That time depends upon the reference frame of the observer has been understood since Einstein’s day. That is why it’s so rare in the modern world to see someone arguing with a calendar.
Just a week earlier, a man in Muncie, Indiana had shot his calendar with a .38 revolver. Rose McClaren had heard all about it on the evening news. The man had been corresponding with a woman from Italy, who had promised to come and stay with him over the holidays. When the day of her planned arrival came and went, however, she still had not shown. The man came to the logical conclusion that the date listed on his calendar must be incorrect, but no matter how passionately he pleaded his case the calendar refused to budge. Regretfully, he was left with no choice but to defend his sanity through the use of lethal force, or so argued the public defender that had been assigned to him once his trial got underway.
The man was being charged with attempted murder. The bullets he had fired at the calendar had pierced the wall behind it and continued on, striking the chest of the neighborhood mailman as he was coming up the walk to deliver a letter. That letter had been dictated by Francesca, the Italian woman at the center of the drama, as she recuperated from a scooter crash that had left her confined to a hospital bed. In the letter, she apologized for not being able to see out their plans, but promised to make it up to the man, offering to pay for him to come to Padua to visit her once she had fully recovered. Unfortunately, the letter was so mutilated by gunfire and the mailman’s blood that it was unreadable, and it only surfaced again as physical evidence to impress upon the jury the grisliness of the suspect’s crimes.
Several other pieces of mail had gone missing in the confusion of the day. They included a package of prescription blood-pressure medication addressed to the suspect’s next-door neighbor, a celebrated criminal defense attorney who would surely have agreed to take the suspect’s case pro bono had he not suffered a massive heart attack and died the following day. The self-defense argument provided by the suspect’s actual attorney was roundly rejected by the jury, and so offended the judge’s sensibilities that he sentenced the suspect to the maximum allowable forty years of imprisonment. Whether there was any greater meaning to this daisy chain of calamities was a question only a higher power could answer.
As a Catholic, Rose did not need to be convinced of relativism’s corrosive effects on society. She stood at the head of the table in conference room B, facing three-fourths of her new project team and staring at a clock that insisted it was twelve-eighteen. She was certain – or as certain as anyone could be in a quantum universe – that she had scheduled their kickoff meeting for noon, yet one of her team members was conspicuously absent. People just came and went as they pleased nowadays, she thought.
At last, the door creaked open. The straggler had arrived. She watched him edge into the room, pressed against the wall like an escaped convict trying to avoid a searchlight. Even when he was clear of the door, he did not shut it right away. Leaving himself an escape route, she thought. It reminded her of an episode of Rodent Wars she had recently seen, where the Head Removal Technician and star of the show, Mac Farley, had stressed the importance of leaving raccoons an avenue for retreat. Give them no other options and the claws would come out.
Well, let him go if that was what he wanted. He hardly inspired confidence. In body language and deadness of eyes he resembled some sort of crustacean. But which sort? The question occupied her for longer than she felt was proper for a distinguished businesswoman. A Maine lobster? No. Dungeness crab? Closer, but not quite. What were the big ones that wobbled around like dancing bears on those stilt-like legs? Japanese spider crabs! She felt a surge of satisfaction that sputtered away like air from a leaky balloon. There had to be better ways to spend an evening than watching nature programs till one fell asleep on the couch.
He looked so young, young enough to be her son. All right, not that young, she reassured herself, but a nagging doubt made her check the roster, and after a quick calculation she realized that it was true. Where had the years gone? This renewed acquaintance with her age made her resentful all over again. Everything she had achieved over the past year felt diminished in context. At long last she possessed the title of Supervisory Manager (how stupidly redundant it sounded to her now) and it felt like a cheap plastic trophy, the type you get at a county fair with ‘Entrant’ engraved on the name plate.
Twenty years earlier it would have meant something to her. She had done enough by that point in her career to have earned it. What she had earned since then was more than they would ever be willing to give her. Even with her recent promotion she had sensed the resentment behind the offer, as if all her years of unrecognized toil were part of an elaborate extortion scheme in which management had unwittingly become ensnared. She had put them in a difficult position, but they had held their noses and done what needed to be done. The breezy way her Section Chief had spoken to her after the promotion was announced belied an untroubled conscience. What must that feel like, she wondered? As a Catholic, there was no such thing in her world as an untroubled conscience.
