Godstone

Sunday was market day in Ürgüp, and people had come from miles around with their goats and their donkeys. The sky was a cloudless pale blue, and the cartloads of foodstuffs that were for sale in the market were all the more colourful because of it: the purple black of the aubergines, the red of the tomatoes and peppers, the oily blackness of the olives, and the grey whiteness of the feta cheese.

The thought of having a couple of drinks and then going home had cheered me up. I felt good as I pushed my way through the crowds and into the café where Gee and I had eaten on our first evening together.

The café was packed with farmers and their families drinking tea. There was also a group of young backpackers in one corner, three girls and one boy. I guessed that they were German, maybe Dutch.

Two local men left as I entered the café, and I took their table. The owner, Hazan, came out from the kitchen. He looked old and tired compared to when I had seen him two days earlier. When I had been there with Gee, he had welcomed us like long-lost friends. Now that I was on my own, he didn’t recognise me.

Nor did he appear particularly impressed when I asked him for raki; it took him a while to bring it to my table. I tried to drink it, but it smelled like shit—literally like human excrement.

I called Hazan back over, upset that he should serve me a drink in such a filthy glass. I explained what the problem was, but he didn’t understand. I held the glass up, and he smelled the drink.

“That’s fine,” he said, rather aggressively. “Nothing wrong.”

I took the glass back, but it still smelled like shit, and I told him so. Hazan passed it over to the man at the next table and said something to him in Turkish. The man smelled it and said something back in Turkish. I understood that he also thought there was nothing wrong with it. Hazan passed the raki back to me, and I tried again to drink it, but the smell was as strong as ever. I put the glass back on the table. There was no way I could drink it.

“Rum?” I asked. Hazan nodded. “And Coke,” I added. Hazan disappeared back into the kitchen and came out with a glass of rum and a bottle of Coke. I relaxed a little, confident that I would at last get some alcohol into my system. Before mixing the neat rum with the Coke, I raised the rum to my face to smell it. I immediately slammed it back on the table. The smell was the same: human excrement.

Hazan looked at me as if I had gone mad, and I realised that I had become the centre of attention in the café. Even the backpackers were looking in my direction. The last thing I needed was to cause a scene, especially after what had happened the previous evening.

I took a swig of Coke from the bottle. It tasted great. I tried the rum again. It smelled terrible. I nodded to Hazan, and he went back to serving the other customers. Attention drifted away from me, and things went back to normal—or at least as normal as they could.

I took Gee’s letter out of my pocket and read it over and over again. No matter how many times I did, I still couldn’t understand it.

She had told me not to worry about what happened in the café, but thinking about it again, I couldn’t help but be worried. I kept visualising those two dead men, their thick blood spreading out over the dusty floor. I became more and more anxious, and the lack of alcohol in my system was making it worse. I knew that there must have been some sort of investigation going on, and I was brooding on this when I heard a familiar voice.

“Will,” said the voice. “Where the fuck have you been?” I looked up and saw Salim staring angrily down at me.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked, shocked to see him. Salim pulled out a chair from under the table and sat down opposite me. I could tell by his body movements that he was upset with me.

“I have been looking for you for two days,” he replied. “The hotel people were also looking for you. They thought you had checked out without paying. The guy at the reception desk, the owner I think, was pretty upset. And then so was I—so am I—you asking me to come all this way and then not being here.”

Hazan came over with a glass of tea for Salim, and he put it on the table. They seemed to know each other.

“Whoa,” I told Salim. “Slow down.” I took a sip of Coke from the bottle while I tried to get my thoughts together. “What do you mean that I asked you to meet me here?”

“You asked me when you called me at home,” Salim replied. “You were lucky I was in. You asked me to meet you here, in this town, two days ago. You gave me the name of the hotel and everything.”

“When did I call you?” I asked. I had no recollection of calling Salim at all.

“The evening after you left for Turkey,” he told me. “You called me from Istanbul. You said you needed my help and that I was to meet you here, in this dump of a town that no one has ever heard of.”

