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The speed of the waking world runs me off the tracks. I was born deaf to rhythm, dumb to numbers, and blind to all things quantifiable. I clap on the up, confuse five and six, and, without realizing, will spend an hour on something that should take ten minutes.
Chris, my fiancé, says I have an erratic heartbeat. When we’re lying in bed, after I’ve finished writing for the night, he’ll put his head to my chest and listen (because, he says, I never tell him anything). The thumps that resound from that mass of muscle are always unpredictable: they speed up then slow down, go legato then staccato and flutter away at hummingbird-speed.
Some might say I’m overanalyzing myself, but I think I have an abnormal resistance to the progression of time. If you were to access my entire Google-search history, you would find, among Toll House cookie recipes and links to free movie downloads, the map points on my vain net-quest for immortality. To wit: the quasi-scientific health benefits of spirulina (a type of algae said to grant the consumer eternal life), articles on Aubrey de Grey (a geneticist racing to offer humankind biological immortality), and a Wikipedia page on various views of the afterlife. Somewhere along the way I stumbled across a book called The Selfish Gene, by British geneticist Richard Dawkins. Genes, says Dawkins, must be selfish in order to replicate, and thus to continue to exist; and we are mere “survival machines” for our genes, the vehicles by which they launch themselves into the future. Individuals, he points out, are transient, but genes, if successful, can last forever. In his book, Dawkins coined the term “meme”–a cultural transmission passed on from person to person. Memes, like genes, are passed on through natural selection, they are immortal, and they can mutate. They are ideas, trends, religions, languages, stories, vestiges of a fundamental desire to propagate, to perpetuate; traces of our legacies.
While the rest of the world sleeps I am out on the front lawn, bare feet turning pink from the cold, dew-soaked grass. It’s blue-time—the time between five and six a.m. when the night sky races to meet morning, when the sparrows ruffle their chilly feathers and begin to chirp their famished songs. When everything takes on some shade at the end of the ROY G BIV spectrum—periwinkle, lavender, indigo, ice. The neighborhood lies dormant, stunned to stillness like a listless teenager with an incurable case of ennui.
Against the monochrome I am rife with color. Against the hush I am teeming with noise. Against this limbo, this lacuna, this strange state of suspension, I reclaim a rhythm that has been lost in the rush of the waking world.
I’ve been coming out here a lot lately, hours before Chris even entertains the thought of getting out of bed. He asked me to marry him last month. We’ve been together almost four years now, and marriage is something we’ve been discussing for a while. But these important events in my life, these milestones or whatever you call them, fail to carry the grandeur that anticipation has promised to imbue them with. In fact, they often charge by so fast I end up missing the moment almost entirely, and it slips into a clouded puddle somewhere in my hippocampus. All I could think when Chris proposed was, He is proposing. This is a turning point in your life. Extend the moment. Pay close attention to what he is saying so you can recall it later. I recorded it in my mind, a cameraman for my own engagement.
Years from now, when I go to retrieve it for future children or friends to admire, I will swaddle it in a golden shroud and clutch it to my chest like a sick infant, like I’ve done with first kisses, my college semester in Paris, and the night I met Chris.
The night I met Chris there were girls in pastel dresses all along the sidewalks, just getting out from a Homecoming dance. They had long acrylic fingernails with French tips, hair twisted and sprayed and curled into elaborate croissants, grown dull from excess product, and stood on long, tanned stork-legs, yelling directions and commands into their Blackberries. Being seventeen in a city that’s good at spotting fake i.d.’s, their only options were house parties or the Chinese restaurant that stayed open until 3 a.m.
