How to Stop Time and Freeze the World

Weslley Morellato Bueno

It happened in the winter, when things are normally dead. This contributed greatly to his confusion. If magic were indeed to return, why not in the spring, when things are reborn? Or why not in the summer, when everything shines? Magic should also respect the cycle of nature, or the cosmic cycle, whatever that was. He considered that perhaps it had returned in winter out of necessity, because things had been dead and gray and cold for a long time. But he knew that nature did not move out of necessity, so he quickly dismissed the hypothesis. After embarrassingly considering fate, he ended up concluding that it had been pure coincidence, but the thought made him even more uneasy, as putting that phenomenon in the hands of luck seemed like an insult.

It happened like an astronomical event, more or less. More or less because it happened at a specific time and place, even though no one was expecting it, and it had no regularity or determinism. There was no law that could describe it either, and there never would be. It didn’t belong to the realm of matter; the phenomenon also had its orbits, but they were more like dances as they were too irregular; it also had its fields, but they were sometimes of attraction, others of repulsion, and there was no visible pattern in that. It could very well be an initial value problem, he thought, and that was when he stopped to think about when it started, in order to isolate the variables.

It was on a road between Hinxton and Cambridge, he remembered, although he couldn’t say the exact point. Maybe there wasn’t one. It had been a continuous and growing event, yes. As for the moment in time, it was on January 24th, between five and six in the afternoon. There was turbulence in the sky, a force that ran through the dead fields and even made the trees tremble. It was dark, but the moon and stars felt the disturbance below and knew something was happening. They peered without shame as the magic returned in an uncontrolled vortex. It was old magic, they knew, and powerful for the same reason. Despite thinking it was dead for good, and perhaps it really was, it found a way to come back to life. It’s the kind of thing that grows anywhere, given the ideal conditions; even if it’s buried under tons of rubble and hard soil, it always grows.

That night he got home shaking from head to toe, and recorded everything in his notebook so he wouldn’t forget. He wanted to share his thoughts and observations with friends and colleagues in the following days. He just didn’t expect so much resistance.

“I’m sure,” he said. He had his hands open in front of his body and his eyes open wide. He wasn’t looking for recognition, but he didn’t understand their skepticism. “I saw it. I felt it!”

“Explain to us how it was. In detail.”

He blinked a few times, excited. “The clouds started exploding,” he brought his hands together as if holding an imaginary sphere, and then pulled them apart violently. “They exploded in various colors. And more explosions came out of the explosions!” He lowered his arms and looked down, frowning. “It was a little scary, to be honest. It seemed like it was going to swallow me whole. It seemed like I was going to explode along with them and disintegrate in the middle of all that mass.”

“But it’s winter,” they told him. “It wouldn’t come back in winter.”

He looked up and was no longer sure of anything. Finally, he shrugged and nodded.

“Yes. Not in the winter.”

He decided to wait. Wait for another event like that one, and only share with others when he was certain, in fact.

The second time he felt that turbulence, he was in a pub, sitting in the corner of a table. The agitation came from a point to his right, but stronger, and more concentrated. He was afraid to look there, but he wished to do that more than anything. Nikita was coming out of a speaker above him, or so he thought, because in the following days he began to mix memories with daydreams, and at that moment it really seemed to him that he was dreaming.

“Look!” he said, pointing to the walls. “Look! There’s the proof.”

But then he regretted having said that, because the others weren’t ready for that yet. The truth, however, was that no one cared. Astronomical events like that happened all the time, and there was no reason to attribute special meaning to that one in particular.

But he insisted.

“The vines are growing!” and really, at least for him, they were. The vines climbed the white walls of the pub, getting into the cracks, turning beams into green and malleable columns, but as durable as old wood; they climbed up to the ceiling, where they bent at perfect angles, and soon it was all covered with branches. They grew so fast, and so certain, as if the paths they traveled were well-defined roads, made only for them. They grew because they needed to grow. The colorless walls needed the green, the old wood needed to become young again, and the lack of life is what brought the daffodils, yellow and white, painting everything.

They asked him about work, family, and the crisis, but they didn’t talk about the damn magic. Those things no longer mattered to him. Hell. Now there were more important things, revealing, transcendental things.

He was aware that he used to exaggerate feelings. “But those vines,” he told himself one night. He was remembering them. In order to sleep, though, he finally concluded that maybe they weren’t so special.

They weren’t, really, at least not for the rest of the world, and they shouldn’t be. That magic was for him, not for them. It had no purpose; it existed for the sake of it, and therefore was incapable of causing pain.

For this reason, he realized that when it faded away, when it died again, he would be happy for having at least experienced it.

And so he did. He experienced it on other occasions, but one in particular proved to be the most powerful. It was in the same pub, when the lights were dimmer, and it was easy to perceive things that didn’t exist or invent others and see them take shape in the drunkenness of shadows and the euphoria of laughter.

Once again it seemed like a dream to him, but he concluded that it wasn’t, because it had been too real, as real as that effect some special dreams leave even after waking up. One of those strangely warm dreams, with a single scene, an enclosed place where people move slowly and laugh carelessly. Dreams where everything moves, but everything is still, because the stop of time is everyone’s desire to create permanence in a special moment, of wine pouring into a glass and being emptied again. And these glasses (there were many more than one, but much less than three) didn’t let light pass through completely: they refracted the yellow rays above them into colors that existed but had no name. Many things needed a name that night, but he didn’t want to, nor could he find one for any of them, because naming something is killing it, and talking about a moment is insulting its memory. So he left them silent, nameless, free, and eternal.

He was certain that magic had returned, because it was on this night that he learned how to stop time and freeze the world for a whole fifteen seconds. The recipe didn’t require much: two pairs of brown eyes locked on each other, punctually at ten o’clock at night, when things lose their voices; shared confidences; and again the desire for permanence, for an indefinite extension of a moment in time. The latter is the most important. It’s the secret ingredient, therefore rare, therefore expensive.

That’s why this phenomenon ends in itself, because only the most fortunate witness it.

For fifteen seconds, everything stopped, everything gazed at that one square meter, at that wave that formed and spread everywhere. And those fifteen seconds lasted much longer for him, confirming all his suspicions and destroying all his doubts.

And so he felt alive again.