The Home for Wayward Clocks (15 page)

There wasn’t anybody he could tell how scared that made him. There were just the clocks and they tried to steady him with their ticking and chiming. But he imagined they were just as scared as he was.

“Over the deep end,” Neal said. “Getting up there.”

On nights like that, the forward-tick of the old office clock felt like it was leading James right to that deep end. And the water threatened to close over his head. Sometimes, he wanted time to just stop. It was odd to think that time stopping could save James and his clocks, but that’s exactly where his imagination took him. If he could stop time, he and the clocks could stay in that house forever and nobody could ever hurt them again.

He got up and crossed the room to the office clock. Trailing his fingers down its cord, James found the plug and pulled. Immediately, the second hand stopped moving and the missing sound filled up the room like a whirlpool.

For a moment, James was light-headed with relief. The forward march stopped, the deep end fell shallow, the getting-up-there became level. But then his heart began to swirl, like it was caught up in the whirlpool too, like the clock, and it ran around in circles, trying to find itself again. James tried to listen to the other clocks, the dwarf tall clock, the cuckoo clock with the too-big bird, the graveyard mantel clock, all the others. Their pendulums swung and spun and dipped around him. But his heart tumbled, it plunged to his stomach, then surged to his forehead, and he clutched first his chest and then his hair. He tried to catch his breath, to yell, but he couldn’t.

Falling to his knees, James found the office clock plug and stuck it back into its socket. The second hand started up again, there was a hum as the clock’s workings lurched into motion and then the familiar thud filled the empty whirling hole in the room. James rested his head against the wall and he breathed, in and out, in and out, until he felt his heart rest, settle in his chest, fall into a pattern with that old office clock. The office clock, the classroom clock, the doctor and dentist clock. The get-through-the-bad-times clock.

When he stopped trembling, when his heart felt strong and steady again, James crossed the room and sank into his recliner. He closed his eyes and listened as everywhere, in every room, in every corner, his family started calling out the nine o’clock hour. He heard the sounds and they lifted him, cradled him in the air, and he felt rocked and soothed. Time was going forward again, moving just the way it always did, before him and during his whole life. And after too, forever after, but he decided not to think about that. Not now.

James was caught up and carried away.

Y
ou look at the clock through the pink nubbled frame of your bare toes. Your feet hang in midair, held up by silver stirrups, and you think wildly for a moment of the Lone Ranger and you want to yell for Tonto. But then you focus again on the clock, its second hand. It thuds and lurches, spelling out time in movement and sound, and as you watch it, you think of time passing, all the little seconds left behind. Time should be sweeping, you think, the second hand soaring around the clock face in an eternally graceful arc. But for you, this clock. This lurching forward second by second, little baby steps.

You reach under the paper gown and touch your stomach. It’s still flat and you’re grateful for that, that there’s no evidence of growth from the inside. But in your head, you can’t help it, you picture a midget, small as a quarter, a cockroach, a kidney bean clinging to your insides. Your womb. You never really thought about having a womb before now. Until it became inhabited. Invaded? Lived in.

No womb at this inn, you think, and you try to laugh. Help, Tonto, you say to your toes.

Legs cramping, you wonder what’s taking the doctor so long. The clock tells you it’s already been ten minutes. Ten minutes since you surrendered yourself to that room, pulled off your clothes, folded them neatly on a chair and climbed astride the table. There is paper everywhere, beneath you on the table and over your body in a gown. You think of a mummy and change your plea to Help, Igor, which makes no sense, but you laugh inwardly anyway. The stirrups were already up when you mounted the table, so you obediently stuck your feet into them. Ten minutes ago.

It should be all over by now. The nurse said it would only take seconds.

Your hand rests gently on your stomach and you think again of that midget, clinging to your insides. That’s impossible, of course, it should only look like a kidney bean. And you hate kidney beans.

