A Tale for the Time Being (2 page)

The truth is that very soon I’m going to graduate from time, or maybe I shouldn’t say graduate because that makes it sound as if I’ve actually met my goals and deserve to move
on, when the fact is that I just turned sixteen and I’ve accomplished nothing at all. Zilch. Nada. Do I sound pathetic? I don’t mean to. I just want to be accurate. Maybe instead of
graduate, I should say I’m going to drop out of time. Drop out. Time out. Exit my existence. I’m counting the moments.

One . . .

Two . . .

Three . . .

Four . . .

Hey, I know! Let’s count the moments together!
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1.

A tiny sparkle caught Ruth’s eye, a small glint of refracted sunlight angling out from beneath a massive tangle of drying bull kelp, which the sea had heaved up onto the
sand at full tide. She mistook it for the sheen of a dying jellyfish and almost walked right by it. The beaches were overrun with jellyfish these days, the monstrous red stinging kind that looked
like wounds along the shoreline.

But something made her stop. She leaned over and nudged the heap of kelp with the toe of her sneaker then poked it with a stick. Untangling the whiplike fronds, she dislodged enough to see that
what glistened underneath was not a dying sea jelly, but something plastic, a bag. Not surprising. The ocean was full of plastic. She dug a bit more, until she could lift the bag up by its corner.
It was heavier than she expected, a scarred plastic freezer bag, encrusted with barnacles that spread across its surface like a rash. It must have been in the ocean for a long time, she thought.
Inside the bag, she could see a hint of something red, someone’s garbage, no doubt, tossed overboard or left behind after a picnic or a rave. The sea was always heaving things up and hurling
them back: fishing lines, floats, beer cans, plastic toys, tampons, Nike sneakers. A few years earlier it was severed feet. People were finding them up and down Vancouver Island, washed up on the
sand. One had been found on this very beach. No one could explain what had happened to the rest of the bodies. Ruth didn’t want to think about what might be rotting inside the bag. She flung
it farther up the beach. She would finish her walk and then pick it up on the way back, take it home, and throw it out.

2.

“What’s this?” her husband called from the mud room.

Ruth was cooking dinner, chopping carrots and concentrating.

“This,” Oliver repeated when she didn’t answer.

She looked up. He was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, dangling the large scarred freezer bag in his fingers. She’d left it out on the porch, intending to deposit it in the trash,
but she’d gotten distracted.

“Oh, leave it,” she said. “It’s garbage. Something I picked up on the beach. Please don’t bring it in the house.” Why did she have to explain?

“But there’s something in it,” he said. “Don’t you want to know what’s inside?”

“No,” she said. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

He brought it in anyway and laid it on the kitchen table, scattering sand. He couldn’t help it. It was his nature to need to know, to take things apart and sometimes put them back
together. Their freezer was filled with plastic shrouds containing the tiny carcasses of birds, shrews, and other small animals that their cat had brought in, waiting to be dissected and
stuffed.

“It’s not just one bag,” he reported, carefully unzipping the first and laying it aside. “It’s bags within bags.”

The cat, attracted by all the activity, jumped up onto the table to help. He wasn’t allowed on the table. The cat had a name, Schrödinger, but they never used it. Oliver called him
the Pest, which sometimes morphed into Pesto. He was always doing bad things, disemboweling squirrels in the middle of the kitchen, leaving small shiny organs, kidneys and intestines, right outside
their bedroom door where Ruth would step on them with her bare feet on her way to the bathroom at night. They were a team, Oliver and the cat. When Oliver went upstairs, the cat went upstairs. When
Oliver came downstairs to eat, the cat came downstairs to eat. When Oliver went outside to pee, the cat went outside to pee. Now Ruth watched the two of them as they examined the contents of the
plastic bags. She winced, anticipating the stench of someone’s rotting picnic, or worse, that would ruin the fragrance of their meal. Lentil soup. They were having lentil soup and salad for
dinner, and she’d just put in the rosemary. “Do you think you could dissect your garbage out on the porch?”

