Hi, Jeremy. You asked for this. It’s Time Day again, 1993. I’ll start with my own Time Day Zero story.
* * *
I was on a daytime flight from Stockholm to London, Heathrow. I had a window seat.
Mid-flight, I remember, I was reading a terribly long blog post from Cory Doctorow on my iPad. Cory was writing from Burning Man. I missed it again this year. I will need to Google Calendar some Black Rock City fun time for next year. I’ll try to drag Jeremy and some others along, maybe make a Next Wave camp, like we did ten years ago. Final 2019 memory…
In a blink, I was lying on my back on a bed, in a pitch black room. The air was dank with humidity. It smelled like a hamper filled with clothing worn far too many days. I knew this smell well. Houston in the summer.
My hand came up to touch my face. I could hear breathing, and, close by, there was movement. The bed creaked when I shifted my weight. I attempted to believe I was asleep in my seat on the airliner. I tried to relax into this dream.
My left hand stretched out. It nudged something next to me in the bed. Someone. A vivid memory struck me.
This would be my older sister, Osie. We shared a single bed until she went to high school. Mama had a small bedroom annex built out from the side wall of the main room for her. When Osie left town before she graduated I got her room.
I reached out. My hand grazed a thigh. Osie screamed. Not a scared scream. This was her excitement scream. I opened my eyes. We both sat up at the same instant. In the darkness, I could just make out her eyes, open wide in astonishment.
“What the fuck!” she mouthed.
I lay down and pulled the covers way over my head. My dream had just become a Twilight Zone episode. A voice from the other side of the room, I recognized as Marques, my younger brother. He grumbled something about us being quiet for a change. He never liked it when we talked together late at night. His bed springs sighed as he rolled over.
* * *
Hurricane Harvey
My next thought. Our eight-hundred square foot house on a scruffy lot off of Cavalcade Street in Kashmere Gardens, was an empty lot in 2019. In 2017, it got flooded out by Hurricane Harvey, and had an electrical fire that burned it down to the water level. Marques and his family had been evacuated, and lost everything. And then his diabetes got really bad, and he died the next year. That was last year. I came to Houston for the funeral.
I felt wrong.
I mean, I felt great. I had not felt this good in decades. I could actually feel my heart beating slowly, my breath in my nostrils. It was like all those years of yoga were paying off. I was instantly fully awake. Eyes wide open under the top sheet, ears attentive; my feet were ready to run.
I heard Osie throw off the thin covers. The bed rocked when she stood. Her footsteps padded across the floor.
The bright light of a bare overhead bulb penetrated dimly through the sheet. I poked my head out from the sheet. The light dangled from a ceiling fixture.
I sat up again. The room came into focus. The cracked gray battleship linoleum flooring was originally white. It had darker gray and black splotches in a pattern I used to call “dog vomit.” On the walls, the pre-War wallpaper—swirls of mauve and lavender, mottled by water stains— assaulted my eyes. I was home.
I saw what I could not begin to understand. Osie was a a girl. Could be ten years old. She stared back at me like she didn’t know me. I looked down at my hands, my arms, at my body. I was a little kid, skinny as a broom. Skin slick as a seal’s.
Marques shouted, “Turn off the stupid light!” He rolled onto his tummy and pulled his pillow over his head. “It’s still night out there.”
“Osie,” I said, “am I in your dream, or are you in mine?” I don’t actually remember saying this, but she does.
She laughed as she raced back to the bed. Her laughter was jubilant.
“Sophie, girl.” She sat on the edge of the bed next to me. “We is kids again!” She leaned in and gave my forehead a kiss. She pinched me. It hurt.
“Not a dream?” I said. She shook her head in agreement.
“I was on an airplane,” I said. “Mid-flight. Where were you?”
“I was sleeping in my bed in California. Woke up here.”
She glanced over at Marques, his face buried under his pillow. “He would probably sleep through the big one.”
“Henry!” A shout from the other bedroom. A voice I knew. It continued, “My darling Henry!”
“Momma?” I spoke. “Henry is alive? Daddy is here? What year is this?”
Marques gave a growl. He sat up and glowered at us. “It’s Saturday! Go back to sleep. What’s wrong with you two?
