Shelly Oria - New York 1, Tel Aviv 0

* * *

Every time we head back south we ask, Have we learned enough? Every time, we think, Tonight, we will look the grading men straight in the eyes and say, Zero; your grade is zero. Tonight, we will not puke. We, the women of the great American city, as we descend upon our city through the windows of our cars, our trains, our planes, as we descend upon our city, we try to pretend that on this journey we have educated ourselves about trust , about puke . We, the women of the great American city, we look at the great American city drawing to a close, and we know: at times there is murder in our hearts.

1991, Part 1: My Escape

In 1991, I went to jail for canning goods without a license. My factory was small, really a mom-and-pop shop, but when they caught me it made national news, because they blamed the whole bruchtussis epidemic on me. A reporter named Dolly P. investigated my operation with the kind of zeal people mostly demonstrate when their children’s lives are at risk. Dolly P. had no children, but she had ambition. She traced the first case to the same small town in Israel that manufactured most of my ingredients. For a while, every time a kid ate bad canned soup, it was my fault; the mother would go on television and cry, My baby is coughing all the time now, my baby never used to cough, and the newswoman would wipe away a tear, sigh, and remind the public once again that my trial would soon begin. I got ten years.

I was a tough woman, a strong woman. But even the toughest human being feels the sting of mortality when the law comes and says, Give us the best decade of your life. I’d just turned twenty-one; it hadn’t even been a year since I’d left Israel. I had to escape.

Dolly P. was visiting me on a weekly basis, out of guilt. One day I told her, That’s all very nice, but I need to get out of here, and what can you really do for me? She said, There’s talk of a time-stop, you know, like in the Middle Ages — why don’t we wait a few days, see what’s what. I said, Dolly, what the hell are you talking about? If you don’t want to help me out, just say so. I knew how to work her. She said, What do you need? I said, A rope, a knife, a pickup truck. She said, I do this for you and we’re even, that’s it. I said, I get out, we’ll talk.

1991, Part 2: The First Time-Stop in More Than a Thousand Years

The first thing people noticed when time stopped: clocks and watches. Nobody could bring back the ticking. Expert horologists from around the world were working the case day and night, except there was no day and no night, only a dim gray. With time went the date: calendars disappeared, the top right corners of newspapers were naked, and the postmarks on letters just said Sent.

Time Counters started emerging everywhere. They would stand in public places and count out loud: seconds, minutes, hours. They were determined to prove that time hadn’t really stopped, that this was only a problem of counting mechanisms, and that humans had to step in and do the work until things got better. It soon became apparent that no one could reliably count time for longer than ten hours, so Time Counters formed teams and used special signals to let each other know when one Counter wanted the next to get ready. They were extremely meticulous, but really they were nothing more than singers of repetitive numbers. After a while, they began to fade away.

Dolly P.’s newspaper ran the story of my escape twice in a row, in successive dateless editions, then had me on the front page a third time. I understood, Dolly P. needed to cover her tracks, be the good reporter no one would suspect of any wrongdoing. But for a while every time a stranger looked at me I felt my muscles flex, getting ready to run. At some point it became clear that no one was reading the paper anymore; when people don’t believe there’s a future, they don’t bother staying current. For the first time in a long time I thought, Maybe I can feel safe.

An Interval: The Time-Stop Stops

Eventually, it happens. A child sees a flower — maybe a lilac, or a rose — and insists that it has grown since he saw it last. He is young enough to notice.

The following day, a dog gives birth in some bathtub, to the amazement of her owners, who didn’t realize she was pregnant. In a different place altogether, numbers appear on someone’s pay stub: the date. Rumors start, and people grow optimistic, and with their optimism comes sundown, followed by sunrise the next morning. The last stubborn Time Counters faint on side roads, relieved of their duty, useless. For long days, beds are squeaking with hope, and a new generation is conceived.

As can be expected, regaining a state of normalcy is not a thing that happens overnight. A good example: when time resumes, women who’ve been trapped in inactive pregnancies give birth within forty-eight hours, regardless of how far along they were when time stopped. The babies almost always survive, but life is never easy for them, with their transparent skin and unfinished features; people call them the half-baked, and generally consider them to be not completely human.

And yet somehow, in spite of the half-baked walking among us, in spite of mad, ersatz Time Counters who walk the streets of our cities mumbling numbers, convinced that time has not resumed, in spite of the various inedible, temporally corrupted fruits and vegetables that the earth, after its long stagnation, produces for at least a year — people forget. People forget because they choose to do so, because remembering allows for the possibility of recurrence. People forget, and make cardamom tea, and fall in love, and buy ties. On Valentine’s Day, they pay for overpriced dinners. Salmon in their mouth, they talk about their planned vacation for the summer. At weddings, they try to guess who the next person to get married will be, and they smile at the thought of the entire family together in one place again , the joy it will bring. Every moment, they wait for the next. Every day, they think about the future. They forget.

I can say this: I never forgot. I found it curious that people around me did. I remembered, and I knew that time would stop again, only to resume again, only to stop again. It seemed obvious, like gravity, or death.

2001: Phil

We met during the next time-stop, in 2001. By then I was a soaper; Phil came to see me in the Public Cafeteria, where I always held preliminary sessions with potential clients. These sessions were necessary because often people had different ideas about the kind of service I was providing. After the first misunderstanding, I realized I needed to take the time to go over the basics in advance: you will be cleaner than you’ve ever been, but there will be no sexual activity of any kind, that sort of thing. Given my past, I couldn’t risk any confusions about illegal matters. Nowadays I charge for preliminary sessions, too, even though there’s no actual soaping involved, but back then I had about ten regular clients and maybe six or seven here-and-theres, and I thought if I played too strict I wouldn’t get new business. I was young. I didn’t know yet that life usually worked the other way around.

At the Cafeteria, Phil looked at me, and right away I knew where things were going. It seemed pointless to waste time, so I said, You remind me of someone: a man I had an affair with. I do? he asked. Yeah, I said, only his eyes were different and he was Israeli and my officer in the army. He smiled. Was the sex good? he asked. Phenomenal, I said. He liked this answer, which was a lie: the officer’s philosophy was, anything over four minutes is a waste of time. But men want to hear that sex can be phenomenal; it opens possibilities.