A Wall of Dead Clocks

Everybody in that city knew that they were blessed to live and die in a place where time followed the course it always had: where rivers flowed liberally and confidently, where watches ticked and meals came at six, and twelve, and six, where births happen after nine months’ gestation, where deaths happen after lives of normalcy and richness. They knew they were privileged, and so funerals were never sad. The bulk of the city came, as they always did for a burial, but nobody cried.1

Death here was the natural consequence of a bountiful life, and no reason for tears. 2

After the interment, I stayed behind, disappointed.3

The crowd and the politicians and the priests – the real priests with white on their collars, and the local shamans of surrounding Villages – all filed out into the cobbled avenue from the graveyard. 4

I remained in the funeral yard, drumming my fingers on the headstone. The Undertaker ambled by me, smiling. In the silent acknowledgment that we both were curators of her different lives, nothing needed to be said of it.5

“Have you seen her husband?” he asked.6

“His grave.”7

“Yes,” he said, nodding slowly, “It’s over in the pre-war quarter.”8

“I’ve been.”9

He stared at me again, his eyes wet and radically blue.10

“Go. Go again.”11

“Again?”12

“Yeah. Again.”13

“Is something new?” I asked. He chuckled mirthfully.14

“You’re brilliant, you are,” he said. “Go again. There’s something you ought to see. And then – you do that – you come see me at the shop. I’ve got something to show you, myself.”15

I pushed on the inside of my cheek with my tongue. I had something that needed to be done here, too, and I hoped it was clear to him. He grinned.16

“You’ll be there.”17

Dragging his steamer trunk behind him on a dolly, he strolled out of the cemetery, whistling.18

A sticker on the trunk - which read in tall, white letters 19

“Minnesota”, and showed a discolored lake surrounded by brown forests – was hanging limply from the side. When the wind came through in a sudden gust, it peeled off and blew away. Hanging on the bluster, it wafted over to me and I caught it with a one-handed leap. It was trash, but as a relic I thought it ought to be treated with reverence, and I stuffed it in the pocket of my corduroy trousers.20

When the Undertaker turned the corner into the wide boulevard, where most of the city’s commerce was house, I kneeled by the grave. There weren’t any symbolic gestures left. I was not a family mourner, wearing widow’s weeds, and I had nothing really to say. I touched the damp earth with a bloody, unwashed finger. The dust clung to the spots where the blood was still moist.21

I stood, and patted the top of the headstone. Over the top of the hillock I could see the sprawl of the cemetery’s fenced and hedgerowed memorial yard. At the bottom, near the monolith that was Artemis’ husband’s grave, I saw the Undertaker crouching in his familiar hessian suit, loud brown against the misty vermilion of the grass. By the time I recognized him, he stood up alert, fixing his eyes on me where I stood on the mound. He left at a trot.22

I ran, achingly fast, down the hill after him. After the grave, or after the wind, or after Artemis. Who knew? I vaulted the short flat fence into the knoll, but reaching the tomb, I could not see him anywhere.23

There was, however, a glint of gold at the base of the steps leading up to the tomb: a ring, on a narrow chain of stainless steel, almost silver in its polish and appearance. I took it between my thumb and forefinger and blew the dust off of it. There was an inscription on the band, four words.24

“Never an idle heart.”25

I rubbed it absentmindedly. Not a clue, exactly, but still – it appeared valuable and important. Was this what he meant for me to find?26

When I put it in my breast pocket, I felt a peculiar heaviness, as if my lungs no longer operated on instinct, as if my heart had been challenged by a surge of blood it couldn’t answer. The tip of my left middle finger went numb, followed by every other finger tips, then the entire hand. My arm, my shoulder, my collarbone, my face – not in the way that sensations are dimmed by cold weather, but in away that erased my awareness that I was made of flesh at all. My extremities were literally disappearing from my control. I grasped, instantly, the significance of the chain. Then, I collapsed.27

