The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  To recuperate from the experiment, I spent the next five days snapped into the Fold reading Louisa May Alcott; I didn’t go near a computer keyboard or my penis the whole time. My wrist pain, which at first was so bad I could barely open a piece of junk mail, moderated considerably. I borrowed a friend’s Hermes manual portable and used it to do some of my creative rotting; the deeper keystrokes were, as Dr. Orowitz-Rudman had suggested, a kind of physical therapy. And I did briefly try to teach myself to jack ambidickstrously, but I failed: my left hand simply did not feel good enough. After a month, I called Dr. Orowitz-Rudman to schedule a follow-up visit. She called me back that evening. I told her that my wrist was doing a lot better, thanks to her. I asked her how the motion studies were going, and she said they were going well.

  “We’ve decided to focus on keyboard problems for now, though,” she said.

  “Oh? But what about—other obvious causes? You were so enthusiastic. You were so—forgive the jargon—sex-positive.” I couldn’t help sounding slightly disappointed.

  “We established the link informally and that’s as far as we can take it for the time being,” she said. “I want to concentrate on keyboard-related injuries for right now.”

  “I knew it,” I said sadly. “I was too talkative in the magnet.”

  She said no, it wasn’t really that. “It turns out that there are problems with doing sexual research. For some reason, the people who hand out research grants don’t take what you’re doing seriously if it’s related to masturbation.”

  This sounded believable. I told her I understood; indeed, I used that three-word sentence that ends so many affairs of the heart: I understand completely. “Anyway,” I said, “it certainly was a pleasant evening for me. Time well spent. That magnet really focused my attention on the problem.”

  “Good,” she said. She wished me all the best with my pornography.

  17

  THUS BEGAN MY LATEST AND LONGEST FERMATA PHASE, THE loose, easy, finger-snapping phase, the phase I remained in until quite recently. I would now like to take a moment to say a little prayerlike thing about my life. I am so very fortunate to have been able to see all the naked women’s breasts I have seen. That’s what it really comes down to. I am just shocked by how lucky I am. No life could be finer than mine. No compulsively promiscuous actor or pop singer, no photographer for a men’s magazine, has a better life, for I can take off a woman’s clothes en passant, as a momentary diversion, without my tender strippage interfering in any way with her life or with mine. The average woman, the unexceptional woman, the interestingly ugly woman, I can stare at in a state of sudden nudity (hers and/or mine) on a sidewalk, or in the unflattering light of a record store, and nobody else can. There are whole phyla of breast-shape that the public at large doesn’t know about, because the women who possess these breast-shapes do not ever bare them except to their lovers and spouses and radiologists. And these ever-hidden plenums, perfect in their indispensable imperfection, that by their hang-angle and scooped realism of curve sing out, “We two are quite modest breasts! We two breasts choose not to appear naked in public!” I get to fill my mind with until I understand them. I love modesty, or Modesty; I love to see and kiss Modesty and suck Modesty’s nipples and whisper to Modesty how arrestingly modest she is. And I have been able to do that.

  I haven’t been punished for it, either. Dr. Jekyll, Faustus, Stravinsky’s soldat, the ballet dancer in The Red Shoes, Gollum, Wells’s invisible man and time traveler, Dr. Frankenstein, and a thousand more recent horror heroes, all master some quasi-supernatural power and are punished for it, worn out by it, destroyed by it. How false and wearisome this outcome is. Why should a life with some unusual metaphysical feature built into it inevitably end in unhappiness and early death? Why should all the heroes have some fatal flaw that causes them to overreach and hence to self-destruct? It’s too convenient. Even the two quieter (and surprisingly similar, one to another) literary artifacts that treat conditions of temporal halt which resemble my own private Foldouts—I am speaking here of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Borges’s “The Secret Miracle”—both punish their heroes severely: they end with military executions. I read these two stories in high school with a sense of deep personal dissatisfaction. Is this all a writer thinks a Fold-drop could be about? Putting off death at the last minute? Where are the supervenient hebephrenias? Where is the life? Where are the tits?