We were in an overly-crowded Irish bar. It was late fall and something like 70 degrees, so I suppose most people were there to take advantage of the unseasonable balm that hung in the night air. Women stood around the bar in espadrilles and tight skirts, smelling of soap and bright citrus and gardenia. My friend Tanya and I were nursing Magners and going outside for cigarettes as often as possible, bare shoulders eager to greet the night, trying to relive the summer we both turned 21. It was the last summer before we went out into the “real world,” when we were filled to the brim with hope, security, sexuality. We had hair down to the middle of our backs and our breasts were small and perky enough to forgo bras under strapless dresses. We knew who we were, knew where we were going, no idea how we’d get there. The weather reminded us of that summer. The women who tried too hard in their tight skirts reminded us. The girls in their homecoming dresses yelling into their phones reminded us. Tanya and I smoked and reminisced. I watched the stars and pointed out the constellations.
I told Tanya that light goes at 186,000 miles a second. It’s a kind of universal speed limit. Nothing can surpass it, not even thought. So when you look up at the night sky, you’re seeing a sort of celestial photo album. I told her the light from the sun only takes eight minutes to reach us because it’s so close. That the closest star besides the sun takes four years. And the Andromeda galaxy, that spiral smudge of light, takes 2.5 million years.
Inside, after my third cigarette break, Chris and I were practically elbow-to-elbow at the bar with our backs to each other, talking to our friends, when I shot my hand back and sent his beer glass toppling over. “I’m so sorry!” I exclaimed. Guinness flowed from the mouth of the cup and formed a river on the bar from which trickled a sable stream onto Chris’ khakis.
“Shit,” he said, helplessly pawing at his pants with a cocktail napkin. Then he looked up at me.
Again: “I’m so sorry,” getting up to dig a generous handful of napkins out of one of the table’s dispensers.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just a little beer. No biggie.” Then he paid for my second Magner’s, after I promised not to spill that.
* * *
That time speeds as you get older is a fact of relativity, not just some weird psychological phenomenon that happens as you age. It’s a matter of mathematics: the first ten years are the longest ten years you will ever experience, because you don’t have any other ten-year stretches to compare it to, and the subsequent decades will be mere flashes in the relativistic pan. So about seven years ago, with the feeling that the years were accelerating to a speed that was faster than I could handle (26 and already suffering from an exhausting bout of nihilism), I began a stubborn protest on sleep. For two years, I slept as little as I could manage. Eight hours of twenty-four was too much time to spend curled in a fetal position cutting up pieces from my day and rearranging them into dreams I probably wouldn’t remember in the morning. Sleep, while pleasant, was nothing but a ravenous consumer of hour upon hour; sleep was the devil and I wanted to be good. So I spent my hours deliberately, taking speed and caffeine and hot showers to jolt me back into states of wakefulness. All the things one can do while the world sleeps: I re-read old journals. I looked through old photos. I typed up stories and essays, scribbled small bursts of narrative. I organized my closet, tried for the hundredth time to part with the frayed jeans I lived in during my junior year of high school. I shaved my legs with Raspberry Rain shaving gel, painted my toenails electric blue or canary yellow. I experimented with the little I had in my kitchen: spinach pasta, cherry tomatoes, tamari, chipotle sauce, ginger-soy dressing. And as the infomercials played in the background of my own personal hustle and bustle, I resisted the urge to pick up the phone and order the knife that could slice deli-thin shavings from a nickel, or the vacuum-like product that could shrink-wrap clothes like beef jerky so the moths wouldn’t make tiny holes in the homecoming dress shoved into a dusty corner of the attic that would never fit again.
The speed I took was prescribed to me, a medication to aid in concentration—Adderall, a party favor of my ADD I kept my paws on after college (the medicine I mean, but yes, the ADD too). I do still need it sometimes, on those days when coffee alone won’t get me going. The Adderall’s always had this effect of slowing time so that I can catch up. When I am on it, I am closed off, not hungry, bubbling inside myself. Pulses of heat prickle my skin. I come alive through fluttering palpitations, mini heart-attacks. I confuse nausea for hunger. I am dismissive, jittery, quick to anger. I push Chris off me, hot and frustrated, needing space. When I lie down in my bed and shut off the lights, three or four hours after the medication is supposed to wear off, I am attacked again with an inner electric charge. I am a buzzing network, but I am content. Death and time are passing thoughts that quickly pop in and out of existence, and even then they are only philosophical. I do not feel like an animal with a death sentence; I feel like a machine that can only grasp death as a hypothetical concept. I feel invincible.
