The Infinite Now

by Mindy Tarquini

  Maybe she was right, also. Her father certainly had been. Despite the old man’s protests, despite his claims he was no more magical than me, he understood plenty, even if he wasn’t always aware. He knew the curtain would lead me down a path I hadn’t expected, and he did his best to teach me to respect the road. But the old man was gone. I was no longer a child. My further path was up to me.

  I dried my tears, rolled up the curtain, placed it in the old man’s wooden chest, and again returned to college. To finish my undergraduate degree, then on to medical school. Because I knew what I knew before I knew it.

  The influenza was a sickness unlike any we might have expected, a virus in a world that still didn’t know they existed. Atypical and very much like the bubble, the flu triggered our beautiful immune systems to overreact, caused a response so concentrated, our defenses turned rogue.

  We killed ourselves. Our young and our vibrant. Our best and our brightest. In a world on a hair trigger, was it any surprise this was the flu we birthed?

  How much we learned, how little we understood. Epidemiology was a new specialty in those days, and of the few women who studied medicine, fewer still chose it for further study. But I was determined, driven, dedicated to vanquishing the guaritrice’s children.

  The day I graduated, I pulled the curtain out of mothballs, the temptation to see Carlo again, too strong. I could observe, not interact. Remember, not change. The past is fixed, my sojourns limited. A smile, a nod, a wave of the hand. Scraps of life, like those my children’s grandchildren send in ten-second snippets on their fancy phones, but silent scraps, except for the slap slap slap of the reel sprocketing at its end. “The past is a road which never changes course.”

  I didn’t want to mire there. I closed the flap, kissed the place on the wall where his beautiful lips said those words, and left Carlo to his well-deserved peace.

  Mamma’s curtain stayed out of mothballs for a long time after, but I never used it to go back, and rarely to go forward. Instead, I used it much as I had the day the old man collapsed beside the lamppost, not to stagnate time, but to slow it, to give myself the luxury of enjoying some moments a little longer than others.

  A day at the beach. The birth of a grandchild. Fipo’s graduation. The day Etti got married. My daughter’s acceptance into the University of Pennsylvania, Fipo’s into flight school. The day he took me for my first ride in an airplane. And his last visit before shipping out to Europe.

  Moments illuminated by love. And if some of those moments were stretched into days or even weeks, can I be blamed? It helped carry me through the sadder times, the moments upside-down and reversed. The day my son lost his first child. The day Tizi lost her last. The day we received notice we’d lost Fipo in a mission over Germany.

  There is no room for hell in hope. My daughter left me last year, following on her brother the year before. It doesn’t matter they were grandparents and great-grandparents. Doesn’t matter they lived long and full lives, achieved more than most, and were for the most part, happy. Their loss is the final and worst grief I’ve had to bear. The final test.

  I am old, my work is ongoing, my research continues, but I long ago passed the baton to a younger generation, brighter, better educated, more inspired than me. They don’t need Mamma’s curtain. It was the proper tool for the proper time, but its greatest power lay in its ability to remember, and the newer generations are making discoveries which make Mamma’s curtain quaint.

  Etti’s great-grandson tells me all times happen at once, the past, the present, and the future. That somewhere on that continuum exists each moment, perfect and whole. He has his doctorate; he has a second. Universities give him grants; government people come to talk to him.

  Because Etti’s great-grandson is an explorer. He’s building a device. A device with an aperture no greater than a pinhole. An aperture he’ll be able to focus on any moment of his choosing, guided by the power of deep mathematics.

  He tells me the applications are limitless. The ability to examine molecules, and history, and maybe get a glimpse of what is beyond our imaginings. Etti’s great-grandson, with his deep, strong voice, his eyes the color of licorice, and the resolute determination of Great-Granduncle Fipo, is building a curtain for a new millennium. A curtain based on science.

  I still have the Big Bens, tick-tick-ticking together in tandem. I’m the only one who winds them, the only one who uses them when I want to know the time. Everybody else checks their phone. The Big Bens are slowing, sometimes in leaps, sometimes in the tiniest of hops, but the phenomena is inexorable, the process inevitable, the end in sight. I’m not scared. The old man once told me time finds a new path after a great upheaval. Once Mamma’s clock stops here, it will start again in another place. And I’ll be with it.

  Not everything found can be kept. Not everything saved will remain. We can’t decide who we’ll lose, nor who we’ll keep. What moments will stretch into a lifetime and which will be gone in a breath.

  The infinite Now is limitless, it is unyielding. And it is not to be wasted.

  I think Etti’s great-grandson understands. I leave this life comforted in the hope maybe someday, someone will look through that pinhole and focus on finding a magical time, a wondrous time, a time of small victories and great defeats, of practical impossibilities and impossible practicalities. A time of hope, of despair, filled with the wise, the foolish, and everybody in between.