  In reality, I’m here to report, people very often get away with things. I have not been caught and imprisoned for what I have done; and besides, I am not Dr. Jekyll or Dr. Frankenstein and don’t deserve torments and agonies. Even if I publish this memoir as a book, and someone recognizes herself in it and prosecutes me for a relevant sex-offense (I have gone through the manuscript, by the way, and altered a few names and fudged a few dates to decrease the possibility of this happening, but it still might), my life will still seem to me to have been a good life and I will seem to myself to have been a man who wanted to do no harm and who in fact did no harm.

  In part I am self-righteous-minded at the moment because of some recent developments having to do with the all-important Joyce Collier, Joyce of the love-inspiring black pubic hair, whom I had to abandon early in these pages in my eagerness to get as much of my past interlife recorded as I could without new preoccupying interruptions. On a Friday at work two real-weeks ago, about the general time I was starting to write about taking my watch off for Rhody in the Thai restaurant, I looked over at the head of a certain squash-playing loan officer named Paul at MassBank and suddenly felt that I wouldn’t be able to stand going to work that coming Monday; moreover, I felt I wouldn’t be able to stand going to work at all until I had finished a good deal more of this memoir. I called my coordinator and asked her for a whole week off from the bank. (I couldn’t afford more than a week.) And I stretched that one unpaid week into twenty-three precious days (counting the final weekend) of autobiographical solitude, simply by upping from one to two the number of personal Snap-days I inserted between every real calendar day. This meant that I was aging three times as fast as a normal human being, but I wasn’t troubled by that. I did my errands every third “day,” and because I was working so hard on this book, I didn’t get as lonely as I would have expected in the interim; a moment of friendliness with a bank teller or a waitress on the calendar days was enough to carry me through the two interior Arno-days that followed. In taking that week off from MassBank, I was of course putting Joyce Collier off as well—I still wanted to ask her out, but I knew that any sudden hubbub or heartbreak concerning her would distract me from the Fold-adventures in my past. I also had a hope that if I was gone from Joyce’s office for a whole week, she might notice that her working days felt different with me not there doing her tapes, and maybe that she looked forward to going to work a little less in my absence—and from there I hoped that she would move closer to a conscious realization that she really liked me.

  Towards the end of this final three-week retreat, as I recreated for the record my magnetic-resonance scan with Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, I was visited by a little realization of my own. It will seem ludicrously obvious to the reader, but to me it felt like real progress. My realization was that I would have to tell Joyce about the Fold right at the outset, before I tried to fuck her even once. There could be no more secrets: if I was going to shock Joyce with my chronanism, I had to shock her from the start, and if I was going to seduce her with the Fold’s help, she would, unlike Rhody, have to be a knowing party to the seduction. That decided, I discovered I liked the idea of finally telling someone. It might make me, “just a temp,” a little more glamorous in her eyes.

  The night before I was to see Joyce again, I couldn’t sleep for about two hours early in the morning. I Dropped during most of my insomnia, because I didn’t want to waste the night in sleeplessness. I wanted to be fresh for her. I lay in bed in a paused universe with my hand cupped over my troika; every time I thought of telling her that I
had tied her knit dress around her waist in the middle of the afternoon and touched her hips and felt her sparkling vafro, I could feel my malefactor come alive. I wanted to tell her the shocking thing that I had done. I wanted her to forgive me and love me for it.

  Here is how I asked her out the next day. Around eleven-thirty, she came by to drop off a tape and waved. I whipped off my phones. “How were things here last week?” I asked. Joyce was wearing a green dress I’d never seen before; her black hair was loosely tied in back with the Cyrillic scarf. I took this as a good omen.

