I’ll tell them that we were wondering why they are such failures as human beings and that we were wondering also how such people live.
We’re anthropologists.
Of a kind.
Why did you bring me here? she asked.
A moment of weakness, I said. Sometimes fear can make you creep into one camp or another, can make you almost believe what you want to think you’re too strong to believe. I wanted to think there is a hell. I guess I wanted to think there is a heaven. I wanted to think that I would see my son again.
That’s not a bad thing to think.
I shrugged. It’s a stupid thing to think.
I cannot argue with that.
Do you think there is evil in the world?
I don’t know what that means. I think there are people who are cruel. I know there are. What about you?
No evil.
Good?
Oh, there’s good. No evil. No god or gods or devils? If there is a god, he’s not very good at much.
What about meaning?
Meaning? You mean, like, purpose?
Okay.
She shook her head.
I nodded. Justice?
Maybe. Justice happens just often enough that the myth of it persists. Funny how injustice doesn’t create its own mythology.
Hope springs eternal.
Hope.
Do you think we’re in hell right now, this place?
No.
That was simple.
Hell would be if I’d never seen the Sieve of Eratosthenes as a child or if I had never been able to understand Gauss’s Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. For you it would have been never reading Huck Finn. I’m guessing.
Close enough. So, we’re not in hell now?
However much it feels like it.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it hell for someone else.
If I were twenty years younger, I’d kiss you.
If you were twenty years younger, I’d let you. Shall we get out of here?
Emily Kuratowski nodded. On our way out, she sneezed and then said, The axiom of choice does not apply if there is a finite number of bins.
Of course, I said.
40
It had been my experience that the one thing thieves hate more than anything else is theft. And so Mrs. Klink and Maria Cortez and Emily Kuratowski and Sheldon Cohen and I took all of our valuables, as they were called, and hid them away behind my azalea bush. And then we, in turn, went to the building administrator and told her that we had been robbed. The administrator, as she was called, had no face and so she could have no expression when one or all of us came to her with our reports. She made notes and said what she would whether she was being told a faucet was dripping or a chicken bone was caught in the throat of a wheelchair-bound, blind man, I’ll see what I can do. This came as no surprise to us, but we made our reports nonetheless. We walked the hallways looking forlorn and lost, our lives’ prizes had been stolen, our keepsakes, our memories. We stumbled into each other, we were so despondent. We cut sidelong and angry glances at the Gang of Six, whispered in the hallways that we knew who had done the pilfering — the bastards. It turned out that what upset a thief more than finding an empty mark was believing that he’d been beaten to the mark. My watch that you gave me, my watch that kept decent time if I checked on it now and again, a glance at the big clock on the street or called up that number that there used to be just to tell you the time, that watch with the sweep hand (does anyone still call it that?) that was stuck in a little circle, one of three circles, one of the other two was for the date and that I never used and the third I have no idea about, but perhaps it was the most important one, perhaps it not only kept track of time but kept time and if I had only looked at it, if I had only understood it and used it, I might have some years some days some hours left, but not for myself because I really don’t need them, don’t want them, and wouldn’t know when to put them or keep them if I had them to keep or if I had a watch with a third circle that just happened to keep them for me. Rubato. My watch has been fakestolen, I will call it, but interred under the dirt as it is, not rendering its readings to me, tick tick ticking through the anything-but-friable soil to the wormies and the buggies and the seedlings, it might as well be stolen, so is there any real difference, except for the time that is stored in those springs, caught in them, twisted in them, warped, buckled, contorted in the skinny housing that looked so elegant when you gave it to me, a watch like the one I had owned before and a watch very much like a new one that I might have bought for myself, but it was from you, wasn’t it? And that made all the difference, all the difference when the leather wristband became stinky in the summer humidity, when sand would grind under it at the beach and I would wear it on and on because it was the time you have given me, time that just twiddled and peetled and staggered and tripped into the gloaming of everydayness, so that now my wrist feels so funny, outré, and not lighter, as one might expect, but denser, concentrated, like a head on Venus. My watch, your watch, sunk into the muck, laid to rest, inhumed with so much else, the wormies and the buggies and the seedlings and so much else, time, my time, because my time is all that’s left, my nonspatial continuum, my measures of change in position and temperature and velocity, my sequences, my durations, my repetitions my repetitions, I agreeing with Leibniz (happily, because he had monads) and with Kant (sadly, because he was so damn predictable) that we cannot measure this time and therefore we cannot travel this time and therefore we’re fucked and I’m an old man, so I can talk like this, say, say words like fuck if I want to, if I choose to, if the feeling moves me, if I have time for it, from time to time, but thank god and the devil for time, because if we didn’t have it, well, things would just stack up, wouldn’t they? Seconds piled on top of seconds on top of minutes on top of hours, with no place for them to go. What a mess. And this talk of eternity, it just won’t last, and besides, what an awful place to meet. I would rather count the hairs on a cat, the grains of sand in a desert, the lies America has told the world, than admit that eternity makes any sense. So, we buried a few things.
41
To save power in those late-summer months Teufelsdröckh’s turned off the air-conditioning an hour earlier and extinguished three of every four fluorescent panels in the corridors and so the evenings were warm and eerily lit, the flickering panels struggling to carve out small regions of shadowy light. By morning all the oldsters were shivering because to cope with the warmer early evening they had opened their windows and by daybreak the rooms were frigid. I never minded it so much, but it was no fun stumbling out in the mornings to be surrounded by bundled-up, yawning, and complaining residents of Limbo. Still, I was happier than I had been for my hours spent with my mathematician friend, her periods of hazy vacation and arithmetical flights of decampment notwithstanding.
You know what would be nice one of these evenings? I said.
A thunderstorm, Emily Kuratowski said immediately.
You’ve been reading my mind.
Or you mine.
Maria Cortez had told us at breakfast that she suspected someone had rummaged through her things again. But of course they found nothing, she snickered.
Emily and I were watching Harley and Tommy, involved in an animated discussion down the hall. I could not make out any of what was being said, but Tommy was scuttling left, the only way he scuttled, his head bent low, still high above Harley’s, but his posture was of contrition, if not fear. I could imagine the dialogue.