The "O" in "NOW" - A short story.

The “O” in “Now” - copyright-George G. Epp

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

(From T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton)

Were there no dog doing odd gyrations in the street in front of the post office, Sol would be spending less time on the balcony and the unbelievable coincidence would not happen. The purpose behind the canine’s pirouetting is of no particular interest to Sol; it's the spectacle that rivets him. Over the tips of the spruce trees backgrounding the post office, sun dogs form tall pillars as if framing the red brick of that ancient structure—with the date of its nativity, 1902, above the shiny aluminum-and-glass doors. So anachronistic, it seems to Sol, and so not in keeping with the stateliness of the Victorian flounces and curlicues, the arched windows. 

Sol lights a second cigarette; the dog—a nervous rat terrier—stops his dance long enough to raise a leg to the mailbox beside the long ramp to the post office’s porch. A distant thud, as of a tire being thrown into the box of a pickup truck freezes the terrier, then sends him dashing down Spurgeon Street to the south. Sol stubs his half-smoked cigarette in the ash tray on the wicker table and prepares to leave the balcony.

(In a parallel universe, perhaps, the dog is a white and brown collie, and Sol is spelled ѼѫӘ¹ and ѼѫӘ stubs out a purple cigar before . . ..) 

Halfway through the balcony door, Sol and (possibly, ѼѫӘ) stop momentarily as the glint of sunlight reflecting off a piece of glass or metal or polished zircon lying in the street strikes them precisely in the eye, as if God, or (ĦǮ, perhaps) is winking.

Sol believes that he knows there is no God; (maybe ѼѫӘ stopped believing in ĦǮ² a millennium or two ago.) Neither interprets the shaft of light to have any particular meaning. Both would have to know, though, that the incident of the perfectly-timed sunrise and the chance of the piece of glass or metal or polished zircon in the street flashing precisely into an almost-departed eye is of the magnitude of one in many, many trillions. But if a thing can happen, then somewhere, at some time, it will. And if it can happen once, it will happen countless times.

Or not. Sol is not sure. If there is one universe, then there must be many; also, if there is one gyrating dog, then there are too many to comprehend and it follows further that at any given instant, millions of men are throwing millions of tires into the backs of millions of pickup trucks while in earshot of gyrating dogs and smoking men on balconies at sunrise.

Sandra is never up early enough to witness sunrise except from October to March, when earth’s sun makes but a cold, slow, five-minute meander across the southern sky. Sandra expends no thought on parallel universes, on staggering odds or even on the certainty that at 39, she is half way between one oblivion and the next. Sandra sees her life with Sol and her two grown sons as a nearly-never-ending journey, the best of which is hopefully yet-to-come, or maybe not. The existential is of no interest to Sandra. She tells Sol repeatedly that he sits too much, doesn't eat properly, should quit smoking and 

. . . and. Sandra is a breast cancer survivor, her recovery from surgery and chemo is, to her, a miracle.

(Was it only few minutes ago that Sandra reached up onto the cool counter-top in the kitchen and because she was so very hot and the counter top so refreshingly cool, she push-dragged a chair over, climbed up onto the counter and lay down, the chill on her cheek, on her thighs and shins such bliss? Wasn’t that just yesterday? They say it was at 3:05 pm, July 8, 1984. So why does it feel so recent? “It's as if at 3:17 I married Sol and the two boys were born seconds apart between 4:00 and 4:11.”) If statistics mean anything—which to Sandra they don’t—she might recognize that she may well sicken and die before 7:00 P.M. curfew. Sandra would neither think nor say any of this aloud; she would simply say to her friend, Anne Drew next door, “My! How time flies!”)

She leaves Sol’s eggs in the pan longer than hers; he hates them runny. (It’s possible—but unlikely—that ѼѫӘ’s spouse in some other universe fries eggs, but that they must consume food to survive—possibly green matter of some kind—is a dead certainty.) But then, who cares about the colour or the consistency of food . . . other than Sol, that is?

Sol fancies himself a thinker, possibly someday even a writer. He’s read and re-read volumes of short stories by O’Henry, Maupassant, Oates, his favourite being “A Matter of Chance,” by Vladimir Nabokov, in which lovers separated already for years by war and ethnic turmoil end up on the same train by sheer coincidence, she as a passenger and he as a dining-car waiter. By the margin of a step delayed for part of a second, they don’t meet. The building sorrow and sense of futility in the man climaxes minutes after the train stops; he walks out in front of a moving locomotive. (He possibly walks out in front of a moving locomotive: Nabokov has a tendency toward ambiguous denouement.)

