The only physical sensation I can compare fading to is the feeling of falling that startles you awake when you are close to sleep. With fading, too, the body reacts with a jolt, resisting the change. It took me months to wear down the part of my brain where that specific response was wired.
These days, fading comes as easy to me as blinking my eyes, which is nearly the last thing that still comes easy to me.
Apparently when I’m fading I look just as if I were asleep. My mom fired my nurse when I started experimenting with fading because she thought that she was slipping me sleeping pills on the sly. But even after Herman took over, I was still spending hours knocked out cold every day. My mom likes Herman. From the way she chuckles at his jokes (Herman fights the debasing nature of our daily interactions with unbreaking good cheer), I think she has a crush on him.
—
My mom was worried about sleeping pills because of some theatrical things I said in the weeks after the accident. But I never really wanted to die. My suicidal fantasies at the time reminded me of those I entertained as a teenager, after a love rejection. These fantasies let me squeeze a few drops of melancholy out of an inescapable situation. They were a pleasurable alternative to getting what I wanted: a girlfriend, my body back. They passed the time, but like everything else, they grew boring.
—
After the accident, I moved back into my family’s apartment, where my mom had been living alone since my dad died. They did not put me in my childhood bedroom, which faces the courtyard at the back of our building, but in the larger bedroom where my parents used to sleep. Here, the window opens on the corner of Viale Monte Nero and Via Anfossi. The plane trees down Monte Nero wave at me in the lightest breeze. The tram slithers past them every ten minutes. There is a café right underneath my window, and while I can’t look down at its tables, the noise of conversation sometimes carries up to me, especially in the summer.
My bed is by the window, positioned to let me catch as long a view of the street as possible. It’s not a clever place for the bed to be, and it forces people to squeeze past me whenever they need to get to the built-in wardrobe, but so be it. At least they can squeeze.
—
I can blink, talk, chew, and swallow by myself. For nearly everything else I need Herman’s help.
My mom flew an American doctor to Milan at one point to enroll me in trials for cutting-edge therapies. The doctor was incredibly happy the day his machines recorded a twitch in my arm muscles. I did not feel any different. I did not feel anything.
He explained what a groundbreaking paper he was going to write using the data he had just collected. My mom asked him what she was supposed to do with a paper. He didn’t understand.
That was the last attempt we made to “treat” my condition.
I have a computer on a table at the foot of my bed with a program that shows text scrolling down the screen. People can set up the program so I can read books. But I’ve always been a distracted reader, now more than ever with those plane trees waving at me, and I’m constantly having to call people in to rewind the text. Often, I just make do with a missing paragraph.
There’s a TV on the wall opposite my bed, a massive flat screen hooked up to a couple of gaming consoles. After he’s fed and cleaned me, Herman sits down with me for an hour or so and plays games. At first, he was playing games for me, asking me what he should do, doing his best to follow my commands, but he just didn’t understand the fantasy games I like – he would always shoot fireballs at innocent peasants – and being so close, and yet so far, from those games was too much to take. I asked him to play games he likes instead. I was happy just to watch.
He mostly plays FIFA, which I never really went for. Our gaming hour, every morning Monday to Saturday, is still one of my favorite things.
—
A fact that fills me not so much with bitterness but bafflement is how, even before the accident, I was mostly housebound. I went on holiday every couple of years, short city breaks with girlfriends or high school friends. I saw the occasional concert. I visited my mom.
Most of the time, however, I spent at home. I worked as a freelance translator, typing away at my dining table, sometimes in bed. I read, played video games, and dreamed of unlikely developments in my life (finding lasting love, becoming a famous writer) that would turn me from a disappointment to myself to an outgoing and confident person with real friends, meaningful interests, and a deep understanding of the world.
If only I could still use my arms, I find myself thinking at least twelve times a day, my life would look exactly like it did before. Sometimes the thought makes me laugh so hard that if my mom or Herman are in the room, they’re at first startled and then amused. Sometimes it sends me into the blackest rage.
—
I call it fading because any other term I can think of, shifting or visiting or departing, suggests a process of moving through space, which fading certainly isn’t. Fading isn’t a brilliant word either. No words I can think of will do justice to the experience, probably because no great writer has ever described it before, and I have no one to pilfer from.
—
The first time I faded, I did so by accident. I don’t remember what I’d been doing, but suddenly I was watching Herman playing FIFA. I was sure that it had been late afternoon, not morning, just a few seconds before. What’s more, I’d already seen the match Herman was playing. He’d played it that same day. He was taking Inter through the Champions League semifinals, and this was his return game against Liverpool. He was going to lose.
“Poor Inter,” he said, like I knew he would. “Even in games it never wins.”
This did not feel like déjà vu, but madness. I tried desperately to alert Herman that I was having some kind of episode, except the noise I heard didn’t come from me, but from the exact same spot I was occupying in the room.