He paused for a moment to let me absorb what he was telling me. “You were completely out of it when you called me,” he continued. “You were so drunk you could hardly speak. I had to make you repeat everything two or three times.”

“But you came?”

“Of course I came. When a friend asks you for help, you help.” Salim smiled. He was calming down a little. “But you also told me that you would pay for my flight and all.”

“I did?” I asked. I wouldn’t have put it past Salim to be making that bit up. “What else did I tell you?”

“Something about you losing a shitload of money and having to sell the flat. You asked me to get that estate agent friend of yours, Simon, to come and value it and put it up for sale.”

“Did you?”

“Yes,” Salim replied. “But for heaven’s sake, how did you get yourself into such a mess?” He was evidently irritated at the thought of moving—and having to find another place to live where the landlord would almost certainly be stricter on rent collection. He guessed from my expression what I was thinking and changed the subject.

“So where the fuck have you been for the last two days?” he asked.

“I’ve been here,” I replied. “I have been at the hotel. I even had dinner in this restaurant two nights ago.”

“I had dinner in the restaurant two nights ago,” Salim told me. “And last night as well. What time were you here two nights ago?”

“About seven.”

“That’s not possible,” he told me, a note of exasperation creeping into his voice. “I was here at seven, and you weren’t here.”

“Well, I tell you I was here,” I replied irritably.

Hazan reappeared from the kitchen with a tray of glasses filled with tea. Salim called him over.

“Was this man,” he asked Hazan, pointing at me, “in this restaurant two nights ago?”

Hazan looked at me and shook his head. “He looks vaguely familiar, but, no, he wasn’t here two nights ago. You were, though…with that Austrian girl.” Hazan smiled and nodded his head towards the group of backpackers at the corner table. Salim smiled back, a complicit man-to-man smile. Salim obviously hadn’t been wasting his time since he arrived. Hazan went back to the kitchen.

“Are you all right?” Salim asked. “You look very pale all of a sudden.”

“Salim,” I said. “Could you please smell this drink for me and tell me what it smells like?”

He picked up the glass of raki and smelled it.

“Aniseed,” he replied. “It smells rather nice, rather like the sweets I sometimes had as a child. But this is alcohol. Not for me.”

“And this glass?” I handed him the rum, and he smelled it.

“Yuck,” he replied. “That one smells bad: brandy or maybe rum. Hey, why are you drinking so early in the morning?”

“It doesn’t smell like shit to you?”

“Yes, it smells like shit to me,” he replied. “I don’t know how you can drink it.”

“No, I mean like human shit?”

The expression on Salim’s face began to register alarm. “No, man, it smells like alcohol. As I said, rum or brandy or some shit like that.”

“I think I have to get some fresh air…to get outside,” I told Salim softly. “I don’t feel too good.”

“It’s all the booze you drink,” Salim replied. “You drink so much you can’t remember anything, and then you are surprised the next day when you have a hangover and feel ill.”

“I didn’t drink anything at all yesterday,” I replied.

Salim looked at me, trying to decide whether to believe me or not. “Hey, man,” he finally said. “If you really didn’t drink any alcohol yesterday, then I guess you are going through some sort of cold-turkey thing. You’ve got the shakes, and you are sweating. Finish that Coke, and I will get you another one. You need rehydrating.”

He turned to the kitchen and called Hazan over. “Hey, my friend, get this man another Coke and some water. Bring us the bill, and take this shit away. My man here is giving up alcohol. Alhamdulillah.”

Hazan took the alcohol away and brought back the Coke and the water. He handed Salim the bill, a slip of handwritten paper. They both looked at me as if I were a patient in a hospital bed.

Salim pulled out a small white plastic bottle from his jacket pocket. He told me that a French lady doctor at Guy’s Hospital in London had given it to him. He said that it contained oligo-elements, or trace elements that the body needs to function.

“For the last few years,” he told me, “you’ve been drinking too much alcohol and not eating enough food. You need to replenish your body, to add back in all minerals and elements that you are missing.

“Take a quarter teaspoonful of this each morning as soon as you get up, and hold the liquid under your tongue awhile. Make sure you don’t take more than that; the doctor said that in this case, at least, less is more.”

