The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  As a rough estimate, I think I have probably spent only a total of two years of personal time in the Fold, if you lump the individual minutes or hours together, maybe even less; but they have been some of the best, most alive times I’ve had. My life reminds me of the capital-gains tax problem, as I once read about it in an op-ed piece: if legislators keep changing, or even promising to change, the capital-gains percentages, repealing and reinstating the tax, the rational investor will begin to base his investment decisions not on the existing tax laws, but on his certainty of change, which mischannels (the person who wrote the op-ed piece convincingly argued) in some destructive way the circulation of capital. So too with me during those periods when I wait for the return of my ability to stop time: I think, Why should I read Ernest Renan or learn matrix algebra now, since when I’m able to Drop again, I’ll be able to spend private hours, or even years, satisfying any fleeting intellectual curiosity while the whole world waits for me? I can always catch up. That’s the problem.

  People are somewhat puzzled by me when I first show up at their office—What is this unyoung man, this thirty-five-year-old man, doing temping? Maybe he has a criminal past, or maybe he’s lost a decade to drugs, or: Maybe He’s an Artist? But after a day or two, they adjust, since I am a fairly efficient and good-natured typist, familiar with most of the commonly used kinds of software (and some of the forgotten kinds too, like nroff, Lanier, and NBI, and the good old dedicated DEC systems with the gold key), and I am unusually good at reading difficult handwriting and supplying punctuation for dictators who in their creative excitement forget. Once in a great while I use my Fold-powers to amaze everyone with my apparent typing speed, transcribing a two-hour tape in one hour and that kind of thing. But I’m careful not to amaze too often and become a temp legend, since this is my great secret and I don’t want to imperil it—this is the one thing that makes my life worth living. When some of the more intelligent people in a given office ask little probingly polite questions to try to figure me out, I often lie and tell them that I’m a writer. It is almost funny to see how relieved they are to have a way of explaining my lowly work status to themselves. Nor is it so much of a lie, because if I had not wasted so much of my life waiting for the next Fermata-phase to come along I would very likely have written some sort of a book by now. And I have written a few shorter things.

  I’m typing this on a portable electronic typewriter because I don’t want to risk putting any of it on the bank’s LAN. Local area networks behave erratically in the Fold. When my carpal-tunnel problem gets bad, I use a manual for my private writing; it seems to help. But I don’t have to: batteries and electricity do function in the Fold—in fact, all the laws of physics still obtain, as far as I can tell, but only to the extent that I reawaken them. The best way to describe it is that right now, because I have snapped my fingers, every event everywhere is in a state of gel-like suspension. I can move, and the air molecules part to let me through, but they do it resistingly, reluctantly, and the farther that objects are from me, the more thoroughly they are paused. If someone was riding a motorcycle down a hill before I stopped time “half an hour” ago, the rider will remain motionless on his vehicle unless I walk up to him and give him a push—in which case he will fall down, but somewhat more slowly than if he fell in an unpaused universe. He won’t take off down the hill at the speed he was riding, he will just tip over. I used to be tempted to fly small airplanes in the Fold, but I’m not that stupid. Flight, though, is definitely possible, as is the pausing of time on an airplane flight. The world stays halted exactly as it is except where I mess with it, and for the most part I try to be as unobtrusive as possible—as unobtrusive as my lusts let me be. This typewriter, for instance, puts what I type on the page because the act of pressing a letter makes cause and effect function locally. A circuit is completed, a little electricity dribbles from the batteries, etc. I honestly don’t know how far outward my personal distortion of the temporary timelessness that I create measurably spreads. I do know that during a Fermata a woman’s skin feels soft where it is soft, warm when it is warm—her sweat feels warm when it is warm. It’s a sort of reverse Midas touch that I have while in the Fold—the world is inert and statuesque until I touch it and make it live ordinarily.

