The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  The class came alive. The blue chalk broke—perhaps I hadn’t put it in her fingers properly. Miss Dobzhansky looked at it for a second, puzzled, and then she picked up a piece of white chalk and went on writing. “Once these tribes got to Alaska, they had to decide whether to settle there or keep going …” she said, and she continued the lesson. There was a faint smell of something burning. I tugged surreptitiously on the extension cord until its plug dropped out of the wall socket; I drew it little by little into my desk. I noticed, glancing down casually as if to pull my chair up, that the blades of the plug were a dull carbon black.

  And that was exactly how it went the first day. Nothing bad happened. All went well. I left the transformer in my desk overnight, and I tried it again the following morning, with big plans, but unfortunately this time, as soon as I flipped the switch, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling fluttered and went out. There was an even stronger smell of burning. Miss Dobzhansky sent for the custodian. Time flowed on without interruption. After school, I carried the ruined transformer home in my lunch box. It was totally wrecked. The red jeweled light was partially melted, and there were whitish heat marks around the lower edge of the unit. Just to be sure, I plugged it in in my room one last time after dinner and flipped the switch, but I got no response. The cat continued to lick between the pads of her paws. The traffic lights at the corner colored segments of the big double icicle outside my window red, then green, then orange. It was over. I had only been able to pause the universe twice, for a total of maybe six minutes.

  On the other hand, even six timeless minutes was pretty good. I adjusted remarkably quickly to the idea that I had seen as much of Miss Dobzhansky as I was probably ever going to see. My next task, to which I devoted the ensuing spring and summer months, was to develop an alternate, non-electrical way into the Fold. I explored a number of experimental possibilities, courting the unnatural. I sprayed some new mock-orange leaves with green spray paint to see whether they would become permanent fakes, since I had always found the notion of bronzed baby shoes mysterious and suggestive. I grafted a very fast-growing thistle to our magnolia tree, wrapping the conjoined wounds with heavy-duty thread, theorizing that the mingling of incompatible growth hormones might have chronoactive effects. I heated six marbles on a baking sheet in a slow oven and then spooned them one by one into a glass of ice water which I held quite close to my eye. Into the glass I had first placed a fossil crinoid and a snip of my fingernail. (Now that I think of it, the sound of my ex-girlfriend Rhody using a fingernail trimmer in the morning in the bathroom, the extremely brief and high-pitched chirping sound of the smiling snipper blades meeting after they had snapped through her nail, which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong, is one of the most satisfying memories that I possess of that relationship.) I fully expected time to stop at the moment the interior of each hissing marble suddenly crazed itself with decorative cracks, but it didn’t. I used the butane torch my father had bought for a refinishing project to heat a notched stainless-steel serving spoon until it turned a deep orange. Though it looked soft and slightly swollen, its edges rounded like the edges of a stick of butter, I could not get the spoon to melt. Then I put a small oval pebble in the same spoon and played the torch flame over it, hoping for some lava. The pebble exploded with a snap, sending a stinging fragment of rock into my T-shirt. All of these experiments, and many others I performed during that period, were inconclusive and, frankly, disappointing. It wasn’t until the summer after fifth grade that I was once again able to Drop in, with the help of our basement washing machine and some thread.

  3

  MANY TEMPS DON’T LIKE DOING TAPES; I DO. NATURALLY I like transcribing some tapes better than others. In the early eighties I worked in the office of the head of a big company—well, why should I suppress the name?—in the office of Andrew Fleury, the head of Noptica. He had a three-person WP staff who did nothing but type his gigantic output of correspondence, speeches, interviews, Q-and-A sessions at stockholder meetings, and so on. I think he must have had political ambitions even then. I worked there several times. One long tape of his that I did included a letter ordering a case of some rare sort of Armagnac from a local liquor wholesaler. (It was a personal letter, let me say.) I didn’t know what Armagnac was, and, guessing, I typed Armaniac. Discovering this, Fleury flew into a rage. I heard him laying into one of the two co-office managers—“Paula, tell me what is wrong with this paragraph!” The letter was returned to me with the following marginal scholium: “An alcoholic beverage, not a crazy Armenian!! Don’t guess, look it up!!” Well, maybe he was right—I should have looked it up. But once Fleury caught the error, he could have at least passed on the fact that the word had a g in it. I lost five minutes flipping around in a dictionary. Most of the time, though, salaried people expect so little from temps that any slight awareness of a letter or memo’s context or intent fills them with joy, and they are as a result very easy to work for.

