This is the first novel in a seven volume collection by Balle. The conceit, in a nutshell, is simple, “He is waiting for me. My name is Tara Selter. I am sitting in the back room overlooking the garden and a woodpile. It is the eighteenth of November. Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November. I no longer expect to wake up to the nineteenth of November and I no longer remember the seventeenth of November as if it were yesterday.”
Tara’s husband, Thomas, is not living through whatever it is that she is. “We were living in two different times. That was all. Two times that had flooded their banks. At a place where rivers meet and converge, a kind of temporal Mesopotamia where the Euphrates and the Tigris are merely two different names for water. We were doing fine in Mesopotamia.” But, inevitably, the day(s) start to wear on Selter’s psyche. “76 days was too many. The distance was too great. I stood in the kitchen with the notebook in my hand and knew that too many days had come between us…. I couldn’t carry on with our repetitions. The fog had lifted, the landscape stretched out clear and sharp before me and we were not waking to the same day.” Still, life, for both husband and wife, moves along, of sorts. “The distance is shortest at night. When Thomas is asleep there is only the ceiling between us, a thin line between two forms of time. I sit in a room that holds the world open and keeps the distance between us as short as possible. He calls the ceiling the floor. I call the floor the ceiling. But these are just words, not a distance but a line that keeps us connected.”
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