* * *
Chris and I met at the same bar the following weekend. Because it was only 7 o’clock, and because the weather had chilled to the 40s, things were quiet; it was he and I, two or three parties having dinner, and a gruff old man at the end of the bar, shoulders rounded toward his glass. His steely eyes peered up at me from beneath two silver brows.
“Here?” Chris said, and hooked a large hand around my waist, guiding me to a bar table far from the old man.
Chris was working as a landscaper for his older brother’s business. When I asked him what he really wanted to do, what, maybe, he was working toward, he gave me a funny look.
“Working toward?” he said, “Nothing. I’m happy doing what I’m doing.” He wrapped his lips tightly around his beer bottle and took a swig.
After I probed a bit further, Chris admitted that he had originally gone to school for theater. Watching at him, learning that, things began to fall into place. He had the remnants of a sort of false confidence that had mellowed out over the years—the same false confidence I’d seen in acquaintances who hadn’t “made it” in their aspirations. When you talked to them you could see a wall going up, a shooing off of childhood dreams as if they were flies buzzing around, just making noise. Like they had chosen not to succeed.
“Why did you stop?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” Chris said, “It’s just not practical. Gotta make money, you know? Gotta pay the bills.”
* * *
The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that disorder—known scientifically as entropy—can only increase with time. Stephen Hawking once illustrated this law by letting a teacup drop to the ground and shatter into shards. The shards, he said, would never gather themselves back into the cup; they would only break down into tinier pieces and resume their existence as grains of sand or specks of dust. It is said that this asymmetry of disorder is what allows us to distinguish the past from the future. And like the shards, this disorder can never retreat back into coherence; it can only continue on, dispersing molecules out into the universe to mix and mingle with other molecules that they had not been acquainted with in their original state. And memes and genes grow and evolve and stick to other memes or genes like sticky rice. How is it that the universe is not ripping at the seams, with ideas and stories and strands of DNA all coming undone, genes and memes floating through the world like bits of broken china, so worn from time you begin to question whether they came from china at all.
Even in the seemingly-immortal bank of memory, time eats away at exactitude. Details blur, disappear, mutate. Details are forged, or accidentally filed into the wrong memory. We collage memories from the stories we hear, the photos we’ve seen, movies we’ve watched–and could swear they were constructed from first-hand experience. We can never be sure whether or not we’ve remembered the past accurately.
* * *
We met up in various bars for another week or so before I went to Chris’ house. It was a small two-bedroom nestled between patches of scrubby trees, dead pine needles all over the driveway. He had been renting it with an ex-girlfriend. When she left him, about five months prior, he finally decided to buy it. Figured it was about time he owned a piece of real estate.
I guess I fell in love by accident. He wasn’t someone I ever thought I’d end up with in any serious way, let alone someone I’d want to marry. He was someone I enjoyed talking to, taking drives with. Not bad in bed—our chemistry was never through the roof, but it was good. He let me work at his house on the weekends while he did laundry or watched TV or (in a sweet attempt to impress me) tried to focus his eyes on a book—Tom Robbins or Jack Kerouac or Chuck Palahniuk. When I was on deadline he’d brew pots of coffee, go to the store for licorice, which helped me concentrate. He was something steady. He calmed me, and I gave in to the warmth of someone else in the bed. With him, my stubborn protest on sleep came to a halt.
* * *
Yesterday my sister and I were looking through an old photo album. In it lie proofs of our past, blueprints for moments of our childhood, or before. Our mother with the American Indian gap between her two front teeth in a teal sweater and a white beret; Dad and the bright peacock bicep tattoo whose myriad colors have since faded from years of working in the sun; my three-year-old self on the floor of our grandmother’s kitchen in a red Little Miss Muffet hat and a Scooby-Doo life-jacket. I’ve told Marina the stories tied to the photos, but she dismisses them, too impatient to listen. For her, the photographs do not conjure the past like the memories inside our heads; the photos are their own objects, belonging to the present. They have a beauty and a story that is all their own, a story that has nothing to do with our ill-remembered past.