“Wait,” Osie said to him. “Where were you yesterday?”
“Yesterday?” Marques looked confused. “What about yesterday? It was hot as blazes. When Dad got home, we barbecued a brisket.”
As he spoke I remembered everything he said. Like a parallel story to mine, but one I knew already.
I said, “We went to see the Astros play.”
Osie said, “No surprise. The Cardinals won.” After a pause, she said, “They’ll take the pennant this year.”
“The ‘Stros won’t win the series until 2017,” I said.
Osie nodded.
“I was there,” she said. “Dodger Stadium.”
“What are you two talking about? What time is it?” Marques said. I went to the bedside table. My wristwatch said it was twenty-six-to-four.
“It is very early,” I said. “Or maybe rather late. Twenty-five…. or six-to-four…”
“Chicago!” Osie shouted. She started whistling the guitar intro.
I giggled, suddenly joyous.
My brain was like a dog circling its bed until it settles down. Round and round my thoughts turned. My memories of the past week in Stockholm were shoved aside, as I recalled minute details of events from the past week here in Houston. I crashed my bicycle yesterday. I looked at my elbow, where a scab was healing.
I am a child. I live here. This is me. But not all of me. I thought of my condo South of Market in San Francisco. All my things there. My life there. I had a Google Calendar full of meetings there for next week.
Osie said, “Marques. You were only here? Yesterday. Not somewhere else, some… time else?”
Marques looked at her like she was speaking in a foreign language.
“Huh?”
Momma crashed through the partly open door into the room. Like Kramer on Seinfeld, I thought. She wheeled about and looked at each of us.
Osie stood and ran to her.
Momma, in her diaphanous nightgown, enveloped Osie with a bear hug. Osie pulled back and shook her finger.
“Momma, I put you to bed last night in Compton. Your arthritis was acting up. Now look at you, all young and sexy.”
Momma’s body shook with laughter. She steadied herself with a hand on the wall.
“I don’t feel any pain. None at all. It’s a marvel. Come here, darlings,” she said. “I thought I was going crazy.”
I jumped up and ran into her embrace, alongside Osie.
“Momma, can you tell them to go back to sleep?” Marques complained from his bed.
“Daddy is alve?” I said. “Can we go see him?” Henry was drafted in 1968 when they increased the age limit. He came back from Vietnam in a box in 1969. They put his name on a wall in the National Mall.
“Your father has no memory of any other time,” Momma said. “He needs to work in the morning and wants to sleep.”
“I’m with Daddy,” Marques said. “Will someone please turn off the light.”
“Let’s go into the kitchen,” Osie said. “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping anymore today.”
Momma opened up the door wide. Osie grabbed her robe from the chair and followed Momma out the door. I found a tee shirt and slid into this as I went after them. I switched off the light and closed the door behind me.
* * *
Getting used to the unimaginable.
I’m going to leave the rest to your imagination, with a brief outline of that week. This is hard, since, as you know, the first week crams fifty-two years of memories in one enormous ball of unrealized events. You still need to get up, walk around, eat, laugh, talk, work and go to sleep each day.
In the kitchen, Momma turned on the radio and found an all-night station blasting the news. We learned about the scope of the time-shift, and that only people alive now and in 2019 could remember anything of that time. We reconnected with one another.
Mom and Osie had occasionally visited me in the City and I had slept in their guest bedroom in Compton. Marques’s funeral was the last time we were together. By sunrise, with coffee, our minds had settled into decision mode.
The first business was an agreement to not let Daddy get anywhere near Vietnam, even if we had to move to Canada. Of course, by the end of November in 1967 there were formal peace talks. So many names erased from that wall in D.C.
Henry is still with us. He became the manager of the H & H hardware store he was working at in 1967. With some “collective encouragement,” he quit smoking in 1972. Last year he tore down the old house and built a large, three-bedroom house on the lot, raised up six feet on concrete footings.
Henry and Mable Ann were like newly-weds that first week. I didn’t have the heart to tell them we could hear their horizontal athletics quite clearly from our room. They also had one major fight to work through.
