My wife was rummaging through her handbag for her father’s watch to take to a nearby jeweler for a new battery, one fine spring day in Rockville Town Square. She removed item after item—her smart phone, two pairs of glasses, a handkerchief, a Quest bar, desiccated lipstick, a dried-up tube of sun-tan lotion—and spread them out over the picnic table, protected from the sun by a large umbrella.
“Life was much easier back when the world was a giant gas ball, 4 billion years ago, and there weren’t so many god-damn things to keep track of,” she said.
“You shouldn’t be thinking in geological time,” I replied. “It’s not the time scale we actually live in. It’ll just confuse you.”
“It’s kind of soothing actually.”
“Is that because it puts your own worries into perspective? Or because the idea of the Earth as a simple, harmonious object somehow pleases you?”
“Why, both at once.”
The sun shimmered on the purse’s gold straps and danced upon its shiny green surface. My wife continued to remove items—a half-eaten box lunch from a recent meeting, a stapler with some loose staples, a baby troll doll, her lap top—and I realized there were more items than could possibly fit.
The list continued—a complete Bible, the Koran, the Mahabharata, the sayings of Chairman Mao, a CD of the complete Beatles, a collection of every song ever sung by Ella Fitzgerald, a mini-CD player, an old desktop computer.
And more—a new picnic table complete with umbrella, an outdoor stage, the jewelry store that would repair her father’s watch should she ever find it—and I realized that she was constructing the entire Town Square around us. Would she go on to construct the city of Rockville, all of North America, Planet Earth itself, the stars strewn across the sky, the universe?
It was kind of pleasant to realize that my wife was actually God. Time itself was clearly an illusion, meaning that she could create the universe right here, right now, in what seems to us mortals to be the middle of existence, and everything would occur in proper chronological order.
“I found it!” she announced, pulling out her father’s silver watch from the very bottom of the purse. Once the battery was replaced, would time itself start ticking forward?
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