SPONTANEOUS TIMING

I meet Elisheva just outside a storefront in SoHo. I took notice of her walking down the sidewalk because she was not especially attractive. Her features were sharp, really sharp. Her bones could hurt you. Long curly dark hair framed her distinctive, sharp face, like a knife in a fluffy wool cap. The look in her eyes was distant, removed. She could have been a serial killer, but that day, a week ago, she walked quite contently eating something sweet out of a plastic store bag. She was just passing by.

“Got enough in there to share?” I asked. What was I thinking? I never do things like that. Am I feeling a little sinister? And just as I came to this realization, she made one efficient turn toward me and stopped just inches from my body. She opened her bag.

“Take anything you’d like,” she said with a smile.

I was not expecting.

As it turns out, Eli is a freelance writer. She writes about anything she wants. She was working on a subject that recently interested me: spontaneous swarming and its sudden disintegration back into autonomous behavior. She explained that it all came down to the timing of discrete actions among indivduals that triggered swarming behavior, and that other individual behaviors triggered the return to autonomous states. (I was rather impressed at how much she knew about the topic. Then again, she was researching it.)

That night, we spent hours sitting at her place. Literally, all we did was sit. I spread myself comfortably on her sofa. She organized and worked and wrote at a table across the room. And we sat, like furniture.

I watched with intrigue because Elisheva was a peculiar individual. She seemed to have a sense of time and of what it is, I thought to myself, but either she had no respect for it or she had no respect for the fact that others do. I say this because she was often caught up in what she was doing in the moment. Focused and thoughtful. Always silent. Time did not command her, and if it tried, she just ignored it. Occasionally, she’d look up from her work and smiled for a moment about something personal—memories, perhaps, or a hope. I could never tell.

Suddenly, she called a friend. It was 1:30 on a Saturday morning, still early, and she talked for 5 minutes. “I’ll be right over,” she said enthusiastically. Expecting to see her move to prepare herself to leave, I did the opposite and settled in for a nap. I was intent on sleeping. But she didn’t get up from her chair. Instead, she turned her attention back to her notes. She wrote something down. Hours passed. I’m awoken but the sudden sound of her voice on the phone, nearly shouting in excitement. She was calling to confirm that she was leaving her place right then, as if it had been only a few minutes since she last called. While on the phone, she wrote something else down. She turned a page, sat back and began to read. Without a word, she closed her cell phone. No one called back. I drifted off to sleep again.

“Okay, I’m ready to work out. Take me to the gym.” Her voice pulled me out of a dream like a deep sea fishing hook. I was disoriented.

“It’s 3:30 in the morning,” I said. “The gym is closed.” But I realized that she would know that.

“I need to lose 15 pounds in 1 week,” she said while gathering her gym clothes.

“Oh? Starting right now?”

“So, we need to get to the gym.”

“But you don't need a gym. You don’t even need food or rest. Just work on her article—don’t sleep, don’t eat—and you’ll lose 15 pounds in 1 week.” I closed my eyes to fall to sleep.

She finished gathering her workout clothes into a handbag. “Great. Let’s go then.” She playfully kicked my foot and jerked her head toward the door.

We walked over to the gym, which, of course, was closed. She waited patiently, searching for something in her bag to chew on, while I unlocked the doors. She followed me in, offering a stick of gum.

At 6:30 Eli finished working out and was showered. She walked into my office and called her friends from my phone. “I’m ready to hit every bar in town!” she told her friends. “We’ll be right over!” She hung up and smiled proudly.

“Eli," I said, "it’s 6:30 in the morning. I need to open the gym in nearly an hour. And didn’t your friends want to go out, er, last night?”

“It’ll be an after-hours thing. You have time to make it to midtown and back. I’m bringing wine, and I need to pick up a melon. Walk me to the store.” She put an apple on the corner of my desk.



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