Fischbinder came back with a copy of the New York Times. The date was right – March 14, 1997 – and there was a front-page story about the president, who did indeed seem to be named Clinton. There was turmoil in the Middle East, for a change, and there was trouble as well in Zaire and Bosnia. There was a map, and Bosnia seemed to be a country, and not just a province of Yugoslavia. In fact they all seemed to be countries, Bosnia and Croatia and Macedonia and Serbia and Slovenia.

Could I be dreaming? Because I had dreamed of the day when all the parts of Yugoslavia would be sovereign nations, I and my brothers in a handful of disparate groups. If the newspaper was to be believed, the day had come while I lay frozen and unknowing. And now, from the looks of things, the citizens of all these new republics were busy killing one another. Not quite the heaven on earth I’d had in mind, but still…

“I don’t suppose it would be that difficult,” I said, “to have a newspaper printed.”

They exchanged glances again. Neither of them actually said the word paranoia, but I could almost hear it just the same. And I guess I knew I was being unrealistic. They might have dummied up the front page of a newspaper, with some imaginative headlines over blocks of jumbled type. They do that all the time in the movies. But this was a whole copy of the New York Times, pages and pages of it, with ads and photos and stories all the way through.

And it cost sixty cents, I noticed. The last time I bought it, all it set me back was a quarter.

“I’m being silly,” I admitted. “I think I believed you from the beginning, and the paper’s a convincer, even if it does raise two questions for every one it answers. But, see, I look the same. You both probably look a lot older than you did in 1972, but I didn’t know you then, so you couldn’t prove it to me. You know what they say, seeing is believing, and if I could just see something that would cut through this inner skepticism of mine…”