Chronicles From The Future: The amazing story of Paul Amadeus Dienach

Jaeger let him observe the lesson for a while. Then I showed him my first writings. I had already started to write and I continued writing in his presence. I thought he’d be impressed by the fact that I had recovered my writing skills even from the first days, but Jaeger had already informed him about my past research on Ibsen, about which I had talked to him as well.

“This is not Andreas’ handwriting,” was the only thing Stefan said.

Apart from the superior Ilectors

, only four other people knew about Northam’s unique case: the two physicians, Ilector Jaeger and Stefan. I pleaded with Jaeger to keep it a secret and not to let me become an object of curiosity in the eyes of the whole world. He promised, but he also added something that I didn’t understand: “The Valley of the Roses will have the last word; it’s up to them to decide how long this will be kept a secret from the rest of the world.”

As for Stefan, he will start coming regularly in a few days; he has much to teach me about Northam and his life. He says that I need to know all that before I expose myself to this new world. The words that Jaeger said, shortly before Stefan’s departure, come to mind: “In any case, Andreas Northam’s family and friends will seek him out. Since the news of his recovery has become known, what’s going to stop him from going back to his normal life?”

When we were left alone, I asked Jaeger to tell me what the Ilectors

had been saying about all this and I told him what happened that night when the young physician saw me crying at the thought of my mother. “Try to put yourself in my shoes for a moment because, trust me, in such a bizarre and horrible situation it’s worth considering both sides. Your course of life flows normally and unobstructed, at the same pace as always. For you, Northam is the one who’s changed. For you, this is a case of ‘personality shift’ of a man who was revived after fifteen minutes of clinical death, a very rare parapsychological phenomenon associated with glossolalia. Your friend is a man who once was one of yours and now speaks a dead language. But I haven’t changed at all. What I see is a piece of the future. Taking that into consideration, how can I not think that I’ve lost my mind? That I’ve gone mad?”

I was sobbing uncontrollably. I was utterly at sea because I could not believe that in there might be the slightest rift in the solid axes of time and space that I knew. The rift had to be somewhere inside me. I had to be the paranoid one!

“Only you can tell me the truth. If it’s been two thousand years, like the young physician told me, then I’m going mad. You can’t imagine how fresh, how recent the memory of going to sleep is in my mind; it feels like yesterday. I could hear my mother’s breathing; she was sleeping in the next room. I can almost see the basin of water next to my bed and the fringed towel with the blue-green embroidery on it. It’s as if she is in front of me right now.”

I stared at him in agony, but Jaeger made no attempt to avoid my gaze. He could understand most of my German. “I don’t think,” he said holding his gaze steady, “that hiding even the tiniest vestige of truth from you will help to still your heart but, trust us, we know much more than you do. We don’t live in the times of Descartes and Kant anymore. Many things have changed. But not everything can be measured solely on the basis of the intellect and constricts of the mere human brain. Are you absolutely sure, for example, that at the time you went to sleep, as you say, Andreas Northam did not yet exist? And are you absolutely sure that, right at this moment, your mother has ceased to exist?”

His incredible response struck me less than it would have a few days ago when it would have seemed inconceivable for me to process. Now, what brought tears to my eyes was the way this great man spoke to me, in such a different manner from the physicians. And he talked to me in my own tongue…

SLEEPLESS

August 23rd

Yesterday and today were two very quiet days. I spent the day writing or talking with Stefan in the mornings and Jaeger in the afternoons, and the night-time reading. I’ve turned into a voracious reader, a proper bookworm!

The physicians believe that trying to induce sleep artificially would be futile. Moreover, lack of sleep is neither fatal nor very harmful in my case, according to them.

At night they let me read, provided that I do it resting in bed or an armchair for at least half of the hours, and in the morning I wake up so fresh, as if I’ve slept for seven hours. Little by little I’ve started picking up their language as well, the “universal tongue” as Stefan calls it or, as I call it, “broken Anglo-Scandinavian”. This language does, however, have a certain consistency between pronunciation and writing as I can now read much more comfortably though I often need the help of a small dictionary.