Timeshare

by Amita Basu

part 1

III

The first funny thing is that when I was young, I was like them. Moodily or recklessly I frittered away months at a time, as if being young and healthy with the world full of possibilities were a curse. I dived into trouble. I thought then that this was because I was too cool to stay straight. Now I realise it was because I had too much time, no direction, and a conviction that I would live forever. And it is, of course, my present perspective on life that’s correct. It’s always the latest perspective, based on the most information, that’s correct. Right?

I’ve had a lot of time to get my head straight. Time blurs the details and reveals the essence.

The second funny thing is that when I was young, I realised that businesses invent products nobody needs, then spend millions persuading us we need them. It was Jessica who guided me to this insight. I’d been running around collecting notches on my bedpost. Jessica drew me by her weirdness.

At first she was just another stamp in stamp collection. We shared the big, empty house her parents had left her. At first, the emptiness terrified me. Then it made me wistful, as if I missed something I’d never be able to name. Then I learned to accept it, to see in it a reminder, not scary but salutary, of the day death would empty my own life.

I realised I’d been filling my empty days with women, my empty house with things. Filling my life with people and things had been an escape from the terror of the blank. Now, living with Jessica, stripped down, I saw that life was essentially blank, that someday you’ve got to stop running.

I never became a minimalist. But I developed a hobby of scoffing whenever a new car, phone, or wallpaint colour launched. Today I’m 92. You know how old fogies reason: “If we’d really needed this thing, we’d have had it back in the 1910s.”

But when TimeShare came along — running beta-trials, through invitation only, no advertising, the scientists keeping it hush-hush — we didn’t cross our arms and sit back to mock. We stormed the premises. We bribed the scientists to take us as guinea-pigs. They didn’t even have to cook up sexy copy to tell us why we needed this new thing. TimeShare really was the thing we hadn’t known we needed.

The third funny thing is that when I was young, I wouldn’t have called living like this living. Giant insulin needle in the tummy thrice a day. Dialysis four hours a day, every other day. Clare and Sophie dead. My sisters and friends dead. At least I can still wipe my own arse and brush my own teeth. Those other tasks — cooking meals, buying groceries, taking out the rubbish — one by one, from my 80s, I let the Solstice staff take over. I don’t know if a 20-year-old smug in the pink of health would call this living. What I know is that this works for me.

It’s funny, what you can get okay with someone else doing for you. After all, we outsource by default our laundry, healthcare, garment design, and food production. Why then do we feel sure that the day we can’t wipe our own arse is the day we’ve lived too long?

A man who hasn’t the flexibility to wipe himself can still stroll around the garden. One lap might take him all afternoon. But so what? When you’ve looked death in the eye, and come back knowing you’re short on time, you realise you’ve always been short on time. Then there’s a period of black depression, and then, well, all the clutter falls away. What remains is one or two things you enjoy, and you’d rather do those one or two things well, taking your time. Wiping my own arse isn’t on the list. I’m looking forward to the day I can outsource that.

When TimeShare came along, Simon already couldn’t wipe his own arse. Simon refused the spot Jamie had bought him in the beta-trials. Simon went in his own time.

* * *

11:00 a.m. Coffee and cookies served in the lobby.

“When did you leave your room today?” Jamie asked.

“Just after 10:00 a.m.,” said Kurt.

“So you’re at an hour now,” said Jamie. “Your room’s the farthest out west, just about a half-mile. One hour to walk one half-mile!”

Kurt grinned. Kurt has never got used to his dentures: so we’ve got used to Kurt’s lisp, and to Kurt’s baby-gummed chain-smoker’s thousand-wrinkled smile, which looks at first like something from a horror movie gone comedy, and then makes you grin right back. “Well, I’ve nowhere else to be. I’ve finally got the perfect balance between the time I’ve got and the things I’ve got to do.”

“If only they could’ve given us the time when we were young!” said Jamie.

“Then we’d all have sold one kidney and one eye, instead of just our houses, to get in,” I said. “But they say that’s not possible. They can give us the time only now.”

“They say!” said Jamie, sulking. Jamie had wanted Simon to take the time. Simon wouldn’t. Now Jamie was alone. “They who came up with this! The thing that we’ve all wished for, so crazy that when we lay in bed whispering secrets and crazy wishes, we never whispered this wish. Now they say isn’t possible to give us the time, back in time. And you believe them?”

“Your logic’s a little off,” I said. “But listen: suppose that was possible. Suppose we could be young again, and healthy; but go back in time with all this wisdom. Mistakes made, lessons learned, youth pre-wasted. All that pointless rebellion, that clutter of hobbies, addictions, arrogance, playlists, books, and token-collecting over and done with. If we could go back, and have our youth again — plus five more years, eleven years — d’you really think we wouldn’t just imagine ourselves immortal again, and find new ways to waste all that time again? Isn’t it better to have the time now?”

“What good is it now?” said Jamie. “What can we do now that we couldn’t do a hundred times better at 25?”

