“Evan,” she said gently, “I think you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

Chapter 4

It took me six months.

I don’t know if you’d call that a long or a short time for the task at hand. All I know is that’s how long it took, and it was an intensive six months. I was at it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with time out for meals and not much else. Even the exercise I got, which consisted of walks around the city, was a sort of busman’s holiday; I tried to take a different route each time and acquaint myself with changes in the neighborhoods.

Mostly I read. Every week I went through a solid year of newsmagazines – Time or Newsweek, I alternated between them, plus the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday Times. I maintained that approximate ration – one week to one year – and supplemented the news with the books and magazine articles my reading led me to.

For example, the news coverage could give me a sense of the increasing role of computers, but I had to read books to find out what they really amounted to. The newsmagazines provided a good idea of the way the AIDS plague had impacted on America and the rest of the world, but I had to read And the Band Played On for a fuller report and an overview. And so on.

I just read all the time. And, while I was taking the years one by one in the same order Time had dealt them out, there was no way to avoid skipping around some. The daily paper kept throwing things at me that I hadn’t yet encountered in my reading, and I couldn’t really pretend I didn’t notice.

Like, for example, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of world communism. How, when you come face to face with a fact of such magnitude, could you put off paying attention to it? A system that had looked for all the world like the inescapable future for all the world had overnight wound up on the dust heap of history, along with Prohibition and feudalism and the Stanley Steamer. The Red Chinese (except no one called them that) had a stock market now, and the Brits had given Hong Kong back to them. The only place communism survived at all, as far as I could make out, was in Cuba, which in turn was the only place where the United States had strenuously opposed it. (There was a lesson there of a sort which probably wouldn’t be lost on a master of the Asian martial arts, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was.)

For my part, I went right on reading. Years ago (obviously!) I’d taken a course in speed-reading. I hadn’t used it all that often – sometimes you want to take your time with a book – but I hadn’t forgotten the technique, and I made good use of it now.

Meanwhile, Minna taught me how to use the computer. At first we spent an hour a day at it, and early on I was convinced that I was hopeless, that I would never catch on, that merely learning what to call things was hard enough but actually using the thing was impossible. I reminded myself that some languages were like that – I’d had a perfect hell of a time learning Chinese – and that all I had to do was stay with it. And then I began to get the hang of it.

Once that clicked in, Minna had me using the thing to study the past quarter-century. It was amazing the access it gave a person. I could sift through the world’s libraries without leaving my apartment. I could also go off on tangents without realizing it, too, and could waste whole hours playing Tetris and computer solitaire, but eventually they lost their curious charm and I managed to get back to work.

So much to find out! So much to catch up on!

A lot of it was exciting. It had been evident even back in the early seventies that Europe was in the process of becoming one nation, and that process had continued, but so had its opposite. Yugoslavia was a prime example, having during those same years become five nations, but it was by no means an isolated example. The bad old USSR had become more than a dozen nations, and even Czechoslovakia had somehow found it incumbent upon itself to bifurcate into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Four short years before my personal Ice Age began, Russian tanks had rolled through the streets of Prague. Now Vaclav Havel, whom I’d met once in a garret in Montparnasse, was president of the country. I remembered him as a chain-smoking young playwright, a gentle idealistic dreamer, and now the son of a gun was a head of state.

Quebec, where I’d spiked a plot against the life of the queen of England, had moved far closer to secession from the rest of Canada. Basque separatism flourished, and so, it now appeared, did separatist movements in Galicia and Cantalonia. There were strong pushes for autonomy for the Flemings in Belgium, and both Scottish and Welsh nationalism had heated up some, although the Cornish separatists seemed disappointingly docile.

On the other hand, some things hadn’t changed a bit. The United States, doing no end of business with such traditional allies as Hanoi and Bejing, continued its blockade of Castro’s Cuba. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants kept up their reprise of the Thirty Years’ War, their version of which was outrunning the original.

And so on.

And then there were the deaths.

Well, hell. Twenty-five years. You have to expect a certain amount of mortality over that great a span of time. The bulk of the world’s leaders had been well along in years, and it wasn’t all that much of a surprise that they were no longer with us. Nixon was dead, and Agnew, and well, dozens of others. Jack Benny, that perennial thirty-nine-year-old, had left us not long after my body temperature plunged; George Burns, on the other hand, had lived to be a hundred. Francisco Franco was dead – evidently that had been taken up as a running gag on a television program. Evelyn Wood, inventor of speed-reading, was dead, too, and I wondered how long her funeral had taken. Two or three minutes, I thought, was how she would have wanted it.

The deaths of prominent persons struck me in a variety of ways. Many seemed both inevitable and appropriate. Some came as a shock, either because the person seemed far too young to die or because – like Franco, say – I’d somehow assumed he would live forever. But the sheer number of deaths was overwhelming. Over twenty-five years, one might have taken them in stride. When they came all at once, in a flood, they were enough to drown you.

Then there were the deaths I took personally. Friends, acquaintances. Fellow tenants and other people in the neighborhood. The owner of the deli at Broadway and 106th – I didn’t know his name, but one day he’d made me a sandwich (corned beef and Russian dressing on rye) and the next thing I knew he was ten years dead.

So many of my gay friends, dead of a disease that hadn’t even existed. Women I’d known, women I’d slept with, dead of breast cancer. The Grim Reaper, never less than up to date, had traded in his scythe for a power mower. He was cropping whole fields and cutting a wide swath through my world.

People I hadn’t even heard of, people who’d barely been around, performers and politicians who hadn’t yet stepped upon the stage twenty-five years ago, had left it forever. One day I’d learn their names in my relentless pilgrimage through Time and Newsweek, and a few days or weeks later I’d read that they had died. Sic transit gloria mundi. Sic transit everything.

It was, as Minna remarked, a real mind fuck. And those words, pronounced so trippingly on her tongue, were a mind fuck all by themselves. The eleven-year-old Minna I remembered would not have said them, but then again neither would a Minna grown to maturity in 1972. These days the nicest sort of woman said words formerly reserved for male company. They even said them in magazines and newspapers, and on television.