The Interstitial Time

Outside of the health factories and the food factories and warehouses the size of hamlets, the human earth has hushed for a time. The top sounds so quiet that the bottom sounds have grown loud. You can hear vines lengthening. You can hear the wing sockets of migrating birds at work overhead, those species that have some place to go. You can hear the insects and mammals underground moving soil around, chewing on roots for water and sugars. You can’t hear them die, but, if you close your eyes and sink into your ears, you might hear their bodies being carried out and left at the entrances to the tunnels. You hear clouds of insects long before they breach the horizon. On windless evenings there is a collective shhooop as blossoms contract and the undersides of leaves close their many mouths. As humans retreat inside, there is the sound of bone moving inside of fur as marginal species—coyote, rat, raccoon—ease themselves from the margins. 

If you are a human, it probably took a while to hear anything other than the goony din of your top brain and your pulse in your ears. And you sometimes startle yourself with a hum—a vibration on the vault of your palette, up through your nasal cavity and brain cells. 

In the time before this one, people thought of human brains in terms of numbers, categories, and status: test scores and IQ and “smart” and “honors” and degrees, which were all shields they held up between themselves and actual tasks and actual people and their judgments and demands and conversation. Your brain was very busy making its internal reward system mirror the external one. You had, for example, a good feeling when other humans (in particular or in the zeitgeist) considered your brain productive. Felt good when your brain was considered acceptable for the needles it had threaded. Or when it was considered nice for some bit of compliance. There were a thousand types of rewards behind a thousand combination locks and some days your brain was busy trying to pick each lock at once. Gray matter whittled to fit a thousand tumblers, rewards for the sake of themselves. 

That wasn’t what you thought your brain was doing. You thought it was professing important elements of your profession. You thought it was problem-solving—all day, solving, solving, solving. It may have been decision-making, but rarely, you think now, problem-solving. So many decisions each day, which increased exponentially the day you brought home your first smartphone and affixed it to your hand, laid it to rest next to your head at night. You wanted, generally, to look like you were grappling with important issues and could be considered a substantial or interesting person, with sound opinions and the respect of others. That is, you thought you were thinking, that you were a thinker, an idea person. Now, in the absence of the collective human project of novelty, comfort, and expansion, what had counted as thought does not anymore.

Do you need to be ashamed of these errors? You feel the shame, think the shame. Nevermind, shame is another error. To have resisted, you would have needed a different mind. There is no trap door back to that time with the mind you are feeling around in now. This mind is for understanding what the quiet is saying. And how, in the future, you may have to learn how to do for yourself what machines and a global network of bodies and virtual synapses used to do for you: Will drinking this water kill you quickly or only very slowly? Will it be worth the trial and error it will take to make a rope, or will the rope fail at its first crucial task and whatever it was supposed to catch or hold fast will be gone, along with those many moments of daylight and the calories it cost your mind and your arms and fingers. Speculative utility governs these thoughts. But utility does not equal death, as you supposed at 20. 

At 20 you thought if you gave an inch to necessity it would swallow you whole. You were right to be afraid, mostly because choices have been cast as necessities—modern hygiene and aesthetics, employment, social engagement. These things have engulfed you, but you never relinquished the pleasure of an unproductive mind. It roams, without purpose. This is some of the greatest happiness you have known: a perpetual movie projected on the back of the eyelids, there any time you close your eyes: Alternate realities! Reprieves from the laws of physics! Non-human experiences in the human mind! You might imagine your block from pigeon-height, pigeon-fear, pigeon-hunger. You might lift a tree house into the air—the one you and your family planned but never built. You might restage a conversation gone terribly wrong or free dive for hours without surfacing. 

You return by opening your eyes, remembering that you have a face. You are teetering on embarrassment: this mental travel is unreal, unreachable, unshareable, no commons or marketplace to give it value or otherwise justify the time spent and the ache upon returning (an ache that is part joy at the memory and part emptiness at the unreality). But now, with no marketplace, no place you need to be—indeed, no place you can go, you can let the real and the unreal hang out together without enmity in their hearts. The thoughts need not be chained immediately and yoked to a plow. 