  “I’m swamped with various disasters,” she said. “We missed you. The person they sent to fill in for you was none too speedy.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” I held out my hand and Joyce gave me the microcassette. “I’ll have this done in no time,” I said. “I’ve missed these tapes, you know. I like being in the middle of typing something you’ve just said into my ear and looking up and seeing you walk across the floor.”

  This took Joyce a tiny bit by surprise. “How was your vacation?”

  “It was good, quite good. Long, though.”

  “What have you been up to?”

  “I’ve been—this sounds insane—but I’ve been writing my autobiography,” I said.

  “Have you led an interesting life?” Joyce asked.

  I leaned forward. “Well, you know—I have! I have. What about you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” I said. “What can I do to help?”

  “Find someone to sweep me away somewhere. The problem is that I have no time to do interesting stuff, because I’m so busy doing stuff that’s uninteresting. Actually, on Saturdays I go to a botanical drawing class at the Arnold Arboretum.”

  “Oh, well there, that’s a positive step,” I said. “I haven’t drawn a plant in years. Is it fun?”

  “Yes,” said Joyce. “Plants sit still. It’s like meditation, but it’s better, because you’re thinking about the plant, and not about yourself.”

  I shook my head sadly. “I wish I had more art in my life right now. I did allow some medical researchers to paint reflective paint on several parts of my body a few months ago. Does that count as an artistic experience?”

  “I should think so,” said Joyce. She asked what the researchers were trying to find out.

  I told her it had to do with my carpal-tunnel problem. “They were trying to figure out how much of my problem was due to typing and how much was due to other factors.”

  “Like what other factors? You know I have a touch of carpal, too,” she confided.

  “I’m sorry. The other main factor was—well—it’s this hobby of mine, something I do in my spare time.”

  “Oh?” she said.

  “In fact,” I said, “I have to talk to you about it.”

  “About—?”

  It was definitely time to ask Joyce out. Her expression had identifiable elements of puzzled, provoked interest. Her eyes were—I think this is the only word for what they were doing—they were shining. Yet what would the look on her face be when she learned that I had already Dropped in on her apartment?I needed a moment to collect my thoughts. Without blinking, I softly snapped my fingers. I relaxed. The easy thing to do would be to undress her now: if I undressed her now and stood on the desk and touched the tip of her nose with my erect stain-stick or stroked her cheek with it in a friendly way, I knew that I would phrase my request for a date more confidently. But I didn’t want to cheat and do that. I could go back to her apartment and lie on her bed and gain strength and confidence from having been there again. But no—the whole point of this date was for me not to trespass unasked. I needed a distraction.

  Still enFolded, I walked briskly all the way to the Gap clothing store in the Copley Place Mall and took off the shirt of every woman in it (there were eleven women), singing the country-western Gap jingle from the seventies: “Fall—in—to—the—Gap.” I draped their bras over their shoulders. With no pants on, I walked around the racks of braided belts and along the walls of folded shorts and overdyed jeans. I knew from previous experience that there would be sand in some of the pants pockets—not because that particular pair had been worn to the beach and then returned, as I had once thought, but because the pants were sand-washed before they were sold. They came pre-supplied with their own memories of the Cape. I twirled slowly like a compass needle in the middle of the store, both hands on my tiller. I let my eye be surprised by each topless woman in turn, saying, “And you! And you! I’d forgotten about you! Wow, those are nice! Hi, how are you?” Having filled my brain with a multiplicity of naked Jamaicas (without coming, however), I redressed my wrongs, putting everything back where it had been, and made my way back to the MassBank building. At my desk, I snapped and emerged from my personal Gap full of self-assurance, fortified by secret acts of vulgarity, looking at Joyce, who, needless to say, hadn’t moved during my absence.

  “Would you like to have a snack with me sometime?” I asked her.

  “What kind of a snack do you mean?” she asked.

  “A dinner sort of snack.”

  “Oh.” She smiled sideways.

  “I need to talk to you. I’ve done you a wrong, and I need to unburden myself.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “Tonight?”

