Work Text:
As the floating city of Columbia advanced on its global tour, summer settled upon it like a migratory bird, roosting on the city and leaving the air stiff and heavy. The sun beat down on Emporia’s mothers under their parasols, their hands resting on the shoulders of their fair-haired children, and the merciless heat clawed at their skirts. Groups of men who had long since removed their top hats wiped their sweating brows with embroidered handkerchiefs. Men in coattails and leather gloves policed the streets, attempting to persuade people to buy from the shops which hired them, growing more irritable with each bead of sweat which dripped under their clothes. Crowds formed around famous magicians who were permitted to perform on the streets of Market District, causing doves to disappear in boxes and juggling numerous balls at once. Ageing ladies clutching ebony walking sticks and silk gloves meandered around the boutiques erected for Columbia’s wealthiest, discussing the latest scandals and where best to find afternoon tea.
A small cobbled road led away from the main street of Market District; isolated from the hum of people under the summer sky, a wooden sign in the shape of a sleeping cat hung from a quaint coffee house, offering respite from the heat and bustle. Across the front of the establishment, in resplendent gold lettering, the words ‘Le Chat Béant’ were boasted.
Inside, the café was full; women in heavy gowns wafted themselves with silk fans as they sipped their tea, while their male counterparts laughed and smoked in shirts and waistcoats, basking in the fusillades of bright summer sunlight which invaded the open windows and settled on the polished surfaces - on the edges of the circular tables with delicate lace cloths, the carved chairs that surrounded them. The scents of tea leaves, coffee beans and cigarette smoke stained the air, tinged with a plethora of spices; cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron. A brass bell tinkled each time the door opened, throwing scattered shards of light on the paintings which lined the walls inside their ornate wooden frames: Deruet’s Road to Calvary; Dubois’ Allegory of Painting and Sculpture; Caron’s Portrait of a Lady. Two crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, catching the sunlight and throwing it back into the restaurant in a myriad of colours which quivered and danced on the walls.
The dull hum of the outside world was concealed by gentle music which issued from a grand piano, keys manipulated by a pristine waiter girl with bloomers which ended at the knee to show black stockings. The blonde curls of her hair had been persuaded into a tight knot on top of her head, and her cheeks were rouged. Coffee steam and cigarette smoke floated to the ceiling and mingled together, dancing to the music.
In a quiet corner of the coffee house, isolated from the idle chatter, Columbia’s greatest minds sat on intricately carved wooden chairs, facing each other. Their matching teal jackets were draped carefully on the backs of their chairs, though their shirts were still buttoned to their throats and matching ties were secured around their necks. They sat near an open window, sunlight lighting their red hair with flashes of gold. While her male counterpart read The Daily Columbian with indifference, licking his thumb as he turned the pages, Rosalind tapped her fingernails on the table impatiently.
“I can’t believe you brought me out here,” she remarked, staring intently at the newspaper which hid the man she called brother.
“You most certainly need it,” he replied from behind the paper.
She stared out of the window agitatedly. The sun gripped a wayward strand of hair on her forehead and set it alight. “We could have had coffee at the labs. It would have been less busy.”
“It’s too hot and stuffy in there. You need to leave the labs at some point.”
“I wear a corset, Robert, it’s always hot and stuffy. Besides, I was working.”
The newspaper shuffled as Robert closed it, thumbed the next page, and opened it again without looking at her. “And you need to stop working at some point.”
“Do not.”
“Don’t be impertinent.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“You need to eat and drink.”
“I do eat and drink.”
“I don’t mean half a sandwich at midnight. You’ve been working too hard.”
“Have not.”
Robert folded one side of the newspaper in order to peer at her, an eyebrow raised. “Rosalind, when I found you, you were dissecting a squirrel.”
She shrugged. “It was an experiment.”
He sighed. With great deliberation he closed the newspaper and folded it. “The lay person would consider the kitchen counter an inappropriate place to conduct said experiment, however,” he reasoned, placing the paper on the table.
“But I think we would both agree that we are not lay people. Besides, you’ve never cared about the kitchen before. You’ve never even stepped inside it. There’s a reason the labs are near some very good culinary establishments.”
“Only because you never learnt how to cook,” he muttered.