  I hope their focus spirals into the kitchen on the second floor of a building on Ninth Street in Philadelphia. A building long ago torn down, then rebuilt, and built again. I hope they focus on a particular table, set with bean soup and biscotti, where a young man and two girls talk about laundry and scrubbing and how best to clean snot. One for all and all for one as they discuss opening a shoe repair shop, or a restaurant, or going to typewriting school.

  And telling stories. Of yesterday and today, tomorrow and beyond. Stories not of if, but when, not how, but why. Stories of the heart, the soul, recounted in the mix of English and Italian common among people of that age at that time.

  A trio of friends—the Three Musketeers—young and happy and alive in a world doing its damndest to kill itself and everyone in it.

  A time formed in a shaft of light, then cast in darkness. A single moment. Enshrined forever.

  Carlo.

  Benedetta.

  And me.

  Historic Notes:

  Originally and incorrectly referred to as the Spanish Flu, epidemiologists have put forth several theories as to where the Influenza of 1918-1919 originated. I found the idea that the flu may have originated on a hog farm in Haskell County, Kansas most intriguing, a home-grown disease exported to Europe because of America’s entrance and involvement in the World War, then returned to us at the end of our involvement, like some kind of awful parting gift.

  What experts do not dispute is the devastation wrought by the disease—approximately one-third of the population infected, and mortality estimated between twenty and fifty million, two to three percent of the world’s population at the time. The Influenza of 1918-1919 killed more in a few months than the war killed during the entirety of its brutal and bloody four years, yet the pandemic was so overshadowed by the war it is sometimes referred to as the “forgotten pandemic”.

  Typical influenza targets those with weak immune systems, the very young and the very old. The virus responsible for the Influenza of 1918-1919 caused an overwhelming immune response, turning the body’s defenses on itself, and thus proved deadliest to those with the strongest immune systems, people in the prime of their lives, the young and the healthy, an ironic footnote during a war which was already hard at work decimating that same population.

  Of American cities, Philadelphia was particularly hard hit, perhaps because the city fathers refused to cancel the Liberty Loan Parade, despite recommendations to the contrary by health officials. The parade went forward as scheduled on September 28, 1918. The incidence of influenza in the city exploded se
veral days after. The disease burned through the population in an October scourge, then dropped off suddenly, all but gone by the armistice of November 11.

  The passage Fiora reads to the boys is from Frank L. Baum’s children’s classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

  Acknowledgments

  Holed up with a laptop and an idea, a writer’s life can be lonely but for the voices in her head. I’d like to give a shout-out to those who broke through with critique and encouragement, good cheer, and a smack upside the head when warranted. Sharon, Kelly, K.C., Jenn, Sandra, Crystal, Morgan, Brooke, Lauren, Julie. An enormous shout out to Lisa Miller for her regularly offered and excellent Story Structure Safaris and Expeditions. Without Lisa’s amazing course, The Infinite Now might still be a cluster of ill-formed ideas ping-ponging between my temples.

  Last, but always first, my love and gratitude to my children and my husband, my never-ending wells of inspiration.

  Book Club Questions

  1. The old man claimed “Belief is powerful.” The young shoemaker declared, “Belief is a house for which the mind provides the mortar.” How real was the bubble to the various characters? Did it ever exist, or was it a manufacture of Fiora’s mind?

  2. In a world without internet, without television, almost without radio, the primary source of news for most people was word of mouth, letters, and newspapers. In the United States, newspapers were loosely controlled by the government-run Committee on Public Information which encouraged all media outlets to a voluntary censorship, a censorship which included keeping all news and attitudes which did not promote the war effort in the sidelines. How might the incidence of the Influenza of 1918 been curtailed by free and well-disbursed public health information? Might that advantage be offset by the rapid pace of travel in today’s world?

  3. What drove Fiora? Love or loneliness? At the story’s end, Fiora is a wise and well-lived woman of great age, but how might her life have been different were she born today, instead of a hundred and fifteen years earlier?

  4. In Fiora’s world, the curtain was as magical as she cared to make it. What items do we depend on today that might serve somebody like Fiora in the same way?

  5. Discuss the symbols and tropes of The Infinite Now, those items drawn from the various myths and fairytales touched on in the story, as well as the old world superstitions. How were they used to deepen the narrative?

  6. Be the author. If you could change aspects of the story, create different endings, what would you change, and why?

  About the Author

  © Ian Cassell

  Raised by traditional people in a modern world, Mindy Tarquini is a second-generation Italian American who grew up believing that dreams are prophecy, the devil steals lost objects, and an awkward glance can invite the evil eye. She is an assistant editor with the Lascaux Review and a member of the Perley Station Writers’ Colony, as well as the author of the novel Hindsight. A native Philadelphian, Ms. Tarquini resides in Phoenix with her husband. She loves writing heroines with special powers. Alas, she has none herself.

  Mindy loves the Internet. Check out her website at www.MindyTarquini.com and stop by her Facebook page at www.facebook.com/MindyTarquiniAuthor.

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