“You picked it up,” he said. “And anyway, I don’t think it’s garbage. It’s too neatly wrapped.” He continued his forensic unpeeling.

Ruth sniffed, but all she could smell was sand and salt and sea.

Suddenly he started laughing. “Look, Pesto!” he said. “It’s for you! It’s a Hello Kitty lunchbox!”

“Please!” Ruth said, feeling desperate now.

“And there’s something inside . . .”

“I’m serious! I don’t want you to open it in here. Just take it out—”

But it was too late.

3.

He had smoothed the bags flat, laid them out on top of one another in descending order of size, and then sorted the contents into three neat collections: a small stack of
handwritten letters; a pudgy bound book with a faded red cover; a sturdy antique wristwatch with a matte black face and a luminous dial. Next to these sat the Hello Kitty lunchbox that had
protected the contents from the corrosive effects of the sea. The cat was sniffing at the lunchbox. Ruth picked him up and dropped him on the floor, and then turned her attention to the items on
the table.

The letters appeared to be written in Japanese. The cover of the red book was printed in French. The watch had markings etched onto the back that were difficult to decipher, so Oliver had taken
out his iPhone and was using the microscope app to examine the engraving. “I think this is Japanese, too,” he said.

Ruth flipped through the letters, trying to make out the characters that were written in faded blue ink. “The handwriting’s old and cursive. Beautiful, but I can’t read a word
of it.” She put the letters down and took the watch from him. “Yes,” she said. “They’re Japanese numbers. Not a date, though. Yon, nana, san, hachi, nana. Four, seven,
three, eight, seven. Maybe a serial number?”

She held the watch up to her ear and listened for the ticking, but it was broken. She put it down and picked up the bright red lunchbox. The red color showing through the scarred plastic was
what had led her to mistake the freezer bag for a stinging jellyfish. How long had it been floating out there in the ocean before washing up? The lunchbox lid had a rubber gasket around the rim.
She picked up the book, which was surprisingly dry; the cloth cover was soft and worn, its corners blunt from rough handling. She put the edge to her nose and inhaled the musty scent of mildewed
pages and dust. She looked at the title.

“ ‘
À la recherche du temps perdu
,’ ” she read. “Par Marcel Proust.”

4.

They liked books, all books, but especially old ones, and their house was overflowing with them. There were books everywhere, stacked on shelves and piled on the floor, on
chairs, on the stairway treads, but neither Ruth nor Oliver minded. Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books. And indeed, buying books was her consolation for
moving to a remote island in the middle of Desolation Sound, where the public library was one small humid room above the community hall, overrun with children. In addition to the extensive and
dog-eared juvenile literature section and some popular adult titles, the library’s collection seemed largely to comprise books on gardening, canning, food security, alternative energy,
alternative healing, and alternative schooling. Ruth missed the abundance and diversity of urban libraries, their quiet spaciousness, and when she and Oliver moved to the small island, they agreed
that she should be able to order any book she wanted, which she did. Research, she called it, although in the end he’d read most of them, while she’d read only a few. She just liked
having them around. Recently, however, she had started to notice that the damp sea air had swollen their pages and the silverfish had taken up residence in their spines. When she opened the covers,
they smelled of mold. This made her sad.

“In search of lost time,” she said, translating the tarnished gilt title, embossed on the red cloth spine. “I’ve never read it.”

“I haven’t, either,” said Oliver. “I don’t think I’ll be trying it in French, though.”

“Mm,” she said, agreeing, but then she opened the cover, anyway, curious to see if she could understand just the first few lines. She was expecting to see an age-stained folio,
printed in an antique font, so she was entirely unprepared for the adolescent purple handwriting that sprawled across the page. It felt like a desecration, and it shocked her so much she almost
dropped the book.

