January through the first week of October come from the second notebook. Everything from October 11 on was typed straight onto the page. Newest at the top.

Christmas Eve at Mrs. Wozniak's, in the apartment behind the shop. In a Polish house nobody eats on Christmas Eve until the first star comes out, so her granddaughter, who is nine, stood at the window with her nose on the glass until she found one. Then everybody breaks a thin wafer with everybody else and wishes them something. Mrs. Wozniak broke mine and wished me "that you get where you are going."

There was an extra place set at the end of the table, a plate and a glass and nobody. It's for the stranger who might knock; it's a custom. Mrs. Wozniak looked at it, and looked at me, and said, "Well. You're him," and moved it in front of me.

Twelve dishes, no meat: beet soup, pierogi, herring, mushrooms, and a carp her son-in-law bought alive and kept in the bathtub for two days, which I'm told is also a custom. The granddaughter named him Pan Ryba, Mister Fish. We didn't discuss what happened to Pan Ryba.

Christmas Day I was back at the diner with Stavros's family. I knew two of the songs.

Yesterday I went to see Titanic downtown. It had sold out twice before I got in. I've seen it before, on a phone, on a plane, with the sound too low. This time it was on a screen the size of a building, in a room full of people seeing it for the first time. The woman next to me cried from the halfway point on and apologized every time. I told her no worries. She said, "What?"

Some mail.

Everyone who writes says this page looks unfinished. "Where are your graphics?" "Did you run out of room?" "Is it still under construction?" A very kind woman in Ohio sent me a set of animated flames for the top.

It's finished. This is how pages are going to look: white, a lot of empty space, gray letters in one column down the middle, nothing moving, nothing blinking. Give it fifteen years. You'll see.

About half of the people who write think I'm making this up, and a few of them are angry about it. That's fair. I'd think so too, and I'm not going to argue. One man has written three times to ask for lottery numbers. I don't know any lottery numbers. If I did, I wouldn't be putting a modem into a Packard Bell at nine o'clock on a Tuesday night.

A man in Texas wrote just to ask if I was okay. I wrote back that I was. I think I was telling the truth.

Last night was the thirty-first, so at 1:40 I was on the bench at Damen, like every month for twenty months.

It was Halloween, and the platform was full of people going home from parties: a Batman, two nurses, a man in a cardboard box painted to look like a computer. A guy dressed as a hot dog sat down next to me and asked what I was supposed to be.

I said, "A man from 2026."

He looked me over, regular coat, regular jeans, and said, "Oh, cool. Subtle." Then his train came.

Nothing happened. The sun came up. I went home and slept till noon.

The Florida Marlins won the World Series last night, in the eleventh inning of the seventh game, against Cleveland. I watched the end at a bar on Milwaukee Avenue, and when it was over I realized I'd had no idea. I didn't remember it. I didn't know who'd be in it. I didn't even know the Marlins had ever won anything.

I know exactly two World Series, and they're seven and nineteen years away.

There's something nice about it. For three hours I was just a guy at a bar who didn't know how it ends.

This is the first entry typed straight onto the page instead of into a notebook.

Mrs. Wozniak built me a computer out of three dead ones: a 486, a fourteen-inch monitor, a 28.8 modem, and a keyboard with the E rubbed off. GeoCities.us let me pick a neighborhood and a number. I picked Area51, because that's where people will assume I belong anyway, and 2026, because it was open. I'm writing this in Notepad, with a library book about HTML propped against the monitor. I know HTML. What I didn't know is how little of it works here.

Why I'm doing this:

Because the notebooks are falling apart.

Because I want there to be a record somewhere outside my own pocket, with dates on it, in case I'm wrong about everything. Or right.

Because if anybody else ever wakes up somewhere they aren't supposed to be, in a year that isn't theirs, I want them to be able to find somebody. Write me. I'll write back.

And because I miss the internet. Not this one. Mine. This is the closest I can get.

Tonight I typed in the whole first notebook. It was strange to read. The man who wrote it thought this would be over in a week.

Princess Diana died this weekend, in a car, in Paris.

I knew she died in a car in Paris. I didn't know it was this year. I didn't know the date. I didn't know it was this summer, this Saturday night, while I was asleep upstairs from a computer shop on Milwaukee Avenue.

Stavros had the TV on all day yesterday, and nobody in the diner talked much.

This is the first time I've understood what I actually know about the nineties. It's a four-year-old's knowledge. I was four, five, six, seven. I know the big shapes, with no dates on them. I thought I was carrying a map. I'm carrying a handful of postcards and no idea what order they go in.

It's a relief, a little. And it's worse. I couldn't have done anything. I wouldn't even have known when.

I did the one thing.

On Wednesday Microsoft put money into Apple, and it's been all over the news. Here, Apple is still the company everybody thinks is going to die. My phone, in a coffee can on the shelf over my bed, has their logo on the back.