He handed me the bottle. “I have another in my room. This one is for you. Take some now,” he said. “It will make you feel better.” I did as he told me, pouring a tiny amount of the clear liquid into a teaspoon. It didn’t taste of anything. And it didn’t make me feel better.

I drank the second Coke and the water. I still didn’t feel any better. Salim handed me the bill, and I paid it. Hazan hadn’t charged for the alcohol. Salim stood up slowly, clutching at his back as he did so.

“I hurt my back,” he explained. “I carried a suitcase onto the bus for an old lady and hurt my back lifting it onto the luggage rack. I think I have slipped a disc. I need to see a doctor.”

Alex’s father had once slipped a disc and was in agony for months. I doubted that Salim had done anything more than pull a muscle.

“Of course,” I said as we left the café. “We’ll find a doctor as soon as possible.”

The street outside was still bustling with people and animals. We walked along the main road, past the farmers’ carts and stalls, to the edge of the town, where the shops turned into workshops. I asked Salim if he minded going a little farther, and he told me he didn’t. Like any criminal, I needed to revisit the scene of the crime.

“Hey, man,” he said, “I am here to help you. I have nothing else to do.”

“Except the odd Austrian backpacker,” I replied. I noticed a note of bitterness in my voice that I hadn’t intended.

“Well,” he replied, “it would have been rude not to.”

We walked on to the café where I had eaten with Gee the previous evening—or at least to where the café should have been. There was no café and no burnt-out shell, only a shop repairing scooters. I walked up and down the road in case I had misjudged the distance and got the wrong place.

For the third time that day, Salim asked me if I was all right. I didn’t know what to answer. I went into the scooter shop and asked the man there if he spoke English. He told me that he did, a little at least. I asked him if his shop had at one time been a café.

“Yes,” he replied. “My father, he had café…too far from town, few customers.”

“Here?” I asked him, pointing around me at the scooters in varying states of repair. The man nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “Fire in kitchen…gaz. Two men killed. Father OK. But give up café. Scooters better.”

“When was fire? When you close restaurant?” I asked, unconsciously imitating the way he talked.

The man thought for a minute.

“Ten years. Ten years ago,” he replied. “Father dead five years,” he continued. “So, yes, ten years ago.”

“And now mend scooters?” I asked, looking around.

“Yes. Me in Germany…mechanic. Come home, open workshop with father. Now have office in hotel in Sogamel. Business good now, lots tourists. We rent scooters to tourists. Here do repairs.”

“Wait,” I told him. “Did you say that there is a hotel in Sogamel?” Sogamel was the little village that Gee and I had walked to the previous day.

“Yes,” he replied. “New hotel in Sogamel, open seven years. Tourists rent scooters. You want rent scooter?”

“Yes,” I replied. “We go Sogamel. Two scooters.”

The man found us two scooters, and I offered him a credit card as guarantee.

“No credit card,” he replied.

“Cash?” I had a couple thousand lira, but he wanted more. I asked Salim if he could help, and he handed over another couple thousand. I couldn’t help noticing that Salim had a wad of brand-new thousand-lira notes in his wallet.

I tried to get my scooter to start, but it wouldn’t. After some messing around, the man exchanged it for another one. Salim’s scooter worked fine, and he jumped on without any problem, his “slipped disc” apparently forgotten.

We set off along the road that Gee and I had walked just the day before. I didn’t recognise much. There seemed to be more houses than I remembered, and the farms seemed better cared for. What was most striking, however, was that the road was paved; yesterday the tarmac had run out just outside Ürgüp.

The hotel was exactly where Gee had said it would be: on the opposite hillside, overlooking the village. The communal bread oven had disappeared, and a number of restaurants and cafés had sprung up around the central area, now paved and turned into a proper square. We stopped the scooters on the side of the square. As I got off, I realised I was trembling. Salim looked at me with concern.

“I am going insane,” I told him. “I was here yesterday, and none of this existed: no hotel, no restaurants—just a communal bread oven.”

