The juice in Eszter’s glass is still trembling on its surface, sitting at exactly the height it was when she set it down, and I’ve been watching for what feels like forty minutes now how nothing spills out of it while she tells me what happened at work today. There are pauses between her words that she experiences as a beat, and I experience as minutes, and through those minutes I sit there the whole time, smiling, nodding at the right moments, because I’ve learned by now which expression suits the silence after “and guess what he said to that.”
The kitchen is warm, the oven fan humming low, and out the window a neighbor’s kid is circling the street on his bike, always taking the same amount of time to complete a loop, which right now, in this stretched-out minute, I can estimate fairly precisely. I count the forks on the table, four, then start over. I count how many times Eszter blinks during a sentence – six, seven, eight. These are tricks I’ve picked up over three years, ways of filling the surplus time that isn’t hers, only mine, and that I don’t know what to do with except stare into it, like a room with no one else in it.
My name is Gábor Lendvai, I’m thirty-six, and for three years now, since a clinical trial at a sleep clinic, time has passed for me differently than it does for everyone around me. Not time travel. Not superspeed, not slow motion in the cinematic sense – if it were that, at least it would have a rhythm you could count on. It’s more an uneven, unpredictable drift, pulling now one way, now the other, and there’s no telling in advance which.
The evening I’m writing this, I lived through forty minutes of a perfectly ordinary Tuesday dinner as though it were three hours. Eszter noticed nothing, because nothing showed from outside – I sat, I ate, I answered, only inside, around every sentence, an empty room kept opening up, in which I waited for the next word to arrive.
There’s no good word for what this feels like from in here. It isn’t like being bored, when the clock drags – boredom still has a kind of awareness to it, a continuous “now” in which you know the whole time that you’re bored. This is more like my own attention is a rubber band someone has taken hold of at one end and is slowly, steadily stretching, so that everything I experience as a second is, from outside, only a fraction of one. Sounds stretch out, not in pitch, only in time, as if a recording were being slowed down without changing its tone, and in that slowing each syllable becomes its own separate island I have to wait for before I can assemble them into a sentence. The lights don’t flicker, they just sit there, static, and meanwhile my brain, with nothing to focus on, starts turning inward, talking to itself, digging up memories I’d never otherwise think of.
I ended up at the Kronos Sleep Clinic four years ago, after seeing an ad on the metro: volunteers wanted to test a new procedure that promised to synchronize the circadian rhythm of people whose internal clock had slipped entirely out of alignment with the world. For me that wasn’t a metaphor. I worked as a freelance graphic designer, and my sleep had been drifting worse and worse since I was twelve – falling asleep at four in the morning as a teenager, at six in my twenties, and by the time I turned thirty-two I could barely tell day from night anymore, because my body simply refused to fall in line with sunlight. I lost jobs because I couldn’t make morning meetings. I lost friends because I was never there when they were awake to live their lives.
I nearly lost Eszter that way too, early on. We met at a mutual friend’s wedding, and she was a morning person, up at six and out running before anyone else woke. The first time we stayed over at each other’s place, I was still at the kitchen table at four a.m. sketching while she slept, and when she woke at six and found me still up, she thought something was wrong. We spent months trying to reconcile our two rhythms, never fully managing it, settling instead for a truce: she accepted I was wired differently, and I tried, at least, to be present for our shared evening hours. That was the first time I learned what it’s like for time to pass differently for someone you love, though I had no idea it was only a preview of a far harsher lesson.
My GP called it delayed sleep phase syndrome, which sounded harmless enough on paper but in practice meant I could never live the way other people did, that every morning meeting was a small battle against my own body, and that over the years I tried light therapy, melatonin, a full month of forcing myself onto a strict routine, and each one helped only temporarily, before my body slid back into its own rhythm.
The clinic was testing a small implantable device they called a “synchronizer” – a pea-sized chip placed under the skin at the back of the neck, sending precisely timed light and magnetic pulses along a nerve pathway to “reboot” the internal clock. Before the implant I attended three consultations, each with a different doctor explaining the same thing in slightly different words, each time asking whether I understood the risks, to which I said yes, because I wanted to believe I did, and because the stipend would have come in handy just then, after a major client had cancelled a project I’d been counting on for months. The risks were listed on a long form I signed – headaches, mild dizziness, temporary sleep disruption – and nowhere on it was what eventually happened to me, because I suppose they never imagined it possible either.
