It all started one of those late Thursday nights her first year of college when Elizabeth (Lizzy) was working on some essay or project (forgive me, I am telling this story second hand) that was due the next day. Her roommate was post-gaming with a few other rushees. Her phone was buzzing with incessant text messages from a jealous long-distance boyfriend. The subtlety of Marcel Proust or Newcombian Fatalism or the Law of Diminishing Returns was not revealing itself to her in this moment, and she found her anxiety going through the roof. She could feel her heart race, feel the adrenaline spike, and then bam! – well probably not “bam” – an incredible calm and stillness came over her.
Anyways.
All of a sudden she found that time had paused for everyone in their little dorm room, except it hadn’t stopped for her. The deep thudding of “Hollaback Girl” had been replaced by a diametrical quiet, the cloud of marijuana smoke exhaled from the balcony neighbor’s rolled cigarette hung unmoving in the air (odorless? Not odorless. I didn’t ask about odor). The time on her phone remained frozen at 1:37.
If it had been me, I would have probably gotten into some trouble – robbed a bank, played a prank on my obnoxious roommate, died of shock – but Lizzy was apparently one of those wonderfully nice, considerate, awfully fearful people. So she just used the time to finish her essay – or project or whatever – and then, completely exhausted, fell asleep in her bed even though her roommate and rushees had run out of mixers and begun mixing alcohol.
She slept a wink and then the next morning wasn’t the next morning, it wasn’t even the next evening. It was Saturday, as her rather annoyed roommate informed her, which is when Lizzy made her first mantra for manipulating time:
Always be sure to submit your work immediately when it’s done.
Which, when she revised, was:
Time catches up to you.
If time was a river, she could dam it for a while, turn its flow into a lake until the waters eventually built up and, you know, burst forth all at once.
So she was careful, she planned for when she thought she might need to pause the world again. Because when every second matters, you have to figure out what matters. So she gave up the long-distance boyfriend and any resemblance of a social life so that she could stretch her time as far as it could go with study and exercise and office hours and then spend the flood-times sleeping and watching reality TV and eating oreo ice cream, things she didn’t mind experiencing on fast-forward.
And it worked. She graduated at the top of her class. She got into a good law school, did well there, took a position as a junior associate at a major law firm in Manhattan (Don’t ask me which. I can never remember the names of law firms). She was young, in the city, with an enviable job, and a kean and developing fashion sense.
But it was more. The things in her life demanded more of her and she found the demand, well, demanding.
She began to borrow time against herself.
She scheduled a week’s time off after her first major brief was due. She devised plausible illnesses around her first quarter review. When the holidays came around, she invented work to tell her mother why she couldn’t come home this Thanksgiving.
But it’s been so long, her mother would say in that voice, since we saw you last.
And in those moments talking with her mother, texting her friends to beg off brunch plans, ghosting a man who was handsome but not obviously so, kind, and smart if also dumb in the way that men can be dumb, Lizzy would wonder how long she would have to pause the world to speed right past this pain. She revised her mantra:
Time is finite.
She decided to give it up, I mean. From then on, she told herself, she would live in the moment like everybody else. Starting after Thanksgiving.
After Christmas.
Once the Casseb lawsuit was settled.
The deal she had made in the past was for a planned day here, a weekend there. She found herself bartering now for minutes and half-hours. But a minute here, a half-hour there, and eventually you’re talking about serious time.
She’d miss calls, urgent interoffice messages from her boss, pause time to catch up, and find something else had gone missing. She was constantly standing up friends or dates and then apologizing profusely. She would try to make it all up on these spurts where she’d stay on pause for a day and half, two days, and then crash. She’d come back and it would be three days later and she’d have to figure out everything that happened and try to set things right.
When the long pause happened, she didn’t see it coming. It started with something so small. She missed the Monday morning train in to work.
It had been a very brief weekend. There were 8 minutes until the next one came. She thought she might pause time just to get a coffee. She was back on street level and half way down the block when the thought occurred to her. She was at least five minutes away from the train now, which means it would be ten minutes by the time she made it back.
Time was paused in one way, but in another it was already past, and she had missed the next train. She tried to do the math; if she took the train after that, how late would she be for the 8:30 meeting with the managing partners? Maybe she could take a cab, but that wouldn’t work. She couldn’t be sure she’d give the right directions, not to mention the absolute fright of the driver when she suddenly appeared in their cab. She knew she needed to unpause time, right then, at that very moment, and do her best to get to the meeting, however late, face the consequences.
But she couldn’t. The city was a flurry of frozen activity and the only thing she could hear was her breath, her heartbeat, her thoughts as she tried to usher time forward again. But the device, the mechanism, the thing in her mind that allowed her to unclench this muscle, was broken.
So she stayed on pause, and she meandered through the Upper East Side, thinking about all the things she was going to lose, the things she’d already missed out on. She went into a cafe and ate a single bite off every plate. On Park avenue she slipped through stores trying on clothes and shoes and jewelry and carefully putting them back in their exact place. She eventually wandered her way to her firm’s building. She went inside, went up to the offices, past the receptionist, the rows of paralegals, past her managing partner. She went into her office. She thought about writing a letter, something that might explain what happened.
She sat at her desk for hours without ever writing anything. Outside the rising sun hovered over Brooklyn indecisively. It felt so so late. She was tired. It had been a long morning and would be a longer morning yet.
