She’d been just a girl when she’d moved in, really, nodding and smiling and ducking her head when she encountered them at the door or on the way up with intractable brown paper bags, bulging as if they were full of cats but tufted with peculiar groceries — vegetables sprouting globular appendages and sloshing cartons of mysterious liquids. Then, farther along in the distant past, Margaret had appeared.
Where there had been one in the market, at the corner bar, on the stairs, now there were two. Naomi, short and lively, given to boots and charming cowgirl skirts; tall, arrestingly bony Margaret with arched eyebrows and bright red hair. Now there were lines around Naomi’s eyes; she had widened and settled downward. One rarely recalled Margaret’s early, sylvan loveliness.
So long ago! Though it felt that way only at moments — when Otto passed by a mirror unprepared, or when he bothered to register the probable ages (in comparison with his own) of people whom — so recently! — he would have taken for contemporaries, or when he caught a glimpse of a middle-aged person coming toward him on the street who turned into William. Or sometimes when he thought of Sharon.
And right this moment, Naomi and Margaret were on their way back from China with their baby. The adoption went through! Naomi’s recent, ecstatic e-mail had announced. Adoption. Had the girls upstairs failed to notice that they had slid into their late forties?
—
Sharon’s apartment looked, as always, as if it had been sealed up in some innocent period against approaching catastrophes. There were several blond wood chairs, and a sofa, all slipcovered in a nubby, unexceptionable fabric that suggested nuns’ sleepwear, and a plastic hassock. The simple, undemanding shapes of the furnishings portrayed the humility of daily life — or at least, Otto thought, of Sharon’s daily life. The Formica counter was blankly unstained, and in the cupboards there was a set of heavy, functional, white dishes.
It was just possible, if you craned, and scrunched yourself properly, to glimpse through the window a corner of Sharon’s beloved planetarium, where she spent many of her waking hours; the light that made its way to the window around the encircling buildings was pale and tender, an elegy from a distant sun. Sharon herself sometimes seemed to Otto like an apparition from the past. As the rest of them aged, her small frame continued to look like a young girl’s; her hair remained an infantine flaxen. To hold it back she wore bright, plastic barrettes.
A large computer, a gift from Otto, sat in the living room, its screen permanently alive. Charts of the constellations were pinned to one of the bedroom walls, and on the facing wall were topographical maps. Peeking into the room, one felt as if one were traveling with Sharon in some zone between earth and sky; yes, down there, so far away — that was our planet.
Why did he need so many things in his life, Otto wondered; why did all these things have to be so special? Special, beautiful plates; special, beautiful furniture; special, beautiful everything. And all that specialness, it occurred to him, intended only to ensure that no one — especially himself — could possibly underestimate his value. Yet it actually served to illustrate how corroded he was, how threadbare his native resources, how impoverished his discourse with everything that lived and was human.
Sharon filled a teakettle with water and lit one of the stove burners. The kettle was dented, but oddly bright, as if she’d just scrubbed it. “I’m thinking of buying a sculpture,” she said. “Nothing big. Sit down, Otto, if you’d like. With some pleasant vertical bits.”
“Good plan,” Otto said. “Where did you find it?”
“Find it?” she said. “Oh. It’s a theoretical sculpture. Abstract in that sense, at least. Because I realized you were right.”
About what? Well, it was certainly plausible that he had once idly said something about a sculpture, possibly when he’d helped her find the place and move in, decades earlier. She remembered encyclopedically her years of education, pages of print, apparently arbitrary details of their histories. And some trivial incident or phrase from their childhood might at any time fetch up from her mind and flop down in front of her, alive and thrashing.
No, but it couldn’t be called “remembering” at all, really, could it? That simply wasn’t what people meant by “remembering.” No act of mind or the psyche was needed for Sharon to reclaim anything, because nothing in her brain ever sifted down out of precedence. The passage of time failed to distance, blur, or diminish her experiences. The nacreous layers that formed around the events in one’s history to smooth, distinguish, and beautify them never materialized around Sharon’s; her history skittered here and there in its original sharp grains on a depthless plane that resembled neither calendar nor clock.
“I just had the most intense episode of déjà vu,” William said, as if Otto’s thoughts had sideswiped him. “We were all sitting here—”
“We are all sitting here,” Otto said.
“But that’s what I mean,” William said. “It’s supposed to be some kind of synaptic glitch, isn’t it? So you feel as if you’ve already had the experience just as you’re having it?”
“In the view of many neurologists,” Sharon said. “But our understanding of time is dim. It’s patchy. We really don’t know to what degree time is linear, and under what circumstances. Is it actually, in fact, manifold? Or pleated? Is it frilly? And what is our relationship to it? Our relationship to it is extremely problematical.”
“I think it’s a fine idea for you to have a sculpture,” Otto said. “But I don’t consider it a necessity.”
Her face was as transparent as a child’s. Or at least as hers had been as a child, reflecting every passing cloud, rippling at the tiniest disturbance. And her smile! The sheer wattage — no one over eleven smiled like that. “We’re using the tea-bag-in-the-cup method,” she said. “Greater scope for the exercise of free will, streamlined technology…”
“Oh, goody,” William said. “Darjeeling.”
Otto stared morosely at his immersed bag and the dark halo spreading from it. How long would Sharon need them to stay? When would she want them to go? It was tricky, weaving a course between what might cause her to feel rejected and what might cause her to feel embattled…Actually, though, how did these things work? Did bits of water escort bits of tea from the bag, or what? “How is flavor disseminated?” he said.
“It has to do with oils,” Sharon said.
Strange, you really couldn’t tell, half the time, whether someone was knowledgeable or insane. At school Sharon had shown an astounding talent for the sciences — for everything. For mathematics, especially. Her mind was so rarefied, so crystalline, so adventurous, that none of the rest of them could begin to follow. She soared into graduate school, practically still a child; she was one of the few blessed people, it seemed, whose destiny was clear.
Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.