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The first thing he smelled was manure.

      Waking up in an unknown place, sounds and smells hitting him like a brick wall, hair and clothes plastered to his body with sweat, wasn’t a new experience for Matty. But nothing that he registered through his three active senses indicated safety, let alone familiarity. His most important concern was that he was safe, and that he still had his wallet; after that, he could figure out where he was, and whether his last explicit memory was recorded a concerningly long time ago.

      Matty struggled to sit up, his eyes squinted against the daytime glare. He could hear the noises of a city – people talking, and what sounded like livestock being moved – but he didn’t have the vaguest idea where he was. The hard, gritty surface beneath him didn’t feel like anything civilized, and the warm air didn’t smell like Hanover. It smelled like manure.

      As Matty opened his eyes by degrees, he felt something hard behind his back and leaned on it: a wall of some sort. Big, uneven stone bricks. Not a building, no, too rocky to hold a roof. His first thought was that he’d somehow made it to Mexico and been stopped on his way in, probably thrown out on his ass by some border patrol agents who had grown tired of his incontinent musings on the arbitrary nature of international boundaries. It seemed like a valid theory, till he remembered that the hypothetical border wall, such a beloved talking point among a certain demographic of American voters, was very much still hypothetical.

      He took the plunge and looked up, sunlight and dust burning his eyes. But all the scenery did was confirm that he had no idea where he was: somewhere wildly different from New Hampshire, apparently, based on how little he recognized. He caught a hint of granite peeking into the blue sky, maybe some marble behind that, but nothing looked remotely familiar, not incidentally or in general style. His closest guess was Boston, but even the pre-industrial buildings hoarded by New England historical societies didn’t look quite as elegant, or quite as ancient, as the corners and edges he could just barely make out.

      From his place leaning against the wall, Matty could see a crowd of people moving this way and that, some holding baskets, others driving cattle, some occasionally coming in or out of the simple buildings across from him. They were dressed in a style he’d never heard of in the first world: simple, loose, like the kind of clothes you would wear after losing everything. But these weren’t rough potato sacks or cut-up Hefty bags: their clothes were bright, clean, almost expensive looking, by the assumed standards of their environment.

      As the cloud of sleep drifted from his eyes and the mounting headache threatened to blind him all over again, Matty forced his eyes to do their God-given task and squinted past the shuffling crowd of humans and animals, focusing on the pair of high-rising corner walls he’d first laid eyes on. They were far away, he realized only now: far off, and very tall, or else a little closer and a little shorter, and maybe it was the hangover but he thought it was possible that this city was very confusing. If it really was a city. The buildings across the dirt road were blocky, whitewashed, with red slate roofs and hardly a second story to be found.

      Matty realized he’d been holding his breath and let it out, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes. The rough stone dug into his scalp. “Where the hell am I,” he muttered to himself.

      It was a third-world country, he was pretty sure of that. There was no city in the United States, or its immediate neighbors, that looked like this. Maybe those short, temporary-looking buildings could have been at home in some remote part of Mexico or northern South America, but the people in the dirty off-white tunics, with their baskets and their lowing cattle, they were too European-looking to be Central American, and when Matty was able to catch an individual word through the collective voices, he was pretty sure it wasn’t Spanish.

      The dirt path that had served as Matty’s bed didn’t look like any pictures he’d ever seen of Africa, the Middle East…definitely not East Asia. And not Australia either – Matty wasn’t convinced Australia really existed, but he knew if it did, it didn’t look like this.

      How much longer, Matty thought to himself, was he going to sit here and draw further into contemplation of his own ignorance before he actually got up and figured out what was going on?

      Well, he did have some idea what was going on. A dense ball of pain was growing in his frontal lobe: the kind that came from too much drinking, not too much thinking. It was a sensation he knew well. But what kind of debaucherous night could land him stuck in a third world country, hundreds if not thousands of miles from home? Well, the kind of night that led to another of its kind, then another, and another, until the drunken stupor lasted long enough to be classified as a bender. Was that what this was? the end result of a week or two of overindulgence? If so, had he been drinking for celebratory reasons, or depressive ones?

