I'm Jules. On the morning of Friday, March 1, 1996, I woke up on a bench on the Blue Line platform at Damen. The night before, for me, was the last night of February 2026. I'm a data engineer. I live in Logan Square, in 2026, with Hana and our daughter June, who is four going on five.

I don't know how it happened, and I've stopped trying to explain it. Some of you think I'm a crank, and some of you think this is a story. I understand. I don't argue. Jules is my middle name, and there's no last name here; the 1996 page says why.

This page is 1999. If you're new, start at the bottom of 1996 and read up.

Sunday night. The moon was still nearly full over Milwaukee Avenue when I walked home from supper at Delia's.

I've been doing arithmetic. For three years I did it the way you pick at a scab. Tonight I did it on purpose, on the back of a repair ticket, and I'm putting it here because I want it written down somewhere outside my head.

I'm thirty-seven.

The boy is seven. He's in second grade on the Southwest Side. He can ride the red bike without the training wheels now. I don't know that. I remember it.

In 2015 he'll meet Hana. I'm not going to write how. That part is theirs.

In 2019 there's a day I'll need to be in the back pew of a church on the Southwest Side, in a tie. Nobody will know who I am. That's the right amount.

In 2021 I'll be fifty-nine, and June will be born, in the summer. She won't be mine. I want to write that plainly, because I've spent three and a half years not writing it. She'll be his: the daughter of the boy who is asleep right now, two buses from here. He'll grow up, and meet Hana, and have June, and then one Saturday in February 2026 he'll work too late, and get off the train at Damen, and sit down on a bench to wait for the next one. That's the year I turn sixty-four.

In between, somewhere, there will be a bench in Logan Square on a summer morning, and a man going gray sitting on it with a newspaper he isn't reading, and a younger man going by with a stroller, too fast, the way I did, talking to the baby about nothing. I'll know the stroller. I'll know the way he steers it with one hand. I'll keep my eyes on the paper. Maybe he'll say nice day. Maybe I'll say it is.

That will have to be enough. I've decided that it will be.

I don't do the arithmetic past the last night of February 2026. Some nights I get as far as the first of March. Then I stop, and make coffee.

Delia says I should end on something. There isn't an end. Tomorrow's Monday. Mrs. Wozniak has three machines on the bench waiting for Y2K checks, and I'll tell three more people that nothing happens. The phone is in the coffee can on the shelf, dark. I know where everything in it is.

Good night.

Last week a reader sent me a link to a page here on GeoCities.us, by a computer science professor, about the year 2026: Where Thinking Machines Are Going. She picked 2026 on purpose, to make herself be specific. I know the feeling.

I read it twice at the branch. Delia asked if I was all right, and I said I was, and went and got a drink of water.

I'm not going to tell you which of her fourteen predictions are right. I didn't tell her either. I wrote her the most careful e-mail I've written in three and a half years. I said I'd read her page, that I had my reasons for thinking she was closer than she knew, and that I couldn't say which parts. I told her to print it and put it in a drawer, because pages like hers and mine won't last.

She wrote back the next morning, and it was kind. She didn't call me a crank, though she must have wondered. She said she would print it. She asked me one thing, whether I thought she had the timing wrong, and I wrote back her own last line: until suddenly they don't.

She says she'll be sixty-nine in 2026, reading her page to see how she did. I hope it's in the drawer.

On Sunday I plugged the phone in, out of habit. The screen came up for a few seconds and went dark. It won't hold a charge any more. That's all right. I said goodbye in August.

The phone takes longer to wake up every month, and dies faster. Tonight it lasted nine minutes. I knew going in that it might be the last time, so I didn't waste any of it.

I went through the ones I'd picked, slowly, and looked at each one until I could close my eyes and still see it. June at Montrose in the yellow bucket hat. June's forehead on the train window. June under the piano. Hana at the piano, turned halfway around, saying something to me I can't hear because it's a picture. The two of us in our kitchen the spring nobody went anywhere, flour on everything, the bread coming out flat. My mother at her kitchen table in 2018, laughing, holding the good mug.

I said their names out loud. I don't do that. The screen went dark in the middle of Hana.

I have them. I have them the way you have your phone number from when you were a kid: not in a place, just in you.

