Confession Day
Today was Wednesday, Dear Dr. Nostra day, when the Great Prognosticator Dr. Michel de Nostradamus humanized himself by answering sleeper questions about love and romance and relationships and the occasional one worthy of his talents.
Dr. N hated it. I liked it. I had relationship problems of my own now and then and a little good advice couldn't hurt. So I would sneak in a question now and then, disguising it as from Virginia Virginia or Alice from South Dakota who always had some misery to share.
The Maestro was pensive. "Number One," he said, "Do you remember when you first signed up?... Paris?...The Sorbonne?"
"I do, Sensei. The more I recall the sharper my memories."
"Take care, Grasshopper," Dr. N said, "Recalling past events can easily create false memories that seem more real than what actually happened."
"Yes." I said. He had warned me of that before and by experience I found it to be so.
Dr. N returned to Paris. "In those days I could fill a good sized room to standing room only."
"I remember that, Doctor." I said.
"Now I seem reduced to pumping out a weekly advice column. If I didn't know better I would say it is humiliating. But I do know better. I have been through this cycle many, many times."
I listened carefully because it was unlike Dr. Nostradamus to reflect in this way
"You know that I am not a real time traveler, don't you Number One?"
I actually did not know that. I thought he was.
"I am not a time traveler in the way you probably understand or think you understand it. I can travel back in my mind to every minute of every day in my life from the time I turned 7 years old. I can re experience everything that I experienced then in exactly the same way. I can remember every word of every book I read and every conversation I ever had. But my time travel is in my mind, not in the external natural world."
I was troubled by what he was saying because it felt like an illusion falling away. I knew of his prodigious memory but surely he was a time traveler. How else to explain so much?
But I wanted to be agreeable. "I know, Sensei, I can still remember the first time I saw you and Mrs. Nostradamus at the orphanage. That was 30 years ago and seems like yesterday. "
"I'm not talking about looking back 30 years Number One, I am looking back over more than 500 years."
I didn't know what to say. Actually, I couldn't say anything.
"I'm a freak of nature," Dr. Michel de Nostradamus said. "I am like a tortoise or a bristlecone pine tree. I age, but very, very slowly. When I was 30 years old my body stopped aging like normal. I now look like I am about 60 so I have probably biologically aged only about 30 years in the last 500."
"What happened to you?" I asked.
"I don't know. I am pretty sure I was born this way. I had a geneticist look at my blood a few years ago. He said I had an unusual genetic mutation but since it didn't seem to cause me any problems I shouldn't worry."
"When did you first think you might be different?” I asked.
"It was the year 1534.... I was 31 years old. The plague had taken my first wife and two children. As you can imagine I was heart broken. But in those terrible days death was so common, suffering was the one sure thing about life.
"I stopped by the house of an old woman who had a reputation as a fortune teller -- a dangerous profession in those days where a careless rumor could get a strange old woman burned at the stake.
The church was a monster.
"The old woman took care not to predict the future because of the danger it posed, but she was free to speak of health and love and children.
"She looked at my hand then took me aside to where no one could overhear. She told me I would live for 1000 years and see the end of the world. She then mumbled a few words in a strange tongue. I remember everything but not those words.
"The old woman became my mentor. Over the next 25 years she taught me the tradecraft of the prognosticator. My visits with her became fewer and the last time I went I was told she had died more than a year before."
This conversation bothered me more than I would have thought, and I had many questions.
But Dr. N drew today's discussion to a close. "Let's continue next Wednesday, which will give us an excuse to delay another ordeal of Dear Dr. Nostra.
"In the meantime read my Wikipedia page."
"I already have," I said, "And if anyone were to go through my google search history they would think I was a Nostradamus nut."
Dixi
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