Timeshare

by Amita Basu

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

So, thanks to the research our consumer psychs had filed away decades ago, now we knew where the time would come from: young people. And obviously it would go to older people. But how? We needed to do the upload and download simultaneously: for time-freezing technology to store time till you’re ready to use it doesn’t exist.

That’s why Mum hesitated. If you could take time from a person — when they were ill, depressed, heartbroken, addicted, or otherwise messed-up and misusing time, waiting for time to pass — and hold it for them, and give it back to them when they were well — that’d be a no-brainer. But who would want to give up their time forever?

Mum thought we’d have to wait for time-freezing technology before we could implement time-transfer. Mum wasn’t thinking of transfer at all: not between two people. It was only after Mum’s funeral that our consumer psychologists confessed what they’d known for years: that many young people want to give up time.

It didn’t make sense to me, either. I double-checked with nine practising psychotherapists.

“Yes, Ms. Zekinallos. I hear this very often. Many of my clients, in their 20s, 30s, and some into their 40s — they realise that they’re living the wrong way. But, from force of habit, they keep repeating the same errors, wasting time.”

“Living the wrong way? Do therapists still believe there’s such a thing?”

She laughed. “It’s the 21st century, and we still think therapy’s all about self-acceptance! No. You’ve got to accept your errors so that you can change. You forgive yourself so that you take the pressure off and give yourself a chance. Of course there’s such a thing as living wrong! As Tolstoy said: ‘Every happy life looks the same. Every unhappy life is unhappy in its own way.’ Routines disordered, emotions all over the map, immense ambition contending with crippling laziness, and you your own worst enemy...”

“Sounds like every unhappy life looks the same, too,” I observed.

“It does actually, when you blur the details to look at the gist.”

“That’s a rare gift,” I remarked dispassionately, as is fitting when the discussion has nothing to do with you.

“No, it’s just a feature of healthy aging... A lot of my clients, who’ve realised that they’re living wrong, tell me they wish they could just hibernate until they got wise, and wake up able to do the things they already know they should be doing.”

“What d’you tell those clients?”

“That there are no shortcuts. That we’ve got to work through what’s holding them back from doing what they know they should.”

“What’s holding them back?”

“Most often, it’s inertia. Or they feel bad for carrying on as they are, but not bad enough. Or they feel really bad, and shame cripples them... So what’s Chronologue’s interest in young-person problems?”

I fobbed off a likely story and rose and thanked her.

With help from our psychotherapist consultants and our in-house team, we’ve put together 120 hours of prerecorded psychotherapy lectures for young people who are about to give up their time to TimeShare. We feed the lectures into them — as the “Matrix” folk fed jiu-jujitsu into Neo so that, — when they wake up next morning, five or however many years older — they’ve learned how to do the things they knew they had to do. Manage time and emotions. Face their mortality and prioritise their goals. Distinguish what, in their own scheme of life, is goal from what is distraction.

Does it work? Can the wisdom of years really be transferred overnight from tapes you listen to as you sleep into lived action? Our plan was to find out via a tiny beta-trial.

They stormed our premises. The young people who wanted to give up time that, New Year’s Resolutions and tearful late-night confessions notwithstanding, they kept misspending. The old people who’d reconciled themselves to indignity after indignity, and found life — now that they had at last the final view, the right view of life — finally worth living.

They forced us to expand the participant pool for our beta trial from 50 to 100,000. Their ringleader, a 91-year-old woman with two steel knees and a colostomy bag, had her nephew hold a stun-gun to my temple. Betty wanted time. Young Ivan wanted to give it up.

Chronologue has always served the people. The people wanted to take a risk. They didn’t want to wait to see if it worked. Who were we to impede the course of human progress with cowardly red tape?

Now, two years into the beta trial, the old people are loving their extra time. Do some of them regret taking it? Many of our older participants are frail, ailing, and demented to varying degrees. But they know that killing themselves won’t give back the remainder of the time they’ve purchased to the young person they’ve downloaded the time from. So they exert themselves into making the most of their extra years.

Of course we’ve got our complainers. There’s a chap who’s been grumbling about our mechanics since the day he signed up. He makes a soapbox of every tea-break, sowing discontent. But he’s in a tiny minority.

Just this morning, on my facility visit, I had a man with purple gums and fingertips, no teeth, and grandchildren all dead in the war walk down the garden path a half-inch a step to thank me. To tell me this week’s Personal Bests, and to breathe on me in his wheezing laughter the odour of slow, gentle, sweet decay.

