The woman’s lack of expression tortured me. Probably she was just wondering whether I was only a harmless idiot or the kind of freak who necessitated an alarm. She usually acted with restrained kindness towards everybody, but I’d once seen a glimpse of another side to her. She couldn’t stand people with intellectual disabilities. Once, a group of four youngsters with cognitive impairments had come to the Library with their instructor, looking for illustrated books about foreign countries. I watched the situation from one side; the eager book-seekers didn’t have the patience to be properly quiet, and the cheerfully noisy group drew everyone’s attention. When they approached the Lady Librarian, she turned pale, stiff, and tense. I could actually smell her aversion towards these harmless people. Now, I was afraid she’d react the same way towards me.
“Yes, we live by the seaside in a white house, and the porch could use some painting,” the Lady Librarian finally said. “And our little daughter is a miserable violin player.”
“True,” I heard myself admit (my voice seemed to come from somewhere far away). “So let’s stop sending her to lessons with Ms. Lindeman. She’d rather gather cockleshells on the beach.”
For a while the situation felt completely natural. She smiled and I smiled; the library hall seemed to brighten around us, and we looked at each other as if it had been the world’s simplest and most obvious thing. Even colors deepened: the brown in the woman’s hair shone browner than any brown I’d ever seen. Never before had we exchanged more than a few superficial words, but here, now, the two of us were discussing our dreams over the library’s lending desk. And how come we happened to share the same dream, in which we lived together with a daughter? How nice, unique, and interesting!
Except I was close to fainting; while my soul felt like a balloon striving to fly off, the flesh on my bones hung heavy and listless. Not even with my wife had I discussed my dreams, since she was rather inhibited when it came to intimate matters. “Dreams are private, just like arseholes,” she’d once said. “They exist, they are common, but they should nonetheless never be talked about.”
It was true, of course. Publicly revealing one’s dreams could result in a heavy fine and forfeiture of civil rights for a long time. And now I’d gone and poured my dreams out to the Lady Librarian! I might as well have dropped my trousers, handed her a torch, and mooned her.
I glanced around furtively. How many had overheard? What kind of job promotions could a man with an indecent exposure record expect? “Publicly revealed his dreams in the City Foundation’s Library, in the middle of a Tuesday.”
“Your finger,” the woman said. I inclined my head questioningly. “The finger,” she repeated and took my hand with a grin. She recorded my DNA on the lending terminal, let go of my hand, and gave me the book. Her smile was once more the epitome of customer service. Obviously she, too, had suddenly remembered the rules of proper conduct. In a public place you didn’t talk aloud about your dreams, or do anything else improper, after all. That’s what mothers tell their little children. “You are welcome,” the Lady Librarian said, without looking me in the eye.
“Thank you,” I muttered. I grabbed the book and blundered out of the adult department on stiff legs. There was a restroom downstairs; I went there to wash my face and to collect my thoughts, but I didn’t even have time to touch the faucet before I doubled over and threw up until my stomach was empty. I heard how the toilet-robot, smelling the mess, clicked out of its niche behind me and waited to fulfill the purpose of its existence: disinfect the basin.
Of the next two Tuesdays I remember nothing but my wife’s distant voice; I suppose she persistently tried to ask me something about the move. My son most likely also came to explain something to me every now and again, which always ended with an inquiring series of sounds that I didn’t have the energy to even try to translate into meaning. Some person of importance might have phoned me, but after the call I couldn’t remember with whom I’d just spoken. I packed things more mechanically than the most primitive E-class robot worker. In my mind, packing had nothing to do with the approaching day of our move. My brain had almost totally disconnected from the external world, while my hands kept tossing data cubes, folders, pens, pots, socks, clothes, and papers into empty boxes my wife Hannelore kept fetching from the supermarket. At times I vaguely realized I’d broken some object, but none of that seemed to matter in the least.
“Daddy’s nervous about the new job,” I heard my wife whisper to our son several times. What a nice explanation.
