way back into the flow of time. If I were to cut the fabric here and you placed your hand through the hole, it would… spaghettify into infinity before the rest of you could climb through. Time is moving at the speed of gravity; you would disintegrate…theoretically. The edge of space, where it meets the flow of time, is… a singularity. Also, it wouldn’t do for me to start cutting space without an approved pattern; where would we all end up then?”

“Oh!”

“I have to go.”

The Tailor stands and moves off. He’s still staring at me, but he’s also moving away. Many versions of him fold over the threads of the faded images crisscrossing the space around us.

I stand. The nausea is intense. My brain tries to create some four-dimensional sense out of this space with only three dimensions. I focus on moving my legs, and they spread across the space.

How do you describe the feeling of opening the space between the atoms of your body as easily as you might stretch the fingers of your hand? I expanded and flowed all at once. Sliding between the spaces between the spaces. I expect to wait for my atoms to catch up, but they are here and there all at once. I am moving and still, starting and stopping.

The information overload is intense, extraordinary, and magical. I have never been so aware of myself and my wholeness.

I appear instantly where the Tailor has arrived.

The Tailor looks up from his work, some fine cross stitch. He, the fabric of space, had worn thin. He was deftly crimping the two sides together to give it more strength. I have no idea how I knew that… it was just there.

“I moved!”

“How was that?” he asked casually, as if we had just bumped into each other.

“I moved; it was weird. Weird, good.”

“Good, a good start. Movement is very important in space.”

Accepting the fact that I could not rejoin time and, therefore, was stuck in space was surprisingly easy. Like everything here, the knowledge was both new and infinitely old. That’s obviously not the right description; my grammar is still very time-focused.

I was aware of everything whilst still unknowing about so much, until I asked the right questions. Space is all about the right questions. I had so many questions.

“What am I supposed to do here? How do I eat? Do you eat? Where do you live? Where can I live?”

Maybe too many questions.

“If you think about it, you already have the answers. You already know everything you need to know”.

And he was right.

My mind, the neurons in my brain, and the space between the neurons in my brain were infinitely connected with the whole of space.  I was as aware of far away as I was close, so infinitely close. I was connected across Quantum and relative space.  By removing time, Space and Gravity become the dominating forces, stretching infinitely – well almost, and containing all things, every particle and sister particle, every measure of energy and atom all present, fixed here—everything including me.

The Tailor smiled his knowing smile.

“You have a journey ahead of you.  You have a whole universe to explore. You are unfettered from time, and you can travel freely through all of space.”

“I’m a god”.

The Tailor laughed. “Don’t let them hear you say that”.

Them hung in the air between for a moment. I was about to ask but I knew instantly that this was not a safe space for such talk. I would need to find… someone… a name…a purpose and a name.

Before my purpose was set by time, in time. Every day was sliced up into thinner and thinner slices of activity. Strung together to give a sense of purpose. A direction in time. Heading from A-B. Now my choices were infinite, my purpose infinite. No, that wasn’t true. My purpose was finite. I had a place in this space, as real as my place in the real world.

“I’m going to miss the real world”.

“What does that even mean? This is as real as any world. It’s so real you can reach out and touch it, feel it. You can understand it at a fundamental level by simply moving through it; all knowledge is yours for the taking”.

“I will miss people. I mean not in an interacting with them kind of way – but I did like to watch them; they had lives of such bizarre complexity. I found people to be very strange”.

“There are people here, Tailors and … others… better you learn about them for yourself. I am a being of space and have opinions about who is a waste of space or not. But you are free, a free man, in a free space. Nobody can take that away from you”.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a lot to take in, but, as he had explained, all of my knowledge was mine. If I wanted it, I just had to reach out and touch it. I lifted my hand and waved it through a streak of colour. My mind was filled with images of the inside of a dog, blood and lungs and a heart… The Tailor pulled my hand out.

His touch felt electric, solid but not solid; it fizzed on my skin.

“Go gently. Stroke, learn what everything is, try not to pass through, gently flow. Move through the spaces in between. Search for the voids and learn from the lines. It flows like a dance”.

He showed me how he moved. It was exactly like I imagined it would be. I could never move like that until I did. It was extraordinary.

The Tailor watched as I slid into the space beside him.

“You have limited abilities to affect things around you, but as you explore, you may find ways to express yourself into their world… I would start with words. Words are something from your old life that appear here. Words have a way of creating an impression across time. The books stay on a shelf. You can move the words… change the messages… it’s hard at first, but you have all the space in the universe to practice”.

“Start small.”

“Exactly”.

“And, do I eat?”

“Do you?”

Again, the knowledge was there instantly, occupying the space it had always occupied.

“No”.

The Tailor smiled. He liked smiling; it seemed to be something he had learnt somewhere, a way of dealing with… people.

“There are others like you.”

“I know,” I said, and I did.

 I knew I was in the right space to set out and find… Katie.