The River of No Return

up into one ball, and tear our pleasures with roughstrife through the iron gates of life:thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run!’”
    Nick stared at the white screen his breath had made. He put his hand on the lean flesh below his ribs; his skin was cold, for the window was still half open, but he could feel the heat beneath. His liver. Once upon a time he had believed that his liver was the origin of his courage and hope and love. All three spreading through him, warm and wet, in his blood. He almost believed it even tonight, as the brave heat in the core of him fought against the freezing night air.
    Strength and sweetness. The iron gates of life.
    Nick slammed the window shut and turned to grab at his clothes, flung across a chair. Fuck the rules, fuck this inertia. He couldn’t not go down into his city, he couldn’t not see what time had done to it.
    Walking out the front door of the mansion set off a braying alarm, but let them send the time police after him. He wagered he could lose them for a few hours, anyway. He trotted down the steps as he had two hundred years ago and headed through the bleak predawn for Pall Mall. He was going, of course, to the river. Pall Mall to Cockspur Street, then down Hungerford Street to the Hungerford Stairs. A matter of a few minutes’ walk.
    But first, as he emerged out of the square and onto Pall Mall, he had to confront the fact that Carlton House, the Prince’s palace and the glittering hub of the social universe, was gone. He stared at the white buildings that stood on the old palace’s gardens. They gleamed in the phosphorous glow of the streetlamps like the grin of a skull. This avenue of mausoleums wasn’t living, breathing London anymore. The city had to be alive and changing and vital somewhere else. Nick glanced up at the moon, then thrust his hands into his pockets and turned left. Find the river, find the city.
    He walked quickly through the too-grand grandeur, around the engorged curve of Cockspur Street . . . and there weren’t the Royal Mews. Lions, fountains, the towering column—so this was Trafalgar Square. And that grand building, presiding over the square—wasn’t that Carlton House’s portico stuck on its front? That building was sporting Carlton House’s façade like a tattered columbine mask! Nick laughed out loud. And St. Martin’s, which used to thrust its steeple up out of the melee of stables like a drowning arm, now stood exposed, a pretty toy church. In fact, Nick thought, it all looked as if an enormous child had dropped building blocks and stuffed lions and toy buses here.
    Walking quickly, he navigated the deserted roundabout at the bottom of the square. A single cab blazoned with an ad for The Book of Mormon spun past him, beeped a question, then whizzed away into the night. Hungerford Street . . . it should be here.
    It wasn’t. Hungerford Street no longer existed, far less its noisome stairs down to the river, which had cut between rotting houses swarming with rats. There had been a blacking factory there at the bottom. Well. No more.
    Nick set off down Whitehall, assuming he could find the Whitehall Stairs if they still existed, or get down to the water at Westminster Bridge. His steps slowed as he approached the Horse Guards, where he had been transformed into a fighting man. It looked the same. The single guard standing at stiff attention outside the gates was the only other living person in this street studded with monuments. Nick repressed a mad desire to stop and tell the young man his story. But he only nodded as he passed and kept on walking, all the way down to the new Houses of Parliament, which looked, he thought, like the radiators in his SoHo loft. He turned left and headed across the bridge, reasoning that he could find his way down to the river on the other side.
    Eventually, past the enormous wheel and the concrete theater complex, he found a broad staircase that led him down to where he wanted to be, among the pipe stems and twisted net, the bits of rope and the shattered bricks that made up the river’s rough bed. Nick took a deep, happy breath as his feet found their level in the debris. He stood by the Thames for a long time, watching its waters glide at their own sweet will through the mighty heart of London.
    It was maybe a half hour or more later when he finally came out of his reverie to find the sun well risen. He bent, stiff with cold, to pick up the perfect