Emerge, instead, blinking into this paused world, nearly absent of human noise. You can hear mites on skin and among feathers and fur, shuffling their legs as a perfectly balanced clean up crew. You can hear water droplets finding their kind and then finding the path gravity suggests and then finding more of their kind, and then creating paths, pushing tiny objects—pebble, twig, empty exoskeleton—out of the way, yielding to larger rivulets. The sound brings up almost more than its fair share of happy words: trickle, drip, gurgle, burble, gush, babble. What might end up in a waterfall or a rush or seep into a wide river, you can hear path finding beneath you, drops at a time.  

In comparison, wind and birdsong nearly deafen—like the combination of a leaf blower and a party just about to get out of hand. (Those old similes. Why did people do those things? Meet in groups to talk at each other’s faces, more and more loudly with less and less understanding. Push leaves around with a high decibel machine.) Under that din, though, the rustle of decomposition. Leaf piles sighing flatter, a soft chorus of disarticulation, also the occasional clink of stone flaking from a rock or an old foundation, the quieter fall of a paint chip. Plastic degrading makes absolutely no sound since it is so very slow. Very very slow things are silent. Snails are no longer slow enough for silence. If you sit still and have not eaten but are not too hungry, you can hear their tiny slurp. Saliva filling the mouth of a predator makes almost no sound, but fear makes a rush in the ears. You can’t hear the sun move because it doesn’t move and you have even more trouble remembering that now than you did before. Perhaps as humans multiplied and sped up, more improbable ideas became possible, like Copernicus’ Earth, spinning and hurtling through space, though it seems like an endless, unbudgeable plain. You wonder if you need to know about astrophysics any longer. What would change if you believed your feet and eyes, instead? 

Very loud but brief are the thoughts that belong to the before time and not to this interstitial hush. They come screaming from behind your head, grazing the top of your ear and then rocket on, almost out of sight. You always thought you were late and in the wrong place. You thought you were in a hole that you had dug with a warped personality and bad habits and year’s worth of wasted time. And the only tool you had deep in the hole was a shovel. And sometimes you used it to dig yourself deeper and sometimes you simply hit yourself over the head with it. The ringing pain was sharp and direct. You didn’t know that your personality did not matter. Nobody’s did. But that’s an understandable error. Most of what you read and watched and felt told you that personality was what should be burnished and chased, punished or rewarded. Charm, when it didn’t tip over into smarm, topples any obstacle, hierarchy, and self-defense. Interpersonal conflicts and compatibility were the source of most meaning and trouble. You were a character among a set of characters with very narrow stage directions: Stay laser focused on personal fulfillment and grievance and failings. You have heard of how rodents pass through holes much smaller than themselves, disaggregating their skeletal frame. But when the hush and solitude began, you passed to the other side of personality like that: unhooking for a second your broad shoulders and folding your pelvic basket, and then you were through. You don’t know what—or why—you are now, but you don’t miss personality. And you are not in a hole, but you wouldn’t mind finding one—a cave, a hollowed out tree—for shelter. 

Youth and beauty were loud and now they make the sound of ashes from a fire pit picked up by the wind. A feathery rustle. 

Performance was loud. For every action and speech utterance, it seems like there was a blank-faced audience. Has any set been broken down as noiselessly? The entire apparatus retracted on fly wires into the ether. 

It helps that you don’t see other people. That you don’t feel judged except by your empty stomach, and the facility in your hands. Which struggle to sew a mask. Then they try making a rope, which seems like useful knowledge for many possible futures. First finding the fibers—which ones would be pliable, not too slippery or brittle, something long you can gather great armfuls of, and then braid and knot. You settle on a narrow plait, which theoretically you could use to lash branches together or supplies to your back or to set a snare if you could intuit how to do that. Plait, lash, old words you turn over in your mouth. But you can’t funnel that pleasure into your fingers, which have no muscle memory for useful tasks. 

Most of your memories, in fact, don’t seem useful, but you find yourself in the Memory Chamber occasionally, walking into walls or getting taken out at the knees by a memory of something or someone that you will never have again. The weight of your infant child asleep on your chest, an unbuckled laugh with your best friend, rhubarb, washed with the garden hose and dipped in a bowl of sugar. But in the before times memory seemed like a frantic industry—a race to acquire and shape the mental images and short films and social media scroll that would make a medically extended life pleasant, bearable, or defensible. Memories went into a bucket called “Progress” that was meant to shape sturdy, foundational bricks. Now the progress bucket looks just like the plastic turret-shaped buckets made to ease the imaginative workload of children at the beach. Dump the grains in and hope it holds. A fort that folds at the touch of a toe. 

