The teens have been discovering things about the world. Last week, they discovered the old iMacs, those brightly colored computers we used to have. They said things like YOOOOOOOOOO and NO CAP YALL USED TO SIT IN AN OFFICE AND DO SPREADSHEETS ON A BAG OF SKITTLES?? They were right: the old iMacs looked ridiculous. Glob-shaped, translucent, in chemical pink or green, like half-sucked sweets. You wince, now, looking at pictures of them. A few of us tried to beg the teens for forgiveness: please, you have to understand, things were different back then, you can’t judge the past by the standards of today, we didn’t know, we didn’t know… A pathetic excuse for an apology. We all knew it was wrong to have computers that looked like that, we must have known, but we simply let it happen. Back then, there was a dangerous falsehood going round: we thought that it was now, that we were living in the present. Ah! we would say, throwing open the curtains one morning in some utterly stupid year like 2002: it’s today! I love living in the time that it currently is! Now we know that it was actually then, not now, even if it felt like now at the time; we were living in the same past that contains the dinosaurs, and all our stuff was embarrassing and out of date. It took the teens to show us how wrong we were. This is now, today. 

In central London, a drunk woman collapsed out of a pub, tripped over the hem of her dress, teetered forwards on her heels, and then fell into the road between two parked cars. Her knee had scraped on the tarmac. She looked up at me from within her mess of splayed-out limbs and blood, like a fleshy spider-creature, scuttling in the gutters, a night monster, eating dead foxes and the children who step on the cracks. She said to me: you’re going bald. She was right: I am going bald. There’s less hair with every passing day; catch me at the right angle and you can see all the way through to my scalp. I don’t like going down on women in case they spot that shining white coin at the top of my head. So much of my life is already over; my body is easing itself apart, and it feels like I’ve barely been in the thing. Later, when the drunk woman unfolded herself, she told me that her family was descended from Turkish nobility, the Sultan’s kin. They had been steppe warriors once, a storm out of the great centre of the world. Oghuz of Transoxonia: the stink of horse-hide and a high tribal yell, all liquid speed, pouring into the carcass of Rome. Once they worshipped the blue empty sky. She asked me for a cigarette. Or maybe, she said, it was Greek nobility; something like that. Whatever. The important thing was that she had good blood. She was well-anchored in the past.

The teens keep discovering things. They’ve discovered old guitar music and flash photography. They’ve discovered MySpace-speak. They’ve discovered blogging. They’ve discovered the yo-yo. They said things like YOOOOOOOOOO and NO CAP THIS THING KINDA SLAPS?? They walk around with yo-yos dangling from the edge of their fingertips, and for a while we tried to tell them that you’re meant to spin the things, bounce them up and down on the string, do little tricks. The teens don’t care. Their yo-yos hang like pendulums, vaguely threatening as they list back and forth. Tick, tick. We’re buying yo-yos too. You have to buy a yo-yo, or else your hair will fall out and your skin will sag and they’ll bury you in an unmarked grave. We used to think yo-yos were embarrassing and out of date, but it turns out that they’re actually not, which means that maybe then was really now all along. We were wrong to stop liking them: that was our mistake; it’s why everything is so bad in the world. In churches, priests wave yo-yos like thuribles. Politicians give speeches with the string of a yo-yo pulled tight around each finger. I’m cool! I’m with it! I’m not out of touch! I’m not on the final descent towards a lonely restless death! Eventually their fingertips are fat swollen grubs, corpse-white; they’ve lost circulation. There is something that’s stopped circulating. It dangles instead. In West Africa, two American mercenaries were shot by the local Islamic State affiliate while staring, transfixed, at their motionless yo-yos. The shadows they cast on the dust of the Sahel, that flat and withering plain.

