My watch said four seventeen throughout the visit. I checked it so often that I can still see the little scratch across the glass. At home, that would have suggested a dead battery. In the garden, where water was climbing out of a stream, it seemed too ordinary an explanation and therefore the one I most wanted. I tapped the face with my fingernail. Sael watched without comment. Somewhere beyond the wall, a bell sounded twice.
The plants had translucent leaves with veins like threads of copper. When sunlight passed through them it left patterns on the path that moved independently of the wind. There were three suns, or three sources of daylight. I could see only two clearly. The third announced itself through a narrow blue shadow running beside my feet. I tried standing still. The shadows continued to change, very slowly, while the leaves above me did not.
A stream crossed the path through a shallow channel. At one end its water behaved normally. At the other, individual drops rose and remained suspended beneath an arch. They were not frozen. I could see tiny movements within them. Each held a different reflection of the garden. When I leaned close, I saw myself at slightly different positions, although I had not moved. That was when I became frightened enough to ask to sit down.
The bench was plain, made of something with the appearance of pale limestone. Its edge was chipped. I ran my thumb over the chip again and again. Sael asked me to describe the bench. I resented the simplicity of the exercise until I understood that I had stopped noticing my own breathing. There was a crack beneath the seat, a dusty mark where a shoe had touched the leg, and one leaf caught in a corner. Those details brought me back to myself.
She described the place as a meeting of intervals. I am uncertain whether those were her words or mine. She offered the image of several paths reaching a gate from different directions. The gate was the same, but the walks were different lengths. I asked whether we were travelling into the future. Her response contained an emphatic refusal, followed by something more complicated that I could not follow. The explanation did not fit into a line with a past at one end.
There was another person in the garden, an older-looking being tending the translucent plants. They carried a shallow basket and worked with deliberate care. I watched them place a fallen leaf in it. A moment later, the leaf was still on the ground. The figure bent again, but from a different angle. I shut my eyes. When I opened them, the basket was full. Sael suggested that I stop trying to keep an account of every movement.
For a while I watched only the stone at my feet. Something remarkable happened when I stopped demanding an explanation: I could enjoy being there. The air smelled faintly of rain on warm pavement. A small sound came from the plants as their leaves touched, like a teaspoon tapping fine glass. I felt no wiser. I felt present. Perhaps that was why the garden had been shown to me, although I distrust the temptation to turn every experience into a lesson.
When we left, the bell sounded twice again. My watch advanced to four eighteen. At home, my phone showed that thirty-seven minutes had passed. I have written both numbers down without deciding what to do with them. A watch malfunction is possible. Memory is imperfect. The feeling of three afternoons overlapping in one place has no scale I can put beside those explanations. I am recording a recollection, not announcing a discovery about physics.
I drew the arch three times on the same page. The lines became confused, and eventually I stopped erasing them. That confused drawing is closer to the garden than the neat version I tried later. I still think about the person with the basket. Whatever I experienced as impossible, they were simply looking after a place. They knew which leaves needed removing. They had work to do before the light changed, whatever changing light meant there.
Anna