On the day of the implant they worked under local anesthetic, and I felt, though it didn’t hurt, a faint pressure at the back of my neck as they placed the chip, and for a week afterward I had only a mild headache and a strange tingling if I turned my head too fast. The first two nights they switched the device on and measured my response, I felt nothing unusual, just fell asleep a little more easily than usual, and that alone was enough to fill me with hope.
On the third night after the procedure I was asleep in an observation room, electrodes on my scalp, when – as I only learned afterward, from the records – a power fluctuation sent the synchronizer’s software into a corrupted loop, firing its pulses continuously, out of rhythm, for more than six hours, while the night staff, two people responsible for an entire floor, didn’t notice until dawn that the alarm had been disabled by an update error. By the time they came in and tried to wake me, they couldn’t. They shone a light in my face, shouted my name, a nurse pressed hard on my fingernail the way the unresponsiveness protocol calls for, and nothing came back, only the monitors showing my breathing and pulse were normal, as if I were sleeping deeply and healthily, except nothing from outside was reaching me at all. For forty-five minutes I didn’t respond to anything, and the doctors were already calling an ambulance when I suddenly sat up in bed and asked why I was wired up like this, and why everyone was looking at me like they’d seen a ghost.
They told me it had just been a long, deep sleep phase. They sent me home with an apology letter and a compensation offer which – foolishly – I didn’t accept right away, because I assumed it was just a formality, and that nothing was actually wrong with me.
Two weeks later I noticed for the first time that something wasn’t right.
Eszter and I were cooking dinner together, she was cutting vegetables, I was turning the meat in the pan, and when she asked how much salt it needed, I couldn’t answer for a moment, because her question reached me as if emerging from a very long silence – as if I’d been waiting minutes for it, though the kitchen clock said no more than a second had passed. I thought I was just tired. I told her so and went to bed early, but lying there, staring at the ceiling, I got the same feeling back: the darkness in front of my eyes wasn’t passing the way it usually did. As if every second that went by lasted a little longer than it took the second hand on my watch to move.
Zsófi, our daughter, was three then, and I always read to her in the evenings, because Eszter had an online course to finish for work most nights. The storybooks – which I knew word for word, because she asked for the same ones every night – now felt strangely long, as if a pause opened after every sentence in which I had time to think through my own childhood, my mother reading to me, before I’d come back to the book and find Zsófi already pointing at the next page, as though nothing had happened in between for her.
I had a video call with a client around then, a bank’s marketing department, for whom I had to present some campaign material, and the meeting, which by the calendar lasted thirty minutes, felt to me like an entire morning. I answered every question, but such long silences passed within me between my answers that one of the marketers eventually asked if I was alright, because I was “reacting pretty strangely,” and only then did I realize that, from outside, I was the one behaving strangely, not them, speaking at their ordinary pace.
I went to doctors, first my GP, who suspected depression and anxiety and gave me a referral for therapy, which I accepted even though I knew that wasn’t it. Then, when the symptoms didn’t pass, I went back to the Kronos Clinic and finally told them what I was feeling: that time wasn’t passing for me the way it did for everyone else.
Dr. Edit Halmai, the clinic’s lead researcher, after a long, quiet examination, said the synchronizer’s faulty cycle had probably “temporarily altered the neural patterns responsible for subjective time perception,” but that this wasn’t theoretically a lasting condition, and that “most comparable cases self-correct within a few months.”
It didn’t self-correct. It got worse.
I sought a second opinion too, a professor of neurology at the university hospital, who, after hearing me out and reviewing the Kronos Clinic’s documents, said only that “subjective time perception disorder” wasn’t a recognized diagnosis, that the symptoms were more likely rooted in an anxiety condition the trauma – the long unconsciousness, the hospital experience – might have triggered, and that he’d recommend a psychiatric evaluation before I considered any further “experimental intervention,” since in his view it was far more likely that an unprocessed trauma lay behind this than that a chip had genuinely altered the physical basis of my time perception. I went home from that appointment feeling like I was losing twice over: once because my time really was passing differently, and again because no one who didn’t live inside it believed this wasn’t just in my head – even though, quite literally, it was in my head, in the form of a chip they themselves had put there.
Six months after the procedure came my first “jump” – that’s what I started calling, in my own head, the moments when time slid the other way, when my own subjective experience shrank, and out in the world, far more time passed than I’d lived through.
