A Tale for the Time Being Read Free

in French, though.”
    “Mm,” she said, agreeing, but then she opened the cover, anyway, curious to see if she could understand just the first few lines. She was expecting to see an age-stained folio,
printed in an antique font, so she was entirely unprepared for the adolescent purple handwriting that sprawled across the page. It felt like a desecration, and it shocked her so much she almost
dropped the book.
    5.
    Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye.
    Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
    Ruth stared at the page. The purple words were mostly in English, with some Japanese characters scattered here and there, but her eye wasn’t really taking in their meaning as much as a
felt
sense, murky and emotional, of the writer’s presence. The fingers that had gripped the purple gel ink pen must have belonged to a girl, a teenager. Her handwriting, these loopy
purple marks impressed onto the page, retained her moods and anxieties, and the moment Ruth laid eyes on the page, she knew without a doubt that the girl’s fingertips were pink and moist, and
that she had bitten her nails down to the quick.
    Ruth looked more closely at the letters. They were round and a little bit sloppy (as she now imagined the girl must be, too), but they stood more or less upright and marched gamely across the
page at a good clip, not in a hurry, but not dawdling, either. Sometimes at the end of a line, they crowded each other a little, like people jostling to get onto an elevator or into a subway car,
just as the doors were closing. Ruth’s curiosity was piqued. It was clearly a diary of some kind. She examined the cover again. Should she read it? Deliberately now, she turned to the first
page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people’s business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this
feeling.
    Hi!
, she read.
My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? . . .
    6.
    “Flotsam,” Oliver said. He was examining the barnacles that had grown onto the surface of the outer plastic bag. “I can’t believe it.”
    Ruth glanced up from the page. “Of course it’s flotsam,” she said. “Or jetsam.” The book felt warm in her hands, and she wanted to continue reading but heard
herself asking, instead, “What’s the difference, anyway?”
    “Flotsam is accidental, stuff found floating at sea. Jetsam’s been jettisoned. It’s a matter of intent. So you’re right, maybe this is jetsam.” He laid the bag back
down onto the table. “I think it’s starting.”
    “What’s starting?”
    “Drifters,” he said. “Escaping the orbit of the Pacific Gyre . . .”
    His eyes were sparkling and she could tell he was excited. She rested the book in her lap. “What’s a gyre?”
    “There are eleven great planetary gyres,” he said. “Two of them flow directly toward us from Japan and diverge just off the BC coastline. The smaller one, the Aleut Gyre, goes
north toward the Aleutian Islands. The larger one goes south. It’s sometimes called the Turtle Gyre, because the sea turtles ride it when they migrate from Japan to Baja.”
    He held up his hands to describe a big circle. The cat, who had fallen asleep on the table, must have sensed his excitement, because he opened a green eye to watch.
    “Imagine the Pacific,” Oliver said. “The Turtle Gyre goes clockwise, and the Aleut Gyre goes counterclockwise.” His hands moved in the great arcs and spirals of the
ocean’s flow.
    “Isn’t this the same as the Kuroshio?”
    He’d told her about the Kuroshio already. It was also called the Black Current, and it brought warm tropical water up from Asia and over to the Pacific Northwest coast.
    But now he shook his head. “Not quite,” he said. “Gyres are bigger. Like a string of currents.