Marina’s begun to take an interest in photography, particularly Diane Arbus’ work, whose name, as she frequently reminds me, is pronounced DEE- Ann, not DIE- Ann.
“It looks like there’s light coming out from beneath the table in this one,” she said, inspecting a picture taken when I was six years old. It was Christmastime, I know, because I am wearing a blue velvet dress and a gold locket, and I am kneeling before the glass-top coffee table, arms rested on it, looking downward because it had come to my attention that the tags on my gifts that said “To Rebecca, Love Santa Claus” were in my mother’s bubbly script.
The last photograph in the book: At 16, Marina stands at five foot six, three inches taller than I was at that age, and boasts a 36 C cup-size under an Enties sweatshirt, probably borrowed from a boy at school who had a crush on her. Freckles spill like grains of sand across her nose, and her thick, once black hair is ruined with streaks of bleach that halo her head in the sunlight. She smiles, eyes half-open, as she holds out a dandelion, bright yellow, which seems to her to be the most important thing in the world right now; she holds it like a scepter, a trophy, a relic of power, a relic she wants you to look at long enough to notice that yes, it is the most important thing in the world right now. It is a thing to see right now, it is a thing for her to hand to her French teacher after sauntering into the classroom ten minutes late while exclaiming “Je regrette, Madame, but everyone knows that time is an illusion anyway.” It is a thing she can hold in her hand and pluck bright slivers of petal from, something she can rub against her palm and smell the peppery pollen paint it leaves behind. Only it isn’t, not for you, the viewer, because it remains trapped in the stillness of the photograph. And the petals and the pollen remain pure in your mind, untainted by specific experience, sitting quietly in an archetypal memory that is tied only to the senses; it is a timeless memory, a timeless relic, an idea called dandelion.
Marina, now 28, is married the young VP of a local bank. There is still a glimmer of the girl who would smoke pot in the fields filled with dandelions before French class, but mostly she is buried under the obligatory domesticities so many twenty-somethings begin to shoulder when they fall in love—chicken dinners with marinades and fresh herbs (real chicken, not the semi-cooked boneless skinless continents you get in freezer bags at Trader Joe’s); incessant ironing; the insuring of expensive jewelry; the comparing of cleaning products.
She returns to her girlish, irresponsible self around me, sometimes, when I’m not being girlish and irresponsible. Only one of us can be that way at a time; the other must play the adult. Occasionally she’ll call me up and say something ridiculous, like “Let’s go to Spain!”
Oh Marina. “On what money?” I say.
“I don’t know, don’t you have a savings account?”
“No,” I say. “They charged me when there wasn’t enough in it. Which was most of the time.”
If I ever do go to Spain though, it will be with my sister. Chris isn’t a big fan of international travel. Planes make him nervous. I try to remind him that the likelihood of dying in a car crash greatly outweighs the likelihood of dying on a plane, but then I remember that you can’t reason with fear. The odds of dying in a plane crash could be as improbable as giving birth to Jesus, winning the lottery, and being abducted by aliens in the same day. It doesn’t matter. The point is that the possibility exists at all.
Where would I be, I can’t help thinking, had I not fallen in love with Chris? You know how love is. It intercepts your momentum. It’s like having a child with a terminal illness, you just know you’ll lose it one of these days—if not now than later, when you’re so bound up together you have to cut out entire chunks of yourself to separate from the other person.
I go back to that night, Tanya and I with our Magners, our cigarettes, my hair still damp from the shower I had taken earlier. I stay outside smoking after Tanya goes in. I am saved by a one-night stand, some guy down from somewhere, probably has a girlfriend or wife he doesn’t tell me about. Chris finishes his Guinness, meets another girl, maybe someone easy to get along with, likes to drink beer in backyards and have people over for “the game,” makes buffalo wings and ranch dip for the occasion. Maybe he takes her number. Maybe she goes home with him. We never even see each other. I continue on in my frenzied insomnia, fueled by Adderall, and write a bestseller. I live in a montage of Ivory soap and old architecture, drugstore commercials and bright sunny lawns, alongside the ghost of a child with dark hair and a politician-smile, the one on the floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in a red Little Miss Muffet hat and a Scooby-Doo life jacket.