“When was the last time that you had any alcohol?” Salim asked me.

“I told you I didn’t drink anything yesterday. The last time I drank alcohol was at lunch two days ago,” I replied. “I had two beers. I was going to have another one, but my friend stopped me.”

“And you had nothing to drink yesterday? No alcohol?”

“No, I was with my friend all day,” I replied. “I didn’t drink anything.”

“I think you are having hallucinations,” Salim told me. “You look terrible, and I guess you are having alcohol withdrawal symptoms. I am not surprised, the amount you drink.”

“No,” I insisted. “In the past, I have managed to go a day or maybe two without any withdrawal symptoms. I only get the shakes and the sweats on the third day. In Istanbul, I went three days without alcohol without a problem.”

Salim looked unconvinced.

“I am not having hallucinations. This is all exactly as my friend told me it would be.”

“So you want me to believe that the hotel wasn’t there when you came here yesterday and that the scooter shop was a restaurant?”

“And there was a communal village oven over there.” I pointed at what was now a kiosk selling postcards and Kodak film.

“Give me a minute,” Salim said. “I will take a look at the hotel and find out when it was built.” He jumped back on his scooter and started it up.

“And try to find out who built it,” I called after him. “The name of the company.”

While I waited for him to come back, a smart new minibus pulled up beside me, and a group of German tourists got out. They all had big cameras around their necks, and they made a beeline to buy film from the souvenir shop. Business was booming; in fact, the whole village was booming.

“The hotel was opened in April 1979, seven years ago,” Salim told me when he came back. “There is a plaque inside that says it was built by a company called Zeus Construction. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Zeus Construction is my friend’s father’s company,” I replied. “Actually it is the joint-venture company between my uncle and her father.”

“Is it possible that you were here ten years ago?” Salim asked. “And that you are getting confused between now and ten years ago?”

“Ten years ago, I was only fifteen,” I replied. “I was at school. I have never been to Turkey before.”

Salim didn’t reply for a moment but then suggested we get a tea. “Maybe you can tell me the story from the beginning,” he said. “But you must tell me everything. Why you are here, who your friend is, all of it. Then maybe I can help you make sense of it all.”

We went into a café on the other side of the square, and we ordered two teas. I was going to order a raki but decided against it. Salim would not have approved, and, besides, I didn’t want to take the risk of the same thing happening as had happened in the café in Ürgüp.

When the teas arrived, I took a deep breath and told Salim all that had happened since I had arrived in Turkey. He listened without interrupting me and seemed particularly attentive when I told him about the two letters that Gee had written to me: the first that had hung for years on the notice board in the Pudding Shop in Istanbul and the second that had been posted three days before I had arrived in Ürgüp.

When I had finished my story, Salim asked if he could see the stone. I took it from my jacket pocket, unwrapped it, and handed it to him. He took it in his right hand and immediately moved his left hand to hold on to the table.

He looked into the stone, and an expression of horror flashed across his face.

“My home,” Salim stuttered, “in Pakistan. It was not clear what was happening.” He had gone pale, and his eyes were darting in all directions.

“Was it good or bad?” I asked him. “What you saw—was it good or bad?”

“Bad,” he replied. “It felt bad. What is it…this stone?”

“My uncle said that the stone shows you what it wants to show you,” I replied. “He said that it shows you who you are. But just because what you saw was bad doesn’t mean that you are a bad person,” I added quickly.

We sat in silence for a while, and the café owner bought us some more tea. The tea wasn’t doing me much good. I was anxious enough as it was.

“You know I am a physicist, that I am studying physics?” Salim asked me as he sipped on his tea. I nodded, unsure where he was heading. “Physics is probably the subject where knowledge is expanding the fastest, almost exponentially. What was true yesterday is not true today.” I tilted my head to show that I was paying attention, but I had no idea what he was getting at.

“It’s not the world that is changing,” Salim explained. “It’s our understanding of the world that is changing.” He paused a moment to look at me to make sure that I was following him.