I was supposed to take a transfer vacation of seven Tuesdays before I started working at my company’s new location, “The Node.”(It was the node of net-crossings, central to the information ferry transport). With my promotion I’d also been promoted to Chief of Information Ferrymen, and at first I’d been very excited. The promotion meant more money and more challenges. I’d always been a virtuoso at forming, organizing, and handling information packages, which of course made me competent to control the ever-increasing four- and soon to be five-dimensional net ferry transport, using the newest results from the Time Research Institute in the planning of its technology. But now I actually didn’t even remember the new job anymore.
On the third Tuesday my eyes focused on an object in my hand. It was the book I’d borrowed from the Library. It was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
I took the book, climbed over the mountain of boxes, and returned to the Library. The Lady Librarian was waiting for me behind her desk and looking at me expressionlessly.
“We have to talk. When the library closes,” she said.
Something terribly powerful was churning below her cool veneer. It was just as though I’d been looking at the beginnings of a volcanic explosion at the bottom of a frozen pond, seconds before the ice ceased to exist forever.
“Yes,” I answered and returned the book. Blindly I leafed through newspapers while I waited for the Library’s closing hour. Headlines flashed on the surface of the reading table: IRAN OFFERS ECONOMIC AID TO EAST-AMERICAN MUSLIM REPUBLIC. INSTITUTE OF INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT DENIES RUMORS OF TIME EXPERIMENTS. SPEAKER OF POPULAR TALK SHOW REVEALED TO BE A SEX ROBOT–GROOM HAS NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. SACKED MANAGER OF T.R.I. REVEALS: TIME EXPERIMENTS HAVE BEEN GOING ON FOR OVER THREE DECADES! T.R.I. ADMITS TO EXPERIMENTS: “WE TRIED TO SLOW DOWN WORKING HOURS.” PROBLEM CHILD: SON OF ICELANDIC RESEARCHER MANUFACTURES 328 COPIES OF FAMILY’S DOG GUNVALD IN CELLAR! “DADDY EXPLAINED TO ME HOW IT’S DONE,” SAID THE THIRD GRADER.
I tried to smile at the news of the 328 Gunvalds, but my face felt cold. I kept glancing at the woman sitting behind the desk. She was watching me rather strangely. I pondered whether I ought to leave, after all. What if she was just wondering why I was still sitting here? What if I’d misunderstood something?
But when eight o’clock arrived and all the customers except for me had left, she locked the door, put on her brown coat, and came over to me. Her smile dispelled all my doubts. “Let’s go,” she said.
Coffee and Great Insights
We descended the stairs, my Lady Librarian and I, and made our way to the café round the corner. There we sat at a private table, not wanting other ears listening in on our conversation. She ordered a coffee and a big cinnamon bun. It was quiet; the radio was softly playing some new production by the virtual Edith Piaf.
Yess! More original than the original! a husky DJ kept assuring us, himself probably just the virtual voice of some radio legend.
Nothing new was good enough for people nowadays; everything had to be neo-twentieth-century. People were coming to blows over tickets to the new Hitchcock movie Fatal Moon, starring Jimmy Dean, vir, and Greta Garbo, vir. Traditional film wasn’t doing well at the box office and actors had to work for scraps, as devotees. Their work and the medium were considered too elitist for the tastes of the common people.
For some time already, the production of films had been the task of comps simulating past masters. I had actually begun to get used to the idea. Chaplin mov
ies by the comps weren’t so bad, after all. Same with comics. I’d bought my son a Carl Barks comp from the series Great Historic Storytellers for his sixth birthday. For a couple of weeks it had churned out one new duck comic after the other, day and night, in the corner of the boy’s room and, except for a few occasional oddities, they all seemed brilliant.