Last night was the thirty-first. At 1:40 I was on the bench at Damen, for the forty-first time. Delia came, with the thermos and the cushion. She's come most months since last September.

Around two I told her it was the last time.

I've decided to do it the slow way. Thirty years, one day after another, like everybody else. It isn't giving up. It's the opposite. Every month I sat on that bench, I was waiting to leave, and you can't really live anywhere you're waiting to leave.

She said, "Good." Then she said, "I mean—" and I said I knew what she meant.

We stayed till three anyway, because it was a nice night and there was coffee left. When we got up I left the cushion on the bench. Somebody will need it.

The Apple money is gone, on purpose.

I didn't look at it for two years, like I said I wouldn't. Last month Mrs. Wozniak told me I'd better, so I did. It's a little more than three times what I put in.

I kept what I put in. That was $1,800 of dishes and IRQs, and it's mine. The rest wasn't. It was just me knowing something.

So Mrs. Wozniak had her broker sell it, and I gave the difference to Delia, and Delia set it up through the library's Friends group as a scholarship: books and bus fare for a kid from the branch going to community college, a little every year until it runs out. No name on it. Delia wanted to call it something. I said call it the Branch Scholarship. She said that's boring. I said good.

It isn't going to change anything anybody will ever read about. I checked that with myself as hard as I know how. Some kid gets books for a couple of years. That's the size of it. It's the right size.

Mrs. Wozniak's invoices live in a program from 1988 that keeps the year in two digits. Come January it's going to decide her customers have owed her money since 1900. I told her I'd write her a new one.

I wrote it in Python. Python exists! It's up to version 1.5, and nobody at the shop has heard of it. It's like running into your best friend when he's eight.

It took me four evenings. Where I'm from, I'd have typed one sentence to the assistant, "read these old invoice files and put them in a new table with four-digit years," and had it in a minute, wrong in one small place that I'd have spent an hour finding. Here every line is mine, and every mistake is mine, and I know where all of them are. I've never been so happy to write code by hand, or so slow.

Mrs. Wozniak watched me type for a while and said, "You're better at this than jumpers." It's the nicest thing she's said to me in two and a half years.

I'm not writing today.

I saw The Matrix twice, last Saturday and today. The second time I laughed out loud at the phones, and a man two rows up turned around.

Everybody in it carries a phone the size of a candy bar, and the only way out of the whole machine is to get to a ringing telephone in time, a pay phone, mostly. I sat there thinking: in 2026 you'd be stuck in there forever. There's hardly a pay phone left in the city.

It's a very good movie. I'd forgotten how good. It's about a man who wakes up and finds out the year isn't what he thought it was. I noticed that the second time too, and I didn't laugh at that part.

On Thursday Pluto crossed back outside Neptune's orbit, so it's the farthest planet from the sun again, for the first time in twenty years. Delia put it on the bulletin board by the reference desk with a paper cut-out Pluto.

I didn't have the heart to tell her. In 2006 a roomful of astronomers votes that it isn't a planet at all. June's picture books have eight planets and a little Pluto drawn off to one side, like a kid who didn't get picked.

While I'm at it: the Red Sox win the World Series in 2004. Tell somebody from Boston. They'll laugh even harder than the Cubs bar did.

It's Valentine's Day. Hana and I never did anything for it; we said it was for amateurs. Every year she left one chocolate on my keyboard anyway. Tonight I bought one chocolate and ate it at my own keyboard. It isn't the same. It's something.

Everybody who comes into the shop wants to know if their computer is Y2K. Mrs. Wozniak sells a floppy that checks, for fifteen dollars. I give away the truth for free. Nothing happens. I promise. The lights stay on, the planes land, the bank still has your money. Buy the water anyway if it makes you feel better; it's a good habit.

A woman asked me today how I could possibly be so sure. I said I've been to the year 2000. She said, "Oh, you're one of those," and bought the floppy.

Jordan retired yesterday. The whole city is in mourning for a man who is fine. Mrs. Wozniak turned the little TV to face the wall.

Stamps went up to 33 cents on Sunday. I keep a book of them in my wallet, next to the twenty I can't spend.

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Last updated Sunday, September 26, 1999.