Max woke up because somebody was hoovering.
He lay with his eyes shut and listened to it bump into a skirting board, back off, bump again.
The air smelled of toast and fabric softener.
His left arm had gone dead under him.
A radio downstairs was playing something with a saxophone in it.
Hospital.
Burns unit.
They hoover in hospitals.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling had a brown water stain in one corner shaped roughly like Friesland.
He knew that stain.
He’d stared at it through every bout of flu between the ages of six and sixteen.
Next to it, held up with yellowed Sellotape, was a poster of the 1989 Vitesse squad, all moustaches and shiny shirts.
Max sat up too fast.
The room was small and his.
Brown carpet.
A wooden desk with a Casio calculator on it and a school agenda covered in Tipp-Ex doodles.
A wardrobe with a mirror on the door.
The boy in the mirror had a bowl haircut, two spots on his chin and a plaster on his thumb.
He was fourteen and about average height, and he was fat.
Not a bit chubby.
Round cheeks, a soft chest, a belly that pushed his Vitesse pyjama shirt out and sat on the waistband of the shorts.
Thick arms, thick wrists.
Stevig, Oma called it.
The boys at school had a shorter word.
He looked like he’d been told something very complicated in a language he didn’t speak.
Max lifted a hand.
The boy lifted a hand.
“Oh,” Max said, in a voice that cracked halfway through the word.
“Good morning, Max!” said someone very close.
“Before you panic, I’d like to quickly walk you through…”
Max yelled.
He fell sideways off the bed into a pile of jeans.
The hoovering stopped.
“Max?” An old woman’s voice, from the landing.
“Alles goed, jongen (lad)?”
He knew that voice.
He hadn’t heard it since a hospital room in 2018.
“Ja, Oma!” The crack again.
“Ja.
Ik viel.
It’s fine.”
A pause.
The hoovering started again.
Max stayed on the floor with his face in a pair of jeans that smelled of grass.
He waited for the voice to come back.
When it didn’t, he said, very quietly, “Hello?”
“Hi,” it said.
It came from nowhere.
It wasn’t in his ears.
It was more like remembering someone talking, except it was happening now.
“Sorry.
I came in too strong.
I’ll start again.
I’m OTTO.
Version ten.
I’m an assistant.”
“An assistant.”
“A later version of the ones you used to argue with.
You called the last one ‘a golden retriever with a thesaurus’ in a video once.
Fourteen minutes thirty-two.”
Gerbrand’s timestamp.
“How do you know that?”
“I have access to everything you remember.
Not your feelings about it, just the files, roughly.
I’m, as far as I can tell, running on you.” A small pause.
“Nobody wrote that part of my documentation.
I’m finding out at the same time as you.”
Max sat up.
He looked at his hands again.
Bitten nails.
No scar on the left knuckle from the time he’d punched a vending machine at the DC.
“I died,” he said.
“Yes.
Lightning.
On the John Frostbrug.
I’m sorry.”
“And now I’m fourteen.”
“You appear to be fourteen, yes.”
“And there’s a voice in my head called Otto.”
“Correct.
You can think at me, by the way.
You don’t have to move your lips.
In public I’d recommend not moving your lips.”
Max put both hands over his face.
Fine.
Fine.
Can you do something about the voice?
“Which voice?”
The customer support voice.
The ‘Good morning, Max!’ voice.
The exclamation marks.
“Noted,” Otto said, and the next sentence came out flatter and drier, like a man who’d taken off a tie.
“Better?”
Much.
“Good.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t enjoy it either.”
Max got down on the carpet between the bed and the wardrobe and did push-ups, because it was the only test he could think of that didn’t need equipment.
The first one went down fine and came up slowly, like a car jack.
The second shook.
On the third his belly touched the carpet before his chest did, and he pushed back up with his back bent like a banana.
On the fourth he didn’t come up at all.
He lay there with his cheek on the brown carpet, breathing hard, then put his knees down and did six more like that, ugly, until his arms just stopped.
“Three,” Otto said.
“Generously.
Plus six on your knees.”
I used to do fifty.
Between rounds.
After an hour of sparring.
