It all begins at the office.
Fast slings paper clips at a rapid clip. Slow blinks them away. Then, with a devilish cyclopean wink, he raises (slowly) a computer monitor above his head.
"Cool it! The boss!" Freeze.
Time approaches the waning of middle age. He starts to resemble his own cartoon image, Father Time. The Fat Lady begins to sing.
After work, they are walking, east to west, together, sort of. Slow crawls along the pavement, head lowered in contemplation. Fast, plugged into his music, his phone, his video game, his pilot, his several other devices, glows, does loop-de-loops around Slow, so that, like Achilles and the tortoise during the final nanosecond of their race, they remain in proximity.
Until ...
F: Jumping Gigabytes!
S: My goodness, it's him, isn't it? But who is that behind ... ?
The R x T = D man crosses their path, ranting away, as usual, hefting his sandwich board:
Right behind the R X T man, they see a possible mugging victim, muggings being a frequent after-work recreation, a stress-reliever like Happy Hour, for the matched friends.
The possible victim, an old woman, inches toward them with the help of a walker, a stomach pack wrapped around her, wires running from the pack up inside the cage of the walker to the little white microphones in her ears.
"Is that pack alarm-wired?" Slow wonders. "Is she a walking ATM machine? a bank vault? a wall safe? a wall-less wall safe?"
"Cut and run!" cries Fast.
He does it, himself, knocking the victim down. As Fast darts around the corner, pack secreted, Slow, clucking in sympathy, bends to help the dazed old woman to her feet. She thanks him.
"I guess there was no alarm, after all," he thinks, with an archaic smile.
An old heresy: God may control the universe, but the Devil controls the timing --the same one (Devil) that is in the details.
Slow explains the speed of sound: Actually, there's no such thing. The speed of sound, also known as Mach 1, changes throughout the atmosphere depending on the altitude, which, simply put, determines the temperature, which, in turn, determines the speed. Still, most people think of the speed at sea le...
Fast: Yadda yadda. 761.2 mph, 1.116.4 ft/s, 340.3 m/s, 1.225.1 km/h, 661.5 knots (no per).
Slow: Yes, of course, but suppose it was a space shuttle eight-and-a-half minutes into its flight, main engines already turned off, traveling 7000 meters per second at an altitude of 110,000 meters? Since the density of the atmo ...
Fast: A space shovel. Yadda. Mach 23.3.
They turn to their favorite movie classics.
F: Steamboat Bill S: Last Year at Marienbad
F: Modern Times S: La Dolce Vita
F: Monsieur Hulot's Holiday S: Woman in the Dunes
Meanwhile, life keeps speeding up. It's Cyber City! Time is the leading actor; people fight for the bit parts. All numbers become mach numbers, any speed less than Mach 1, any .M speed, = horse-and-buggy days:
A reaction sets in. Time is getting tired. He wishes he could slow down. A resounding sigh echoes through the concrete canyons.
People take heed. The pendulum swings. Once again, couples make time. The birth rate moves off "Stuck," inching upward. Nostalgia kicks in. People make time for things: for your car, you make time ... for your nose ... .
But, of course, it doesn't last. Each pendulum swing is shorter, faster, until, even to the most sensitive measuring instruments, let alone the naked eye, the pendulum is not moving at all.
Fast is way ahead of the game. Some weeks after the mugging, he sees a sign for a cancer-treatment center, and thinks, "I can go there when I get it."
Not so fast. Slow and steady.
Their temperamental differences become philosophical, historical, scientific.
Slow: My preferred medium of change is stochastic resonance, in which "noise," such as atmospheric turbulence, enters a highly variable system, like climate change, and pushes it over the edge into a new equilibrium, like an ice age. My ur-moment is the dawn of the military-industrial complex during the second Assyrian empire.
Fast: Mine's Woodstock, when Janis Joplin sings, "Owhoahhhh!"
The paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. Slow patiently explains that, with the advent of calculus, the paradox has, in fact, been resolved. Given that motion is ...
Fast: Yadda. Achilles wins.
Fast makes a joke about watching paint dry. Slow, not amused, does a slow burn.
The friends pursue further leisure-time activities.
First, they take a day trip to the shore.
Slow sits on the boardwalk in the late autumnal sunshine. He savors the ponderous crashing of the sand-laden waves. He tries to slow the systal-diastal of his own heart to match the comings and goings of the mighty ocean.
Fast: Whee! A speck in the air, he rides the tail of a wi-fi ad towed by a red glider.
They go on vacation.
Slow finishes a single hole of golf that he began four months ago, in summer. Then, just after the ice has formed, with uncharacteristic haste, he is out there curling. He plays through, climbs back out, plays on. The third time through, he does not come up.
Fast plays sweeper in a soccer game on a minefield in a war-torn country. A blur, airborne, gone.
Time, oh, poor, stooped, withered father, lurches, keels, expires.
About the author:
Ron Singer trawls the genres: poetry, fiction, satire, journalism (about Africa), and drama (including librettos for two operas, recorded and performed). Among the places his work has appeared are Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review; The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; diagram (e-zine and print anthology) Ellipsis; Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review; Poets & Writers online; The Wall Street Journal; Windsor Review; and numerous literary e-zines. He wrote the Introduction to Thackeray's Vanity Fair (Bantam Books). In November 2006, his chapbook, A Voice for My Grandmother, was published (Ten Penny Players, Inc/bardpress chapbooks), and it has thus far been reviewed five times. Singer lives in New York City, where he has taught at Friends Seminary, a K-12 Quaker school, for thirty years. His wife teaches, too, and she is a visual artist; their daughter is a food writer.
© 2009 Word Riot