I was reading Zsófi her bedtime story, her favorite, the one with the dragons, and the next thing I remember is looking up and finding her hair longer, and a tooth missing from her mouth where they’d all been before, and the book in her hands a different one, one I didn’t even recognize. I thought I’d dozed off for a moment, and asked what time it was, and Zsófi – who now spoke more confidently, more loudly than I remembered – said, “Dad, are you kidding? You don’t even read to me in the evenings anymore, because you’re working,” and then Eszter stepped into the room, and there was something on her face I couldn’t place right away, a kind of careful exhaustion, as if she’d already gotten used to having to answer questions like this.
Seven months had passed. For me, the whole thing felt like one afternoon, a long but continuous afternoon I’d been present for, only not in any way I’d enjoyed – more like a dream you don’t remember the details of, only the general sense that something had been going on.
That night, once Zsófi was asleep, Eszter sat down with me in the living room and told me what had happened in the months I had no memory of. That I’d been there, physically, getting up every day, working – or at least seeming to work, sitting at my computer, doing something, though I later had to delete a good portion of it because it made no sense, just repeating lines and shapes that led nowhere. That I’d been present at one of Zsófi’s kindergarten events, smiling in the photos, but that there’d been something off about my face, an absence other parents had noticed too, and that someone had once asked if I was alright.
“I took you to a doctor once, during those months,” Eszter said, “because you were so not here. But you said you were fine, and the doctor found nothing, and I didn’t know what to do, because you looked like you, talked like you, just somehow… delayed. Like a video with a little lag between the sound and the picture.”
She told me that at night, when she thought I was asleep, she’d sometimes sit up beside me and watch whether my eyes moved under my closed lids, because that was the only sign she had that something was still going on in there. She told me that once, on a March afternoon, she’d taken me to the cinema, hoping a film, a shared story, might bring me back, and that I’d sat beside her for two hours, smiling at the right moments, but on the way home, when she asked what I’d liked best, I couldn’t name a single thing from the plot, only the feeling of having sat very far away, in some dark room.
“The worst part wasn’t that you didn’t remember anything,” she said. “The worst part was having to constantly decide, in the moment, whether to lie to you when Zsófi asked about something you couldn’t possibly know had happened. I kept our family running on lies in front of you, while you sat there with us at the table.”
Seven months, of which I had one afternoon left. Zsófi lost her first tooth, and I didn’t know. She learned to ride a bike without training wheels, and I never saw it. There was a week she had the flu, when Eszter sat up with her alone every night, because I – though I was home – wasn’t there the way I should have been.
There were smaller, more everyday signs of the disorder too, none of them alarming on their own, only forming a pattern together. A grocery run that used to take ten minutes sometimes felt like an entire morning, every shelf demanding a thorough look because my attention couldn’t move quickly from one object to the next, and standing at the register while the cashier ran the barcodes through the scanner, a small eternity opened between every beep, in which there was nothing to do but wait for the next one. Other days the opposite happened: I’d set out for the shop, and when I got home Eszter would ask why I hadn’t bought anything on the list she’d sent, and I’d realize I had no idea I’d even been inside the store, because the whole trip, the shopping, the walk home, hadn’t lasted me longer than a blink.
That’s when I started taking the Kronos Clinic’s further tests seriously. Dr. Halmai explained that the brain scans showed some abnormality in the areas responsible for time perception – insular activity, basal ganglia rhythms – but that they couldn’t say why it alternated so unpredictably, now dilation, now compression. They tried medications – a benzodiazepine subtype they thought might stabilize the brain’s internal clock, then an experimental dopamine receptor modulator borrowed from an entirely unrelated study – but none brought lasting improvement, only side effects: nausea, tremors, a month of constant ringing in my ears.
There was a group Dr. Halmai referred me to, other trial volunteers with less severe, or differently shaped, symptoms. A woman named Marika, my age, said that for her time simply passed more slowly, continuously, not alternating like mine – every day felt like two days, and oddly, that felt more like a gift than a punishment, since she had more time for everything, only it exhausted her, as if living double days on half the energy. A man named Zoltán said nothing had changed about his subjective speed, just a constant, several-second lag between him and the world, like a bad phone line, and that he’d gotten used to it, though his wife said it was maddening how he was always a beat behind in conversations.