It would be impossible. You tell yourself this again and again. It would be a reminder, a forever reminder, of something you so want to forget. What if it had his ears? Those eggplant ears that stuck out at such odd angles, the only feature you really know of him, the only thing you could focus on as you tried to look past him to the sky.

You see it all again and you close your eyes, trying to shut it out, but it’s still there in the darkness, especially in the darkness. So you look at the clock, but the clock face is the curve of the sky, the lurching second hand his rhythm, the only sound the same sound your body made as it slapped the grass. The numbers count the times he drove himself in and in and in again until you thought you were nothing but motion, nothing but an ever-deepening pit.

Help, Tonto, a whisper between damp leaves and grass, a plea thrown past his ears into the blackness of the sky, staring down with so many dead pinpricks of light, the light that wouldn’t shine around you. The light and the dark. You wished for a moon.

Your toes, trying to run, twitch in the stirrups and you twist your head sideways, trying to find something else to look at. But there’s only the instruments, silver-cold, on the tray next to the table. You fight an impulse to throw out your arm, knock over the tray, send it all clattering to the floor. Bring the doctor, bring the nurse. Bring them all running.

Sighing, you look up at the ceiling. Your hand rests gently on your stomach. The clock’s thudding fills your ears. Seconds keep lurching by.

It would be impossible. It would be a reminder. You would never forget. Never.

As if you can forget now. As if it’s not always there, in your dreams at night, your thoughts wide awake, in between the bites of a sandwich, in the shirts you fold, in the pounding of your fingers against the keyboard. How can there be a reminder if you’ll never forget anyway?

You look at the clock. It’s been twenty minutes.

It only takes seconds.

Help, Tonto.

Your hand rests gently on your stomach.

The silver instruments glint and wait. In the stirrups, your feet fall asleep. A million bugs crawl up your legs. There were bugs in the grass where you fell. Where he knocked you down. You remember a mosquito landing on the inner curve of his ear. You reached up and wiped it away, leaving a tomato smear. He didn’t notice. In and in and in again.

Your hand rests gently on your stomach. The fingers of your other hand slowly roll in, until you make a fist. Your sleeping toes curl, making little foot fists. You want to kick something.

Then you sigh and force yourself to relax, force yourself to fake it, loosen your fingers and toes, listen to time lurching forward. Your knees fall further apart. It only takes seconds.

Twenty-five minutes.

When the door opens seconds later, you turn your head and see the smiling nurse, the scowling doctor. The nurse takes your hand, leaving your stomach cold and bare under the paper. The doctor seats himself between your knees.

“This is the speculum,” he says and you feel one of the silver instruments slip inside. In and in and in again.

It only takes seconds.

You squeeze your eyes tight and hear the clock lurching. Everything becomes black, everything, the eggplant ears, the dead pinpricks of light, the air and the sound and the grass. It’s all gone. And then you yell.

No!

Your knees slam together.

The nurse cries out, but you rip your hand away and sit halfway up. Get it out, get it out! you scream. The doctor doesn’t look at you, but quickly removes the speculum. You feel your body close up again. Close up tight and safe.

The doctor and the nurse leave. They said something, but you couldn’t hear, your ears filled with the thudding of your heart and the lurch of seconds passing. Trembling, you remove your feet from the stirrups, one by one, and let your legs dangle down. You sit up and shred off the paper gown, tearing the ties and not caring.

Looking down at your naked body, you wonder if the ache will ever go away. There was bruising inside and out. Inside. In and in and in again.

But oh, so deep in, you see that midget kidney bean, still clinging to your insides. Its fingers and toes curved into fists.

Getting off the table, you dress slowly, moving as if the bruises are still there, still fresh, still purple and green and yellow. You take one more glance at the clock, at the second hand lurching around its circle, and then you leave. You get to the door by counting the black and white floor tiles, ten, eleven, twelve, and you don’t say anything to the nurse, the doctor, standing in the hallway.

When you step outside, the air and light hit you full in the face. You blink, squint, then walk away, resisting the urge to look over your shoulder.

