The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  Or maybe I just think it is wrong to cheat and steal and so don’t do it. When I was desperate for money a few years ago and I found a way to drop into the Fold by writing a certain mathematical formula on a scrap of paper, I gave serious thought to walking around the city stealing one dollar from every open cash register. It would have taken me months to amass a few thousand dollars, so I would have worked for my loot in a sense, and I would have been stealing a trifling amount from each business. But I found that there was something horrible about the sensation of pulling a dollar bill that was not mine from under that springy clamp that held it down with its own species. There was misery in it, not excitement. I was behind the glove counter at Filene’s trying to steal my very first dollar and I could not do it. Instead, I stood behind the motionless glove salesperson, a woman of twenty or so, very close to her, and squeezed her hard, so that I fancied I could feel the tiny cysts in her breasts as well as the ribs beneath her shirt. (I always find that it is good for me to hug a woman like this because when I feel her ribs I know she is human. Ribs inspire pity and tenderness and the sense that we are all in the same sparred boat.) She was an Italian woman, I think, who looked as if she had taken a few courses in beauty school and had had her natural esthetic sense injured by the experience. She wore a big engagement ring with an oblong diamond. She was a person who would never be physically attracted to a person like me, just as I would never be physically attracted by a person like her. This total incompatibility made me able to feel a surge of momentary sympathy for her which was almost like an infatuation.

  I pushed the diamond on her finger back and forth. (Her nails were cut short, but polished—perhaps short because she liked trying on the gloves she sold?) Then I slipped her engagement ring off and looked through it. It said 14K on the inside. On a whim, I knelt and held her hand and slipped the ring gently back on. “Will you?” I said. I had not been aware before that moment of the straightforward erogenousness of a ring: it suddenly occurred to me that the sides of the fingers are sensitive in an upper-thigh sort of way, and that the singling out of that fourth vulnerable shy finger, the planet Neptune of fingers, which otherwise gets no unique treatment in life and does very little on its own except control the C on the high school clarinet or type the number two and the letter X, to be held and gently stimulated forever by an expensive circle of gold is really quite surprisingly sexual. The resistance of this Filene’s woman’s slender finger-joint, where her skin bunched momentarily before giving way and allowing the band I held to slide home, was in an inverted way like the moment of resistance or dry fumbling before the groom’s unpracticed richard moved smoothly in. Getting engaged was thus an obscenity. “If you fingerfuck this ring for me now, darling, I vow that I will fuck you regularly for the rest of your life.” That’s basically the arrangement. Why does it take me so long to understand such obvious things, things everyone else probably picks up on right away?

  Another more pertinent question might be, If I think that it is wrong to steal a dollar bill from an open cash register, and if I feel guilty about stealing two fresh shrimp from a hotel restaurant, why don’t I have qualms about hugging an otherwise engaged glove saleswoman at Filene’s? She doesn’t know me; she doesn’t know that I’m hugging her and mock-proposing to her. Do I really think I have the right to hike Joyce’s wool dress up around her hips and tie a knot in it? How can I be sure that she would want me to have my fingers in her pubic hair? The question of my wrongdoing is a fair one, but I’m going to table it for the time being and instead sketch in a few more of my early Fold experiences—not because they will explain anything, but because when I try to imagine defending my actions verbally I find that they are indefensible, and I don’t want to know that. I honestly do not feel as if I have done anything wrong. I have never deliberately caused anyone anguish. In fact I have with the Fold’s help saved a few women from small embarrassments, adjusting the occasional awry slip before an important sales meeting and pushing a vagrant underwire in a bra back in place, that kind of thing. I mean well. But I know that meaning well is not any kind of satisfactory defense.