And then she left her office, took off her heels, and began walking the dozens of blocks back to her apartment. She stepped into a favorite breakfast place and again ate a single bite off each plate, regretted ruefully that she hadn’t gotten stuck like this on an early Sunday afternoon. She went home, closed all the blinds, fashioned some bedroom drapes with blankets and Command hooks, and went to sleep.
It became a routine. She would wake up and find that the world was on a stand-still and she would slowly make her way to work (in more comfortable shoes), nibbling here and there, sometimes getting lost in a bookshop or boutique, finally arrive to work and then –
And then she would walk back. Stop at a bodega or a grocers to get necessities (she left money at first, but who keeps cash? She felt terrible about this).
Sometimes, as a break from this routine, she gave herself sick days, weeks, although it was hard to track time.
It had always been difficult to keep time when she was in the pause. Clocks were useless. The sunlight or lack thereof didn’t help. Before this, she had measured her time in tasks, in work. But she couldn’t bring herself to do anything. She was frozen too in this frozen city. And yes, she could walk and talk (to herself) and think, so Descartes would say that she was certainly living, but in terms of how she was living, what impact she had on the world and the lives of people around her, she felt worse than frozen, she felt rotten.
And all the while her debt in time accrued.
And she tried to track the time.
What she found, in the end, was that the only measure of time was her own body, the time between each meal (when she didn’t forget to eat), tracking each instance of deeply restful sleep, her menstrual cycle (though this was sometimes inconsistent because of how often she forgot to eat). At first she kept a record, but after a while it became overwhelming to look at.
She would hide her records from herself in places she felt terribly uncomfortable; her boss’s desk, the bedside table of a man she dated, at an unemployment office, her dentist’s. She hid these physical records and avoided them as long as she could until she had to go back and collect them to feel whole.
And sometimes she would disagree with herself. This sleep didn’t count or that meal was more of a snack. But after a while it was impossible to deny, the time paused had really been years. She could see it in her face, she could feel it in her muscles, she knew it in her teeth. The miles she had to walk each day now to find new restaurants in that morning sun and without running water or anyone to talk to. Existing in this state, she wondered if it was taking off more time from her life than if she let the thing play out.
Finally her mind, her body, her device finally let her unpause. And she watched the years go flooding by, watched her life go streaming past her, completely unable to intercede. She watched herself fail at the law firm, disappointing her boss, everyone. She watched a series of friends and boyfriends fall out of her life. She lost her apartment, and moved into another burrough. She gained weight and then lost a lot more. She watched herself make/interact with embarrassing posts on social media late at night.
Anyways.
That’s where the story ends as it was related to me and this group of us. I’ve embellished it here and there for you now, but this was the basic story and where my acquaintance left it off with a kind of ‘what do you think of that?’.
At this backyard party, at parties in general, I am a bit gun shy. I had an idea to say something but then someone else mentioned an article in Vox about work-life balance that was kind of related to the story and then the conversation went off in that direction. I went for another drink and when I came back the groups had shifted and reformed, like starlings. And the story got left behind like so many paper plates of appetizers.
I wasn’t happy where we left it. I believe in Jesus Christ and the rule of three, and we hadn’t gotten a third mantra. A story ends one way and it becomes a tragedy, a cautionary tale; there are wolves lurking in the forest, don’t trust strangers, indecision will kill you. Where we left it, Lizzy read (charitably) like a victim in the cog of the thing or (uncharitably) someone who couldn’t cut it. There was an implied question, ‘how would you spend the time?’, that I think steals from her experience and misses the other questions.
Like, what if it wasn’t a bad thing? What if it took that experience, and those years, for her to realize that she didn’t want to be a corporate lawyer, that the things she truly cared about weren’t aligned with the work she was doing at her law firm to help some hugely profitable company avoid paying their taxes? How long would it take for any of us, after spending so much time and effort and leasing so many rooms within ourselves to one whole life, to give it up and choose another?
What if she was doing really well now? She doesn’t post online as much, so her distant acquaintances wouldn’t know it, but all the time frozen within that moment allowed her to reset her values, what she was looking for in a job, a partner, from her parents. Maybe she realized she needed therapy.
It’s uncouth in contemporary fiction to come out like this and deliver a message, but here is what I take from her story:
Time is infinite, but we are finite.
We worry so much about our lives, but if time is a river, we are probably a shallow pool. We aren’t even a creek. Time runs over us and past us and is inconceivable to us and it doesn’t give us the least consideration.
I don’t know what that means to you. I don’t entirely know what that means to me. I took a class in college about folk tales, and I remember how different they were from the stories I thought I knew growing up. At the end of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, for example, the mermaid is scorned by the Prince who marries another. The little mermaid is wrought by her many sacrifices and thinks to kill him in revenge, but at the moment standing over him with a dagger, she decides against killing him. She throws herself into the ocean to die. She is transformed into sea foam and then becomes something like an angel, a guardian spirit of little children.
Maybe for Lizzy, frozen in time like that for all those years, her self became smaller and smaller and began to meddle in the lives of people around her, the people she moved between. Try to uncover the mysteries of their human hurts and the world, try to resolve them in some way. Provide food and clothing to the needy. Return all the lost jewelry a grandmother had hidden away from herself. Rehome at-risk salamanders. I don’t know.
And if Lizzy did that, nobody would know that part of her story. When time began again, for the people she helped, it would seem to them like nothing more than a stroke of luck.