(from Doctor Rocker’s office, chapters whatever… it’s in progress…)
See, there’s this story I’ve been working on for a long time. So long that I’m afraid it’ll take many a year just to go back through the notes. Tens of thousands of pages. Handwritten in ink and sometimes pencil. I’m considering hiring typists. It’s layered in there with many others, many, many other stories, more, a line here, a paragraph there, a note in a torn, twenty-some-maybe-more-year-old margin. Fading. But keeping. Safe.
It’s as if someone took seven completed books and shuffled them together like a deck of cards. That went through a shredder. This is my life’s work. Unshuffling. Sorting, and always translating of course.
My doctor suspects sleep apnea. I told him that it’s waking too. I just forget to breathe. It’s not so automatic a thing as so many other more well-rested minds may seem to think. If it’s not only while I’m sleeping then wouldn’t it be apnea? Simply apnea? I mean, let’s not drag sleep into this if it has no part. Maybe I’m just apnetic… is that even a word? I have to look up everything myself during my waking hours when it seems no one else does but they’re probably sleeping right now, it’s late… here it is, apneumatic, that’s the word. Maybe I’m apneumatic. Maybe I’m preoccupied. Or just occupied. So many unnecessary fixes, pre- and/or suf-, maybe I’ve been occupied since before the beginning. Maybe my mind is just occupied. I live here, for one. I wonder, is there a checkbox on my doctor’s checkbox check-up procedure for that? Apnea. On a clipboard. Check that. Or, maybe I have so many things in mind to remember or to look up regarding Time and the expanding distances on top of remembering to square the denominator in order to keep speed up to the task of keeping up with the increasingly rapidly outward-bound differentials and limits using only an expanding but evaporating superficial subset of symbols, all void but those on the stretching and thinning surface, one’d think that it would pop, eventually, pop pop goes a bubble or the weasel, but I only have so many brain cells available at any one given time and one of my characters in that story is currently using most of them to figure this out: If a denominator can be squared then what else could it be?, because we have a lot of catching up to do even without those growing deltas and dimensions, so I don’t know for sure because that’s where I’d have to stop sleeping long enough to look something up myself knowing full well that I’d be starting all over again, as far as gathering momentum is concerned anyhow, and/or possibly gathering quantum grad-school math credentials, more Time, so yeah, probably apnea, put me down for that– not the first definition listed as a “weakness of breath…,” but the second as “a temporary suspension of breathing…” could be the case and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit nor would (pre)occupation and the keeping up with the staying on top of Time’s spinning rings and the exponentially redoubling of their expanding ripples rippling unto space especially when you consider what kind of math or magic it takes to not only stop time, realtime, which isn’t difficult in itself, and start it moving again, also not overly difficult, but then to get it caught back up and in sync with realtime’s growing spheres, the exponentially outwardly expanding shape of the waves that circles make in becoming part of something greater than themselves, like spheres for example, that’s the tricky part that probably keeps me up, and my character too, apnea perhaps taxing our sleep, but it’s okay for him because it keeps him awake where he is, which is in a place where it’s good to be awake because awake is kinda vital to his survival at that moment and he also knows the center is moving, this one and that one too, a lot of math to do, but he can be trusted with the math on his end because that’s how I made him, trusty and careful with numbers and creative with equations, and he’d better be keeping up his field notes too because I lent him the brain cells, for now, and he also knows what creators do for a living so my guess is that he also feels the weight of waking responsibility. It could be the math even though I know better than to worry. It could be an approaching deadline, like a hopelessly back-sliding date stamped in the back flap of a lost library book. Expiring to dust. There’s this library book entitled “The Immortal Class” (Culley), currently residing on my bookshelf but was due back in Temple’s Paley Library on August 8, 2001, that I retrieved among many other things for safe keeping and cherishing from a long-dead best friend’s messenger bag. And knowing him it was riding around already long overdue in the bottom of his bag for an age and a day before that. It’s possible it wasn’t even his, it may have been a job, a delivery left undelivered because its carrier checked out. I don’t know but I know I’ll get there. I’ll return it when they have one of those fine-exempt, Olly Olly Oxen Free return days for Us Outlaws and Dead Messengers. I know it’s neither the numbers nor the notes, they are indeed being crunched and kept, so it could be sheer curiosity keeping me awake. Wonder. It could be that I’m a natural-born explorer temporarily docked here, now, for a refitting and new upholstery and the tracking down of a fence to move my anchors for their weight in coffee. I never did have much use for them, anchors, but I don’t think that that’s what’s keeping me up, it’s probably apnea, sleep and waking. Because I always seem to forget to breathe. Or perhaps I’m just too choosy about air. And I would never use more than is called for– waste not, want not. Which also applies to coffee beans and ink, I think. Maybe we rely too heavily on commas. Is there a checkbox for that?
I can hear my doctor now, sitting at his clothed and vased table by the window at the country club, because he lives in the city and likes being in clubs and it’s a nice day today, telling his friend, the anaesthesiologist, over the violets and a Gin & Tonic, “Yeah, I have this patient who just doesn’t need air.”
But here’s where the notes would stop because that’s one of those cursed words I would have to look up every time and this time I probably got lost in this language or in the country or in the background noise. I only just recently learned to spell connoisseur without stopping because I love roads and curves, especially so at speed.