  I first stopped time because I liked my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Dobzhansky, and wanted to see her with fewer clothes on. She might not seem beautiful to me now, but I certainly thought she was beautiful then. Everyone did. She had shorter hair than was usual for elementary-school teachers in 1967, and she was an enthusiast of stop-sign-red lipstick—she must have worn down a stick every fortnight, so full were her lips. She also had one of those wide soft tongues that just naturally like to rest a little way out of the doorstep of the mouth, beyond the teeth. (Not that it lolled!) She always smiled with her mouth open. She wore long, droopy, soft-looking navy-blue cardigan sweaters over sleeveless dresses. I listened to her with great attention as she described the system of locks on a nineteenth-century canal and the Indian technique of manufacturing a dugout canoe. In sharp contrast to Mrs. Blakey, my talented and demanding third-grade teacher, whose loose arm-flesh flapped around in chaotic rhythms as she wrote on the board, Miss Dobzhansky’s chalkboard arm was revealed to be fine and firm, gracefully fitted at the shoulder with a flame-shaped muscle, when in the afternoons she removed her sweater and draped it over the back of her chair.

  I didn’t feel lust for her, really. In fact, that word, lust, is too abstract and intransitive and preacherly to apply even now to my feelings for Miss Dobzhansky or any other woman. I never “lust for” or “after” a woman. I want to do specific things: have dinner with, make smile, hold hips of. I didn’t even, in the beginning, imagine that I wanted to see Miss Dobzhansky in a state of undress. What first made me want to stop time was that after Christmas break she changed the original seating arrangement of the class. I had been in front and now I was all the way in the back. A kid who wrote words backward sat at my old desk. I understood her reasons, but still I was a little hurt. And I noticed then that I couldn’t see the chalkboard as well as I had.

  It was not a question of my being unable to read the words or decipher the figures. It was merely that I could no longer tell at a glance, as I had been able to in my former seat, whether Miss Dobzhansky was using a piece of newly broken chalk with a sharp edge that sometimes briefly left a faint second parallel line, or whether she was holding a more rounded piece that she had used before. I wanted to know exactly what was going on on the surface of the chalkboard—I felt I was missing out on the physical reality of her writing, as opposed to what it meant. When I was in front, I had been able to monitor the chalky ghost of a word she had several times erased; now that was almost always impossible. Two other kids had already gotten glasses, and I knew that glasses would help me a little, but what I really wanted to do was to stop the whole class, the whole school, the whole school district, for a few minutes whenever I needed to walk up to the board and inspect its surface at very close range.

  My big Christmas present that year was a figure-eight race-track and one blue and one brown race car that drove around it and occasionally flipped off. I played with it for a week or two. The problem with it was that there weren’t enough segments of track to make an asymmetrical race-course, and I strongly preferred asymmetry in race-courses. Soon the track got dusty and the cars began to halt suddenly when their bushings lost contact. I pushed it under my bed and thought instead about meat thermometers and toads who can hibernate for years in dried desert mud.

  But after Miss Dobzhansky had moved me to the back of the class, I woke up in the middle of the night and let my arm drop to the floor between the bed and the wall. I was in the habit of doing this fairly often; I did it to prove to myself how nonchalant I was, how certain I was that there were no crustaceans under the bed. This time, though, my hand brushed against something warm. It was the transformer for the race-track. It was still plugged in, still on, still transforming. I got out of bed and pulled the track out. The transformer had, a red faceted light that glowed faintly. It also had a chrome toggle switch. I turned on the light in my
room, so that I could see better, and held the transformer. It was very heavy, with rounded corners, and it had a finish that seemed to have been made by dipping it in thick black paint and then blasting it with hot air so that the paint formed a texture of tiny wrinkles. It had a silver UL label on the underside. “Underwriters Laboratories”—a racy, vaguely underwearish name. The hum that the transformer made was almost inaudible. I touched the toggle switch, then flipped it off, and suddenly I knew that this was the machine I needed, and that the next time I turned the transformer back on, it would stop everything.