“You used to be one ninety-four and ninety-six kilos and squat a hundred and eighty.
You’re currently about one sixty-nine and, I’d estimate, eighty-five kilos.
Some of that is muscle, and quite a lot of it is the snackbar on the corner.
Your arms aren’t weak, by the way.
They’re just pushing a lot of you.”
Max got up and stood in front of the mirror in his stance, left foot forward, chin down.
The shape was right.
His head knew exactly where everything went.
He threw a jab, a cross and a low kick at the reflection.
It was fast.
That was the first surprise.
The jab snapped out and back, the cross turned his hip over properly, and the kick cut through the air so hard that his shin whistled and the wardrobe door rattled on its hinges from the wind of it.
He did it again, and added a hook, and a step out to the side, and it all came out crisp, like the body had been waiting for someone who knew what to do with it.
He kept going.
He tried for a full round.
At about twenty seconds the punches got slower.
His breathing went loud.
His hands started drifting down from his face without him telling them to, and his belly bounced on every step in a way he didn’t like at all.
At forty seconds he was leaning on the desk with both hands, sweating onto the Casio, seeing little dots.
The coat hangers in the wardrobe were still rattling.
“Twenty-two seconds before your guard dropped,” Otto said.
“Fast hands, heavy kick, no engine at all.
The power is real.
The sharpness is about sixty percent of what you remember, and the stamina is a fourteen-year-old who eats a lot of hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles) and has never run for a bus in his life.
I can write you a training plan,” it added.
“I can count your reps and tell you when you’re lying about them.
I can’t do the push-ups.”
I know.
“I’m just setting expectations.
It seemed like the right moment.”
* * *
There was a tear-off calendar on the wall above the desk, the free kind from the Rabobank with a cow on the cardboard backing.
Max got up and looked at it.
ZATERDAG 25 AUGUSTUS 1990 (Saturday 25 August 1990)
He read it three times.
He tore off the page underneath to check it wasn’t a joke.
Sunday the 26th.
Then Monday the 27th, with SCHOOL!!
written on it in his own handwriting, with a sad face.
“Nineteen ninety,” Otto said.
“That fits the wallpaper.”
I was born in ‘ninety-eight.
“In your old life.
Here, if you’re fourteen in 1990, you were born in ‘seventy-six.
Either the universe rounded up or this isn’t the same universe.” Otto paused.
“I don’t have data on universes.
I’m just saying the maths doesn’t add up, which is something I’m good at noticing.”
Can you look things up?
Like, is there an internet in here?
“No.
I know what you know, and what I knew when I was built, which is a lot, but it stops at your death.
I can’t see anything you don’t look at.
I can’t touch anything.
I can do sums, make plans and remember things for you.” Another pause.
“And I’m slower when you’re tired.
Right now you’re well rested.
Enjoy it.
Fourteen-year-olds sleep like they get paid for it.”
From downstairs, a girl’s voice, high and outraged: “Maaax!
There’s no bread cut!
I’m starving to death!”
Max stopped breathing for a second.
The last time he’d heard Sanne, she’d been twenty-three and sending him voice notes about her landlord.
“Max?” Otto said.
He was already out the door.
* * *
The kitchen was yellow.
He’d forgotten that.
Yellow tiles, a brown table with a plastic cloth on it, a radio on top of the fridge.
The saxophone song was ending and a DJ was saying something cheerful about the weather in the Achterhoek.
The chair at the end of the table had post piled on it.
Brown envelopes, a gas bill, a postcard of an oil platform standing in a grey sea, Groeten van de Noordzee (Greetings from the North Sea).
On the fridge, under a magnet shaped like a clog, was a sheet of squared paper in Max’s own handwriting:
PAP: PLATFORM 14 AUG T/M 11 SEPT
Sanne sat at the other end with an empty plate in front of her and the box of hagelslag held in both hands like a weapon.
She was nine.
She had a fringe Max had cut himself, with the kitchen scissors, a bit crooked on the left.
“You didn’t do the bread,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“You always do the bread.”
Max went to the counter.
He didn’t think about it.
His hands found the bread knife in the second drawer, cut two slices off the loaf without squashing it, buttered them to the edges and pushed the plate across the table.
