Nicholson Baker: The Fermata

People are somewhat puzzled by me when I first show up at their office — What is this unyoung man, this thirty-five-year-old man, doing temping? Maybe he has a criminal past, or maybe he’s lost a decade to drugs, or: Maybe He’s an Artist? But after a day or two, they adjust, since I am a fairly efficient and good-natured typist, familiar with most of the commonly used kinds of software (and some of the forgotten kinds too, like nroff, Lanier, and NBI, and the good old dedicated DEC systems with the gold key), and I am unusually good at reading difficult handwriting and supplying punctuation for dictators who in their creative excitement forget. Once in a great while I use my Fold-powers to amaze everyone with my apparent typing speed, transcribing a two-hour tape in one hour and that kind of thing. But I’m careful not to amaze too often and become a temp legend, since this is my great secret and I don’t want to imperil it — this is the one thing that makes my life worth living. When some of the more intelligent people in a given office ask little probingly polite questions to try to figure me out, I often lie and tell them that I’m a writer. It is almost funny to see how relieved they are to have a way of explaining my lowly work status to themselves. Nor is it so much of a lie, because if I had not wasted so much of my life waiting for the next Fermata-phase to come along I would very likely have written some sort of a book by now. And I have written a few shorter things.

I’m typing this on a portable electronic typewriter because I don’t want to risk putting any of it on the bank’s LAN. Local area networks behave erratically in the Fold. When my carpal-tunnel problem gets bad, I use a manual for my private writing; it seems to help. But I don’t have to: batteries and electricity do function in the Fold — in fact, all the laws of physics still obtain, as far as I can tell, but only to the extent that I reawaken them. The best way to describe it is that right now, because I have snapped my fingers, every event everywhere is in a state of gel-like suspension. I can move, and the air molecules part to let me through, but they do it resistingly, reluctantly, and the farther that objects are from me, the more thoroughly they are paused. If someone was riding a motorcycle down a hill before I stopped time “half an hour” ago, the rider will remain motionless on his vehicle unless I walk up to him and give him a push — in which case he will fall down, but somewhat more slowly than if he fell in an unpaused universe. He won’t take off down the hill at the speed he was riding, he will just tip over. I used to be tempted to fly small airplanes in the Fold, but I’m not that stupid. Flight, though, is definitely possible, as is the pausing of time on an airplane flight. The world stays halted exactly as it is except where I mess with it, and for the most part I try to be as unobtrusive as possible — as unobtrusive as my lusts let me be. This typewriter, for instance, puts what I type on the page because the act of pressing a letter makes cause and effect function locally. A circuit is completed, a little electricity dribbles from the batteries, etc. I honestly don’t know how far outward my personal distortion of the temporary timelessness that I create measurably spreads. I do know that during a Fermata a woman’s skin feels soft where it is soft, warm when it is warm — her sweat feels warm when it is warm. It’s a sort of reverse Midas touch that I have while in the Fold — the world is inert and statuesque until I touch it and make it live ordinarily.

I had this idea of writing my life story while within a typical chronanistic experience just yesterday. It’s almost incredible to think that I’ve been Dropping since fourth grade and yet I’ve never made the effort to write about it right while it was going on. I kept an abbreviated log for a while in high school and college — date and time of Drop, what I did, how long in personal minutes or hours or days it took (for a watch usually starts up again in the Fold if I shake it, so I can easily measure how long I have been out), whether I learned anything new or not, and so on. You would think, if a person really could stop the world and get off, as I can, that it would occur to him fairly early on to stop the world in order to record with some care what it felt like to stop the world and get off, for the benefit of the curious. But I now see, even this far into my first autobiographical Fermata, why I never did it before. Sad to say, it is just as hard to write during a Fermation as it is in real time. You still must dole out all the things you have to say one by one, when what you want of course is to say them all at once. But I am going to give it a try. I am thirty-five now, and I have done quite a lot of things, mostly bad, with the Fold’s help (including, incidentally, reciting Dylan Thomas’s “Poem on His Birthday” apparently from memory at the final session of a class in modern lyric poetry in college: it is a longish poem, and whenever nervousness made me forget a line, I just paused the world by pressing the switch of my Time Perverter — which is what I called the modified garage-door opener that I used in those days — and refreshed my memory by looking at a copy of the text that I had in my notebook, and no one was the wiser) — and if I don’t write some of these private adventures down now, I know I’m going to regret it.

Just now I spun around once in my chair in order to surprise myself again with the sight of Joyce’s pubic hair. It really is amazing to me that I can do this, even after all these years. She was walking about thirty feet from my desk, across an empty stretch of space, carrying some papers, on her way to someone’s cube, and my gaze just launched toward her, diving cleanly, without ripples, through the glasses that she had complimented, taking heart from having to pass through the optical influence of something she had noticed and liked. It was as if I traveled along the arc of my sight and reached her visually. (There is definitely something to those medieval theories of sight that had the eye sending out rays.) And just as my sighted self reached her, she stopped walking for a second, to check something on one of the papers she held, and when she looked down I was struck by the simple fact that today her hair is braided .

It is arranged in what I think is called a French braid. Each of the solid clumps of her hair feeds into the overall solidity of the braid, and the whole structure is plaited as part of her head, like a set of glossy external vertebrae. I’m impressed that women are able to arrange this sort of complicated figure, without too many stray strands, without help, in the morning, by feel. Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts. They give thought to how the edges of their underpants look through their pocketless pants from the back. (“Panties” is a word to be avoided, I feel.) But French braids, in which three sporting dolphins dip smoothly under one another and surface in a continuous elegant entrainment, are the most beautiful and impressive results of this sense of dorsal space. As soon as I saw Joyce’s braid I knew that it was time to stop time. I needed to feel her solid braid, and her head beneath it, in my palm.

So, just as she started walking again, I snapped my fingers. This is my latest method of entering the Fold, and one of the simpler I have been able to develop (much more straightforward than my earlier mathematical-formula technique, or the sewn calluses, for instance, both of which I will get into later). She didn’t hear the snap, only I did — the universe halts at some indeterminate point just before my middle finger swats against the base of my thumb. I got out my Casio typewriter and scooted over here to her on my chair. (I didn’t scoot backwards, I scooted frontwards, which isn’t easy to do over carpeting, because it is hard to get the proper traction. I wanted to keep my eyes on her.) She was in mid-stride. I reached forward and put my hands on her hipbones. It felt as if there were cashmere or something fancy in the wool, and it was good to feel her hipbones through that soft material, and to see my hands angling to follow the incurve of her waist, which the dress had to an extent hidden. Sometimes when I first touch a woman in the Fold I tense up my arms until they vibrate, so that the shape of whatever is under my palms keeps on being sent through my nerves as new information. I never know exactly what I will do during a Drop. To get her dress out of the way, I lifted its soft hem up over her hips and gathered it into two wingy bunches and tied a big soft knot with them. It had seemed as if she had a tiny potbelly with the dress on (this can be a sexy touch, I think, on some women), but if she had, it disappeared or lost definition as soon as I pulled her panty-hose and underpants down as far as I could get them, which wasn’t that far because her legs were walkingly apart. (Also, before I pulled down her pantyhose, which is a smoky-blue color, I touched an oval of her skin through a run in the darker part high on her thigh.) And then I was given this sight that I have before me now, of her pubic hair.