  I smuggled it and an extension cord into class in my lunch box. I did nothing with it all morning. As the rest of the students were lining up for lunch, when Miss Dobzhansky stood halfway out the door, I hastily plugged the extension cord into the outlet under the long table against the back wall, which was only a few feet from my chair, and hid the transformer in my desk. Over lunch, though I was quite keyed up, I gave nothing away. I casually discussed with my friend Tim what it would be like to be an agitator BB ball in a can of green spray paint, as if it were an ordinary day. We agreed that it would be fun to dig into the pigment at the bottom of the spray can and then fly up through the pressurized froth and clack around—better perhaps than descending in a spherical space vehicle into the chemical storms on Saturn. Tim contended that there were sometimes two agitator BBs in a single can of spray paint, and I disagreed, arguing that it only sounded as if there were two when you shook it fast.

  I had not expected anyone to notice the cord leading into my desk, since I was in the back corner, and nobody in fact did. I let half an hour go by, watching Miss Dobzhansky discuss a kind of slitted sunglasses that the Eskimos whittled from bone to avoid snow blindness. She began to write the old spelling of Eskimo, with a q, on the board in white chalk. My hands were deep in my desk; my fingertips touched the wrinkle-finish black paint and the smooth toggle switch. As she embarked on the letter m, her back to the class, I flipped the switch. She didn’t finish the m. She and the class were without sound or motion.

  I said, “Hey.” I said “Hey” again. Nobody turned toward me. Far from being eerie or disturbing, the silence was, I found, quite comfy. This acoustical coziness, which is a consistent feature of the Fold, is the result, I think, of the relative sluggishness of the air molecules that surround me. Sound diffuses outward only a few feet, as far as I can tell. I’m often reminded of a line in the first stanza of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”: “And silent was the flock in woolly fold,” My Fold is woolly.

  Presently (“presently” is right!) I flipped the toggle back to the off position, deactivating the machine. At once everyone and everything took up where they had left off. The world expanded, sounding once again as if it were recorded in stereo. Miss Dobzhansky finished writing Esquimaux. She gave no indication that she was aware that anything out of the ordinary had just happened; and as far as she was concerned, of course, nothing had happened. She turned toward us and began talking about a thin strip of land that she claimed had once joined Alaska and Asia, over which tribes had traveled, giving rise not only to the Eskimo, but to the American Indians of the lower states. I must have been looking at her with an expression of unusual attentiveness, or even of rapture, because her gaze landed on me and she smiled. I knew we had a special understanding. I knew also that she might be the most beautiful person I would ever know. I knew that she knew that I sometimes didn’t raise my hand to give answers to the questions she asked even when I knew the answers, because I wanted to give her the option of drawing out other kids, of calling on me only when she needed to, as a backup. Her explanation of the waves of Asian migrations across the Bering Strait interested me, so I let her finish before stopping the universe for a second time. As soon as she turned toward the blackboard again, to write Bering, I flipped the switch and took off all my clothes.

  The air is quite close in the Fold and takes a little getting used to, although as long as you wave your arms around every so often there is no real risk of asphyxiation. I was very conscious of my breathing as I walked up the row of desks and chairs, naked, and reached my lovely teacher. “Miss Dobzhansky?” I said, standing right behind her, though I knew that she couldn’t hear me. My plan, as I had conceived it in a flash when she had smiled at me a moment before, was to take off all her clothes and then sit back down at my desk and click time back on—that is, turn the time transformer off. When she felt the cooler air on her skin and discovered that she was entirely nude, she would turn toward us, confused and startled, but not really flustered, since I had never seen her flustered—her serenity and ability to adjust to any eventuality in the classroom was an important part of what made her so lovely to me—and she would meet this challenge with her usual aplomb. She would turn toward us with her hands shielding her breasts and look inquiringly at our faces, as if to say, “How, class, has this happened?” Her eyes would seek out mine, because she knew she could trust me to help her through difficult moments, and I would look back at her with an ardent, loving, serious expression. I would stand and shush anyone who dared to snicker at the fact that both I and Miss Dobzhansky were completely naked, and I would walk up to her and nod at her as if to say, “Everything will be all right, Miss Dobzhansky,” and collect her sweater and her dress, which I would have left neatly folded on her desk. She would say, “Thank you, Arno,” in a voice that communicated how grateful she was that I was in her life and was able to help her through this moment. She and I would retire to the cloakroom for a few minutes, where I would hand her her clothes one by one as she got dressed. She would do the same for me. When we re-emerged, I would take my seat and she would continue her social studies lesson. The class, docile with shock, would have remained silent through our whole absence.