  I had this idea of writing my life story while within a typical chronanistic experience just yesterday. It’s almost incredible to think that I’ve been Dropping since fourth grade and yet I’ve never made the effort to write about it right while it was going on. I kept an abbreviated log for a while in high school and college—date and time of Drop, what I did, how long in personal minutes or hours or days it took (for a watch usually starts up again in the Fold if I shake it, so I can easily measure how long I have been out), whether I learned anything new or not, and so on. You would think, if a person really could stop the world and get off, as I can, that it would occur to him fairly early on to stop the world in order to record with some care what it felt like to stop the world and get off, for the benefit of the curious. But I now see, even this far into my first autobiographical Fermata, why I never did it before. Sad to say, it is just as hard to write during a Fermation as it is in real time. You still must dole out all the things you have to say one by one, when what you want of course is to say them all at once. But I am going to give it a try. I am thirty-five now, and I have done quite a lot of things, mostly bad, with the Fold’s help (including, incidentally, reciting Dylan Thomas’s “Poem on His Birthday” apparently from memory at the final session of a class in modern lyric poetry in college: it is a longish poem, and whenever nervousness made me forget a line, I just paused the world by pressing the switch of my Time Perverter—which is what I called the modified garage-door opener that I used in those days—and refreshed my memory by looking at a copy of the text that I had in my notebook, and no one was the wiser)—and if I don’t write some of these private adventures down now, I know I’m going to regret it.

  Just now I spun around once in my chair in order to surprise myself again with the sight of Joyce’s pubic hair. It really is amazing to me that I can do this, even after all these years. She was walking about thirty feet from my desk, across an empty stretch of space, carrying some papers, on her way to someone’s cube, and my gaze just launched toward her, diving cleanly, without ripples, through the glasses that she had complimented, taking heart from having to pass through the optical influence of something she had noticed and liked. It was as if I traveled along the arc of my sight and reached her visually. (There is definitely something to those medieval theories of sight that had the eye sending out rays.) And just as my sighted self reached her, she stopped walking for a second, to check something on one of the papers she held, and when she looked down I was struck by the simple fact that today her hair is braided.

  It is arranged in what I think is called a French braid. Each of the solid clumps of her hair feeds into the overall solidity of the braid, and the whole structure is plaited as part of her head, like a set of glossy external vertebrae. I’m impressed that women are able to arrange this sort of complicated figure, without too many stray strands, without help, in the morning, by feel. Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts. They give thought to how the edges of their underpants look through their pocketless pants from the back. (“Panties” is a word to be avoided, I feel.) But French braids, in which three sporting dolphins dip smoothly under one another and surface in a continuous elegant entrainment, are the most beautiful and impressive results of this sense of dorsal space. As soon as I saw Joyce’s braid I knew that it was time to stop time. I needed to feel her solid braid, and her head beneath it, in my palm.

  So, just as she started walking again, I snapped my fingers. This is my latest method of entering the Fold, and one of the simpler I have been able to develop
(much more straightforward than my earlier mathematical-formula technique, or the sewn calluses, for instance, both of which I will get into later). She didn’t hear the snap, only I did—the universe halts at some indeterminate point just before my middle finger swats against the base of my thumb. I got out my Casio typewriter and scooted over here to her on my chair. (I didn’t scoot backwards, I scooted frontwards, which isn’t easy to do over carpeting, because it is hard to get the proper traction. I wanted to keep my eyes on her.) She was in mid-stride. I reached forward and put my hands on her hipbones. It felt as if there were cashmere or something fancy in the wool, and it was good to feel her hipbones through that soft material, and to see my hands angling to follow the incurve of her waist, which the dress had to an extent hidden. Sometimes when I first touch a woman in the Fold I tense up my arms until they vibrate, so that the shape of whatever is under my palms keeps on being sent through my nerves as new information. I never know exactly what I will do during a Drop. To get her dress out of the way, I lifted its soft hem up over her hips and gathered it into two wingy bunches and tied a big soft knot with them. It had seemed as if she had a tiny potbelly with the dress on (this can be a sexy touch, I think, on some women), but if she had, it disappeared or lost definition as soon as I pulled her panty-hose and underpants down as far as I could get them, which wasn’t that far because her legs were walkingly apart. (Also, before I pulled down her pantyhose, which is a smoky-blue color, I touched an oval of her skin through a run in the darker part high on her thigh.) And then I was given this sight that I have before me now, of her pubic hair.