Momma didn’t marry again after Henry got killed in the war, but she confessed having a long relationship with one of Henry’s close friends. Osie and I remember Jermaine well. He worked at the post office, and was a surrogate dad for us, mostly for our brother. Jermaine took Marques to little league, and taught him basketball over at the park.
After an evening of shouting, door slams, and tears, Momma and Dad made up. I think they made up two or three times that night. Jermaine died in a car accident on the 610 in 2014. So, he has no idea why Henry never invited him over for Labor Day BBQ again.
Actually, Henry had the best week. Several coworkers were genuinely glad to welcome him back to the living, and our church pastor mentioned him by name as an example of God’s infinite grace. Momma’s joy at being thirty again spilled over into their nightly calisthenics.
That first week, Osie had a long talk with our brother about the course of the disease he died from, including the amputations. She told me he looked sufficiently terrorized by these details. He is still trim today, but he confesses a couple years of sugar binging when he went to Texas State University.
I’m glad we landed back here in the Summer, although the heat was a bitch. I wasn’t looking forward to second grade in the fall. Understatement alert.
I spent every afternoon I could at the main public library with its newly installed air-conditioning. The magazine room also carried newspapers from around the US and also the Times and the Guardian from the UK.
A bevy of us adolescent timedrifters made the library a second home. I found three others who lived nearby and we started car-pooling with our moms to get to the library. One mom, concerned we were spending too much time indoors, offered to drive us down to the public swimming pool in Emancipation Park in the Third Ward. We were not allowed to swim at most public pools.
I found David Goldin’s parents’ phone number and address in the library’s New York City phonebook. I could not afford long distance calls, but first class stamps were a nickel. By early 1968, I had active correspondence with David, and an invitation to visit New York City, which I dreamed about regularly.
* * *
Back to School
School started after Labor Day. Osie was lucky. Her sixth-grade teacher was a timedrifter. There were only a handful of realtimers in the class. She gave them her full attention, and let timedrifter students use the classroom as a space for adult conversation.
My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Winston, a widow who had been teaching for forty years, was a realtimer. Only three of my classmates were realtimers. The rest of us were reluctant to follow the proscribed curriculum. Another understatement.
After a week, we rebelled. When called upon to read in class, we took turns riffing stand-up comic improvisations from the textbook passages. I can report that Dick and Jane did a lot more than run up that hill. Yes, and….
Mrs. Winston was furious. She threatened to beat us with the yardstick she kept up at the blackboard. We called her bluff, and lined up voluntarily. That’s when she called in the principal. He sent us all home. The situation could have gotten ugly, but the school board had an emergency Saturday meeting and decided to separate timedrifter classes from realtimer classes.
For us, schooling became mostly daycare with cheap food. Momma worked in my school cafeteria, so I will not disparage their menus. Texas was not about to unleash a million timedrifter kids onto its labor market.
The two hundred timedrifter kids at Kashmere Gardens elementary school included two university professors, sixteen corporate executives, five lawyers, and a range of factory and retail workers. Some had been great athletes. Several were serious musicians. Several others had been to prison. A couple had been in prison when the timequake hit. So many stories to listen to.
Mamma said I should be careful, but I find seven-year-old willhavebeen felons more curious than dangerous. I reminded her that I have a black belt in aikido. I miss the dojo, but I’m not about to take some lame kids’ karate class.
At school, we self-organized interest groups and taught each other, while the faculty watched over us with increasing disinterest. We pretended we were on social media by taping room-lengths of butcher paper on the bare side wall and scribbling our “posts” on this throughout the day. We made up silly contests. Mr. Phelps, who taught fifth grade, won the “longest sleeper” award, when he napped from the opening bell through lunch.
I got to practice my French with a small group a couple times a week. I had dibs on one of the typewriters in the office-training classroom every day at two. I rewrote several of the essays that had been published in The Next Wave, and worked on a science fiction novel with, yes, a time-travel plot.
Chapter 10: Paris and London
* * *
Paris and London
In the future/past, I did well enough in high-school, and was good enough with my essays to win a scholarship at Rice University. This was reserved for Texans whose fathers had been killed in the Korean or Vietnam war. I finished a journalism degree there and went to Columbia University for a Masters.
