My first memory was just a feeling; a feeling of being ready to get going. Ready to get up.

It felt like – this was nuts – it felt like I was in an oven, a warm oven, and a timer had gone off, and I’d had to push open the door myself.

Wherever I was, I was ready. I was something that was ready to exit.

The hatch of the casket thing I was in must have opened automatically. I had risen and realized I was covered in some sort of gel. I pressed it off my body while still standing in the bottom half, as if I were getting out of a shower.

I had a sort of haze of a memory of having been in the case for a long time, possibly a very very long time, but I felt – good. I wasn’t sore. I could stand easily, and I was steady. This was another odd sensation, just like the feeling of having been shut in an oven was. Mentally I felt like I had been unconscious for perhaps years, but physically I felt as if I had just lay down twenty minutes earlier.

I was outdoors, underneath a bridge, next to a stream. This was not some pleasant rural covered bridge over a quiet creek; everything was large, and dirty. The stream was wide and brown. The bridge was very large, made of weathered concrete and steel. The bank of the stream ran up at an easy incline, and under the ends of the bridge there were shadows that may have concealed who knows what. My casket had evidently been thrown up from the water somehow onto this stretch of gravel and dirt.

The bridge was quiet. It didn’t seem to host much traffic, not right now anyway.

“Welcome to Trenton Thurning,” a voice said.

It startled me, literally. I jolted, and nearly lost my balance.

A man had been squatting next to a pillar of the bridge. He hadn’t been hiding, but I hadn’t noticed him. He stood up, holding out a gray blanket to me.

“Saw you’d need this. Couln’t find shoes yet sorry. Whyn’t you put this on and we’ll pull your machine there up to hide.”

His speech was clearly American English, but it sounded sped up. Words ran together.

He approached, holding out the blanket. As I took it and thanked him he adjusted a shoulder bag he wore and looked down at the casket.

He was young, maybe early twenties, and dressed in clothes that struck me as being unusual, although I couldn’t immediately pin down why. I had a sense that people didn’t usually dress this way, but then I realized I couldn’t remember exactly how people did dress.

They certainly didn’t stand around naked as I had been doing. I remembered that much.

But he looked to be dressed for the outdoors. That was it. Boots, and a green shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and green pants too. The clothes made me think of –

Teddy Roosevelt. That was who. And this man here also happened to wear wire-rimmed glasses.

“Havnt seen no handles.”

“No handles on what?”

“Your case, there. No way to pull it. To hide it.”

“You’ve looked at it? Were you watching me for some time?” I asked.

He nodded.

“I pulled yup this far. Saw you comngdn the stream. Sat here a while. Seemed like that door was ready to open, and surenough here you are. Let’s hustle this thing up into those weeds.”

“Why? Is the water going to rise?”

“To hide it.”

“I don’t know that we need to,” I said.

“There’s other people around. Someone might take it.”

“Maybe they could have it. I don’t know what they would do with it.”

He looked at me, perplexed.

“Serious? You don’t want to take care of this vehicle? Well I do if you don’t.”

“It’s not a vehicle. I don’t really know what it is.”

“Well you should. You must have rode it a long way. Come on, won’t do no harm. If you don’t want it youdn’t needa get it again. But if you changermind it’ll be here.”

I draped the blanket around my shoulders and bent down to help him shove the case up the slope.

“And like I said,” he added as we heaved. “You don’t want it, I might.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Stennis. Yours?”

“Perry. I remember that much.”

“Sorry ain’t found you shoes,” he said. “For this gravel. I’ve some food though once this is up there. If you want it.”

The casket crunched over the ground as we pushed it into tall grass.

The food turned out to be a bread roll he pulled out of his shoulder bag. I wasn’t really hungry, but ate to be polite.

“Can you tell me again where I am?”

“Trenton Thurning.”

“Trenton, you’re saying?”

“Yeah. Trenton Thurning.”

“I don’t know what that is. I know of a city named Trenton, are we near there?”

“Just Trenton Thurning.”

“The one I know is in New Jersey.”

“That’s the old-time name, sure. This is a city. Outside a capital.”

“The old-time name?”

“Right.”

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“I didn’t know anyone wasn’t just calling it New Jersey.”

I looked at him more closely, then. He had first struck me as just an oddly-dressed young man, but now I noticed more. I hated to judge, since he had helped me with the blanket and food, and may have actually released me from the case, for all I knew, but – his clothes were not in good shape. The boots were worn. His hands were dirty. He wore a brimmed hat – again, something that would not have looked out of place on Teddy Roosevelt – and it was not clean, either. He had a very patchy beard. He may have had some problems, I thought.

“I’m thinking Trenton,” I said, “is the capital. If I’m remembering right.”

“Trenton Thurning ain’t. I mean a capital, a dome city. Vyou been in that thing a long time?”

“Maybe I have been. I don’t really know, Stennis. I can’t remember. Not yet, anyway.”

“It’ll come back to ya, I’m sure. Woulnt have come all this way if it woulnt. I know where to get shoes, you want to go do that now?”

“That would be good,” I said. I was reeling a bit, what with my lack of memory, and my lack of understanding about what was going on. Focusing on shoes was helpful; I couldn’t argue with that plan.

He turned and started walking, further along the bank for a moment and then up into trees and down a trail.

“Stennis,” I asked. “How long had you seen that case for? Had it floated down that stream?”

“It did. Couple days ago. I pulled it up. The light on the screen was flashing. Slow first, then faster and faster. Seemed like something was going to happen.”

“There was a screen?”

“Yes. That little – panel. On the side. Blank now, though.”

