by Leena Krohn
“Oh no? I’ll show you what you can do with it!”
And I did.
“See? This is a human middle finger extended to its full length, fingernail and all. And that’s how it’s going to stay until it gets buried with the rest of me.”
Raikka ran off. I think I had offended him to the core. He was still practically just a child. And how his amputated finger must have ached!
That ache lodged itself in my chest. It was so bad that I had to lie down on the mat for a while. It wasn’t healthy to get so worked up. I was also sad that The New Anomalist had probably lost a good contributor. I doubted that Raikka would write any more articles for us on cosmology or the latest trends in alternative physics.
I wanted to say to him, “How could you, who knows everything there is to know about the gradual increase of Uranus’s apparent magnitude, infrared and asymmetrical galaxies, who talks like a poet about the pale blue glow of distant galaxies and the vastness of vacuums, how could you of all people go and have the end of your left middle finger removed?”
Would he answer, “So that people wouldn’t think I’m so weird . . . ”?
Raikka was gone, but I remembered the lonely taus he had told me about, the taus that wander through our city, through amputation parlors and kinky parties and innovation centers at nearly the speed of light, hardly affecting anything, probably hardly affected by anything.
Trillions of them flow through our muscles and fat, our blood and our hard skulls. Then nothing meets nothingness. Nothing happens, and yet does happen. Nothing exists, and yet, something does.
The Moving Image of Eternity
“Everything that is large was once small. Even the universe was once small, smaller than the period at the end of a sentence,” he said. “But that was before time and space. On the other hand, how can anything be called small, if there’s nothing larger than it, if there’s no one to see the smallness? And who could possibly be outside the universe?”
“Some people would say God,” I said.
“But would anything be large or small to God? Actually, the universe was not a point, but a hole, it was a non-thing. When it stopped being a non-thing and became a thing, time can be said to have been born. Time, a shadow that eternity throws on the wall of our cave. Plato, you remember, ‘the moving image of eternity’ . . . ”
He was an expert on time. I called him the Timely Man. There was once a menswear store called that in this city, at the beginning of time . . .
Where did I read this sentence? “We live in the hour all free of the hours gone by.” It’s rarely true, because we so rarely live in the moment: more often we live in our time.
When I was a child, when there was still a store called Timely Man in the city, I would experiment with time. I wanted to know how long the present lasts and what the present really is. I came to the conclusion that it can never last longer than a second or two. I tried so hard to hold on to the present with my eyes and ears, with all my attention, but before I realized, it had already slipped into the past.
It is impossible for us to hold back the flow of time, to be really present, to stretch out the moment without it tearing. Something always happens to break our concentration and push us into the uproar of the events around us.
I dress myself in time first thing in the morning—I wrap a watch around my wrist. Even while sleeping I’m troubled by the bustle of life. But that winter, I began forgetting appointments and meetings. I was supposed to go listen to the Timely Man’s lecture at the Institute of Spiritual Growth and meet him afterwards. But even though I had marked the time and place in my calendar and though I thought I’d checked my schedule, I forgot the appointment. There were days when I couldn’t remember what season it was without checking the newspaper.
And so, the Timely Man waited for me that day in the Institute’s café. I didn’t remember the appointment until the Marquis asked me how the interview had gone, and then I was alarmed.
“It’s a pity you made him wait for nothing, a busy scholar. What’s the matter with you?” the Marquis asked. “You seem so absent-minded and tired these days. Has your asthma gotten worse?”
“No no, just the opposite, actually,” I said. “It’s better now. I’m trying a new remedy, you know, herbal. But it does make me drowsy sometimes.”
I felt my lips sticking together, and took a long sip from my water bottle. The Marquis stared at me suspiciously.
“I think you’ve lost weight. You should get yourself looked at,” he said. “By the way, have you started wearing perfume? There’s a strange smell in the office.”
“No, I don’t wear any,” I said, embarrassed. I realized I was carrying around the stench of datura.
The next day, the Marquis brought the Timely Man with him to the office after treating him to lunch at The Foxhole. I’d do the interview at the office while the Marquis took off again. I didn’t have the courage to ask how lunch had been—I just hoped that the Timely Man considered the establishment picturesque. He looked with polite interest at the products in the parastore that the Marquis forced me to show him. I was happy that the Timely Man didn’t go near enough the bookshelf to set off the rock ’n’ roll fish.
The Timely Man had studied cosmology, received his doctorate early and with honors, and been given a tenured position at a respected university. But one of his classes had caused serious controversy, an academic scandal of sorts, after which he thought it best to resign. The Timely Man drifted out into fringe research, forced to lecture at institutions of questionable repute, and publishing articles in magazines and journals just like The New Anomalist. His lecture at the Institute of Spiritual Growth was called “The Possibility and Impossibility of Time Dimensions.”
