8.
K.’s silence was of an indeterminate length. The sun went down; the room went dark. Frieda could not still have been reading, although she didn’t seem to have moved from her place by the files.
The situation invited sleep. K.’s sleep had always been more actual than conventional, however; it didn’t have a fixed duration, alternating with alertness, as no doubt the metrici experience. Sleep for K. was instead a flexible mix of waking and dreaming, and the self-storage facility, despite its tomb-like dark, had only exaggerated this rhythmici-like pattern. The plethora of objects in the building mixed with objects in K.’s dreams, and K. had found that he could readily collect them from both sides of the divide - which was less porous to K. than simply accessible, like a storage unit from a hallway, or vice-versa.
The music Frieda had introduced to K. seemed designed to accompany these frequent crossings. K. noticed that the quality of this music changed with the hour of day, even with his differing activities. Toward noon, when he would often find himself thinking of Frieda because of the timing of her initial visit, he heard a nostalgic tone creep into the songs. The music at this hour was intended to contain feelings, rather than provoke them, and K. would find himself in a suspended state neither expecting Frieda nor forgetting her.
But in the evening the songs grew more agitated, even anxious about the next day. “I am hoping that tomorrow won’t come,” sang Jo Stafford, with unnerving calm, and a confusingly chipper male chorus. “The party’s over,” said Willie Nelson, to a sprightly two-step; “Turn out the lights.” The female chorus shimmies: “And tomorrow starts the same old thing again!”
Finally, just before midnight, horns and a Hammond organ announced the song that closed each day. Sometimes it even played twice in a row, as if to draw the border more clearly.
Kiss me each morning for a million years
Hold me each evening at your side
Tell me you’ll love me for a million years
Then if it don’t work out
(Then if it don’t work out)
Then you can tell me – goodbye
K. was interested by the perfect rhyme in this first verse. It’s just like the clock, he thought. A million years and a million years, rhyming together, do not sum to two but layer one over the other.
The timescale of the bridge was similarly vertiginous:
If you must go, oh no, I won’t grieve
If you wait a lifetime before you leave…
Acting after a lifetime is impossible, K. felt sure. But waiting a lifetime, while also acting, was for K. just like the rhyming million year spans - it made sense that a life can be waited through, and acted through, at once.
Which helped but didn’t fully explain the puzzling final verse:
But if you must go
Mmm, I won’t tell you no
Just so that we can say we tried
Tell me you’ll love me for a million years
Then if it don’t work out
(Then if it don’t work out)
Then you can tell me – goodbye
In the first verse, the timeline was expansive but clear: the lovers kiss in the morning, again in the evening, and this might continue for a million years before it doesn’t work out.
But in the last verse that timeline has shifted, or rather multiplied. The lovers are separating as it begins - at least we tried, says the singer. And then he repeats: tell me you’ll love me for a million years. Those million years are now both behind and ahead, it seemed to K.
This song, played at the same hour each night, signaled sleep for K. like a reverse alarm clock. It also ensured that he remained alert as he entered his first sleep of the night – alert, and troubled by the timing of goodbye in the last verse. If only I had a painting of this timespan, he would think. And then he would dream.