That led to a year abroad at the École Normal Supérieure in Paris, and a fellowship at the London School of Economics for a PhD, which included doing another masters degree. I quit after the masters, figuring I really needed to escape the academy.
I took a job at the Guardian in London. I covered social unrest and educational issues for a decade. I began to try freelance writing about emerging digital technology in the mid ‘90s. I moved to a cheap third-floor walk-up in West Oakland to be nearer to the action.
I did my first feature piece for The Next Wave in 2005. It revealed the emergence of database technologies that would drive the next generation of social software. I bagged an interview with Safra Catz, and we explored the emergent data-driven software boom. I am recounting this to explain why I felt no need to step onto any university campus this time around.
I digress. Back to Kashmere Gardens.
I am not proud of the times during that first week when I ranted in Mrs. Winston’s classroom, using Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society to deconstruct the school’s lame curriculum. It’s not her fault that neither of these books had been written yet. I was significantly less annoying than the trio of seven-year-olds beatboxing in the back of the room. We are lucky Mrs. Winston wasn’t armed.
It was extra hard being a black girl again in Houston in the late 1960s. That goes for every black girl. For us timedrifters, it was like being stuck as a participant in a tragic documentary about exclusion and poverty, a film we had seen so many times before at arty movie houses on Telegraph Avenue, and now we were living it and can’t escape.
Chapter 11: David
* * *
David
I’m not going to write about technology. Jeremy, you’ve paid me to do that for twenty years, and all those feature articles are on file. I’m not sure how you and David connected, but that moment turned out to be the turning point in my life.
When David asked me to join the team in La Jolla, I was overjoyed. In the new now 1970, David was the most amazing person to be around; and the most exasperating person to be with. He suffered from uncontrollable hyperactivity. A primary multitasker, he was rarely present in even our most intimate conversations.
I had to remind myself that some timedrifters came back with fifty-two years of mundane life, while David came back with fifty-two years of unbridled activism. David’s future/past fame chased him down and obsessed his life.
We were both overgrown kids. We split when we turned eighteen again. It was necessary, at least for me. David’s invitation to La Jolla did change my life, and I will always be grateful. Obviously, Lis has found the key to his heart. I am so happy for them both.
* * *
Nimali
Nimali knocked me off my feet (but not physically, that came later) in the first week I was in Bologna. The Wellspring Cooperative Headquarters had sent me out there to report on the new COOP-University they had set up here. It was supposed to be a three-month gig, and then back to San Francisco. That didn’t happen.
Six years older than me, Nimali seemed decades wiser. I spent my future/past career years interviewing innovators. Nimali was right in the middle of projects innovating new economics and forging cultural lifeways. She was the perfect person to run COOP-University for Wellspring.
It took me a full year to catch up with the knowledge she and her team brought to this organization. Much of this knowledge got unpublished with the timequake. Thousands of web pages and dozens of books about cooperatives, DAOs, and intentional communities had vanished.
My job, as I saw it, was to re-chronicle this knowledge. Wellspring supplied me with an AIWA reel-to-reel recorder, and I made excellent use of this. I interviewed dozens of coop mavens. Jeremy gave me a budget to have these tapes transcribed. A couple years later the transcriptions were converted into word processing files. I popped these raw interviews on the internet in 1980. Before that, as you know, we published the Wellspring Coop Governance Manual.
Nimali was my favorite raconteur. She understood how valuable all of this remembered work would be today. She also knew people I should interview across Europe and the UK, including several who were siblings or spouses of afterkinder experts. I was eager to see these now-gone coop heroes get their credit.
Nimali and I were coworkers to start, and quickly good friends. At the graduation party for the first cohort of Wellspring community architects, we shared a common fondness for Negroni cocktails. This led to a carefree night of frolicking and fondling in her apartment. Happily, the aftermath of this was not shame, but delight in finding each other, and a readiness to move forward.
Jeremy got The Next Wave Magazine rolling again, and I took an editorial job there. He wanted news from the coops in Asia and sent me a ticket to Tokyo. I spent several weeks visiting coops in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.
