i
Through the window, I can see her sitting in the restaurant. It's the kind with fake plants in the windows and a neon sign, square formica tables, metal chairs. She has a notebook or headphones. She is tired from a day of wandering. Tired from the way that cities that are not your own draw out wants you didn’t know you had. She’s trying to watch the other customers without being too obvious. There’s a couple of middle-aged lesbians, an old man with a newspaper. She tries to decipher their gestures, to conjure up their histories in the spaces between bodies and objects.
She’s been there for hours by the time I come in from the night. For years maybe. Until recently I had forgotten about the restaurant entirely. Now I am caught again in its soft buzzing and fluorescent glow. I sit down across from her and touch her lips, her cheeks, trace the lines between her knuckles, her blue veins. “Everything changes.” I tell her. “Nothing changes at all.”
Once, I learned that time is not a river, not a line. It does not flow. It does not move forward. Each moment crystallized, stacks of gossamer layers, almost visible, almost tangible. As if, with enough force, you could push your fingers through them.
ii
Winters last forever and that last one was so long ago. There was the night when Katya and I slid down the snowbanks by the river. We barrelled into each other at the bottom of the slope, faces burning, slush in our socks. So many layers of fabric between our damp bodies. All sorts of untold stories still waiting to catch up with us.
Then, I couldn’t imagine not feeling the future winding on, open and indefinite: each fear, each possibility of romance or revolution. That was the year that we held hands as we fled through clouds of tear gas. In the spring, we burned through the days: every breath electric, every opportunity lost. I buzzed and buzzed. Time swelled around us. Threatened to swallow us whole. A man chased us through a crowd of strangers and we forgot to breath for a week.
iii
There was another year when it felt like I was hurtling through the world, picking up speed as I went. Paradoxically, time turned out to be an aperture, as I moved faster it slowed down: hours stretched into days, weeks into lifetimes. This wasn’t only a quantitative experience, it was also an effective one. Not only the unimaginable volume of things achieved in a short day, but the accelerated closeness that I seemed to generate with people around me. Sometimes it felt like I was falling, falling out of time, out of myself. Perhaps it was that I had rubbed myself so raw that if you touched me you couldn’t help but get a little bit stuck.
I’m not sure when I lost the barriers I had so carefully cultivated, when I found myself like some kind of throbbing nerve in city after city. Kissing strangers and looking for friends, and answers, and places to sleep. The unsticking hurt of course; ripping yourself out of people’s lives again and again is something that maybe some can sustain indefinitely, but I found it exhausting.
That I had trampled the boundaries of my own subjectivity was also a survival mechanism, if I couldn’t make friends, I’d have nowhere to stay, nowhere to go next. In many ways it was voluntary, subjecting myself in ever expanding increments to situations I’d have otherwise avoided. Eventually it felt like I had crawled out of my own skin.
Before I started getting stuck to people, I had to get used to the sound of my own head. I found myself prodding recesses of my consciousness that I had tried my best to ignore since childhood. Often it was terrifying, but there was also an eerie comfort here, like I was removing cobwebs from some long forgotten hiding place. I wrote to a friend: “I am learning how to be alone again.”
Later, when I tried to explain everything to the people back home, I also had to explain this element of time travel. They’d look perplexed and I’d have to say: “You see, then, time didn’t work the same way it does now.” Changing time again was probably the hardest part of coming back. I was hit by a different sort of acceleration, the kind where days bleed together, and you fold back in on yourself, dull around the edges. No more throbbing. It took a few weeks sure, a few weeks to let go of the feeling of all-consuming urgency, to stop spinning. Like a child who makes herself dizzy turning in circles and then falls back on the ground, lying perfectly still as the sky reels above her. This time, I wasn’t hurtling through time, rather it was rushing past me as I clung to the grass.
iv
In a large enough black hole you might get to see the entire history of a particular spot in the universe. Ahead of you, everything that’s ever fallen in before. Behind you, every falling object to come. Such a black hole would rip the human body apart, but maybe there is poetry to this dismemberment. The way that fingers might last for years before they are plucked off. The foot that lands in another century. Splintered ribs scattered across millennia.
I wonder if, as I come apart at the seams, I will release something soft and oozing. If it will stick to me like tar: dense, unescapable. In this void, I want to cut myself open, to perform an autopsy of time. I could slice through the fibres of seconds so carefully. Lift out this or that moment. I’d arrange them. Consider them. Then sew them back up again. I’d leave my cadaver with a well-organized report.
v
There is an old story about the revolutionaries who shot at clocks to make the day stop. Walter Benjamin writes that during the Paris Commune: “On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris.” This imagery – clocks smashed in a revolutionary fervour against mechanical time – crops up again and again on posters and insurrectionary pamphlets.
