Year 2000

Year 2000 is the future date on which Henry Chinaski and William Keesing each expect to die, a coincidence that makes mortality briefly shared rather than solitary. Chinaski gives the year a bluntly practical appeal as a “nice round number”; Keesing adds the unsettling specificity of a dream that supposedly disclosed the day and hour of his death. The date remains an expectation, not a confirmed outcome, and its matter-of-fact delivery gives it the scene’s peculiar force.

A Chosen Endpoint

Asked how long he expects to go on, Chinaski answers that he has planned to die in 2000, when he will be eighty. He offers no account of how the plan would be carried out; the declaration presents death as a date he has selected and stated plainly. His explanation is deliberately modest: he likes the year because it is round. That preference makes the imagined endpoint sound less like prophecy than a simple piece of personal arithmetic.

Keesing’s Matching Prediction

Keesing says that 2000 is also the year he expects to die. He connects that forecast to a dream in which he saw not only the year but the day and hour. The exchange gives his prediction a more ominous precision than Chinaski’s, while neither man argues over whether such foreknowledge is credible. Their matching dates create an unlikely point of recognition between them: each speaks about death without ceremony, and each lets the other’s forecast stand.

The Date Within the Visit

The discussion does not interrupt the visit or turn it into a solemn vigil. Chinaski and Keesing drink for another hour or two; Chinaski takes the extra bedroom while Keesing sleeps on the couch. Keesing’s wife, Cecelia, appears serious about leaving him, so the visit’s immediate circumstances remain unsettled even as the men name a distant future endpoint. The two men later drink beer quietly as darkness falls and a high wind rises. Chinaski recalls being glad they had met and describes Keesing as a tough, unpretentious man whose poems had found an audience in Australia but not, so far, in the United States.

An Unresolved Future

The prediction receives no confirmation in this episode. Instead, the narrative returns to ordinary obligations: after a telephone call from Cecelia establishes that the tornado passed around them, Keesing prepares his notebooks and other necessities in a backpack, gets on his bicycle, and pedals to the university to teach. Chinaski is due to give a reading that night. The contrast between a precisely imagined death and these continuing routines keeps 2000 in suspension: it is at once a number that makes mortality seem manageable and a future neither man’s words can secure.