The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  What this means, practically speaking, is that every few days I will almost certainly run into someone with whom I have worked closely at some company at some time in the past. And I will want so much to remember his or her name! They usually remember my name, and in some cases I can detect a faint hurt look in their eyes when they perceive, through my joshing and bluster, that I don’t remember theirs, since together we did work very hard and beat impossible deadlines and joke around only six months ago, or a year and a half ago, or five years ago. And—they and I both secretly think—they were higher-ranking than I was, they were salaried, I was a temp, so it is a duty in keeping with my subordinate station to remember their names, while it is only noblesse oblige for them to remember mine.

  Yet if they took a moment to do the arithmetic of my work life versus their work life, as I have, they would perhaps understand and absolve, for they see the same people every day, their universe of clients and contacts and colleagues is relatively confined and stable, so that a new temp like me in their office is a novelty, a topic of conversation, a person to whom they can “give a leg up,” an outsider in whom they can confide hatreds and old wounds. I stick in their mind because they are pleased that they were able to put aside class differences and treat me as an equal. “Arno, hi!” And there I am, standing in front of Park Street Station, unable to reciprocate properly, feeling like a waiter asked to remember an order from a table he served months before.

  The name problem is compounded by the fact that there is apparently some vulnerability in my countenance that signals to lost people that I should be approached for directions. I have gotten good at sensing the lost now as they look over a crowdlet of potential help at a stop sign: they spot me, and though I’m wearing a tie like the other men, they seem to smell that I’m a temp and must therefore be permanently lonely and lowly, a sick caribou that the wolf singles out for attention; they know that they will feel at ease with me about admitting to being a stranger because I am going to welcome any human contact, any indication that I’m established and not transient. I go through periods when I am asked three times a day for directions. And these lost people are right—I do like being interrupted on the street, especially by women, but by men, too. I am poor at retaining street names, however, even streets that hold buildings in which I’ve worked in the past. For a while I deliberately studied maps of the business district in the evening, counting traffic lights and memorizing cross streets and helpful landmarks, so that I would live up to the expectations of unintimidating guidance that my face and features seem to create. (I find that the response is especially heavy if I am carrying some bulky item, like a bunch of flowers or a Wang VS backup disk.) As a result, I never know if the person coming toward me on the sidewalk and seeking eye contact is someone I worked with at Gillette or Kendall or Ropes & Gray or Polaroid or MassBank or Arthur Young, or whether he or she just needs to know how to get to Milk Street.

  During the periods when I have full Fold-powers, however, these difficulties are easily solved. As soon as I hear an “Arno, hi!” I can do a Drop and check wallet or purse ID and then greet whoever it is properly. It makes such a difference. I don’t feel cringey and can lose myself in the pleasure of the reunion: for I really do like most of the people I have worked with over the years; almost all of them have some lovable feature. And if someone asks me how to get to a place that I should know perfectly well how to get to and don’t, I can freeze his inquiring expression and check a map. (I carry one in my briefcase, as well as my old bottle of contact-lens solution, in case someone finds herself in ocular distress.) Of course, I could pull out the map while he looks on, but I hate to see that shifty, clouded look come into his eyes as he thinks to himself, This guy doesn’t have a clue—I should have asked one of the others. Also, when I pull out a map to help a tourist, especially an Asian tourist, I inevitably end up giving it to him, because impulsive generosity is such a high—and those maps are ridiculously expensive.

  I’m not being quite fair to myself, then, when I say that the Fold is just a sexual aid. It is primarily that—my Fold-energies seem to be a direct by-product of my appetite for nakedness. I doubt that I would have wormed my way into the Fermata even once if I had not been motivated primarily by the desire to take women’s clothes off. But I don’t want to ignore or depreciate the range of nonsexual uses that I have put it to. I have, for example, relied on it for things like last-minute Christmas shopping; it’s nice to browse in utter silence. When I’m irritable at work, and I know that the people around me don’t deserve my misanthropy, I can stop them all until I’m fond of them again. If someone makes a revealing comment in passing, I can take time out to think about its hidden implications and check the expressions of others who have heard it, all while I’m right there and it is fresh in my mind.