Her eyebrows raised, and a wry smile pulled at her mouth. “Pot kettle black, brother. Why should I be the one to learn to cook? You learn.”
“I just think we should have at least one clean room in the labs,” Robert sighed, “preferably untouched by dead vermin. Besides, why were you cutting up a squirrel anyway?”
Rosalind shrugged again peered out of the window. The light lit up the dusting of freckles on her cheeks. “Like I said. Experiment.”
The woman at the piano ascended into the string of upbeat notes which Albert Fink’s ‘Pretty Woman’ comprised of, her fingers dancing along the ivory keys.
Robert pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. “What has that got to do with quantum mechanics?”
“Is a woman not allowed to have an active interest in biological processes, Robert? And don’t pinch your nose like that,” she added brusquely, “I thought you were getting a nosebleed.”
“Do not change the subject, Rosalind.”
“What subject is that, brother? I thought the conversation had already reached its imminent and comfortable conclusion.”
“You can’t just kill and experiment on defenceless creatures.”
“Oh, do not assume the moral high ground with me, Robert. It was already dead.”
He opened his mouth to reply, but was cut short when a waiter approached their table. He was young, skinny, with sunburnt cheeks and dark hair which stuck to his forehead. His black uniform appeared freshly pressed, with a miniature cat pinned to his lapel. Though his cheeks were freshly shaven, wisps of dark hair ghosted around his upper lip, marking his valiant attempt of being in the first stages of growing a moustache. He spoke in a French accent which bordered convincing, though the pair could hear the whispers of American pronunciation behind the heavily practised vowels; “Bonjour sir, miss Lutece. My name is Arnaud and I shall be your waiter today. What may I get for you both?”
Robert noticed that the youth appeared to pointedly avoid Rosalind’s eyes. “What would you suggest?”
“Well,” Arnaud began, in a tone which suggested a well rehearsed speech, “if sir and miss would like something refined and oriental then we are serving masala chai, with spices obtained from Colombia’s recent stop at India during its global tour. Or, if you would prefer, we have our own renowned café au lait. May I also suggest, perhaps, the excellent selection of pastries we have today, including croissants, pain aux raisins and the delectable puits d’amour, a favourite of King Louis XV. Or, perhaps you would like—”
“Two café au lait,” Rosalind nodded matter-of-factly.
“And some of those pastries,” Robert interjected, earning himself a disdainful rolling of eyes from his female counterpart.
“Merci, très bien.” Arnaud bowed, gave a faltering smile, and departed.
“Those sweet things will be the death of you,” Rosalind commented, nonchalantly inspecting the cuff of her shirt. “What do you think his real name is? My bet’s on Stephen. He looks like a Stephen. Or Christopher.”
Robert analysed his sister closely. His tone was light and conversational. “Strange.”
Rosalind’s eyebrows lifted. “Hm?”
“That the young man seems to be almost wary of you,” he observed.
Rosalind shrugged, still interested in her shirt. “I’ve been in here before.”
There was a pause. “And?”
“Yes?”
Robert smiled softly. His fingers interlocked on the table. “One would say you are flouting the Gricean Maxims.”
“I never was very fond of them. I tell my conversational partners all they need to know, no more and no less.”
“Even by those standards you are not giving me the information I require to continue being your conversational partner.”
Rosalind sighed and met his face evenly. “If you must know, that young man insisted on referring to me as Mrs or madam every time I visited this establishment. So I civilly and with refinement—”
“And clearly with some force.”
“—informed him that I am not married.”
Shaking his head, Robert turned in his seat to fish around in the inside of his jacket. For a moment Rosalind watched him with interest; with his back to the sun, his thin shirt was turned almost transparent, exposing the constellations of freckles which decorated his spine. His shoulder blades flexed as he fussed about with the inside pocket.
Smiling wryly, she pulled her gaze away and looked instead out of the open window, folding her legs under her skirt. She placed her head on her hand and watched as a pair of boys, no older than ten, skulked along the cobbled street outside, sticking close to the buildings on the opposite side where the shade hung like dark bedsheets on a washing line. They did not belong in Emporia; their sunken faces were smeared with dirt and their clothes were torn and ragged, hanging loosely from their thin bodies. Their feet were bare. The smallest turned his head and looked Rosalind straight in the eye, a rabbit in headlights. He pulled on the torn shirt of the larger boy and they streaked away, disappearing down an alley that Rosalind didn’t even know existed.
