Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

I lifted one of the rotors from a shelf in one of the labs. It was not a light object. It was milled out of some kind of compressed titanium alloy and it was finished in an elegant anodized black. It looked like a forty-five-dollar dark-chocolate birthday cake, with holes for, say, eight unusually thick candles — but it weighed about as much as a bowling ball, or a human head. I’m seldom as impressed as I should be when I hear that a weightless entity like an electrical impulse can dash around in its silicon irrigation ditches a thousand times a second, or even a million times a second, because electricity is ungraspable; opposable thumbs are of no use in its presence. But when a California company manufactured a machine that could get something heavy, something that you might grunt gently in lifting, that would dent turf if you dropped it, to rotate a thousand times a second, the achievement seemed close enough to being conceivable that it became inconceivable. A head, spinning a thousand times a second! I was impressed when the little girl in The Exorcist spun hers around once. As I held the rotor, knowing myself to be the one unstill being in the center of a temporarily still universe, I began to want very much for my own head to revolve at ultracentrifugational speeds — I wanted to spin so fast my ears would rip off my head and slap onto opposite walls; I wanted my grotesquely elongated tongue, unretractable after I opened my mouth to utter the usual “Help!” of the Faustian inventor, to form a pink Saturnian ring or an Elizabethan collar before my brain finally blew. Not only could the human head not survive sixty thousand r.p.m., I thought, it could hardly survive thinking about sixty thousand r.p.m. And in fact, when I reflect on it now, I realize that my Foldouts are in many ways equivalent to centrifugation, since when I spend a few hours of quality time in the Fold I am in fact held in the vacuum chamber of a single exceedingly patient millisecond, potentially doing a thousand things, reading whole books, wandering through buildings filled with scientific instrumentation, and thus, from a bystander’s perspective, moving over my closed loop at miraculous Spinco speeds.

TO RETURN TO THE BLUE-AND-WHITE-STRIPED BEACH TOWEL of last year, however. I again tried to tell myself how self-sufficient I was stretched out in the Goldman Sachs sun, and therefore how totally unnecessary any sort of time-perversion, chronofugational or otherwise, was to me. I had a whole free real weekday to do whatever I wanted; I could, for instance, and should, read a book. I could go to a bookstore and select a new beautiful paperback and buy it and put my nose in it to smell the fine pukey smell that new books often have. If I had clutch powers I could browse in a bookstore until I saw a woman I liked … and here I came up with the aforementioned idea of writing a startling burst of filth in the top margin of a book that a woman was considering. With an effort of will, I erased that phantasm: there were wonderful non-gonadotropic topics everywhere and I wanted very much to do them the courtesy of thinking about them — it was my duty as a conscious creature to think about them. The plastic arts, for instance. At random I thought of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, how skilled he was at depicting clear water and wet tulle. It would be good to be lying on a towel on a beach while the Hispanic phlebotomist held flat the pages of a large-format edition of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings with her flatly sagging coconut-oiled breasts, so that the Caribbean breeze wouldn’t make me lose my place. My eyes were still closed, the towel was still clean-smelling, I was still lucid-feeling, but I knew that I was almost ready to turn over on my back, and I knew that if I turned over on my back my bathing suit would come off a minute later (and who cared if anyone saw me — I wanted people to see me! — but I was pretty sure nobody was home downstairs anyway, because no cars were in the driveway), and once my bathing suit was off, my Juiceman would writhe and elongate against my thigh until, in attempting to rise and make a drunken statement, it would lose its balance and fall heavily back against my hipbone, where it would writhe some more. As a last resort, to remind myself that most of the world was asexual most of the time and well worth a close look even so, I opened my eye, the one that wasn’t lost in the turf of the towel, and I saw, with nearsighted monocular vividness, my huge sunlit watch and my glasses. Through one lens of my glasses I could see the Fieldcrest label, or rather its verso inside, which was nicer-looking than the outside because you could see all the spendthrift lushness of soft thread that had been necessary to sew the little familiar logo and its trademark sign — though the sight of this made my Fold-urges reawaken, since time too was lusher when turned inside out. Beyond the sharp-edged inner bourne of my myopia I saw the macrophage of my T-shirt draped over the telephone, which would only ring if Jenny, my coordinator, came up with a late assignment for me, and I imagined the quick upward arpeggio of metallic clicks produced by the telescoping chrome antenna as I pulled it out roughly to answer a call, one segment reaching the limit of its slide and engaging with the next, and the same clicks in reverse order after I’d hung up and was pushing the aspirin-shaped end-bauble down. Time telescoped in a similar way; it would be most helpful if I could instigate a Drop whenever I pulled on the antenna of my portable phone. All things that came to mind suggested mechanisms of pausation to me; so much so that I began to feel that I was on the verge of regaining my powers.

I closed my eye and opened it again, and this time I looked only at my glasses, and it seemed to me then that the very best thing about sunbathing was that you could open your eyes at any time and see your own companionable glasses waiting for you there so close to your face, casting their sharp shadow: I could see with extreme clarity the thick opaque ground perimeter of the rimless lenses, and the side-pieces crossed at their kneelike earward ends, and the eyelash hair, whose curve enhanced my appreciation of the curvature of the prescription, and the dust that built up so gradually that I hadn’t noticed it, and the nose-pods that were filthy but whose filth was irrelevant because nobody else could see it, and the paired reflection of some branchy blueness in the faintly scratched surface — all this nineteenth-century precision that I wore on my face every day, and never had the opportunity to study because all I did was take the glasses off at night and fold them automatically and put them by my bed and put them on again in the morning. No matter how often I closed my eyes, my corrective lenses would be there in the sun when I opened them again, waiting to be praised and seen, and seen more exactly and clearly than if I were wearing another pair of glasses to look at them, because my nearsightedness shortened the minimum focal length, making things even two inches away fully contemplable. I saw my own glasses better than anyone who didn’t need glasses could ever see them. The word clarity struck me as very fine. My happiness had a clarity to it. My happiness was optical. My happiness was the direct result of my glasses. Should I do ten pushups to celebrate the innocent clarity of my happiness? Should I do ten pushups naked? I took off my bathing suit and did ten pushups naked, and each time I lowered myself trembling down to earth, and my down-hanging soft-serve nosed unprotestingly into the towel, I turned my head so that I could see my glasses waiting there for me to appreciate them. Possibly they seemed beautiful to me in part because they were hybrids, existing halfway between knower and known, between what I saw and how I saw. I felt as if I were looking at my own sense of sight, even at myself, when I looked at them.