The Folded Clock (11 page)

Today my friend is arriving from London to help me pack. I am in Italy, I have been in Italy for a month, working at an art colony, and together she and I are going to a different part of Italy (also to work). I am often anxious about traveling alone, so she has been requested to keep me company and prevent me, in theory, from being anxious. What I forget is that she often makes me anxious when I am with her. She has a hunger for adventure so extreme that my usual hunger for adventure becomes, due to reactionary prudence, squelched. If she suggests we do something, then I know it is my job to wonder,
Why is this probably a very bad idea?

The last trip my friend and I took together was to see and experience a building. I'd heard about this building for years; I'd even written a novel that took place in this building (that I'd never, save in my imagination, visited). While living in Germany—i.e., nearby, relatively—I decided it was time to finally see it. My friend agreed to accompany me.

This building, in order to be seen and experienced, however, required great effort. My friend and I had to fly to Zurich. We had to rent a car and drive, in winter, on terrible Swiss mountain roads. Our arrival was adventure enough for me. I was happy to stay inside for the rest of our trip. We were there to see and experience a building; let's stay inside the building! (The building is a spa, but “spa” does not accurately describe the building. It is more accurately
described as an art installation filled with water.) But my friend had other ideas. She wanted to explore the area. She'd found a place where we could ride a sled for six miles down an alp. She'd found a beautiful reservoir she wanted to visit. She wanted to leave the building we'd traveled all this way to see and experience, even though, she agreed with me, we'd never been inside a building like this in our lives. A building built for people. Why are most buildings
not
built for people? We asked ourselves this question over and over as a means of restating our astonishment. Most buildings are machines. They perform services. They provide heat and dryness and other basic functions that help with survival. This building provided so much more than survival. This building was like a bed or a sweater or an orchestra. This building took into account what your body wanted to do, feel, see, hear. After not too much time in this building we felt as though we'd taken hallucinogenic drugs. We simply could not believe how much this building intuited and addressed (and maybe, too, inflamed) every desire we possessed. It became overwhelming. We needed a break from the building. We needed a break from being so deeply understood.

Given that the six-mile sled run was closed (I tried not to seem excited by this news) we decided to drive to the reservoir. We asked a local man for directions. He warned that the roads, due to snow, were impassable. My friend pushed. Really? Were they really impassable? The man agreed to call the resident expert on road conditions. He would tell the expert the make of our car, and she, based on whatever fate algorithm she ran, would calculate our survival chances.

The woman said: with our car, we might be fine.

This did not sound like encouragement to me. To
my friend, it sounded like encouragement. Because I am scared of appearing scared, I agreed with her interpretation. I would drive us to the reservoir.

No one should listen to experts. The road was ice-shellacked, the road was steep, the road was barely the width of our car; to the right of the road loomed a cliff so steep we could see only air. As often happens in situations when reality becomes terrifyingly stark, I avoid panic by allowing metaphor to take over. It's not
I am headed up a steep and slippery mountain road and I cannot turn around
but
My life is a novel written by an author who might want me to entertainingly die
. My friend and I were no longer people in a car; we were characters in a plot. As characters in a plot, there was no escaping the fact that our story would have an ending. An
outcome
. Arguably, each day, at its conclusion, produces an outcome (arguably so does each minute, each second, each microsecond). But even when you're just a person (not a character, or a person who feels like a character) your day will end, and using the most basic (i.e., starkest) accounting model, one of two outcomes will befall you—you will be alive or you will be dead. Some days the luxury of other outcomes can obsess you—
Will he respond to my e-mail? Will I get enough sleep so that I can teach tomorrow?
Other days refuse to permit distractions from the most fundamental outcome options: alive or dead. On these starker days, you can begin to worry as characters in a book should worry. Your outcome, however it gets decided, might not be designed with your best interests in mind.

Then we encountered the tunnel.

It was not clear, at first, that the tunnel was a tunnel. The road simply disappeared into the side of a mountain. Preventing us from pursuing the road was a metal door.

The road here also widened. At this single point in our journey, it was possible to turn around.

“I guess we have to turn around,” I said.

My friend thought otherwise. She'd read about this tunnel online. If we drove right up to it, she said, the door would open.

This seemed impossible. It was not. The door creaked and groaned as it rolled open, slat by slat.

We drove through. In the rearview mirror, I watched the door lower with the stuttering movements of a mechanism about to fail. The door resembled a jaw closing, and the tunnel, aptly, a digestive track. The stone undulated overhead, muscular and involuntary. Our outcome was being processed.

We drove a few kilometers. If we'd lowered the car windows, we could have touched the walls as we threaded the space between them. Finally we reached the exit, sealed shut by a second door. We approached at idling speed, hoping to God the thing would open. It did. We'd driven more deeply into the Alps but also more deeply into winter. The snow was abundant, the icicles thick and browned with age. We'd traveled through more than just solid matter to reach this place.

