Double Twenty

CHAPTER 2 - Time (Hootie & the Blowfish)

"We do not remember days, we remember moments." – Cesare Pavese

Matthieu emerges from the depths of his sleep in a state of profound confusion. His bed, with a mattress usually well-suited to the fragility of his lower back, now feels strangely cramped, much too hard, as if someone had changed it overnight. As he turns to find a better position, he dismisses this absurd thought as quickly as it came. "Too much rosé." Around him, the room is bathed in near darkness, each object appearing altered, almost unrecognizable. A nostalgic melody softly emanates from the Aiwa clock radio on the nightstand, a device he had discarded with the advent of the smartphone in the 21st century. The crackling mono version of Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You" plays. "The speaker has always been terrible," he thinks, which makes no sense, except in a particularly realistic dream. Matthieu turns again and this time finds himself face-to-face with the glowing red digital display reading 8:20. "What the hell, this can't be happening!" He bolts upright, as if struck by lightning or attacked by aggressive black flies, it's a vital emergency for the survival of his business. "Damn, damn, damn, I have a meeting at 9:00 with HR at Eco-Transcom!" He speaks aloud, more to himself than to the walls that do not respond. He gets up hastily, clumsily bumps into the nightstand, curses at this suddenly intrusive piece of furniture. Groping for a light switch, the room is suddenly flooded with a harsh light that makes him blink. Facing him, a full-length mirror stuck behind the door reflects an image, his improbable and crazy image: a young Matthieu, much younger, as if the years had evaporated overnight. He opens his eyes wide, his mouth agape, experiencing an emotional vertigo like a one-legged tightrope walker without a net 30 meters above the ground. "Am I dead? This can't be! A stroke? A prank, it's just a damn prank," a setup by Julien after their conversation yesterday. He turns around, "No, but it's sure," he says to reassure himself, "they're all there, hiding with their cameras, filming me, and I'll end up all over social media. Bastards! Okay guys, good joke, enough, I hope you're getting paid well!" he says frantically, with a voice that betrays the panic and is hard to recognize. Silence. No sound other than that of the plumbing and the refrigerator in the open-plan kitchen-living room of the apartment he occupied from nineteen to twenty-five years old, in Puteaux (92), in the Paris region. Naked as a worm, he runs frantically through the living room in search of proof, a tangible element capable of justifying what is happening. On the coffee table, among beer bottle corpses, ashtrays filled to the brim, various papers, a folded copy of "Le Monde" freshly dated April 1, 1997. You can't make this stuff up.

In front of him, embedded in an Ikea Billy bookcase, is his old Samsung TV, a monolith of plastic and glass that bends the shelf under its weight. It is connected to a stereo amplifier and a Sony multi-CD player, surrounded by a PlayStation 1 and a Nintendo 64. There's no longer any doubt: Matthieu feels like he's in an episode of "Rick and Morty," inexplicably propelled into his own past. At this surreal, unacceptable thought, he is seized by fear, solitude, chills, without bearings or direction, at the mercy of a world that is no longer his. A thin stream of warm urine runs, along with tears of anguish, down his leg. He is twenty years old. His dream of yesterday seems to have come true. "Crazy thing," "insanity," "maybe nuts," real. He feels like a victim of a hypnic jerk but awake.

Lost, with his brain and limbs like jelly, Matthieu gathers the little courage he has left, heads to the shower, thinking the hot water will bring him back to his time, which it does not, and while drying off with a very soft towel (much softer than those in his future), he examines himself more attentively from head to toe, with a renewed vision: The overweight, his faithful companion in recent years, has given way to a slim and muscular figure. Where he expects to find gray body hair, his skin displays a youthful smoothness, only marred by the distant echo of teenage acne. His hair, absent for more than fifteen years, stands on his head with a vigor and density he had forgotten, along with many other memories of that age. Each breath is a puff of freshness, a purified breath, free from twenty-seven years of nicotine, a sensation as strange as it is pleasant. His body seems to have been rebooted, reset to zero. The years of debauchery and indulgence in all kinds of excesses erased. In an instinctive impulse, he slaps himself, a quick and precise movement to test this overwhelming reality. The sharp sting of pain on his cheek is undeniable. "Ouch!"