  I’m not normally a pubic-hair obsessive—I really have no ongoing fetishes, I don’t think, because each woman is different, and you never know what particular feature or transition between features is going to grab you and say, “Look at this—you’ve never thought about exactly this before!” Each woman inspires her own fetishes. And it isn’t that Joyce has some ludicrous Vagi-fro or massive Koosh-ball explosion of a sex-goatee—in fact her hair isn’t thicker really than most. It’s just that it covers a wider area, maybe, and its blackness sparkles, if you will—its curving border reaches a little higher on her stomach. A little?—what am I saying? It’s the size of South America. To think that I could have died and not seen this—that I could have picked a different temp assignment when Jenny, my coordinator, told me my choices a few weeks ago. What is exciting about its extent is maybe that, because it reaches higher than other women’s pubic hair, it becomes less and more sexual at the same time—the slang for it, like ‘pussy hair” and “cunt hair” (I flinch at both those words, except when I’m close to coming), doesn’t apply because it is no longer, strictly speaking, “pubic” hair at all—its borders are reaching out into soft abdominal love-areas, so love and sex mix. I wanted to feel it, the dense sisaly lush resilience of it, which makes that whole hippy part of her body look extraordinarily graceful. It is a kind of black cocktail dress under which her clit-heart beats—it has that much dignity.

  But rather than holding it immediately, I deprived myself of the sight of it for a little while and instead gently placed my hand on her braid, which was cool and thick and smooth and dense, a totally different idea of hair, so different that it is strange to think of the two orders of hair as sharing the same word, but which follows the curve of her head in the same way that her pubic hair follows the curve over her mound-bone, and when I felt the French-braid sensation sinking into the hollow of my palm, which craves sexual shapes and textures, I then went ahead and curled the fingers of my other hand through her devil’s food fur, connecting the two kinky handfuls of home-grown protein with my arms, and it felt as if I were hot-wiring a car; my heart’s twin carburetors roared into life. That’s all I did, then I started typing this before I forgot the feeling. Maybe that’s all I will do. That sexy, sexy pubic hair! I’m noticing now that its contours are similar to those of a black bicycle seat: a black leather seat on a racing bicycle. Maybe this is why those sad sniffers of comic legend sniff girls’ bicycle seats? No, for them it isn’t the shape, it’s the fact that the seat has been between a girl’s legs. They are truly pathetic. I have no sympathy to spare for compulsions other than my own. I would, though, like to rescue the correspondence between pubic hair and narrow black-leather bicycle seats from them.

  All right, I think that is enough for now. I’ve been in the Fold for, let’s see, almost four hours and written eight single-spaced pages, and the problem is that if I stay in too long I’ll have jet lag tomorrow, since according to my inner clock it will be four hours later than it is. Usually I don’t spend nearly this long in a Drop. I am going to put Joyce’s clothes back in order and smooth out her dress (I would never have tied a knot in it if she wore a cotton dress, because the wrinkles would show up too much and puzzle her) and I’m going to scoot back to my desk and finish out the day. The good thing is that if she brings me a tape to do later this afternoon, I will be much more relaxed and therefore likable than if I hadn’t partially stripped her without her knowledge or consent. I will jest knowingly and winningly with her. I will compliment her on today’s scarf—which isn’t, honestly, quite as nice as the Cyrillic one. (Maybe when she was getting dressed this morning she put on this knit dress and then remembered that I had admired her scarf, and maybe she thought that wearing it again as well would be too direct a Yes from her; but then again maybe the reason she was wearing the dress, this soon again was that she had liked my complimenting her on her scarf and wanted to allude to that compliment indirectly by wearing the same dress with another scarf.) This new one is a Liberty pattern of purply grays and greens, definitely worth smiling at and even acknowledging outright. But I don’t want to get into one of those awful running-compliment patterns, where I have to mention her scarves every time she wears one.

