Mom, Dad, wake up, you’ve been sleeping all day . . .
Who are you, what are you doing here? the couple in the bed asks . . . Get out of here!
Where the hell is my hair? What did we have to drink last night, we were at a party . . . Do you remember what you dreamed?
No, not at all.
Me, neither.
Hm. Wait a second, there were some people, they were congratulating us for something, then . . . no, it’s all, a blur. You try to remember.
I was supposed to go back to my parents’ place—I’d just taken my final exams for junior year.
We were in the same major, right?
I was supposed to call them to let them know I wouldn’t be coming home. She looks at her watch. Should I call them now? What year is it?
Where the hell is my hair, for Christ’s sake? He again touches his bald head.
We’d been going together for a few months. That night when we got drunk, you said you wanted to get married.
A person says all kinds of stupid stuff when he’s drunk.
Well, clearly we did . . .
I don’t remember a thing. This isn’t that old apartment of ours.
We must’ve gotten married. We must’ve found jobs. We surely had friends. I don’t remember a thing, zilch. Maybe we took vacations at the sea, we must’ve gone to the seaside. Do you know our kids’ names?
No, goddamn it, I have no idea about any kids.
We’ve got to go to a doctor.
To a doctor? And what will we say?
Well, that we woke up today and it turns out that twenty years have passed.
Did you see the calendar?
Yes, I did, it’s 2020. Two thousand and twenty. I mean, that’s a whole other century.
Wait, when were we juniors in college, when was that party?
It must’ve been 1998.
Okay, right, so we got drunk after that exam in, what was it again . . . and you stayed over at my place. We did whatever we did, then fell asleep. But back then I was twenty-three and had hair, goddamn it.
You also didn’t have that . . . you were thinner, is what I’m trying to say.
You were different, too.
So what would we tell the doctor? We woke up this morning, and the last thing we remember is going to bed in June of 1998. We’ve slept for twenty years. Well, you shouldn’t have slept that long, the doctor will say. Any other symptoms? Well, just that I’ve gone bald, you’ll say, while I’ve gotten old. And we don’t remember a damn thing. Absolutely nothing.
They pull the covers up over their heads and fall asleep again, in hopes that this time they’ll sleep backward and wake up in that old apartment.
32.
Protected Time
The next step came when Gaustine decided to open these clinics of the past not only to patients, but to their friends and family, too. Then we had people showing up who wanted to live in certain years, without having any connection with a patient at all. People who didn’t feel at home in the present time. I suspect that some, if not most of them, did it out of nostalgia for the happiest years of their lives, while others did it out of fear that the world was irrevocably headed downhill and that the future was canceled. A strange anxiety hung in the air, you could catch a whiff of its faint scent when inhaling.
I wasn’t totally sure it was ethical to admit technically healthy people to the clinic. Was it ethical to mix them in with the patients? Or perhaps the right to the past is inviolable and it should be valid for everyone, as Gaustine liked to say. People wanted it, and if not here, they would find it elsewhere. In fact, all sorts of quickly cobbled-together hotels for the past were starting to pop up.
Gaustine didn’t share my equivocations and began gradually opening up the clinics to a broader set of clients. For a person whose obsession is the past, every such expansion of the field was a welcome one. Nevertheless, Gaustine did it carefully. I am not sure that he had a strategy or that he was looking to make money off of it. (Although there was definitely a niche for it.) If you ask me, he was looking for something far greater than the solidly backed paycheck of the past. He wanted to enter into the clockwork of time itself, to nudge some gear, to slow it down, to move the hands backward.
Gaustine’s idea went even further. He didn’t intend for you just to drop in for a couple hours a day, like at a gym, but rather to stay . . . he didn’t say forever, perhaps a week, a month, a year. To live in that place. I say “place” and immediately see how out-of-place that word is. Actually, Gaustine wanted to open up time for everyone. Because that’s exactly what this was about. Where other people were thinking about space, square meters or acres, he was measuring years.
The point of the experiment was to create a protected past or “protected time.” A time shelter. We wanted to open up a window into time and let the sick live there, along with their loved ones. To give a chance for elderly couples, who had spent their whole lives together, to stay together. Daughters and sons, more often daughters, who wanted to spend another month or even a year with their parent, before things completely went to seed. But they didn’t just want to stand next to their beds in a sterile white room. The idea was for them to stay together in the same year, to meet up in the only possible “place”—in the year that still glimmered in the parent’s fading memory.
33.
The Last Game
I was walking along on a warm June evening in 1978. A song floated from somewhere on the street. “Hotel California” by the Eagles flowed out of everywhere back then. Gloomy and intoxicating, in some places it would stop making sense, then it would come back again, that guitar coda at the end truly hypnotizing. Those boys were the real deal. The music magazines foretold a brilliant future for them. Thirty-odd years later, out of all their albums only that song would remain.
. . . some dance to remember, some dance to forget . . .
All the tables were filled at the restaurants that lined the central street. The final game of the World Cup poured from some potbellied Bakelite TV. They were broadcasting live from Buenos Aires. I stopped and watched. Holland vs. Argentina, Europe vs. Latin America. I knew very well how that match would end, for it was the first one I had ever watched with my father forty-some years ago. Because of the Argentinians’ constant dirty tricks, we were rooting for Holland, but they were clearly going to lose. In the ninetieth minute Rob Rensenbrink would get the ball after endless passing, he’d take a shot . . . and hit the goalpost. We’d bet on the losing team. We should be used to it by now, because Bulgaria always loses; besides, we’re not even playing in this game. But you never get used to it. Plus, Holland was playing beautifully. It’s not fair, don’t the good guys always win? I pound my small fist on the table. I’m trying to be even angrier than my father. My father turns to me and says: Look, old man [that’s what he called me], life is more than a single loss.
There are things you remember your whole life. Perhaps because fathers at that time—and my father was no exception—generally spoke down to children. So when my father told me life is more than a single loss, it was an usual event. It must be a fatherly commandment. I never did quite figure out whether he meant that life would be full of losses and this was just the first of them, or that life was always more than any one loss. Maybe both.
The restaurant is buzzing, everyone is keyed up from the game. There at the end table a tall, thin man of eighty is sitting, with pure white hair and light eyes. He doesn’t take his eyes off the television, but it’s as if he is not taking part in the general excitement, at least not visibly. He doesn’t blink and he doesn’t move. I make my way over to him and sit down. May I? I ask. He looks at me without turning his head and his lower lip quivers almost imperceptibly.