Date: March 15, 1884 | Location: Whitfield residence, Sam's nursery | Sam's Age: 9 months old
The room was wrong.
Sam knew this with the certainty of someone who had lived forty-two years and therefore understood when reality was fracturing. The walls were the same pale blue. The crib railings carved with their familiar vines. The oil lamp casting shadows that moved like living things. Everything was exactly where it should be.
Except he wasn't.
He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, and felt his consciousness beginning to separate like oil from water. One moment he was Sam Whitfield, nine months old, listening to his parents' voices from downstairs—his father's careful tones, measured and controlled, his mother's laugh like bells. The next moment he was also someone else. Someone 42. Someone in an apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a city that moved too fast, filled with machines that glowed. Someone whose last coherent thought had been a text message notification at 2:47 AM before an aneurysm tore through his brain like lightning.
Both moments were happening right now.
The dissociation came first as nausea—a sickening lurch in his baby stomach, as though the world had tilted on its axis. His tiny fingers curled involuntarily. His breathing became shallow, quickened. This was physical, not just psychological. His body was rejecting something his mind couldn't process.
No. Focus. You're a baby. You're in a crib. You're safe.
But safe was a lie his consciousness kept trying to tell itself.
Because underneath the nausea was the memory of the other place, the other time. The apartment with its impossible technology. The phone in his hand—he could still feel the weight of it, could taste the metallic aftertaste of too much coffee, could smell the recycled air of a San Francisco high-rise at dawn. He'd been tired. So tired. Twenty years of office work, of staring at screens, of pretending that emails and spreadsheets mattered in the face of mortality. And then the pain. The sudden, explosive pain in his skull that lasted approximately three seconds before there was nothing.
And then this. A baby's body. 1884. A world moving at horse speed instead of gigahertz.
Which is real?
The thought broke him open.
Both were real. He could access both simultaneously. The memory of fluorescent lights and his mother's lamp. The memory of a woman's voice saying "another successful transfer of assets" and Evelyn's voice downstairs humming while she set the table. The memory of his cubicle and the way the keyboard felt under his fingers and the smell of commercial carpet cleaner and the taste of the terrible office coffee he drank anyway because staying awake mattered and—
His vision blurred. Literally blurred. His baby eyes couldn't focus on the ceiling anymore because his consciousness was fracturing and taking the neurological control with it.
He wanted to scream. Instead, he made a sound—not quite a cry, not quite a moan—and it was wrong. It was the sound of an adult mind trapped in an infant's throat, and he couldn't control it.
From downstairs, Evelyn heard something. Not the sound of a baby crying—Samuel rarely cried without reason. Something else. Something broken.
She was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Thomas would be home soon, and she'd been thinking about what they needed to discuss. The new white banker at his firm had made a comment yesterday that Thomas still hadn't fully explained to her. Something about "ambitious for your kind," said with a smile that meant nothing good. Thomas had come home with his shoulders tight, his movements careful, the way he moved when he was afraid.
She'd dressed Samuel in his finest clothes this morning for Dr. Wilson's visit—not because Samuel was sick, but because they'd learned that Dr. Wilson treated them better when they looked prosperous. When Samuel looked like the son of a successful man, not just any Black baby. It was the calculus of survival: if you appeared successful enough, dangerous enough to matter, perhaps you'd be left alone.
Now she set down the knife she'd been using to prepare vegetables and listened.
There it was again. A sound from upstairs that made her mothering instinct flare into something sharper. Not pain. Not hunger. Something psychological, something she couldn't name.
"Samuel?" she called, though she knew he couldn't answer.
No response. Just the ambient sounds of the house. The creak of floorboards. The rattle of the window from a breeze. The hum of the city beyond.
She wiped her hands on her apron and made her way upstairs.
The dissociation intensified when he heard her footsteps on the stairs.
Because now his consciousness had to split three ways: the part of him that was nine months old and needed his mother, the part of him that was 42 and understood on an intellectual level that his mother was about to see him in distress and there was nothing she could do about it, and the part of him that was somewhere in between, confused and terrified.
His breathing came shallow and fast. His small heart was racing—actually racing, not metaphorically—in a way that felt dangerous, like his infant cardiovascular system was being taxed by something it was never meant to carry.
She appeared in the doorway. Evelyn. His mother. The woman who had carried him for nine months and given birth to him and loved him with a fierceness that bordered on desperation. She took one look at him and her face changed.
"Samuel? Baby, what's wrong?"
Everything, he tried to say. I'm 42 years old and I'm dying again and this time there's no hospital and no doctors and I'm trapped in a body that can't process what my mind knows and I'm—
But infants don't have those words. So he made another sound, something between a whimper and a cry, and his small body went rigid.
Evelyn lifted him from the crib and held him against her chest, and the warmth of her body created a moment of grounding. For just a second, he could feel his consciousness snapping back together. The weight of her arms. The smell of her—soap and the faint lavender from the linens. The steady thump of her heartbeat against his cheek.
