Sunday Scrawl #1: Learning Not to Know

When my parents sat me down in the living room the night before I was supposed to leave for college, I thought they were going to tell me they were getting a divorce. At the time, it was the most terrifying upheaval I could imagine.

Instead, they told me that the Nintendo Game Boy that I’d gotten for my sixth birthday first released two hundred and nine years ago. They told me that the last Backstreet Boy passed away one hundred and twenty three years ago. They told me they had paid a hefty price to raise me in a daydream of the past, and that beyond the careful curation of the town I grew up in, technology was leagues beyond anything I’d ever seen. Every disease I’d assumed would someday kill me had been eradicated. Only a handful of accidental deaths happened worldwide per year. The beginnings of space colonization were underway. It wasn’t a world without want—things like food, shelter, and healthcare were all abundant, but if you wanted more, you’d have to pay.

I suppose I should’ve been angry, but my sense of justice and right conduct broke beneath the sheer logistical enormity of what pulling the wool over my eyes had demanded. My parents had practiced for nearly a year to scrub their speech of anachronistic language. When I’d learned to drive, our car had been microadjusting my steering. I had never been in real danger.

I learned it was my parents’ second time raising a family in a cultural and technological time bubble. They’d started with the 2040s, but they’d wanted something more exotic the second time around. They said they’d enjoyed their time together, and that they loved me and one another very much, but that after my younger brother’s time to “leave for college” came, they’d probably go their separate ways on their next adventures.

“Better to end on a high note,” my mom had said, as if that explained it all.

In retrospect, the cracks in reality had always been there. The weird tradition around not seeing or talking to college-bound friends and siblings until you, too, headed off to get your education. The fact that despite the statistics, nobody ever seemed to die.

I didn’t go to college. I went to something closer to elementary school for eighteen-year-olds. Societal integration courses were part of the package, and all of us time capsule kids spent four years catching up to modern society.

It was both compassionate and practical for them to put us all together, hundreds of kids from dozens of time periods. We were all clueless together. Looking back on it, it would’ve been easy for those to have been been some of the best years of my life, to meet people with wildly different, but still relatable, experiences.

Things didn’t go that way.

I was lonely during those years, and melancholy. Grieving, without ever knowing it, for the life I didn’t get. Eventually, everything felt so alien that I started emulating the games I played as a kid. I found custom software I could run in immersion rooms to simulate the cathode ray tubes of my childhood TV. Buying an antique would’ve been way too expensive.

So many words had drifted in meaning, and so many were new. Even after four years of study, it still took all my skill just to keep up with the conversation, and when I spoke to those who had grown up in the real world, it was painfully obvious that something was different about me, and they’d ask, and I’d explain my childhood, and suddenly I’d be a bauble, not a person. I’d be considered, remarked upon, and then placed back on the shelf.

As the years wound to a close, everyone started making plans. Some of my peers wanted to travel. Many moved on to normal higher education.

The only thing I could imagine doing was going back to raise time capsule kids of my own. I could be anything; I decided to become my parents.

To do so, I’d need to save up a lot of money and find someone willing to be my wife for about twenty years. I made a bit of money working as a perspectivist—someone with uncommon life experiences and worldviews. Most of my gigs were social gatherings, where I’d offer a unique experience for the adventurous conversationalist, which usually devolved into the same questions about whether I had really believed in the world I’d grown up in. Occasionally, I’d be brought in by a corporation doing research on whatever speck of their target market I represented. I was fortunate that my parents were early adopters of the long-term historical tourism craze. My job options would have been limited if they had been late to the bandwagon.

I’d been working as a perspectivist for a few months—long enough to know that I wasn’t saving nearly as much as I needed to be, not long enough to allow myself to know that—when I met Jask. Her mother hired me to provide entertainment at her twenty-fifth birthday party. I was supposed to be something interesting for the guests to pass the time, ranking somewhere between the houseplants and the caterers in importance. When we started talking, she was asking me all the regular questions, clearly a little bored. Five minutes in, she went off-script, asking how it had felt to learn that I didn’t really have to support a family, asking how my relationship with time had changed since leaving home. Her mother came by and hinted that she should spend more time with her guests, and Jask ignored her. She spent the whole party talking to me. She paid to extend my time, so I stayed. A little past midnight, she told me I was free to go if I wanted. I didn’t. She kissed me, more of an experiment than anything else, and I didn’t stop her.

We had a strange connection. She loved me from the first day, but she loved me as early physicians loved cadavers. I was a mysterious thing which existed to be pulled apart and examined. In time, though, something deeper began to bloom.

She was wealthy in a way that made my savings largely irrelevant to the choices available to me, and she was fascinated by the prospect of raising time capsule kids. A year later, we took several tests, signed a novel-length contract, forked over a massive sum, and moved into a lovely house which we agreed to tell the kids had been built in 1964.

Todd is seven now, and Sandra is three, and I love it here, but learning not to know is so much harder than I’d imagined. I’m not supposed to know that Todd developed a growth that “modern” medicine can’t detect or treat, so we’ll need to add a pill to his dinner next week so he stays asleep while a robot from the future excises it. I’m not supposed to know that the real reason the Thompsons “moved away” six months ago was that one of them couldn’t take the pretending anymore and spilled the beans to their daughter.

I’m not supposed to know that Jask—“Elaine”, in this world—is cheating on me.

I don’t think she’ll ever understand how it feels to me. I’m not mad. We don’t see the world in the same way. To her, this is a playground, and this is just another slide. She knows I know. We each get a daily report. She’s mad at me, I’m sure, for not finding a way to “find out”. She craves the encounter, craves the shouting match and the death glares and the shame, all of it. For her, this is a part of it in the same way that the joy of raising the kids is. She has always embraced the vastness of experience with open arms. It’s why I love her. It’s also why she loves me. She told me once that I’m the first truly new thing she’s ever found.

I don’t think I could explain to her how it hurts me, because I’m not sure she’d understand. I could tell her that I was hurt, that I was really, truly, out-of-character wounded because of what she’s done, but it probably wouldn’t reach her. Authenticity is different for her. Authenticity means achieving the closest possible alignment with the person you are trying to be. All the advertisements frame historical tourism that way, as an opportunity for an encounter with an exotic way of being. I’m the one who’s trying to make it something else because I grew up in its thrall.

I can’t figure out which one of us loves this experience more: her, cherishing every facet of this world without partiality, reaching her hand into the murky depths of it and relishing the texture of the grimy grit at the bottom, or me, desperately clinging to the solemnity of an era when choice was still entwined with consequence.