“I never understood physics at school,” I told him. “We had a physics teacher that used to be able to recite pi to three hundred decimal places. But I never could follow his lessons.”

“Well, I see two possible explanations as to what has happened here,” Salim continued, ignoring my comments. “The first is that you have had some sort of nervous breakdown and imagined all this.”

I nodded my agreement. For the time being, that seemed the most plausible explanation. I took another sip of tea. It was exceedingly bitter even with the two sugars that I had added.

“The second is that you actually did go back ten years in time.”

I looked sharply at Salim, wondering if he was making fun of me. He wasn’t.

“I have to ask you a question,” he said. “Has anything weird like this ever happened to you before?”

I didn’t want to answer that question, and he felt it. “Have you been back in time before?” he asked.

“Not really,” I replied, shaking my head unhappily.

“Not really?” he asked. “What does that mean?”

I hated talking about myself at the best of times—and this wasn’t the best of times. I especially didn’t want to talk about this. “I have never told anyone this,” I said hesitantly. “I never expected anyone to believe me.”

“Well, you must tell me now,” Salim replied with an encouraging smile.

“When I was very young, maybe two years old, the family drove to Canterbury to visit my Aunt Alice, my father’s older sister. While we were there, and while my mother must have been doing something else, Aunt Alice took me into Canterbury Cathedral. I can still remember it vividly.”

“And?” Salim prompted me.

“I hated the place; it really scared me. My aunt later told my mother that I had given her a guided tour of the cathedral, showing her where an archbishop, Thomas Becket, had been murdered after a dispute with the king, Henry II. She said that there was a plaque in the cathedral to mark the spot where the murder took place but that I told her that the plaque was in the wrong place.”

“How could you know that?” Salim asked.

“Because I saw the murder take place,” I replied. “While I was there…while I was in the cathedral. But I didn’t just see it. I was actually there when it happened. I saw the swords. I smelled the blood. I witnessed the murder.”

Salim stared at me. I suspected that he did not believe me.

“And you remember that?” he asked sceptically.

“I remember that,” I replied. “I particularly remember his eyes—Thomas Becket’s eyes. I was so close to him I saw his eyes; one was blue, and one was green.”

“Thomas Becket,” Salim repeated incredulously. “Isn’t that your uncle’s name? Becket?”

“Yes,” I replied.

We sat for what seemed the longest time without saying anything. A few tourists drifted in. It was getting close to lunchtime.

“Do you believe me?” I eventually asked Salim.

He took a breath and sighed before answering.

“I don’t know what to believe,” he eventually replied.

Without asking me, he called the waiter over and asked for the bill. He must have been in a state of confusion because when the bill came, he paid it. It was the first time I had ever seen him pay for anything.

We walked outside into the midday sunshine. It felt good to be outside. It made it feel as if the world was real. We walked over to our scooters and sat on the saddles.

“When I looked into the stone,” Salim said, “I felt that I wasn’t looking into it but that I was actually in it.” He shuddered involuntarily as he remembered what he had seen or, rather, what he had experienced.

I told him that I had felt the same when I looked into it. “Are you suggesting,” I asked him, “that somehow the stone pulled me in and that I have been living inside the stone for the past two days?”

Salim told me that was exactly what he meant.

“Let me try to explain this simply,” he said. “My world, the world of physics, is currently divided into two parts: big and small. Einstein’s general theory of relativity explains how big things like the universe work. Quantum mechanics explain how small things, like atoms, work.

“But the two explanations contradict each other in some important ways. Things behave differently at the small level than they do at the big level, and we don’t know why. Physicists are trying to reconcile the two to find a theory that explains everything, both big and small, a universal theory of everything, if you like.

“And in a way, we have succeeded to reconcile the two, but to do that, we must accept the existence of other dimensions…of more dimensions than the three that we know—or four, if you include time.”

I looked at Salim blankly and told him that I didn’t know anything about quantum mechanics and that I had never understood the theory of relativity.

“OK,” he continued, “let me try to explain this in a different way.”

I nodded; a different way would be good.