I was relieved that the Timely Man accepted my profuse apologies with such grace. In fact, it seemed like he couldn’t wait for the chance to give another lecture. My notes from our meeting don’t do him justice: they only touch on a couple of the thoughts he presented. He also talked about dualities, Maxwell’s equations, and D-branes. Most of what he said was far over my head due to my limited understanding, poor education, and mental state that day. I’m sure there are people who would say that there’s no point in trying to understand the Timely Man’s opinions, because he had drifted out of the scientific community, into the large and motley congregation of independent thinkers. But in our meeting, he emphasized that more and more scholars were supporting similar positions.
“One could say—and it was actually already proven back in 1949—that the passage of time is just an illusion,” he said. “You’ve heard of superstring theory, I’m sure.”
“I’m sorry to say I haven’t.”
I’ve noticed that this is a phrase I’ve had to repeat over and over again in the company of various experts.
“Superstring theory claims that elementary particles are not points, but vibrating strings. According to the theory, we have ten dimensions of space, six of which are so compactified that we can’t see them. But this theory has had to be abandoned. M-theory states that there are actually eleven dimensions. But then there is F-theory, which is the one I subscribe to.”
“And what does F-theory maintain then?” I asked.
“It holds that there are a total of twelve dimensions in the universe, two of which are dimensions of time,” he explained. “Usually, you see, it’s thought that space can and must have many dimensions, but that time has just one.”
“Do you mean that, according to F-theory, there is a dimension where time doesn’t flow from the past into the future?”
“That, too. But I’m inclined to trust that this particular hypothesis tells us something more specific about the universe than previous ones.”
“And so effect wouldn’t actually come after cause, is that it? That would create some real trouble,” I said. “Contradictions and paradoxes. The kind of science-fiction stuff that can’t be taken seriously. I’m sorry if I’m expressing myself crudely.”
“
A paradox for us, in any case,” he said. “There’s no escaping that.”
“But if one could undo what has been done . . . ”
“To us, time means always being carried, whether speeding or crawling, in the same direction, which we call the future. Every moment we leave the past behind us, in a place we cannot return to, whereas in space, we can move forward and backwards, up, down, and side to side. But if there is another dimension of time—as there is every reason to believe—we could also move diagonally . . . ”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“We could step aside when threatened by an unpleasant event . . . ”
“ . . . like death?” I blurted out.
“Yes, like death, for example,” he agreed. “Or, if the need were to arise, we could retreat, loiter, stay in place, or charge forward, just as if time, too, had its own landscape and geography. We might to some extent be able to choose our pasts, because information could also travel from the future to the past.”
“But how could we access such a dimension?”
“Well, that’s the hard part. In this universe, at least.”
“That’s knowledge that humankind could really use. I mean, it would change everything. It could solve nearly all our problems.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” he said. “Would it help us? Would we live our lives any more wisely? And if we didn’t have shared time, would we even be living in the same world?”
“Yes,” I admitted, “maybe it would actually lead to deeper unhappiness than ever before, chaos and unheard of agonies. What if everyone decided not to die, how would there be room for anyone new to be born?”
“It’s entirely possible,” the Timely Man said, “that we’ll never have an alternative direction for time. It’s possible that each universe has a unique combination of dimensions of time and space . . . Let me show you.”
The Timely Man asked for some paper and began drawing diagrams. His verbose explanations were lost on me completely.
All I could take in was his voice, not what he said. Suddenly, in the company of this stranger, I was overcome with sympathy. Though I was looking past him and his papers, into the hazy cold of the winter day, I saw him as a being of time, and I saw myself as one as well. I could see him lengthen and thin out and lose his identity.
How deeply people put out roots into the place that becomes time. His beginning is as far away as mine, in the misty birth of the species and beyond, in the gaseous clouds of newly forming stars. The Timely Man is long as a sounding line, as a fishing line sinking into precipitous depths of unknown matter, the darkness of light years.
The beginning is so very far away, I thought, but the end is always near. That’s what time means, to humans.
The Old Woman Ahead of Me
I see that old woman nearly every day now. I flinch when I see her walking ahead of me, always ahead of me. I’ve never yet caught a glimpse of her face.
A rosy scalp shows through her silvery white hair, carefully curled, but quite thinned already. She looks fragile and stooped, clearly very old. That considered, it’s amazing how quickly she walks. She can keep up the same pace block after block. And how admirably certain and determined her movements are! She never hesitates at crossings, she seems to know where every street leads. She must have lived in this city a long time, decades, perhaps all her life.
I’ve followed her a couple of time, just to see where she’s going. I’ve tailed her, spied on her, I’m ashamed to say. But I have nothing to show for it.
What a strange old woman! There is something eerie in the whole phenomenon. Whenever I take it upon myself to follow her, I soon lose sight of her in the swarming crowd. I can’t keep up with her at all. Just when I think I’ve managed to get alongside her, she’ll turn in toward a metro station and the escalators will whisk her out of my sight, or she’ll duck into the revolving doors of a department store. I’ll follow her to the cosmetics department, where people are listening to the product demonstrator’s gospel, but all I’ll see are adolescent girls, young women, and middle-aged women. She’ll have lost me again.
