Beyond Measure. Rachel Z. Arndt
The night I was born, while my mom was in labor, my dad called my grandfather to ask him to take the dog out. Right after, my mom’s doctor showed up, in white pants and a pastel blouse, arriving straight from a Memorial Day barbecue. She hadn’t had time to change.
Because I was born early, there was, until I was eight months old, no place for me on the growth charts. I’d jumped the gun so much that I couldn’t even be counted, and everyone else couldn’t be my context. It was as if I existed in a vacuum in which time was absolute and I was never even early (or late) because there was no one else to show up.
Being late is needing an excuse: I was stuck on the train, the train never came, I spilled a bottle of lotion, I forgot my umbrella. The excuse can be real or fake—it matters only for the one saying it, not the excuser. The trouble comes when a real excuse was in the repository of fake ones, and the late person feels like she’s wasting it when she has to use it as truth.
I was stuck at the hospital for twenty-five days. When my parents took me home, I came with a beige apnea monitor the size of a picnic basket. For three months, an alarm would sound if I stopped breathing or if the wires disconnected. Every day no alarm, the same data, and time was passing, and my parents were growing tired of the testing at home and the testing at the hospital and finally, they said, Enough.
Even then you were early, my mom told me once. She meant impatient.
My first phrase was “not a baby, a girl.” Already I was defining myself in terms of time, on a timeline on which each moment of now passes inexorably from the future into the past, per Aristotle: “Whenever we notice the before and after, then we say that there is time.”
My mom did not worry about me being born early. She wonders now why she didn’t worry more.
It can be too early to tell, too late to make a difference. It can be too early in the morning, too late at night. It can be an early surprise or a late change, an early predictor or a late adjustment.
It can be early days, like when I first embarked on the project of being late more often. I’d sometimes succeed in showing up at the college dining hall after whomever I was meeting, but mostly I’d fail and would still get there first, ticking away time by doing the student-newspaper crossword.
My Sunday paper arrives late Saturday night, and whenever I come home to it and reach down to pick up the puckered blue bag, I like to think I’m time-traveling. But then I feel older, and I remember I’m supposed to be worried about meeting the deadlines of growing up.
For the past week my computer has been unable to open the “Time” Wikipedia page. It spends a few seconds frantically loading and reloading the site before it gives up and goes gray, telling me an error has occurred.
The only rule is time, but really the only rule is expectations.
Inside a spansule of Adderall are tiny beads, and inside each of these is a mix of salts. These salts in spheres in capsules can make a person stay awake. They can also make the restless focused and the focused restless. They give me what I imagine to be a healthy level of alertness, and even when I fall asleep just minutes after taking one, upright on the couch or defeated back in bed, I am glad for them, because it is against this medicine that I measure possibility—of being awake, of being with other people, of being. Because of that measurement, I have something to focus on, always, something to hold my unrelated anxieties. Because of that measurement, I can be sure I’m trying to be productive, and these days, that’s the best you can ask of someone, at least in public.
In the relative private of my friend’s car, driving to Minneapolis along highways flanked by fields both fallow and full, I was getting tired. So I reached into the tiny pants pocket with my pointer and thumb and tweezed out my pocket pill, glanced away from the billboard-free road to look at my friend and make sure she was still reading while I instinctively swished around some spit, and dry-swallowed it. She knew I took the pills, but still, I didn’t want to call attention to it, because she was a new friend, and I was trying to seem “normal,” an effort I air-quoted when I thought it, as if protecting my ego from its own judgment. We were going to Minneapolis to see the Nine Inch Nails, a band I lied about liking because I was trying to make friends in the town I’d moved to a month before.
The pill wasn’t enough. I knew it wouldn’t be because it never is when I drive, but I still hope, every time, thinking that maybe I’ll have calibrated everything well enough for the medicine to obviate the Coke Zero or iced coffee I usually drink on long drives, their caffeinated push augmented by the sleep-disabling need to pee. Inevitably, I overdo the caffeination, but it doesn’t become apparent until I arrive and find myself shaking and sweaty as I unpack the car with the manic enthusiasm of someone looking for a misplaced wallet in her own house, tearing through drawers and moving every object because movement feels like a solution.
When we got to Minneapolis, I raced to get everything out of the car and into the place we were staying, the house of my friend’s friends, who were out of town. As my friend punched the code into the digital front door lock, I wondered if I should ask for it, driven by the need to plan and the tendency to always expect the worst. The keys depressed and popped out one by one, each depression triggering the spring-out of the last button. Inside, trying to make my avoidance of the house’s two cats seem like I was restless, not afraid of cats, I worried that I’d taken the pill too early in the day, that it wouldn’t last through the concert, despite the caffeine rushing me unasleep as if through subtraction.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.