“Well. Thanks. For pulling it up. You kept an eye on it for a few days, then?”

“Yes. Went home a couple times and came back. Thought about moving it, but it was heavy. If anyone else had seen it, well, who knows. But no one did, and I want to hide it now.”

“I wonder how long I was in there. And what happened to me.”

“It’ll come back.”

We left the short tract of woods and crossed a field of weeds. Things were green, and the day was warm enough, fortunately, but the land we were passing through was littered and tired. There were piles of scrap metal, overgrown patches of asphalt, and a long rusted-out section of something that looked like it might have once been an aircraft fuselage. We eventually came to a ditch, on the other side of which was a cultivated field, planted with corn.

“We have to go around this,” Stennis said. “Council land.”

“Council?”

“That’s right. Belongs to everyone, but look out if they find anyone actually on it. Heh. We’re almost there.”

“There” turned out to be a long, ramshackle wooden building I took to be a storage shed, at first, but which I then saw doubled as a residence. An older man emerged. He was Black, with a gray beard. He wore overalls.

Behind him, leaning against the building, were all sorts of tools. A wheelbarrow, shovels, a post hole digger, a cluster of machetes. I realized this must be not his unkempt house, but rather a store.

“John,” Stennis said.

“Stennis. This is the fellow from that case you mentioned?”

“It is.”

“I should’ve come seen it, then.”

“What, you didn’t believe me?” Stennis said this as if he knew well that what he had said had been unbelievable.

“How was your trip?” John asked me.

“Well,” I started. “It’s hard for me to say. I’m not remembering much.”

“I wonder what happened to you, then. Your name?”

“Perry. Perry Doran.”

He turned to Stennis.

“Suppose you’re looking for shoes?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he got forem? Well, let me ask him.”

He turned back toward me.

“What you got forem?”

“I’ll spot him,” Stennis said. “I don’t think he has anything. Not now.”

“Well,” John said. He paused. “You know what, man like this thrown up out of the river. Almost in a basket. I can spare shoes.”

He turned back toward the doorway. I heard him mutter something which I guessed was along the lines of “Things aren’t so bad I need to be holding back shoes.”

He came out with a pair that looked to have been handmade, with pieces of a rubber mat as soles. The upper parts were canvas. They had cord laces. They were large, but they fit and were comfortable enough.

“They’re good,” I said. “Thank you for these. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to pay you for them.”

He waved his hand.

“And I’ll set you up with some better clothes, too. So, Perry. Where all’ve you been?”

“Well, nowhere for a long time. I was knocked out in that case for a long time, I think. It may have been years.”

“So – what year do you think it is, now?”

“I really have no idea, John.”

“Well. It’ll come back. I hope. But it’s 2251.”

This guy was standing in front of what looked like a frontier trading post that could as easily have been in 1851.

“Really,” I said. “Twenty-two hundred?”

“And fifty-one. That woulntve been your guess?”

“No.”

“Can you remember where you came from?”

“It’s – hard. Hard to say exactly. But I’m from – was from – Virginia.”

“All right then. You from a capital?”

“I still don’t know what you mean by that.”

“You must be from one,” Stennis said.

“Must be,” John agreed. “Where else’d that thing have come from.”

“No other way. But we mean the cities, Perry. A city. Are you from the inside?”

“Again, I’m not sure what you’re saying. I lived in a city, once. But I’m thinking that was very long ago. And I don’t know what you mean by ‘inside.’ ”

“Well you can see ours from here, from in back,” John said. “Let’s go show you.”

He led me around his house, with Stennis following. Some yard birds that looked like guinea hens scattered before us. In back he had a clothesline with enough laundry for a large family hanging out. Past it, a woman about John’s age, also Black, sat in a chair, talking with a girl who looked to be about eight or nine. Again their clothes struck me as more Nineteenth Century than Twenty-Third; loose, off-white garments that looked like linen.

“Ma’am,” John said.

“Who’s this?” she asked him.

“Visitor. Showing him the dome.”

The girl leaned into her grandmother and watched me, the vagrant in a blanket traipsing through her grandfather’s yard.

“There it is,” John said.

In the distance, across fields that were cultivated near us but then appeared to run wild further on, there was, sure enough, a domed city.

It was blue. It was silent. At ground level it shimmered a bit with some heat currents rising off the fields. It was maybe a mile or two wide. Its glass, or whatever it was, rose a few hundred yards into the air, it looked like; it was difficult to judge from the distance.

“It happened,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I just remember people in my time guessing that some would eventually build these things. To get away from – something. Poor air, maybe.”

I turned to them.

“So that’s a capital. Why were they built? Was it polluted out here, something like that?”

“Why were the cities built?”

“The dome, I mean. Why is it covered up?”

Stennis shrugged.

“I don’t believe it was bad air. They just – shut themselves away. When they could.”

“But away from what? Some sort of danger? Was there a war?”

“They’re just – keeping to themselves,” John said, shrugging. “They have more, you know. More food, more instruments. They just – separated themselves. But I think you must have come from one yourself.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The way you talk. And you’re educated. Right? Went to university?”

“I did.”

“There you go.”

‘You don’t have universities out here? Outside that thing?”

“It’s very different out here, Perry. And that case of yours, especially – it had to have come from a capital. No one out here could have invented that thing.”

“Well, if it’s as old as I think it is, they didn’t invent it either,” I said. “Have you been inside that dome?”

“I never have been. They don’t tend to invite us,” he said, with some sarcasm. “Once in a long while they may trade something with us, but that’s well away from the dome, out in the field.”