In a brightly-lit room, with wide windows, a television droned. He cut around the corner of the portico. She was reclining on the sofa, in Hellenic relaxation, eyes closed and napping – everything in her posture whispered dormancy and rest. She was beautiful, even inert. She was slim, though the weight she did carry rested naturally on her hips in a girdle, and her slender legs lay like the beams of a building in a juxtaposed frame. The hot daylight swam over her like a tide. Her small breasts heaved in the idle rhythm of sleep. 28

“Scientists in Geneva today test-fired a supercollider of record size…”29

He went outside, where the steam from an active sewer floated up from the curb. Grass too long and too untidy swayed in stunted breezes on the lawn of a neighbor they rarely talked to. 30

With the houses so closely crowded and so diminutive, lining streets no wider than the spine of a butter knife, the whole world seemed like a florid monastery shrunk to elfin size. It was a city built for sprites. The rare car or SUV that crept through looked uncomfortable and dangerous.31

After smoking, he stubbed the cigarette on a flowerpot and went back inside. The TV was still on, and she was still sleeping.32

A scientist, a pastor, and a concerned activist talked in long, angry tirades about the experiment in Switzerland.33

“The LHC is a purely scientific instrument. This isn’t nuclear weaponry. This isn’t Three-Mile Island! Chernobyl!”34

“But you can’t possibly be so certain it’s safe. We’ve never seen these particles in nature.”35

“Scientific controls-“36

“Doctor Kurzerheiser , to address–“37

“Scientific inquiry, measure con-“38

“And what of meddling with nature, Doctor, with God? With time?”39

“Father, a little meddling has to be done to attain any meaningful knowledge about the world we live in. It is imperative to our scientific understanding that we discern the nature of the Higgs’ boson. Like all good research, security measures are in place along every inch of the LHC. This is a safe query, this is a very controlled experiment.”40

“Controlled? Unnaturally! To try to master this ‘God particle’…”41

The three continued to bicker venomously on a screen shared with the moderator and studio, but his attention drifted when she spoke.42

“Were you going to let me sleep all day?” she asked.43

“Until dinner, maybe.”44

“You’re silly.”45

“Yeah. You’re scary.”46

She yawned expansively.47

“Did I miss anything good?”48

“Just some scientists. A particle thing in Europe.”49

“Lovely. Did they prove that God exists?”50

“No, not quite.”51

“Did they prove he doesn’t?”52

He let out a deep and meaningful laugh.53

“Not really.”54

She beamed, and my breastbone filled with a million pangs of admiration.55

“Then who gives a shit?”56

They ate supper in front of the news. Two months later, He proposed to her. When we married, he bought her a simple wedding band. No inscription.57

A year after that, the scientists in Geneva lived out their dream, shot their collider and split neutrinos or sub-particles and found that we could whittle the world down the very components of matter, antimatter, and time – or a void in which it did not occur.58

The experiment was a success, and safe, but within a year of course it was weaponized. Less than a decade later, the world was at war again, and when the bombs hit they turned time into an uncertain, amorphous presence, disturbed like water in a shallow pools where a stone is dropped, distributed to fill the gaps where water has been displaced.59

She was away, interviewing for a job in another city, a position as a community coordinator.60

In the weeks that followed - while the world was in the twilight of reason, while our temporal feelings resettled against our nausea and discomfort, while the bereaved search for the missing and those that lived and couldn’t bear a world without time ended their lives in droves – her disappearance muted me. Every fixture on which she had ever lounged was a museum piece and a vision, nothing was exempt. The sofa – that sofa – was a disquieted shrine, bewailing its loss.61

He went in search of her, found as much gasoline as he could to stow in plastic cans in my trunk, went driving and, when the fuel ran out, my relentless loneliness didn’t. He left on foot.62

He found out where she had gone from a ruined industrialist. He had lost his whole factory to a direct bombing, but had been miles away surveying land for a future expansion. Sitting on a pile of rubble in the remains of his factory, he had seen her walking – in the direction of the Forks, thirty miles down the road. Thirty irrelevant miles.63

