Heaven,
Heaven is a place,
Where nothing,
Nothing ever happens.
— Heaven, Talking Heads
I
If you lived a year every day you’d never see a living bird, or an insect. At midsummer, you’d experience a couple of minutes of light, watching the sun race across the sky. You could observe plants reaching up towards the sun, following it, sinking back down.
People would move in a blur. You’d only notice one of their buzzing forms if they sat in front of you to paint you, perhaps for a full morning. You’d be a curiosity to them, so this isn’t so unlikely. Curiosity giving way to compassion, kind humans might feed you. The food would oxidise in your mouth, making it cold and a little stale to your palate.
You could listen to ‘Heaven’ by Talking Heads in three quarters of a second. To actually hear it as intended, someone would need to slow it down to last for 24 hours and 20 minutes.
Your minders probably wouldn’t let you walk around. When they moved you, you’d see your new vista in a flash. You wouldn’t notice the transition. If they did, by some miracle, let you walk through a forest, you could crouch for a few minutes and watch as the weeds grew around your ankles. Spending your afternoon there, you could experience our autumn and let the humus rise around your feet.
A freshly painted house would dirty itself and fade before your eyes. Rooms would fill with dust as if the air was thick with it. You could see a new road laid in a blink, and hang around as the asphalt sagged and flowed around the tracks that formed in it. Cars would be ghostly tail lights, or nothing at all. Don’t step into the road.
Unless the place you lived in was particularly stable, you’d experience periods of great hunger and thirst, as the world forgot about you. If you are lucky, they’d find you before a decade had passed and keep you alive. People could communicate with you, if they invested the time. It’s likely they’d tire quickly. No one is worth quite that much effort.
II
I’m lying flat in my childhood bed. I’m watching the familiar shapes in the ceiling, a vulpine stain, the outline of a Punch and Juddy puppet’s face. It is evening, one that I’ve cleared for myself. It’s reading week, five weeks into the first term of my second year at university. Time lies ahead and behind me, portioned carefully into numbered weeks, named days.
I picture myself sliding inexorably down some shaft, towards the finish. Beyond that, I cannot see. The weeks have no number. I want this night to be a pause, a true rest, to mean nothing. But I know that it must mean something, and that I’m using one of my allotted nights to no purpose. I want everything to slow, I want a pause.
This room, so ridiculously familiar, the place I’ve spent most of my nights and most of my time seems momentarily solid. It is reliable, it never changes. The polka dot curtains I picked out when I was ten are there, the accent wall — all I was allowed — is painted Tardis blue.
I know this is an illusion. This place exists in time, and so do I. It is aging — hairline cracks in the paint of the ceiling, a sagged area in the mattress where I always lie, dust on the boxes of childish things I don’t want to part with. Not just yet.
I imagine the past, the people who lived and slept in this room a hundred years before me, five of my lifetimes before this moment. I imagine the future, the ceiling cracked open to reveal the blue sky as the house is demolished.
I realise that time is not a place. More, that no place is a place in the way I wish. We tell ourselves we’ve found a hill, but really it’s always a wave, out in the deep, slow, sea.
III
He realised, when he was twenty years old, that he could stop time.
He was giving a presentation and he was petrified. Seeing the faces turned towards him in that all-too-bright classroom he felt the pressure rising in his head, claustrophobic, almost unbearable. In desperation he closed his eyes hard and heard the drumming of his blood in his ears. When he opened his eyes they’d paused.
It took him time to realise this. He stumbled through his short presentation, staring at his script. It was only when he’d finished that he had his first vision of that silent statuary arranged before him. He was mortified, thinking he was being flash-mobbed or cruelly pranked. He awkwardly took his seat near the back of the class. It was oddly hard to manipulate the chair, the air resistance making it seem much heavier. But he sat.
When he couldn’t stand it any more, he went outside, rushing to his accommodation between the walkers stopped mid-step, the cars, lights on in the middle of the road. In his small room he slept, overcome with his stress. When he awoke it was still evening.
With time, he learned to control this power. The clenching of a certain inter-head muscle seemed to do it. Within a week in our time, he could throw a coin in the air and stop it mid-flight.
From the perspective of his classmates, his change was instantaneous. He was brilliant in conversation and in examination. He always knew what to say and never seemed to tire. On a night out he was the last to leave, the most fun. He could drink any amount, dance all night. They were in awe of him.
He learned to sleep anywhere, in a booth at a bar, on the floor at a conference. He learned how to get into the library when the turnstiles were paused, how to read whole books alone sometimes over days in his time, mid-examination or mid-conversation. After a few embarrassing attempts, he learned to take all his substantial pauses away from people to avoid those awkward looks when, for their eyes, he seemed to glitch from one position to another.
He was, as would have been everyone’s surprise, more socially anxious than ever before. He would castigate himself for even the smallest mistake because he knew, of course, that he needn’t have made it. He had no excuse for ever being unprepared.
He spent his paused time alternately like a monk and like a layabout. He’d force himself to study for hours on end or he’d take long anxious breaks, often hidden away on the floor of a disabled bathroom, postponing even the most trifling of inconveniences. It would take him several days to deliver a speech, to do an exam, to get through a date.
Despite his outward success, which never ceased to accrue, he never found love. In every attempt the feeling of falsity on his part was too strong. The person his partners loved was never him. He could never let down the mask.
He was in his late twenties when he began to suspect the toll that his ability was taking on him. He tried to write this off as paranoia but could never quite scour the worrying from his mind. It sat under his thoughts like the dark slippery silt below a poorly founded dwelling.
He died an exceptionally old-looking man soon after his fortieth birthday.