2022. In the wee hours of the morning I finished Here, Richard McGuire’s graphic novel meditation on time, impermanence, and a single corner of a living room. It was soft and pleasant and lovely. The narrative device in Here, simple but brilliant, is precisely the same as in the 1989 six-page comic strip that seeded it: every two-page spread shows the same space, but frames superimposed on the scene show it in different years. It’s simple in that you immediately get what’s going on; it’s brilliant in the sense that all the other comics artists were probably thinking, why didn’t I think to do that with comics before? The way that different years just intrude on the same space, as if they already coëxist in some sense, and Richard McGuire is presenting a narrative out of a series of time-travelling cross-sections of a four-dimensional spacetime, tugs at my sensibilities on a personal level.

I think a lot about time. I am unable to reach past my own era, but I dream a lot about other eras. Sometimes those other eras are so palpable in the air that I sometimes blink and for a moment it’s 2019. Or 2007. Or 1940. I blink and the fabric of the universe is imperceptibly shifted, the light streams through the curtain at a slightly different angle, a coffee cup is out of place, the wallpaper is one shade of brown different, and suddenly it’s not 2022 anymore. It’s never permanent, though. I’m never able to trick myself for long enough.

[2021. Sabrina stirred on the couch. Fuck, she thought. Late for another interview. Her work lay scattered across the coffee table. A delirious night of organising and practising, and what do you know? You’ve overslept. She swept her pieces into her portfolio, you can sort them out on the way up the elevator, and dashed out the door in haste. She would not notice until halfway up to the seventh floor in the Hastings Building that her showpiece, a two-page spread experimenting with the formal properties of colour in comic art, was missing.]

Here is about many things, but most salient to me is impermanence. A lot of action takes place in a twentieth-century home, but the wallpaper and furniture and other décor change every decade. And before the home was built in 1907, there were rivers and forests and Lenape Indians and Benjamin Franklin and dinosaurs. And after the house floods in 2111, there are radioactive wasteland wanderers and cataclysms and strange marsupials. And, true to life, few characters in the household evince any awareness of any of this. Sometimes their dialogue rhymes obliquely with dialogue from other eras, but none of them know this. You know this, and Richard McGuire knows this, because he is juxtaposing their panels over the space to highlight a common theme. There are spreads with people dancing across eras, crying across eras, hurling insults across eras. I find this poignant.

[2019. Rohan sat at his desk in contemplation and hunger. On the screen, the webpage in the foreground bore the insignia of the Technology Credit Union. A button placed prominently in the middle proclaimed: Click Here And We Will Send You Physical Mail About Ourselves To Your Current Apartment Address, And Please Be Advised That We Will Keep Doing That Even After You Move Out So That Future Tenants Of Your Apartment Can Enjoy The Mail. His cursor hovered over the button, and his finger hovered over the mouse. Should I? he asked himself. Yes, he answered.]

[2025. Parvaneh stuck the brush far under the dishwasher. If to-day’s cleaning day, may as well go all the way. The brush caught on something papery, and she yanked it out. A photocopy of a strange piece of artwork, a two-page spread with grotesque colours and characters. I wonder how long this has been here, she mused.]

I wonder what else has happened in my space. I have only occupied this one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment for eight months, but the complex has been here for decades. Now I weirdly want to know what the other tenants were like. What jokes were traded across what kitchen tables? What arguments transpired between couples next to the counter? Which show’s theme songs drifted across the living room from what models of television? The management cleans up well for new tenants, so the only traces I have of these previous tenants are the names on the invoices and loan offers and other junk mail that populate my mail slot.

[2020. Sultan paced by the screen doors. In his hands he held an unopened letter. He already knew what the letter said, of course. A letter bearing Marjory’s official judicial title and the address of the High Court could only mean one thing. What am I going to say to Tasbeeh? he thought. What am I going to say to the children? Then he had an idea. I’m just going to leave this letter in the mail slot for future occupants of this apartment to deal with. For me it does not exist. It never existed.]

Here joins Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State as my set of Perfect Coffee Table Books. In my fantasies, at least the more grounded ones, I’ll have guests in my apartment and by chance they’ll wander over to the coffee table while I’m cooking. Then they’ll open the oddly enticing book whose trade dress is the word HERE imposed upon a painting of a half-shadowed window. They’ll flip through it, think Hmm, that’s nice, and they’ll keep flipping, and soon they’ll find they can never leave, so engrossed they are in the intertwined narratives.

[2025. Afterward, Parvaneh couldn’t explain why she didn’t toss the artwork into the recycling bin. Something about it was weirdly compelling. She walked over to the living room corner where three years ago I typed this essay at my desk. Now it was occupied by her daughters’ paper fort, constructed mostly of Technology Credit Union envelopes. “I found something you might like,” she said.]