  I also use the Fold when I’m called on to come up with something especially understanding or sympathetic in a conversation and I want to be sure that my tact is exactly on key—although there is a serious risk in mulling over your kindness for any longer than fifteen or twenty seconds, because as you weigh and polish your response you can quickly lose your working sense of the immediate emotional flux. I’ve nearly derailed one or two important heart-to-heart talks by pausing so long to hone my tone that when I was finally ready to re-enter time I knew that I was going to be brittle and foolish and insincere, exactly what I’d Dropped out to avoid, and I had a very hard time working myself back around to the mood that had made the conversation seem important enough for me to have wanted to interrupt it in the first place. Nonetheless, used sparingly, the Fold can really help with commiseration.

  It is an obvious escape, too—though here again, I have learned to use it sparingly. I was given a temp assignment at the alumni office of a graduate school, where I was asked to roll up posters and stuff them in mailing tubes. I did this for four straight days. I would not have minded if the posters had not been so ugly. On the second day, I found it difficult to entertain the notion of rolling up one more purple-and-black poster—the waste of glossy paper, of post office energy, of university money, seemed too awful—and so I hit the clutch and took two non-hours to read some of Diana Crane’s The Transformation of the Avant-Garde. In that case it helped a lot: the book was better, more licentiously toothsome, for being read en Folde. But there have been other times when, once I have lapsed into the timelessness of the arrested instant, the particular obligation or person from whom I have temporarily freed myself becomes more and more horrific, posed in its or his stalled imminence, and the idea that I will have to take up right where I have left off becomes unbearable, and I re-enter time’s cattle-drive with a sense of defeat and unhappiness more acute than any I felt before I had ducked, or copped, out.

  I think, too, that it is exceedingly dangerous to Drop when you are in any sort of depression about how bad the world is. A Fold then can deepen infinitely—since in a way you are now in control over whether all the world’s continuing atrocities and tragedies should resume or not. You know that as soon as you give the go-ahead to time again, pets will not be given enough water, feelings will be needlessly hurt, killings, crashes, miscarriages of justice, bureaucratic harassment, infidelity, artistic disappointments, and worse will all go forward,and you begin to think that you will be in a sense their cause, you will be directly responsible for them, since you have a choice whether to let them happen, by opting to restart time or not. When I am in a Fold, I know for a fact that no woman anywhere is crying or feeling betrayed, and since I want above all for women not to cry, I can begin to believe, irrationally, that it is my duty to live out my entire life in this artificial solitude, eating canned foods. “He died suddenly,” they would say on discovering my abruptly aged body. But when I died, all the misery-in-progress that I had so heroically held at bay for forty-odd years would resume anyway. I don’t have any power to alter the fact that evils will do their work, only how “soon” they will. As a consequence, I have determined that my Foldouts shou
ld in general be short, recreational, and masturbatory, rather than deep and pained.