Finally the overexerted comp had coughed and caught fire; in its last moments its scorched circuits spat out a half-finished story, a story with several serious stylistic flaws. Obviously the essential Comics Code circuit of Barks’ production had broken down. In the story a nuclear bomb, jury-rigged by Gyro Gearloose, devastated Duckburg in revenge for a lost football match. The story included a strange, somehow familiar subplot, in which the secret of Uncle Scrooge’s wealth was exposed to be a pact with Satan; Uncle Scrooge also suffered from syphilis, caught from Glittering Goldie during his Klondike years, which was slowly ruining his brain. Finally I realized the Barks comp had obviously been drawing material from the Net, at least from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which I’d read at the age of fourteen.
But the newest new was the author comps—a real sacrilege! Anybody with enough money could buy a comp version of Dostoyevsky, Pullman, Waltari, Irving, or Tolkien (the selection was getting wider all the time) and make it produce text according to the given parameters. Luckily not quite everything was possible, after all, as one of my colleagues found out while trying to make the Tolkien comp write a porno version of “The Lord of the Rings”; he had to give up the endeavor when the system crashed time after time. The Tolkien comp had no erotic circuit at all. “As long as I sit behind my desk, not a single comp book gets into the Library,” my companion snorted when I mentioned the matter. Her cheeks flushed a pretty pink with indignation. I smiled in mute admiration at her temper.
The new trends in the movie industry and literature weren’t, however, a central subject of our conversation that night. Until that Tuesday changed to the next one, we sat in the café and talked about our dreams. Sometimes we held each other’s eyes, sometimes we stared out at the boats moving up and down the Maple River beyond the window. They were research boats of the City Technical Department. I vaguely remembered hearing something strange had happened on the river. Some rumors told of an accident, others of a mysterious discharge that probably had something to do with the recent fire at the Time Research Institute.
At some stage we took each other’s hands. Everything was wonderful, fabulous, and complicated, and at the same time surprisingly plain and clear.
By morning we’d kissed some twenty times, germinated our amazing Theory of Weekdays, and acquired a huge headache. At that stage, the theory was, of course, just a confused collection of vague, partly contradictory ideas, the majority of which even we didn’t take seriously. Many of the ideas made us laugh, but some also aroused our fears.
Before we parted, we agreed to meet again, and as an aside, to also spend the rest of our lives together. After our night at the café we felt crazy and courageous, yet I remember fearing that our romantic certainty would evaporate with the new day and that we’d end up with nothing and remain prisoners of our former life.
I went home and informed my wife I could no longer live with her. I told her I’d had another woman for a long time already (which was only technically a lie). My wife nodded absentmindedly. I imagined I’d got off scot-free: obviously my wife had also been harboring secret thoughts of divorce. Brilliant! We both could then deal with the situation maturely and with equanimity.
But when I’d collected my suitcase and returned to the hall with sprightly steps, she made a scene after all. She attacked me like a madwoman. We wrestled a moment until I finally managed to pull her fingers from my hair.
My son watched me silently from the top of the stairs when I stepped past my shaking wife, who was panting from exhaustion, and left. My hands were trembling, my face had bloody scratches on it, and I felt as though I was hanging partly loose from my own body. I was simultaneously joyful and terrified. I closed the door behind me, heard the latch click—and that click rang in my mind for a very long time.
A couple of weeks later I contacted Hannelore to settle the practical arrangements with her. Besides considerable alimony, she also wanted to keep the house, the car, and all the movables inside the house. I felt guilty and consented to all her demands.
After nominal opposition I also gave up all claims to our son. This may sound callous, but if I’m completely honest, I actually didn’t want anything, or anybody, from my former existence in my new life. Of course I cared about my son. However, the feeling was distant and unattainable, as though coated with lead and sunken somewhere in the bottomless mud of myself.
I took a hotel room just a few blocks away from the Library and went to sleep. The six dream-sequences in arrears streamed through my consciousness; six different versions of reality. The dreams were now clearer than ever before. Familiar people in different roles. Places simultaneously familiar and strange. The house by the seaside. The Lady Librarian who was my first and only wife in the dream. Our completely unmusical daughter, whose stubborn efforts to learn to play the violin amused, touched, and infuriated us. And the cat: at some stage this peculiar-looking nuisance of a cat padded into the dream, appearing out of nowhere, having evidently decided to stay with us. What a super-Freudian symbol constructed by the unconscious, I remember thinking afterwards. The cat obviously signified female eroticism, or perhaps my own feminine side. Whatever.