The group met in a yellow-walled conference room on the clinic’s third floor, six chairs in a circle, and every time the same unopened pack of water bottles sat waiting on the table. Marika once brought her own journal too, a thick, graph-paper notebook, and showed how she marked beside each day how many hours she’d subjectively “lived” – some days she’d written thirty-two – and said her husband had learned to go to bed earlier than her, because he knew she still had half a long night left after he was already asleep.
Zoltán, the man living in a lag, once brought his wife along, a quiet, patient woman who said that at first she’d been angry, feeling he never paid her enough attention, always a beat behind the punchline of a joke, but that she’d come to understand it wasn’t inattention, just a physical barrier he couldn’t bridge, and that she’d learned to wait for his reaction the way you would with a foreign friend still learning the language.
When my turn came, and I told them about the dragon book, the seven months, Zsófi’s missing tooth, the room went quiet, and Marika said that at least she knew what to expect every morning, while I never knew which way the day would tip, and that this, in her words, was “like standing at opposite ends of a scale, except mine at least doesn’t throw me.”
No one there had it swing both ways the way mine did, unpredictably, first one direction, then the other, and somehow that made me lonelier than if I’d been the only one in the whole group.
My work kept getting worse. A client I owed a logo design to went three weeks without a reply from me, because – as I later reconstructed from the files’ timestamps – I’d sat down one evening to work, and that “evening” had subjectively lasted three weeks for me, while in reality maybe four hours passed, during which I didn’t draw a single line of the design, because my brain had somehow wandered off into some internal, stretched-out time where I couldn’t focus on anything concrete. I lost the client. Then two more, once word got around that I’d become unreliable.
It was Eszter’s idea to try organizing my work differently, because she was afraid I’d lose our entire livelihood, not just time. She set up a strict daily routine – every morning before leaving for work she’d type three tasks into my phone, short, plainly worded, and set an alarm for every two hours to force me to look up, check where I stood in time. It helped, partially – at least the number of fully vanished days dropped – but the method couldn’t solve the moments when a “jump” happened within the two-hour alarm window itself, and I simply never heard the phone ring, because inside my own head a whole week had passed within that same two hours.
Our circle of friends gradually thinned out over those years. Not because I told anyone the real reason – only Ákos and a couple of family members ever got the details – but because it got harder and harder to accept invitations when I never knew for certain which evening would be “normal,” and which would be the kind where a beer with friends felt like three weeks, or the opposite, where a whole weekend hiking trip flew by in an afternoon and I remembered nothing my friends had said. An old university friend, Peti, took offense once when I cancelled on him three times in one month, and though I tried to explain there were medical reasons behind it, he didn’t want the details, and our friendship has been reduced to Christmas messages ever since. Sometimes I think how simple it would be to save a friendship like that with one precise explanation, but every time I try telling someone outside our daily life, I hear how unbelievable my own voice sounds, and I let it drop instead.
A friend of mine, Ákos, also a graphic designer, who’d saved one of my oldest clients by personally vouching for my work, offered at one point to partner with me, if I wanted – he’d handle the deadlines, I’d just do the creative work when I could. I took the offer, because I had no other choice, but every time I handed him a task I couldn’t finish on time, it felt like giving up another piece of who I’d been before any of this started. Today that shared arrangement has become my permanent form of working – Ákos’s name is on our invoices, he negotiates with clients, I just work at the drawing table when I actually can, and though it means less money than I’d have made alone in the old days, at least I’m not losing a new client every month.
We had to live on Eszter’s salary, and though she never said outright that it was a burden, I saw it on her face whenever she looked at the bills, a tension that hadn’t been there before.
The hardest afternoon – or evening, really it was an afternoon – came when Zsófi turned four, on a Saturday when Eszter had to go out for an hour’s shopping and I was watching our daughter at the playground in the little park behind our building, where the same mothers always sat on the same benches with the same strollers every afternoon. I sat down on a bench, Zsófi playing in the sandbox with a little girl I didn’t know, and I was looking at my phone, an article about the weather, since rain was forecast that day, wondering if we’d make it home before it started. And then a “jump” came – the longest I’d experienced yet. For me maybe ten minutes passed with the same article that refused to end, the sentences circling round and round like a corrupted recording, and when I finally looked up to check on Zsófi, the way I usually did every minute, the sandbox was empty, just a small shovel lying in it I didn’t recognize at first as hers.