“There’s always tomorrow, Herman.” Which is what I’d told him that morning.
At this point, I must have scared myself back to my present, because it was afternoon again. The light outside the window was unmistakable. My plane trees were staring at me in defiance, challenging me to question the most obvious, most cruel fact in all the world, which is that now can only ever be now.
—
My best guess is that I’m able to traverse time because I am egregiously incapable of traversing space, the way a blind person will develop a refined sense of hearing and heightened sensitivity in their fingertips.
Fading backward into the past is much easier than fading forward. I suspect that’s because I have already lived in the past, and can slip back there with relative confidence, like a traveler finding its way down a dark but familiar path. The future feels like walking uphill. Fading a single day in that direction requires three or four times the amount of energy, concentration, or whatever force fading takes out of me than fading one day in the past.
There’s a limit to how far I’m able to fade. The more I stretch myself, the wearier I get, until I just can’t push any further. For the past, the limit is something like 130 or 150 years. For the future, it can’t be much more than 30.
—
When I fade, I can only move through time, never space. I am always in this room.
The room, however, is not always here.
—
The furthest reaches of the past are my favorite place to visit, or at least the place that grants me the simplest, most untroubled escape.
The late nineteenth century looks nothing like what I had imagined. The first time I traveled here I was expecting to see horse-drawn carriages in place of cars and trams outside my window. Ladies in bell-shaped skirts and top-hatted gentlemen strolling under the plane trees, under the calculating gaze of barefooted ruffians.
But there was no one outside my window. There was, in fact, no window at all.
My apartment’s neighborhood is regarded as fairly central in the present. During my university years at Milan Cattolica, I was the only student in my class who had grown up a couple of subway stops away from campus. And yet in the late 1800s Milan didn’t reach this far. From my position in the sky (my bedroom is on the third floor), I can see the city walls, grim and massive with wide walkways on top, and the sharp corners of the diamond-shaped bastion near Porta Romana in the distance. Outside the walls, and all around me, stretch fields and meadows, some overgrown, some arranged in neat rows of corn and beans. I can see two farmhouses, one far in the distance with pens full of pigs, and the other, much nearer, with chickens running through its dusty yard. An old man brings his chair out in that yard every morning. Like me, he watches the carts going up and down the road to the city’s gates. He breathes in the clean air and the interesting stenches of the country. He studies the shimmering motions of a starling murmuration in the sky.
—
My building was erected sometime in the 1920s. The first owner of my apartment was a businessman from the Veneto who used it as a pied-à-terre on his business trips to Milan. I rarely travel to his time. He is a sour alcoholic with a nasty scowl. What sort of person wears a scowl when they’re home alone?
After the businessman’s death, Enrico moved in. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with a serious expression and the vaguest hint of a frown always creasing his forehead. The frown gives me the notion, otherwise unfounded, that he may be related to the Veneto businessman: a nephew, perhaps, who inherited the property. In his early twenties, Enrico studies Law. I like to visit this time and watch him at his desk, which is under the window, close to where I am. He sits for hours with his textbooks, from mid-afternoon until he’s burned out a whole candle, without rising from his chair and without taking any food.
Only a fraction of this time is actively spent on the textbooks. He is almost as smitten with the plane trees outside the window as I am. Often, he will pull a novel by Verga out of a desk drawer, read one page, and put it away, only to take it out ten minutes later to read the whole thing. Some nights, after he’s stared at the wall in perfect immobility for a while, he takes a piece of paper out of another drawer and writes to Laura. Short, neat letters, heartfelt if steeped in youthful self-commiseration, and a little indebted to the soppy novels he reads. I think of your face as I waste another candle. I wish I could call on you without causing a scene.
Her father does not approve of the relationship. I believe her family is much better off than Enrico’s, the type of old Lombard nobility that looks down on a future lawyer as a pitiful upstart.
The night, years later, when Enrico takes Laura home for the first time is perhaps my favorite moment in all of time. He leads her into the bedroom by the hand and they sit down on the edge of the bed. They bounce awkwardly as the mattress is springy and covered in too many blankets. She looks into his face, at once happy and exhausted from years of waiting. He looks around the room, seeing for the first time the grimy smears on the windowpanes, the coating of dust on every surface. He is mortified. She has to put her hand on his cheeks to get him to look at her.
Sex is something I miss with such ardor my longing is incandescent, cauterized. Unspoiled by envy or spite. There is nothing pornographic in watching Enrico and Laura make love, probably because they do not know they are being watched, and so do not put up a performance except for each other. It feels luminous instead to be commuting with other humans. To share the treasure of one of life’s indescribable moments.