      Before he could think of a reason not to, Matty opened his eyes and pulled himself up, his fingers finding shallow holds in the rocky wall behind him. “Okay,” he grunted. “I’m up.”

      He looked around. The scene wasn’t much different from six feet up: he stood by a tall stone barrier, probably thirty feet high, and his dirt path bordered a row of the plaster buildings – behind and between them, shadowy side streets of cobblestone and more one-story structures – and on the path, always in flux, was the crowd of people wearing bedsheets.

      As he watched them, Matty realized they were watching back: a lot of them were staring at him without breaking stride, absently whipping their cows or clutching their baskets while their eyes focused on the dark-haired man in the strange clothes. Matty was wearing jeans, a black button-up, and a gray sportscoat: his usual outfit for a day in the classroom, but apparently an unusual sight in this foreign land.

      “What,” he said aloud, to no one in particular. The closest among the crowd were always giving him a strange look, and seemed to trade the expression off as they moved along. He realized that his throat was dry, his mouth sour: clear signs of late-night drinking. He tried again: “¿Habla Español?” He didn’t speak three words of Spanish, but Spain was the country that came to mind when he saw those smooth white buildings and those swarthy people in their ragged clothes. Spain, or maybe Greece –he’d seen enough dream vacation photos to have a general idea –

      He frowned. No, he realized – he wasn’t reminded of Greece. It was Rome. Ancient Rome, to be exact, though to someone who didn’t care there wasn’t much difference. Except even Matty could tell their clothes were wrong: Italy wasn’t a third-world country, and he was pretty sure they’d discovered pants by now.

      The country that had given birth to pizza and the mafia didn’t subsist on driving cattle.

      Matty wandered into the crowd, bracing himself against the push of people and animals. He had been to New York, he knew how to make his way through big groups on the street – but this was a little different. These people weren’t on their way to catch the subway or hit the Jewish deli before their lunch break ended. They didn’t seem quite so rushed. Their movements were calm, less paranoid-feeling than he had seen in an American metropolis. This, if nothing else, told Matty he was in a third-world country: the people he saw on the street didn’t seem angry or threatening – he didn’t get the feeling that one of them might stab him.

      “Excuse me,” he said to the woman walking closest to him. He was following the bulk of the crowd, moving down the gritty road and past the whitewashed houses. “What country is this?”

      He had to raise his voice over the mooing of cattle and the clucking of the chickens and the conversations held in a foreign language. He might have been able to recognize the dialect, if the peasants weren’t all talking over each other.

      The woman didn’t respond, though she’d obviously heard him. She was around his age, he thought, with dark hair piled on top of her head in a style he wasn’t used to seeing on white women. She wore a loose off-white gown, sleeveless, cinched at the waist with a cord. Probably cotton, not particularly nice-looking, regardless of national origin. Yeah, said that nagging voice in the back of his misty mind: she was just like whatever disparate images of ancient Roman women he’d seen. Weird. Maybe it was a reenactment.

      “I just woke up here,” he continued. The woman didn’t even dignify him with a glance, but he could tell she heard. God, he was thirsty. “This isn’t America, right?” Still, nothing. Matty decided to call it a day, not to give up, but to accept the outcome. Language was his profession: he made a living teaching students how to better utilize English, so he wouldn’t be caught dead playing into the trope of the uneducated American yelling monosyllables at foreigners in a desperate attempt to suddenly turn them bilingual.

      So he followed the crowd, keeping pace with the dark-haired woman. She eventually entered one of the sides streets and they left the border wall, the sandy road giving way to flat and even cobblestones. This, at least, reminded him of New England, if the buildings on either side were still completely foreign.

      The alleyway, if that’s what this stone path was, led under a massive arch of brick, so wide that it was more like a tunnel: more grand than an overpass, and apparently holding up a tall building dotted with windows. If this was a third world country, Matty thought, it was one that used to be wealthy enough to build this impressive city – or else these swarthy people in their dirty tunics had moved in after the original builders were wiped out.