  But why is it that I so like typing tapes? I’ve seen word-processing operators throw their headsets down after several hours of transcribing, shouting, “I hate doing this!” Yet I even liked typing Fleury’s tapes. For one thing, I like that I’m fairly good at it—I can, for instance, often engage in a little parallel processing, typing the sentence that just passed while listening to and storing the phrase that I’m currently hearing: I enjoy seeing how long I can go without resorting to the rewind half of the foot-pedal. But mainly I prefer doing tapes to typing handwritten documents simply because you can hear the dictator thinking. You can hear him groping for the conventional formula that will cover a slightly unusual case. You can occasionally hear undertones of irritation or affection. It is a great privilege to be present when a person slowly puts his thoughts into words, phrase by phrase, doing the best he can. Because you are traveling right along with him as he forms his sentences, making each word he says appear as a little clump of letters on your screen, you begin to feel as if you are doing the thinking yourself; you occupy some dark space in the interior of his mind as he goes about his job.

  It isn’t difficult to imagine an erotic aspect to all this. Sandi, a temp I discussed the subject with a year ago or so, told me she once developed an intense thing for a man she transcribed for. He was in personnel, and his job was to advise employees and retired employees on the best way to handle their pensions. He talked very slowly, she said, in an almost dreamy but loud low voice, with long bold pauses. She said he sounded a little like David Bowie in “China Girl.” He very seldom resorted to the pause switch on his machine; he just let the tape run. And he talked a great deal in his letters about “invading the annuity.” “If your husband predeceases you, Mrs. Plochman,” he would say in a letter, “and you elect to invade the annuity …” “If, on the other hand, you both invade the annuity now …” So often repeated, this particular actuarial idiom began, as a result, to take on a special meaning for her. As she typed it, it was as if she were handling what he was saying, consenting to it, letting it run scarf-like through her fingers. “Please do,” she felt she was whispering back to him by typing exactly what he spoke into her headset, “please do invade my annuity.” They never did anything sexual, though.

  In my own case, I often get thoroughly hypnotized by the tapes of women dictators. Women litigators, especially: when they say things like “Although there are no hornbook rules,” my breathing elevates. And I already mentioned the strange thrill I felt when I heard in a credit update Joyce quote someone as saying that someone else “lied like hell.” Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce’s forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce’s case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I let it surround me, it is as if I’m sunk into the pond of
what she is saying, as if I’m some kind of patient, cruising amphibian, drifting in black water, entirely submerged except for my eyes, which blink every so often. Each word comes floating up to me like a thick, healthy lily pad and brushes past my head. And sometimes, especially if Joyce kindly lets me hear her hesitate (rather than clicking her recorder off to hide the length of her hesitation, I mean), the stretch of black still water between the intermittent green floating words can momentarily expand into infinitude. All the lily pads withdraw themselves from me. At those times I become amazed by the power I have: the power to lift my foot off the transcriber pedal at will and halt that sentence of hers right there for as long as I want in order to think about just where I am in it, and about what it can mean that this living, feeling creature is spending five days a week saying such things into a tape recorder, and about what her mouth looks like as she says them. I pause within her pause and float in the sensory-deprived lagoon of her suspended meaning. What is especially nice, in this state of “deep transcription,” as I call it, is to look up and discover that cheerful, unmysterious Joyce herself is walking briskly somewhere, perhaps toward my desk, wiggling a pen in her fingers.