When I woke up I only remembered a part of my dreams, fragmentary bits here and there, although I could recollect more of them better than before. Little by little I learned to remember more. The Lady Librarian and I developed a mental technique by which we could, step-by-step, recall to mind those six dream sequences almost perfectly. This technique is fully and clearly demonstrated in our book Is Every Day Indeed a Tuesday? (The book Is Every Day Indeed a Tuesday? is available from the Readers’ Digest only as an electroflash version to your Home Book. We regret that the 10,000 numbered copies of the Special Edition are already sold out. Ordering instructions on p. 128. – Ed.)
Leaving my family was curiously easy for me. After everything that had happened I no longer felt bound to my former obligations. I understood that I’d just wrecked my former life and left amongst the ruins a woman and a child, the two people I would have unhesitatingly died for only a day before. Well, winds blow, emotions flow. I knew that under normal circumstances I’d have felt like a miserable bastard who deserved to be stoned to death. I’d always condemned people who did things like that to their families. How I had loved standing on the moral high ground, filled with my own supercilious nobility! But now I discovered that when you get close to the very greatest insights, matters like guilt, duty, and responsibility are amazingly easy to ignore. When a person experiences reality-quakes, things acquire completely new proportions. And the victims will always be the ones whose lot it is to become less important in relation to the whole.
I lived in the hotel for a week. I notified my employers that I wouldn’t be around anymore. I had some savings and decided I could always find another job at a later stage. I wasn’t afraid of changes or uncertainty—I actually glowed with enthusiasm and energy. Now and then I felt almost manic. Then I moved in with my Lady Librarian. By no means did she live in a seaside villa (that we acquired only later); instead, it was a small apartment at the end of a street guarded by linden trees, in the eastern part of the city, which we inhabited.
When we weren’t making love, we talked and made notes on our observations and thoughts. By day I typed out our notes while I waited for my lover to come home from the Library. Gradually, the Weekday Theory took its final form, and we noticed there was a whole book piling up on the desk. I don’t remember which one of us first got the idea of offering it to a publisher, but we were both just as excited about the idea.
I didn’t know it then, but the book was to become a bestseller that made it possible for us to live out
the rest of our lives without financial worries.
The Amazing Theory of Weekdays
In the next chapter I shall try to explain, as concisely as possible, the central characteristics of the Theory of Weekdays. I’ll also aim to make it easily understandable, although I probably won’t manage that. For a layperson it will be difficult, if not impossible to comprehend the theory, and I’ve therefore included a chart that hopefully clarifies matters a little—although a simplification will necessarily also mean a mild distortion of the subject. (The chart is included as a folded appendix inside the back cover – Ed.)
Nowadays no rational person even imagines that he could keep count of time’s course any more. Not that very many would even want to do that. Measuring time is just as strange a thought for the younger generations as playing chess on the wing of a bird in flight—it’s strikingly difficult, and besides, there are quite a lot more sensible things to do. There will, however, always be brave, eccentric individuals making the effort, the fascination with desperate endeavors perhaps being the characteristic that makes us human.
Once in a while new versions of clocks and calendars appear in the shops. They are extremely complicated and difficult to interpret with their hour systems that vary from zone to zone, and their whole- and half-jump-days. Ideological Clock Movements organize long and expensive courses for those brave enough to try learning the secrets of time measurement instruments and with enough money and leisure. For a while the new kinds of clocks and calendars might seem to function, some of them actually quite well, but before long even the best mechanisms always prove to be nothing more than beautiful objects that have no predictive power at all over the changing currents of time. And that’s why people buy clocks and calendars, of course, to acquire unique ornaments. Time cannot be measured nowadays. One could just as well try to build an instrument that measures the average speed and direction of every single bird’s flight across the sky.
It Came from the North Page 23