This was real. This was safe.
But underneath it, like a second heartbeat, was the other thing. The knowledge that safety was conditional. That the world beyond this room was hostile. That his mother, brilliant as she was, educated as she was, could not protect him from the future he carried in his consciousness. That she couldn't even protect him from his own fractured mind.
"Shh, baby. You're okay. Mama's here."
She's trying, he understood with the adult part of his consciousness. She's doing everything she can and it's not enough because the problem isn't external, it's me, it's my mind splitting at the seams, it's 42 years of life packed into a nine-month-old nervous system and there's nothing anyone can do.
His fingers found the fabric of her dress and held on, but not the way a baby should hold—with instinct and need—but the way a drowning man holds a piece of driftwood. Desperate. Terrified. Aware of the gulf beneath.
Over the next three days, something shifted.
Not healed. Not resolved. But shifted.
His consciousness didn't stop splitting, but it started to organize itself. Like his mind was building a thin membrane—not a wall, but a barrier permeable enough to let both consciousnesses function. Not integrated. Never that. But compartmentalized in a way that allowed his body to continue the basic work of being alive.
On Tuesday morning, he stopped vomiting. His mother had been beside herself, certain he was ill, but Dr. Wilson found no fever, no obvious cause. "Sometimes infants have these episodes," he'd said, not understanding that what was happening was neurological, existential, impossible.
On Wednesday, Sam took milk again. Not because the hunger had changed, but because the baby part of his consciousness found a way to function despite the adult consciousness screaming underneath. It was like learning to use a tool from his childhood—his mouth knew how to suckle even if his mind didn't understand why any of this was happening.
By Thursday, something approaching normalcy.
But the normalcy was a lie. A survival lie. The compartmentalization held because his developing brain—young enough to be plastic, adaptive—had learned to create functional separation. The adult consciousness—the 42 years of lived experience, the memories of a life that shouldn't be his, the foreknowledge of catastrophes—that consciousness didn't disappear. It retreated. Created a space inside him that was separate from the baby's needs and reactions.
It was not healing. It was amputation of the psyche.
And yet: he could breathe. His mother could hold him. His father could come home from work and look at him without seeing a child in crisis.
The cost was immense. Sam understood that even then, even at nine months. Some part of him—the adult part—would always be observing from a distance. Always separate. Always carrying the weight of forty-two years while his body remained nine months old. The dissociation wouldn't end. It would become the baseline of his existence.
But it wouldn't kill him.
Not today.
That night, Evelyn came to him at midnight.
This had become her ritual—checking that he was breathing, that he was safe, that the crisis had passed. She lifted him from his crib with practiced gentleness and held him against her chest. His small hand grasped her nightgown automatically, the baby reflex still intact even though the mind behind it was ancient and terrified.
"My baby," she whispered into his hair. "What happened to you? Where did you go?"
Everywhere. Nowhere. Into myself and out of myself and into the space between.
But he was a baby, so he made a small sound and let his eyes drift closed against the comfort of her presence.
Evelyn rocked him slowly, moving in that instinctive pattern that mothers have always used. The motion was soothing—to her as much as to him, perhaps more. She was processing something in the rhythm of it, working through worry with the mechanical repetition of the rocking chair.
"You're safe," she said, and her voice held all the force of her will, as though speaking it hard enough could make it true. "I promise you're safe."
But even as she said it, she could feel the falseness of the promise. Not because she was lying—she meant every word, with every fiber of her being, with the full force of a mother's love. But because she was a Black woman in 1884, holding a Black son, in a world that had not made a place safe for either of them. Because safety for children like Samuel was never a given; it was something you fought for, gambled for, prayed for, knowing the odds were against you.
She could protect him from immediate danger. She could feed him, hold him, love him, educate him. But she couldn't protect him from the systemic nature of the world. She couldn't protect him from the way being Black and successful would make him a target. She couldn't protect him from the future that his father already understood and his mother was beginning to grasp.
And she couldn't protect him from whatever was happening inside his own mind—the fracture she could sense but not see, the consciousness that seemed too old for his body, the distance in his eyes that appeared sometimes when he thought no one was looking.
"You're safe," she whispered again, this time almost to herself.
Samuel's breathing deepened. His small body relaxed into the architecture of her love. For a moment, he almost believed her. The baby part of him, the part that was still only nine months old, could rest in the illusion of safety that her arms created.
But deeper—in the compartment where the 42-year-old consciousness lived, where the adult memories were stored, where the weight of knowledge was kept—he understood the truth.
Safety was a story mothers told their children. Safety was what you fought for and never quite achieved. Safety was a promise that could be made only because the alternative—living in constant awareness of danger—was unbearable.
He would never be safe. Not in this time period, not with this body, not with this consciousness. The best he could do was survive. The best his mother could do was love him while that survival happened.
It would have to be enough.
Because it was all either of them had.