Nicholson Baker: The Fermata

By this time I was standing between her and the blackboard, very close to her. Her breasts were my horizon line. I decided that I could at least safely undo several of the middle buttons of her shirt to see what all was underneath. In the cottony silence of the idled universe, I undid two buttons. My fingers trembled, of course. And even now, twenty-five years later, my fingers sometimes tremble when I watch them at work undoing a row of a woman’s shirt buttons, especially when her shirt is loose, so that once you have finished unbuttoning it no more is revealed to you than when you began, and, as a separate deliberate act, you have to part the still-overlapping sides of the shirt with the backs of your hands like a set of curtains. I peered into the oval world I had just created. What I could see of her bra was very interesting. It had little X’s sewn along the borders of the two side-pieces that attached to the round bosom-holding parts, and the bosom-holding parts had perfectly sewn seams running diagonally up over their curves, like a napping cat’s closed eyes. I reached up and pushed gently on one of her bosoms with the palm of my hand. (I called them “bosoms” then, and really it isn’t such a bad word for them.) The shape was unexpectedly soft and quite warm. I unbuttoned another lower button so that I could now comfortably surround my whole head with her shirt. Her skin glowed in the shadowy cloth-diffused light. I felt like a daguerreotypist, crouching and covering my head with a camera cloth to see my subject more completely. I saw her stomach, which was extensive at this close range. In the middle of it was her belly-button.

This I hadn’t reckoned on. It was the big moment. I had never seen anything so womanly, so grown-up-looking, at such close range, in my life. Miss Dobzhansky’s belly-button did not look like a child’s belly-button at all. There was a sort of stretched proscenium of skin over the top, a bell curve, similar in a way to the epicanthic eye-fold on Asian people (like Esquimaux), whereas the slope below led the eye right into a little private sanctum elegantly cupping something that looked like a tiny piece of used chewing gum or the knotted part of a balloon. What was impressive was simply how wise and experienced it looked, how profoundly oval it was. I passed my knuckles lightly over it, awestruck. Then I emerged from her shirt for a second to get a rounded piece of blue chalk, which I gently twirled in it, as if I were chalking up a pool stick, except the other way around. I left only the most imperceptibly small trace of chalk dust, brushing the excess away. Feeling by then that I had had more than enough for one afternoon, I buttoned her shirt back up. As an afterthought, I replaced the white piece of chalk that she was holding as she wrote the word Bering with the piece of blue chalk that I had used on her. Then I went back to my seat, put my clothes back on, arranged myself so that I was sitting exactly as I had been, and turned the time transformer off. Its chrome switch was almost painfully hot to the touch.

The class came alive. The blue chalk broke — perhaps I hadn’t put it in her fingers properly. Miss Dobzhansky looked at it for a second, puzzled, and then she picked up a piece of white chalk and went on writing. “Once these tribes got to Alaska, they had to decide whether to settle there or keep going …” she said, and she continued the lesson. There was a faint smell of something burning. I tugged surreptitiously on the extension cord until its plug dropped out of the wall socket; I drew it little by little into my desk. I noticed, glancing down casually as if to pull my chair up, that the blades of the plug were a dull carbon black.

And that was exactly how it went the first day. Nothing bad happened. All went well. I left the transformer in my desk overnight, and I tried it again the following morning, with big plans, but unfortunately this time, as soon as I flipped the switch, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling fluttered and went out. There was an even stronger smell of burning. Miss Dobzhansky sent for the custodian. Time flowed on without interruption. After school, I carried the ruined transformer home in my lunch box. It was totally wrecked. The red jeweled light was partially melted, and there were whitish heat marks around the lower edge of the unit. Just to be sure, I plugged it in in my room one last time after dinner and flipped the switch, but I got no response. The cat continued to lick between the pads of her paws. The traffic lights at the corner colored segments of the big double icicle outside my window red, then green, then orange. It was over. I had only been able to pause the universe twice, for a total of maybe six minutes.

On the other hand, even six timeless minutes was pretty good. I adjusted remarkably quickly to the idea that I had seen as much of Miss Dobzhansky as I was probably ever going to see. My next task, to which I devoted the ensuing spring and summer months, was to develop an alternate, non-electrical way into the Fold. I explored a number of experimental possibilities, courting the unnatural. I sprayed some new mock-orange leaves with green spray paint to see whether they would become permanent fakes, since I had always found the notion of bronzed baby shoes mysterious and suggestive. I grafted a very fast-growing thistle to our magnolia tree, wrapping the conjoined wounds with heavy-duty thread, theorizing that the mingling of incompatible growth hormones might have chronoactive effects. I heated six marbles on a baking sheet in a slow oven and then spooned them one by one into a glass of ice water which I held quite close to my eye. Into the glass I had first placed a fossil crinoid and a snip of my fingernail. (Now that I think of it, the sound of my ex-girlfriend Rhody using a fingernail trimmer in the morning in the bathroom, the extremely brief and high-pitched chirping sound of the smiling snipper blades meeting after they had snapped through her nail, which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong, is one of the most satisfying memories that I possess of that relationship.) I fully expected time to stop at the moment the interior of each hissing marble suddenly crazed itself with decorative cracks, but it didn’t. I used the butane torch my father had bought for a refinishing project to heat a notched stainless-steel serving spoon until it turned a deep orange. Though it looked soft and slightly swollen, its edges rounded like the edges of a stick of butter, I could not get the spoon to melt. Then I put a small oval pebble in the same spoon and played the torch flame over it, hoping for some lava. The pebble exploded with a snap, sending a stinging fragment of rock into my T-shirt. All of these experiments, and many others I performed during that period, were inconclusive and, frankly, disappointing. It wasn’t until the summer after fifth grade that I was once again able to Drop in, with the help of our basement washing machine and some thread.

MANY TEMPS DON’T LIKE DOING TAPES; I DO. NATURALLY I like transcribing some tapes better than others. In the early eighties I worked in the office of the head of a big company — well, why should I suppress the name? — in the office of Andrew Fleury, the head of Noptica. He had a three-person WP staff who did nothing but type his gigantic output of correspondence, speeches, interviews, Q-and-A sessions at stockholder meetings, and so on. I think he must have had political ambitions even then. I worked there several times. One long tape of his that I did included a letter ordering a case of some rare sort of Armagnac from a local liquor wholesaler. (It was a personal letter, let me say.) I didn’t know what Armagnac was, and, guessing, I typed Armaniac . Discovering this, Fleury flew into a rage. I heard him laying into one of the two co-office managers—“Paula, tell me what is wrong with this paragraph!” The letter was returned to me with the following marginal scholium: “An alcoholic beverage, not a crazy Armenian!! Don’t guess, look it up!!” Well, maybe he was right — I should have looked it up. But once Fleury caught the error, he could have at least passed on the fact that the word had a g in it. I lost five minutes flipping around in a dictionary. Most of the time, though, salaried people expect so little from temps that any slight awareness of a letter or memo’s context or intent fills them with joy, and they are as a result very easy to work for.