Future Pasts (Prologue)

 

It was after 5.30 when he returned. The temperature was still around 40 degrees. Was it too optimistic to hope that it would drop to 30 degrees during the night and that the air conditioning could be turned off? Rain was expected for the next day. He wanted to conserve the energy stored in the house battery in case the sun took a while to return.

“I’m home!”

The house was silent except for the hum of the ventilation system.

“Dad, I’m home!”

An old man was lying on the sofa, a notebook in one hand and nothing in the other. The pencil had slipped through his fingers and was on the floor.

“Dad?”

The old man snorted lightly.

“Dad!”

He opened one eye, then the other.

“What? Oh! You’re back? Wait, were you away?”
“Yes, I went to Ms. Yamashita’s funeral.”
“Oh… That was today? Wait, Ms. Yamashita died? When did that happen?”
“Two days ago.”
“Ah, I thought I spoke to her yesterday.”
“That’s unlikely, Dad. The last time you saw her was probably two or three months ago. She didn’t go out much after her accident last summer, you know.”
“Mmm… Oh yes, I remember. She had a bad heatstroke last year, right? Yes, she did… And she died of it almost a year later? Isn’t that strange?”
“No, Dad. She didn’t die from the heatstroke one year later. Her heart just gave out.”
“Oh, I see. It reminds me of when I was a kid. Old people used to die because their hearts gave out. And then there were strokes too, the regular ones, not the heat ones. We used to call them strokes at first, and later cerebrovascular accidents; it sounded more scientific. And then there were the cancers. They became the big killers. And now it’s heatstrokes. It’s as if every generation had its own unique way of killing off its old people.”

Kei listened to his father, nodding from time to time.

People on the island talked about him as a selfless and brave young man (though he wasn’t so young anymore) for staying on to look after his aging father. At a time when the little community was gradually becoming a hospice, most people who could leave the island did so. Some suspected that he was staying because he owed his father a debt he couldn’t repay and was just waiting for the old man to die. They whispered behind his back that he would disappear the day after the old man’s funeral. Kei knew where the gossip came from. Neighbors whose children had left one day without warning, never to return. He pretended not to know about the rumors and just felt sorry for them in silence.

 

 

In truth, Kei had no intention of leaving. He loved this island as much as he loved his father. And even if he did leave, where would he go? To the main island of the archipelago? Things weren’t much better over there. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t intrigued about what went on in the cities. How much truth was there in the stories that reached the small island? Were urban areas really mostly deserted? Were the cities that, in his early childhood, had been crowded by millions of people really populated by no more than a few tens of thousands at most now?

Both ideas struck him as equally absurd. How could people in the past have lived in such cramped quarters, literally on top of each other, surrounded by concrete as far as the eye could see? And how could the same places today be almost devoid of human life? The events of his late childhood had a noticeable effect on demographics. But so much?

As for the countryside, it certainly had more resources than the islands or the cities, but it also had more dangers. Wild beasts had once again taken over the forests and were making more frequent incursions into populated areas. In the south, when the war ended, some of the invader’s troops were left behind as their homeland collapsed, but they never managed to integrate with the local population. Their children, now adults, were organized into more or less nomadic groups, most of them armed, and sometimes attacked villages and communities in the neighboring regions.

Once again, as in the previous century, the small islands of the Inland Sea were forgotten by the rest of the world. And ironically, it was their traditions of almost self-sufficient living that largely helped to protect them from the great upheavals of recent decades.

Why leave the island? Sure, life was harder than the one he remembered from childhood, but it seemed a lot easier than anywhere else he knew or even heard of.

“Kei?”
“Oh, sorry, Dad, my mind was elsewhere.”
“I read what you wrote. I made a few corrections.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Come on, I’ll show you.”

Kei could never rely on his father’s corrections. Granted, they were the old man’s memories, and his proofreading was important. However, when his father told him about the past, words usually came straight to him, unfiltered. On the other hand, when he later made changes to what his son had transcribed, they were usually much less reliable. Whether that was intentional or not, Kei couldn’t tell.

“Okay, hang on. I’ll put the kettle on. I’m a bit thirsty. I imagine you are too. Then, if you don’t mind, I’d rather you tell me how the war started.”

 

 

(to be started)

 

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