The coolest, most mind-boggling feature of the natural world is that the passage of time is influenced by gravity and speed.1 Physicists call this “time dilation.”
I wanted to use this concept in COMMUNITY DAY. In fact, the original title of the novel was Gravity of the Times.
An artistic version of time dilation is front and center in Chapter 21, which is called “This Whole Time.”
Lots of books and films use distorted time as a theme. Christopher Nolan seems to like this device a great deal (e.g., Memento, Inception, Tenet, Dunkirk, Interstellar).
COMMUNITY DAY plays around with distorted time in a number of ways, including repeated references to broken clocks, describing motion in the counter-clockwise direction, the narrator’s story bouncing between time periods, etc.
But I wanted to do something specifically about time dilation. The underlying concept is that the narrator tries to manage his troubled life by stretching or condensing time. I first came to this idea via a theory about addiction—that some use gambling, alcohol, etc., to slow their minds, to blur events, remove themselves from time, to lose track of time.
My idea was to have my narrator avoid admitting his mental health problems by instead blaming time. Rather than conceding that his mind was problem; he’d act as though the clock was the problem.
In Chapter 21, when his wife confronts him for missing work again and continuing to pursue his conspiracy theories, the narrator begins talking about time. In previous chapters, he discusses how he uses work to focus his mind when he’s feeling panicked or disconnected from events. But here for the first time he goes into detail about how he understands the passage of time when he’s most agitated.
Here are some lines from Chapter 21:
By this point, it was Wednesday night. I’d lost track of time again. That happens when I get in the zone.
I like being alone. I like the quiet. Emptiness…The space and the time are yours. Time is different, too. It’s not a burden or prod; there’s no difference between this second and the next or this hour and the next.
Time is agreeable. The clock isn’t tracking you. Time is smooth, supple; no jagged edges; each moment flows into the next, no border between the two; a thought can spread as far as it needs; the time is yours, not the other way around.
Each instant was its own barb, distinct and sharp…A thousand pin pricks…Each second was discrete, an opportunity for a stare or movement or noise…This never-ending succession, this infinite spiral.
I have a half-baked idea for playing with time in the prequel. The novel will be set in ~1990 Annapolis, MD. But I want to have three major scenes in different locations, each giving the feel of a previous era.
I think there will be a scene in Breezewood, PA, a famous turnpike way station. I want to make that scene feel like it’s in 1950. There will be a scene at the annual Naval Academy-St. John’s croquet match that will feel like it’s 1920. And then there will be a scene in Richmond, VA that will feel like 1880.
My idea is to show how the book’s big themes play out differently in different eras.
Chapter 1: Introducing Key Characters
Chapter 2: Forest and Breadcrumbs
Chapter 4: Heisting from Hamlet
Chapter 6: The Mysterious Stranger
Chapter 10: The Madness of Covid
Chapter 16: Split Personalities
Maybe this is tied with quantum entanglement and the bending of space-time by gravity. But I don’t have a story related to Chapter 21 about those subjects, so this will have to do.
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