The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 14: June 26

Today I ordered ten toy stethoscopes from a party supply company. I did this over the phone. Toy stethoscopes did not seem to be the sort of items that, if you ordered them online, would come. I often order things online that fail to come. I ordered a birth tub once. It disappeared in Tennessee. I tracked it like an air traffic controller does a plane that vanishes over the Bermuda Triangle, a series of regular blips that suddenly, like a heartbeat, stop. This was a very large item, not the sort of thing one could easily lose. Nor, though expensive, did it seem to be massively desired yet under-available. There is not a black market infrastructure built around birth tubs. Yet no one could account for the birth tub’s whereabouts. My birth tub had dematerialized in transit.

This happens to me quite a lot, as I’ve said. Sometimes I’ll place an order online and make my husband click the CONFIRM PURCHASE button, because he is confident and believes in ways that I don’t, whereas the online commerce universe can sense my faithlessness. When I order things online, I am expressing my desire for an item I have never touched or experienced as a 3-D object, and to trust in the process requires the suspension of something I cannot fully suspend, even though I understand perfectly how online commerce works. As the object travels from the warehouse to me, it gains matter. Presumably it gains matter. But because I am faithless, my objects do not.

So I wanted to talk to an actual person about the stethoscopes. Conversations with strangers are so touching and intimate these days. Maybe it’s simply that any conversation with a stranger, since such conversations are more and more rare, represents something you almost didn’t do. I almost didn’t call you about toy stethoscopes. Every item I’ve ever bought online represents a conversation with a stranger I didn’t have. It’s only when the system fails that you talk to people. Or exchange heated e-mails. I once bought some boots online that didn’t fit, and I tried to return them, but I no longer had the original box. Because I no longer had the original box, I could not return the boots. I engaged in a lengthy e-mail discussion about this box. The box was worthless — it cost maybe two dollars at most — while the boots cost five hundred dollars. I had never before spent close to this amount of money on any article of clothing; this made me panic, and then become deranged. I wrote the online seller many deranged e-mails. Why should the boots become worthless because of a two-dollar box?

Once I failed to receive a pair of chairs from an eBay seller. She’d disappeared, and with my money. I left her phone messages. I e-mailed her. Finally, weeks later, she called me. We spoke at length about her life. She had a chronic female pain condition that flared at times, incapacitating her. Nothing eased the hell, not even morphine. I asked how this affliction had befallen her. She’d ridden horses as a child, she offered. Maybe that was the cause.

At the time of our conversation, I had just finished a book about a woman with an incurable headache. As I read this book, which chronicled the woman’s endless cure quest, I became less interested in her pain than in my changing response to it. I began to think, as many of her doctors had begun to think, that maybe she was crazy or depressed. As her suffering intensified, and with it her desperation to treat it, I found myself increasingly doubting that she had a headache at all.

The eBay seller and I talked about how difficult it was to solicit people’s sympathies over the long term. I admitted that I’m one of those people who harden in the face of other people’s incurable pain. I start to blame them for failing to get better. Not to defend myself, I told the eBay seller, but I probably needed for my own sake to believe that I might be to blame for any of my future sicknesses; if I ever became sick, I could find comfort knowing that I was the crux of the problem and thus also the cure. I could just stop being who I was and get better.

We had a really candid conversation, the eBay seller and I, thoughtful and honest. When I arrived at her house to pick up the chairs, however, I found that she’d left them out on her lawn for me. When I knocked on her door to say hello, she did not answer.

Afterward, I told all of my friends about the eBay seller with the female pain problem. This story was good for a chuckle, and mostly at my own expense — no one was so incapable of the simplest online transactions as I was. Always my transactions failed, or became hilariously complicated. Even though none of my friends knew the eBay seller, I’d always felt guilty that I’d used her misfortune to make people laugh at me. Eleven years later, I contracted a strange pain down there, and I’ve never ridden horses. For three weeks I thought I had an untreatable, incurable condition. I thought I’d brought it on myself. I deserved it for making hay of the eBay seller’s misery. It turned out I only had a tight muscle. I was quickly cured.

But because I did not have the proper faith to order these toy stethoscopes online, I called the company. The man with whom I spoke was very nice; he reassured me I’d receive the stethoscopes by the following Monday, in time for the Fourth of July parade. Then he said how odd it was that I, too, was ordering toy stethoscopes; his company hardly ever sold toy stethoscopes, yet in the past month there’d been a run on toy stethoscopes. We tried to figure out why. Many people were planning universal health care floats for their Fourth parades: this was our best guess. We didn’t really have any other ideas. But I thought about the sudden popularity of toy stethoscopes for most of the day. There existed a reason for their popularity even if I didn’t know it. Everything can be traced to its point of origin, and possibly to its point of disappearance. We know where things came from and where they are, even if those things have dematerialized in transit. I have become a location buff, possibly because I have a really good sense of direction. My interests and desires can be mapped, or mapped back. In parks, when people veer from the established paths and cut new ones through the grass, these are called “desire lines.” Many people have the same desire when it comes to walking, which implies that we all want to get to the same place, and more quickly. Recently I desired to surround myself with the color cerulean. Six months later so did everyone else. Why did I crave cerulean just before everyone else craved cerulean? I try to crave colors and paths that other people do not crave. Right now, because I recently saw a ’60s French movie in which the lead actress is wearing a union suit, I am craving a union suit. I am certain that come next winter, everyone will be wearing union suits. Will I get credit for wanting them first? Why do I need credit for my desire? It’s ridiculous. But I do.