As for the young people, giving up their time, hoping to sleep through the age of folly and wake up in the age of wisdom, does it work? It’s too soon to tell.

I thought and thought, in circles as mad as an electron’s flight path, until I lay in bed, stunned and dizzy, sure that I was either a genius or mad. Through all that chaos, my thoughts kept circling back to one conviction. The problem is that I have too much time.

In 2071, Khadija Hasan was interviewing Stephen Webster. Webster was discussing his Oscar win and his best friend’s suicide. “We never knew he was struggling,” said Webster. “It burns me up when someone’s really struggling and they’d rather die than reach out.”

Hasan asked Webster if he’d ever struggled with depression.

Webster shook his head. “I don’t have the time to be depressed. I’ve got kids in school, a company to run... and two alimonies to pay,” he laughed. “Idon’t have time to be depressed.”

I’d struggled with depression for years, tried all the talk therapy and New Age rituals and experimental drugs there are. Webster’s remark stuck like a splinter in the marrow of my brain. On the one hand, he was being insensitive: speaking of mental illness as if it were garbage you’d forgotten to take out. You just have to keep busy and then you won’t have time to be ill. As if being ill were a pastime! It was a ridiculous perspective, and I knew it, we all know it. But it stuck in my brain.

I looked Webster up. I realised that behind all his massive successes, he’d had a hard life. He never spoke of it. And after that interview, I kept waiting for him to break down, to stop being so busy and start being real. I kept thinking, “You’ve got to resolve your issues. Sometime they’ll catch up with you. You can pretend to be tough, bury yourself in work, leave yourself no time to think but, some day, it’ll all come flooding out, and you’ll be a mess sobbing on the stage in the middle of your 78th consecutive night performing Cats on Broadway.”

But Webster never broke down. He died at 89: popular, critically acclaimed, father of two successful actresses, a philanthropist for controversial causes that scared other celebrities, his name untarnished. The idol of his generation and of mine. After seven years of chemotherapy, he opted for euthanasia.

So I looked, with his sceptical eyes, at myself.

If I had a child to feed, would I have time to shop compulsively, then punish myself with one meal a day for weeks? If I had a job I was paid to go to instead of classes my parents were paying for me to take, would I have time to mourn my guinea pig for weeks? If I had to work a job to put dinner on the table, would I let Yvette treat me like something the cat dragged in months after I’d decided to break up with her?

My first therapist told me that every problem behaviour has a specific solution. You’ve got to work out what rejection, in your infancy, makes you think you have to starve yourself to be lovable. What twisted inner voice tells you that you deserve to love only sick women? What unspoken need does smoking fill in your life? Once you know, you can begin to solve.

But what I learned from pursuing Stephen Webster down the rabbit-hole is that many problem behaviours also have one general solution: just take away time.

Fill, fill, fill your life with things to do. Boot-camp your mind into shape. Old injures won’t have time to heal in the sunlight, but buried deep they’ll be forced to scar over. You’ll manage to keep going, doing a little more every day. The old insecurities will lurk in the steel safe in the basement of your brain. Leave them there. Jump out of bed the moment your eyes open. Fall into bed only when you’re exhausted. Let the sickness of thinking and thinking and thinking gather dust in the attic. Stop thinking and start doing. Don’t wait till you’ve scythed your way out of your electron-cloud brain fog. Just do it.

And if you still can’t?

January 01, 2081. I’m about to upload seven years of my life into Chronologue’s TimeShare server. I’ve opted for closed transfer: I won’t see who gets my years. Some old woman: I wish her joy of my years.

And me? Tomorrow I’ll wake up. I’ll be 42. The age when, Grandma said, Mum finally came to her senses. Plus I’ll have the benefit of the therapy-sessions they’ll upload into me. “Truth be told, I was just the same,” Grandma told me when I was a kid. “Scatterbrained, self-destructive... Maybe it’s something I passed on to your mum. Maybe everyone’s like that.”

Grandma lived to be 120. Grandma won the Nobel Prize. How much I could achieve, if I could sleep through the dizzying, worse-than-useless, stumbling-in-circles imbecility of my youth!

I’m terrified. Tomorrow I’ll wake up, and the seven years I’ll have aged will be a blank. But why does a blank terrify me? The Chronologue psychologists told me: it’s because I realise that, if I stumble on this way, my whole life could be a blank. Sleeping through seven years overnight is a small price to pay to avoid seven years of running around in circles bat-blind, stubbing my toes against the same stones.

Grandma said there are no shortcuts. But this isn’t a shortcut. This has a price. This will work. Won’t it?

Tomorrow I’ll still be me. Just better than I know how to be.