Behind us, the door closed.

We parked. We hiked, or tried to hike, but the roads were so slick we could only skid and fall. We eventually reached the reservoir. I tried to pretend I was enjoying myself. I wasn't. My friend teased me about being such a worrywart, and I finally stopped feigning otherwise and admitted—I wanted to go back. I did not find it fun to wait for our outcome to be decided. I wanted to
know
our outcome, even though the variables were tilting us toward the less desirable of the basic two. Slippery roads. Mechanical
doors that might or might not open. This situation reminded me not only of being in a novel but of writing one. It is equally no fun to be the author of scenarios where only a number of small outcomes are plausible. I knew the horror from both sides. In part this is why I'd told myself I was no longer, or not for the time being, writing novels. When writing novels I cannot seem to escape the trap of a plot. I imagine a fictional scenario and so quickly the march of consequence takes over. Things happen and so then other things must happen. I spend so much time working in the guts of this machine I feel less like a writer and more like the engineer of a high-performance vehicle. I am stuck perfecting the mechanics of happenings and coincidence. This is how plots take shape and achieve viability, at least when I'm wearing the hard hat—coincidence, recursion. In my defense, I am simply being mimetic. My life seems marked by a high degree of coincidence and recursion and synchronicity (as Durga the psychic confirmed). I know no other means to achieve plausibility.

I would like to learn other means.

My friend teased me for being such a timid, neurotic freak. She did it good-humoredly. We got in the car. The tunnel doors opened. The roads remained roads and did not cede to air. Back in town, we made a sunny lunch of cheese and bread we'd stolen from the breakfast buffet, and drank vodka, and grew giddy. We'd survived! We ran through the town like lunatics. We'd survived! We hiked up a hillside and peed in a sheep barn. We ended up at a store that sold sweaters. We made the shopkeeper drink with us. We asked her lots of questions about herself.
Who was she, no really, who?
She was Danish, not Swiss. She ran a bed-and-breakfast with her (also Danish) husband. She said, after a time, “I like your scarf.” I was wearing a
striped knit scarf. I told her that I'd bought it a few weeks ago in Berlin. I told her that I'd Googled the designer afterward to see what else she made, and everything was ugly, and this made me wonder if maybe I shouldn't love my scarf as much as I did.

The woman asked to see the tag. “Ah,” she said. “I know that woman. She used to sleep with my husband when we lived in Copenhagen. It's true, her stuff is shit.”

We wanted to ask—when did the designer sleep with her husband? While he was her husband? Before he was her husband? We left the shop in a whirl of questions. The day was not yet over—our outcomes, in theory, had yet to be decided. There could be an avalanche! My friend could get another stupid idea! But I suspected we were safe. We'd already had our unlikely coincidence, our moment of synchronicity or recursion. The machine had run its course. Our deaths would not be the likely outcome today.

Today I met for coffee a friend who, a few years ago, told me the most perplexing lie. She told me she was having an affair with a married man at work. (This part was true.) The only other details I gleaned from her confession—offhandedly mentioned—were these: The man lived in Connecticut. He had three children. She told me enough about him, in other words, that I could sleuthily Google her small company and discover his identity if I wanted to. Was I supposed to do this? I wasn't sure. To be safe, I didn't. I would respect, as she apparently wanted me to
respect (since she hadn't outright told me his name), both his and her privacy.

A week or so later, however, I decided oppositely. She'd felt bound by discretion but, at the same time, badly wanted me to know. Maybe she'd made a promise to the man, who was married and obviously trying to keep things under wraps, not to tell anyone, not a soul. She'd given me the search terms so that she could tell me without telling me. Obviously she
expected
me to Google her love affair. I did. The only man at her company who lived in Connecticut with three children was named Ryan. Ryan, I now knew without her needing to break her vow of secrecy, was the man in her office with whom she was sleeping.

A few months later, I was shopping with this same friend. (Obviously we are not such close friends that we see each other frequently.) I asked her how “things” were going. She said she was in love but miserable, and that the situation had become really complicated with Nick's wife.

“Nick,” I said. “Who's Nick?”

She seemed surprised that I shouldn't know who Nick was.

“Nick's the guy,” she said, leaving the rest unspoken. Nick's the married guy I'm having the affair with.

We kept shopping but I was quietly confused. I'd Googled all of the men in her workplace. I knew enough about Nick, in other words, to have confidently excluded him as a suspect. Nick lived in Brooklyn and had two kids. And yet she'd told me that the man with whom she was sleeping lived in Connecticut with three kids. Ryan was her only coworker who lived in Connecticut with three kids. So she'd known that if I Googled her affair using the data points she'd provided, that I'd be steered toward
the wrong man. Had she done this on purpose? Was this a test? If so, had I passed or had I failed? Years later, I still don't know.