The Fermata

3

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.

But why is it that I so like typing tapes? I’ve seen word-processing operators throw their headsets down after several hours of transcribing, shouting, “I hate doing this!” Yet I even liked typing Fleury’s tapes. For one thing, I like that I’m fairly good at it — I can, for instance, often engage in a little parallel processing, typing the sentence that just passed while listening to and storing the phrase that I’m currently hearing: I enjoy seeing how long I can go without resorting to the rewind half of the foot-pedal. But mainly I prefer doing tapes to typing handwritten documents simply because you can hear the dictator thinking. You can hear him groping for the conventional formula that will cover a slightly unusual case. You can occasionally hear undertones of irritation or affection. It is a great privilege to be present when a person slowly puts his thoughts into words, phrase by phrase, doing the best he can. Because you are traveling right along with him as he forms his sentences, making each word he says appear as a little clump of letters on your screen, you begin to feel as if you are doing the thinking yourself; you occupy some dark space in the interior of his mind as he goes about his job.

It isn’t difficult to imagine an erotic aspect to all this. Sandi, a temp I discussed the subject with a year ago or so, told me she once developed an intense thing for a man she transcribed for. He was in personnel, and his job was to advise employees and retired employees on the best way to handle their pensions. He talked very slowly, she said, in an almost dreamy but loud low voice, with long bold pauses. She said he sounded a little like David Bowie in “China Girl.” He very seldom resorted to the pause switch on his machine; he just let the tape run. And he talked a great deal in his letters about “invading the annuity.” “If your husband predeceases you, Mrs. Plochman,” he would say in a letter, “and you elect to invade the annuity …” “If, on the other hand, you both invade the annuity now …” So often repeated, this particular actuarial idiom began, as a result, to take on a special meaning for her. As she typed it, it was as if she were handling what he was saying, consenting to it, letting it run scarf-like through her fingers. “Please do,” she felt she was whispering back to him by typing exactly what he spoke into her headset, “please do invade my annuity.” They never did anything sexual, though.

In my own case, I often get thoroughly hypnotized by the tapes of women dictators. Women litigators, especially: when they say things like “Although there are no hornbook rules,” my breathing elevates. And I already mentioned the strange thrill I felt when I heard in a credit update Joyce quote someone as saying that someone else “lied like hell.” Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce’s forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce’s case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I let it surround me, it is as if I’m sunk into the pond of what she is saying, as if I’m some kind of patient, cruising amphibian, drifting in black water, entirely submerged except for my eyes, which blink every so often. Each word comes floating up to me like a thick, healthy lily pad and brushes past my head. And sometimes, especially if Joyce kindly lets me hear her hesitate (rather than clicking her recorder off to hide the length of her hesitation, I mean), the stretch of black still water between the intermittent green floating words can momentarily expand into infinitude. All the lily pads withdraw themselves from me. At those times I become amazed by the power I have: the power to lift my foot off the transcriber pedal at will and halt that sentence of hers right there for as long as I want in order to think about just where I am in it, and about what it can mean that this living, feeling creature is spending five days a week saying such things into a tape recorder, and about what her mouth looks like as she says them. I pause within her pause and float in the sensory-deprived lagoon of her suspended meaning. What is especially nice, in this state of “deep transcription,” as I call it, is to look up and discover that cheerful, unmysterious Joyce herself is walking briskly somewhere, perhaps toward my desk, wiggling a pen in her fingers.

