Now when I close the chicken coop at night, I stand in the altar and give a eulogy. I say how grateful I am to have spent a third of a century under its gaze. I thank the tree for its contribution to this farm, for standing by my family in good times and bad. I whisper a prayer for whatever is the afterlife of trees, and hum a favorite hymn, “Ein Feste Burg,” singing a sad goodbye to what was, indeed, a mighty fortress.
Much of the lore about the chamber’s propensity for mind-annihilation centers on the concept of blood sounds. It is an oft-reported experience, in anechoic chambers, for visitors to become aware of the sound of blood pumping in their heads, or sloshing through veins. Hearing the movement of blood through the body is supposedly something like an absolute taboo, akin to witnessing the fabrication of Chicken McNuggets — an ordeal after which placid existence is irreparably shattered.
Owing either to blood-sound insanity or cost, the record duration in the Orfield chamber was, until very recently, just two hours. I wanted to set a new world record for something, even if it was a world record that, for legal reasons, I could not describe as being in any way affiliated with or sanctioned by the famous Guinness inventory of world records — on which, more later. Even more than that, I wanted to hear the forbidden blood song. I emailed Orfield Labs to book a three-hour attempt and, a few days later, boarded a plane to Minnesota.
The visit was proposed during a period in which I was suffering from the tyranny of time. Which isn’t to say I was suffering because I was getting older—I didn’t care about that. I was consistently underestimating how long it took to do a thing, to do anything, consistently believing that I could accomplish, say, five things in a given span of time when really, I could do just a single thing, maybe two. This disconnect began to emerge in my understanding as a failure, and through repetition—that is, over time—the failure became a pattern of failure, until the pattern, a thick, intricate brocade, became indistinguishable from me, from my life.
There were books, I knew, to combat this. Books and podcasts, TED talks and seminars, all of which sought to solve the time problem. I didn’t want to solve it. I didn’t want to “manage my expectations” or “be realistic.” I simply wanted to believe that I could accomplish a certain number of goals in an arbitrarily delineated period of time, and then, one day, accomplish them. And the next day, do it again, until a new pattern could be created, one of success and satisfaction, that would with no effort eradicate the previous pattern, unspool it until it was just a pile of thread that could blow away on a stiff breeze.
Culture shock is, in fact, central to Tawada’s subject matter: her characters tend to be travelers of one kind or another—mail-order brides, bewildered exchange students—forced to wander in the gap between languages, where the meaning of ordinary daily experience turns slippery and weird. Consider “The Guest,” translated into English from the German by Susan Bernofsky, in which her narrator finds herself in a German flea market, struggling to make sense of the many odd objects arrayed in no apparent order, until, finally, she picks up what looks to be a book.