Because those moments are not only rare but always short, even though when we traverse them, we feel certain they will never end. Before too long, Enrico is sent off to war: to Africa first, from which he comes back with a debilitating gut infection, and with a stern, fixed gaze that all of Laura’s fussing does not manage to break. Seemingly as soon as he gets better, he is shipped off to Russia. He looks more like himself when he comes back this time, skeletal-thin and droopy-shouldered but nonetheless able to smile, perhaps because he knows that the war won’t last much longer. The fall of fascism, the German occupation, the eventual liberation of Milan: these things enter the household via conversations and newspapers, and I’m shocked that events schoolchildren will study for decades barely manage to make a ripple in the daily routine of the people living through them. It is not the fate of nations that worries Enrico and Laura, but where in Milan one can still get butter. Whether Laura’s family firm will manage to recoup its losses. The prospect that Enrico will be asked to fight once more for the moribund fascist republic.
The years after the war are long, and hard to read. Most nights, Laura and Enrico fall asleep holding each other. Sometimes they bicker over meaningless nonsense. A snide comment made at a dinner party. Laura’s father enduring efforts to humiliate Enrico. Enrico works for the man’s firm, a compromise that was necessary to ensure his acceptance into her family. In time, he comes to blame his father-in-law, and by extension Laura, for the loss of his dream of a career in Law – although judging by how hard he used to study, I think this is an unfair assessment.
Enrico grows bold in voicing his contempt. Nasty, even. Laura absorbs all his spite and works on the tough emotional arithmetic of balancing out the opposing forces shooting at her from the people she loves. One day, Enrico says one word too many, and the balance slips. There are weeks of silence, interspersed with evenings of relieved, exhilarated truce. Stretches of peace hiding the seeds of the next quarrel.
What I wish I could tell them during these moments of misery: but you do have the treasures, too! The first night you spent together, and the other moments of happiness you must have lived in all the other rooms of your life. The fact that you can’t travel to them, that you are stuck in the now, does not mean they are gone.
One weekday in his forties, Enrico comes home in the middle of the morning, a time when neither he nor Laura are ever in. There is a woman with him, younger than he is. He leads her to the bed by the hand and they sit down together. He kisses her immediately, almost in a rush.
This, too, is an indescribable moment. I do not know if Enrico shared many more with this woman: she never reappears in the apartment. If he did, I’m sure they shared the misery, too.
—
Fading saved my life, or at least saved me from turning into a rusted shell, which is what I became for a while after the accident. Snapping at my mother and my first nurse when they didn’t obey my requests fast enough or did so too zealously. Soiling myself for the pleasure of giving them something to do. Pulling a sour face at my mom’s teary smiles.
It was a way of exerting pressure on other people, one of the last ways left to me. I can see how someone in my position could become addicted to such cruelty.
—
I don’t spend much time in the future. I particularly avoid the years immediately following my present, because I am terrified of learning the exact moment when my mother passes away, or when Herman leaves me for a less depressing job. The moment my heart starts racing and then stops, and I’m unable to call for help.
I don’t know if I could spend any more time in the present if I knew how it ends.
What I can say is that I won’t be in this apartment twelve years from now. What this means, I’m not sure. A new family moves in then, a doctor from Ecuador married to a Sicilian publicist. They live here until the birth of their second child. They are happy enough, although viciously stressed. They share a few indescribable moments and vast amounts of misery.
The knowledge of how inextricable these two things are – how every life I’ve witnessed seems to contain so few of the former, lost like sunken treasure in a sea of the latter – strikes me at times as maddening, and other times as the greatest of consolations.
After the family moves out, a man called Ciro moves in. He reminds me a lot of the Veneto businessman who lived in the apartment when it was first built. He does not seem very happy, but neither is he ever miserable. He surrounds himself with gadgets beyond my understanding, and he has frequent visitors, women and men who do not seem to be his friends, but with whom he trades various forms of pleasure.
Then something happens to him. Twenty-two years into the future, Ciro goes missing for about fourteen months. The only person who enters the room during this period is the housekeeper, brusquely vacuuming the middle of the floor.
A team of burly tattooed men eventually appears to remove all furniture from the room, bumping it against the walls and threshold. They seem to be in a hurry.
The next day, Ciro comes back.
He does so on top of a bed that is carried inside by two men with protruding guts and sallow complexions. The look of people who are overworked and eat unhealthy food. They put the bed down in the exact spot where my parents’ bed, and Enrico and Laura’s, used to be. (Still is, really.)
Ciro’s eyes are closed. Thin wires come out of his shaved skull, his arms, and his chest, all of them connected to compact machines that one of the men puts down in the otherwise barren room. Tubes emerge from under his blanket, attached to plastic bags that empty and fill up in the course of the day. A nurse walks in every two days to bring new bags and take the old ones away.
No doctor ever comes to check on Ciro. He does not look comatose to me, nor quite asleep, either.
Ciro is still lying in his bed at the 30-year mark where fading becomes too onerous for me to stretch any further. I don’t know if, like me, he had some terrible accident, or if in his time everybody who can afford it looks and lives exactly like he does.