Sol has attempted a short story or two, or three, but in the rereading they always sound stilted and self-conscious, as if he were trying to copy Nabokov’s style, then O. Henry’s, then Maupassant’s

. . . and failing utterly at all of them. Also, he can’t explain how it happens that his clumsy narratives switch from past to present tense repeatedly, and his narrator keeps shifting from third to first person—and back again. 

What is left of Nabokov, of course, is a bit of ash and dust in a decaying box buried in Cimitiére de Clarens near Montreux, Switzerland. The dining-car waiter, though, seems to keep on walking out in front of the locomotive, and if that’s true, Sol thinks, then he most certainly will be killing himself forever and ever, however long that might be. (Perhaps—in another universe—the waiter and his lover meet on the train and are reunited . . . for ever and always. That story, too, would be eternal, it's denouement equally ambiguous.)

He once said words to this effect to Sandra; she’d replied that this would only be true as long as copies of it existed. Sol puzzled over that in a wakeful night and concluded that the reading of it had imprinted it on his brain, so the existence of a paper copy would be redundant to its survival as a story.

In his mind, Sol retains the video of Sandra whipping egg whites into a meringue for a lemon pie even while she is saying that “this would only be true as long as copies of it existed.” Sandra will be whipping egg whites into a meringue forever.

Sol’s philosophy prof said that “eternal goes both ways, you know; if time never ends, then it also never wasn’t.” Sandra has always been whipping egg whites into meringue—in Sol's universe, at least.

And Sol thought: The Big Bang is not at the beginning of a line; it must be at an uncertain and indifferent place on a circle.

He said this to his roommate in college, Jeffrey Bonorski, who understood none of it and tried to cover up his Puzzlement by saying, “That makes no sense, Solomon.”

And then there’s the dog, gyrating in front of the post office. Why? Why there? 
Why then?

Why not?

Their “boys” are James and Matthew, aka Matt. Matt is the younger of the two, currently known to be 21; one day Sol changed Matt’s pungent-smelling diaper and put him to bed, and when they all woke up on the following day, Sol could smell the suffocating aroma of marijuana and the even-sharper stench of Matt’s insolence. Matt went to live with his brother in his apartment just off the university campus sometime before he was known to be 21; James is an assistant prof in the education faculty.

Matt works as a landscaper, mostly laying sod in the summer time and clearing snow in winter. He talks about civil engineering some day when he's saved the money to go back to university, not to his father (talk, that is) but to his mother and his brother, both of whom know that whatever he earns, he dissipates in bars and gadgets like drones and guns. James won't allow either of Matt's collections in the apartment. The prohibition on anything smoked or snorted means Matt is “out” a lot, which suits James completely. 

On Matt's birthday—said to be his 12—Sol carried the birthday cake with burning candles into the dining room where the family was gathered to celebrate—officially—but more urgently to set up for a photo op since the grandparents on Sandra's side were holidaying in Panama City. Sol tripped on the dog. The cake landed candles-down on the floor.

Things go wrong but can be remedied. Others can't. A cake, upside-down in the carpet is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb . . . if those present feel as they did—on the one hand—that the destroyed cake was purposeful, that it was a statement father to son. Sandra sees it to this day as a turning point in the trajectory of Matt's “maturation;” for Sol that event continues to play on and on, like a looping video; for as long as there is Matt-consciousness, as long as there is Sol-consciousness (and the nagging inability to ask for forgiveness—or to forgive) the cake will continually fall upside down on the carpet.

And that will explain everything. Except time . . . and how things are before and after, or if there is a before and after.

Sol remembers that once—when in response to his procrastination regarding a school assignment—Sol told James to “get at it,” and then, “Now is always the best time,” he'd said.

And James said, “There is no now, Dad, because by the time you say the W, the N is already in the past.” 

And Sol, impressed with the answer said, “The immediate future is always the best time, then.”

“There is no possibility of doing anything in the future, because the moment you begin . . . to, well, do something, it becomes now, and as we just decided, there is no now.”

Now . . . or in the immediate future . . . Sol thinks: How can a dropped cake be both past and immediate . . . or distant . . . future at the same time as being in the past?

On the morning after the gyrating dog, Sol goes out onto the balcony with his coffee and cigarettes, but there is no dog to be seen anywhere. The hum of the city, however, is identical to every other morning: past, present and future.

He smokes only one cigarette. As he stubs it in the ashtray, he decides not to go to work. “How could one day of my tax auditing possibly be meaningful in a universal sense?” he thinks. Does one sand grain stolen really cost the seashore anything? The nation? The globe?