You think of the office clock and you wonder at how things can change. It only takes seconds.

You lurch forward, your hand resting gently on your stomach.

A
nd so you stumble through the days and the nights and the months and the years and there are so many days that mean nothing to you. The first Sunday in May. The third Sunday in June. Your own birthday, which you only know by the date listed on your report cards, and that allows you to calculate your age. Every December for the first few years of school, you listen closely as your teacher reads stories to the class about a fat red man named Santa and you are amazed at the idea of a stranger bringing you toys, but it never happens anyway. The only trees are outside and they hold leaves, not ornaments. You learn quickly that your mother doesn’t know school breaks from school days and so you slide out of the house every morning, no matter what. Better to wander around the woods, better to take the long hike into town and then take it back, than to do something that attracts her attention and sends you to the root cellar.

Imagine a life without holidays and birthdays and events. Imagine showing up to kindergarten and throughout grade school on Valentine’s Day, without a baggie of red and pink and purple cards for your classmates, and imagine how red your face burns when your teacher forces the other kids to give you the valentines with your name printed, then written in cursive on little envelopes, even though you have nothing for them. Imagine how that burn goes deeper when the teacher follows you out of the classroom, insisting you keep the stuffed shoebox that you decorated yourself, created from a box that she gave you because you never have one from home to bring. Shoes from thrift stores don’t come in boxes.

One year, you try to make valentines for your classmates out of things around the house, but there is never much around the house. You slip aluminum foil out of the kitchen, scotch tape, and you use crayons that you sneak home from school. But your mother hears the crinkle of the foil, the scritch as the tape leaves its dispenser, and she sees the mess in your room, sparkle-silver and red waxy streaks and crooked hearts with sad loopy arrows. You spend Valentine’s Day down the root cellar that year. When you return to school, the teacher still sends you home with your shoebox full of reluctant and unreciprocated valentines. She says she saved them for you special.

In fifth grade, you dare to ask your mother, as you sit at the supper table with a bowl of cereal that you fix yourself because she is pacing the house again, living room to kitchen to bedroom to bathroom, a sure sign that there will be no meal, “What is this Valentine’s Day stuff anyway? All those hearts and I love yous. Where’d that come from? Why do they do that?”

She pauses and actually stares at you for a moment, her eyes suddenly sparkling instead of glassy. “Your daddy loved me,” she says, clear, her voice a charm. “He gave me candy every year, in a big red heart.” And then she walks on.

Your memory of your father is slipping away by this time, into the fog, just as he disappeared into the fog. He left three years earlier. He left you with her.

Imagine.

I know what happens, son.

And suddenly, you fling your cereal bowl across the table, and it shoots off the end and against the cabinet and makes a glorious mess, dripping down the scratched wood onto the floor. The bowl shatters and you know how it feels. When your mother grabs you by the collar, your shirt collar this time, and hauls you down the root cellar, to the belt, the chain, and the cold dirt floor, you don’t care. You don’t care because red hearts and cupids and curlicue I love you’s are fucking stupid.

Imagine a rage that thick.

James didn’t have to. He felt it roil silently under his skin every day, and he swore it forged its own veins that ran parallel to his blood. Veins that formed a river. With all his might, he willed this parallel river to remain under his skin and to never, ever erupt in spatters as thick as cereal thrown suddenly against a cabinet.

I
n the morning, James followed his schedule as usual. Checking the calendar, he wrote a list of clocks to be wound that day, and then began moving through the house.

It was a Tuesday, which was usually the slowest day for tourists. The busiest weekday was Friday, James figured because these were people on three or four day weekends. James just unlocked the front door at opening time and settled down for a break with a second cup of coffee when he heard the welcome bell ring. Sighing, he put down his mug and went forward to greet. It was another family.

“Hi!” the father said. He had his arm wrapped around the mother and his hand held a little girl, about four years old. “We’re just passing through, but we saw your billboard and thought we’d stop. We never heard of a clock museum before.”