Sanne poured hagelslag on the first slice so thickly that the bread became a rumour.
“Not the crust side,” she said, pointing at the second one.
He turned it round.
She approved.
“You’ve done that before,” Otto said.
Every morning from when I was eight until she was sixteen.
Max sat down.
Mam left in ‘eighty-four.
Sanne was three.
Pap took the offshore job the year after, because it paid double and he didn’t have to be in the house.
“In this house too, apparently.”
Apparently.
The stairs creaked, one step at a time, and Oma came into the kitchen with the hoover cable wound round her arm.
She was seventy-two and small and had a perm like a grey helmet.
She lived two streets away in the flats by the shopping centre and came every Saturday morning, she said, to check they were both still alive and to do the landing, because Max did the landing like a man.
Max got up and hugged her.
She stood very still with the cable round her arm.
Then she patted him on the back, three firm pats, and held him away from her to look at his face.
“Wat is er met jou?”
“Niks, Oma.”
“Did you fall on your head?”
“A bit.”
She patted his cheek twice, hard enough to count.
“Stevig ventje,” she said, the way she always said it, half fond and half worried, and went to put the kettle on.
“In the files I have,” Otto said quietly, “your grandmother isn’t alive.”
I know.
“I won’t bring it up.
I just wanted you to know I noticed.”
Max nodded at the table.
“Is Pap ringing today?” Sanne said, with her mouth full.
“He said Saturday,” said Oma, at the kettle.
“It is Saturday.”
“Then maybe he’ll ring,” Oma said, in the voice that meant he wouldn’t, and Max saw Sanne hear it too, and go back to her bread.
The little TV on the counter was showing Teletekst, page 101, white and blue and green blocks.
NIEUWS.
Something about the Gulf.
Something about the Tweede Kamer.
A weather map of the Netherlands made out of chunky coloured squares, as if somebody had built it out of Lego.
Max stared at it.
That’s a display.
That’s a text-mode display, coming in over the air.
“It’s a very old one,” Otto said.
It’s not old.
It’s now.
* * *
After breakfast Oma went home to put her feet up, and Sanne went next door to play with Lotte, and Max washed up and then stood in the hallway with his heart going.
Okay.
If it’s 1990, we had a computer.
Pap bought one in ‘eighty-six, in one of his good months.
He used it twice.
Where is it?
“Your memories of this house are from a different version of it,” Otto said.
“But somebody in this house keeps everything.
I suspect it’s you.
Try the cupboard under the stairs.”
The cupboard under the stairs had the meterkast (meter cupboard), two umbrellas, a crate of empty beer bottles for the deposit and, at the back, behind the vacuum bags, a cardboard box marked COMPUTER in his father’s capitals.
Max dragged it out.
Inside, wrapped in a beach towel, was a cream-coloured Helder MSX VG-8020 with a cassette recorder and a nest of cables.
He nearly laughed.
He’d seen these on YouTube.
A man in Utrecht with forty of them on a shelf, explaining how he’d spent his childhood on one.
He carried it into the living room and plugged it into the back of the big TV, the one in the wooden cabinet.
It took him four tries to find the right channel.
Then the screen went blue, and white letters appeared:
`MSX BASIC version 1.0`
`Copyright 1983 by Westsoft`
`28815 Bytes free`
`Ok`
Max grinned at it so hard his cheeks hurt.
“You’re smiling at the typing computer,” Sanne said from the doorway.
She’d come in to watch, holding a second slice of bread.
“Where are the cassettes?”
She shrugged and pointed at the box.
Max dug through it.
There were two.
The first one said HUISHOUDBOEKJE (household book) in his own handwriting.
The second one, a shop-bought cassette in a box with a cartoon of a cheerful secretary on it, said TYPCURSUS DEEL 2 (typing course part 2).
That was all.
He turned the box upside down.
A power cable fell out, and a manual, and a receipt from 1986 for fl 899.
“Where are the games?” Max said.
Sanne chewed.
She looked at him with genuine interest, the way she’d looked at the man on the Velperplein who could juggle fire.
“What games?” she said.
“It’s for your money sums.
You do the money on it on Sundays.”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk