But if I am alive, could Gaustine be dead?
I remembered the little room on the ’40s floor where we had met for the last time. It was his latest secret office, so to speak. It would be equally frightening to find him there and to not find him there. I opened the door with trepidation. On the desk, next to the model airplanes, lay a big brown envelope with my name on it. Inside was a sheet of paper in his handwriting and with his signature, stating that everything connected to the clinic and the villages of the past was temporarily left under my direction, for an indefinite period of time. There was something else—a yellow notebook, one-sixteenth-inch format with soft covers, half filled. I would read it later. And a black-and-white postcard of the Main Rose Reading Room from the New York City Public Library, with two lines written on it in Gaustine’s hand.
I need to go to 1939, I’ll write when I get there.
Farewell, your G.
Typical Gaustine. Dropping everything with two sentences. (I must admit that I felt personally offended.) No instructions, no heart, no nothing. All his projects ever only made it this far. All his crazy schemes, I should say. And my own crazy schemes, since I had been part of them, I had bought into them, I had created them alongside him. He simply jumped from a moving time, from one century to another. He had known it when we saw each other that last time, it had already been decided. That’s why he had fixed me with that piercing look when I had said that we’d meet at six before the war.
He had gone to defuse the bomb of ’39. I would follow him sooner or later.
What should I do with these clinics and villages of the past, now that the past has crept out of them and officially settled into all the surrounding cities? What to do with Alzheimer’s homes in an Alzheimer’s world? I spent several nights thinking about that. How could he have dumped all of this on me? Of course, the clinics had to stay open, the patients had the right to a protected past. Especially given the temporal chaos outside. Even more so, given the temporal chaos outside.
*“We are the people!”
**“Atomic energy? No, thanks!”
V
DISCREET MONSTERS
And when the demons came out of the past, they went into man . . .
—Gaustine, the yellow notebook
I do not know which of us has written this page.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I”
1.
The box was open . . .
In the beginning, after countries had chosen their happy decades, things were relatively calm for several months. There was a noticeable boom in old movies, albums, vinyl records, and the production of record players. Magazines and newspapers from back in the day started publishing again, telegrams, typewriters, and ditto paper reappeared . . . People had forgotten how detailed the past is and they were gleefully rediscovering things, going down to the basement, digging out old stuff, cleaning it off, repainting it, getting it restored. Collections of stamps, matchboxes, napkins, and records were pulled out. Movie theaters were showing old films around the clock, directors were getting orders for remakes, retro dance clubs were springing up like mushrooms, ever more frequently on the streets you could spot old Ladas in the East or Opel Rekords in the West, light industry was switching tracks . . .
But there were also things that could eventually upset the applecart. Sometimes it is harder to forget than to remember. For example, giving up smartphones, the Internet, social media . . . Some people did it gladly, that was the whole point, after all—to forget, to toss things aside . . . but they were quite a small percentage. The heroin of the virtual had done its job. Most people, even those who had voted for the ’50s or the ’60s, didn’t want to give these things up. The mobile operators and social media empires also were not happy about a possible reversal of fortune, and rumor had it that they were secretly pouring money into campaigns to boycott the new rules.
On the other hand, a rebellion was simmering among those who had “lost” the referendum. Those who had voted for the ’90s, for example, refused to go along with the timelessness of the ’70s. Everyone wanted the decade they had voted for and which had been awakened over the course of the campaign. Anarchism and centrifugal turmoil moved upon the face of the countries. Suddenly that which was supposed to be idyllic started breaking down . . . Discontents began breaking off into their own communities and enclaves, marking off small territories and populating them with different times. The local once again became important.
If an uninitiated person were to set out on a trip, they could unexpectedly find themselves in a different time, one not marked in any guidebook: an Eastern European village that had broken away into early socialism, with collective farms and old tractors, a town with late nineteenth century Bulgarian Revival–era houses where preparations for rebellion were in full swing, or a forest with wigwams, Trabants, and East German Indians straight out of 1960s Red Westerns. All sorts of past eras were rolling around the streets of the Continent, fusing together and taking place simultaneously.
The old road maps became time maps.
2.
The world had become a chaotic open-air clinic of the past, as if the walls had fallen away. I wondered whether Gaustine had foreseen all this—he, the one who always made me shut the doors tightly so as not to mix the times . . .
The decades were flowing like streams feeding a river that had surged beyond its banks and was pouring over everything around it, churning through the narrow streets, flooding ground floors, climbing up walls, smashing windows and going into rooms, dragging branches, leaves, drowned cats, posters, street musicians’ hats, accordions, photographs, newspapers, scenes from movies, a table leg, fragments of phrases, other people’s afternoons, skipping records . . . A great tidal wave of the past.
It started to become clear that the time map of the new countries would last only a short while. The demons that the referendum had awakened could not be stuffed back into their bottles. Once they had crept out, they scurried around everywhere, exactly as Hesiod had described them—voiceless, yet seductive . . .
The world was returning to its original state of chaos, but not that primordial chaos, from whence everything arose, rather it was the chaos of the end, the cruel and chaotic abundance of the end, which would drown all available time along with all creation in it . . .
The demons had been set free . . .
3.
I chose two young and ambitious doctors to run the clinic. I equipped myself with an armload of books, empty notebooks, and pencils, and went back to the monastery on the hill, behind the walls of the seventeenth century, just beneath the bell tower. From the height of the monastery (and the seventeenth century) I could better observe where the flood of the past had reached, plus it would take some time before its waters would reach me here. I also took the yellow notebook that Gaustine had left me, filled with all sorts of observations, new and imminent diagnoses (that was what he had called them), personal notes, and blank spaces that seemed to have been left on purpose. I soon began filling them up. I first marked his notes with a “G.,” and then my own with two (“G.G.”), but then I stopped. Our handwriting was indistinguishable.