Perry woke up on the ground—outdoors, in a field, on grass—covered in the gel. His head spun. He lay prone. Rising to his hands and knees was simple enough, but then when he tried to stand any further, vertigo nearly overwhelmed him. He dropped back on all fours.

He felt as if he were a boy again, playing football, having been tackled hard. It would have made sense but for the gel and no clothes.

Something moved to his right. He looked over.

The field he was in was unkempt; just a natural clearing surrounded by trees. On one edge of it, close to him, he saw ruins of a building. Torn-apart walls rose two or three stories, and some sections of iron protruded from them a bit higher into the sky.

The movement he’d glimpsed was, he saw now, a woman. She approached to within feet of him and then stopped, staring.

She wore a dress that looked to be made of leather, held together with laces. Perry thought it looked like something traditional a Native American would wear.

She held a spear. She had set its butt on the ground and had her hands folded around it.

She spoke to him:

“Shu na tode.”

“Na tode,” she repeated; but it sounded to him as if she were saying this more to herself than to him.

The gel was falling off him in glops. He turned his head; there sat a long white container the size of a coffin. It had been opened up, like a huge eyeglasses case, and he could see it was filled with the gel. He had clearly been in it.

“Where did that come from?” he asked her. She did not answer.

He managed to stand. He faced her, and looked down at himself.

“What in the hell,” he said. He began sloughing off the gel with his hands.

The day was warm, fortunately.

The woman lifted her spear—not threateningly; just to carry it—and came closer. She was looking at his body, seemingly curious about something. She circled him, apparently to inspect him from behind. He didn’t feel there was anything to do about it. He kept squeegeeing himself as clean as he could.

As for his own inspection of her, as she walked around him: She was tall, young, strong. Her hair was brown, and she had a relatively dark complexion. Her eyes were bright. She struck him as – healthy. He didn’t know why, exactly, but she just exuded health.

But neither her actions nor her words – certainly not her words – were telling him anything about what was going on. He looked over again into the container; it held nothing useful. On its side there was a black panel protruding that looked like it might have been a display of some sort, but it was blank.

“Did I get jettisoned from a plane or something?” he said.

The woman stopped her walk, in front of him again. She held out her hand.

“Sark?” she asked him. She lifted her hand toward him, showing him the side of her pointer finger knuckle. “Sark?”

At first he thought she was gesturing toward something, but then realized she had a large scar on the knuckle, running down most of the finger.

“No. No scars on me,” he said. “No big ones. Just this. Accident at a summer job a long time ago.” He raised his hand and showed her a small white line on the side of his palm.

She frowned and shook her head.

“Nem sark,” she said. “Shu nam todem.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Come,” she said.

“Come? I will come.”

“Come ora grunen satay.”

She nodded toward the ruined building and began walking toward it, slowly, exaggeratedly, as if she were leading a dog, or a child. She kept her eyes on him. “Come.”

*

As he walked, two realizations came to him simultaneously: First, he had somehow been assuming that he knew his own story, his background, his narrative; that it was there in the back of his mind; but, second – this supposed memory was nearly empty.

Only now that I stop and think about it do I realize how little I know –

His name was Perry; Perry Doran. He –

He had a wife.

And a child.

He lived in the year Two Thousand and – something. 2020? No; at least 2022 – he had watched that World Cup. 2025? He could picture that date on – something.

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*

The building, he saw, had not fallen into ruin anytime recently. Its lower walls were intact, but dirt covered the floor, fires had been built in it, and any metal and glass doors or windows it might have ever had were long gone.

The woman indicated he should stay inside, and she would return. She pulled her dress, and then made a waving gesture at her own mouth.

Her dress was clearly handmade leather, and of course he couldn’t miss the spear, but she didn’t strike him as any sort of television barbarian. Her hair was carefully braided. Her face was not covered with smudges of ash or anything else. She wore well-made moccasins.

“Doesn’t look like there’s going to be any Planet of the Apes roundup, at least,” he said aloud.

*

The woman – he eventually learned that her name was Andolen – returned with two men. They were dressed as she was, in leather. One carried a bow and arrows; the other was unarmed. Like her, they struck Perry with their near-glow of health. They looked like they could be her brothers, or cousins; but later, Perry would see that most members of her clan simply had this similar appearance.

They had brought him a sort of long vest – like a cape with armholes – and a leather cord to tie it around the waist.

One of them, who looked older, handed it to him and muttered some words which were not even as clear as anything Andolen had said; but yet, oddly, Perry felt that he could understand him just by his tone and his glance downward. He guessed he had said something coarse along the lines of “You can cover that thing up, my man.”

The other one handed him something soft covered in wide leaves. He parted them and saw it was a cake of cornbread.

Andolen pointed to herself and said, slowly and clearly.

“Andolen.”

Then, pointing to each of the other two in turn:

“Rorlam. Adan.”

“Perry,” he told them. “Perry Doran.”