But only a small batch of memories can be curated, and the rest—unchosen, maybe unwanted—are spilled all around. A whole beachful, wave after waveful. Before, experiences were sometimes curated in order to fill those buckets with provisions for the end of youth, of a relationship, of an era, for the end of a willing heart and a well body. But only a small patch of memory can be curated. There’s a huge tub of the stuff you don’t want: the tableaus or skits of embarrassment, shame, anger, moments when you were careless or someone was careless with you, ethical lapses or patterns, a whole slurry-full of lies, bad intentions, unrequited resentment or regret—memories that bag the story of your life out of shape. Then there are the atmospheric memories that simply are—neither curated nor confrontational: that season smelled like ____; we were listening to a lot of ____ that year. When you think of the first years of that new job, your face remembers its mask of aloof good will, a mask that did none of the jobs you hoped it might. In another era, the only thing you saw was scaffolding, the only thing you felt was your child’s hand in your hand, which was making him walk faster than he’d like, the only thing you spoke were careening toddler stories, Scheherazading your way through the day, block by scaffolded block. 

So many nights and early mornings were spent replaying, pruning, running alternate endings. But now? The project of memory seems to be over. No use for that. A day is a pool of time you swim through, trying to stay afloat. The memory project seems inexplicable now, except perhaps as a metaphor. It reminds you of the time when you were a kid and began cutting out the collectible cards printed on the back of a cereal box, working for what seemed like years toward a full set. You imagined finally having a complete pack and playing the intended game with a kindly and infinitely available adult. This adult had not yet shown any signs of existing, but your imagination insisted that when the game was complete, they would arrive. You were a few cards short when the promotion was discontinued. The knowledge that followed the announcement felt too big and too old for you: the relative was never coming, you had held your life in abeyance for a set of cardboard rectangles, and you had not even cared about playing. Your child-self made vows and knew that many small pleasures would have to be foregone to honor them. The vows were forgotten immediately. 

Vows are now irrelevant, the many small pleasures gone and the Memory Project retracting—a hotel lobby fish tank drying down to an obsidian crystal that can fit into the lower lint-filled triangle of your pocket. The space it vacated is now full of sounds.

~

You didn’t know how loud you walked. You used to travel everywhere on foot with earbuds funneling the news of the world into your Eustachian tubes. The words you heard described true things—Muslims rounded up in one country, exterminated in another, contested elections, the signs of rising fascism lined up like a how-to manual, annexation of land, landmine-sniffing rats loping across farm fields, money sliding in and out of offshore accounts, difficult to trace. You thought you were stepping quietly because voices from all over the world were banging around in your skull, asking for other countries and people to become real to you. And you were trying to stretch your accordion file folder already full of other files. There wouldn’t be a test, but it all felt like a test. To know everything there was about everything there was—or at least a veneer of everything because you were responsible for it all. And you might be called upon to perform your knowledge. You and all the other people. 

You had felt responsible, for good and ill, for past and future, for staying “informed” and “up on” events and theories, feelers out for changes in the zeitgeist. You didn’t think you were powerful, just responsible. But you rarely remembered that those two conditions couldn’t be prised cleanly apart. You knew you had lost your mother’s fraying mind when she told you she wasn’t going to watch the news or read the paper any longer—“it’s just a bunch of stuff.” You’ve given up being a person, you thought. Angry grief followed. But you understood it to be a factor of the little pits of vascular death scattered through her brain. You had far more scorn those who went on “news diets”—cutting the newspapers, podcasts, and 24-hour scrolls from their lives. Invariably, they would testify after how little they really needed to know, when they had thought the answer was everything. How could they shirk their responsibility that way, while everyone else picks up the slack, gathering headlines as if they are oxygen molecules in a thin atmosphere. 

So you directed the headlines into your ear—voices introducing and voices summarizing and voices interviewing and voices analyzing all the information the other voices had accumulated. Often you didn’t remember what you’d heard. But even when all of the news was alarming or pessimistic, the stream was almost soothing, a ritual that made you feel as if you had done what was necessary, like getting dressed. 