“Cigarette?”
Rosalind turned hastily back to Robert. Across the table, he proffered a slim pack of State Express 555s. One was already nestled between his lips, unlit.
“I’m afraid we may receive some unwanted attention. It’s not respectable for a woman to smoke in public.”
“You must have a cigarette,” he reasoned. “A wise man once said a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
Rosalind’s lip curled. “I would not call any character of Mr. Wilde’s a wise man, dear brother. But I will have that cigarette, I think.” She removed one from the packet and leant close as her brother lit a match, lighting hers before his own with the same flame. They drew breaths in unison, paused, and together released blossoms of dark smoke. The two plumes met above the table, danced together, and floated to the ceiling where they faded.
They only drew apart, hastily, when the waiter returned to them, supporting a large tray on his shoulder which was laden with various pots and plates. Robert removed the newspaper from the table, rolled it into a tight tube and reached behind him to slide it into the pocket of his jacket, allowing space for the waiter to unburden himself.
“Miss,” Arnaud murmured with great deliberation, placing in front of Rosalind a large china cup, embellished with a golden handle and intricate roses painted on the saucer, followed by a spoon, a bowl full of sugar lumps, a small pot of steamed milk and a plate. “Sir,” he acknowledged as he turned to Robert, setting the same out in front of him. In between the two the waiter set a large pot and the plate of assorted pastries. “Is there anything else I can—”
“Thank you,” Rosalind concluded dismissively. The dark-haired youth bowed and left.
Holding his cigarette loosely, Robert reached for the pot between them and lifted the lid. He drew in a deep breath. “Very dark coffee,” he observed, “and with a woody scent. I do believe there is use of some chicory flavouring.”
Rosalind raised her cup and proffered it to him. “Would you care?”
He carefully poured coffee into her cup before filling his own. They both ignored the sugar but, while Rosalind left her coffee black, Robert swirled milk into the cup until he had created a shade of silky ochre. Content, he leant back in his chair, blowing smoke from his pursed lips out of the window.
Rosalind followed suit, sipping from her cup as she reclined. She felt a gaze fixed on her and tilted her head to meet the heavily lidded eyes of the woman at the nearest table. Her face was painted with expensive makeup and disdain as she surveyed Rosalind from behind her lace fan. Rosalind rolled her eyes and tapped the cigarette into the crystal ashtray on the table, haughtily turning back to her brother. “What time is it, Robert?”
His reply was accompanied with an infinitesimal smile. “Not to worry about that, sister. There is no such thing as time.”
“Of course there is.”
“Not at all. Not beyond the social construction created by human beings to rationalise life and death.” He flicked ash out of the window and fit the cigarette between his lips, turning back to her.
She rolled her eyes. “Then what is the hour according to the social construction of time?”
“Meaningless.”
“I asked what the hour physically is, not for your analysis of an hour.”
“There is no physical time, Rosalind, you know that.”
“Then what is the metaphorical time?”
Robert blew out a stream of smoke and took the cigarette from his mouth, holding it between his index and middle finger. “For us, a horizontal plane. Tomorrow is always ahead of us, and yesterday behind us. But then for the Chinese there is a vertical plane. For them the month above is the previous month. The question is who is right?”
“I think we both know perfectly well that neither is correct. Anyone to represent time as a linear force needs some serious and firm education.”
“Exactly. Then why must you ask the time?”
Rosalind held her cigarette between the tips of her index and middle finger, rubbing her temple in exasperation. “This is all irrelevant, Robert. Must we play these games? I merely want to know what the time.”
“How unfortunate that in the English language the number of the hour and time as an elaborate concept are inextricably linked with the same noun,” he replied conversationally.
“If preferential to you, and if it will get me knowledge of the hour any quicker, then I will learn a language where the two concepts are separate.” She ground her cigarette into the ashtray and folded her arms.
Robert watched her closely, tendrils of smoke whispering between his fingers. “What is time?”