The summer when I couldn't stop spinning, Katya and I painted a banner together. The old apartment buildings by the highway hadn't yet been razed to make way for a new overpass. The days would smell like lilacs before they smelled of garbage. We stretched out our canvas in a friend's living room where the rush of nearby traffic sounded strangely like the sea. We had cheap brushes and acrylic paint stolen from the dollar store, which we used to adorn our banner with the image of a bullet-riddled alarm clock. I don't remember what the words said. Maybe they called for infinite strike, or maybe it was a never-ending vacation.
vi
Walter Benjamin killed himself in Portbou, on the Spanish border. In 1940, fleeing the Vichy regime, he had crossed over from France in hopes of being granted asylum and of ultimately making his way to the United States. Instead, he and his companions were informed by the local police that they would be deported the next day. In the morning, Benjamin was found dead in his hotel room, having overdosed on morphine.
vii
In May I stumbled off the train in Portbou, looking for Walter Benjamin’s grave. I was surprised to find the town quite empty. I had left Barcelona earlier that morning, leaving a note next to a sleeping acquaintance. Now, Portbou seemed somewhat provincial: the train station quaint, the streets sleepy. I lugged my duffle bag down towards the sea and followed the signs which pointed me to the Benjamin monument. I was sent scrambling up a hill side, along concrete steps and dried grasses.
The monument too was without other visitors. There were the white-washed walls of a church cemetery, some cactuses, an olive tree. From there, you could see the town below, the beach and the foothills, the expanse of the sea. I stayed there some time in contemplation, took a few photos which I later lost. The monument rose out of a cliff-face, a tunnel of rusted steel and some steps that took you down towards the incredible blue of the Mediterranean. Further in, there were traces of past visitors. Someone had left Walter Benjamin a yellow flower. I left him a stone, like you would on a loved-one’s grave.
With some time left to kill before my next train, I made my way down to the boardwalk. I took a coffee on an empty terrace, then I picked my way over the white stones to the farthest, emptiest stretch of the beach. There was only an old man already up to his waist in the sea. I hid my bag behind some rocks, stripped down to my underwear and waded in. I was not used to the buoyancy of saltwater, the way that the sea is warm and tastes like sweat. I let myself float for a long time.
viii
Benjamin also writes of Messianic Time, a revolutionary crisis of temporality. It liberates the present from its monotonous progression towards who knows what. Benjamin too rejects time as a sequence of causal events. His time is monadic, crystalline. Like the black hole, his present moment contains all of human history.
If revolution is underpinned by the crisis of time, what forms of time travel does it imply? What other calamities allow us to slip through time? Often I can feel this urge ticking away under my skin. I want to break everything and leave, a need to abnegate space-time through cataclysms. Perhaps this is self-destruction, but the desire for a total break is also erotic. There is a thrill to quitting, a comfort in anonymity. The relief of the train pulling away.
In practice there is no perfect escape, only moments of solitude stolen in parks or cafés. In practice I break things in increments.
ix
She is still alone in the restaurant. The lesbians, having settled their bill, left only a scattering of crumbs and a small pool of spilled soy sauce. A few tables over, the old man has collapsed onto his newspaper, snoring softly.
She unfolds her napkin and wonders if, light years away, Katya is lying in a snow bank, looking at the stars. Katya has left the city definitively. Their phone calls have become increasingly infrequent. Space has stretched out between them, warping, rippling.
I come in from the night and sit down next to her. She blinks a few times, but seems unsurprised, as though she has summoned me from the plastic leaves and harsh lights. We haven’t met yet, but somewhere along the way the years got slippery, blurred together.
x
There is this feeling of lightness after the end of something. A breakup or a thunder shower – the kind that makes the cat hide under the sofa. There is this cold that comes in October, damp, lingering – it seeps through cracks under doors, holes in wool sweaters. It sticks to your bones, to fingertips.
I wondered – if I stopped spinning, would I stop moving at all? I wondered if numbness too might be a kind of lightness, the sensation of lifting off, of no longer being a body.
Malka Gould’s story was short-listed for the Malahat Review’s 2019 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. Gould’s work has also been long-listed for Room Magazine’s 2019 Fiction Contest.
Photo by docoverachiever on Foter.com / CC BY