      As the blue sky disappeared behind the tall arched overpass, Matty swallowed back the notion that had been forming in his hungover mind. It was stupid, he thought, and not even worth thinking about; maybe this strange city did look more like a wealthy country in the Ancient World than a poor country in the twenty-first century, but unless Jack Daniels had recently added an ingredient that could cause temporal warping while intoxicated, that wasn’t a line of thought he needed to follow. The more important question – the only real question – was how he had gotten here, and what was the quickest way to New Hampshire.

      Matty followed the woman out the other side of the tunnel and found himself in an open area, a loose courtyard enclosed by tall wooden buildings. They were surrounded by vendors: small booths and tents manned by people hawking their livestock, produce, and clothing. The air was full of sounds and smells: yelling, clucking, and, still, manure. It reminded him of the weekly immigrant-led market in the North End.

      Matty felt his stomach twist. He might have to revisit the reenactment theory, he thought, because, god damn, the chaos around him, the shouts of sellers and squeals of buyers, the clip-clop of cow hooves and the bok-bok of chickens in wooden cages, the cobblestone market square below him to the deep blue sky above…it looked for the world like Ancient Rome.

      With a start, he realized the woman had almost disappeared into the crowd of shoppers. He hurried after her, keeping close but hanging back. Whoever she was, she was his anchor to reality, and he didn’t need her running away.

      But then, he froze, the woman leaving his mind even as she left his sight. More than the architecture, more than the clothing, more than the sounds and smells, this new sight that had caught his eye implied for him the slightest inkling of understanding. He didn’t know the how, but he knew the what: the what was Ancient Rome, though, conversely, this in no way proved the when or the where. The where couldn’t be Rome, not really, not unless he’d flown across the world on a bender. And the when…well, ancient wasn’t the answer, ancient couldn’t be the answer, not as long as words still had meaning and time still moved in one direction.

      Through the bustling crowd of marketgoers, across the cobblestone square, two men stood by, watching the peasants go back and forth, pretending not to notice the women with their bare arms and thin tops. They were straight out of a textbook, or one of the thousand life of Christ movies that silently held back the film industry. Coppery breastplates molded to look like a muscular torso; red leather shoulder pads and skirts; short swords in scabbards clasped to the belt. But what settled the issue, what told Matty that he was, without any doubt, seeing a pair of Roman soldiers, was their helmets: bronze and leather, missing the cartoony red plumes but including those iconic cheek guards that anyone in the modern world would know on sight.

      “Well…shit,” Matty said, panic rising in his chest. Reen-actment, he reminded himself: the only logical explanation. If he could accept that he’d somehow ended up in Europe, he could believe this was some kind of event for the anniversary of something or something else. Maybe it was Christmas. Or Saturnalia.

      Someone bumped into him from behind and shot Matty a weird look – probably the clothes – before moving on.

      When Matty glanced back at the Roman soldiers – looking for all the world like the nameless redshirts in a movie called Son of God or Savior of the World or something predictable like that – they were looking right at him.

      He froze. The woman from before, the one he’d followed into this market, was standing with the soldiers, pointing through the crowd and directly at Matty. She had ignored him, but had she actually been scared? Or was it because of his clothes? Maybe it was a faux pas to break the reenactment. Maybe the Italians were really into historical LARPing.

      The soldiers started towards him, and every muscle in Matty’s body tensed up. Should he run? What would happen if these make-believe authority figures caught him? He knew what the back of a squad car felt like, but somehow he didn’t think they had one of those.

      The men in fake muscles wove their way through the crowd, dodging women holding baskets and men trying to intercept them with merchandise. Matty’s pulse quickened. Run, or not? They were thirty feet away. Then twenty.

      “Goddammit,” he hissed, turning and plunging into the crowd. In his experience, no matter what the situation, or the time period, cops storming towards you never spelled anything good for the near future.

      Behind him, the soldiers cried out and he could hear them start to run. Matty pushed through the crowd, shoving women in shawls side, not taking the time to apologize or to marvel at the thoroughness of their reproduction. If he wasn’t smart, if he wasn’t logical, if he wasn’t a professor for God’s sake, he might have been tempted to think that this level of historical reproduction was hardly less unbelievable than traveling back in time.