* * *
I find myself retreating to faded memories of having this great hope for the future. Well here I am. Where is the future? Where is my great hope? All I have are these memories of great hope. I remember being small, looking at adult women and thinking, God. Someday I’m going to have their life. Someday I’m going to have sex and children and a career. Confidence too. The ability to do whatever I want. I will have a story. I will have jewelry that means something, has value, like the oriental artisan earrings my father gave my mother on anniversaries. I will drink wine and say what I mean and I won’t be afraid of anything, not even death. I will have a family and a house and Christmases with good china and a roaring fire and dim lights, warm music, good Brandy. Clout. Books. Bestsellers. But even more so: an all-encompassing feeling of content. Of satisfaction. I could feel the weight, the significance of the life that stretched out before me. But here is the future, and I feel no weight, no significance. No child-like contentment. Even with Chris, who I do love, but still—I have traveled at light-speed along with time and memory and I am travelling further and further away from a hope I keep trying to regain, like all those china-shards of memes and genes floating further and further away from their teacups.
Christ Rebecca, will you ever stop building your future on the unreliable holiness of your memories?
There’s a jet making its way across the sleeping blue slate of sky. It’s leaving a scar in its wake. I think of Chris, his fear of being up there, no control whatsoever if the plane does go down. At least with cars you’ve got the wheel in your hands and the promise of the pavement right under you.
To live from moment to moment means to free-fall with no parachute above or cushion below. I keep missing those moments, like a girl at the playground who cannot for the life of her jump into the fray of two swinging ropes. Maybe the trouble is that I don’t quite know how to fill the space that spans the present moment and my inevitable death. Because it is just a space, and death is inevitable, I don’t want to delve too deep. I don’t want to become so entwined in that space that when death comes, I am unprepared. No, that’s not what I mean. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t. I’m so terrified that I’ll get so involved with life and fall in love with the world that I’ll lose track of time and it will all be gone in an instant. When you live, you charge forward. You begin to die.
I don’t have any grandiose hopes of Heaven after I die. I want to stay here, conscious or no. I’m addicted to the world.
What I want is to find beauty in the persistence of matter and memes, my matter, my memes, when the machine begins to break. When the body disseminates into its fundamental building blocks--into molecules, into atoms and quarks and leptons and gluons and to neutrinos, billions of neutrinos; when those neutrinos become particles of light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second out in every direction. When the ideas, memories, and stories turn to sound: to verbs and adjectives, to fragments and run-ons, to the breath between phrases of sentences that strive to be whole, complete, but can end only in ellipses; to single words, to vowels, to morphemes and phonemes, to the irrevocable heat of entropy. To scattered, splayed disorder.
* * *
Last night I didn’t sleep, my first all-nighter since Chris. I was up again, writing, shaving my legs, watching the infomercials. I threw out the old jeans, and promised to donate the Homecoming dress to Goodwill, a promise I’m not sure I’ll follow through on. Chris is like a rock; he didn’t notice when I pried his sleeping arms from me and wriggled out of the sheets, about twenty minutes after he had slipped into his dreams, the ones he’ll shake off like a dusty rug when the alarm sounds.
There’s something about this blue-time that rubs nostalgia and anticipation away so that the present moment may shine, and all I can feel is the blurry triumph of a night spent without sleep, the glorious exhaustion in my muscles, the icy shock of wet grass on my feet. I put two fingers on the pulse point below my jaw. There’s a steady rhythm.
But it’s just a moment like any other. Soon time sets itself into motion as alarm clocks ring and the busy people of the world start their cars or walk to work, the patter of their patent-leather shoes a record of each second that passes by.
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