To the subterranean traveller the past is a grey mist most of the time where voices can be heard but not much is seen. Images that do come to mind are in hazy black and white, to remind him he is dealing with lost moments that will never spring to colourful life again. You’d better pay attention to the here and now, his memories seem to suggest the subterranean traveller. Comfortable with the way his brain works the travler never was someone to dwell on how things might have been, he had little reference after all, but a recent visit to Amsterdam opened his eyes to quite a different point of view. It was four years since the subter moved out of the city where he spent his twenties and thirties and a full year since he last had walked its streets. The subterranean traveller couldn’t help noticing how distant Amsterdam was becoming to him, how little there was left that still belonged to him, how little he himself belonged to. It was a matter of attitude rather than appearances. The crowds around him, as familiar looking as they were, had taken to incomprehensible ways. They way they rode their bicycles, how they spoke to one another and how they did not smile at strangers, it all seemed so completely different from what the subter travler held for memories. Could four years really be that long? It confused the subterranean, not that he should be afraid of what he might come up against, but he honestly felt he had known these streets; and of course he knew them, there could be no doubt about that, he recognized most of the houses, many shops still the same, he remembered some of the passing faces and to his pleasure not all from the same part of town. Yet it was undeniable he had become a stranger here, an alien almost, he could easily imagine himself not even present, just having a ghost-like look. Nobody recognized him.
The subterranean traveller began to see the present from a distance and when he did so, vaguely wondering if it really was him who was the stranger here or perhaps the city as a whole had gone astray, he suddenly noticed how well-known events started happening before his eyes. The sky turned a darker shade and the tram was yellow again and the subter smiled at G., a soft skinned woman with red hair and ocean eyes he was having an extra-marital affair with. G. was waving, her long legs in tight black pants and a miniskirt carrying her to him and he apparently capable of an unexpected coolness. G. looked so unbelievably young, 24 she was, nothing more than a child, just like he. It was a cloudy evening in early June of 1987 and he had been waiting for G. at the tram stop to take her for a snack and a drink, they shared a Thai soup with beers, and then they would walk to his flat to have her in front of the mirror, she was amazingly white and vulnerable, and later more caressingly in bed, speaking little because words would only betray the illusion their love might be worth the step for her. The subterranean traveller himself stepped forward to kiss G. as he was supposed to do, but just when he reached to taste her lips she quickly faded and disappeared with the whole 1987 setting around her, the sun shining bright again over the warm August afternoon. They had bought tickets for Prince the other day, waiting in a merry line the whole night long, but G. would not join him to the concert, already back to her old life. Years later they met when the difference was just the other way round and nothing had happened. The subterranean traveller couldn’t recall having ever had such lively recollections before and he assumed without hesitating he had actually been in the past for a moment, a magical moment he reluctantly said goodbye to. The traveller smirked his thankful smirk and walked a couple of streets further up the road, past a long gone house where he was watching football with friends, stoned out of their heads and not knowing what the score was, drinking cheap champagne. It was March 1992 and nobody knew why they were having champagne, it felt very much like a mistake, something to laugh about constantly as if to show each other they hadn‘t really grown older since the days they first joined for smokes. The evening ended with cocaine though, as was the fashion of the day, a few quick taxi delivery lines and beers in a noisy bar where the subterranean traveller in his momentary disguise of the author Jan Luik fell victim to unstoppable self loathing and the hot promise he would leave the marching powder from there on, a promise he since has seldom broken, walking heavily home along the rain glistened Herengracht where he pissed in the water to his relieve and shame.
The subterranean traveller entered other times, some newer, some older, some lighter, some darker, some not as clear as he would have liked, all the while treating the present with calculated reserve and thinking how wonderful it would be to just make believe one weren’t there and step at will into his earlier heres. The danger was you went fooling yourself of course by making a mere trick of it, the experiences riddled with dreams. One has to pay chance its proper respect. Once the subter had stumbled onto this, the magic was obviously gone. He was full back in the unfamiliar present with a bagful of extraordinarily vivid short term memories of long ago. He saw himself laid bare in perspective, how the promise was never challenged because it was funnier to just look at life. Why know one isn’t good enough? The subterranean traveller smirked his smirk for having seen a whole new way to live through time. He felt quite sure it would happen again one day and he thought he might learn required techniques to go through longer periods of honest distancing, it was all a question of what he fed himself most likely, it usually was. The subterranean traveller drove home along familiar roads. The present is a beautiful nightmare for everybody, he wondered, but forgotten memories can be just as real when you happen into them. They stayed overnight in almost the same hotel, having dinner opposite last year’s snack bar, and arrived safely in their hometown of Barcelona, a city whose streets the travler hadn’t walked enough to even begin losing his memories. One day, he knows, the Amsterdam experience will come to him here and he shall be ready, and one day Amsterdam will be too far gone to find any leftover past, because eventually everything ends up in the big black hole that is chasing us, finally even the present.