  “Hm.” She almost went for it. But then she said: “No, tonight is bad. I wish I could, but I’m probably going to have to stay late. I’m going to have to go over the stuff in that tape when you get it back to me. Thomas needs to look at it tomorrow morning.”

  “If I have it back to you in ten short minutes,” I said, “will you go out with me tonight?”

  “There’s an hour of stuff on that tape!”

  “I know that. I’m just saying, if I get it back to you in ten minutes, will you go out with me tonight? I know it’s a little strange, but it has to do with what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Okay, yes, sure,” she said.

  I took her to the restaurant at the Meridien. As we walked there, we followed some deep unwritten law adapted from business practice, a law that enjoins against any discussion of the main subject until a certain number of random-seeming conversational topics have arisen and been dealt with and a context of cool detachment thereby established. We talked about the rise and fall of shoe-store chains and the merits of various kinds of women’s shoes and whether women’s shoe salesmen were invariably fetishists. (Joyce’s own shoes were great-looking gray flats with sexy side-buckles.) But as soon as we got some wine, Joyce said. “Now: I want you to explain to me in detail how you did that tape so fast.”

  “If I tell you, will you tell anyone?” I asked.

  “You can’t know this about me,” Joyce said, “but I never, ever tell anyone anything that was revealed to me in confidence.”

  “Good—I want to believe you. I’ve listened to your voice so much transcribing your tapes that I think I have unusual insights into your character.”

  “You should believe me,” said Joyce.

  “I do. No—I think the problem really is whether you will believe me.”

  “The only way to find out is to try me,” said Joyce.

  So I told her that at various periods in my life, starting way back in fourth grade, I’d been able to disengage myself from time. I told her briefly about the race-track transformer, the thread going through my callus into the washing machine, about the rubber-band stretcher and the mechanical pencil, and about pushing up my glasses.

  Joyce laughed. “And this morning? How did you do it this morning?”

  “I just snapped my fingers. I won’t do it now, but whenever I snap my fingers, the entire universe immediately pauses for me, like a stretch limo waiting for me on the street while I run some errand. I spent probably, oh, an hour and a half doing your tape, with the universe in pause-mode, and then I snapped my fingers to turn it back on again and I went over to your desk and delivered the work. And before that I’d snapped and taken over an hou
r to go for a walk. I went down to the Gap and browsed a little. So it’s really around ten o’clock at night for me.”

  “You must be starving,” said Joyce. “I know I am. Some bread?”

  “Thanks.”

  Chewing, she regarded me. “Do you have more to say?”

  “Yes.” I had felt confident, even cocky, moments before, but I now noticed that my hands were unsteady as I stuffed a piece of bread in my mouth. “I’ve never told anyone what I’m telling you,” I said. “I tried to tell someone obliquely, but it wasn’t a success.”

  Joyce said, “Why are you telling me, then? I mean, I’m delighted that you are—I think. But don’t you want to continue to keep all this to yourself if you’ve kept it to yourself for this long?”

  I said, “I’m tired of having this big secret life and not being able to tell anyone.” And suddenly I did feel enormously tired of it. I felt as if I was going to get slightly weepy, but fortunately I didn’t. “I like you and I just want to tell you. I’ve written about it in the memoiry thing that I’ve been working on, and though I haven’t shown that to anyone, having done that, gone public on the page, I seem able to accept more easily the fact that people will know. It feels inevitable now, though of course it isn’t. It’s the next step. Also, I’ve used the Fold to do things that might make you uncomfortable, if you knew about them, and if they are going to make you uncomfortable, I’d rather that happened now and not later.”

  “The Told’?”

  I went into the terminology in some detail. We ordered. I told her about the equation with the garment-care symbols, and about colliding with the parking meter and stealing two shrimp. I gave her a bowdlerized account of my experience in the electromagnet. Finally I worked up the nerve to mention that at selected times in the past I had used the Fold to take off women’s clothes without their knowledge.