I think, too, that it is exceedingly dangerous to Drop when you are in any sort of depression about how bad the world is. A Fold then can deepen infinitely — since in a way you are now in control over whether all the world’s continuing atrocities and tragedies should resume or not. You know that as soon as you give the go-ahead to time again, pets will not be given enough water, feelings will be needlessly hurt, killings, crashes, miscarriages of justice, bureaucratic harassment, infidelity, artistic disappointments, and worse will all go forward,and you begin to think that you will be in a sense their cause, you will be directly responsible for them, since you have a choice whether to let them happen, by opting to restart time or not. When I am in a Fold, I know for a fact that no woman anywhere is crying or feeling betrayed, and since I want above all for women not to cry, I can begin to believe, irrationally, that it is my duty to live out my entire life in this artificial solitude, eating canned foods. “He died suddenly,” they would say on discovering my abruptly aged body. But when I died, all the misery-in-progress that I had so heroically held at bay for forty-odd years would resume anyway. I don’t have any power to alter the fact that evils will do their work, only how “soon” they will. As a consequence, I have determined that my Foldouts should in general be short, recreational, and masturbatory, rather than deep and pained.
I should mention here, though, under the heading of nonsexual uses of the Fermata, one of my least attractive episodes. Three black kids, age eighteen or so, stopped me one afternoon and asked which way the Boston Common was, and when I put on my usual “Yes, I’d be delighted to help you find your way, and I will of course be discreet about your sketchy knowledge of this area of the city, and when you walk away you will be cheered by the conviction that you did the right thing asking me and not those other, less amiable people for directions” face, one of the kids placed a gun to my jaw (this was near the medical center downtown), and asked me to give him my wallet and watch. I timed out by pushing on the lead-advance button of my mechanical pencil (in my back pocket), and took the gun out of play. I was trembling, outraged that these kids would feel entitled to my wallet and watch and were willing to threaten me with death to get them. I was put in mind of the old jokey way of teaching genuflection: “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch.” So I got some wire from the back of a New England Telephone truck that was parked nearby and tied all three of them by the balls to a nearby stop sign. It is a somewhat disorienting experience to be calmly winding telephone wire around the testicle-sack of a person who has just been in the process of mugging you. I taped their dicks up temporarily so that they wouldn’t annoy me by hanging in my way while I wound. (Two were uncircumcised.) When all three of them were fully secured to the stop sign, the three wires exiting the backs of their pants through holes I had snipped with wire cutters, I stood back a few paces, turned time on, and, with pathetic bravado, said, “Come and get me, you little fucks!” Startled, they sized up the situation for a second, then lunged after me and fell forward at once, swearing with pain. I loped off, feeling increasingly remorseful, not to mention relieved that I hadn’t in the first flush of my vengefulness cut off their balls altogether and dragged them to the emergency room; an option, I am ashamed to say, that I had briefly considered. (Can one bleed to death from castration? Probably. And it was doubtful they had medical insurance.) After that unsettling experience I spent an “afternoon” performing acts of lite altruism, wandering in the Fold through crummy neighborhoods collecting concealed handguns off anyone who looked under thirty, but the frisking was tiring and distasteful work, and I stopped after I had only forty-four weapons in my commandeered shopping cart, with the sense that I had done nothing of real value, and had possibly even destabilized a momentarily tranquil street scene. (Still under cover of the Fermata, I pushed the weapons into some newly poured cement at a construction site.)
4
BUT — I DO LIKE TRANSCRIBING MICROCASSETTES. I MENTION this because only a few days after I wrote that very first sur le vif chunk about Joyce’s exuberant pubic hair, I was immersed in one of her tapes, dog-paddling along in the moonlit scum-less lily pond of her consciousness, my eyes fixed on the green letters that she called forth from my fingertips, when I glanced up to see her walking briskly toward me, wiggling a pen and looking to one side as if preoccupied. I made a move to take off my headphones, but she held up her palms, indicating that I should continue transcribing, evidently feeling a twinge of the guilt which considerate people often feel when they drop off an unusual amount of work for a temp to do in a short interval of time. Obedient, I kept on transcribing. “Subject indicated that high credit was in the low six figures,” etc. Joyce meanwhile wrote something on a scrap of paper and affixed it with one of the rubber bands from my rubber-band tray to the cassette and put it on top of my monitor. It said, “No rush, thanks.” I nodded, making my mouth into a downward U of conspiratorial assent. I didn’t tell her that I was typing her own earlier tape. I let her walk away. And the sight of her diminishing figure, while at the same time her voice talked so tiredly and yet evenly in my ear of high credit and low credit (this bank job was beneath her, surely), made my interest in her, my love for her, flare up. I loved her, for instance, for not writing “Thanx” on her note and not using an exclamation point. I watched her go back to her desk and sit down and pull in her chair and pick up the phone. She was a woman. Though I’m thirty-five, as I seem to want to point out on every page, I am often surprised by the simple observation that there are women, that they wear rustly layers of clothing, that they have lips and teeth which on occasion they employ to smile at me. They take their existence for granted, but I don’t, by any means. I think, too, in all modesty, that I have an unusually good instinct for detecting when an average-looking woman senses herself entering a new phase of attractiveness. I can detect better than others when a woman feels that she is looking unusually good that day, or when something like a new haircut, or the discovery of a store that has the kind of clothes that she looks best in, reminds her of the fact that romance and flirtation are part of life, too. Joyce is perhaps not, objectively considered, stunning, though she is pretty — but these happen to be, I think, miracle weeks for her, as she learns to her surprise how she can be beautiful in a thirty-year-old rather than a twenty-three-year-old sort of way. The French braid is part of it. I doubt very much that anyone at work has said that to her—“You are entering a new phase of beauty, Joyce”—but some of them must have noticed it, too.
Joyce had been eating something — yogurt, probably — as she dictated. Normally I am not fond of this practice. But when she said the word “unplanned” and I heard one of those odd palatal moments, most often associated with yogurt, in which the tone of her voice changed suddenly, went nasal on me, I simply could not believe I was this close to her. My head was practically in her mouth! I had a great deal of work left to do, though, so I snapped time off in order to have a few minutes of freedom to think about what I might do with Joyce if I switched off time in a big way. (I often do this: I Drop just to itemize all the neat things I could do if I did Drop right at that moment.) I could stay in the Fold for several years, mastering carpentry and other building trades, and construct an entire alternate city for her, a city with irregular spires and elevated walkways, where I would transport her, and then, turning time back on, I would wait in one of the deserted buildings I had built until she discovered me, and I would profess total bewilderment at how we had gotten there and why we had been left to fend for ourselves, and eventually she would get desperate and we would fuck sitting up at twilight, looking into each other’s eyes, in the middle of a cobblestone street, each cobble of which I had laid by hand.