This said, the surprising thing really is how little luck I have had using the foot-pedal of my tape-transcription machine to trigger a true Drop. I have thus far been unable to stop the universe using it, or using the remote-control PAUSE buttons of VCRs or CD players, which would seem obvious actuators. I had, as I mentioned, only a brief success in college with a garage-door opener. It may be that to engage time effectively and stop it cold, a mechanism has to have some quality that links it uniquely with me, with my own emotional life, which is why, for example, the toggle-switch transformer for my race-track only worked as a chronoclutch after my fallen hand brushed against it, discovering its warmth, in the middle of the night. This could also explain why the general trend in my Fold-actuators, with a few important exceptions, has been away from hardware and toward simpler, purely bodily spurs like a finger-snap or the pushing up of my glasses on my nose.
The most elaborate piece of fermational equipment I ever developed was a custom-made piece of machinery I called a Solonoid (with three 0’s). I had it built for me by an MIT undergraduate four or five years ago. I still have it, though it stopped working after a week of Fold-hours. It is very bulky and it made a loud chuffing noise when it was idling, although I’m sure it could be miniaturized and redesigned for quietness. All it did was stretch and unstretch three rubber bands oriented in the x, y, and z directions. I was able to tune the oscillatory frequency of each rubber band by pushing a rheostat on a small mixing board. I had it built simply because I knew one morning, just after I awoke, after many dry Fold-free months, that this design would work. My uncle loaned me fifteen hundred dollars (I told him that it was to take several months off from temping and see if I could get interested in my master’s thesis again), and I put an ad in the MIT student newspaper and interviewed a number of students. I chose the sole woman respondent, naturally.
She used three small motors. I told her that I was a post-doc in philosophy working on a monograph about a turn-of-the-century American metaphysician named Matthias Batchelder, who had postulated that three India-rubber bands, when alternately stretched and slackened at a particular frequency in the three Cartesian planes, would insert null placeholders into the stream of Becoming, effectively pausing the universe for all but the operator of the mechanism. Though Batch-elder had written to G. E. Moore, C. S. Pierce, and A. A. Michelson about his ideas, I said (scrambling for plausibility), nobody had exhibited the slightest interest, partly because he lacked institutional affiliation, and partly because he had an off-puttingly contentious personal manner. (I should stress that there was no metaphysician by the name of Batchelder — the rough design for the machine had simply come to me one morning — but for the sake of secrecy I needed to distance myself from it. I “lied like hell” to this young mechanical engineer — I had to, I’m sorry.) She — I’m ashamed to say that I’ve forgotten her name — built the machine in short order, and she did a very nice job of explaining its finer points to me, though I have forgotten them. To keep costs down, she was kind enough to use “takeout” parts ordered through the Jerryco catalog — that is, motors removed from used equipment, copiers and such. “Well, I got it to do what you said you wanted it to do,” she said, in her serious way, as we stood in one of the mechanical-engineering labs (she was getting course credit for this project, it turned out, although she had hidden that fact from me), “but I’ve played with the frequencies and I can’t get it to do anything. The rubber bands look kind of neat when they really get going, though.”
I sat down in front of it. It was ludicrously bulky, definitely not portable. “You mean it doesn’t pause the universe?” I said, chuckling with mock incredulity to indicate that I knew full well that Batchelder’s ideas were a crock, and that I had gone through this whole exercise only out of kindness, merely to give this forgotten eccentric a belated chance to prove himself. “Well, I suppose I should try it myself anyway, for the old man’s sake,” I said. She pointed out the on/off switch, which I threw; I took a moment to adjust the stretching frequencies. (The rubber bands were chosen by me at random from a forty-nine-cent bag of Alliance rubber bands, PROUD TO SAY MADE IN USA.) As soon as I got the ratios right (by ear), the lab, the woman, Cambridge, and everything else, with the exception of me and the jouncing Solonoid, promptly went into suspension. I crawled behind the engineer and kissed the beautifully defined H shapes at the back of her thick knees, which are often the best feature on college women (she wore a jean skirt), and then took my place at the controls again and cut the power to the Solonoid.
“See?” she said. “Nothing.” We shook our heads sadly, pitying poor deluded Matthias Batchelder, and I wrote her out a check for the full fifteen hundred and thanked her. (I keep my canceled checks; I must remember to go back and find out this young woman’s name.) She asked if she could possibly have a copy of some of Batchelder’s metaphysical writings, and I told her that for estate reasons I wasn’t allowed to give anything out, but that I would definitely send her a reprint of my monograph when it appeared. That satisfied her. And for a few weeks after that, until my supply from that first bag of bands ran out, I was able to do a fair number of intricately filthy Foldy things. The nice unforeseen quality of that machine, now that I think of it, was that it had a high degree of risk associated with it, since a rubber band could snap suddenly, without warning, causing time to resume and potentially exposing me at a very awkward moment — the sex-in-public-places risk. But I was careful. Eventually I incorporated some redundancy into the design by stretching two rubber bands in each direction rather than one, even though it meant I ran out quicker.
This problem of remembering names, which just came up in connection with the MIT woman, is a particularly acute one for the career temp. I may work as many as forty different assignments in a given year — some for a week or two, some for a few days. At each assignment, there are typically three to five names to learn the first day (and occasionally many more); ten or more the second day. Depending on how heavy the phone action is, the number of names I end up finally mastering per job can go considerably over one hundred. Per year, I am being exposed to roughly three thousand names, of which (scaling back again) perhaps five hundred belong to individuals I get to know a little, talk to, work fairly closely with. Over ten years, that makes five thousand personalities, about each one of whom I must develop a little packet of emotion, a liking, a disliking, a theory about their feelings for some colleague, a mental note about their taste in clothes, a memory of how they like things done, whether they are of the opinion that state names ought to be spelled out in full or given the two-letter abbreviation, whether they like the document name or number included on the letter or think that this is a vulgarity, whether they want me to amuse myself when I’ve caught up with my work or prefer that I come bounding into their office asking for more to do. In college I was impressed by how well some very popular professors kept up with the particulars of their students’ lives — but the fact is that I master just as much raw humanity each year as the most hotshot celebrity professor. And the difference is that in my lowly case, all these people, or most of them, continue to work downtown, just as I do. They aren’t going to graduate and go away.