The Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

But I suppose this is often true of moments of life that are remembered as major advances: the discovery is the crucial thing, not its repeated later applications.

As I walked out of the office-supply store, I became aware of the power of all these individual, simultaneously pending transactions: all over the city, and at selected sites in other states, events were being set in motion on my behalf, services were being performed, simply because I had requested them and in some cases paid or agreed to pay later for them.

All of this and more I could get the world to do for me, and at the same time all of it was going on, I could walk down the street, unburdened with the niceties of the individual tasks, living my life! I felt like an efficient short-order cook, having eight or nine different egg orders working at once, dropping the toast, rolling the sausages, setting up the plates, flicking the switch that illuminated a waitress’s number.

The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

I had already half pulled out my shirt-pocket pen, but not wanting to refuse her offer, I hesitated; at the same time, she saw that I already had a pen, and with an “Oh” began to retract hers from the proffering position; meanwhile I had decided to accept hers and had let go of the one in my pocket, not registering until it was too late that she had withdrawn the offer; she, seeing that I was now beginning to reach for her pen, canceled her retraction, but meanwhile I, processing her earlier corrective movement, had gone back to reaching for my own pen—so we went through a little foilwork that was like the mutual bobbings you exchange with an oncoming pedestrian, as both of you lurch to indicate whether you are going to pass to the right or to the left.

My T-shirt, of course, was already tucked into my underpants: a few weeks into the job I had discovered that this small act of foresight made the whole rest of the business day much more comfortable.

I then began to wonder how late to work I was going to be. My own watch had been stolen by threat of force a week before, but I glanced hopefully down the diminishing perspective of hands and wrists that held the metal loops of the subway car. I spotted many watches, women’s and men’s, but on this particular morning they were all unreadable.

And this was when I realized abruptly that as of that minute (impossible to say exactly which minute), I had finished with whatever large-scale growth I was going to have as a human being, and that I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development. I did not move or flinch or make any outward sign. Actually, once the first shock of raw surprise had passed, the feeling was not unpleasant. I was set: I was the sort of person who said “actually” too much. I was the sort of person who stood in a subway car and thought about buttering toast—buttering raisin toast, even: when the high, crisp scrape of the butter knife is muted by occasional contact with the soft, heat-blimped forms of the raisins, and when if you cut across a raisin, it will sometimes fall right out, still intact though dented, as you lift the slice. I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be.

but besides date-stampers and the ball bearings in pens and in desk drawers, which exist in isolation, where but in the corporate bathroom do we witness mechanical engineering in such a pure form? Valves that allow a controlled amount of water to rush into a toilet and no more, shapes of porcelain designed so that the turbulence in them forms almost fixed and decorative (yet highly functional) braids and twists that Hopkins would have liked;

again; I polished the lenses with the fifth paper towel, making bribe-me, bribe-me finger motions over the two curved surfaces until they were dry.

Incidentally, if you open a Band-Aid box, it will exhale a smell (as I found out recently, needing a Band-Aid for a surprisingly gruesome little cut1) that will shoot you directly back to when you were four2—although I don’t trust this olfactory memory trick anymore, because it seems to be a hardware bug in the neural workings of the sense of smell, a low-level sort of tie-in, underneath subtler strata of language and experience, between smell, vision, and self-love, which has been mistakenly exalted by some writers as something realer and purer and more sacredly significant than intellective memory, like the bubbles of swamp methane that awed provincials once took for UFOs.