Time Shelter

In ‘Time Shelter’, an unnamed narrator meets Gaustine, a ‘flneur through time,’ who has uncoupled his life from his contemporary reality, reading old news, wearing old clothes, haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. Gaustine is the mind behind the first ‘clinic for the past,’ an institution based in Zurich that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time and find comfort in their fading memories. Yet an increasing number of healthy people are interested in seeking out the clinic as a form of ‘time shelter,’ hoping to escape from the horrors of our present, a development that results in an unexpected conundrum, when the past beings to invade the present.