Saturday was an easy day for both of us, in so far as I was free from all former commitments to start with and so was Alice. However, Sunday we woke again under different circumstances: I’d left my wife and my two beautiful daughters and suffered from heavy compunctions. I lived with Alice in her little dark studio apartment, and waited for the possibility to move into a house by the seaside.
And Mondays we had Giselle with us, our beloved Monday child, who didn’t exist in the other days of the week. Once I came home from the city with a pale-colored dress in my hand and started to show it to Alice.
“Look! Is Gise home yet? This is just what she’s been talking about!”
Only after seeing Alice’s expression, mixed with sorrow and amusement, did I realize my mistake.
“Oswald,” Alice said tenderly, “your idea is very nice, but it’s not Monday today! Giselle will only be home in six days. You’ll have to buy the same dress again in Monday, there’s no one who can use it today.”
This kind of life was very exhausting. Keeping track of the correct day of the week was difficult but necessary—slips usually had their consequences. When we went out, we met several people who played different roles in different days of the week. The man Alice knew in Mondays as a good friend and a detective chief superintendent, was an alcoholic petty criminal in Tuesdays, who tried to sponge money off her for booze. He got increasingly difficult to get rid of, when Alice one Tuesday inadvertently went over to him and greeted him cordially for a friendly chat, thinking it was Monday. For me it was difficult to remember on which day Hannelore was my friend’s wife whom I ought to greet with polite kindness; when she was my own ex-wife, who’d spit in my eye whenever I didn’t remember to dodge her; and when again she was a complete stranger I’d never even met.
We lived in a state of constant confusion, and the words “nervous breakdown” began to appear more and more often in our discussions. However, some generally inexplicable incidents became understandable when the explanation could be sought in the other days of the week. One strange incident occurred in three separate weekdays: a woman known to be altogether respectable killed a man who’d been a total stranger to her. By all accounts the man was a decent family father and a reputable citizen. In Friday the woman, a salesperson in a store’s kitchen appliances department, stabbed the man dead when he asked the price of a knife set he’d found. The woman managed to stab him with five of the six blades in the set, before people came to the rescue. In Saturday the same woman saw the man step in front of her car on the pedestrian crossing and, instead of hitting the brakes, she stepped on the gas. In Sunday she worked as a waitress in a little restaurant, and put a strong poison in the man’s mussel soup, knowing he was a regular and exactly what it was he ate. According to eyewitnesses the woman had said, “It’s on the house,” before the man dropped to the floor, frothing at the mouth.
The incidents caused a great sensation and amazement in their respective days of the week. “A senseless murder!” the headlines shrieked. “Murderess cannot explain her actions!” I wished I could have explained to people, and especially to the woman herself, the reason for what had happened. In Thursday the man was a degenerate who’d completely lost control of his life. He’d been drinking wine and taking diverse drugs when he raped and murdered the woman’s fifteen-year old daughter. When she heard of her daughter’s death, the woman went mad and threw herself off the roof of an apartment building. It was clear that Thursday’s events had entered her consciousness through dreams in the other weekdays, too, and drove her to commit those seemingly inexplicable bloody crimes.
Completing the Continuity
We couldn’t go on with a life like that anymore. The constant necessity to adjust to all the changes drained all our resources. We decided we ought to unify the continuity, and seal up the rest of the seams. We needed to make the different days of the week as similar as possible. In all the weekly days we would move into our one white house by the seaside and exclude all the rest of the daily changing world.
There was something very ironic about the situation. Since my childhood I detested the idea that in every one of life’s choices I had to be satisfied with just one of many alternatives. I found it altogether intolerable that choosing one alternative automatically meant forsaking all others. How difficult it was to choose just one chocolate from an entire box when there were so many different sweets to choose from, each the most tempting one in its own way. How difficult to choose one of two interesting girls, and turn one’s back on the other! How painful to stay with the one you chose, when every day you met new women, each one fascinating in her own special way.
So many times I wished for a chance to choose all the alternatives. I was always the “Hesitant Henry” who’d have wanted both to eat his cake and save it. And now it was possible. I lived six (or seven) separate lives. For instance, in Friday I was married to the sweet and kind Marissa, yet in all other days I could live with my Alice, technically without even being guilty of adultery. I really could both eat and save the aforementioned cake.
And yet, when I finally realized it was indeed possible, I still chose the same alternative every time—the life with my Lady Librarian!
In each day of the week we wrote our book, caused a sensation, got rich, and built ourselves a white house by the seaside and, but for Alice’s trips to the Library, left it only in exceptional cases. We no longer invited our friends for a visit. We’d become tired of keeping track of what each person was in which weekday, and what we were talking about in which day. In Friday, to complete the continuity, we forced ourselves to break the hearts of Marissa and Mr. Boumgarden, and broke our own hearts at the same time; but we did that for each other’s sake. Besides, without those hard decisions we’d have inevitably lost our minds.