I had about $1,800. It's every dollar I've saved in a year and a half of dishes and IRQs. I can't open a brokerage account; I don't have a Social Security number I can use without using his. So I asked Mrs. Wozniak. She has had the same broker since 1961. She called him from the shop phone and bought the shares in her own name, and wrote me a receipt on the back of a repair ticket: JULES / APPLE / HELD FOR HIM / H. WOZNIAK. It's taped inside the cover of this notebook.

She asked why Apple. I said I had a feeling. She looked at me over her glasses the way she looks at a motherboard that's lying to her.

I feel strange about it. I made a rule not to use what I know, and here I am using it. I'm telling myself it's small: it isn't a lottery number, it's $1,800 on the one company I'd be embarrassed not to. I'm telling myself a lot of things. I'm going to leave it alone and not look.

Bulls again. I watched it on the little TV Mrs. Wozniak keeps on the workbench "for testing." When it was over she said, "Well, that's that," and went back to her soldering.

I live over the shop now. One room, a hot plate, a window on Milwaukee Avenue, cash on the first of the month, no lease. The buses go by all night and I sleep fine. It's eleven blocks from the building where I live in 2026. I walked past it once, in April. I'm not going to do that again.

I haven't written since the park. I will someday. Not yet.

Tonight I took the train and a bus to the lake and walked out to the point at Montrose to see the comet. Everybody's been talking about it for weeks, and it's real: low in the northwest after dark, a smudge with a tail, not moving, like somebody pressed a thumb on the sky. It's bright enough to see over the city. A man had a telescope set up and was letting people look. The little girl in line ahead of me said, "It's a star with hair," and her father said, "That's exactly right."

Where I'm from, you'd see a thousand pictures of it before you ever looked up, and everybody on the rocks would be holding a phone over their head. Here everybody was just standing there, looking at it. So was I.

It won't be back for a couple of thousand years. Nobody in 2026 will see it. For once I'm not the one who's behind.

I went to the park today. I'm going to write this down once, carefully, and then I'm not going to write about it for a while.

It was the first warm day. I took two buses to the Southwest Side, to a park six blocks from the house I grew up in. I told myself I was going to look at the trees. I kept the rule; I didn't go near the street. I sat on a bench near the swings with a newspaper I didn't read.

She came around two. My mother. Carmen. Thirty years old, in a purple coat I'd forgotten until I saw it and then remembered completely. It's Palm Sunday, and she had a palm from church folded into a cross, sticking out of her pocket. She was pushing a boy on the swing. He wanted to go higher. He's four. He'll be five on Thursday. I know what he's getting: a red bike, with training wheels my father will take off too soon.

I kept my eyes on the paper. After a while she let him run to the slide, and she came and sat down on the other end of my bench to rest, the way anybody would.

We talked for about four minutes. I know because I looked at my watch after.

She said nice day. I said it was. She said, "Chicago gives you one nice day in March so you don't move to Florida." She said that every March of my life. I had forgotten that I'd forgotten it.

She asked if I thought the Bulls would do it again. I said yes. She said, "From your mouth to God's ears." Then he called her from the slide, and she stood up and said, "Enjoy the sun," and went.

I didn't tell her anything. I want that on the record. There's one sentence I could have said, about something twenty-two years from now. I've been thinking about that sentence since she stood up. I don't think a sentence from a stranger on a bench can travel twenty-two years. I don't know. I didn't say it.

Her hair was the color it was before it went gray. She smelled like the lotion that used to sit on the kitchen windowsill.

That's all. I'm going to stop now.

New job, or half of one. I still wash dishes for Stavros on Saturdays, because he says nobody else can be trusted with the good cups.

There's a repair shop on Milwaukee Avenue with a hand-painted sign, WOZNIAK ELECTRONICS: RADIO, TV, COMPUTER, and there was a card in the window that said HELP WANTED, MUST KNOW COMPUTERS. I know computers. That's what I thought.

Mrs. Wozniak is seventy. ("No relation," she says, before anybody can ask. She says it so often it comes out as one word.) She and her husband fixed radios on this street starting in 1953, then televisions, and after he died she started on computers, because, she says, a computer is just a television that argues. She pays cash on Fridays.

I'm a data engineer. Where I'm from, I build the plumbing that moves numbers between computers in buildings I'll never see, and I do most of it by describing what I want to a program that writes the code. I have never once in my life set an IRQ.

This week I learned what an IRQ is. That a sound card wants IRQ 5 and address 220 and sulks if it doesn't get them. What a jumper is, and that it's the size of a grain of rice, and that you will drop it in the carpet. That an ISA card goes in the long black slot and you hold it by the edges like a record. That everybody calls Plug and Play "Plug and Pray," which doesn't make it any less funny coming from a seventy-year-old woman.

On Wednesday she watched me fight a modem for forty minutes, then reached over my shoulder, moved one jumper, and walked away. She calls me the Professor. It isn't a compliment.