She sighed agitatedly. “Time is money, so we should get back to—”
“A little originality if you please, Rosalind,” he scoffed.
Her lips pursed. “Time is an ocean.”
“Not a river?”
“What did I say about linear metaphors and firm education, brother.”
“But rivers are anything but linear. Think of the tributaries. The ever-changing water. And of the fish which fight the currents to get to a point that they prefer.”
“For a river there is a definite course from source to delta. There is a natural force which leads it. That is not time.” She paused for a mouthful of coffee before continuing. “Time is a myriad of competing currents. Time is the surface in which we live, and the unexplored depths all around us.”
Robert smiled and inhaled from the cigarette one last time before placing it in the ashtray and drinking from his cup. “Then what does it matter what the hour is? When considering those unexplored depths, all of surface time seems irrelevant, let alone the social construct of the hour which has been created to harness and restrict what we know as the passing of time. Stop worrying about it and enjoy your coffee.”
“Time is power,” she replied coolly, to which Robert raised a brow.
“How did you reach that conclusion?”
“Time is money. Money is power. Time is power.”
He smiled lopsidedly, placing his cup on his saucer with a soft clink. “A very circumlocutory theory.”
“But a valid one,” Rosalind persuaded, her voice lowering as she leant closer.
Robert mimicked her. “Just because variable A equals B and B equals C does not mean that A equals C.”
“The theory in this context is sound.”
“The theory is a narrow gulf.”
“An oxymoron.”
“A metaphor.”
“An illusion.”
“A travesty.”
Robert’s fingers, still warm from the coffee, touched her wrist. Rosalind glanced down at his hand. The hair at the nape of her neck prickled. She looked back up into her own eyes, set in the face of her brother, which even a mirror could not imitate as perfectly as he. She forced away the thoughts of Narcissus which threatened her.
“Time is relevant to people only to identify what is, what has been and what will be,” she murmured matter-of-factly, pulling her wrist away.
Robert scoffed and reached for the croissant. He placed it on the small plate in front of him and smeared raspberry jam on it with his knife. “All perception of time is down to the grammarian. Nothing more than matters of semantics.”
“Only if you consider the conceptualisation of time as a result of language rather than an innate idea in all humans,” Rosalind reasoned, refilling her cup with more coffee.
“Surely to assume that all languages have a conceptualisation of time is a little too holistic of an approach.”
“Everyone needs a way to describe the passing of time, Robert. It affects us all, after all, does it not? We have summers and winters. Days and years.”
“Animals are affected by the passing of time, yet they don’t need a language to rationalise it. They merely get older.”
“Ah, but it is human nature, not that of animals, to rationalise everything. Even the things I sincerely doubt we are meant to understand.”
Robert tilted his head as he considered her words, chewing on a piece of croissant. He reached over and placed the pain aux raisins on her plate. “Eat,” he instructed, before adding, “And don’t be stubborn about it.”
Rolling her eyes, Rosalind picked at it boredly.
“Have you read the theories of a one Benjamin Lee Whorf?” Robert asked after swallowing another piece, following it with the last dregs of his coffee. He poured himself a fresh cup.
“Well of course. How else do you think I have a copy of his theories in our library?”
“Well, as I’m sure you will know,” Robert continued, stirring milk into his drink, “Whorf deeply studied the Native American language known as Hopi-”
“I do hope you have a point you’re intending to get to.”
“-and by doing so he came to the conclusion that no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we, as speakers of English, refer to as time.”
Rosalind laughed. “Did you take in any of that book at all, brother?”
“I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean,” he murmured unsurely, brow furrowing.
She shook her head, ate a little of the pain aux raisins and drained her coffee. “It is not that the Hopi have no way to refer to time,” she began when ready, “merely that the structure of that particular language is very different to English and therefore conceptualises time in different ways. Ways which, I may point out, are in some cases more poignant than English.”
“Then you are saying that the Hopi are better suited to discuss time?”
“Did I say that, Robert?” she rebuked curtly. “I was about to elaborate, before you rudely interrupted. It is not that the Hopi people have no concept of time, but rather – how does Whorf put it? – they have no general notion or intuition of time as we know it. That is, I mean, that they have no concept of a linear plane, either horizontal or vertical. Where we envisage a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past, the Hopi people leave the subjective quality of time intact.”
