It Came from the North

by Carita Forsgren

  Once, however, time was measurable. For instance, during the latter half of the last millennium, measuring time was a quite essential part of human culture. In my youth time still used to be measured rather accurately. Today’s youth can’t even imagine “The Old Time” we oldsters reminisce about, which obviously had a rather linear character. The ancient linearity of time feels rather funny in a city that’s been fragmented by time turbulences to the point that it’s become unfit to live in. Once, clocks were indeed something more than just complicated toys for eccentrics, but that’s no longer the case. If time’s passage nowadays still follows some unknown logic, that rationale is incomprehensible to both the human intellect and the enormous computing power of the comps.

  Since our first meeting, the Lady Librarian and I thought about the essence of time a great deal, and I’d say our interest in time never ran out completely. We were children of our own time, after all. In our youth, time passed at an even rate, just as fast as everywhere else, and it could be logically divided into equal parts, based on the movements and positions of heavenly bodies. The parts of time had several kinds of names, too. People in the past actually amused themselves by talking about time.

  A particular day, for example, would be called Tuesday. Tuesday could mean either the whole calendar day or just the part of it spent awake. As for the sleep phase, it was divided into six separate parts that were called Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The names were borrowed from an ancient custom that divided a year—an integral whole formed by four successive seasons—into weeks, each of which had seven days. (The system of the days of a week was abandoned with the great Calendar Reform sometime in my early childhood. The global counting of years, on the other hand, was only abandoned sometime after the Great Time Flood, although a person’s age is still defined in subjective years.)

  But all this is incomprehensible to the younger generations. I have, indeed, noticed their expressions when old people, without realizing it, use such archaic phrases as “after a month,” “yesterday,” “two years ago.” It’s difficult to discard old habits, even if all the phrases denoting an objective and uniform passing of time are now just as useless as the notches carved into a boat’s side to try and mark a good fishing place, as told in that ancient moral tale.

  The Theory of Weekdays originated in this way. For a start, I and my wife-to-be considered our dreams, which had something very special to them. We had indeed been having similar dreams. That in itself was a very intimate and exciting realization. Just talking about dreams was apt to make one blush, and when one also noticed such convergences . . . now and then it actually became hard to breathe.

  In our dreams we lived together, and we both remembered many corresponding details in those visions. Parts of the details had to do with our shared life, others with the scenery and inhabitants of the city. We knew each other’s bodies already long before we’d touched each other even once. I knew with clinical exactness how to arouse her passion. Her body fascinated me, but it held no surprises for me. Before I’d even dared to really look at her, I’d already seen her breasts with photographic exactness: so small they could have belonged to a boy, and the dark brown, rather reddish shade of their nipples that reminded me of a wilting rose petal.

  The more we talked about our dreams, the better we began to remember. And little by little the dreams started to feel all the more tangible. We began to suspect that they actually were real, as irrational as the idea felt at first. And finally, when the dream images had become clarified to the utmost, we knew it with a certainty. Gradually the different days of the week glided through our minds in clear parallel rivulets with a considerable number of similarities, but even more differences between the days.

  We began to order the dreams we remembered chronologically. We talked, negotiated, debated, and made notes. We wrote down the events in our dreams on paper slips and then shuffled these in front of, beside, over, and after each other. Some events formed a continuum; others were parallel to each other, as sort of alternatives. In the older dreams, the awake-phase was illogically called Monday, and on Tuesday, then, came the first of the six dream phases. In the Monday phase, Tuesday had for a long time felt like a dream; we remembered seeing Monday dreams where we reminisced about our dreams of the other days in2 which we didn’t always know each other. In the later dreams (that is, Monday dreams) we began to realize that the other days of the week were actually real. In Tuesday we’d had a Monday dream where we became aware it wasn’t a dream. It was in this dream that we’d had an insight, which we only discovered much later. Except, what we in Tuesday thought of as a dream, wasn’t a dream, after all.

  At this stage of my explanation, the reader can probably easily believe that any effort to really understand these swaying and obscure constructions aroused in us weird feelings and a great deal of stress. For quite a while I was plagued by a depression, for which I had to seek help from the pharmacist’s. When my brain had been strained to the utmost, I even considered returning to my old family and to the safe one-dimensional life I’d lived. I suspected that the Lady Librarian also felt the temptation to push me away at times and to abandon the whole issue. Once, we didn’t say a word to one another for eight Tuesdays. We weren’t actually giving each other the silent treatment, we both just needed to come to terms with the issues we were dealing with, before we were able to explore them with each other. Our state of mind may be illuminated by a particular incident one Tuesday, when the Lady Librarian suddenly punched me in the face without any reason or forewarning whatsoever; I touched my bloody nose in amazement, and she, just as surprised by what she’d done, burst into tears and locked herself in the bathroom for the rest of the Tuesday. We both kept drawing different schematics and managed to quickly lose the thread of their logic again. One day I even caught my Lady Librarian constructing some kind of three-dimensional model of the phenomenon from paper, tape, and bits of string. By and by, and extremely gradually, the fundamental nature of the complicated issue became clear to us.

