She even wrote down the date of her discovery. January 20, 2011. She wrote it down right at the bottom of another list of other 20th of Januaries, noted in black marker. She finds it surprising that her discovery coincides with her list of 20th of Januaries. The sentence came to her while sleeping. Time doesn’t exist. Upon waking, she jumped out of bed, seized her list, scribbled January 20, 2011, adding alongside it: Time doesn’t exist. The fact that the nonexistence of time can be written down as a date and time — specifically a January 20 — made her smile. She wanted to mark this event in pencil at the bottom of her list. That way, she could unseat time at will, she could wring its neck. She counts them. That’s the number: nineteen 20th of Januaries. From the date of her discovery, nothing will ever be the same. Suffering. Pain. In order not to live these things, she’ll now be able to think about how atemporal they are.
As soon as the door opens, she jumps up, puts her scrap of paper in her pocket, and smiles. The smell of his pipe wafting through the room comforts her. She knows it’s her turn. Every Wednesday she waits for her shrink to appear in the doorway. Waving his hand, he motions to her to come in. She gets up and walks through hurriedly. As soon as the door shuts on them, Hanane is more fearless than ever.
“There is no time, doctor, there’s just a hole. My body is an hourglass. The moment copulates in my blood over and over again. Each second is a woman giving birth. I give birth to time ad infinitum. Do you understand? I am time. Today we are January 20, 2011 — that is to say nowhere. Time doesn’t exist.”
Hanane almost jumps out of her chair while speaking. Of all of this man’s patients, she’s the one who intrigues him the most. And exasperates him the most too. In nineteen years, even if her motor skills are in the process of being normalized, she nonetheless seems hopelessly stuck in mental lethargy. He experiences a feeling of powerlessness that he drowns out by puffing on his pipe. This morning, Hanane watches him preparing his tobacco like he always does at the beginning of a session. While filling up his pipe, he observes his patient’s hands. Sometimes it seems to Hanane that he doesn’t even see her. That he looks past her. She wiggles impatiently and continues on:
“We all have it all wrong. It isn’t us who are captives of time, but the reverse. I live this space, therefore time is. Its measure is our consciousness. I’m telling you that in reality my body contains blood. Of the past. Of the future. Everything is an illusion. Atemporal, time is its own contradiction. It simply takes revenge and makes death flow through us. Do you hear me? Time is envious of the full power of our imagination through which it was born. It’s unbearable to be a captive. Do you remember the hourglass that my father gave us? He was proud of his purchase: an eighteenth-century hourglass that he bought for next to nothing from an antique dealer at the Basta flea market. Of all the many objects he bought while antiquing there, he only exhibited this one — putting it right in the middle of the living room on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. Now it has been nineteen years that this object of measurement sits proudly, uselessly, in the same place. We, too, remain in the same place. The sand does nothing. Neither does time. Vanity lies in how space is organized.”
And then she stopped talking.
Of course he remembers the hourglass. Whenever she called for extra sessions, it would inevitably be because she’d been in contact with the object on the very same day. Merely seeing the hourglass would trigger a crisis in her. This conical object, its sand enclosed by two glass vials and connected by a hole, anguished her. At first, she remained planted for hours in front of the door to the formal living room where the object could be found. She never crossed the room with her eyes open. Whenever she approached the hourglass, she tensed up, squinted, and breathed deeply before continuing on her way.
Despite the shrink’s advice, her mother refused to move the object. Nonetheless, nineteen years earlier, it was she who had brought her daughter for a consultation, on the advice of a friend. She followed her friend’s directions to reach the clinic. After arriving at the top of the street, they passed by an old lady with disheveled hair and too much makeup who was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. Her comings and goings gave off the smell of cheap perfume.
“If you pass a crazy lady standing on the sidewalk,” her mother’s friend said, “that means you’re there. She rents a flat on the third floor; she’s a nymphomaniac at the end of her career who picks up clients on the street. She’s ugly and she stinks. Since no one wants her, she offers her body — for a fee — to construction workers to jump on after work. From time to time she finds clients who are in greater distress than she is who are interested in her decrepitude.” Then, her mother’s friend added seamlessly, “Avoid the crazy lady, bypass her, and ring for the second floor at the large gate just behind where she is.”
Her mother did as she was told. She pushed her daughter’s wheelchair, climbed up onto the sidewalk, and rang the building’s intercom behind the old lady. The man on the second floor who opened the door to them was charming. A tall man, he had a carefully tended mustache jutting out below severe, dark eyes. A certain intensity radiated from his profile. Hanane remained indifferent to men’s charm. She stared at her feet. The shrink motioned to them to come into the room in which there was a chaise lounge and two armchairs facing a desk, sitting behind which he seemed mostly to be protecting himself against the world. When he invited them to speak, Hanane said nothing.
“Doctor,” her mother said, “for three months my daughter has found it pointless to move, walk, or eat. She remains stuck in the same position — sitting, her eyes staring at her legs. She froze, all of a sudden, on the very same day that my husband bought an hourglass. As soon as he took it out of its package, my daughter stiffened up. At the beginning, she was still walking normally — though more slowly — but nothing foreshadowed her refusal to move at all. It happened suddenly, shortly after the hourglass was bought. In fact, she stopped walking completely when her father died. She abhors her feet. She accuses them of wanting to make her move ahead. The idea of putting one foot in front of the other terrorizes her. She even refused to take part in the funeral procession. We visited practically every doctor in the city and did all the tests you can do. Physiologically, they detected nothing abnormal. She still stares at her legs, repeating endlessly that it’s pointless to insist; she won’t move forward. Sometimes she attacks them, swears at them, and accuses them of wanting to betray her. She screams at them, tells them that she’s going die anyway, that she’s already dead. Other times, she says she’s going to be born later. I don’t understand her delusions at all. Her father’s death made her go mad... Even to sit her down on a wheelchair I had to twist her around...”
The shrink listened to the mother’s speech, his eyes riveted on the barely pubescent girl who gave no sign of life. And what if delusions consist of misunderstanding delusions themselves? He nodded his head before interrupting the mother and proposing that she take a forty-five-minute walk without her daughter. When she came back, he took her aside.
“Ma’am, your daughter suffers from an inversion of time and an inability to adjust her perception of time to its usual standards of measurement. For her, moving ahead is regressing into the past. She moves ahead by going back toward yesterday. In other words, her future has already happened. She speaks of an hourglass sitting on a mantelpiece. It seems that this object is the trigger for this inversion. The sand moving through the vial terrorizes her. For her, it would need to slide from bottom to top. She’s devastated by the idea that time moves forward.”