II. THE YELLOW TIMESTAMP

II. THE YELLOW TIMESTAMP

That evening the algorithm offered him another old recording. This one was a street in 1998. The date glowed yellow in the lower corner. Cars moved with the confidence of machines not yet considered old. A shopkeeper arranged fruit. Two schoolgirls passed beneath a sign that no longer existed. A cyclist rang his bell at the camera. N. watched for thirty seconds and felt the familiar pressure begin behind his ribs. The shopkeeper: where could he be now? The girls: what names did they grow into? The cyclist: did he survive the years that followed? The timestamp seemed cruel. It knew exactly when everything was and said nothing about what everything became. N. noticed that old recordings had started to divide time into two populations: those inside the frame and those outside it. The first group did not know they were past. The second could never stop knowing.

He began collecting recordings. Not important ones. Importance spoiled the experiment. He wanted ordinary footage: birthday tables, school corridors, tourists waving from buses, office parties where no one remembered the joke anymore. He created folders by year and another document called QUESTIONS. At first the entries were simple. “Man selling newspapers, 2001— alive?” Then they became elaborate. “Girl in green coat, railway platform, winter 1996—did she ever return to this station? Does she remember the person standing beside her? If she is alive, would she recognize herself?” He did not search for answers yet. The questions themselves gave him a strange relief. A question can imitate care. It can make the absent feel temporarily supervised. But every night the list grew, and relief turned into obligation. It seemed increasingly immoral to ask about a person and then abandon them to uncertainty.

His friend Elias found the file by accident. “What is this?” “Nothing.” Elias scrolled. “You have written three pages about a man who sneezes in a graduation video.” “He is not just sneezing.” “What is he doing, then?” N. took the laptop back. “Continuing.” Elias laughed, then stopped when N. did not. “You know this is impossible,” he said. “You cannot know what happened to everyone.” “That is exactly the problem.” “No. That is exactly reality.” The word reality sounded lazy to N., as though it were a large cupboard into which people threw all the facts they did not wish to examine. Elias left early. At the door he said, “You are turning curiosity into duty.” After he had gone, N. added the sentence to the document under a new heading: ACCUSATIONS.

Sleep became difficult. The people from the recordings arrived just before he drifted off—not as ghosts, but as unresolved variables. He saw the shopkeeper closing his shutters year after year. He saw the schoolgirls aging in separate houses. He saw the cyclist in a hospital bed, then at a dinner table, then nowhere. His mind did not prefer tragedy. That would have been simpler. It preferred alternatives. He understood, with a kind of horror, that death was not the only disappearance. A person could remain alive and still vanish from every route by which N. might find him. “What do you want from them?” he asked himself in the dark. The answer came after a long time. “Proof that time does not simply consume its witnesses.” He slept badly and dreamed of a camera filming an empty room. In the dream, the date in the corner was tomorrow.