I needed to resolve my relationship with David. So I did a mea culpa visit to San Francisco. We had not promised intimate fidelity during our time apart, and David confessed to more than one adventure from his side; nothing that any eighteen-year-old male college professor would be ashamed of, he announced. I suggested that this covered a whole lot of territory. He gave me that smile of his. But he also knew that we were done, at least as a monogamous couple.
Nimali came over to stay for a time that summer. I won’t detail how awkward that was. I was already too much in love with her to be with David like he wanted. Like we had been. He was still David, so I knew he would not be wounded by our breakup. We talked about being together in a coop somewhere. That was never to be. I followed Nimali to Sri Lanka. Best thing I’ve ever done.
* * *
Truth and Preconciliation
I need to slip in a bit on Truth and Preconciliation here. Nimali’s family was deep into this process for five years. Her father, Rohan Rasanayagam, willhavebeen killed in the Sri Lankan civil war in the future/past 1980s. When the Sri Lanka National Truth and Preconcilication Council was set up in 1975, he was elected as a member.
The process was based on future/past councils from Argentina and South Africa. Only this time, the war crimes have not yet been committed. The military leaders and other actors responsible for the murder and mayhem of the Sri Lankan Civil War, were now children again, as were many of their victims. The scene of these kids testifying to the violence they saw or did made a huge impact.
In Sri Lanka, the civil war was largely the result of British colonial rule, and its economic programs. The British used cheaper imported South India laborers on the tea plantations and elsewhere. After independence, this population, isolated by language and history, remained economically and politically marginalized. In the 1950s, Sri Lanka declared Sinhala as the single national language.
Rohan Rasanayagam led the Council to push for a constitutional amendment to include Tamil as an official language, and to fund bilingual education nation-wide. He wrote, “It took the British two-hundred years to divide our nation’s peoples, we will need at least two generations to reweave our civil society. Give this process time and sincere effort and it will heal us.”
In my new home here, on this gem of an island, a land of green mountains and turquoise seas, a great sense of calm has come to a nation that was ripped apart by war in the future/past. Every year on Time Day, Nuwara Eliya, like most towns on the island, honors all of those present who had been killed in that other-time war.
We gather in the park to dance, laugh, and eat together. And then, right before the evening concert, those locals who are now alive, and who had been killed in the war, are called to the stage to be garlanded. They number several dozen, Tamil and Sinhalese, standing together. To the crowd’s applause, they are joined by their families. Then we all sit back to enjoy the music, together as one village.
* * *
* * *
Civil Union
In the 1970s, Sri Lanka’s entire civil code was rewritten with a whole inventory of forward-leaning, 2019-type ideas, including gay marriage. Nimali and I were among the first to be legally a couple there. There is no actual doctrinal scripture in Buddhism or Hinduism to support homophobia. It was the former colonial legal code, and residual European Christian social norms that were the basis for a lot of current social discrimination. Lucky for us, the Wellspring Cooperative’s code of conduct was clear about inclusion and belonging. We believe in fierce equality.
My Sinhala advanced much faster than my Tamil. Tamil is a bitch to learn as a second language. The spoken and written forms are really different. And my lover is Sinhalese, so all those hours in flagrant delicto together with whispered tenderness were important lessons for me. The best second-language teacher is a passionate lover. Not sure that can be marketed.
Then Nimali and I did the thing that caused a ruckus; we adopted two toddlers, our daughters Anjali and Dayani. One is ethnically Tamil, the other Sinhalese. They were already like sisters in their coop nursery school. In their play, they discovered their own shared vocabulary. All of their parents were killed on a tragic, stormy monsoon morning in July. Their coop work bus veered to miss a boulder fallen on the roadway, and rolled down a ravine.
At first, we took the girls into our house to care for them while we searched for family members—aunts, grandparents, whomever—who would take them in. We discovered that all of their parents were single children whose parents were now dead. I could not imagine turning them over to an orphanage in Colombo.
“We can adopt them,” Nimali said at dinner that evening.
“I don’t think it’s remotely possible,” I said.
“We will make it possible.” She gave me her “Durga” face: that look of absolute determination she acquired when the right thing to do seemed undoable. Like she did when we decided to marry.
Accomplishing a half-century of cultural change in a single decade upsets a lot of well-positioned families in a society. People with their own access to newspapers and local governments. Some of them objected to about everything concerning our new family. Apparently, we were leading Sri Lanka down some slippery cultural slope into depravity and ruin.