He began walking, too, to follow her. He ached with hunger and ate rarely. He watched the burning earth and the boiling lakes turn into ravages and steam. He kept a pace, a strong pace, in a vale where dispossessed ghosts wandered despite the savage oscillations of time, who stood prattling in their distress, in purgatories of their own, while their brains burned up inside their heads and their skin wrinkled on their withering bodies. His did, as well, and he kept moving. They ate constantly - the hunger never ceased when time could not be trusted. You ate because you didn’t know: perhaps the meal would be followed by a day that passed in an hour. They ate, though they couldn’t drink, and they died, raving, slaves to a breed of time that no longer existed. It was a spy that hid himself behind their expectations, a killer that appeared from unnatural darks.64

He survived because he did not eat. He walked, and eventually, he felt an immense peace wash over him, and he knew that the time here was hers, and because he loved her, he could understand it. The world she had made wanted me there implacably. Too easily lulled, he rested against a tree, and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.65

I woke, perspiring, with a chill gripping my spine. There was a palpable weight in the middle of my body, as if somebody had lay a steel door along my breastbone, on its side.66

The left side of my body was hanging, corpselike, still numb. The right side felt electrified, hot as magma and protesting in pain – not soreness, not exhaustion, but seized in spasm of trauma with the persistence of a headache, a pain of inexpressible strength and duration. 67

I retched and vomited tremendously, but unable to lift my head, I just sat in the resultant puddle next to me. 68

It was clear from the furnishings – threadbare loveseat, chipped cabinet, innumerable photographs of the blank-faced newly dead – that this was one of the neglected backrooms of the Undertaker’s loft.69

I lifted my head slightly, still in excruciating pain, to look at the source of the pain: a plain ring on my middle finger. I shook my hand to throw it off, but it was fruitless.70

The undertaker walked in, swinging the creaking door shut behind him. He coughed, and spat on the greasy carpet. Without saying a word, he removed the ring on the right side. My arm, my shoulder, my fingers all burst into paroxysms of delight, all suffused with new life like the first activity of the lungs after birth. It felt oddly cold.71

I tried to speak but found myself hacking and folding over into fits of coughing.72

“What was that?” I finally asked.73

“That was a wedding ring. Actually, that was her husband’s wedding ring.”74

“Why-?”75

“It hurt, I know. I’m sorry.”76

I started coughing again, this fit a virulent rumble from the bottom of my lungs.77

“We needed to have a chat. I know you saw the watching moving again. You know what that means, or you think you do.”78

“I need to go back, right now.”79

“And we needed to talk about that,” he said.80

“No, I need to leave.”81

“You ought to rethink that.”82

“Why?”83

“We just had her funeral. You were there, you know – she’s dead. Is she going to come back, brand-new, clean body right back in your Village? Not a chance.”84

I spat a trace of vomit from the corner of my mouth, and didn’t answer. I had seen the watch ticking, and my decision to go back was a leap to instinct, a half-cocked call to arms.85

“When he died – her husband – I was looking for something, too. It’s become less important to me what, exactly, I was looking for. For years, I’d say ‘my daughter’, and then I’d have to leave. It was like reliving it, to say it. I wish I could feel as strongly, but now… but he, if he had lived as long as I had, he would still be looking for her.”86

“You know, all these people now, these gods and goddesses, we need them, but they’re just puppeteers. Even they don’t know what they’re doing. I saw him, and he was resolute. If anybody ever deserved to be a ‘god’, was ever worth admiration, it her husband. Not her.”87

“My point: the pain you felt? That was how he died. He was a real martyr. Her? I don’t know. Seems to me she had it very comfortable.”88

He muttered something almost inaudibly, and looked away. When his eyes darted back, they were swollen with hurt.89

“I think you’ve guessed by now why that watch is moving, and it’s not because of her.”90

He put it down on the coffee table beside the bed. I watched it tick more carefully than I had last time. The more I looked, the more the ticking seemed as natural to me as extending a finger, as drumming a desk, as chewing or blinking. To me, the second hand of the watch moved in a slow circle, steady and smooth as the movement of a wheel’s spoke. But I knew that, had anybody else watched it: it would have moved, a second at a time, ticking.91