So there is, without a doubt, a strong chronanistic element to my doing of tapes. It may even be that if I hadn’t spent so large a portion of the last ten years of my life transcribing words, starting and stopping so many thousands and thousands of modest human sentences-in-progress with my foot-pedal, I would have long ago lost the ability to drop into the Fold altogether. The daily regimen of microcassettes has kept me unusually sensitive, perhaps, to the editability of the temporal continuum — to the fact that an apparently seamless vocalization may actually elide, glide over, hide whole self-contained vugs of hidden activity or distraction — sneezes, expletives, spilled coffee, sexual adventures — within. “The mind is a lyric cry in the midst of business,” says George Santayana, whose autobiography (volume one) I got out of the Boston Public Library yesterday; and it occurs to me that this aphorism illuminates the peculiar suggestiveness of the microcassette, and of all audiocassettes, in fact: these stocky, solid, paragraph-shaped material objects, held together with minuscule Phillips-head screws at each corner (the screws are smaller, incidentally, than the screws in the hinges of my glasses, so small that only SCARA robots could have twirled them in place in such quantity), with their pair of unfixed center sprockets left deliberately loose so that they can comply with slight variations in the spindle distances of different brands of machine — these chunky pieces of geometrical business within which, nonetheless, an elfin wisp of Mylar frisks around any tiny struts or blocks of felt placed in its path, minnowing the ferromagnetic after-sparkle of a voiced personality through whatever Baroque diagonals and Bezier curves it can contort from the givens of its prison.

This said, the surprising thing really is how little luck I have had using the foot-pedal of my tape-transcription machine to trigger a true Drop. I have thus far been unable to stop the universe using it, or using the remote-control PAUSE buttons of VCRs or CD players, which would seem obvious actuators. I had, as I mentioned, only a brief success in college with a garage-door opener. It may be that to engage time effectively and stop it cold, a mechanism has to have some quality that links it uniquely with me, with my own emotional life, which is why, for example, the toggle-switch transformer for my race-track only worked as a chronoclutch after my fallen hand brushed against it, discovering its warmth, in the middle of the night. This could also explain why the general trend in my Fold-actuators, with a few important exceptions, has been away from hardware and toward simpler, purely bodily spurs like a finger-snap or the pushing up of my glasses on my nose.

The most elaborate piece of fermational equipment I ever developed was a custom-made piece of machinery I called a Solonoid (with three 0’s). I had it built for me by an MIT undergraduate four or five years ago. I still have it, though it stopped working after a week of Fold-hours. It is very bulky and it made a loud chuffing noise when it was idling, although I’m sure it could be miniaturized and redesigned for quietness. All it did was stretch and unstretch three rubber bands oriented in the x, y, and z directions. I was able to tune the oscillatory frequency of each rubber band by pushing a rheostat on a small mixing board. I had it built simply because I knew one morning, just after I awoke, after many dry Fold-free months, that this design would work. My uncle loaned me fifteen hundred dollars (I told him that it was to take several months off from temping and see if I could get interested in my master’s thesis again), and I put an ad in the MIT student newspaper and interviewed a number of students. I chose the sole woman respondent, naturally.

She used three small motors. I told her that I was a post-doc in philosophy working on a monograph about a turn-of-the-century American metaphysician named Matthias Batchelder, who had postulated that three India-rubber bands, when alternately stretched and slackened at a particular frequency in the three Cartesian planes, would insert null placeholders into the stream of Becoming, effectively pausing the universe for all but the operator of the mechanism. Though Batch-elder had written to G. E. Moore, C. S. Pierce, and A. A. Michelson about his ideas, I said (scrambling for plausibility), nobody had exhibited the slightest interest, partly because he lacked institutional affiliation, and partly because he had an off-puttingly contentious personal manner. (I should stress that there was no metaphysician by the name of Batchelder — the rough design for the machine had simply come to me one morning — but for the sake of secrecy I needed to distance myself from it. I “lied like hell” to this young mechanical engineer — I had to, I’m sorry.) She — I’m ashamed to say that I’ve forgotten her name — built the machine in short order, and she did a very nice job of explaining its finer points to me, though I have forgotten them. To keep costs down, she was kind enough to use “takeout” parts ordered through the Jerryco catalog — that is, motors removed from used equipment, copiers and such. “Well, I got it to do what you said you wanted it to do,” she said, in her serious way, as we stood in one of the mechanical-engineering labs (she was getting course credit for this project, it turned out, although she had hidden that fact from me), “but I’ve played with the frequencies and I can’t get it to do anything. The rubber bands look kind of neat when they really get going, though.”

