The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  I snipped all the thread from my hands and amassed a load’s worth of dirty clothes from the floor of my room (supplemented by several towels) and I started a large warm wash with the lid open and the interlock jammed. While the wash churned through its preliminaries, I chose a new needle, threaded it, and pushed it through the thus-far-unsewn callus at the base of my left hand’s middle finger. I put the spool in place on the nail and wrapped the loose end of the thread around the post of the washing machine. Now, as the spin cycle began, it pulled the thread through my callus, through a part of me, in winding it onto itself. The thread tugged through the hole in my skin surprisingly easily, faster and faster. My hand lay on the sill of the washer, face up. The heat of the friction began to hurt; when it became almost unbearable, and I was on the verge of closing my fist on the thread to snap it, the event, or non-event, happened. Everything stopped. I looked into the tub of the washing machine and was thrilled to be able to see and even touch that fiction of the physical sciences, centrifugal force. Without suffering harm, I could now reach in and hold clothes that were in the midst of spinning at six hundred r.p.m. I put my hand in the machine. The remaining blue water, immobilized in its turbulence and yet still wet to the touch, was especially beautiful. The world was again available for undressing. But I knew that if the thread that ran through my callus broke, time would resume. So I was unfortunately tethered to the washing machine.

  Over a period of ten minutes I laboriously paid out the thread through my callus so that I could walk upstairs and out to the yard. A bird was out there, a robin, paused in the air, about three feet off the lawn—I touched its spread wings, though not hard enough to dislodge it from its pausal locus. I continued to unspool my callus-thread until I had reached the street. A woman was in a station wagon with her elbow on the door. I touched her shoulder with my hand, then reached into her blouse and went under her bra and felt her hot heavy ostrich egg of a breast. Her nipple was amazingly soft. Her hair was motionlessly wind-fluffed; the speedometer said thirty miles an hour. That soft unselfconscious nipple I touched (my very first after infancy, recall) was driving down the street at thirty miles an hour while I, caressing it at leisure, stood in place! When I had learned enough about the weight and highly advanced mobility of her entire Jamaica in my coarse and threaded hand (joggling it reminded me, to my surprise, of the variable heft of a Slinky toy as you let its arched length recoil back and forth from palm to palm), I went back to the sidewalk so that I wouldn’t be run over, and I yanked on the thread until it broke. I pulled it from the hole in my callus. The station wagon sighed promptly by—I saw a flash of the woman in profile, then the back of her car, her meaninglessly specific license plate, then her turn-signal light blinking, then she turned down Southland Street, gone. In the basement, my clothes took up with their spinning as if I were still standing at the washing machine looking in. Nobody in the cars that followed seemed to notice that I had just appeared next to a bushy spray of elm-stump suckers, out of nowhere.

  My second successful drop-phase ended there, circa August 1969: it, like the time-transformer experiment that helped me into Miss Dobzhansky’s shirt, was apparently induplicable, depending on exactly those particular clothes and towels,those calluses, and that specific new packet of needles from the Needle Man. Tethering oneself to a clothes-washer was in any case a somewhat awkward way of forcing time into remission; although as I thought that period over on the beach towel in the yard I remembered none of the awkwardness—only how leapingly happy I had been for the rest of the day because I knew then, after all my false starts and failed attempts, that there really was more than one way to trip the universal clutch.

  Now, out in the back yard, because I was so desperate to stop the calendar, I considered trying something like it again: sewing through my fingers and washing the very towel I lay on. But the fact was that my adult skin was much too thin. Typing does not make for heavy callusing. (As I type I can feel the raised pleasure-dots on the J and F keys of the typical keyboard, molded there to let you know that your fingers are properly stationed in the “home” position, with something close to discomfort, so tender are my fingertips.) Perhaps there was a way to trigger a Drop by pretending I was sick and going to Commonhealth, my HMO, and listing off lots of mysterious pains and moments of dizziness in the shower, so that the doctor would order some comprehensive blood work, and when the blood was sucked from my elbow and spun at six thousand r.p.m. in a bucket centrifuge in the lab to separate the yellow plasma from the red cells, that higher-speed self-centrifugation would re-create the conditions of the primordial washing machine, and I would, while the spin was in progress, be able to unclasp the Hispanic phlebotomises bra while she posed in the Fermata, expertly tapping into someone else’s vein. But I rejected the possibility, since even if a temporal hematocrit worked, it would be too unpredictable and impossible to control; I needed a way to switch time on and off quickly and easily.