  So there is, without a doubt, a strong chronanistic element to my doing of tapes. It may even be that if I hadn’t spent so large a portion of the last ten years of my life transcribing words, starting and stopping so many thousands and thousands of modest human sentences-in-progress with my foot-pedal, I would have long ago lost the ability to drop into the Fold altogether. The daily regimen of microcassettes has kept me unusually sensitive, perhaps, to the editability of the temporal continuum—to the fact that an apparently seamless vocalization may actually elide, glide over, hide whole self-contained vugs of hidden activity or distraction—sneezes, expletives, spilled coffee, sexual adventures—within. “The mind is a lyric cry in the midst of business,” says George Santayana, whose autobiography (volume one) I got out of the Boston Public Library yesterday; and it occurs to me that this aphorism illuminates the peculiar suggestiveness of the microcassette, and of all audiocassettes, in fact: these stocky, solid, paragraph-shaped material objects, held together with minuscule Phillips-head screws at each corner (the screws are smaller, incidentally, than the screws in the hinges of my glasses, so small that only SCARA robots could have twirled them in place in such quantity), with their pair of unfixed center sprockets left deliberately loose so that they can comply with slight variations in the spindle distances of different brands of machine—these chunky pieces of geometrical business within which, nonetheless, an elfin wisp of Mylar frisks around any tiny struts or blocks of felt placed in its path, minnowing the ferromagnetic after-sparkle of a voiced personality through whatever Baroque diagonals and Bezier curves it can contort from the givens of its prison.

  This said, the surprising thing really is how little luck I have had using the foot-pedal of my tape-transcription machine to trigger a true Drop. I have thus far been unable to stop the universe using it, or using the remote-control PAUSE buttons of VCRs or CD players, which would seem obvious actuators. I had, as I mentioned, only a brief success in college with a garage-door opener. It may be that to engage time effectively and stop it cold, a mechanism has to have some quality that links it uniquely with me, with my own emotional life, which is why, for example, the toggle-switch transformer for my race-track only worked as a chronoclutch after my fallen hand brushed against it, discovering its warmth, in the middle of the night. This could also explain why the general trend in my Fold-actuators, with a few important exceptions, has been away from hardware and toward simpler, purely bodily spurs like a finger-snap or the pushing up of my glasses on my nose.

  The most elaborate piece of fermational equipment I ever developed was a custom-made piece of machinery I called a Solonoid (with three 0’s). I had it built for me by an MIT undergraduate four or five years ago. I still have it, though it stopped working after a week of Fold-hours. It is very bulky and it made a loud chuffing noise when it was idling, although I’m sure it could be miniaturized and redesigned for quietness. All it did was stretch and unstretch three rubber bands oriented in the x, y, and z directions. I was able to tune the oscillatory frequency of each rubber band by pushing a rheostat on a small mixing board. I had it built simply because I knew one morning, just after I awoke, after many dry Fold-free months, that this design would work. My uncle loaned me fifteen hundred dollars (I told him that it was to take several months off from temping and see if I could get interested in my master’s thesis again), and I put an ad in the MIT student newspaper and interviewed a number of students. I chose the sole woman respondent, naturally.

  She used three small motors. I told her that I was a post-doc in philosophy working on a monograph about a turn-of-the-century American metaphysician named Matthias Batchelder, who had postulated that three India-rubber bands, when alternately stretched and slackened at a particular frequency in the three Cartesian planes, would insert null placeholders into the stream of Becoming, effectively pausing the universe for all but the operator of the mechanism. Though Batch-elder had written to G. E. Moore, C. S. Pierce, and A. A. Michelson about his ideas, I said (scrambling for plausibility), nobody had exhibited the slightest interest, partly because he lacked institutional affiliation, and partly because he had an off-puttingly contentious personal manner. (I should stress that there was no metaphysician by the name of Batchelder—the rough design for the machine had simply come to me one morning—but for the sake of secrecy I needed to distance myself from it. I “lied like hell” to this young mechanical engineer—I had to, I’m sorry.) She—I’m ashamed to say that I’ve forgotten her name—built the machine in short order, and she did a very nice job of explaining its finer points to me, though I have forgotten them. To keep costs down, she was kind enough to use “takeout” parts ordered through the Jerryco catalog—that is, motors removed from used equipment, copiers and such. “Well, I got it to do what you said you wanted it to do,” she said, in her serious way, as we stood in one of the mechanical-engineering labs (she was getting course credit for this project, it turned out, although she had hidden that fact from me), “but I’ve played with the frequencies and I can’t get it to do anything. The rubber bands look kind of neat when they really get going, though.”