When I was young, my grandparents tried to explain the years to me. Right now it’s 1994, they said, and next year is 1995, and then 1996, 97, 98, 99, and what comes after that? Next, I said confidently, it’s back to 1994. No, they said, a year only happens once. It will never be 1994 again. I didn’t sleep that night. I had barely learned what year it was; nobody had ever told me that this could change. I certainly hadn’t considered, until then, that a year might only happen once. This year was my home; I lived there. But it was already late summer; 1994 was slipping away from me and I’d never get it back. Later they died; for them, there was a year that did not end. My grandfather knew I was interested in outer space, so once he cut out a few newspaper articles about outer space, glued them to a sheet of thick paper, and attached it to two empty kitchen roll tubes, like a scroll. He painted the words SAM’S TORAH on the rollers. All the outer-space stories that made it into the newspapers were about comets that would imminently collide with our planet and end all human life. I still have that little Torah. One of the headlines reads: 6:30 PM, OCTOBER 26, 2028: COULD THIS BE THE DEADLINE FOR THE APOCALYPSE? According to the article, on that date asteroid XF11 will pass within one lunar distance of our planet: perilously close. 2028 felt like a very long way away at the time.

The teens have not stopped their discoveries. The teens have discovered the 1645 Treaty of Linz. They said things like YOOOOOOOOOO and NO CAP HOW YOU GONNA RESTORE IMPERIAL REPRESENTATION TO THE ESTATES OF PRINCE GYÖRGY I RÁKÓCZI AFTER HIS TREACHERY AT THE SWEDISH SIEGE OF BRÜNN?? The teens have become unreachable. We keep trying to keep up with them, and they keep slipping further ahead of us, or behind, which have become the same thing. They are mining more of the world than we knew. The teens have become catholics. The teens have discovered the personification of abstract concepts. They said things like YOOOOOOOOOO and NO CAP AMAZEMENT STEPPED DOWN FROM HER MANY-TIERED THRONE, ATTENDED BY HER PAGES WHO WERE CALLED SHOCK AND SURPRISE, AND CASTING ASIDE HER PARAMOUR WHOSE NAME IS RECOGNITION, SHE SEIZED MY SPIRIT WITH HER WELL-FORMED HAND?? After six hundred years, the mystical relation to the symbol is back: every metaphor threatens to become its own thing. Sex is less real than porn. Your true face is the one with digital filters applied; the object in the mirror is your mask. Our world is only a shadow of the images on your phone, which shine and are eternal. The teens speak a different language now, and we do not understand them. The teens have discovered Old Church Slavonic. The teens have discovered Liturgical Armenian. The teens have discovered Anglo-Saxon. They said things like HWÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆÆT and SÓÞFÆSTLIC ÞÍN ĠEDWOLSPRǢĊA ÆFTERHYRIGEST GEÓNUNGE SÉAMERUM?? For the teens, everything has become static and cyclical, a placid wash from what was to what shall be again, and we’re trapped outside that perfect sphere, still expecting things to happen. The teens have stopped getting older. Their nails are retreating back into their flesh. The teens have stopped speaking. They open their mouths and a fine dust falls out. The teens have discovered the swallowing tug of the inorganic world. They said things like NOTHING and NOTHING and NOTHING. The teens congregate on street corners. Blind, silent, motionless: they look like rock formations, stalagmites. Every street in every city has its forest of ossified teens. It’s not clear if they came together deliberately, or if the wind blew them there in clumps. The teens have become water, which is neither young nor old.

Some of my friends have started having children. A three year old girl is obsessed with dinosaurs; she knows all their names and the different noises they make. She jumps around pretending to be a tyrannosaurus. And now you’re the tyrannosaurus and you have to chase me. She doesn’t yet know that dinosaurs aren’t like the other animals, lions and zebras and bears, because all the dinosaurs are dead. She doesn’t know how deep the well of time she’s perched on really goes. There is so much children need to learn about this world we’ve prepared for them. They need to learn that computers used to come in different colors, and that the Byzantines were defeated at Manzikert, and that all the dinosaurs are dead. They need to learn that the earth is round and it revolves around the sun. In your first years under the sun you see it every day, but without knowing what it is. I’m told that sometimes when deaf people have cochlear implants fitted, afterwards they’re surprised: they expected the sun to make a noise. How could something so bright and burning be silent? The sun should hum, the low hum of huge, distant machinery. It should crack and sizzle like a puddle of hot oil in the sky.