I sat down in front of it. It was ludicrously bulky, definitely not portable. “You mean it doesn’t pause the universe?” I said, chuckling with mock incredulity to indicate that I knew full well that Batchelder’s ideas were a crock, and that I had gone through this whole exercise only out of kindness, merely to give this forgotten eccentric a belated chance to prove himself. “Well, I suppose I should try it myself anyway, for the old man’s sake,” I said. She pointed out the on/off switch, which I threw; I took a moment to adjust the stretching frequencies. (The rubber bands were chosen by me at random from a forty-nine-cent bag of Alliance rubber bands, PROUD TO SAY MADE IN USA.) As soon as I got the ratios right (by ear), the lab, the woman, Cambridge, and everything else, with the exception of me and the jouncing Solonoid, promptly went into suspension. I crawled behind the engineer and kissed the beautifully defined H shapes at the back of her thick knees, which are often the best feature on college women (she wore a jean skirt), and then took my place at the controls again and cut the power to the Solonoid.

“See?” she said. “Nothing.” We shook our heads sadly, pitying poor deluded Matthias Batchelder, and I wrote her out a check for the full fifteen hundred and thanked her. (I keep my canceled checks; I must remember to go back and find out this young woman’s name.) She asked if she could possibly have a copy of some of Batchelder’s metaphysical writings, and I told her that for estate reasons I wasn’t allowed to give anything out, but that I would definitely send her a reprint of my monograph when it appeared. That satisfied her. And for a few weeks after that, until my supply from that first bag of bands ran out, I was able to do a fair number of intricately filthy Foldy things. The nice unforeseen quality of that machine, now that I think of it, was that it had a high degree of risk associated with it, since a rubber band could snap suddenly, without warning, causing time to resume and potentially exposing me at a very awkward moment — the sex-in-public-places risk. But I was careful. Eventually I incorporated some redundancy into the design by stretching two rubber bands in each direction rather than one, even though it meant I ran out quicker.

This problem of remembering names, which just came up in connection with the MIT woman, is a particularly acute one for the career temp. I may work as many as forty different assignments in a given year — some for a week or two, some for a few days. At each assignment, there are typically three to five names to learn the first day (and occasionally many more); ten or more the second day. Depending on how heavy the phone action is, the number of names I end up finally mastering per job can go considerably over one hundred. Per year, I am being exposed to roughly three thousand names, of which (scaling back again) perhaps five hundred belong to individuals I get to know a little, talk to, work fairly closely with. Over ten years, that makes five thousand personalities, about each one of whom I must develop a little packet of emotion, a liking, a disliking, a theory about their feelings for some colleague, a mental note about their taste in clothes, a memory of how they like things done, whether they are of the opinion that state names ought to be spelled out in full or given the two-letter abbreviation, whether they like the document name or number included on the letter or think that this is a vulgarity, whether they want me to amuse myself when I’ve caught up with my work or prefer that I come bounding into their office asking for more to do. In college I was impressed by how well some very popular professors kept up with the particulars of their students’ lives — but the fact is that I master just as much raw humanity each year as the most hotshot celebrity professor. And the difference is that in my lowly case, all these people, or most of them, continue to work downtown, just as I do. They aren’t going to graduate and go away.

What this means, practically speaking, is that every few days I will almost certainly run into someone with whom I have worked closely at some company at some time in the past. And I will want so much to remember his or her name! They usually remember my name, and in some cases I can detect a faint hurt look in their eyes when they perceive, through my joshing and bluster, that I don’t remember theirs, since together we did work very hard and beat impossible deadlines and joke around only six months ago, or a year and a half ago, or five years ago. And — they and I both secretly think — they were higher-ranking than I was, they were salaried, I was a temp, so it is a duty in keeping with my subordinate station to remember their names, while it is only noblesse oblige for them to remember mine.

Yet if they took a moment to do the arithmetic of my work life versus their work life, as I have, they would perhaps understand and absolve, for they see the same people every day, their universe of clients and contacts and colleagues is relatively confined and stable, so that a new temp like me in their office is a novelty, a topic of conversation, a person to whom they can “give a leg up,” an outsider in whom they can confide hatreds and old wounds. I stick in their mind because they are pleased that they were able to put aside class differences and treat me as an equal. “Arno, hi!” And there I am, standing in front of Park Street Station, unable to reciprocate properly, feeling like a waiter asked to remember an order from a table he served months before.