Giselle remained a problem for a long while; her one-day-only-life was a constant source of confusion for us. Eventually we had the idea of furnishing her room exactly the same way in every weekday, so that the house looked similar throughout the week. Then we could pretend that our Giselle was away on a trip, except in Mondays. We missed Giselle very much, and when she woke up in Monday mornings, she always found us in her room. She thought us very odd. She’d last seen us the evening before when going to bed, and just could not understand the overflowing “good mornings” she received.
Then she got hold of the book we’d written about the Theory of Weekdays. We tried to protect her from it, but the effort was destined to fail. She considered the theory for a while, then presented us with a very sensible question: “Dad. Mum. If you have seven separate lives, why is it that I have just the one?”
Multidiurnals and Monodiurnals
In our book Is Every Day Indeed A Tuesday? (in the Monday version: Is Every Day Indeed A Monday?), we present the hypothesis that every person has seven separate lives, which can be more or less perfectly recollected through the technique we have developed. In the other days’ versions we were, however, able to include a theory specifying our original idea even further: the Theory of Multidiurnal and Monodiurnal People.
At the time, it seemed there were two kinds of people: those to be found in every day of the week, and those who existed in only one weekday. When we studied the issue, we made an important observation: the decisive factor differentiating monodiurnals from multidiurnals was their birth dates. Those born after the year 2137 were all monodiurnals. I and Alice and all the others who proved to be multidiurnals were born before the year 2137, Marissa and Giselle and a lot of other monodiurnals after this time point. Something special must have happened around the year 2137, something that divided the lives of people alive at that time into seven separate lines.
We tested the idea by researching old newspapers published on different days of the week. The newest papers no longer featured the old-fashioned exact dates, but the older editions did. (The purely technical matter that before the Great Calendar Reform, one and the same day of the week had seven different names alternating in a certain order, felt
a little funny. So for instance the old newspapers we studied in Thursday were also named after the other weekdays. Later on, it understandably occurred to us that the Great Calendar Reform might just have been an effort by anonymous authorities to hide the sevenfold differentiation of the time line. With the concepts becoming confused enough, it’d be difficult to raise the issue.)
The newspapers confirmed that the year 2137 was the turning point: to be exact, December 12th in 2137. Until that date, the daily news of each day was identical. In the newspapers of December 12th, a small fire at the Time Research Institute is mentioned—the article including a statement to the press by the Institute’s director. According to the statement, no dangerous situation ensued at any stage.
However, the next day’s papers already differed in every weekday. Not too much, though. At first the differences could be found in small events such as bicycle accidents, brawls, slight differences in picture angles, even in the wording of articles. But gradually the differentiated timelines began to diverge more and more—a consequence of even the smallest decisions naturally accumulating and forming longer chains. For instance, when Tuesday’s newspaper reported on the decision to build a new shopping center in a certain place, Friday’s paper had a small article about a residential home for people with disabilities on the same site, while Monday’s paper included notices for the shows at a movie theater at exactly the same address.
The conclusion was quite obvious: the accident at the Time Research Institute divided everyone’s lives into seven separate lines. Those born after the accident at the TRI were usually born in one day of the week only; the child’s parents naturally living separate lives in the different time lines.
The opportunity to live seven different lives was thus given to just a select group of humans. I don’t really know about cats. Starback found us in all the days of the week. This doesn’t fit the overall picture, since as a young cat Starback was obviously born after the decisive date. I wondered about this quite a while. Finally I came to a kind of conclusion, although I haven’t had the strength to consider it very critically: it’s said that cats have nine lives, so perhaps the belief is true. Perhaps all cats, by their very nature, live nine parallel lives, while we multidiurnal humans have, as an exception to our species, reached seven of them!
I still don’t know which of us have finally been happier—the monodiurnals or the multidiurnals. Living seven parallel lives hasn’t been a blessing for everyone. When our book was published, sensible people started behaving in completely irrational and irresponsible ways. Families broke up, children were orphaned. The book had been a way for us to share our exciting observations with the whole world and to maybe earn some money for our new life. It never occurred to us, not once, that it might derail the lives of so many people. In hindsight, of course, we ought to have expected it. Alice and I, however, never thought the matter through as far as that. Perhaps we should have done so.
Well, the Weekday Theory also brought some people a lot of happiness, but to a considerable majority, it only brought grief, confusion, and fury. The situation between Hannelore and myself was repeated almost identically thousands of times. The most unfortunate situations involved couples where the one was multidiurnal and the other monodiurnal. Often the multidiurnal partners remembered their other, better lives and went in search of the loved ones they knew existed in other weekdays, while the monodiurnals became even lonelier than before. And even when the multidiurnal one stayed with the monodiurnal partner, the most incredible dramas of jealousy took place. The monodiurnal one had no way of controlling what the partner was doing in the other weekdays.
I had it easier than most; after all, in every day of the week I loved the same woman, Alice. When less lucky people remembered the other weekdays, eventually reached their continuity, and noticed themselves loving seven different people simultaneously, the therapists were up to their ears in work.
