What happens when you don’t complain is that solutions find you. On a Tuesday morning, after we’d made love, Phil lay next to me and said, Bambi, just relax now, can you do that for me? I said nothing, but he knew I meant yes. He did all kinds of things with his fingers then: nothing too sexual, just tapping, touching without touching. He said, Close your eyes, and when I did, it felt like I had a blanket. This went on for a while. Then he said, How about we do this, and when the time-stop is over we make a baby.
I never knew that this was what I wanted. But now I knew, and all of a sudden it was the only thing. My breathing hastened. That’s right, he said. What do you say?
I had to ask now. What about your wife, I said. Long gone, he said, and then again, long gone, and the way he said it answered the question I hadn’t asked. I knew at that moment that our first encounter had not been random; knew that he’d already had intentions back then, the beginning of a plan. Whoever he’d been with before me had probably become unnecessary to his plan, the way I almost had. I knew all that, but I didn’t care. There was no effort left in me, except the kind that makes you get up in the morning to braid a child’s hair, write a note for school.
* * *
The next day, time stopped again. I still experienced it as two entirely disparate events, in two different sites — my brain being one, the world another. But by now I knew better. Phil was the happiest I’d ever seen him. He couldn’t stop talking. In our apartment, enthusiasm was everywhere, and in many ways we weren’t part of the world anymore; outside, people were developing all the regular time-stop symptoms, reenacting patterns of behavior that were long ago declared detrimental, against studies and cold data, against the soft whisper of their own inner voice. At airports, riots were erupting. Airline company reps, and even the pilots themselves, would try to reason with the crowds; there was obviously no way to ensure safe travel, no way to synchronize sky traffic, and you’d think that people would understand that. Instead, they threw stones, broke glass, shouted things like “But I need to get to my convention, asshole.”
On street corners, huge piles of microwaves grew, their frustrated owners unwilling to remember that at some point time would resume, that when others stepped back into their own kitchens and turned on cooking timers — casually, as if they’d always been able to do so — they, the people who were quick to discard, quick to give up hope, would form the famous ten-mile lines outside the various Baking Solutions stores.
This is the truth: there is no objective reason for time-stops to be as devastating as they are. For example: food can be tricky, sure, but no more people die of starvation during time-stops than at any other time (supplies always last until the manufacturing of Synthetic Food is in full force, and generally speaking, people are a lot less hungry). And not being able to travel by plane is limiting, yes, but in fact the difficulty of going anywhere else allows you to more fully be where you are. Really, the worst thing about time-stops is that they make people believe that time is something like oxygen.
* * *
Phil and I were working around the clock, so to speak. I followed every instruction he gave me. Together, we built a big device that looked like a satellite dish, and another one that Phil called the Medusa — a big silver ring with eight arms like hooks. Both fit in what used to be my study, after we took everything else out. The satellite dish, facing the window, was meant to receive much of the energy saved by the time-stop (up to 70 percent of it, Phil said proudly), and the Medusa was to store that energy and later convert it into a greasy blue liquid that Phil would use to make his products — mainly pills (those known today as T. pills) and these oddly shaped metal disks that allow some people to relive scenes from their old lives. (I personally see nothing but gray snow on my screen every time, which has been the subject of quite a few clashes between us — Phil believes that I’m blocking the feed on purpose somehow.)
We worked together, but it never felt that way; often I would shout out to Phil only to discover he was standing right next to me. I asked as little as possible about it all, afraid of the information as if it were another person lurking around the house. It was clear — this was Phil’s main course, the one he’d been waiting for his entire life. I think he assumed I would come around eventually. I was waiting for him to be full, and trying not to resent him for his undying hunger. Waiting, when time is standing still, is not an experience I wish on anyone with a beating heart.
* * *
I used to be different; I used to find comfort in time-stops. I’d close my eyes and feel like I was in some underground maze; I couldn’t get anywhere, but I wasn’t supposed to. I try to remind myself of that every time I open my eyes to a new gray day. Still, I often forget.
* * *
This all happened a long time ago, though experts would argue that I can’t technically say that. That’s what it feels like, anyway, and I am now part of the Time Language Movement, so using these terms is a cause I spend my days fighting for. We believe in the power of language, and we believe that by using time expressions we can, at the very least, create an illusion of passing time so strong that it functions as the real thing in essentially every way.
Nobody in the movement knows about Phil, or about my involvement in what is now referred to as The Big One. I believe that, since we’re all working for the same cause, none of that should matter. Phil, in turn, believes Language people are no different from Time Counters and other types of lunatics.
These days, he mainly operates from what he calls the Factory — a huge facility just outside of town, where they used to make cribs before everyone stopped needing to buy new ones. I know where it is, but I’ve never been there. If things between us were different, if I woke up one day and believed in his operation and wanted to do my part, I imagine he would take me over, give me the grand tour. I imagine he’d want me to fully understand the mechanics behind the dam that holds time back. I imagine he’d be happy. And some days I think Why not? Why not make him happy? But I know this: we are playing against each other in a staring match; if I look down, I have lost, and Phil will never change. And perhaps that’s true anyway, perhaps I have already lost.
I still practice my profession. I rent a small bath at a Soaping Inc. downtown. They call me every time one of my clients shows up, and I usually drop everything and go. It’s a good arrangement for me, given that I can’t see clients at home anymore; letting strangers into the apartment is exactly the kind of mistake Phil would never make. If anyone ever knew enough to come looking, the files stacked in his study (once mine, then ours, now his) would expose everything. It sometimes seems that when I so much as look at them in passing, he can sense it.
There’s no phone at the Factory, no way to reach Phil when he’s there, and yet every morning before he leaves, he says, I’ll be at the Factory, as if we’re already a family, and maybe our daughter would have an earache and I would need him to come home.
* * *
Yesterday, we were sitting on the balcony, drinking champagne and eating crackers. The dim gray light outside was getting to me, the way it often does. I looked at the color of the champagne in my glass, then at the gray light, and again, and again. I was trying to concentrate so that one would somehow spark the other, but whatever gift I had, it’s gone; I sold it for hope.
Phil said, Bambi, that’s cute, what you’re trying to do. He was mocking me, and it hurt, of course, but I’ve gotten used to this kind of pain. I looked at him. Sometimes he says unkind things but you can still see kindness underneath them. At the end of each evening, before we go to sleep, he goes to the kitchen and checks my vitamin jar, to make sure I’ve taken all my Nutrient Pills for the day. I said, What about what you promised me, Phil? What about the baby? I’d intended never to ask him that, but all of a sudden I forgot why.