  That was my plan, but I soon found that I had to modify it. Miss Dobzhansky was wearing her navy-blue droopy sweater and a simple white shirt buttoned at the top with a blue enamel Saturn pin covering the top button. The sweater was already unbuttoned, so I left it alone. But when I reached up to undo the enamel pin (or “brooch” I guess they are called) I felt that this was not something I wanted to do at all. What if, once I got her totally naked, I chickened out and didn’t want to proceed? Would I be able to pin the pin back in place precisely as it had been? I worried about possibly breaking its little catch, or putting it on crooked. If it wasn’t replaced exactly right, she would sense a sudden slight displacement at her neck when I turned the classroom back on and she would suspect something, and because of my recent look of rapture she might connect me with her odd sensation, and if she asked me directly, I didn’t think I could lie to her and tell her that I had had nothing to do with it.

  By this time I was standing between her and the blackboard, very close to her. Her breasts were my horizon line. I decided that I could at least safely undo several of the middle buttons of her shirt to see what all was underneath. In the cottony silence of the idled universe, I undid two buttons. My fingers trembled, of course. And even now, twenty-five years later, my fingers sometimes tremble when I watch them at work undoing a row of a woman’s shirt buttons, especially when her shirt is loose, so that once you have finished unbuttoning it no more is revealed to you than when you began, and, as a separate deliberate act, you have to part the still-overlapping sides of the shirt with the backs of your hands like a set of curtains. I peered into the oval world I had just created. What I could see of her bra was very interesting. It had little X’s sewn along the borders of the two side-pieces that attached to the round bosom-holding parts, and the bosom-holding parts had perfectly sewn seams running diagonally up over their curves, like a napping cat’s closed eyes. I reached up and pushed gently on one of her bosoms with the palm of my hand. (I called them “bosoms” then, and really it isn’t such a bad word for them.) The shape was unexpectedly soft and quite warm. I unbuttoned another lower button so that I could now comfortably surround my whole head with her shirt. Her skin glowed in the shadowy cloth-diffused light. I fe
lt like a daguerreotypist, crouching and covering my head with a camera cloth to see my subject more completely. I saw her stomach, which was extensive at this close range. In the middle of it was her belly-button.

  This I hadn’t reckoned on. It was the big moment. I had never seen anything so womanly, so grown-up-looking, at such close range, in my life. Miss Dobzhansky’s belly-button did not look like a child’s belly-button at all. There was a sort of stretched proscenium of skin over the top, a bell curve, similar in a way to the epicanthic eye-fold on Asian people (like Esquimaux), whereas the slope below led the eye right into a little private sanctum elegantly cupping something that looked like a tiny piece of used chewing gum or the knotted part of a balloon. What was impressive was simply how wise and experienced it looked, how profoundly oval it was. I passed my knuckles lightly over it, awestruck. Then I emerged from her shirt for a second to get a rounded piece of blue chalk, which I gently twirled in it, as if I were chalking up a pool stick, except the other way around. I left only the most imperceptibly small trace of chalk dust, brushing the excess away. Feeling by then that I had had more than enough for one afternoon, I buttoned her shirt back up. As an afterthought, I replaced the white piece of chalk that she was holding as she wrote the word Bering with the piece of blue chalk that I had used on her. Then I went back to my seat, put my clothes back on, arranged myself so that I was sitting exactly as I had been, and turned the time transformer off. Its chrome switch was almost painfully hot to the touch.