  I should mention here, though, under the heading of nonsexual uses of the Fermata, one of my least attractive episodes. Three black kids, age eighteen or so, stopped me one afternoon and asked which way the Boston Common was, and when I put on my usual “Yes, I’d be delighted to help you find your way, and I will of course be discreet about your sketchy knowledge of this area of the city, and when you walk away you will be cheered by the conviction that you did the right thing asking me and not those other, less amiable people for directions” face, one of the kids placed a gun to my jaw (this was near the medical center downtown), and asked me to give him my wallet and watch. I timed out by pushing on the lead-advance button of my mechanical pencil (in my back pocket), and took the gun out of play. I was trembling, outraged that these kids would feel entitled to my wallet and watch and were willing to threaten me with death to get them. I was put in mind of the old jokey way of teaching genuflection: “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch.” So I got some wire from the back of a New England Telephone truck that was parked nearby and tied all three of them by the balls to a nearby stop sign. It is a somewhat disorienting experience to be calmly winding telephone wire around the testicle-sack of a person who has just been in the process of mugging you. I taped their dicks up temporarily so that they wouldn’t annoy me by hanging in my way while I wound. (Two were uncircumcised.) When all three of them were fully secured to the stop sign, the three wires exiting the backs of their pants through holes I had snipped with wire cutters, I stood back a few paces, turned time on, and, with pathetic bravado, said, “Come and get me, you little fucks!” Startled, they sized up the situation for a second, then lunged after me and fell forward at once, swearing with pain. I loped off, feeling increasingly remorseful, not to mention relieved that I hadn’t in the first flush of my vengefulness cut off their balls altogether and dragged them to the emergency room; an option, I am ashamed to say, that I had briefly considered. (Can one bleed to death from castration? Probably. And it was doubtful they had medical insurance.) After that unsettling experience I spent an “afternoon” performing acts of lite altruism, wandering in the Fold through crummy neighborhoods collecting concealed handguns off anyone who looked under thirty, but the frisking was tiring and distasteful work, and I stopped after I had only forty-four weapons in my commandeered shopping cart, with the sense that I had done nothing of real value, and had possibly even destabilized a momentarily tranquil street scene. (Still under cover of the Fermata, I pushed the weapons into some newly poured cement at a construction site.)

  4

  BUT—I DO LIKE TRANSCRIBING MICROCASSETTES. I MENTION this because only a few days after I wrote that very first sur le vif chunk about Joyce’s exuberant pubic hair, I was immersed in one of her tapes, dog-paddling along in the moonlit scum-less lily pond of her consciousness, my eyes fixed on the green letters that she called forth from my fingertips, when I glanced up to see her walking briskly toward me, wiggling a pen and looking to one side as if preoccupied. I made a move to take off my headphones, but she held up her palms, indicating that I should continue transcribing, evidently feeling a twinge of the guilt which considerate people often feel when they drop off an unusual amount of work for a temp to do in a short interval of time. Obedient, I kept on transcribing. “Subject indicated that high credit was in the low six figures,” etc. Joyce meanwhile wrote something on a scrap of paper and affixed it with one of the rubber bands from my rubber-band tray to the cassette and put it on top of my monitor. It said, “No rush, thanks.” I nodded, making my mouth into a downward U of conspiratorial assent. I didn’t tell her that I was typing her own earlier tape. I let her walk away. And the sight of her diminishing figure, while at the same time her voice talked so tiredly and yet evenly in my ear of high credit and low credit (this bank job was beneath her, surely), made my interest in her, my love for her, flare up. I loved her, for instance, for not writing “Thanx” on her note and not using an exclamation point. I watched her go back to her desk and sit down and pull in her chair and pick up the phone. She was a woman. Though I’m thirty-five, as I seem to want to point out on every page, I am often surprised by the simple observation that there are women, that they wear rustly layers of clothing, that they have lips and teeth which on occasion they employ to smile at me. They take their existence for granted, but I don’t, by any means. I think, too, in all modesty, that I have an unusually good instinct for detecting when an average-looking woman senses herself entering a new phase of attractiveness. I can detect better than others when a woman feels that she is looking unusually good that day, or when something like a new haircut, or the discovery of a store that has the kind of clothes that she looks best in, reminds her of the fact that romance and flirtation are part of life, too. Joyce is perhaps not, objectively considered, stunning, though she is pretty—but these happen to be, I think, miracle weeks for her, as she learns to her surprise how she can be beautiful in a thirty-year-old rather than a twenty-three-year-old sort of way. The French braid is part of it. I doubt very much that anyone at work has said that to her—“You are entering a new phase of beauty, Joyce”—but some of them must have noticed it, too.