“When I was 25, I could never have taken an hour to walk a half-mile,” lisped Kurt, grinning ear to ear. “Not if you’d paid a thousand bucks to do it. I never had the patience to finish a Sudoku, sit through a funeral, or see a thought through. So why would I go back to being 25? The only Personal Bests I made then were making bad friends and taking all my energy out by trying to destroy myself.”

“No,” exclaims Jamie, “you’re assuming we’d go back still stupid. Don’t you see? We’d actually be going back with old men’s wisdom in young men’s bodies. This time we wouldn’t waste our time. This time I could’ve settled down and made something of myself.”

“I think you’ve got to earn your wisdom in this body, for it to stick,” I said. “Look. When we were young, was there any shortage of people giving us advice? But we thought we knew better, didn’t we? We thought we were special: the rules didn’t apply to us. They didn’t see. We’d show them. If we could go back in time with our wisdom, it’d just be the wisdom of another old fogie, doling out advice because he couldn’t make anything of his own life. It’d be just another voice to ignore.”

“Pessimist much?” Jamie hissed.

“We have this time now.” Kurt was still grinning. Sometimes you wondered if his face had got stuck that way. The purple splotches on his pale gums gleamed like poppies on snow. “Are you going to spend all morning arguing? I’m off for the mini-golf course. The championships start at noon, so I’ve just time to walk down the street and stretch a bit.”

“Oh, just give up and take the cart!” said Jamie. Jamie couldn’t stand to watch the rest of us hobbling around like ants climbing a mountain. Jamie never lost sight of the mountain or of the thousand tumbles he had taken off it, trying to sprint up it.

“I’ll take the cart on the way back. Jamie! Watch.” Kurt held up one swollen-jointed finger with its persistently fungus-eaten nail. “One: how fun it is to walk slow. Two: how nice it is to know when you’re tired, rather than lazy, to know when it stop pushing yourself. There’s two more things I didn’t know when I was young! If they paid us to take this time when we were young, I wouldn’t.”

“You’d sell your liver to take it,” snapped Jamie.

“Sell this liver?” Kurt chuckled, his lungs rattling like marbles. “After all the scare and sickness of the transplant?”

Of the 120 residents at Solstice, Kurt’s just about the most decrepit. Kurt’s always laughing. I bet you Kurt’s the last to go, even without the extra time.

The technology is simple. It’s got nothing to do with time travel. We just take time from A and give it to B. Here at Chronologue, we had proprietary rights to all the elements for TimeShare by 2051. We just didn’t think there’d be a demand for this specific combination of elements. What sane person would give up time when they’re young?

2061 to ‘63 were bad years. The war was over, there was no boom to rocket us out of the recession, and the new dictatorships had shuttered our East Asia subsidiaries. That’s when Mum hired Polyopsis to review our assets, survey the market, and brainstorm new products.

Everybody at Polyopsis has an absolutely unique multihyphenate background: that’s how the think-tank identifies revolutionary opportunities. TimeShare was the wildest idea Polyopsis gave us. Mum pondered over it for months, deliberating over ethics and mechanics, then okayed the offer at the last minute, on a whim. Mum was always making decisions on a whim, complaining about not being able to resist whims, secretly delighted by her whims. Now I realise that her whims were simply the boldness of genius repudiating caution.

First, we had to find young people willing to give up time. Only then did our consumer psychologists tell us that this was one of the product ideas they’d filed on our database years ago. It had come out of routine potential-product surveys. You’re wondering how our marketing team had come up with this idea?

There’re a lot of things people want but never articulate, not even to the person who knows their dirtiest secrets. To strangers, though, people open up. If you don’t know me, you’re less likely to care what I think of you. But, stranger or not — if a need has never seen daylight, never dared to grope for words — how do you suddenly articulate it now? The answer is neuromarketing.

You put people in a brain-scanner, generally an MRI machine. Let their minds wander. The brain is never at rest: random neurons are always firing, exciting other neurons. Let a person lie “idle” long enough, and you’ll see whole networks in their brain lighting up. Like Christmas lights on an epileptic tree. Making apparently no sense. “Just a random thought,” the person himself might say apologetically, if you could translate that activity into words.

That’s when you bring out the brain atlases. You look up what it means when this network — down the left parietal lobe, and the bilateral prefrontal — lights up. Then you reverse-engineer from your crazy-lit Christmas tree to work out what it was this person was thinking when their brain lit up like this. Turns out our consumer psychologists had known for years that many young people fantasised about giving up their time. The idea must’ve been too weird for them to process, so we had to go peeking under the hood.

If you look at us right, we marketing professionals aren’t really vampires looking to suck you dry. We’re priests, probing for the one desire you don’t dare articulate even to yourself. We probe you not with gold-digging fingers but with fingers of love. If you don’t start with love, you don’t get far, not even in a conspicuously consumer capitalism. You can dupe the market once, but not twice. And Chronologue has always been in for the long haul.

Proceed to part 2...