  But this notion of self-centrifugation did and does have a powerful appeal, and I sometimes have the distinct sense, as I hover in the middle of a page of this memoir, choosing which of my past Fermatas I will relate next, that in order to write my life properly I need the entire receptacle of my consciousness spun, as the ultracentrifuge’s rotor spins its vials of biological freight, fast enough to conquer diffusion and impose some artificial order. I need to dangle in a severe vacuum from a one-tenth-inch-thick length of piano wire (like the rotor in the old Spinco Model E ultracentrifuge, developed in the fifties by Edward G. Pickels and his colleagues and still in use in a number of grant-depleted research programs in protein chemistry), while a xenon lamp flashes some unforgiving wavelength over my memory sample, rotating sixty times faster than the washing machine in my basement did—I want all of the semi-remembered images of half-dressed women, all these fragments of my voyeuristic history, that still remain in messy colloidal suspension to fly around at the speed of insight until they are compelled to file themselves away once and for all into neat radial gradients of macromolecular uniformity, like layered cocktails or fancy multicolored creations in Jell-O. I happen to know, from a three-week assignment in the research department of Kilmer Pharmaceuticals (for better or worse, an alert temp can pick up lots of stray knowledge), that biochemists routinely use the centrifuge (especially the low-end tabletop Beckman model called the Microfuge) to spin down, or “pellet,” lengths of DNA in order to purify or clean them. And everything in the mind—that final triumph of protein chemistry—is likewise in helpless motion, afloat, diffuse, impure, unwilling to commit to precipitation: only an artificially induced pensive force of hundreds of thousands of gravities can spin down some intelligible fraction of one’s true past self, one’s frustratingly polydisperse personality, into a pellet of print.

  One evening after work very recently, needing to rev myself up to continue writing some section of this very document, I snapped time off and went for an indoor walk around the research buildings of Mass General, looking for ultracentrifuges and for the breathtaking women post-docs who use them. I again vaguely envisioned centrifuging some of my own cells, this time for the pure ideational rush of it: I could devote a whole Pause to placing small samples of my blood (or possibly sperm, though that seemed a needlessly cruel thing to do to my sperm) in every Sorvall and Beckman and Hitachi ultracentrifuge in Boston and Cambridge and setting them all on top speed. I would be anemic and listless by the end, but I wouldn’t care, because I would know that at that second my own perky little cells were being crushed into alternative world orders of protoplasm by exotic megagravities in expensive vacuums in every high-powered NIH-funded research program in the area, and that trickster knowledge would power me upward into raptures of self-knowledge and self-abandonment. But I didn’t actually do it, because I would then have had to clean all the bloody test tubes after their runs were completed, since I wouldn’t want to leave something as unsettling as provenanceless yellow plasma around for researchers to discover. Fear is my least favor
ite emotion; I want to be responsible for creating as little of it as possible. I did look at a fair number of ultracentrifuges, however, and what I noticed was that the big floor-model machines, the ones built in Palo Alto by Beckman Instruments, bore a surprisingly strong resemblance to clothes-washers. They were a little wider, and they were blue (which should be a standard color for washing machines but perplexingly is not), and a close look at the control panel revealed, in addition to familiar words like SPEED, TIME, and TEMP, the less laundry-relevant terms VACUUM and ROTOR—but they still had an oval opening in the top that you closed after loading with a simple latch, and their direct-drive motor (I learned this from flipping through a textbook in one of the lab’s libraries) operated on exactly the same induction principal as a Maytag’s. The huge difference between these two consumer durables (and I think one of the best things about centrifuge as a noun is the ghost of the word huge it safely contains) was that the Beckman machine could turn a rotor, fitted with eight or even twelve little cuvettes containing some biohazard or other, at sixty thousand r.p.m. In other words, it could dependably spin, without flying apart, or overheating, or making disturbing noises (I noticed that it was quieter than a washing machine), at a rate of over one thousand revolutions per second.

  I lifted one of the rotors from a shelf in one of the labs. It was not a light object. It was milled out of some kind of compressed titanium alloy and it was finished in an elegant anodized black. It looked like a forty-five-dollar dark-chocolate birthday cake, with holes for, say, eight unusually thick candles—but it weighed about as much as a bowling ball, or a human head. I’m seldom as impressed as I should be when I hear that a weightless entity like an electrical impulse can dash around in its silicon irrigation ditches a thousand times a second, or even a million times a second, because electricity is ungraspable; opposable thumbs are of no use in its presence. But when a California company manufactured a machine that could get something heavy, something that you might grunt gently in lifting, that would dent turf if you dropped it, to rotate a thousand times a second, the achievement seemed close enough to being conceivable that it became inconceivable. A head, spinning a thousand times a second! I was impressed when the little girl in The Exorcist spun hers around once. As I held the rotor, knowing myself to be the one unstill being in the center of a temporarily still universe, I began to want very much for my own head to revolve at ultracentrifugational speeds—I wanted to spin so fast my ears would rip off my head and slap onto opposite walls; I wanted my grotesquely elongated tongue, unretractable after I opened my mouth to utter the usual “Help!” of the Faustian inventor, to form a pink Saturnian ring or an Elizabethan collar before my brain finally blew. Not only could the human head not survive sixty thousand r.p.m., I thought, it could hardly survive thinking about sixty thousand r.p.m. And in fact, when I reflect on it now, I realize that my Foldouts are in many ways equivalent to centrifugation, since when I spend a few hours of quality time in the Fold I am in fact held in the vacuum chamber of a single exceedingly patient millisecond, potentially doing a thousand things, reading whole books, wandering through buildings filled with scientific instrumentation, and thus, from a bystander’s perspective, moving over my closed loop at miraculous Spinco speeds.

