I closed my eyes. All this time, it had been me. Vincent and Edwin had seen the anomaly because I’d been with them in the forest. I must not have been close enough to Edwin to see it myself, that first time in 1912. I finished the lullaby, and heard Gaspery’s applause.
He stood before me, clapping awkwardly. I was so embarrassed for him—for me? for us?—that it was difficult to meet his eyes, but I managed it. I was grateful that my dog had slept through my younger self’s incompetence.
“Hello,” he said brightly, in a jarringly imperfect accent. “My name’s Gaspery-Jacques Roberts. I’m conducting some research on behalf of a music historian, and I wondered if I could possibly buy you some lunch.”
13
“How would I describe my life?” I repeated, stalling. “Well, son, that’s a big question. I don’t know what I can tell you.”
“Maybe you could tell me a little about what your days are like. If you don’t mind. I haven’t turned the recorder on yet, by the way. This is just us talking.”
I nodded. I would keep him off-balance. I would quote Shakespeare at him because I knew he didn’t know his Shakespeare yet. I would call him son because he hated being called son, and his irritation would distract him. I would bring up my dead wife because he was embarrassed by his own failed marriage. I would make him feel insecure about his accent, because accents and dialects were what he’d struggled with the most in his training. But first I would lull him with the quiet of my life.
“Well,” I said. “I stand there for a few hours a day, playing the violin, while my dog naps at my feet, and the commuters dash by and throw change at me. They move with inhuman speed, the commuters. It took me some time to get used to this.”
“Are you from around here?” the investigator asked.
“A farm just outside the city. Lived there all my life. But listen, son, by the time I took over the farm, small-scale farming had become mostly a matter of watching. You watch the robots move over the fields. You tinker with their settings sometimes but they’re well-made, they adjust themselves mostly, they don’t need you for much. You play your violin in the field just to keep yourself occupied. In the distance the airships rise with the speed of fireflies, but they’re faster up close.”
When I played my violin at the airship terminal I sometimes thought it was as if the airships were falling upward, gravity reversed. They filled with a cargo of blank-faced commuters, then fell toward the sky. The commuters glanced at me sometimes as they passed, tossed coins into my hat. I watched their ships carry them up into the early morning, to jobs in Los Angeles, Nairobi, Edinburgh, Beijing. I thought of their souls moving fast through the morning sky.
“When my wife died,” I told the investigator, “I kept up the farm for another year and then thought, to hell with it.”
He was nodding, feigning interest, trying not to be nervous, trying to convince himself that he was doing a good job. What I didn’t tell him: I felt that without Talia I might disappear into thin air, out there by myself. Just me and the dog and the farm robots, day after day. Loneliness wasn’t a strong enough word for it. All that empty space. At night I sat on the porch with my dog, avoiding the silent house. Playing that game kids play, where you squint at the moon and half-convince yourself that you can see the brighter spots of the colonies on its surface. Distant over the fields, the lights of the city.
“Is it okay if I switch on the recorder?” the investigator asked.
“Go ahead.”
“Okay, it’s on. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.”
“You’re welcome. Thank you for lunch.”
“Now, just for the benefit of my recording, you’re a violinist,” my earlier self said.
I followed the script. “I am,” I said. “I play in the airship terminal.”
When I wasn’t playing my violin in the airship terminal I liked to walk my dog in the streets between the towers. In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.
Notes and Acknowledgments
The quote referenced on this page, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” is from John Buchan’s 1919 novel Mr. Standfast.
The riff on this page re: chickens coming home to roost—“It’s never good chickens”—is paraphrased from something the American poet Kay Ryan said when we were at a literary festival together in 2015.