      Matty escaped the marketplace through an alley, trying to move fast without bumping into pedestrians or tripping on the cobblestones. A quick glance behind him revealed the men in helmets careening out of the market, being a lot more aggressive with the bystanders than he was. Matty moved ahead, leaving the alley and taking to the street.

      He didn’t admire the scenery as he ran, and he didn’t think about his situation. He couldn’t let himself wonder, or theorize, or he would lose his resolve and get caught. All that went through his mind was the pain growing in his side, and the headache threatening to split his skull. Behind him, he could hear the shouts and footsteps of the soldiers.

      He realized too late he had left the beaten path, as it were. The wide street gave way to a casual walking path, smooth slate tiles cutting across a well-manicured lawn. By the time he realized he was running uphill, it was too late to turn back. The pain raked at his side and he allowed himself a moment of power walking to conserve energy.

      Up ahead, on the plateaus of the rolling green hill, a number of houses loomed over their lesser neighbors, blocky and white but clearly expensive, lavish in an ancient sort of way, with courtyards and pools and lesser buildings. A glance behind told Matty that the two men were still following, even gaining on him, so he grasped his ribcage with both hands and left the footpath, pushing himself harder than he had since eighth grade P.E. as he stumbled across the grass, ascending ever higher towards the white houses.

      Matty’s lungs were burning, but he still heard the men behind him, their near-silent feet in the grass drowned out by their occasional shouted orders. They were trained soldiers, he thought, of course they would have better stamina than him – or, he corrected himself, whoever was in charge of this whole façade had chosen decently athletic men to portray the soldiers. Maybe outside the playacting, they were actually in the military.

      Up ahead, the grass seemed to give way to open air as the hill sloped down. The sky was cloudy, and the world beyond the homes on the hill looked purely white, like a blank sheet of paper. He pushed on, his legs and skull protesting the effort, lying to himself, telling him if he could make it to the summit, he could disappear and find freedom to assess the situation.

      Matty did make it to the summit, and he did stop running, but the sight that lay before him wasn’t the salvation he’d promised himself. All thoughts of his hangover, the soldiers, and the imaginary reenactment vanished from his mind as he looked out across a landscape that anyone with a decent education would recognize on sight, both the location and the time period.

      A handful of expensive white homes descended below him to the base of the hill, but down at the ground level, the houses were ugly improved structures, wood and brick rising up to six stories in dangerous-looking towers. In all directions, this hill acting as the spoke of Matty’s vision of what seemed to be all of creation, the buildings of dark or light material, of expensive or shoddy construction, spiraled out in ragged lines, crisscrossing and intertwining until they were indistinguishable apart from the occasional palace-sized home. Laid out below him were hundreds – thousands – of buildings, a genuine city, but none could be called skyscrapers, and none had been made by modern machinery.

      The buildings were white. Their roofs were red. The crowds were dense, and the air was polluted not with fossil fuels but with the all-natural scents and smells of an ancient city. The collection of miniature homes laid out below him like a city of dolls seemed to stretch to infinity – ad infinitum – a group of forested hills seeming to stand in the way of anyone who wished to harm this cradle of the gods. And right in Matty’s line of sight, hundreds of feet below and hardly a quarter-mile away, was a building even more recognizable than the city itself, a simple cylinder known across the world more for its missing pieces than the parts that had remained. The Colosseum was now fully-formed, and less imposing from this height, but its presence was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the sight that finally jolted Matty out of his self-delusion. The Colosseum still existed in his time – but not with that extra quarter of its bulk.

      Matty felt a far-off pop as his knees hit the grassy earth. This wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. Pale white ghosts loomed in every archway, mocking him, drawing him back to the past that is the present.

      Footsteps came to a stop behind him, and one of the soldiers barked a command at Matty. He said it again, and again, until Matty’s muddled brain finally recognized the language: Latin.

      Matty obliged, slowly, tearing his eyes away from the city laid out below him and looking over his shoulder to see the two men he now realized weren’t reenactors, weren’t from an Italy of mozzarella and organized crime. These men were sworn soldiers of the Roman Empire.

      “What the hell’s going on,” Matty said, as one of the soldiers stepped up to him and raised his sword.