What this means, practically speaking, is that every few days I will almost certainly run into someone with whom I have worked closely at some company at some time in the past. And I will want so much to remember his or her name! They usually remember my name, and in some cases I can detect a faint hurt look in their eyes when they perceive, through my joshing and bluster, that I don’t remember theirs, since together we did work very hard and beat impossible deadlines and joke around only six months ago, or a year and a half ago, or five years ago. And — they and I both secretly think — they were higher-ranking than I was, they were salaried, I was a temp, so it is a duty in keeping with my subordinate station to remember their names, while it is only noblesse oblige for them to remember mine.
Yet if they took a moment to do the arithmetic of my work life versus their work life, as I have, they would perhaps understand and absolve, for they see the same people every day, their universe of clients and contacts and colleagues is relatively confined and stable, so that a new temp like me in their office is a novelty, a topic of conversation, a person to whom they can “give a leg up,” an outsider in whom they can confide hatreds and old wounds. I stick in their mind because they are pleased that they were able to put aside class differences and treat me as an equal. “Arno, hi!” And there I am, standing in front of Park Street Station, unable to reciprocate properly, feeling like a waiter asked to remember an order from a table he served months before.
The name problem is compounded by the fact that there is apparently some vulnerability in my countenance that signals to lost people that I should be approached for directions. I have gotten good at sensing the lost now as they look over a crowdlet of potential help at a stop sign: they spot me, and though I’m wearing a tie like the other men, they seem to smell that I’m a temp and must therefore be permanently lonely and lowly, a sick caribou that the wolf singles out for attention; they know that they will feel at ease with me about admitting to being a stranger because I am going to welcome any human contact, any indication that I’m established and not transient. I go through periods when I am asked three times a day for directions. And these lost people are right — I do like being interrupted on the street, especially by women, but by men, too. I am poor at retaining street names, however, even streets that hold buildings in which I’ve worked in the past. For a while I deliberately studied maps of the business district in the evening, counting traffic lights and memorizing cross streets and helpful landmarks, so that I would live up to the expectations of unintimidating guidance that my face and features seem to create. (I find that the response is especially heavy if I am carrying some bulky item, like a bunch of flowers or a Wang VS backup disk.) As a result, I never know if the person coming toward me on the sidewalk and seeking eye contact is someone I worked with at Gillette or Kendall or Ropes & Gray or Polaroid or MassBank or Arthur Young, or whether he or she just needs to know how to get to Milk Street.
During the periods when I have full Fold-powers, however, these difficulties are easily solved. As soon as I hear an “Arno, hi!” I can do a Drop and check wallet or purse ID and then greet whoever it is properly. It makes such a difference. I don’t feel cringey and can lose myself in the pleasure of the reunion: for I really do like most of the people I have worked with over the years; almost all of them have some lovable feature. And if someone asks me how to get to a place that I should know perfectly well how to get to and don’t, I can freeze his inquiring expression and check a map. (I carry one in my briefcase, as well as my old bottle of contact-lens solution, in case someone finds herself in ocular distress.) Of course, I could pull out the map while he looks on, but I hate to see that shifty, clouded look come into his eyes as he thinks to himself, This guy doesn’t have a clue — I should have asked one of the others. Also, when I pull out a map to help a tourist, especially an Asian tourist, I inevitably end up giving it to him, because impulsive generosity is such a high — and those maps are ridiculously expensive.
I’m not being quite fair to myself, then, when I say that the Fold is just a sexual aid. It is primarily that — my Fold-energies seem to be a direct by-product of my appetite for nakedness. I doubt that I would have wormed my way into the Fermata even once if I had not been motivated primarily by the desire to take women’s clothes off. But I don’t want to ignore or depreciate the range of nonsexual uses that I have put it to. I have, for example, relied on it for things like last-minute Christmas shopping; it’s nice to browse in utter silence. When I’m irritable at work, and I know that the people around me don’t deserve my misanthropy, I can stop them all until I’m fond of them again. If someone makes a revealing comment in passing, I can take time out to think about its hidden implications and check the expressions of others who have heard it, all while I’m right there and it is fresh in my mind.
I also use the Fold when I’m called on to come up with something especially understanding or sympathetic in a conversation and I want to be sure that my tact is exactly on key — although there is a serious risk in mulling over your kindness for any longer than fifteen or twenty seconds, because as you weigh and polish your response you can quickly lose your working sense of the immediate emotional flux. I’ve nearly derailed one or two important heart-to-heart talks by pausing so long to hone my tone that when I was finally ready to re-enter time I knew that I was going to be brittle and foolish and insincere, exactly what I’d Dropped out to avoid, and I had a very hard time working myself back around to the mood that had made the conversation seem important enough for me to have wanted to interrupt it in the first place. Nonetheless, used sparingly, the Fold can really help with commiseration.
It is an obvious escape, too — though here again, I have learned to use it sparingly. I was given a temp assignment at the alumni office of a graduate school, where I was asked to roll up posters and stuff them in mailing tubes. I did this for four straight days. I would not have minded if the posters had not been so ugly. On the second day, I found it difficult to entertain the notion of rolling up one more purple-and-black poster — the waste of glossy paper, of post office energy, of university money, seemed too awful — and so I hit the clutch and took two non-hours to read some of Diana Crane’s The Transformation of the Avant-Garde. In that case it helped a lot: the book was better, more licentiously toothsome, for being read en Folde. But there have been other times when, once I have lapsed into the timelessness of the arrested instant, the particular obligation or person from whom I have temporarily freed myself becomes more and more horrific, posed in its or his stalled imminence, and the idea that I will have to take up right where I have left off becomes unbearable, and I re-enter time’s cattle-drive with a sense of defeat and unhappiness more acute than any I felt before I had ducked, or copped, out.