On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

by Solvej Balle

The minute we deviate from simple, practical matters, the conversation lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble. Our communication, initially meaningful and coherent, turns into a series of fitful exchanges containing neither sentences nor information: little words and sounds meant—I suppose—to keep the line between us open, but which, instead, make all too clear how far apart we are. So we have learned to split the work between us, stick to practical matters, and only speak to one another when necessary.

They had a closeness which I could not help but notice. Not the sort of unspoken awareness that shuts other people out, the self-absorption of a couple in the first throes of love who need constantly to make contact by look or touch, nor the fragile intimacy which makes an outsider feel like a disruptive element and gives you the urge to simply leave the lovers alone with their delicate alliance. They had an air of peace about them,

The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other—the one person who makes everything simple—a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.

it wasn’t the first time I had come to grief for not heeding, as Thomas put it, the basic principles of cause and effect.

That is why I began to write. Because I can hear him in the house. Because time has fallen apart. Because I found a ream of paper on the shelf. Because I’m trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.

for a moment I sensed a kind of familiarity, a glimmer of recognition, perhaps. But I must have been mistaken. It was probably just wishful thinking.

It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility.

That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak oc...

The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.

For a fleeting moment I could see this rift in time as a mere detail, a problem that can be solved, a trek through cold and rain that would soon be over, but then I remember that it is not some detail that can simply be dismissed. The error did not disappear, it grew bigger and I don’t know how to erase it.

what I remember now is a fleeting glance which I can only describe as faintly reproachful, as if it was not time, but me, that was failing him and throwing his world out of kilter.

Distance, leave-taking and reunions are not what bind us to one another. For us it has always been about the days together, day after day, night after night, again and again.

It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it’s a chemical reaction, I don’t know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other’s company.

This was a time that did not run away with us. It was like the time after we first met, only more intense and possibly—or so it seems to me now—with an undertone of quiet desperation, but that is not how we saw it. There was the feel of electrically charged skin, the way our sentences flowed together when we talked. There was something in the air between us, an intensity, a dense network of connections. I felt understood. I uttered sentences that were heard and heard the words that were spoken.

Often, we would simply come to the conclusion that you cannot know everything, that you have to accept some displacement in life, that you have to expect inconsistencies, and that was what we encountered: patterns and inconsistencies, two worlds trying to merge.

We could not find the mistake. We could not find the reason why time had fallen apart. There was no reason. I could not find a reason, Thomas could not find a reason. We could find patterns and we could find inconsistencies. Thomas was the pattern, I was disturbance.

We talked about love. About whether it could make things happen. About whether love could bring us in or out.

There were inconsistencies in time and it was impossible to discern a pattern that made sense.

For the first time I found it frightening. Not merely bewildering and odd and a little bit sinister. It was frightening, it was senseless and in no way magical. The fog had cleared completely.

Every time we came to a dead end we had to go back to the facts: Thomas was subject to the laws of forgetfulness, and I was accumulating too many days in my memory. Thomas was caught in eternity and I was slowly but surely moving toward my grave.

I do not go in and toss 151 days onto the floor in a heap between us. I don’t go into that room and try to drag him out of his pattern. I live with the distance.

To be a door. To be touched. And slowly swing back into place and close on easy hinges. But that’s not me. I don’t swing shut. I have no hinges. There is nothing to hold onto.

It is the loss that staggers me. It is the longing for what is lost and there is nothing I can do about it.

It was me who made things disappear. That must be it. I am living in a time that eats up the world.

I am using up the world while Thomas lives in a world that restores itself. I leave a trail. I have become a ravening monster, a monster in a finite world. A swarm of locusts. How long can my little world endure me?

How do they live in the same houses, though, those couples who have been halved? How do they go on living the same life year after year?

You can’t plan for everything, he said. Sometimes you just have to be ready. Take each day as it comes, be on the alert. Something will turn up. An opportunity. An escape route.

It felt empty, but with the emptiness came a sense of relief: a well-known evening, an outline without too many details. There was something refreshing about the lack of detail, the lack of imaginings and scenarios and alertness and condensation.