Robert finished his croissant and brushed crumbs off his hands. “Then perhaps time matters less to them. Or at least the rationalisation of their time matters less. Perhaps we should be the same.”
Rosalind opened her mouth to reply but was cut short by a sudden cacophony of notes from the piano. They both turned to find the piano stool being forced upon by a man who gripped the waiter girl around the waist, attempting to force her onto his lap. She tried to push him away, but he held fast. His wife shouted his name desperately from their table, hiding her face behind her hands.
Robert moved as though to stand with intentions to help her, but returned to his seat when the man was clapped on the shoulder by a muscular, burly chef who had appeared from the kitchen. He let go of the waiter girl hastily and was escorted from the café with a “Please kindly leave the premises, monsieur. Merci,” in a low, grating French accent.
“Hard to believe he makes macarons and such delicate things,” Robert commented quietly as the man’s sobbing wife left the café after him, whispering something about ‘never showing her face in public again’ under her breath. Then he saw Rosalind’s face; “What?”
She was wearing almost a smirk. “You went to get up,” she observed. “What could you have done to help that woman?” She raised her cup to her lips, lowering her voice, “Dazzled him with physics until he ran out of the door, perhaps?”
Robert bristled. “I don’t quite know what you mean.”
“Well, you’re hardly the physical type.” She studied Robert’s face closely. Her fingertips traced the edge of her saucer. “Where were we?”
“We were discussing Hopi and their rationalisation of time.”
“Ah, yes, of course. Anyway, it is not that time matters less,” she countered, “and to even think that would be fairly ignorant. English and Hopi are two completely different cultures, and the perceptions of time we both have are believed to be a result of these cultures, and their languages.”
Robert studied her carefully, sipping his coffee. Over in the corner the waiter girl had composed herself enough to begin a slow rendition of Fink’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. “Do carry on.”
“As English speakers,” Rosalind began, “we appear to prefer to keep our objects organised. We can have three dogs, but not” - she motioned to the coffee in front of them. – “three sugars. Since we cannot form clear boundaries, we force sugar into lumps or spoonfuls. We cannot have three salts, so we force it into grams. For us, this is the same for time, in that we must quantify time by containers; an hour of time, a moment of time, rather than ‘one time’ or ‘two times’. Time is carved into quantities by our summers, winters, Septembers, and noons. Hopi, however, does not think of time in this way. For them, time is countable, and parts of time, such as morning, are almost like adverbs as opposed to nouns. Summer is only when it is hot and dry, thus there is no ‘this summer’ in Hopi, only ‘summer now’, ‘summer recently’.
“So for English, it is convenient to separate time into past, present and future because of these subdivisions of time. For the Hopi, however, the only important distinguishers are the experienced and the yet to be experienced. Thus, the Hopi are able to describe all phenomena in the world without ever having to recourse to a notion of linear time like English speakers do. This means that the Hopi people see tomorrow as a reoccurrence or revisit of their present day, while we see part of a new cycle which is the same as the day we are living, or the day yesterday. Therefore Hopi time is much more centred on rituals and preparations as their days reoccur and do not disappear, whereas in English we place a premium on time. Whorf believed this is where the monotony and regularity in the culture of English speaking cultures comes from.”
“But who is to say that the culture affects the language and subsequent perceptions of time rather than the language affecting the culture?”
“Who is to say it is not both? It can be inferred from Whorf’s writing that he assumes there is not a linear system where either language influenced culture, or vice versa, but rather they may have grown together, constantly influencing each other. After all, who is to say where linguistics begins—”
“—and culture ends?”
She nodded. “This also brings the rather more philosophical issue of the extent to which language is innate. One would imagine numbers and counting to be a commonsense and universal aspect of language, but there are differences with even that between Hopi and English.”
Robert leant forwards and held his elbows in his hands. “Would you care to illustrate?”
“Since I know you love your visual stimuli, here.” She arranged her spoon, pot of milk and sugar bowl in front of her. “In front of me are three spoons.”
Robert’s forehead creased. “But they’re not.”
