Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Once, however, I remember knowing what time it was for every minute, and yet this made time feel uncatchable, like a fistful of twenties the wind blew out of my hand. (This happened to me once. My first three years in New York, I lived on an avenue lined with factories and through which the wind tunneled at high speeds. This was also the only time in my life I had fistfuls of twenties because I worked, after quitting my hostess job, as a waitress paid with tips.) I’d met up with a friend in L.A. She lives in London, and at that point we’d e-mailed each other many times a day for a year, but we’d only seen each other twice, for about three days each. Nonetheless, we’d fallen into an intense friendship. We were so intense in L.A. that people mistook us for lovers. We drove to the desert for the weekend, and stayed at a very small spa hotel where all the rooms faced inward toward a thermal pool, and the high desert wind, though hot, blew through our rooms and made air-conditioning seem silly, or at least unhealthy, so we left all of the windows open. The wind was so strong it blew the water glasses off the table. It blew open our books and sped-read the pages. A marine from the local base, on leave with his wife, stayed in the room opposite ours. He liked me because I am blond and marine-friendly. He did not take to my friend, who is darkly elfin, androgynous, and wicked. We decided to mess with him. I had a very good time flashing my wedding ring and talking about my husband while rubbing my friend’s shoulders suggestively. Soon he started avoiding me. When I got into the thermal pool, he got out of it. The wind continued to blow. It blew through the days. It blew through the nights. Suddenly it was time to drive my friend back to the airport, and put her on a plane, and then probably I would not see her again for six months or even a year. On the way to the airport, she pushed to stop at a museum to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock. The Clock —some call it an art installation — is also a twenty-four-hour-long movie that’s a fully functional (and visual) timepiece. Every minute of a twenty-four-hour day is accounted for by a preexisting film clip, in which a clock or a watch appears (often during a dramatic moment, or what feels like a dramatic moment, in whatever film is being sampled — there is something breathless-making about time), showing the appropriate minute (1:22, then 1:23, then 1:25, and so on).

I drove speedily — we didn’t have much time to see The Clock , and the more quickly I drove, the more time we’d have at the museum, but also the more quickly, it seemed, I’d be dropping my friend on the LAX curb. We arrived at the museum, parked, ran inside, discovered a terribly long ticket line, somehow located another not-so-terribly-long line, found a spot on a couch in the dark screening room, and watched. We’d decided beforehand that we had to leave at 3:45 for her to catch her flight. We passed our dwindling time together watching a visual representation of our dwindling time together. It confused my desire mechanism, and maybe rightly, because my desire mechanism was pretty confused. The movie made me so excited to see how the next minute (3:29, 3:30, 3:31) would be portrayed (what film clip would it be? Would I recognize it?), but I didn’t want the time to pass because then we’d have to leave, and then I’d have to say good-bye, and then I wouldn’t see my friend again for what felt like an eternity if measured by the time standards we encountered on that couch. Time crawled. Time flew. We broke our vow and stayed until 3:58.

Today I ordered ten toy stethoscopes from a party supply company. I did this over the phone. Toy stethoscopes did not seem to be the sort of items that, if you ordered them online, would come. I often order things online that fail to come. I ordered a birth tub once. It disappeared in Tennessee. I tracked it like an air traffic controller does a plane that vanishes over the Bermuda Triangle, a series of regular blips that suddenly, like a heartbeat, stop. This was a very large item, not the sort of thing one could easily lose. Nor, though expensive, did it seem to be massively desired yet under-available. There is not a black market infrastructure built around birth tubs. Yet no one could account for the birth tub’s whereabouts. My birth tub had dematerialized in transit.

This happens to me quite a lot, as I’ve said. Sometimes I’ll place an order online and make my husband click the CONFIRM PURCHASE button, because he is confident and believes in ways that I don’t, whereas the online commerce universe can sense my faithlessness. When I order things online, I am expressing my desire for an item I have never touched or experienced as a 3-D object, and to trust in the process requires the suspension of something I cannot fully suspend, even though I understand perfectly how online commerce works. As the object travels from the warehouse to me, it gains matter. Presumably it gains matter. But because I am faithless, my objects do not.

So I wanted to talk to an actual person about the stethoscopes. Conversations with strangers are so touching and intimate these days. Maybe it’s simply that any conversation with a stranger, since such conversations are more and more rare, represents something you almost didn’t do. I almost didn’t call you about toy stethoscopes . Every item I’ve ever bought online represents a conversation with a stranger I didn’t have. It’s only when the system fails that you talk to people. Or exchange heated e-mails. I once bought some boots online that didn’t fit, and I tried to return them, but I no longer had the original box. Because I no longer had the original box, I could not return the boots. I engaged in a lengthy e-mail discussion about this box. The box was worthless — it cost maybe two dollars at most — while the boots cost five hundred dollars. I had never before spent close to this amount of money on any article of clothing; this made me panic, and then become deranged. I wrote the online seller many deranged e-mails. Why should the boots become worthless because of a two-dollar box?

Once I failed to receive a pair of chairs from an eBay seller. She’d disappeared, and with my money. I left her phone messages. I e-mailed her. Finally, weeks later, she called me. We spoke at length about her life. She had a chronic female pain condition that flared at times, incapacitating her. Nothing eased the hell, not even morphine. I asked how this affliction had befallen her. She’d ridden horses as a child, she offered. Maybe that was the cause.

At the time of our conversation, I had just finished a book about a woman with an incurable headache. As I read this book, which chronicled the woman’s endless cure quest, I became less interested in her pain than in my changing response to it. I began to think, as many of her doctors had begun to think, that maybe she was crazy or depressed. As her suffering intensified, and with it her desperation to treat it, I found myself increasingly doubting that she had a headache at all.

The eBay seller and I talked about how difficult it was to solicit people’s sympathies over the long term. I admitted that I’m one of those people who harden in the face of other people’s incurable pain. I start to blame them for failing to get better. Not to defend myself, I told the eBay seller, but I probably needed for my own sake to believe that I might be to blame for any of my future sicknesses; if I ever became sick, I could find comfort knowing that I was the crux of the problem and thus also the cure. I could just stop being who I was and get better.

We had a really candid conversation, the eBay seller and I, thoughtful and honest. When I arrived at her house to pick up the chairs, however, I found that she’d left them out on her lawn for me. When I knocked on her door to say hello, she did not answer.