“Suppose you want to meet someone. Let’s take an easy example: you want to meet someone in New York, where the streets are laid out in a grid. To meet someone, you have to agree on a place, say the corner of Forty-Second Street and Lexington.” My eyes widened in surprise. When I lived in New York, I had lived on Forty-Second and Lexington. I could not remember telling Salim that, but I supposed I must have.

“So you have settled the two dimensions, the horizontal ones: forwards and sideways,” Salim continued. “But you still need to agree on a vertical dimension. You have to agree to meet at a certain floor in the building, say the twenty-second floor.”

I drew a sharp breath. My flat had been on the twenty-second floor.

“So now you have all the information that you need to meet up with your friend: Forty-Second Street and Lexington, twenty-second floor.”

I nodded my agreement.

“Wrong,” Salim said with a laugh; he was suddenly enjoying himself. “You also have to agree on a time to meet. If you don’t fix a time, you would be sure to miss each other.”

“Of course,” I replied, as if it was so blatantly obvious that it wasn’t even worth mentioning.

“Now physical dimensions are fixed, but if my doctoral thesis is correct, time isn’t fixed. If I am right, time is a pretty slippery thing. Sometimes it accelerates; sometimes it slows down.”

I looked at him blankly. “And your point is?” I asked him.

“Somehow you slipped back in time and then forward again in time, and this stone gave you the power to do that.”

“You mean that I didn’t meet my friend two days ago. I met her ten years ago? That is insane!”

“Not necessarily,” Salim insisted. “When most people think of dimensions, they think of things you can measure in straight lines. Will the cupboard fit in the bedroom, for example? That sort of problem can easily be solved with a measuring tape.

“But dimensions are simply what we perceive to be reality,” he continued. “We can only see three dimensions—and we can perceive the fourth, time. However, we are not good at perceiving the fourth; that’s why there are so many clocks everywhere and why we all have watches.”

“Holy fuck!” I interjected. “My watch wasn’t working the whole time I was with Gee, but it is working now.” I showed Salim my watch to prove my point. I thought it was confirmation of something, but just what it was confirmation of, I had no idea.

Salim just looked at me as if I were insane.

“How many dimensions do you need for your theory of everything to work?” I asked Salim, wanting to get him back on track.

“For the theory of everything to work, we need ten dimensions,” Salim replied slowly. “The universe simply doesn’t work if there are any fewer. So, one way or another, those ten dimensions must exist, no matter how difficult it is for us to conceptualise them.”

“But what would these other dimensions look like if we could conceptualise them?” I asked. I was really having difficulty following his arguments and imagining that there could be more than four dimensions.

“Well, of course, no one knows what they would look like,” Salim replied. “But physicists believe that the fifth dimension is only slightly different from the other three.

“But the real difference,” and here he paused, “is that in the fifth dimension, you would be able to travel backwards and forwards in time. And once you can travel backwards and forwards in time, you need the other dimensions to allow for the other outcomes.”

“I don’t understand,” I told him. “What other outcomes?”

Salim suddenly laughed, louder than he should have done.

“You really need a PhD in physics for this, but, basically, if you travel back in time, you will change things, maybe not intentionally, but you will change them all the same. These other dimensions allow for those alternative histories—to allow for the things that you have changed.”

“So what you’re talking about is alternative realities?” I asked. “Is that correct?”

“No,” Salim replied, “not really. They are the same realities. They are not alternative worlds; they are the same worlds coexisting in space and time. But for the theory to work, once you master the fifth dimension, you’d be able to travel back in time or go to different futures.”

“So that’s what you mean about the stone?” I asked. “You’re suggesting that the stone pulled me into another dimension—a fifth dimension—and enabled me to travel back in time?”

“I agree it sounds crazy,” Salim replied. “But it would validate the universal theory of everything. The stone—this stone—could be the facilitator that allowed us access to those other dimensions.” He said it without excitement; there was a tremor in his voice that I read as fear.

“So you now think that I may not be going mad after all?” I asked. “You think that somehow I really did slip back ten years?”

“Well,” Salim replied, “it would at least explain why no one knew where you were for the past couple of days.”