A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki Read Free Book Online

letters disintegrating, unread. But instead it got washed up on the beach below Jap Ranch, where you could find it . . .”
    “What are you saying?” Ruth asked.
    “Nothing. Just that it’s amazing, is all.”
    “As in the-universe-provides kind of amazing?”
    “Maybe.” He looked up with an astonished expression on his face. “Hey, look!” he said, holding out the watch. “It’s working!”
    The second hand was making its way around the large luminescent numbers on the face. She took it from him and slipped it on her wrist. It was a man’s watch, but it fit her. “What did
you do?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “I guess I wound it.”
    5.
    She listened to the watch ticking softly in the dark, and the sound of Oliver’s mechanical breathing. She reached over to the bedside table and felt for the diary. Running
her fingertips across the soft cloth cover, she noted the faint impression of the tarnished letters. They still retained the shape of
À la recherche du temps perdu
, but they had
evolved—no, that word implied a gradual unfolding, and this was sudden, a mutation or a rift, pages ripped from their cover by some Tokyo crafter who’d retooled Proust into something
altogether new.
    In her mind’s eye, she could see the purple ink scripting sinuous lines into solid blocks of colored paragraphs. She couldn’t help but notice and admire the uninhibited flow of the
girl’s language. Rarely had she succumbed to second thoughts. Rarely did she doubt a word, or pause to consider or replace it with another. There were only a few crossed-out lines and
phrases, and this, too, filled Ruth with something like awe. It had been years since she’d approached the page with such certainty.
    I am reaching through time to touch you.
    The diary once again felt warm in her hands, which she knew had less to do with any spooky quality in the book and everything to do with the climate changes in her own body. She was growing
accustomed to sudden temperature shifts. The steering wheel of the car that grew sticky and hot in her grip. The smoldering pillow, which she often woke to find on the floor beside the bed where
she’d flung it in her sleep, along with the covers, as though to punish them all for making her hot.
    The watch, by contrast, felt cool against her wrist.
    I’m reaching forward through time to touch you . . . you’re reaching back to touch me.
    She held the diary to her nose again and sniffed, identifying the smells one by one: the mustiness of an old book tickling her nostrils, the acrid tang of glue and paper, and then something else
that she realized must be Nao, bitter like coffee beans and sweetly fruity like shampoo. She inhaled again, deeply this time, and then put the book—no, not a schoolgirl’s nice pure
diary—back on the bedside table, still pondering how best to read this improbable text. Nao claimed to have written it just for her, and while Ruth knew this was absurd, she decided she would
go along with the conceit. As the girl’s reader, it was the least she could do.
    The steady ticking of the old watch seemed to grow louder. How do you search for lost time, anyway? As she thought about this question, it occurred to her that perhaps a clue lay in the pacing.
Nao had written her diary in real time, living her days, moment by moment. Perhaps if Ruth paced herself by slowing down and not reading faster than the girl had written, she could more closely
replicate Nao’s experience. Of course, the entries were undated, so there was no way of really knowing how slow or fast that might have been, but there were clues: the changing hues of ink,
as well as shifts in the density or angle of the handwriting, which seemed to indicate breaks in time or mood. If she studied these, she might be able to break up the diary into hypothetical
intervals, and even assign numbers to them, and then pace her reading accordingly. If she sensed the girl was on a roll, she could allow