  At first we didn’t remember any other parallel days, except Monday. But when Monday had become clear enough, bits and pieces of the other dream phases began to surface in our minds—at first something from Sunday, then, later on, from Saturday also. Finally all the other days of the week came to us; with each clarified day, the preceding day cleared up. In Monday we had already remembered the other weekdays for quite some time, and when (in Tuesday) we’d managed to remember Monday, we rather quickly acquired in our minds the remaining weekdays, too. Please note, however, that in the other weekdays, except for Tuesday and Monday, we were still blessedly ignorant at this stage of the whole Theory of Weekdays (although in those days, too, we remembered having dreamt about the other weekdays). It felt weird, of course; it was as if we’d been secretly watching ourselves through a double mirror.

  Monday was in any case our first new day, at least from Tuesday’s point of view.

  Our World of Monday

  On Mondays we lived (had for years already lived) in a large white villa by the seaside, close to the woods of Bachenwachen. It was a beautiful place. In Tuesdays there was an ice cream stand with closed shutters, which had last been open some time in my childhood. We had built the villa with the money we’d made from a book we’d written, in which—right, just that—we treated the Theory of Weekdays. The same money guaranteed us a rather pleasant life, and my wife would not have needed to work in the Library, but she absolutely wanted to. The thing was, she couldn’t entrust her beloved books to anybody else. “Those geniuses from the City have tried again and again to cart away the books to some dump and replace them with flash-down versions,” she would explain, affronted. “Sure, their arguments are quite rational. Flash-down books are very practical. You don’t even have to come down to the Library to get a book. But those stupid bureaucrats don’t understand that other values exist besides dull and stupid rationality! Only a paper book is a real book.”

  I
n Monday, remembering other weekdays and creating the Theory of Weekdays had been a much longer and more laborious process than it was in Tuesday. That might have been because I was much happier in Monday than in Tuesday and didn’t even feel inclined to remember the other parallel, less perfect days.

  We’d already lived together for years then, I and my Lady Librarian, and I’d never married or even dated Hannelore. (Though in Monday it was also the dreams that had brought us together.) I did know Hannelore; she was married to one of my schoolmates and they had two children, one of whom looked very much like my Tuesday son. Sometimes we’d even meet with Hannelore and her family. But when we started remembering Tuesday in Monday (which obviously had happened quite a while before we’d started remembering Monday in Tuesday), we began to avoid them. Embarrassingly enough, I sometimes surprised Hannelore staring at me with an odd expression on her face. On some level of consciousness she obviously also remembered our Tuesday marriage. If not as a real memory, then as a dreamlike recollection. It was, after all, in the dreams that I, too, connected with the reality of the other weekdays. I began to understand why talking about dreams was the taboo it was. Dreams are quite a bomb, especially to the institution of marriage. I already had experienced this firsthand myself, and after the publication of the Theory of Weekdays, the divorce rate exploded.

  And we had a daughter, our blond Giselle who played the violin. Actually, playing the violin was already history; it finally ended one warm evening when my wife and I had made sure Giselle was already asleep, then stole away with her violin and buried it in the beach sands, giggling. The following morning Giselle woke up, naturally noticed that her violin was missing, and scowled at us suspiciously over the breakfast table. She, however, never inquired after her instrument, nor did she ever utter a single word to show she’d even noticed its strange disappearance—she loved to tease people like that sometimes; she was an exciting character in that way.

  And the next morning, when Giselle found a stray star-backed cat in our yard, washed and combed it, and adopted it after ardent appeals and our eventual blessing, I think we were mostly quits.

  Sunday

  Common to all weekdays was that Alice worked in the Library. (Her name was Alice, by the by, Ms. Alice Boumgarden, born Hesse. The last name was a relic from a previous short-lived marriage—Mr. Boumgarden had thought it prudent to run off to sea and get sunk along with his ship, torpedoed by pirates, into the depths of the Mediterranean). In Sunday, however, Alice had never been transferred to the adult department; she was still a library assistant in the children’s department.

  I considered this a great injustice, but Alice soothed my anger—she’d herself wanted to stay with children’s books. She understood that now, considering it in Tuesday, although her Sunday self was still quite bitter. She came to realize how, behind her own back, she herself had done all kinds of little things that gave others the impression that she wasn’t someone who could be given responsibility for the entire Library. Her reason was that deep down she wanted to stay involved with children. That’s what she believed, anyway. The Sunday version of my Alice was, for some reason, a bit fonder of children, and at the same time, more stubborn than the Alice from the other days. And even though she’d have very much wanted to have children of her own, she couldn’t admit it either to herself or her friends. After her husband had absconded, she’d emphasized her independence to a ridiculous extent, though Alice did eventually yield enough to start feeding a stray cat that had adopted her yard as its territory.

  In Sunday we hadn’t become acquainted, yet. We were stalking each other, mostly in a hesitant way—at times almost brave enough to take the decisive initiative, but always withdrawing at the last moment. In Sunday I also had a wife I actually didn’t even like, plus two sweet daughters. On the pretext of my daughters’ reading needs I regularly visited the children’s department of the Library by myself to secretly catch a glimpse of the Library assistant.