Now you walk untethered. You realize that no one other thing makes you feel as vulnerable as this. The phone-to-headphone-to-ear canal loop made you feel as if you existed inside the device or in the waves that brought the sound. You slipped the buds in your ears and disappeared. And you loved this. To feel responsible abstractly for anything that might happen anywhere on earth or the universe, but not responsible for a personality shellacked over a body bumping around in this one particular place. 

It is now precisely the opposite. You are an untethered body-mind and when you walk, you are so loud. You were loud all along and didn’t know it. The gusts out of your nose and mouth, joints crackling, clothes rubbing together, swishing through grass, feet snapping sticks and grinding pebbles. 

~

You’re not the loudest thing in this timeless time, though. The field behind you is heaving with insect call. And as still as you would like to be, they won’t leave you alone: trying to bite or drink or burrow or get swallowed into the interior feasting ground, to use you as a nest or nursery, or simply as a place to land. You can’t stop swatting and jerking. You realize that you’re living in an insect empire. You always were, but you were fitted at birth with a lens that made you see only the opposite. Television told of companies and products that let people lead insect-free lives. It aired mini-stories about hubristic insects crushed by or running scared from human ingenuity. Big white trucks pulled up in the neighborhood and brought out the sprayers—chemical baths for inside and outside. Poor horses and cows in the field with flies clustered around their eyes, poor deer with a biting fly and a burrowing tick named after them, poor creatures of all sorts with their fleas and mites and worms and flies. Nowhere to go for relief except in the water if they’re lucky, or the mud. 

You had sprays and clothes and swatters and zappers that fit in your hand, and screens and windows and sealing doors. And more sprays for the insects that slip in. You could close up your windows, close out the bugs, and gloat through the sliding glass door. You remember the rage—the outrage—at insect bites. How dare they? Have they not gotten the message? Beasts in the field, ok. Humans, in charge and off limits. 

Now you see with a flash that living in the Western world in the 21st century was like living in space: safe only in the sealed capsule of the home, in the sealed capsule of the car, or with a space suit of Deet surrounding you. Venturing out into lawns and fields and trails occasionally, but retreating quickly into sealed, temperature controlled chambers, checking furiously for any insects that might have been trying to turn you into a host. You were on the run. So fragile. So frightened of a bite or an itch, so insistent on your dominion that you were willing to spread poison on yourself and your nests. A bite was a sign that you had lost, an intolerable narcissistic injury. 

This hasn’t changed. Your nervous system ripples at the crawling, buzzing, stinging, and itching. This is not for you, this is for the poor beasts of the field! Oh, you are a beast of the field, or the yard, at least, steps from the sealed capsules and untethered from the length of an extension cord. You will have learned something useful from this interstitial time if you can have this thought without panic, anger, or grief, when you can prod it with a stick and it doesn’t come roaring back with teeth and claws: you are a lightly-furred blip in the seething insect empire. A lightly-furred blip in the seething insect empire. A lightly-furred blip in the seething insect empire.

~

Hush. There’s a splash around the bend of the creek. You’re pretty certain, without seeing, that it was a heron spearing a frog. The heron had harnessed silence and then released it quickly. Now you hear a watery plop into the water, but your ears don’t, can’t make a picture of it. A snake, a turtle, something mammalian? Something transitioning from one task, one element, to the next. The creatures that you see and hear don’t seem to take breaks, they may hesitate for a moment at the edge of decision, but not for long. You have seen minute rest, though: a bee toward the end of a run pausing for a few beats on each flower, heavy and a little drunk. In that moment, they are deep in the center of their Venn diagram: their conscious function, collection, overlapping their unconscious function, pollination. You didn’t ask, before, what your unconscious function was. Perhaps conscious functions were so clamorous (projects of self-and-family-improvement, projects of ambition, of service to the greater good, of self-punishment and promotion, projects of happiness and satisfaction. Your unconscious project was to make money for a very small number of people. To wear the grooves of human and Western and white dominion just a smidgeon deeper through use. To be safe from criticism, to be less and less alive. 

You guess your conscious project now is to learn what else a human might be or do. But your unconscious project? To never let your conscious mind know that these circumstances might not be temporary.