He will not go to work.

But if he hasn't left the house by 8:15, Sandra will say, “Why are you still here? You'll be late for the office.” He will leave the house at the usual time, with briefcase, hat and umbrella and return only when Sandra has safely begun her workday at the library. What purpose could possibly be served by his explaining why he hasn't gone to work?

Compact cars are backing out of garages, small poodle-cross dogs are being walked by women without makeup as Sol makes his way north up Spurgeon Street, past the bus stop where he ordinarily takes the 17 downtown, and on past the Tim Hortons. “I'll have a coffee here on my way back,” he thinks, “and a daughter or two.” And then, “Did I think daughter?” “I meant doughnut.”

He decides to take a left turn onto Blair Saunders Crescent, not for any other reason than that he can. Blair Saunders, he's been told, was a WWII war hero who saved an allied passenger ship full of children from being torpedoed by crashing his Sea Hurricane into a German submarine, Kamikaze style. Sol does a quick calculation: if Saunders was 25 in 1940, he'd be 93 now, so probably dead of natural causes if he survived the war. “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished” runs uninvited through Sol's mind. He can't remember where it's from, but thinks it's probably Shakespeare. He tries, but can't remember what it means.

There will never be a Solomon Crane Street. 

At Blair Saunders Crescent and 98^th St. a police cordon arrests Sol's progress. An ambulance is idling in the street and two police cars with garish, alternately-blinking red and blue lights are parked illegally. Sol joins a knot of the curious and picks up that the blanket on the lawn is covering the victim of a drive-by shooting. A policeman shuts off the idling engine of a riding lawn mower. “Is a successful drive-by shooting like hitting a moving moon from a moving earth with a rocket?” Sol wonders. Surely the bullet would continue to move in the direction and with the speed of the car; inertia of motion and all that. So wouldn't you have to aim your shot at a point other than the target? 

Sol cannot bring himself to contemplate the humanity of the mass under the blanket, nor of the woman he saw briefly silhouetted in the living room window of this house that is like every other house on Blair Saunders Crescent, except blue. Surely it's all a bit like a dog gyrating for no reason in front of a regional post office early on any given morning. Time will erase the event as surely as the police will clean up the ribbons, as the ambulance will clear away the remains. Won't it?

The briefcase is a dead weight and as Sol begins to retrace his steps back toward home, he drops it into a garbage bin waiting for pickup on the curb. In the interest of fairness, perhaps, he throws his umbrella into the bin next door, then his hat and overcoat in successive bins. He doesn't feel the cold although the wind on this 12 morning in what has come to be called October is downright bone biting.

Somewhere in Africa, maybe, a neonate dies after only a few breaths and the mother is relieved; she can barely feed and clothe the six who are always hungry, always too cold or too hot and always subject to insect bites, snake bites, sibling bites. Had the neonate survived, it would have been either Franklin or Francine because most African names exist only in antiquity, buried with their owners in shallow graves. 

The world will run tickety-boo without Franklin or Francine. 

Statistically, biologically—Sol thinks about this often—he and Sandra were endowed with enough eggs and sperm to bring at least a dozen persons into the world. So there would have to be at least 10 people denied existence in the Sol and Sandra universe, and by the same token that whatever is possible will happen, he wonders about their lives, lives that must be happening right now in an alternate universe. Perhaps they are acquainted with Franklin or Francine or the innumerable persons that could have been but are not . . . at least not here. 

Grains of sand.

There must be—in the vagaries of time—places, points, Sol thinks, that are like the O in NOW. Points that might have caused homo sapiens to invent the word itself. Like the point where a man walking in a southerly direction on Spurgeon Street steps on a crack and breaks his mother's back, RIGHT NOW. A point, perhaps where the meaninglessness of being or not being, of doing or not doing drops like a tear into a pond of crystal clarity.

Because it's possible—in a universe that is not Sol's universe—that he doesn't skip work, but rides Conveyance 17 almost joyfully to the job because Thanksgiving weekend is near and James and Matthew will be coming home with that-other-Sol's four, beautiful grandchildren and his two matronly, but pretty, daughters-in-law. And that-other-Sandra will meet him at the door with a touch of flour on her nose and wearing a floral apron, and she'll embrace and kiss him and say, “How was your day, ѼѫӘ?”

And in that far, far away universe, perhaps Sol doesn't step out in front of speeding Bus 17 at the time known as 11 A.M., which is the time, at least, on Spurgeon Street . . . and in some other places
. . . now. 

1Pronounced Ohyay

2Pronounced Hadzh