I didn’t appreciate how much social capital Nimali had with Sri Lankan national politicians until she spent it all to make sure Anjali and Dayani could stay with us. We make headlines in newspapers and magazines across South Asia for a couple months. A good half of the editorials were against us. But the law was on our side.
I was never going to “belong” to the wider Sri Lankan society. Being a black female expatriate in an Asian town, I had regular reminders that I was from elsewhere. I was exoticized and valorized in turn by strangers on the street, and visiters to our coop. I got stared at a lot. People also asked me questions as though I were the queen of some remote black empire, or of the entire continent of Africa.
“What’s it like to live in Nairobi?” Or Lagos, or Kinshasa, or wherever. “Ask me about San Francisco,” I’d respond. “I grew up in Houston.”
I was invited almost every month to attend some conference or workshop where I knew I would be the only black person in the room, and would be asked to speak for the whole population of color as an expert on discrimination. Fortunately, I’d been through all this before in my future/past Asian travels. Today, “no,” is a big part of my vocabulary. When I say “no” I mean this: I don’t have the time to solve your history of racism for you’all. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. is still alive and writing books you can buy and read.
I saved all my yeses for the neighborhood realtimer kids who were innocently fascinated by the fact of my existence. I might be the first, and the only, black person they will meet in years. I’d find us a place to sit—a rock or a bench—and let them query me as they wish.
I ended up learning a lot about the local, non-coop-belong society from them. I discovered several families that could use some financial, medical, or caring help, and guided coop teams to visit these homes with resources. I taught a group of local girls to do double dutch jump rope, and I teamed up with my coop to buy some mats so I could teach kids Aikido. Yes, I’m good with kids.
David and Abigail came to visit us in the late 1970s. Nimali and I were deep into parenting and problem solving cooperative organizational snafus across the island. While I did my best to show them the sights, I had little time to spend, and I think David was disappointed. He took an immediate interest in the various sharing opportunities our coops had devised.
Near the end of their visit, I found Abigail alone at a tea stall, looking lost and bored. David was busy interviewing coop managers. I took her to a nearby temple with some archaeological importance. We shared some David stories (not going to report these here). She was ready to get back to London, she said. I think she was ready to move on from David.
David, he wrote Mend, Don’t Spend, and ended up on the Whitehouse staff. That cat will always land on his feet.
* * *
Peace and the beach
Some last thoughts here. Sri Lanka was not the only nation facing the trauma of future/past civil war. From Angola to Yugoslavia, dozens of nation states were “preconciling” the political and cultural divisions that diddone led to bloody internecine warfare. Globally, millions of lives have been spared in the past twenty-six years.
However, not all of these programs were as successful as Sri Lanka’s. Tragic events can hurt, even when these are yanked back from a time only remembered. Long-term family and tribal feuds were sometimes inflamed in the process. Outbreaks of “prevenge,” where individuals confronted their future nemeses, sparked new struggles.
In several countries, some timedrifters, now kids again, formed murderous gangs. They could not manage to un-live the conditions of their former future—the massacres and imprisonments, the tortures and rapes. Fifty-two years of lives they would die to forget, and kill rather than forgive.
Child on child violence act this scale was a spectacle the world had not experienced before. Each child had a story to tell, and every story was a cautionary tale of what might happen again. This new violence helped push their communities to implement peaceful means for resolving conflict. Hopefully, the next generation will be largely free from the traumas of civil warfare.
We do remain a vexatious species. Apparently, not even a time drift will change this. Jeremy asked for my disappointment, and I just said it. We are all too human. Not in a Nietzsche style, but in our biology, which evolved beyond our capacity to be satisfied just being human.
Fortunately, Kurt Vonnegut has a remedy for this. Let me paraphrase. “We were born on this planet to fuck around.” We need to dance more, laugh more, tickle each other’s fancy on a regular basis, find joy in a fondle, and care for one another. Scheme less and dream more. We need to know we have already arrived. Our destiny is not in the stars, but on the beach, with a cold one and a hot lover. Finally, none of you needs to listen to me. Just do it your way.
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