5.

Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye.

Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

Ruth stared at the page. The purple words were mostly in English, with some Japanese characters scattered here and there, but her eye wasn’t really taking in their meaning as much as a
felt
sense, murky and emotional, of the writer’s presence. The fingers that had gripped the purple gel ink pen must have belonged to a girl, a teenager. Her handwriting, these loopy
purple marks impressed onto the page, retained her moods and anxieties, and the moment Ruth laid eyes on the page, she knew without a doubt that the girl’s fingertips were pink and moist, and
that she had bitten her nails down to the quick.

Ruth looked more closely at the letters. They were round and a little bit sloppy (as she now imagined the girl must be, too), but they stood more or less upright and marched gamely across the
page at a good clip, not in a hurry, but not dawdling, either. Sometimes at the end of a line, they crowded each other a little, like people jostling to get onto an elevator or into a subway car,
just as the doors were closing. Ruth’s curiosity was piqued. It was clearly a diary of some kind. She examined the cover again. Should she read it? Deliberately now, she turned to the first
page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people’s business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this
feeling.

Hi!
, she read.
My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? . . .

6.

“Flotsam,” Oliver said. He was examining the barnacles that had grown onto the surface of the outer plastic bag. “I can’t believe it.”

Ruth glanced up from the page. “Of course it’s flotsam,” she said. “Or jetsam.” The book felt warm in her hands, and she wanted to continue reading but heard
herself asking, instead, “What’s the difference, anyway?”

“Flotsam is accidental, stuff found floating at sea. Jetsam’s been jettisoned. It’s a matter of intent. So you’re right, maybe this is jetsam.” He laid the bag back
down onto the table. “I think it’s starting.”

“What’s starting?”

“Drifters,” he said. “Escaping the orbit of the Pacific Gyre . . .”

His eyes were sparkling and she could tell he was excited. She rested the book in her lap. “What’s a gyre?”

“There are eleven great planetary gyres,” he said. “Two of them flow directly toward us from Japan and diverge just off the BC coastline. The smaller one, the Aleut Gyre, goes
north toward the Aleutian Islands. The larger one goes south. It’s sometimes called the Turtle Gyre, because the sea turtles ride it when they migrate from Japan to Baja.”

He held up his hands to describe a big circle. The cat, who had fallen asleep on the table, must have sensed his excitement, because he opened a green eye to watch.

“Imagine the Pacific,” Oliver said. “The Turtle Gyre goes clockwise, and the Aleut Gyre goes counterclockwise.” His hands moved in the great arcs and spirals of the
ocean’s flow.

“Isn’t this the same as the Kuroshio?”

He’d told her about the Kuroshio already. It was also called the Black Current, and it brought warm tropical water up from Asia and over to the Pacific Northwest coast.

But now he shook his head. “Not quite,” he said. “Gyres are bigger. Like a string of currents. Imagine a ring of snakes, each biting the tail of the one ahead of it. The
Kuroshio is one of four or five currents that make up the Turtle Gyre.”

She nodded. She closed her eyes and pictured the snakes.

“Each gyre orbits at its own speed,” he continued. “And the length of an orbit is called a tone. Isn’t that beautiful? Like the music of the spheres. The longest orbital
period is thirteen years, which establishes the fundamental tone. The Turtle Gyre has a half tone of six and a half years. The Aleut Gyre, a quarter tone of three. The flotsam that rides the gyres
is called drift. Drift that stays in the orbit of the gyre is considered to be part of the gyre memory. The rate of escape from the gyre determines the half-life of drift . . .”

He picked up the Hello Kitty lunchbox and turned it over in his hands. “All that stuff from people’s homes in Japan that the tsunami swept out to sea? They’ve been tracking it
and predicting it will wash up on our coastline. I think it’s just happening sooner than anyone expected.”

1.

There’s so much to write. Where should I start?

I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote back this:
.
¹⁰