  8

  TO RETURN TO THE BLUE-AND-WHITE-STRIPED BEACH TOWEL of last year, however. I again tried to tell myself how self-sufficient I was stretched out in the Goldman Sachs sun, and therefore how totally unnecessary any sort of time-perversion, chronofugational or otherwise, was to me. I had a whole free real weekday to do whatever I wanted; I could, for instance, and should, read a book. I could go to a bookstore and select a new beautiful paperback and buy it and put my nose in it to smell the fine pukey smell that new books often have. If I had clutch powers I could browse in a bookstore until I saw a woman I liked … and here I came up with the aforementioned idea of writing a startling burst of filth in the top margin of a book that a woman was considering. With an effort of will, I erased that phantasm: there were wonderful non-gonadotropic topics everywhere and I wanted very much to do them the courtesy of thinking about them—it was my duty as a conscious creature to think about them. The plastic arts, for instance. At random I thought of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, how skilled he was at depicting clear water and wet tulle. It would be good to be lying on a towel on a beach while the Hispanic phlebotomist held flat the pages of a large-format edition of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings with her flatly sagging coconut-oiled breasts, so that the Caribbean breeze wouldn’t make me lose my place. My eyes were still closed, the towel was still clean-smelling, I was still lucid-feeling, but I knew that I was almost ready to turn over on my back, and I knew that if I turned over on my back my bathing suit would come off a minute later (and who cared if anyone saw me—I wanted people to see me!—but I was pretty sure nobody was home downstairs anyway, because no cars were in the driveway), and once my bathing suit was off, my Juiceman would writhe and elongate against my thigh until, in attempting to rise and make a drunken statement, it would lose its balance and fall heavily back against my hipbone, where it would writhe some more. As a last resort, to remind myself that most of the world was asexual most of the time and well worth a close look even so, I opened my eye, the one that wasn’t lost in the turf of the towel, and I saw, with nearsighted monocular vividness, my huge sunlit watch and my glasses. Through one lens of my glasses I could see the Fieldcrest label, or rather its verso inside, which was nicer-looking than the outside because you could see all the spendthrift lushness of soft thread that had been necessary to sew the little familiar logo and its trademark sign—though the sight of this made my Fold-urges reawaken, since time too was lusher when turned inside out. Beyond the sharp-edged inner bourne of my myopia I saw the macrophage of my T-shirt draped over the telephone, which would only ring if Jenny, my coordinator, came up with a late assignment for me, and I imagined the quick upward arpeggio of metallic clicks produced by the telescoping chrome antenna as I pulled it out roughly to answer a call, one segment reaching the limit of its slide and engaging with the next, and the same clicks in reverse order after I’d hung up and was pushing the aspirin-shaped end-bauble down. Time telescoped in a similar way; it would be most helpful if I could instigate a Drop whenever I pulled on the antenna of my portable phone. All things that came to mind suggested mechanisms of pausation to me; so much so that I began to feel that I was on the verge of regaining my powers.

  I closed my eye and opened it again, and this time I looked only at my glasses, and it seemed to me then that the very best thing about sunbathing was that you could open your eyes at any time and see your own companionable glasses waiting for you there so close to your face, casting their sharp shadow: I could see with extreme clarity the thick opaque ground perimeter of the rimless lenses, and the side-pieces crossed at their kneelike earward ends, and the eyelash hair, whose curve enhanced my appreciation of the curvature of the prescription, and the dust that built up so gradually that I hadn’t noticed it, and the nose-pods that were filthy but whose filth was irrelevant because nobody else could see it, and the paired reflection of some branchy blueness in the faintly scratched surface—all this nineteenth-century precision that I wore on my face every day, and never had the opportunity to study because all I did was take the glasses off at night and fold them automatically and put them by my bed and put them on again in the morning. No matter how often I closed my eyes, my corrective lenses would be there in the sun when I opened them again, waiting to be praised and seen, and seen more exactly and clearly than if I were wearing another pair of glasses to look at them, because my nearsightedness shortened the minimum focal length, making things even two inches away fully contemplable. I saw my own glasses better than anyone who didn’t need glasses could ever see them. The word clarity struck me as very fine. My happiness had a clarity to it. My happiness was optical. My happiness was the direct result of my glasses. Should I do ten pushups to celebrate the innocent clarity of my happiness? Sh
ould I do ten pushups naked? I took off my bathing suit and did ten pushups naked, and each time I lowered myself trembling down to earth, and my down-hanging soft-serve nosed unprotestingly into the towel, I turned my head so that I could see my glasses waiting there for me to appreciate them. Possibly they seemed beautiful to me in part because they were hybrids, existing halfway between knower and known, between what I saw and how I saw. I felt as if I were looking at my own sense of sight, even at myself, when I looked at them.