Everything on this page was written by hand in a spiral notebook, the first thing I bought here, and typed in during October 1997, when I put this page up. I fixed the spelling. I didn't fix anything else, including how sure I was at the start that this would be over in a week. Newest is at the top. If you're new, start at the bottom.

Stavros closed at two. By three the family had pushed four tables together down the middle of the diner: his wife Eleni, their two sons, a daughter-in-law, a baby, Stavros's mother, who is ninety and speaks to me only in Greek, loudly, as if I'll catch up, and Rena, and me. There was lamb, and a round Christmas bread with a cross of dough on top, and a tin of melomakarona, honey cookies, of which I have eaten about eleven.

Stavros's mother put a cookie in my hand every time my hand was empty. At one point she said something long to me and the whole table laughed, and Eleni translated: "She says you eat like somebody who has been away."

On Friday the radio in the kitchen said Apple is buying Steve Jobs's company, and he's coming back with it. Here, Apple is the company everybody expects to go out of business. I laughed out loud over the sink, and Stavros asked what was funny. I said I know how this one ends. He said, "Everybody knows how everything ends. Wash."

At home, if home is the word, June would have been up at six. Hana would have set up the coffee the night before so all she'd have to do was push the button. There'd be too much wrapping paper, and a video call with Hana's parents where the screen froze on somebody's face in the middle of a word. I missed it so much I had to go back and wash dishes for a while in the middle of dinner. When I came back out nobody said anything. The baby was asleep. Stavros poured me coffee and said, "Next year you'll know the songs."

This is the last page of the first notebook.

The phone turned on.

It took two weeks of evenings at the diner counter after close: a power supply out of a dead computer somebody left in the alley, the cable that was in my coat pocket the night I fell asleep, with one end cut off, a borrowed meter, and a library book. I'm not going to write down how. Done wrong, it's a good way to start a fire. I went slowly, with the back door propped open and Stavros standing behind me holding the extinguisher, asking every few minutes, "This is legal?"

Nothing happened for twenty minutes. Then the screen lit up.

No Service. It's going to say that forever.

But the pictures are there. All of them. June at Montrose Beach in a yellow bucket hat, squinting. Hana asleep on the couch with a book open on her face. June again, and again, and again. And my mother, at her kitchen table in 2018, laughing at something I said that I can't remember, holding the good mug. That was the year before she died. I'm going to write that once, here, and not again.

The clock on the phone says it's 2026. It's the only thing that does.

I'm going to ration it. Once a month, on a Sunday night, twenty minutes. A battery only has so many charges in it, and I'd rather have this for years than use it up by Christmas.

Also this week the city got a new area code, 773. It's the one on my phone number. It's the first thing in 1996 that has caught up with me.

The big library downtown has computers on the internet. You sign a clipboard and get thirty minutes. I went today on my day off.

The computer dials out, and you can hear it do it, a screech and a hiss like two fax machines arguing. Then the pages come in from the top down, slowly, like somebody lowering a window shade. Most of them are gray, with blue underlined words and a little picture of a construction worker saying the page isn't finished. People have made pages about their cats, their churches, their bands, their model trains. They're very proud of them. They should be.

What there isn't is almost everything. I tried to look things up the way I would at home and kept finding nothing. No maps that talk. No video to speak of. No encyclopedia anybody can edit. None of the companies I've worked for exist yet. The search engines give you every page that happens to contain your word, which is a very honest way to do it.

It's like walking into a mall the week before it opens. The lights are on. A few stores are open and very pleased with themselves. Everything else is plywood with a sign that says COMING SOON. Where I'm from, this is where everything is: every song, every movie, your bank, your mail, your doctor, the whole contents of your life. I sat there with my thirty minutes and felt like I was visiting my own neighborhood back when it was a field.

Saturday Stavros's niece got married, and I did the Macarena with her grandmother. I already knew it, which is a strange thing to be able to say.

They did it. On Father's Day.

This is the one thing I knew for certain, the one date I'd have bet my life on. I grew up on this season. My father, who doesn't tell me much, told me about this night every time the Bulls came up, which was often, because they were the one thing we could talk about without it turning into something else.

I watched it on the TV over the counter with Stavros and Rena and six regulars. When it ended the whole diner stood up. A man I have never spoken to hugged me. Outside, every car horn in the city was going at once, people were hanging out of windows with towels and flags, and a bus went by with the driver leaning on the horn in rhythm. I stood on the sidewalk with a dish towel over my shoulder and cried a little, and nobody thought it was strange, because half the street was doing it.

I was happy. I want to write that down plainly, because it's the first time since March. I was happy and completely alone in it, the only person in Chicago who wasn't surprised. Somewhere on the Southwest Side my father was watching with a four-year-old asleep on his chest. I know because it's the one story he told me twice.

Rena paid me the dollar. I'm keeping it in the back of this notebook.

It was Father's Day. There was nobody to call.

I've been thinking about what I know.

Some of it is good and silly. The Bulls are going to win seventy-two games, and then the whole thing. Rena bet me a dollar they won't win it all. I told her I couldn't take her money. She said, "Then I'll take yours."

Some of it is big and slow: the phone, the internet, the rest of it. That I'll write about sometimes, because it's home.

And some of it is bad. Some of the bad things are coming soon. I'm not going to write about those, here or anywhere. If I'm wrong, I'm a crank. If I'm right, it's worse. I've thought about it for six weeks and that's where I've come out.