  Joyce had been eating something—yogurt, probably—as she dictated. Normally I am not fond of this practice. But when she said the word “unplanned” and I heard one of those odd palatal moments, most often associated with yogurt, in which the tone of her voice changed suddenly, went nasal on me, I simply could not believe I was this close to her. My head was practically in her mouth! I had a great deal of work left to do, though, so I snapped time off in order to have a few minutes of freedom to think about what I might do with Joyce if I switched off time in a big way. (I often do this: I Drop just to itemize all the neat things I could do if I did Drop right at that moment.) I could stay in the Fold for several years, mastering carpentry and other building trades, and construct an entire alternate city for her, a city with irregular spires and elevated walkways, where I would transport her, and then, turning time back on, I would wait in one of the deserted buildings I had built until she discovered me, and I would profess total bewilderment at how we had gotten there and why we had been left to fend for ourselves, and eventually she would get desperate and we would fuck sitting up at twilight, looking into each other’s eyes, in the middle of a cobblestone street, each cobble of which I had laid by hand.

  Or I could write her a short, immoderate, uncool letter telling her how wonderful it was to do her credit memos and how little I had expected to meet someone of her charm on this floor of the MassBank building, and how extremely glad I was that she liked my glasses, and I could paper-clip the note to the back of the papers I gave back to her. Or I could borrow her keys from her purse and go see what her apartment looked like. (I used to hang around cafés in Cambridge on Sundays, reading women’s handwritten poetry journals while in the Fold, but the surprising thing was how little you learned about what the women were actually like, what their manner was like, by reading their poetry journals—though their handwriting told you something. Eventually I found that a more dependable way to get an idea of a particular woman without actually talking to her was by hitting PAUSE, finding her address, and borrowing her keys to see how she lived.) Or I could put one of my special homemade editions of a pamphlet called Tales of French Love and Passion in a trash can just as Joyce was tossing something out, so that she would find it and perhaps read it. Or I could ask her out to dinner. That seemed the most reasonable thing to do.

  But in the end, needless to say, I borrowed her keys and checked out her apartment. I dropped into the Fold at around four-thirty. Fortunately for me she lived on Garden Street, one of the streets that slopes down Beacon Hill, a fifteen-minute walk, and not out in Brookline or somewhere, though I would have been willing to walk to Brookline, or at least borrow a courier’s bicycle to get there, something I have done often enough when I have needed to get around while the
universe is off. (The stopped traffic makes driving a car in the Fold impractical.) Joyce lived on the fifth floor, in a small oddly shaped studio attached to an incongruously long narrow sunporch, where she apparently slept. There were a number of flat canvas shoes, floral, turquoise, in front of her sofa, which was a faded blue foldout and looked second-hand. The floor was painted gray. A plastic tampon wrapper crinkled underfoot in the bathroom. Her makeup was thrown haphazardly in a metal box that had once held some sort of French biscuit. A Piazzetta poster was on one wall; a small framed illustration taken from some eighteenth-century textbook of perspective was on another. Her alarm was set to seven-forty. She was reading several books; the only ones I recall now were Mary Midgley’s Wickedness and D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. There was a bottle of maple syrup and a copy of a Dover book, 500 Small Houses of the Twenties, on the kitchen table. A cat, a lithe adolescent whose sex I didn’t bother to determine, was estoppeled in the middle of jumping from a counter onto a chair. I tried to get some notion of what Joyce wore when she wasn’t wearing work clothes, but as usual, when I hit the clutch to snoop, I couldn’t: it is not intuitively obvious what items go with what others. But her mess was good—I love messy women. (On the other hand, I love neat women.)

  The best thing about her apartment, though, in my opinion, was the mattress pad. It was one of those bumpy therapeutic ones, made of hundreds of rounded inch-high hillocks or pingos of foam, that people use to dampen the pressure points of too firm a mattress. I had never known anyone personally who used one. It gave me great pleasure to slip my hand under the disorderly blankets to feel it under the sheet. My fingers looked as if they were playing the piano as they passed over its repetitively dimpled surface. I pulled up a corner of the fitted sheet. The foam pad was a dark-yellow color; when I stared at it, the pattern of identical shadows tricked my eyes with false dimensionalities. I felt as if I were looking at a rough approximation, in foam, of time’s true geometry. Everyone else stayed at the level of the sheet, and only I could drop below it.