  The other thing I should say is that under normal circumstances I would probably give serious thought to “poaching an egg” at this point, but because I have written all this, and because this is, I believe, going to be the very beginning of a sort of autobiography, I can’t. What a surprise, though, to find this Casio typewriter acting as chaperon! (Maybe what I will do is go ahead, but not mention it.)

  2

  I WAS BORN WITH A KNOT IN MY UMBILICAL CORD, A SIMPLE pretzel knot. I doubt that this fact of my birth has anything to do with my later chronanisms, but I will put it down here just in case it does. I am proud of having set immediately to work art-nouveauing the functional furnishings of my intrauterine deanery. Somehow I was able to form a loop and then swim right through it. I tied a knot in myself. Like many child prodigies, however, I fizzled early. The Fermata, first unfolding itself for me in fourth grade, has been a lifelong distraction. I have wanted to keep it a secret, and as a result it has swallowed up large chunks of my personality. But I hope that will change now.

  Once, following a long lull, I found a way to get back into the Fold five or six times after I smashed my head into a parking meter in Philadelphia. I was thirteen or fourteen. We were staying at the Barclay Hotel; as a treat I was allowed to drink some watered-down wine with lunch. I drank more of it than the adults knew and found myself acting wild and flaily on the street during our afternoon walk. I ran ahead, hid between two cars, intending to spring out on everyone. I sprang, shouting, “Boo!” But my mouth and the side of my face met a parking meter that I had forgotten was there. The collision made an enormous bony sound in my head. The meter had only a minute or two left, I noticed, staggering; the red thought-balloon saying EXPIRED was just about to dawn. I saw a pattern of squirming diamonds that would have made very nice Wiener Werkstatte wrapping paper. Twenty minutes later, as the bed made sloppy figure eights around the hotel room (where I had been left to convalesce), I pinched my swollen lip and noticed that all traffic noise stopped. I realized I was in the Fold. I walked downstairs to the motionless hotel bar and back to the kitchen and ate two huge shrimp that a motionless cook or cook’s helper held as he arranged a shrimp cocktail. I was
amazed at how good the cocktail sauce tasted. I sucked on a piece of lime and threw it out in a can behind the bar. I felt steadied. I went out into the lobby and sat down next to a woman on a couch and smelled the collar of her coat deeply. At first I thought it smelled like pickles, and then I realized that it smelled like cigarette smoke, and I was very surprised to think that pickles and cigarette smoke were allied smells. (Is that what people mean by a “sour” smell?) Then I went back upstairs and pinched my lip again the same way I had, a little to the right of center, until it hurt a lot, to turn the Barclay Hotel and the rest of the planet back on, and I went to sleep. I still feel bad about stealing those shrimp—not only because of the theft, but because the kitchen helper may to this day be troubled by that bit of strangeness all those years ago, when he had held one in each hand and had them suddenly disappear.

  There—that was a typical early Drop. I know that I could probably make much better use of my gift than I do. For me it is just a sexual aid. Others might put it to fuller avaricious or intellectual use: government secrets, technological espionage, etc. Surely over the centuries a few individuals have developed this ability and used it to consolidate power or to liquidate enemies. J. S. Bach, for instance, could not have cranked out a cantata a week without some sort of temporal trickery: he was probably seventy-five when he died, not sixty-five, but he had borrowed the last decade of his life and used it up piecemeal in earlier Drops. I was reading Cardano’s autobiography not long ago, to see how one is supposed to write one’s autobiography (it’s harder than I thought!), and I had a suspicion at one point that he had discovered a way into the Fold, but was not going to reveal that fact to us. Something he said about preferring solitude is what alerted me. He said, “I question the right of anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.” In my place, some would toggle time and cheat on their Ph.D. orals or simply take money from open cash registers. Cheating and stealing don’t tempt me, though.