Sometimes I try to be clever and rush down a side street to be able to walk down the boulevard in the opposite direction and come face to face with her. But when I turn, out of breath, onto the boulevard, the old woman is nowhere to be seen. I’m left standing, baffled, in front of a shop window containing disembodied legs dressed in this season’s pantyhose.
A day or two will pass, and once again I’ll see the old woman’s back. As I step in one door of the café, she’ll be stepping out the other. As I step down from the tram, she’ll be climbing aboard. I finally found her standing still one day on my way back from the bank. She had stopped at the corner, waiting at the crosswalk as the traffic lights shone red for pedestrians. There she was—I was sure I’d finally catch her!
But as her thin neck was nearly in front of me, and her silvery curls almost tickled my nose, the light changed. She crossed the street at a run, but I stumbled. I made my way slowly, as if the air around me had thickened into a dense and sticky substance. A tram hid her from view for a moment, and when it had passed, the old woman had pulled her disappearing act again.
Frustrated, I swore, “Don’t think you’ve gotten away. I’ll catch you yet, and we’ll meet each other face to face!”
The Mouse, the Wolf, and the Nightingale
This spring, before putting anything in the trashcan in the cupboard under the sink, I knock on the cupboard door. Is anyone home?
I know it’s a very odd thing to do, but it serves a purpose. The cupboard is inhabited, at least from time to time. There is hole under the kitchen counter that the drainpipe disappears down. A mouse uses the hole to get to the delicacies in my trashcan. I knock on the cupboard door to warn the rodent. I don’t want to catch it off guard—nor do I want to be caught off guard myself, unpleasantly startled to see it leap out of the trashcan when I open the door.
Have you heard of the black mouse and the white mouse? One is night and the other is day, but they both have the same job.
During the spring nights, I wake up in my bedroom to the mouse’s rustling, whether it’s the same mouse or a different one, I don’t know. It’s past midnight, but spring is already so far along that night isn’t properly dark anymore, just a hazy twilight that dissolves color and blurs outlines. Daybreak is a while off; it’s still the hour of the wolf, the hardest time of day for the children of man.
During the hour of the wolf, people are at their most defenseless. Their body temperature and energy levels are at their lowest, and their exhaustion is at its deepest. But the mouse nibbles and labors away. One couldn’t be blamed for thinking that a thief had broken in to do his sly work. And it is a thief, stealing my life. The black mouse always works the nightshift. Its associate, the white mouse, does its work during the day. I just can’t make out its rustling in the incessant clamor of the day. Now it’s the black mouse’s turn to gnaw through my life’s thread, no, the umbilical cord through which life nourishes me. That is the job of the black mouse, and also the white.
But at the same time, from the thicket of bird cherry and black alder in the park, I hear the melody of a nightingale—the last of the evening or the first of the morning? Such energy, such joy tinkling in the twilight, the boundary between night and day. An invisible fountain of volition and hope leaping into the air, glistening in the spring landscape. The nightingale is a different time. It doesn’t live in the hour of the wolf.
“Earth and sky, forest, and fallow-plot,
Caught that discontinuous strain,
Those portionings out by lot
Of trials, glee, fatuities, and pain.”
I’m awake now, at least almost, and listening to two sounds at the same time, the mouse and the nightingale. Hearing connects me to both the indoors and the out. I can hear the nearness, and I can hear the distance. I can hear the infiniteness of space. My senses give me both myself and that which is not me. They are both a bridg
e and a chasm. When they disappear, I suppose I will disappear as well.
It’s night for all of us now, the mouse, the nightingale, and me, their audience. But it’s not the same moment; each of us has our own. I alone, at least so I believe, am the only thing connecting our moments. Or could the mouse, between nibbles, be listening to the nightingale’s song? That is all I am now, a listener of the sound made by these two. One is nibbling away inside, the other singing outside. Both completely unaware of their audience.
Suddenly, still half asleep, I understand: the mouse truly is inside, inside me. It lives in me, they live in me and always have, the day mouse and the night mouse both. They are a part of me, a temporal being who is shortened by each passing day and night.
But the nightingale trills in mists of dawn, outside of me, in the real spring. There is another reality out there, in which I, too, have gone about my business, but only part of me. Was it only my ears that flew there? Is everything else left here, with the mouse, in the hour of the wolf?
And I say to the mouse, “Gnaw away, do the work that was given to you, that you were born to do. It won’t be long before the thread is severed. What then? The nightingale’s song is something you cannot chew through, mouse. The song is also an umbilical cord, still feeding me with wordless melodies. There will come a time when I can no longer hear your nibbling or the nightingale’s song. But as long as I remember the nightingale, I will believe in eternity, I will believe that there is no end to spring, or to me.
It’s always spring somewhere. There is always someone to hear the nightingale’s song.
And I fall asleep again to song and nibbling and to the smell of datura. My dream, reality! Now the building in which the mouse is nibbling is within me, but so is the city, the nightingale’s park, and further away, the harbor, the open sea, the sky. They are all in me, part of me, and I am gone.