  I sat down in front of it. It was ludicrously bulky, definitely not portable. “You mean it doesn’t pause the universe?” I said, chuckling with mock incredulity to indicate that I knew full well that Batchelder’s ideas were a crock, and that I had gone through this whole exercise only out of kindness, merely to give this forgotten eccentric a belated chance to prove himself. “Well, I suppose I should try it myself anyway, for the old man’s sake,” I said. She pointed out the on/off switch, which I threw; I took a moment to adjust the stretching frequencies. (The rubber bands were chosen by me at random from a forty-nine-cent bag of Alliance rubber bands, PROUD TO SAY MADE IN USA.) As soon as I got the ratios right (by ear), the lab, the woman, Cambridge, and everything else, with the exception of me and the jouncing Solonoid, promptly went into suspension. I crawled behind the engineer and kissed the beautifully defined H shapes at the back of her thick knees, which are often the best feature on college women (she wore a jean skirt), and then took my place at the controls again and cut the power to the Solonoid.

  “See?” she said. “Nothing.” We shook our heads sadly, pitying poor deluded Matthias Batchelder, and I wrote her out a check for the full fifteen hundred and thanked her. (I keep my canceled checks; I must remember to go back and find out this young woman’s name.) She asked if she could possibly have a copy of some of Batchelder’s metaphysical writings, and I told her that for estate reasons I wasn’t allowed to give anything out, but that I would definitely send her a reprint of my monograph when it appeared. That satisfied her. And for a few weeks after that, until my supply from that first bag of bands ran out, I was able to do a fair number of intricately filthy Foldy things. The nice unforeseen quality of that machine,
now that I think of it, was that it had a high degree of risk associated with it, since a rubber band could snap suddenly, without warning, causing time to resume and potentially exposing me at a very awkward moment—the sex-in-public-places risk. But I was careful. Eventually I incorporated some redundancy into the design by stretching two rubber bands in each direction rather than one, even though it meant I ran out quicker.

  This problem of remembering names, which just came up in connection with the MIT woman, is a particularly acute one for the career temp. I may work as many as forty different assignments in a given year—some for a week or two, some for a few days. At each assignment, there are typically three to five names to learn the first day (and occasionally many more); ten or more the second day. Depending on how heavy the phone action is, the number of names I end up finally mastering per job can go considerably over one hundred. Per year, I am being exposed to roughly three thousand names, of which (scaling back again) perhaps five hundred belong to individuals I get to know a little, talk to, work fairly closely with. Over ten years, that makes five thousand personalities, about each one of whom I must develop a little packet of emotion, a liking, a disliking, a theory about their feelings for some colleague, a mental note about their taste in clothes, a memory of how they like things done, whether they are of the opinion that state names ought to be spelled out in full or given the two-letter abbreviation, whether they like the document name or number included on the letter or think that this is a vulgarity, whether they want me to amuse myself when I’ve caught up with my work or prefer that I come bounding into their office asking for more to do. In college I was impressed by how well some very popular professors kept up with the particulars of their students’ lives—but the fact is that I master just as much raw humanity each year as the most hotshot celebrity professor. And the difference is that in my lowly case, all these people, or most of them, continue to work downtown, just as I do. They aren’t going to graduate and go away.