On this particular night, however, when Luc was watching Seuroq through the library window, something more extraordinary was happening than just remembering. Seuroq had indeed been thinking of Helen: but at the very moment Luc was in the courtyard trying to get the doctor’s attention, a number of split sensations were tumbling one on top of the other in a single second, initiated by the wind’s rustling the chains on the old courtyard wall and then the instant memory of a night in a very old hotel on the right bank of the city years before, when Helen found the card. Once, when Helen was still married to her first husband, she and Seuroq had a rendezvous in this old hotel; six years later, Helen having long since left her first husband and married Seuroq, the two of them went back as an anniversary of sorts. It was May of 1968. The next morning the tanks rolled down the rue d’X beneath their balcony on the way to the turmoil of the left bank, and the momentum of colossal historic events would steamroll whatever small personal memories of hotel rooms preceded them. Nonetheless, now eight months after Helen’s death, the wind rattled the chains and Seuroq thought of that night in the hotel room, when Helen lost an earring and they pulled the bed away from the corner and found the card in a crack where the walls of the room separated. On it was the picture of a dark woman, sitting on a throne holding a rod. A cat lay at her feet and the landscape around her was strewn with rubble; a white moon rose in a blue sky. “The Queen of Wands,” Helen announced, “is the card of passion.”
“You’re making that up,” Seuroq had retorted.
What provoked him to think of this? he wondered now in the library. If he had ever had the temperament for rage he might have now raged that everything, even the most absurd thing like the sound of chains in the wind, reminded him of Helen. I am haunted by associations that aren’t even my own, Seuroq thought with desolate bitterness.
The extraordinary thing was not that this entire recollection, in which the chains clanked in the wind and Seuroq and Helen made love in the old hotel on the rue d’X and the earring fell behind the bed and the bed was pulled away from the corner and she found the card tucked between where the walls separated, had taken a single second but rather that, shooting through his heart like a pang, it had taken a second. Because at the moment of the sound of the chains against the wall, Seuroq had looked up at the only particularly modern piece of technology in his library, a digital clock, which had said 5:55:55; and now, a second later, his reverie disrupted by the departure of his assistant Luc through the courtyard gate, it said 5:55:54. When he was a child he remembered waking sometimes in the middle of the night, on the eve of a holiday perhaps, to look at a clock and find the night had acquired time rather than spent it; even as a child he reasonably attributed this to his own greedy anticipation of the day. And in his grief over Helen he might have thought it was another trick on his perceptions, except it was hard to mistake an alignment like 5:55:55, and he was quite sure that a second later it said 5:55:54. Now the clock was ticking normally but there was no doubt in his mind that a second had been lost or, looked at another way, gained.
Being a scientist, Seuroq’s first assumption was not of the extraordinary but the ordinary; it was not that he had made some earthshaking discovery, but that he had a broken clock. He woke the next morning not to any new enthusiasm for scientific adventure but to the same depression he had felt every morning for the last eight months, the kind that didn’t want him to get out of bed, that didn’t even want him to wake up. As had been the case every morning, it took all his will to get dressed, have his coffee and bread and jam, and then unplug the clock from the library wall and take it down to the electronics store off St-Germain-des-Prés. On the boulevard along the way banners flapped halfheartedly in shop windows and from streetlights celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the First Republic in 1793—a muted hoopla, the French having always found the actual Revolution a happier contemplation than all that business with the rolling heads afterward. This was at a time, moreover, when people’s ideas about freedom were confused anyway, Moroccans and Slavs and gypsies overrunning the city, not to mention the beginning of the nervous exodus from Berlin. Even the banners themselves, as had been wryly pointed out in the newspapers and on TV, were in error. YEAR CC, they read, in reference to the revolutionary calendar adopted by the Republic and later discarded by Bonaparte; except that 1993 being the two-hundredth anniversary was therefore in fact the two-hundred-and-first year of the Republic, had the Republic lasted that long. YEAR CCI was what the banners should have read, before they were amended by either bad mathematics or a misplaced sense of poetry. “The clock’s broken,” Seuroq told the shopkeeper at the electronics store.
“Yes? It loses time? Or it’s fast,” said the shopkeeper.
“It runs backward.”
The shopkeeper, of course, found nothing wrong with the clock. “A power surge,” he suggested to Seuroq. “You live in a very old building, right?” But it didn’t seem to Seuroq that a power surge would have unwound the clock by a second; and though his head told him there simply had to be something wrong with the clock, Seuroq’s heart was beginning to hear the whisper of the last years of the second millennium. Since it was the heart speaking to him, he could not rule out the heart’s agenda — that the psychic debris of Helen’s death was gathering like autumn leaves in a storm, blowing together into a meaning; whether the universe cared, Seuroq needed such a meaning. Whether the universe cared, Seuroq needed to believe some purpose might be derived from Helen’s death; and he knew this, he recognized the heart’s agenda, and in the manner of the scientist tried to factor the heart into the equation. And so, as he returned to his university office for the first time in eight months, to pursue the theory brewing someplace between his heart and mind, he continued to insist on the possibility he was just being sentimental, deriving from Helen’s death nothing more than a needy wild conjecture. “What if,” he said to Luc, dismissing with the wave of a hand the assistant’s apology for having left the night before without a goodbye, “time is relative not simply, to the perspective of motion, not simply to what the eye sees from a passing train or a rocket hurtling at the speed of light, but to the heart as well, and the speed at which it travels?”
“What?” said Luc.
What was, Seuroq asked himself, the speed at which the heart travels, in the throes of love or grief or in the fall of its deepest trauma? Across the pages of his logs he calculated until the numbers available wouldn’t calculate anymore, at which point he used new ones, remembering as he did the obscure discovery of a reclusive American mathematician in Cornwall forty years earlier who had found a missing number between nine and ten. Beginning with a given premise, he charted the heart’s arc across the course of lifetime, from the moment it first took flight until the crash into pieces; and like the clanking of prisoners’ chains on a courtyard wall, his head now flooded with a hundred memories of her, ending with her question to him asked in their darkest hour, when they had come close to separating, when they almost lost each other. “But what does life mean, if one isn’t loved?” He had argued it might mean many things. But then he had reduced, in scientific fashion, the meaning of all of those things to a common denominator, and it was always love; and humbled by his wife’s observation, which she had made with no scientific principles whatsoever, which he had to prove to himself with theorems and calculations and equations even as she had known it in a moment’s intuition, he succumbed to the intangible meaning of everything they had been together, and it saved them, until cancer took her and nothing could save them.