Oddly enough, I didn’t act on this rather crude idea until quite recently, because the thought of vandalizing a trade paperback with pornographic graffiti made me sad: a wheelchair-bound art-history teacher in college once gave an impressive sermon out of the unparalyzed side of his mouth on the viciousness of writing in books one didn’t own, and I took it to heart. A few months ago, however, I tried the idea out one evening at the Waterstone’s bookstore on Exeter. A finely constructed woman of thirty in a black curl-necked cotton sweater with gray sleeves stood in the fiction section and pulled a copy of something called Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer off the shelf. It was a red paperback. I hadn’t read it, though I’d heard of John Mortimer. She glanced at the back, then flipped to the first page, then skipped to somewhere in the middle, where a scene caught her eye. She read for a few seconds, and then she did what I was hoping she would do: she curled the corner of the page under her fingertip so that she would be able to turn to it immediately when she needed to — thus signaling to me that she was definitely going to look at the next page. I snapped my fingers to invoke the Clutch and gently removed the Mortimer novel from her hands and wrote on the page that she would be turning to, in as elegant a cursive as I could muster, I need to pop my nuts on a pair of small sexy tits right this second!! I snapped out of the time-clutch and watched her from a safe distance as she turned the page and read what I had written. She did an almost imperceptible double take, then flipped around in the book to see if there was anything else handwritten. She looked about her, noticed me absorbed in a copy of The Princess of Cleves, and, because (though somewhat rough-hewn) I look “intellectual” (the glasses), she was reassured that whoever had written that desideratum in the book she had picked up had done so a while ago, perhaps months ago, and was in any case no longer in the store. Then she sighed conclusively and put the book back on the shelf and inspected something by Muriel Spark called Loitering with Intent. Titles are so important to lonely browsers. I could of course have written something dirty in that book, too, but I resisted the urge, not only because it would have made her fearful that someone was singling her out somehow, but also because I couldn’t for some reason make myself write nasty things in a book written by a woman. I could deface John Mortimer without compunction, but not so Muriel Spark. I hovered there until the woman in black cotton finally left (with Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and then I bought the Mortimer myself, since I had ruined it. I still have it; I mean to read it someday.
Many, most of my fold-adventures are like that — inconclusive; wastes of time by some standards. But I like when my little schemes don’t really work out — I still feel that I have created some bond between myself and the woman with whom I have decided to meanwhile away the time. The woman in black will eventually forget about the writing I did for her at the top of the page of Paradise Postponed, since it is difficult to retain the active memory of minor incidents which are in a small way inexplicable and random-seeming, and yet for a short time that evening, for a few hours, she might possibly have entertained herself by speculating about what sort of person would browse Waterstone’s writing apostrophes of smut in modern English novels. She might have brought it up that weekend at a dinner party — maybe someone was talking about the history of the Waterstone’s building and she would be reminded of the oddity I had given her and start to tell the story and realize that she would be slightly embarrassed to repeat in company what I had written, and then someone else at the table, a catty gay man, would say, “Oh, come on, Pauline, you can’t bring us this far and not finish us off, we’re grown-ups after all,” and she would repeat to the dinner party, in her own thoughtful, even voice, surprising herself that she did in fact remember the text, “Well, I believe that it said, ‘I need to pop my nuts on a pair of sexy little tits right now.’ Exclamation point.” And there would be whooplets of mock-shocked mirth. All because of me, all because of me.
7
LET US, THOUGH, BRIEFLY RETURN TO THE TIME I WAS OUTSIDE on the beach towel in the yard, since I did go on to imagine writing more than mere expostulations in paperbacks that morning, and the manner in which events developed as a result of my imaginings is quite typical of my Fold-life. (Maybe interlife would be a good word for the portion of my life I spend between-times, in the Fold.) I turned over a number of distinct thoughts that morning, but mainly I thought of writing a brief amateur sex story of my own and planting it where a woman might find it. I envisioned becoming a writer of private erotica — a rotter, a secret member of the literoti. Specifically I envisioned dashing off something about a woman on a ridem lawn-mower that I would print out, staple at the corner, and put in a plastic food-storage bag with a twist-tie closure and bury in the colder, unsiftable sand just below where some warm-skinned sunbathing woman was idly digging as she lay face-down on her towel on a beach somewhere.
I was during that period without Fold-powers — I had not, as a matter of fact, been able to disrupt sidereal time at will for eight full months, a fairly long fallow period for me, and while at first I had as usual been relieved not to have the distracting option of stopping all the clocks whenever I wanted to think or spy or feel, I was now really quite desperate to get back some of the old magic. What if I never accomplished a successful Drop again? Horrible. I wanted immediate controlled nudity. The calendar, the year-at-a-glance wallet calendar I carry around with me, that marvelous invention in which twelve locomotive-shaped months in series pull the miscellaneous freight of a full year of days along, had become my enemy. What had I done with all that free time? What had I done with my life, my interlife? Often on my mind was the slogan devised by some self-helper about ten years ago—“Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.” It is a good, exciting, up-rewing slogan. But it was beginning to occur to me to wonder what the person who thought it up had done with the rest of his life, following the momentous minute when he first conceived of it. Has he been himself helped by his own snappy bumper sticker? Has he done anything else of note aside from writing it? Is his mightiest accomplishment going to be merely the invention of a memorable formula that urges others to accomplish something? And was the world any better for his having written what he had written? The world has recognized its inspirational value and fully metabolized it; individual lives have perhaps been in some cases improved as a result of its existence — high school homework may have been done that wouldn’t have been done, new leaves may have been turned over, difficult phone calls may have been made — but now its own big moment of efficacy is finished, it can no longer surprise us into sudden effort, and yet the person who thought it up is almost certainly still with us, living out, not Day 1, but Day 1,234, or Day 3,677, of the sadly anticlimactic rest of his life — repeatedly experiencing, as we all do, those brief calendrical regrets when it is no longer the toddlingly innocent fifth or sixth of a given month but somewhere early in the teens, midway down, and then suddenly it’s the twenty-sixth and the month is going forever, the one and only October you will be given that year, and the false optimism of a new young month is about to begin, like a stock split that without changing any fundamentals makes the price per share look alluringly cheap all over again; and then the “3” of the new month’s date again slides into the “5,” and the “5” mutates into the “12,” each of the thirty or thirty-one successive numerical dates carrying with it, regardless of what actually happens on that day, a default mixture of emotions that results simply from its location on the scaffolding of the calendar — a specific ratio between the residual determination to get whatever difficult or distasteful things there are outstanding done in the days of the month that remain and the growing despair at the many difficult or distasteful things that simply cannot get done in the days that remain and must be carried forward to the next month. The calendar was my enemy because I had no control over it anymore, no option of postponement, no eject button, and I had not been in control of it for over eight months.