My heart started pounding immediately, with its full force. I stood up, looked around, shouted her name, and a woman at the far end of the playground came over and said she’d seen the little girl walk out the gate five minutes earlier, assuming I was following. The gate opened onto the street, where cars drove.
I found her two streets away, standing in front of a flower shop, looking at a mannequin in the window, completely safe, not a scratch on her, but those minutes while I searched, not knowing how much time had actually passed within my own subjective confusion, were the longest and most terrifying minutes of my life. I ran the park’s three exits, shouting her name, my own voice sounding strange in my ears, as if coming from someone else’s body, and when I finally spotted her yellow coat in front of the flower shop window, I collapsed onto the pavement beside her so hard that a passing woman stopped to ask if I needed help. Zsófi just said, “Dad, look how pretty this doll is,” not understanding why I was crying, why I was holding her so tight she could barely breathe. For days afterward I couldn’t let go of her hand whenever we went anywhere, watching my own internal clocks every minute the way a pilot watches instruments in a storm.
I had to tell Eszter. I couldn’t hide it, and didn’t want to, but when I told her, what showed on her face wasn’t anger but something worse: fear, specifically of me, her own daughter’s father.
“I can’t let you watch her alone until this is solved,” she said, her voice shaking as she tried to say it calmly. “Not because I don’t trust you. Because I know you don’t trust yourself either.”
She was right. From that day on I was never alone with Zsófi unless Eszter or my mother was also there, and that arrangement – necessary as it was – felt like one more piece being taken from me, on top of all the months I’d already lost without knowing it.
I kept the medical notes the Kronos Clinic issued every time a client or an office demanded an explanation for my absences in a separate folder, because there were so many of them they no longer fit in the drawer I’d originally meant for them.
Eszter’s parents, once they heard what had happened at the playground, came over one Sunday, and her father, an engineer his whole life who looked for a logical solution to everything, suggested it might be better if we lived apart for a while, “until you’re sorted out,” and though I knew he meant it out of concern, what I heard was that I wasn’t safe for my own family. Eszter snapped back hard that this was her decision, not theirs, but that night, lying down, she asked me what I thought – was Zsófi really safe with me – and I couldn’t answer in a way that let either of us believe it.
Eszter’s sister, who lived farther away and had only heard about things over the phone, suggested once that it might be good if Zsófi stayed with her for a while, “until we figure out what this whole thing is going to be,” and though Eszter refused immediately, I heard in her voice that she’d considered it herself for a few seconds before saying no, and those few seconds, once she told me about them, hurt worse than if she’d been certain the whole way through.
My own mother reacted differently. Having raised me alone after my father left when I was ten, she said of course she’d help whenever needed, and that I shouldn’t think of myself as a burden, because “that’s exactly what a mother is for.” But I saw it in her too, when she played with Zsófi, glancing over at me now and then as if checking whether I was still “here,” and that look, however loving, always landed a little humiliatingly.
The Kronos Clinic, meanwhile, was trying to handle the legal side of what they’d done to me. A lawyer the clinic sent came by one afternoon with a compensation offer tied to a non-disclosure agreement – if I accepted the sum, I could never speak publicly about the trial or its consequences again. The amount was significant, enough to cover years of our lost income, and I thought about it for days, because Eszter and I could barely keep up with the bills, but in the end I didn’t sign, because I felt that signing would mean admitting this was a closed matter, an accident that could be compensated, while I lived inside it every single day, every hour, and nothing about it was closed.
The lawyer, a middle-aged woman who spoke kindly but firmly the whole time, as if reading from a script she’d rehearsed many times, said the non-disclosure agreement “served both parties’ shared interest,” since it also protected me from the discomfort of public attention, not just the clinic. I asked what would happen if I didn’t sign. She said the compensation amount would then be significantly lower, since it “wouldn’t cover” future, uncertain damages, only what had already been documented. I took the papers home and left them on the table for a full week, and every morning, looking at them, I wondered how much that sum would be worth to us, and how much it would be worth if I could one day, in a courtroom, say out loud that an experimental device, approved by an ethics board, had destroyed seven months of my life without my ever knowing it was happening.