Off the top of her head she could think of only one Supervisory Manager who was older than her – Sylvester Banks, a man so old that the word had affixed itself like a title to the front of his name. One spoke only of “Old Sylvester Banks”; was she then destined to become “Old Rose McClaren”? Wearing moth-eaten cardigans and corduroy slacks, smelling of envelopes?
“Twelve-nineteen,” she said. Her voice was like a Minnesota breeze in January.
The room fell silent. The newcomer, who had only just made it to his chair, seemed to shrink several inches. Mac Farley might have compared this to the defensive posture of the Texas kangaroo rat.
When enough time had passed that even she had begun to feel uncomfortable, Rose said, “Were you aware this meeting started at noon?”
“I…yes,” said the newcomer, looking visibly relieved to be asked something he knew the answer to.
“And yet…”
“And yet.”
“You’re late.”
“Just so.”
“Nineteen minutes late.”
“That much?” He dug his phone out of his pocket, tapped the screen awake, then held it up for her to see. “Twenty, now.”
“Would you care to explain why?”
“I…well…no, frankly.” He paused. “I apologize if my candor shocks you. I should tell you that I’m a practitioner of radical honesty. Are you familiar with the works of J. Walter Freeman? He wrote the book, Put This in Your Pipe: The Liberating Effects of Telling It Like It Is. Mr. Freeman contends that unvarnished truth-telling holds the potential to increase U.S. GDP by up to three percentage points. Did you know that Iranians lose an estimated eleven-million man-hours every year offering figs to their houseguests?”
“No,” said Rose.
“Or dates or pomegranates,” he added. “I believe that’s inclusive of all fruit stuffs.”
Rose approximated a smile and turned her attention to the young woman seated to her right. It was one of the strategies she had learned in Leadership University, the company’s professional development program, for bringing unproductive conversations to a swift end. Not a class, seminar, mentorship, lecture, job shadowing, or similar opportunity to burnish one’s resume had been offered by the company over the past thirty-two years that Rose had not attended. The certificates dotting the walls of her office were but a fraction of her achievements, the majority of which had long ago been consigned to some dingy nether-region of her filing cabinet. Indeed, although a five-time graduate of Leadership University, only three of her diplomas still hung in a place of prominence above her desk – her first, as a memento of a burgeoning career full of promise; her third, as a symbol of her perseverance; and the last, as a stinging rebuke to LU’s claim of being “where the leaders of tomorrow are born”, unless the administration had a more liberal definition of ‘tomorrow’ than was customary.
The young woman reminded Rose of herself in earlier days. You wish, she thought a moment later. Not a stray thought went through her head of late that was not tempered by self-criticism. No, she had never been quite as pretty as this girl, who seemed to be all points – pointy nose, pointy jawline, pointy breasts, adorable pointy ears. And of course, that ever-present, crescent-moon smile. That was one thing the younger Rose definitely had had in common with this girl. Just looking at it now she could feel the old, familiar ache in her jaw, like the pain from a phantom limb. How long had she rehearsed that in front of a mirror, Rose wondered? Only a practiced smile could look so natural for so long.
Like an assassin’s knife slipped without warning between her ribs, Rose felt a stab of resentment. It was a pity. As one aged one hoped to discover that one’s judgmentalism stemmed from personal shortcomings and could therefore be remedied through the medicines of introspection, empathy, and self-improvement. But to discover that one still desired the same things in middle age as one had in youth, that there is no other side of the coin, that the world distributes its largesse at random, that people were not better than they appeared at first glance, were bitter pills to swallow. What was the Aeschylus quote – against our will comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God? She should have finished her degree in Classics. She imagined herself in another life, combing through some musty Roman library by day, writing insufferable treatises only a handful of other academics would ever read, while in the evenings being pursued by a cavalcade of bronzed, Italian gentlemen in designer pants. A tarantella played in her head. She swayed to its rhythm, unbothered by the bewildered expressions regarding her from across the room.