Now, scribbling his way through his laboratory at the university, he was flooded by so many memories of Helen he could barely keep up with them, scrambling to translate them into his equations while, over the course of the day and then the next and the next, administrators and other scientists watched him from the hallway through the little window of his door. There was the time he and Helen had driven up the coast and she had unbuttoned his fly while he was driving, and there was the lighthouse on the rocks above the waves as she touched him, and the time they house-sat for a couple in Normandy and for dinner she blackened the fish the way they had it in New Orleans that time they went to the jazz festival, and how in New Orleans at night they slept with the doors of their hotel room open because it was so humid, and the dress he bought her in London when they both knew he couldn’t afford it, and how they argued over dinner that night in Vienna about whether she should get a job — she said yes and he said no — and the time a thief stole a bag of asparagus she had just bought in the market off the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie and she was furious when she went back to get some more and insisted none of the asparagus was as good as what she’d just bought, until the grocer took insult and Seuroq started laughing about it.
And the time her mother died, and then the first miscarriage, and then the other one, until they ran out of chances; and the way he came home from the hospital after the second one and walked the house with the baby’s blankets in his arms, as he’d practiced doing all during Helen’s pregnancy, because he was terrified he wouldn’t know how to carry a baby, and how she had lost both the generation before her and the one behind her and remained undefeated even as she seemed born to such losses, until she was lost to him eight months ago and it seemed to him he should have been the one to go before her because she was the one that life had equipped with the wisdom for loss. As he was barraged by one memory after another, he calculated all the more maniacally, until he had exhausted every possible trajectory of the human heart and then two hearts in tandem and then three, until he came to the heart of history.
Beyond three hearts in tandem was history, and when he reduced the meaning of history he was left not with the common denominator of love but rather that of freedom. And then his calculations split off in two directions, one into the next room off his laboratory, the occupants of which he scribbled out of their occupancy until they were standing in the hallway with the others, watching him through the window; and the other into the hallway itself, scientists and assistants and administrators backing away from him down the hall as though he were something oozing out of the ground. One calculation based itself on history’s denial of the human heart and the other on history’s secret pursuit of the heart’s expression: if one heart’s story was the pursuit and denial of love and if history was the pursuit and denial of freedom, what lay at the arcs’ intersection except the missing moments consumed by memory, the second that was consumed by a memory and then given back to time, when the clock unwound itself from 5:55:55 to 5:55:54? If it was the lesson of the early days of the Twentieth Century that the truth could be dislocated from time, the lesson of the waning days of the second millennium was the dislocation from time of memory, by which the truth is surmised. A wind had blown and chains had rustled against the wall and Seuroq had a memory of a weekend in a hotel with Helen that had nothing to do with chains whatsoever. Perhaps, he thought at first, the association was born of some unconscious conviction that a ghost had brushed past the chains rather than the wind, but once he identified this conviction he had no sense of having held it: it was the sound of the chains, not their movement, that had triggered the memory, a sound that had nothing to do with a weekend in a hotel, and that was when Seuroq realized that a stranger’s memory of the sound of chains had randomly coupled with his, as though memory were a restless thing freefloating in the twilight, like dying ions or dandelion wings, or black notes falling from a sheet of music.
By the time Paris had settled its celebration of long-failed Republics and dead calendars, by the time the misnomered banners had fallen from the windows and the streetlights, Seuroq had found the missing day.
In the labs and the hallways, the scientists and assistants and administrators were giving him a wide berth. They watched his mad numbers as he moved from log to log and desk to desk and blackboard to blackboard. The university called in doctors and wardens in white coats and a couple of police to coax Seuroq out of his frenzy, even to return him peacefully to the numbing dead grief of his mournless mourning; but Seuroq didn’t acknowledge them from the fever of his factoring anymore than he had acknowledged Luc in the courtyard. Finally they sent in Luc himself. From the laboratory doorway Luc inched forth as though to nab a butterfly in the cup of his hands. “Dr. Seuroq?” he whispered, and Seuroq answered nothing until, with Luc only feet away, the old scientist suddenly threw up one hand to signal he was on the verge of a conclusion. He dropped his pencil and raised his eyes to the window.
“What is it, doctor?” Luc said very quietly.
He was humoring the old man at first, but then Seuroq started telling him about the missing day, and the more he talked the more frightened Luc became, because either the old man was insane, which unsettled every flimsy foundation a young researcher like Luc had established for himself, or the old man was quite sane, in which case none of the foundations were going to matter much anyway. There it was, Seuroq insisted, pointing to the timeline at his fingertips, a missing day that lay between the 31st of December 1999, and the first of January 2000—twenty hours and seven minutes and thirty-four seconds to be precise, the accumulation, according to Seuroq’s calculations, of all the moments over the millennium that grief and passion had consumed from memory and then dribbled back into the X of the arcs of history and the heart, past and present and future rushing toward a dense hole of time into which all of history would collapse. An amazing dark temporal star weighing 72,454 seconds that hovered between the millennia, on the other side of which everything the past millennium had ever meant might be utterly different, everything history had claimed might utterly shift, the reducibles of freedom succumbing to the reducibles of love, or perhaps vice versa.
Even now Seuroq believed he could sense the acceleration toward the vortex; and when night finally fell on this missing day between the 31st of December and the first of January, we might all be anywhere, or nowhere, or more precisely anywhen or nowhen, since this was not a black hole of space but time. We might come out in a lurch onto the year 2493, Seuroq thought to himself, and then upbraided himself for such a banal conclusion, not having quite yet reached the further one, that beyond such a day time would measure itself not by the numbers of the clock but of the psyche, which was to say that history would measure itself not by years but by memory, where the heart is a country. Perhaps on the other side of the 32nd of December or January 0, however one might mark it, one would see that the millennium had already begun much earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, perhaps, or in 1945 when we gazed into the nuclear mirror, or more likely sometime in the middle of an anonymous night in an anonymous hotel room when someone exchanged freedom for love or love for freedom, or entered some irrevocably compromised bargain with a certain happiness that memory doomed to misery before it ever had the chance to remember itself, when the promises of history or the heart first showed the signs of their own betrayal. Perhaps now, in 1993, it was already the Third Millennium, or perhaps it was the ur-Millennium, and a thousand years didn’t have anything to do with anything, it was just a presumption, like a republic or a reich.