The name problem is compounded by the fact that there is apparently some vulnerability in my countenance that signals to lost people that I should be approached for directions. I have gotten good at sensing the lost now as they look over a crowdlet of potential help at a stop sign: they spot me, and though I’m wearing a tie like the other men, they seem to smell that I’m a temp and must therefore be permanently lonely and lowly, a sick caribou that the wolf singles out for attention; they know that they will feel at ease with me about admitting to being a stranger because I am going to welcome any human contact, any indication that I’m established and not transient. I go through periods when I am asked three times a day for directions. And these lost people are right — I do like being interrupted on the street, especially by women, but by men, too. I am poor at retaining street names, however, even streets that hold buildings in which I’ve worked in the past. For a while I deliberately studied maps of the business district in the evening, counting traffic lights and memorizing cross streets and helpful landmarks, so that I would live up to the expectations of unintimidating guidance that my face and features seem to create. (I find that the response is especially heavy if I am carrying some bulky item, like a bunch of flowers or a Wang VS backup disk.) As a result, I never know if the person coming toward me on the sidewalk and seeking eye contact is someone I worked with at Gillette or Kendall or Ropes & Gray or Polaroid or MassBank or Arthur Young, or whether he or she just needs to know how to get to Milk Street.

During the periods when I have full Fold-powers, however, these difficulties are easily solved. As soon as I hear an “Arno, hi!” I can do a Drop and check wallet or purse ID and then greet whoever it is properly. It makes such a difference. I don’t feel cringey and can lose myself in the pleasure of the reunion: for I really do like most of the people I have worked with over the years; almost all of them have some lovable feature. And if someone asks me how to get to a place that I should know perfectly well how to get to and don’t, I can freeze his inquiring expression and check a map. (I carry one in my briefcase, as well as my old bottle of contact-lens solution, in case someone finds herself in ocular distress.) Of course, I could pull out the map while he looks on, but I hate to see that shifty, clouded look come into his eyes as he thinks to himself, This guy doesn’t have a clue — I should have asked one of the others. Also, when I pull out a map to help a tourist, especially an Asian tourist, I inevitably end up giving it to him, because impulsive generosity is such a high — and those maps are ridiculously expensive.

I’m not being quite fair to myself, then, when I say that the Fold is just a sexual aid. It is primarily that — my Fold-energies seem to be a direct by-product of my appetite for nakedness. I doubt that I would have wormed my way into the Fermata even once if I had not been motivated primarily by the desire to take women’s clothes off. But I don’t want to ignore or depreciate the range of nonsexual uses that I have put it to. I have, for example, relied on it for things like last-minute Christmas shopping; it’s nice to browse in utter silence. When I’m irritable at work, and I know that the people around me don’t deserve my misanthropy, I can stop them all until I’m fond of them again. If someone makes a revealing comment in passing, I can take time out to think about its hidden implications and check the expressions of others who have heard it, all while I’m right there and it is fresh in my mind.

I also use the Fold when I’m called on to come up with something especially understanding or sympathetic in a conversation and I want to be sure that my tact is exactly on key — although there is a serious risk in mulling over your kindness for any longer than fifteen or twenty seconds, because as you weigh and polish your response you can quickly lose your working sense of the immediate emotional flux. I’ve nearly derailed one or two important heart-to-heart talks by pausing so long to hone my tone that when I was finally ready to re-enter time I knew that I was going to be brittle and foolish and insincere, exactly what I’d Dropped out to avoid, and I had a very hard time working myself back around to the mood that had made the conversation seem important enough for me to have wanted to interrupt it in the first place. Nonetheless, used sparingly, the Fold can really help with commiseration.