Rorlam – who had given him the garment – started a short conversation with the other two, the meaning of which was, again, obvious. He nodded toward Perry’s bare feet, but they apparently came to an agreement that he could walk without the moccasins the others wore.

They motioned for him to come along.

*

The people lived in a nearby village of sturdy, portable tents. There he was given more food – roast meat on a spit; he thought it was venison – and seated in front of an open fire to be talked about and talked to.

Andolen said a few phrases directly to him, which he did not understand. The words seemed more run together, singsong, compared to what they had said to him so far. He guessed she was trying out a different language which neighbors must have used.

“I’m afraid I only speak English,” he told them.

He remembered:

“And okay Spanish. Ah, por casualidad – se habla español aqui? Castellano? Nadie?”

Andolen shook her head. They did seem to understand the question.

An older man and woman joined them. The six of them sat on wooden stools. Other villagers came up to try to gawk, but Andolen, Rorlam, and Adan shooed them away.

*

Soon he would learn that people called themselves The Sylvan. They raised corn and potatoes in patches of cleared land. They fished in a river, mostly with nets, and hunted deer.

There were other clans around – many of them – but he learned that the spears and bows and arrows he saw were primarily just for hunting and for defense against bears. The Sylvan didn’t worry about violence from their neighbors.

He dressed in deer skins. He eventually helped to fish, plant corn, start fires. He was given a small tent. A one-person tent; Andolen was partnered, with Adan, and there didn’t appear to be any single women his age. Perry found this a relief. He looked down at his left hand.

“At least they could have left me my ring when they put me in that thing,” he said aloud. “I can’t believe that would have disabled it.”

*

It was when he was lacing up the moccasins that had been given to him that he first wept for Araceli.

She had had a similar pair; they were boots, though, with long leather strings that took time to work through all the holes. She was old enough to lace shoes, by then, but had grown frustrated.

“Here,” he said, “I’ll do one, you do the other. These are hard.”

He didn’t want to do too much for her, but he also didn’t want to leave her upset and overwhelmed. This seemed like a good compromise.

He sat down with her on the thick white rug on the hardwood floor of her room, and together they laced the boots in the rays of sunshine coming through the windows. She calmed down. They had, as far as he could remember, worked silently, or nearly so.

Jennifer had worried about this exact problem, with the new boots. She had also bought that soft rug. And she had dangled colored glass stars – on thin lines from the top of the window frame – which now dappled the rug with reds and oranges in the sunlight.

They had been so happy.

*

Perry remembered more and more of his first life, quickly, but he was not able to use his knowledge of that industrial age to help the Sylvan at all. He found this immensely frustrating. Despite their healthy appearance, he did see them fall ill from causes which were probably bacterial, and suffer from wounds which certainly were. He knew that antibiotics had been developed from bread mold, but what good could that do him, or them? Even if they had had wheat, which they apparently didn’t, he would not have been able to build containers to isolate and test mold, and of course his hosts would have thought him insane had he tried.

“I can imagine trying to get them to take experimental pills made from bread mold,” he muttered to himself. “Just trust me, folks.”

The people could already obtain and refine iron; they knew about charcoal, ore, and forges. They already had wheeled carts, and wheelbarrows. They made soap.

He couldn’t build a glider, nor would it have served any purpose had he been able to. Their children already knew kites – made from woven grass, or bark paper – and played with those.

*

The Sylvan were literate, too, many of them. They could make bark paper, and ink from certain large seed pods on trees. But the use of writing was not widespread. Perry remembered well that this had been the case in many ancient societies – writing being confined to a few scribes, and upper classes – but it still struck him to see it demonstrated. He could not have imagined any large number of people back in his time passing up the opportunity to learn to read and write; but here, it appeared that only a handful of children – evidently those considered to be brighter than average, and teachable – were taught. And then they had very few opportunities to make use of it. Village leaders would write down agreements to trade made with neighboring tribes, if needed. And Perry eventually came across an older woman who kept a long record of notable weather events, and long-term changes in the numbers of deer around the village, and visible migration patterns of birds. But no one was much interested in reading her notes.

If he made his own bark paper and ink, might he write down their folklore, and their herbology, and their history? But their attitude was that all of these things should be known by everyone. Each person should know what plant to rub on a burn; it would be a sad state for The Sylvan if such knowledge was forgotten but for lifeless words written on ephemeral bark.

*

He did consider trying to build a wooden bicycle, as a project, but again he couldn’t see that anyone would find a use for it in this woodland community without roads. It would just be a toy, and they didn’t need those.

Perry remembered, as a child, constructing from a kit a small generator which could light up a tiny bulb. It consisted of a roll of copper wire spinning between two magnets. Or was it magnets spinning inside a sleeve of copper wire? In any case, even on the outside chance that over the rest of his life he could locate copper ore, refine it, and hammer it into wire, there was no way he could make a glass vacuum tube or magnets.

“After you finish your penicillin pellets, everyone, help me blow this glass and build this air pump and mount a filament for my generator,” he said to himself. “And by the way, does anyone have a couple magnets?”