This Modern Writer: The Physics of Perceived Time by Curtis Smith

My son holds his kata’s opening pose: back straight, fists low and clenched. Tonight, he says, he’d rather not have me watch.

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because.”

“Fair enough.” I shut my eyes.

“Are they closed?”

“As closed as they can be.”

I listen. His new kata is complicated. The carpet rubs his pivoting feet. He steps, pauses. His shirt rustles with his first chops. His fist strikes his thigh and chest. My eyes are closed, yet the moment is not blank. Indeed, the moment blossoms. In the dark, I see him like never before.

I open my eyes when he returns to his ready stance. “Can I watch now?”

He thinks for a moment. “Not this time. Maybe later.”

*

I am fifty. Imagine the physicist’s ball in flight. I’m at least a decade past the trajectory’s apex. Gravity is now my journey’s driving force. Of course it always was, but I’d been duped by youth’s reckless velocity. That current lifted me to the clouds. Now I’m hostage to an ever-speedier plummet. Behold the onrushing earth. Behold my impending return to dust. Fifty, and there’s still so much to do. I want to learn to ice skate. I want to grow watermelons in my garden. I want to hold a grandchild. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three . . . the playground taught me the second-hand’s cadence. Time remains the faultless constant. Yet time crumbles beneath my skin, no match for the forces of experience and soul.

*

Friday evening karate class, my boy barefoot despite the cold. The space echoes with the children’s bloody cries of Ki-ya! There are exercises, drills, turns taken at the punching bag. When his name is called, my son stands alone before his instructor, and I’m finally allowed to witness the warrior’s choreographed routine. There are flaws, but there is also flow and power, promises of better things to come.

The instructor claps his hands. “Gear up!”

The students strap on their sparring gloves. My boy runs to his mother. He opens his mouth, and she slides in his guard. “Hands up,” I remind him, but he sprints back before I can be sure he’s heard me.

“Ready?” the instructor asks.

My boy nods from behind his raised fists. He and his partner exchange jabs and tepid kicks. Son, like father, is not the aggressive type. The instructor sends another boy onto the floor, and now my son must fight two. The seconds pass for us all, but for my boy, the necessity of attack and defense blurs the present. For me, the same moments grow interminable for I see not the safety of the dojo’s padded gear but a foreshadowing of the bruises and black eyes that await this child I love so dearly.

The instructor steps into the fray. “Break!”

*

A physicist’s fundamental understanding of time:

–

–

–

-       a = delta v / delta t

-       v = delta d /delta t

*

In my dreams, I am twenty-five, thirty—a young man’s strongest years. This flattering picture has frozen in my thoughts, as real as a statue and, alas, just as useful.

*

My wife and I stand and applaud as BB King is led onto the stage. All hail the King of the Blues! His sits, Lucille balanced upon his lap. His white hair shines beneath the lights. Unexpected, the welling that finds me, a teary appreciation to be sharing this night with a legend.

The King picks and croons. Between songs, he jokes with the audience, but more than once, he loses track of what he’s saying. “I’m eight-five,” he laughs. “The only things I remember are my age and that girls are pretty.”

*

My son pushes a chair to the fireplace. Atop the mantle waits his advent calendar, a shallow wooden box with twenty-five doors. Each day brings a surprise, a bit of candy, a trinket likely to break within the week. He has just turned eight, and how long a month, especially this one, must seem. I witness the same scene, amazed that soon he’ll have opened all the doors and another year will have passed.

The physicist tallies the seconds it takes my son to climb atop the chair. Work is calculated. Power. Joules and watts. Kinetic energy yields to potential. All these derived quantities are true, yet this is just the surface. Reach deeper into the physicist’s bag of tricks and consider the Doppler effect. Our existence is awash in waves, carriers of all we see and hear. In this light, one could argue that the singular moment is little more than the simultaneous crashing of a thousand waves from near and far.

The moment dies in its birth, and as we grapple to stay afloat in the present, we are left with an ever-fading appreciation of what was once real. The present it titular—a heartbeat, a sigh. Beneath this pinnacle exists the shadowland of perceived time, and no physicist who values his sanity want to explore this quagmire.

Disciples of science, here is my theory: perceived time operates on an as-yet discovered algorithm of the Doppler effect. Consider the compressed waves born of wanting and desire—the child’s Christmas-week anticipation, the adult’s anxious witnessing of karate-class blows. In these situations time expands beyond the accepted frameworks of calendars and clocks. Balancing these are the red-shift waves of the years that fly past, an avalanche of days barely noticed until we are deposited in an unexpected future, our joints brittle and our closets full of dated fashions.

My boy climbs down. Today’s treat—Swedish fish. He extends his hand, a red candy upon his palm. “Want one, Daddy?”

*

Deep into her eighties, my grandmother’s mind deteriorated. She forgot to turn off the stove. She returned from the supermarket without the groceries she needed. She spoke to me in a new tone, a nuance that perplexed me until I realized she believed she was talking to my father. The time had come to put her in a home.

“Do you like it here?” I asked during my first visit.

“Yes.” She clutched my arm and whispered, “But the people here are so old!”

*

My son stands in the living room’s center. He wears last year’s favorite sweatpants, the cuffs now riding high above his ankles. Behind him, the Christmas tree, white lights and all around us, the evergreen scent. Only five closed doors remain on the advent calendar.

Tonight I am permitted to watch his final kata. I rest my book and glasses on my lap and hear out my son’s stipulations. No laughing, no correcting, and I am not so old that I can’t remember feeling the same way about my father, his well-intentioned criticisms magnified and stinging in my gut.

My boy begins. Pivot, stance, block. Step, punch. The tree lights twinkle, a hundred delicate pinpoints eclipsed by his little body. The moment exists. The moment is. The moment is both shared and cleaved into two unique realities. The seconds click, a parade of impersonal markers. The moment passes. Its echo, nurtured by the misunderstood physics of perceived time, burrows into our hearts. There, it waits for resurrection and perhaps, if we are fortunate, understanding.

Curtis Smith’s stories and essays have appeared in over seventy literary journals and have been cited by The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best American Spiritual Writing. His latest books are Bad Monkey (stories, Press 53), Truth or Something Like It (novel, Casperian Books), and Witness (essays, Sunnyoutside).