There was a Christmas we spent at Eszter’s parents’, setting out on what should have been a six-hour drive at half the margin we should have, because Eszter was worried I’d slip into a “jump” along the way and wanted to be ready to drive instead of me if needed. During the drive, in the back seat beside Zsófi, a “jump” began that this time didn’t shrink but stretched: the drive, of which maybe four hours remained in reality, felt to me like six days, six slow, identical days in which, looking out the car window, I watched the same field, the same power pole pass by again and again, as if we were stuck in a corrupted loop. I said nothing, because I didn’t know what I could say that wouldn’t frighten Zsófi, just sat there trying to fill those six days without losing my mind, counting power poles, trying to recall childhood memories in order, by year, just to have something for my attention to rest on.
When we arrived, Eszter said I looked strange, as if I were “somewhere else,” and when I told her what I’d lived through in the back seat, she went pale, and from that Christmas on she never again let us set out on a long drive without someone sitting beside me to watch whether I was staring blankly into nothing for minutes at a time, occasionally just asking, “you okay, Gábor?” – not because she expected an answer, but to pull me back with the sound of her own voice if I started drifting.
Dr. Halmai, who was clearly protecting her own position and the clinic’s reputation as much as anything, admitted once – maybe because she too was running out of ideas – that she didn’t know whether what the faulty cycle had caused could be reversed, since there was no precedent, no prior case to learn from. She suggested we try a second, experimental intervention, one that would attempt to use an opposite-direction pulse sequence to “re-align” the brain patterns, but warned that the risk was unknown, and that it could just as easily worsen my current state, or scramble my time perception in some entirely different, unprecedented way.
For weeks I couldn’t decide. Eszter and I talked about it at night – whatever counted as “night” for me by then – she trying to stay objective, listing the pros and cons, but I could see she was afraid of losing another piece of me if I said yes, and just as afraid she’d never get back what she’d already lost if I said no.
We finally reached a compromise Dr. Halmai accepted too: we’d try a smaller, less invasive test first, pure observation, to see if the pattern stabilized at all on its own without further intervention. For three months they measured me daily – brain waves, pulse, cortisol – and asked me to keep a journal noting when I felt the shift, which direction, how strong.
The journal was a simple lined notebook I had to hand over to Eszter every evening to photograph, because Dr. Halmai wanted a second witness to the timing of each entry, in case the record itself got tangled in the distorted time. On the first pages I still tried writing exact figures – “around ten this morning, a one-minute conversation felt like roughly twenty minutes” – but as the weeks went on I just drew a simple arrow beside each day: up, if time felt stretched, down, if it shrank, a flat line if nothing happened. One month had eighteen arrows pointing up and only three down, and Dr. Halmai showed this excitedly to her colleagues as if she saw a trend in it, though the very next month showed the exact opposite.
The journal made for strange reading. Some days nothing happened, time passed the way it does for anyone. Some days a five-minute phone call lasted an hour for me. And there was one week – I’ll never forget it – when, in a single evening helping Zsófi with a jigsaw puzzle, I felt as though perhaps three weeks had passed, and when I looked up and saw Zsófi still in the same pajamas she always wore to bed, the puzzle exactly as far along as when we’d started, I cried with relief, because I realized that this time nothing had actually been lost, my brain had just played a trick on me, and from the outside nothing strange had happened at all.
That was the first time a “jump” hadn’t stolen anything from reality, only stretched my subjective time without the world moving on without me. Dr. Halmai said this might be a good sign, that the pattern was “refining,” moving in a less destructive direction, though she stressed that nothing could be concluded from a single week.
At the end of the three-month observation, in a closing consultation, Dr. Halmai and two colleagues laid out the data, showed graphs indicating the “spikes” had become somewhat less frequent, though their amplitude – how large a time gap they caused – hadn’t. They offered the second, more invasive intervention again, arguing that now, knowing more about the pattern, they could calibrate the opposite pulse sequence more precisely. Eszter and I went home and talked about nothing else for three days, circling the same arguments, until we finally decided: not yet. Not because we were sure it was a bad idea, but because after the first intervention I’d learned that “we don’t know for certain” is the worst sentence a doctor can say before putting something into your body, and I wasn’t ready to take that same risk again until I had no other choice.
Eszter, when we made the decision together, said what scared her most wasn’t the risk itself, but that if we went ahead and it got worse, she’d never forgive herself for allowing it, and if it got better, she’d never quite believe it hadn’t just been luck. The decision brought no relief, only a different kind of waiting. Two months later came another “jump,” this time toward compression – an entire weekend at Eszter’s parents’ felt to me like an afternoon, and on the drive home, when I asked why we had Zsófi’s school project with us, which I didn’t remember helping her make, Eszter just said, tiredly, “it happened again, didn’t it” – not a question, a statement.
