In the Drift: When Time Stops

The sports website editor sends an email asking for more work on a story and that means picking up the phone and calling the drag racer.

I like him and don’t mind spending the time, so I tell my wife that I am going to be on the telephone for awhile and she says, “Do you have to call now? Can’t we just have a weekend together?”

Weekend?

And then it dawns on me that this is Saturday and my wife doesn’t have to work her Big Company finance job, even from home, and these are the hours we usually spend together, eating out, taking walks, seeing movies and friends, not thinking about work, but now things are different.

We’re sheltering in place and after a few weeks of confinement I realize that I can no longer tell what day it is, what time it is and, often, what I was doing just a half hour before.

Things are different for my wife because her days have retained a small semblance of normalcy. She is doing her numbers job from home. She’s on her computer at the same time she usually arrived at the office. She has meetings and she makes phone calls and picks up the phone when it rings.

She gets tired at night the same time she did before the pandemic and comes into the bedroom where I am reading or flipping through the Internet and says, “Turn the light off. It’s time to go to bed.”

Then she closes the door and goes into the other room to do her late-night chores, like watering her plants and arranging things just so or brushing her teeth or reading stories on the Internet, and I will close my eyes and try my best to fall asleep before she finally comes to bed because I toss and turn and sigh and keep her awake and I’m trying to do my part so that when the next morning comes she’ll be rested and ready to to work again.

But it’s different for me.

I can wake up at 3 a.m. and look at the clock a thousand times and get up and read a chapter of a book and not have to worry about the next day, which will come soon enough whether I like it or not, but I don’t have to fret about being ready for the new day, like my wife does, because while she is working, I am in The Drift.

The Drift is a term a friend and I use to describe that state when you’re not being productive, when you’re drinking or smoking pot in the middle of the day or staying in bed and staring up at the ceiling, like you’ve just been laid off from your job and you don’t feel like doing anything so you don’t because you’re in The Drift.

And so my wife and I lead two different lives in the same small place. We have competing circadian rhythms, two approaches to time. I live my days like I’m on perpetual jet lag, when the clock doesn’t tell the truth, or it wouldn’t if I looked at it because I don’t, not much.

For me, the clock has lost its hands. It’s that fast-spinning time piece in the opening sequence of the Twilight Zone or that painting by Salvatore Dali called the Persistence of Memory, where time pieces drip off tables and hang over branches and drape dead birds and are covered with ants.

My days now resemble stoner movies like “Dude, where’s my car?” or that Cheech and Chong riff about a partier who’s so wiped out that he doesn’t know the guy knocking at the door is the same one who just left two minutes ago. “Dave? Dave’s not here.”

For me, each day morphs into the next one with the same penitentiary sameness. But I do not complain. It feels good. Like a dream, like floating on a magic carpet on a windless day.

Years ago, before we got married, my wife wanted to take tango lessons so we could do a stylized dance at the wedding party and I said OK because I wanted her to be happy, even though I do not like to dance, not the tango or the waltz or the twist.

Once a week, we met at a dance studio in Hollywood and we learned our moves and everything was OK as long as I was dancing with my wife, but as soon as the instructor made us change partners, my dancing wheels spun off their axles.

Once, I was dancing with this South American woman who was a much better tango student than I was and she kept carping at me over the music, “No! No! You are doing it all wrong!” and sweat started dripping from my nose and I was miserable, until I was back partnered with my wife.

I used to look at the clock during those classes and it would say 9 p.m. And then I’d look again a while later and it would say 8:30 p.m.

Time went backwards during those tango classes.

Now, under quarantine, time may not be my enemy but it is also certainly not my friend. Time has become a stranger.

I wake up naturally, when my eyes open. I make the coffee, put on toast, spread on the peanut butter, make the bed. Most of the day, I lie on the couch, not ten feet away from my wife but in another world. If any editor calls with an assignment, I will play journalist but I don’t look for work. Instead, I read nonfiction stories, one about a man who spent 40 years in a prison’s solitary confinement, about the life of a sailor during the Age of Sail, and about a murder on the Rez. I watch Netflix documentaries or Scandinavian police procedurals.

Often I walk around the tiny condominium during the day, to log more steps on my Fitbit, and the place is so small that I feel like a convict who can only go three paces and must turn around because his cell is so confined.

I go from bedroom to bathroom to living room and through the galley kitchen and back again like a sleep-walking patient at the asylum.

Sometimes I call friends, or they call me, but in a pandemic nobody really has much new to say. I sprawl on the same red couch in the living room that I used to make fun of because it was so small it looked like a doll’s couch and now my big feet hang off the edge like the paws of a dog that’s too big for its bed.

In slower moments, I imagine time-lapse footage of my wife and I moving around our small place, blurred and herky-jerky, like we’re doing some manic amphetamine-induced dance.

While I no longer look at clocks my wife does. She knows that 11 a.m. is the time she does her half-hour video yoga session as I lie on that small red couch, a lazy cheerleader complimenting her on her flexibility.

In the afternoon, I watch her water her orchids, the 15 plants she bought online from a nursery in Southern California that sold them cheap because they were all going to die without good homes.

Sometimes, I’ll walk over and kiss her on the forehead when she is in the middle of some work conversation. Or she’ll she’ll take a break from her work and visit with me, ask me how my day is going. And I’ll tell her just fine. It’s great. How is yours?

Or I will call hello across the room and she'll say, "Go away! Don't bother me! I'm busy!" and I will drift back into my timeless reverie.

One morning, I watched her roll a still-warm hardboiled egg on her eyes. She said that it relieved stress and pressure and that I’d like it. And so I tried it and I did.

Then we watched Goldfinger with a young Sean Connery as James Bond and all the bad guys wore blue suits and were Asian. I didn’t notice, but my wife did. She was born in Beijing.

“Those are all just Asian boys,” she said. “They’re kids.”

The movie was made in 1965, right before the start of the Cultural Revolution, when the Chinese demonized Western culture and I wondered what Mao would have thought to see those Asian teenage actors getting gunned down like toy soldiers. 

I’m like a house cat that dozes away the day, knowing that when the sun goes down, it’s time to walk the neighborhood, after the streets have emptied and we don’t run into people. One night, on an unlit street, my wife turned to me and said, “You know, I’ve been really happy over the last few weeks.”

She likes working from home. She likes having me around all the time, rather than living in Vegas like I usually do.

The other night my wife read something about atrocities in China that upset her. She got into bed and I was still awake.

“I don’t want you to have nightmares tonight,” I whispered.

I know how she gets. She calls out at night, like she’s in danger or being harmed and I will be there right next to her and feel so helpless and frustrated and protective but there is nothing I can do. Then the next morning she will tell me about being chased by monsters.

I pulled her close.

“Well, don’t be afraid of any monsters, OK? I’m here to protect you.”

And finally I knew what time it was, time to go to sleep and dream good dreams. 

In The Drift.