I met 2012 at the National Park, in Athens. He was walking, out of breath, waggling his arms and legs. Apparently he had been running for some time now and he was stretching his muscles. He had his number written on his T-shirt, like marathon runners usually do. He stopped by the shade of a cypress near me and drunk some water. I thought it would be nice to say hello.
I introduced myself. He said that he was 2012 and that he was eager to know more about me. I said what people usually say on these occasions. Occupation, age, what I was doing in the National park that time of the day.
“I don’t understand” he said. “This doesn’t make sense”.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“If I am to put you in a context, you have to tell me what comes before and after you”.
I talked about my favorite writers. Italo Kalvino, Margarita Karapanou, Alice Munro. He looked puzzled so I mentioned old masters too. Henry James, Emmanouil Roidis, Arthur Schnitzler. The ancient greek poetess Sapfo.
He still looked puzzled. Did he think it was pretentious to discuss my strange habit of writing instead of my real life? So I talked about family. How my father took my hands in his to soap them, when I was a child. How my daughter painted a human face for the first time in a very young age.
“No, you misunderstood me” 2012 said. “I am talking about the essence of numbers here. You are describing experiences lost in time”.
So I mentioned dates, important dates in my life. My first bicycle in 1976. My fist kiss in 1978. My first book of short stories published in 1994. The birth of my daughter in 2002. The death of my father in 2008. The beginning of the Greek financial crisis short after that. Then I thought I should put that on a context too; I talked about the 400 years of the Ottoman Occupation and how it shaped the character of Greeks. I talked about the Second World War and the 50s. About the European Dream in the 80s. And what happened with it lately.
He nodded and drank some more water. He seemed more compassionate now, more eager to talk. We walked together, 2012 and me. After a while we sat on a bank. We looked at a pigeon nibbling some seeds by our feet. He talked about how people don’t pay attention to numbers anymore. How many seeds, how many pigeons. They use numbers as apocalyptic judgments about bank speculation and recession. Or as statistic elements during small talk. Like table decoration.
He became more and more excited. I realized he was personally engaged in what he was describing. “Yes, he said, isn’t it awful to think that numbers, years passing by, is just a common way to treat time, a rhetoric strategy? It is much more than that!”.
“And why are you so furious about it?” I asked. “People have their own opinions about time. You can not impose yours upon them”.
2012 looked suddenly very exhausted. “You don’t seem to understand” he said. “I came after 2011 and I carry upon me all the curses of ancient times. I guess you know already what they say about me. Mayanists, new age scholars, all these crazy fools. They are imagining every possible thing. A geomagnetic reversal, a nuclear war, a collision of Earth with a black hole, or a giant supernova. People are buying private underground blast shelters to save themselves from me, can you imagine?”
I nodded because that was what he expected me to do.
“Tell me the truth, please. Do I look so suspicious to you?”
2012 stood up and made a full circle with open arms, so as to prove that he was harmless. He looked harmless indeed; a four digits number. A prejudice with arms and legs. A human shaped concept.
To console him I said it happened before. Nostradamus had blamed 1999. A King of Terror would fall from the sky then, he had said. And Isaac Newton calculated the end of time in 2060. He was quoting the Book of Revelations and the Bible.
“Right” said 2012. “Then you see my point. People put tremendous expectations on time. While they still live in the past. Or in the future. Remembering or expecting vaguely. They are never around here”.
We sat there, without talking for a while. Old people and children passed by, looking at our strange couple. 2012 was more relaxed now. I guess talking to strangers always helps a little. I feel like that sometimes. Nervousness flies away when you confess your inner thoughts to people you won’t meet again. I told him that, with a sense of exhilaration.
He looked at me as if I was crazy. “But we meet all the time!” he said. “We meet every day. You mention me in your diary. In fact I am the first thing you mention everyday. You put me there in every paper you sign, in every bank statement. I support you all, every day, every second, from not falling into timewave zero”.
He thought of people massively, as a whole. That was the problem. He thought in objective terms, in large scales, in groups and masses. I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t believe in serious disputes after all. Instead I talked about literature. I said how I believed that fiction is a one-to-one discussion, a confession of a writer, a leap of faith of a reader, as they both meet in an instantly created universe of consensus. It is an incident that will never repeat itself, not in a hundred years, not even with the same reader, reading the very same book some other time.
“There is a common message” 2012 insisted. “A common expectation”.
“No”, I said. “There is not such a thing. See, if you try to address people, the common soul, you are doomed to fail. People understand when someone is teaching ethics. And then you don’t have stories, codified patterns of life, anymore. You have lessons. Nobody likes lessons”.
“But then people will make the very same mistakes”
“Sure”, I said. “And they will read about other peoples mistakes. They will understand, through empathy, and then they go on and make other mistakes. It is literature, not religion”.
“And you think the same thing happens with time?”
“I think so, yes. Time is relevant. Experience is relevant”.
I think he got my point because he looked at the sky, as we humans do when we contemplate various possibilities.
“I hope you don’t misunderstand me” I said. “I don’t have any expectation, whatsoever from you. I don’t think you are good, or bad, or dangerous. You are just another year. I will use you. You will use me”.
“That makes sense” he said.
We then shook hands and moved our separate ways. He run again. I tried to walk as calmly as possible.
