The Fermata Read Online Free PDF

corners, and it had a finish that seemed to have been made by dipping it in thick black paint and then blasting it with hot air so that the paint formed a texture of tiny wrinkles. It had a silver UL label on the underside. “Underwriters Laboratories”—a racy, vaguely underwearish name. The hum that the transformer made was almost inaudible. I touched the toggle switch, then flipped it off, and suddenly I knew that this was the machine I needed, and that the next time I turned the transformer back on, it would stop everything.
    I smuggled it and an extension cord into class in my lunch box. I did nothing with it all morning. As the rest of the students were lining up for lunch, when Miss Dobzhansky stood halfway out the door, I hastily plugged the extension cord into the outlet under the long table against the back wall, which was only a few feet from my chair, and hid the transformer in my desk. Over lunch, though I was quite keyed up, I gave nothing away. I casually discussed with my friend Timwhat it would be like to be an agitator BB ball in a can of green spray paint, as if it were an ordinary day. We agreed that it would be fun to dig into the pigment at the bottom of the spray can and then fly up through the pressurized froth and clack around—better perhaps than descending in a spherical space vehicle into the chemical storms on Saturn. Tim contended that there were sometimes two agitator BBs in a single can of spray paint, and I disagreed, arguing that it only sounded as if there were two when you shook it fast.
    I had not expected anyone to notice the cord leading into my desk, since I was in the back corner, and nobody in fact did. I let half an hour go by, watching Miss Dobzhansky discuss a kind of slitted sunglasses that the Eskimos whittled from bone to avoid snow blindness. She began to write the old spelling of
Eskimo
, with a
q
, on the board in white chalk. My hands were deep in my desk; my fingertips touched the wrinkle-finish black paint and the smooth toggle switch. As she embarked on the letter
m
, her back to the class, I flipped the switch. She didn’t finish the
m
. She and the class were without sound or motion.
    I said, “Hey.” I said “Hey” again. Nobody turned toward me. Far from being eerie or disturbing, the silence was, I found, quite comfy. This acoustical coziness, which is a consistent feature of the Fold, is the result, I think, of the relative sluggishness of the air molecules that surround me. Sound diffuses outward only a few feet, as far as I can tell. I’m often reminded of a line in the first stanza of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”: “And silent was the flock in woolly fold,” My Fold
is
woolly.
    Presently (“presently” is right!) I flipped the toggle back to the off position, deactivating the machine. At once everyone and everything took up where they had left off. The worldexpanded, sounding once again as if it were recorded in stereo. Miss Dobzhansky finished writing
Esquimaux
. She gave no indication that she was aware that anything out of the ordinary had just happened; and as far as she was concerned, of course, nothing had happened. She turned toward us and began talking about a thin strip of land that she claimed had once joined Alaska and Asia, over which tribes had traveled, giving rise not only to the Eskimo, but to the American Indians of the lower states. I must have been looking at her with an expression of unusual attentiveness, or even of rapture, because her gaze landed on me and she smiled. I knew we had a special understanding. I knew also that she might be the most beautiful person I would ever know. I knew that she knew that I sometimes didn’t raise my hand to give answers to the questions she asked even when I knew the answers, because I wanted to give her the option of drawing out other kids, of calling on me only when she needed to, as a backup. Her explanation of the waves of Asian migrations across the Bering Strait interested me, so I