Besides, I don't know as much as you'd think. I was a little kid for this whole decade. I know the nineties the way you know a movie you saw half of on a plane with the sound off, and I'm not going to go around shouting half a movie at people.

I'm not a prophet. I'm a data engineer who fell asleep on a bench.

Last night was the last night of the month. At 1:40 in the morning, which is about when I closed my eyes, I was back on the bench at Damen. Same bench, second from the stairs.

I sat until three. Two trains came through. A man with a guitar case got off one, looked at me, and got on the next. It was cold enough to see my breath. Nothing happened.

I rode back and slept two hours and went in to wash dishes.

I'm going to do this on the last night of every month. I know it's probably stupid. I know I'll do it anyway.

I'm thirty-four today.

About the name. Jules is my middle name. My mother found it in a book when she was pregnant, and my father vetoed it as a first name, so it went in the middle, where nobody has ever used it. I'm using it now because my first name is taken. There's a boy on the Southwest Side who has it. He's four today. My mother, who is twenty-nine, is probably putting too much frosting on a cake right now, because she always did.

I know the house. I know the street. I know which window. I'm not going to go there. I made that rule the first night, and I'm writing it down so it's a rule and not just a feeling: I don't go near him. Whatever this is, I'm not going to find out what happens when I'm standing on the sidewalk in front of that house.

So no last name. Stavros writes JULES on my envelope on Fridays. That's plenty.

I told Rena it was my birthday, and Rena told Stavros, and at eleven he came back to the dish station with a slice of galaktoboureko on a saucer with a kitchen match stuck in it. He lit it and stood there until I blew it out, and then he went back out front without saying anything.

I don't know what I did to get put in front of this man.

I have a job.

It's a Greek diner on the Near West Side, six blocks from the mission, under a sign that says OPEN 24 HRS with the 4 burned out. The owner is Stavros. He's about sixty, with a gray mustache and forearms like a longshoreman's. I asked if he needed anyone. He looked at me for a long time and asked one question: "You drink?" I said no. He said, "Good. Aprons in the back."

That was the interview. He pays cash on Fridays, in an envelope, and he hasn't asked my last name, which is good, because I don't have one I can use.

Everybody smokes in here. Everybody. The man at the counter smokes between bites of his eggs. Every table has a heavy glass ashtray, and I wash about two hundred of them a night. My clothes smell like it when I go to sleep. Where I'm from, you can't smoke in a restaurant in this state, and I didn't know I'd miss that until now.

I have to stop talking like I'm from somewhere. Yesterday Rena, the waitress, asked how I liked the job so far and I said, "Lowkey, I love it." She said, "Low what?" Tonight I told Stavros "no worries," and he said, "Who said I was worried?"

I wash dishes from four to midnight. The water's so hot my hands are red all the time. For eight hours I don't think about anything at all, and that's the best part of the job. Don't tell Stavros.

Things I did today that I will probably keep doing:

Reached for my phone. Eleven times; I counted. It's in my left pocket, dead, and my hand goes there every time there's a pause: at a red light, in line, whenever I want to know what time it is, even though I'm wearing a watch.

Tried to swipe the TV. There's one in the day room at the mission, and when a commercial came on I put two fingers on the glass to skip it. A man named Otis watched me do it and said, "It don't work like that, chief."

Stood at a pay phone with the phone book open, looking for the search box. There isn't one. It's alphabetical. That's the entire system. It's actually very good.

Got lost four times. I haven't gone anywhere without a blue dot telling me where I am since high school. There's a map of the CTA on the wall at the station, and I stood in front of it like it was a painting in a museum until a lady asked where I was trying to go and drew it for me on the back of a transfer.

At the bus stop on Madison nobody was looking at anything. They looked at the street, or the sky, or each other. A woman read a paperback. A man did the crossword in pen. I stood there with them, looking at nothing, and it felt like being in church.

I'm writing this on a cot in a mission on the Near West Side. There are about forty other cots. A man two down from me is saying the rosary out loud, and I'm grateful for it, because it's something to listen to.

Last night, for me, was Saturday, February 28, 2026. I'd been at work until after midnight fixing something that broke. I got off the Blue Line at Damen, thinking I'd walk the rest of the way home, and then I didn't feel like it, so I sat down on a bench to wait for the next train. The app said eleven minutes. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them it was light, and cold, and very quiet. That's the first thing I noticed, the quiet. Nobody on the platform was looking down. A man in a Bulls jacket was reading a folded newspaper. My phone was dead.

I went down to the street to find a charger. The stores were wrong. I went into a Walgreens, and there was a stack of Sun-Times by the register, and the date at the top said Friday, March 1, 1996. I stood there long enough that the woman at the register asked if I was all right. I said, "No worries." She looked at me like I'd said it in Dutch.

What I have: a dead phone. A wallet with a driver's license and three cards that expire in years that haven't happened. A watch. A coat. And thirty-one dollars: a twenty, a ten and a one. The twenty and the ten are wrong, with the faces too big and off to the side and color in them. The one is the same as it's always been. So I have thirty-one dollars, and I can spend one.

I spent it on this notebook and a pen.

Then I called Hana collect from the pay phone outside. An operator, a real person, told me very kindly that there's no such area code.

A man at the bus stop told me where the mission was. I don't know how this happened. I've stopped asking, for tonight. My daughter is four, going on five, and she won't be born for twenty-five years. I'm going to write that down and then try to sleep.