There was an evening, about a year after the diagnosis, when Eszter said she didn’t know how much longer she could do this. She didn’t say it as a threat, more as a fact she finally had to voice, after carrying it silently for months. She said that sometimes, looking at me, she couldn’t tell whether she was with me, or just with a body that remembered how to act like me, and that this uncertainty had started seeping into everything – the morning hello, the goodnight kiss, the way my hand reached for hers in bed.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said, seeing the fear on my face. “But I can’t promise I won’t sometimes look at you like a stranger. Because sometimes you are one.”
There was nothing I could say to that, because she was right, and because I knew that in her place I’d feel exactly the same. I took her hand, and we just sat there a while in the dark living room, not talking about anything, just being there beside each other, which was the only thing I could still reliably offer her at that point. From that evening on we tried building a different kind of closeness, one that didn’t expect the other to always be present in the traditional sense, only to try to be present when possible, and to say so, at least, before drifting too far.
At Zsófi’s sixth birthday party, which we held in our garden with ten kids and a few parents, a “jump” hit while I was cutting the cake, right when everyone was waiting for me to start lighting candles. From outside it was only a few seconds – Eszter said later I’d stood frozen for maybe five or six seconds, knife in hand, staring into nothing – but for me those few seconds felt like an entire morning, in which I did nothing but stand there, trying to find my way back into my own body. One of the mothers joked to Eszter that “Gábor went somewhere for a minute,” laughing like it was a joke, and Eszter laughed along, but that evening, once the kids had gone and Zsófi had fallen asleep exhausted among her new presents, Eszter sat down beside me and said she dreaded the moments when it happened in front of strangers, because she never knew how much she’d have to explain, and how much she’d have to hide.
The most severe spike came a few months after that sixth birthday, and it was the one that finally made me understand this wasn’t a condition that was improving, but a force that strikes back exactly when you least expect it. I woke up one morning believing it was an ordinary Monday, but when I went downstairs, Zsófi was already sitting at the table in a school uniform – a uniform I’d never seen before – and when I asked what it was, both she and Eszter just looked at me for a long moment before Eszter said, carefully, that Zsófi had started school three months ago, that there had been an enrollment ceremony I’d “been at,” only – she said now, her voice starting to shake – I hadn’t really been there at all.
Ten months. Of the ten months since my last “jump,” maybe a week remained to me, in torn fragments – a hazy memory of a dentist’s visit, an evening storm, paying a bill I didn’t remember being so high. Zsófi’s start of school, which we’d prepared for, talked about for years, had vanished completely, and when I asked her what her first day had been like, she just gave me a strange look and said, “Dad, I already told you this,” and in that sentence was something that hurt worse than anything before it: that it wasn’t only me losing time anymore, she had lost something too – a father who’d had to be told everything twice.
Dr. Halmai, when we told her about the ten-month spike, stayed quiet for a while before saying this was the longest case she knew of, not just in my own data but across the entire trial cohort, and that it might suggest the condition wasn’t confined to some narrow range you could eventually learn to live inside, but a range that could keep widening. I asked what happens if a “jump” never ends. She didn’t answer right away, and that silence said more than any words could have. Eventually she only said that in such a case they’d monitor my bodily functions, that they’d “keep me safe,” but I didn’t have the heart to ask further, because “keeping me safe” didn’t sound anything like the home I feel with Zsófi and Eszter.
As Zsófi grew, she understood more and more that her father was wired differently from other people. At five she just knew that “Dad has strange days sometimes,” and accepted this as simply as the fact that Grandma’s knee hurt, or the neighbor’s dog had three legs. At six she started asking harder questions – once she wanted to know if she could “catch” whatever I had, because a boy in her class had something the teacher had explained to everyone, and Zsófi couldn’t understand why nobody explained exactly what was wrong with me the same way. I tried telling her not to be afraid, that this wasn’t a disease you could catch, just an accident that happened to me before she was even born, and that it had nothing to do with her, but I could see on her face that she didn’t fully understand, and that this was alright, because I didn’t fully understand it either. A few days later, in a kindergarten drawing she brought home, she’d drawn a clock, but where the numbers should have been there were only question marks, and when I asked what it meant, she said, “that’s Dad’s,” and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at how precisely she’d landed on something we adults had been struggling to put into words for months.