  Seen from Tuesday and Monday, our germinating Sunday romance was painful to follow. We wanted to shout out eager encouragements to ourselves through the dreams, urge ourselves to finally take the risk and at least exchange a few words. But we knew we couldn’t hurry the matter. We remembered very well how confusing, from Tuesday’s viewpoint, the memories of our parallel lives in dreams had been. Our life together was of course, to some extent, accessible in Sunday through dreams, as it had been in Tuesday, too, and would therefore in all probability finally make one of us act. We just had to be patient and wait.

  That’s what we agreed to do in the end. After all, confusing one’s Sunday self by hurrying things along surely wouldn’t do any good.

  And yet I noticed that Alice secretly tried to influence her Sunday self through dreams. She spent long hours writing the same sentence over and over again: TALK TO HIM, ALICE, FOR GOD’S SAKE! HE IS INTERESTED IN YOU! The Sunday Alice probably woke up wondering about the strangely monotonous dreams delivering her a very simplified message.

  And finally, one drizzly Sunday, the beautifully aging library assistant scared the wits out of the man who’d once again come to borrow some books for his little daughters, which they didn’t really need. The woman blurted out that her name was Alice and she’d seen him in her dreams, and when the man—after retrieving, with numbed fingers, the books from the floor—answered by saying something about a white villa by the seaside, their lives were very beautifully derailed from their former ruts.

  Saturday

  Saturday everything happened quickly and painlessly. We both happened to go to the same pub. I was a bachelor, and had just quarreled with my girlfriend (who wasn’t Hannelore, by the way). I’d launched myself on a boozing spree around town. Alice, too, was out by herself; she wanted to celebrate her tiny salary increase which would allow her to eat one more cinnamon bun a day. After some roaming about we found ourselves sitting at the same table. We recognized each other immediately, and drunk as we both were, began talking frankly about everything all at once: the dreams, the white house by the sea, Giselle, the cat.

  The next morning we woke up in the same bed. After some hangover pills, we made the first notes for our book. We were embarrassed and very confused; because of the intoxication we’d progressed much too fast with one another, but such feelings were soon to make room for our growing enthusiasm.

  Friday

  Friday morning we walked along the riverbank road, shaded by maple trees. The leaves rustled in the wind. A fleet of boats from the Technical Office was patrolling the river. We had, once again, come to a meeting of the Literary Discussion Club, which was organized every sixth Friday, though nowadays we were the only two members left. We’d gradually shaken off the other seven founders, by orchestrating the intentional inefficient flow of information, and continuously changing dates and venues for meetings. Not that we explicitly collaborated on anything like that; we weren’t that obvious. Ours was a purely tacit agreement. But that didn’t make it any less real.

  We met in cafés, outdoors—everywhere that was quiet enough for intimate discussion, on the one hand, and public enough so that we could go on believing our own façade, on the other. We had to fool ourselves, too, you see. After all, we were both married, and actually quite happily.

  “I think Heathcliff is an implausible figure,” Alice said. “Exaggerated.”

  A cool summer wind made her brown dress flutter. It was the same shade as her hair. She walked beside me with long, stretched-out steps, feet a little too thick to be really beautiful. Her shoes clicked and rustled over the riverbank’s stonework. The gulls for one reason or another no longer thrived by the riverside; my ears missed their screams.

  I pointed at the water. “Boats, again. That one there seems to be in some kind of trouble.”

  There were three men in the boat. They were yelling loudly to the other boats. Then they suddenly fell silent and froze. The boat, too, stopped strangely in the middle of the stream, while the other boats gave it a wide berth. �
�There’s the turbulence!” one of the boatmen bellowed. “The turbulence! Stay away! Mark it down! Damn it!”

  “Time turbulence,” Alice said lightly. She wrapped her words in an amused coolness. “Discharges from the Time Research Institute. I read about it in a scandal sheet in the reading room. I didn’t quite believe it, but now I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “What the hell,” I said. “The boat isn’t moving at all. Nor are the men. It’s as if the river has stopped flowing at their point.”

  “Not the river. Time.” Alice said. I glanced at her; I wanted to see her expression. Her expressions were like chocolates to me. The wrinkles under her eyes were impishly deepened by the laughter bubbling beneath the surface of her smile. “According to this reliable and respected newspaper of ours, something happened in the Time Research Institute, which has dangerously polluted the river. It isn’t dirty, to cite the article. The water just doesn’t ‘follow a uniform temporality’ anymore.”

  “‘Temporality’?” I tried to understand the meaning of Alice’s words, while the boat’s crew remained petrified, statue-like on the river. The sight was altogether absurd.

  “That’s what the paper said. Time turbulence. The boat obviously drifted over a place where time has almost stopped. There was a scientific diagram about it in the paper. Looked very convincing. If you get to a place where time has slowed down, the rest of the world suddenly seems to be moving at a tremendous speed, as though you’d jumped on a merry-go-round! Poor men—to get stuck on a boat in a time turbulence. Though that seems more like a back-vortex to me.”