The city filled with tragicomic tales. There was a bishop who became aware of his totally immoral life as a pimp, male prostitute, and rock musician in the other days. There was a judge, reputed to be quite harsh, who in all the other days of the week lived the life of a mafia godfather. There were white racists who woke up in other days in the arms of partners of different races, their children noisy beyond the bedroom door. There were Thursday’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, who worked in the porn business in Fridays, and in TV factories in Saturdays. There were fierce enemies who found out they were friends or even lovers. The surprises of the other days of the week were sometimes happy, sometimes shocking, depending on the viewpoint: a certain Monday bum, for instance, had a pleasant surprise when he discovered he was Tuesday’s chairman of the board in a bank; but the Tuesday’s banker didn’t find the realization that he was Monday’s bum quite as happy a surprise.
The most sensitive ones succumbed to desperate deeds; others tried to reconcile the separate parts of their identity as well as they could. It caused a great sensation in Thursday when the mafia godfather gave in to his deeply moral judge self and arranged for almost five hundred members of his organization, including himself, to be sent down with long jail sentences.
At times, the social order seemed close to imminent collapse. Muggings and murders increased explosively. Psychiatrists saw an enormous number of new patients. As a diagnostic concept, “schizophrenia” acquired completely new dimensions. Throughout all this, our book was printed and bought in huge amounts in all the weekdays.
Things were thus altogether confused, but my Lady Librarian and I lived our sheltered, suddenly well-to-do new life, in a white house by the seaside. Sometimes we received roses and thank-you-cards from people who’d found a purpose in their lives after reading our book. More often, though, we received homicidal threats from deserted spouses, orphaned children, people who’d lost their zest for life, and from religious fundamentalists who attacked every new idea on principle. The guards we employed made sure no one got near us, with either a bunch of roses or a loaded gun. The armed bodyguards would’ve also followed Alice to the Library, where she insisted on working, very much afraid that in her absence the printed books would be destroyed on the sly. Alice, however, didn’t wish to spoil the Library atmosphere with gunmen.
The Great Time Flood
The Theory of Weekdays is now almost forgotten. Not counting the cases preserved in back-vortexes of time, all the multidiurnals are by now either dead or with one foot in their grave; the world belongs to the monodiurnals again. The multidiurnals still left might just as well be monodiurnals, the chains of days having broken again. Monodiurnal or multidiurnal people’s lives certainly remain just as confused, in whatever day of the week they’re living now.
I’ve already said something about the time turbulences in the Maple River and the fates of people who dived into them. After the river was fenced off, things were kept orderly for some time. Now and then, however, the most curious ones cut holes into the fence to make their time jumps. The people of the city started getting used to the river’s time turbulences. They bragged unashamedly about it in all the guidebooks advertising the city, and the time turbulence was put forward everywhere as the official Eighth Wonder of the World. But then something happened, which later came to be called the Great Time Flood. Somebody had the bright idea of throwing dynamite into the river, and as a consequence the turbulences rose up from the river and spread throughout the city as invisible rivulets. The capricious tugs of the time turbulences continuously played all kinds of practical jokes on people, some amusing, others merely cruel.
The city has now officially been classified as unfit for living. Every inhabitant has been allotted a new home in one of the less dangerous neighboring cities. Except for occasional adventurers, extremists, and researchers, tourists are no longer seen in the city. But have the inhabitants left? Mostly not; after all, your hometown will always be home.
When children go out into the street, they might step into a time turbulence or puddle, and return home either
a couple of seconds after leaving it or decades later. Workers might go on working overtime until the sun finally burns out. This will probably be the case of two employees at a small watchmaker’s in the city center. Their shop was flooded by an exceptionally strong back-vortex—scholars call such phenomena “time freezes.” Housewives could go shopping in a department store that’s been imperceptibly polluted with time turbulences, and stay there a whole lifetime without noticing it. And when at last they step out one day with their shopping bags to return home, they are likely to find their children in the city’s retirement homes or in its graveyards. But still, people haven’t moved away, they just adapted. You don’t just leave your hometown. I don’t know whether it’s stupidity, defiant pride, genuine love for one’s native place, or a fear of change. Myself, I’ve stayed mostly because I’m stupid and too lazy to change my abode.
Alice and I frequented a department store called “Madame.” Once we were on our way there when we heard it had been blockaded by time. We immediately went over to observe the phenomenon. Through the windows you could see that the store was filled with totally immobile shoppers who, from their own viewpoint, were still moving about normally. An observer patient enough would, perhaps, have seen the customers moving ever so slowly. And if you could manage to stand absolutely immobile by the window long enough, the people inside might’ve noticed you as a quick flash. There were placards attached to the windows, with messages to the victims of the time-freeze: “COME OUT AT ONCE, YOU ARE IN A BACK-VORTEX!” The doors to the store were sealed and warnings posted in front of the building. Unfortunately it was, and still is, impossible to help the people trapped inside. The first of them will get out just in time to see their children retire. Even if one of them might stumble onto what’s going on, and look out the window, just turning her head will take half a decade from an outsider’s point of view.
It Came from the North Page 26