Eszter and I have since worked out a set of signals we use whenever we suspect I’m “in a jump.” If she asks what season it is and I can’t answer right away, that means she needs to stay alert. If Zsófi says something I don’t understand, a word, a reference to something I don’t know about, Eszter has learned not to panic right away, but to explain it gently, without questions, as if it were just an ordinary reminder, not a sign of missing months.
Zsófi is six now, and sometimes, sitting beside each other, her hand in mine, explaining something about school, a friend, a teacher she doesn’t like, I catch myself monitoring my own internal clocks, trying to tell whether this moment is passing the way it is for her, or whether it’s starting to stretch, or shrink, around me again.
Last week there was an afternoon we sat in the garden, Zsófi making me a drawing – a three-headed dragon, each head a different color – and the whole time, that entire afternoon, my time passed exactly the way hers did. I felt every minute at its true length, heard the neighbor’s lawnmower gradually approaching, then fading, felt the sunlight warming my arm by precisely the amount an afternoon sun like that should, no more, no less, and this ordinary, synchronized time felt so rare and so precious that I could hardly believe it, and was afraid to speak, in case I’d scare it off.
The crayon in her hand was a little worn down, the green one, and I noticed even that with the same clear attention as everything else that afternoon. Zsófi turned the drawing toward me and asked which head was my favorite, and I gave the question exactly as much time as a question like that actually deserves – a few seconds, no more – and looked at her and said the green one, because it looked the friendliest, and she nodded, satisfied, and turned back to add another cloud to the sky, and the whole scene was so perfectly, painfully simple that I wanted nothing more than to stop time right there, in that state, forever.
That evening, when I told Eszter what the afternoon had been like, she said she’d noticed something different in me all day too – “you were present,” she said, and those two words meant more than anything a doctor had ever told me.
I don’t know what it means. Dr. Halmai, when I told her about the afternoon in the garden, studied my most recent brain scans on the monitor for a long time before saying it would be too soon to call this a stabilizing pattern, adding that it was just as likely we were simply in the middle of another, longer wave, and that the next “jump” would be far worse than any before it. I asked if there was anything in the data that could predict which it would be. She said no, that the brain patterns they tracked showed no reliable warning sign yet, and that she herself could only hope, the same as me.
Eszter doesn’t say it, but I can see that after every calm day she’s a little more afraid of the next one, because she knows the longer the quiet lasts, the bigger the next wave might be. Sometimes, when I fall asleep beside her on one of these good days, she tells me she hears me mumbling something, dates, years, as if even in sleep I were counting how many I’ve lost, and how many I might still get back.
There’s a calculation I don’t dare say out loud to anyone, not even Eszter: that if the current ratio holds, by the time Zsófi turns eighteen, I’ll have lost maybe two, maybe three years of her life that I’ll know nothing about, only what others tell me about it afterward. I don’t know which years those will be. I don’t know if I’ll be there when she falls in love for the first time, or when she graduates, or if I’ll just be looking at a photograph of it afterward, trying to convince myself I was there. Sometimes, thinking about this, I start counting forward in the calendar, how many days in a year, how many years until eighteen, as if a calculation like that could change anything about how I’ll feel when it arrives.
Zsófi asked tonight why I look at her so strangely when she talks to me, and I couldn’t explain that it’s because every sentence of hers is a small gamble I make with myself, betting it will end for me in the same amount of time it does for her. I told her it was just because I love listening to her, which was true, just not the whole truth.
After she was put to bed, Eszter and I sat in the living room for a while, and she asked if I’d thought any more about the second intervention. I told her yes, every day, and that I still don’t know. She said that whatever I chose, she’d stay with me, but there was an exhaustion in her voice she no longer tries to hide, the kind that doesn’t build up in one evening but out of three years of losses, piece by piece, and I had nothing else to offer her except taking her hand, and we just sat like that a while, in silence, and that time, at least, we both felt the same.
I lay down tonight beside Eszter, and she’s already asleep, her breathing even, steady, a rhythm you can always count on, and I’m looking at the ceiling, trying to sense which way time is starting to lean around me now – slowing, speeding, or maybe, just maybe, staying even a few more hours before shifting again toward some direction neither I nor anyone else can predict. I count my own breaths, one, two, try to match them to Eszter’s, and for one moment, just one, it seems like we’re breathing in time together, before I can no longer tell whose breath it is I’m hearing.
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