It is an obvious escape, too — though here again, I have learned to use it sparingly. I was given a temp assignment at the alumni office of a graduate school, where I was asked to roll up posters and stuff them in mailing tubes. I did this for four straight days. I would not have minded if the posters had not been so ugly. On the second day, I found it difficult to entertain the notion of rolling up one more purple-and-black poster — the waste of glossy paper, of post office energy, of university money, seemed too awful — and so I hit the clutch and took two non-hours to read some of Diana Crane’s The Transformation of the Avant-Garde. In that case it helped a lot: the book was better, more licentiously toothsome, for being read en Folde. But there have been other times when, once I have lapsed into the timelessness of the arrested instant, the particular obligation or person from whom I have temporarily freed myself becomes more and more horrific, posed in its or his stalled imminence, and the idea that I will have to take up right where I have left off becomes unbearable, and I re-enter time’s cattle-drive with a sense of defeat and unhappiness more acute than any I felt before I had ducked, or copped, out.

I think, too, that it is exceedingly dangerous to Drop when you are in any sort of depression about how bad the world is. A Fold then can deepen infinitely — since in a way you are now in control over whether all the world’s continuing atrocities and tragedies should resume or not. You know that as soon as you give the go-ahead to time again, pets will not be given enough water, feelings will be needlessly hurt, killings, crashes, miscarriages of justice, bureaucratic harassment, infidelity, artistic disappointments, and worse will all go forward,and you begin to think that you will be in a sense their cause, you will be directly responsible for them, since you have a choice whether to let them happen, by opting to restart time or not. When I am in a Fold, I know for a fact that no woman anywhere is crying or feeling betrayed, and since I want above all for women not to cry, I can begin to believe, irrationally, that it is my duty to live out my entire life in this artificial solitude, eating canned foods. “He died suddenly,” they would say on discovering my abruptly aged body. But when I died, all the misery-in-progress that I had so heroically held at bay for forty-odd years would resume anyway. I don’t have any power to alter the fact that evils will do their work, only how “soon” they will. As a consequence, I have determined that my Foldouts should in general be short, recreational, and masturbatory, rather than deep and pained.

I should mention here, though, under the heading of nonsexual uses of the Fermata, one of my least attractive episodes. Three black kids, age eighteen or so, stopped me one afternoon and asked which way the Boston Common was, and when I put on my usual “Yes, I’d be delighted to help you find your way, and I will of course be discreet about your sketchy knowledge of this area of the city, and when you walk away you will be cheered by the conviction that you did the right thing asking me and not those other, less amiable people for directions” face, one of the kids placed a gun to my jaw (this was near the medical center downtown), and asked me to give him my wallet and watch. I timed out by pushing on the lead-advance button of my mechanical pencil (in my back pocket), and took the gun out of play. I was trembling, outraged that these kids would feel entitled to my wallet and watch and were willing to threaten me with death to get them. I was put in mind of the old jokey way of teaching genuflection: “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch.” So I got some wire from the back of a New England Telephone truck that was parked nearby and tied all three of them by the balls to a nearby stop sign. It is a somewhat disorienting experience to be calmly winding telephone wire around the testicle-sack of a person who has just been in the process of mugging you. I taped their dicks up temporarily so that they wouldn’t annoy me by hanging in my way while I wound. (Two were uncircumcised.) When all three of them were fully secured to the stop sign, the three wires exiting the backs of their pants through holes I had snipped with wire cutters, I stood back a few paces, turned time on, and, with pathetic bravado, said, “Come and get me, you little fucks!” Startled, they sized up the situation for a second, then lunged after me and fell forward at once, swearing with pain. I loped off, feeling increasingly remorseful, not to mention relieved that I hadn’t in the first flush of my vengefulness cut off their balls altogether and dragged them to the emergency room; an option, I am ashamed to say, that I had briefly considered. (Can one bleed to death from castration? Probably. And it was doubtful they had medical insurance.) After that unsettling experience I spent an “afternoon” performing acts of lite altruism, wandering in the Fold through crummy neighborhoods collecting concealed handguns off anyone who looked under thirty, but the frisking was tiring and distasteful work, and I stopped after I had only forty-four weapons in my commandeered shopping cart, with the sense that I had done nothing of real value, and had possibly even destabilized a momentarily tranquil street scene. (Still under cover of the Fermata, I pushed the weapons into some newly poured cement at a construction site.)