“Thank you for pointing that out, Robert,” she replied incredulously. “I hadn’t noticed. I thought you were meant to be the more creative of the two of us. Fine, there are three cats here. Not any more believable—”
“—but infinitely more agreeable.”
“As I was saying,” she pressed on, “in English we can say there are three cats when three cats are in front of us, and we can also say something will happen in the next ‘three days’, despite it not being a concrete object like a cat. In doing this, we count three days by recycling the perception we have of one day three times in our imagination. Time, by itself, is a mere subjective ‘becoming later’, and English speakers objectify it by dividing time into quantities – the quantities being days, in this example.”
“But surely this must be universal?” Robert inquired. “Future days can only be perceived in terms of what we know of a day, and that the next ‘three days’ is the same as the previous ‘three days’. The only difference is the latter is concrete and the former imaginary.”
“Except it’s not. This idea of cyclicity is not commonsense, since, in Hopi, they would only be able to count the cats in this conversation. For days they have to combine the ordinal with singulars. For a Hopi person to say ‘I stayed in bed for three days’, they would have to say ‘I left bed on the fourth day’. This leaves the subjective quality of time intact, and things happen ‘later’ instead of ‘in cycles’. This implies that our language influences how we perceive imaginary objects such as time, and thus influences our culture.”
“Then if we changed our language as a whole to be more like that of Hopi, would we be less pessimistic as a people?”
“Eat your puits d’amour, brother, it is far too early for that kind of debate.”
Robert smiled softly. A tiny goldfinch with intelligent eyes landed on the window sill and chirped. As Robert pulled small pieces off the pastry and threw them towards the bird, he remarked, “Perhaps we should be more like the Hopi then, not focusing on the monotony of life. Perhaps if we were members of the Hopi people you would be happier to spend an afternoon here with me.”
“Perhaps we should, then maybe we would be better quantum physicists.”
“Ah, now that I remember reading,” Robert nodded, rubbing sweet pastry between his fingers and littering the windowsill with crumbs. “Whorf’s idea that our language is inferior at explaining quantum physics because of the way it is structured. Counterintuitive concepts and notions which cannot be explained inside our highly-inflated common sense and assumptions that Newtonian principles are innate intuitions, rather than a result of the culture and language from which Newton established them.”
“Precisely.” They watched the goldfinch fly away before she continued. “I have found that, when a scientist approaches me with the obvious intentions to embarrass me with my lack of scientific knowledge, the easiest way to make him skulk off with his tail between his legs is to discuss the quantum realm of particles and quarks for which normal words can no longer correctly describe what is happening. The inexperienced quantum physicist may well be confused by experiments that show interference of electrons where only one was used.”
“For what is the sound of one hand clapping?”
“Exactly. Our grammar forces us to construct sentences in which every action has a cause and effect. Even when no one is doing anything, we force an actor; when we say ‘it is raining’, there is no ‘it’ but it is still doing the raining. In Amerindian languages action occurs independent of subject or object, and thus it is hardly surprising that Whorf has theorised that these speakers have less trouble comprehending the paradoxes of quantum mechanics than English speaking scientists do.”
Robert nodded with great deliberation. “How strange to think we have been discussing Benjamin Lee Whorf’s work in the tense when I don’t believe he has even reached his fifth birthday yet.”
“Strange indeed. He’s going to grow up to be a lovely fellow though.”
“Quite.”
Rosalind finished her pain aux raisins. Outside it had darkened into a cool evening, the sky a soft purple which ascended into a deeper blue, streaked with blue clouds which resembled watercolour paints. The coffee in both the pot and their cups had long since stopped steaming and gone cold. The piano lid was closed, though neither of them had noticed an end to the music, and two waiters were wiping tables near each other, whispering together in undertones. The only customers remaining apart from the Luteces were a young couple, holding hands around a single cup of tea.
“We should probably head back to the labs,” Rosalind said softly, reaching into a pocket in her skirt and pulling out a dainty pocket watch. She clicked it open. “It’s getting late. I should at least get a few more hours of work in.”
Robert stared at her. “You’ve had your watch on you the entire time? Then why were you asking what the time was, Rosalind?”
A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, her eyes softening. “Well,” she shrugged, coyly placing her head on her hand, “I had to get a decent conversation out of you somehow, didn’t I?”