The most common response I get when I tell people what I do for a living is: I couldn’t do a job like that. What they mean is they wouldn’t do a job like this. Every so often a new gruesome story circulates about salesmen, and what travelling between time speeds does to one’s physical health.

We are twice as likely to be alcoholics, three times as likely to die by suicide, and infinitely more likely to disappear without anyone caring at all.

But all I ever say is – you’re right. You couldn’t do a job like this. You couldn’t haggle in a language that you don’t speak. You couldn’t fall asleep anywhere, training your body to relish fifteen-minute-long seated naps in the middle of a busy market square. And you couldn’t wake up the way we do.

Salesmen wake up like dogs. Snoring one second, barking at a stranger the next.

I wake up on the train. Somewhere between Crader and New Davia I feel the carriage screech against a tunnel, and have the slightly spectral sensation of knowing – even with my eyes closed – that I am being watched. The tangled gari beads are pressed between the seat and the nape of my neck, leaving light indents in my skin.

“Hello,” I say, eyes shuttering open. Everything about the stranger tells me she’s in the wrong place. First of all, she’s a she. You rarely get women travellers these days, unless they’ve got a visa to work a special trade, and she looks too young and too out of sorts for that to be the case. Every detail uncovers a new question. Questions like: why is she wearing summer clothes on a train heading this far west? Why is she wearing a man’s watch that doesn’t fit her wrist? I squint at the glint of light catching the clock’s face. It’s heavy. Expensive. Silver.

“Hello,” she responds anxiously. The longer I look at her, the more her strangeness unfurls like new petals. Frantic green eyes glancing worriedly down at an orange slip, a paper rectangle no bigger than her palm. “You’re in my seat.”

I gesture around the empty train carriage, arms wide with emphasis. Evidencing that there are quite a few seats free, and it’s rather churlish of her to be protective of this one.

“There is no my seat,” I reply. “This is the North-west quad – no assigned seating. Who are you?”
She says nothing. Just shows me her orange rectangle, creased in her nervous hand. I take it from her, and read it aloud like I’ve been handed a story written by a small and imaginative child.

“13.05 single,” I read. “Cork Kent to Dublin Heuston.”

She looks at me expectantly. “Am I near?” she asks, the hope draining from her speech. “Am I near Dublin?”

I hand the bright stub back to her. I’ve never heard of where she’s from or where she’s going to. I choose not to share this information. Salesmen are supposed to know about everywhere. The licensing tests are rigorous. They give you a big empty train map to mark with every world station, and it’s ninety per cent pass-fail. They want to make sure you know every world, so there’s less plausible deniability if they catch you in the wrong one with the wrong visa. Perhaps she’s a plant. A test. A mole. Some new plan of Semper’s, designed to trial our memories, our sympathies, and our resistance to a pretty face.