Nicholson Baker: The Fermata

My big Christmas present that year was a figure-eight race-track and one blue and one brown race car that drove around it and occasionally flipped off. I played with it for a week or two. The problem with it was that there weren’t enough segments of track to make an asymmetrical race-course, and I strongly preferred asymmetry in race-courses. Soon the track got dusty and the cars began to halt suddenly when their bushings lost contact. I pushed it under my bed and thought instead about meat thermometers and toads who can hibernate for years in dried desert mud.

But after Miss Dobzhansky had moved me to the back of the class, I woke up in the middle of the night and let my arm drop to the floor between the bed and the wall. I was in the habit of doing this fairly often; I did it to prove to myself how nonchalant I was, how certain I was that there were no crustaceans under the bed. This time, though, my hand brushed against something warm. It was the transformer for the race-track. It was still plugged in, still on, still transforming. I got out of bed and pulled the track out. The transformer had, a red faceted light that glowed faintly. It also had a chrome toggle switch. I turned on the light in my room, so that I could see better, and held the transformer. It was very heavy, with rounded corners, and it had a finish that seemed to have been made by dipping it in thick black paint and then blasting it with hot air so that the paint formed a texture of tiny wrinkles. It had a silver UL label on the underside. “Underwriters Laboratories”—a racy, vaguely underwearish name. The hum that the transformer made was almost inaudible. I touched the toggle switch, then flipped it off, and suddenly I knew that this was the machine I needed, and that the next time I turned the transformer back on, it would stop everything.

I smuggled it and an extension cord into class in my lunch box. I did nothing with it all morning. As the rest of the students were lining up for lunch, when Miss Dobzhansky stood halfway out the door, I hastily plugged the extension cord into the outlet under the long table against the back wall, which was only a few feet from my chair, and hid the transformer in my desk. Over lunch, though I was quite keyed up, I gave nothing away. I casually discussed with my friend Tim what it would be like to be an agitator BB ball in a can of green spray paint, as if it were an ordinary day. We agreed that it would be fun to dig into the pigment at the bottom of the spray can and then fly up through the pressurized froth and clack around — better perhaps than descending in a spherical space vehicle into the chemical storms on Saturn. Tim contended that there were sometimes two agitator BBs in a single can of spray paint, and I disagreed, arguing that it only sounded as if there were two when you shook it fast.

I had not expected anyone to notice the cord leading into my desk, since I was in the back corner, and nobody in fact did. I let half an hour go by, watching Miss Dobzhansky discuss a kind of slitted sunglasses that the Eskimos whittled from bone to avoid snow blindness. She began to write the old spelling of Eskimo , with a q , on the board in white chalk. My hands were deep in my desk; my fingertips touched the wrinkle-finish black paint and the smooth toggle switch. As she embarked on the letter m , her back to the class, I flipped the switch. She didn’t finish the m . She and the class were without sound or motion.

I said, “Hey.” I said “Hey” again. Nobody turned toward me. Far from being eerie or disturbing, the silence was, I found, quite comfy. This acoustical coziness, which is a consistent feature of the Fold, is the result, I think, of the relative sluggishness of the air molecules that surround me. Sound diffuses outward only a few feet, as far as I can tell. I’m often reminded of a line in the first stanza of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”: “And silent was the flock in woolly fold,” My Fold is woolly.

Presently (“presently” is right!) I flipped the toggle back to the off position, deactivating the machine. At once everyone and everything took up where they had left off. The world expanded, sounding once again as if it were recorded in stereo. Miss Dobzhansky finished writing Esquimaux . She gave no indication that she was aware that anything out of the ordinary had just happened; and as far as she was concerned, of course, nothing had happened. She turned toward us and began talking about a thin strip of land that she claimed had once joined Alaska and Asia, over which tribes had traveled, giving rise not only to the Eskimo, but to the American Indians of the lower states. I must have been looking at her with an expression of unusual attentiveness, or even of rapture, because her gaze landed on me and she smiled. I knew we had a special understanding. I knew also that she might be the most beautiful person I would ever know. I knew that she knew that I sometimes didn’t raise my hand to give answers to the questions she asked even when I knew the answers, because I wanted to give her the option of drawing out other kids, of calling on me only when she needed to, as a backup. Her explanation of the waves of Asian migrations across the Bering Strait interested me, so I let her finish before stopping the universe for a second time. As soon as she turned toward the blackboard again, to write Bering , I flipped the switch and took off all my clothes.

The air is quite close in the Fold and takes a little getting used to, although as long as you wave your arms around every so often there is no real risk of asphyxiation. I was very conscious of my breathing as I walked up the row of desks and chairs, naked, and reached my lovely teacher. “Miss Dobzhansky?” I said, standing right behind her, though I knew that she couldn’t hear me. My plan, as I had conceived it in a flash when she had smiled at me a moment before, was to take off all her clothes and then sit back down at my desk and click time back on — that is, turn the time transformer off. When she felt the cooler air on her skin and discovered that she was entirely nude, she would turn toward us, confused and startled, but not really flustered, since I had never seen her flustered — her serenity and ability to adjust to any eventuality in the classroom was an important part of what made her so lovely to me — and she would meet this challenge with her usual aplomb. She would turn toward us with her hands shielding her breasts and look inquiringly at our faces, as if to say, “How, class, has this happened?” Her eyes would seek out mine, because she knew she could trust me to help her through difficult moments, and I would look back at her with an ardent, loving, serious expression. I would stand and shush anyone who dared to snicker at the fact that both I and Miss Dobzhansky were completely naked, and I would walk up to her and nod at her as if to say, “Everything will be all right, Miss Dobzhansky,” and collect her sweater and her dress, which I would have left neatly folded on her desk. She would say, “Thank you, Arno,” in a voice that communicated how grateful she was that I was in her life and was able to help her through this moment. She and I would retire to the cloakroom for a few minutes, where I would hand her her clothes one by one as she got dressed. She would do the same for me. When we re-emerged, I would take my seat and she would continue her social studies lesson. The class, docile with shock, would have remained silent through our whole absence.

That was my plan, but I soon found that I had to modify it. Miss Dobzhansky was wearing her navy-blue droopy sweater and a simple white shirt buttoned at the top with a blue enamel Saturn pin covering the top button. The sweater was already unbuttoned, so I left it alone. But when I reached up to undo the enamel pin (or “brooch” I guess they are called) I felt that this was not something I wanted to do at all. What if, once I got her totally naked, I chickened out and didn’t want to proceed? Would I be able to pin the pin back in place precisely as it had been? I worried about possibly breaking its little catch, or putting it on crooked. If it wasn’t replaced exactly right, she would sense a sudden slight displacement at her neck when I turned the classroom back on and she would suspect something, and because of my recent look of rapture she might connect me with her odd sensation, and if she asked me directly, I didn’t think I could lie to her and tell her that I had had nothing to do with it.