Fiction from Web Del Sol
THE CLOCK-WINDER OF GLANZ Patrick Keppel
Continued ...
IV
As far back as people could remember, my family had never distinguished themselves in any way except through their clumsy deaths. In the last century alone they had fallen off maypoles, drowned in wishing wells, plummeted through thin ice. When the first electrical wires snaked into the area, my uncle rushed right out and became the first to experience the sizzle of electrocution. So you couldn't blame my father for trying to fly this fate, for finding a way to live well without leaving the house. No one ever saw his invention, certainly not my mother or my brother, and not even the people who came from miles around to have the cores of their boils and carbuncles dug out with it. He kept the tool in a secret place in the house and made his patients wear a blindfold while he operated. Of course, his first patients were those who had been given up for dead, their infections having resisted the usual treatments from the licensed physicians. Finally, it was bound to happen, one or two of them happily survived, and as word spread the number naturally grew, as though by some mathematical principle, an algebraic function, Numerical Exaggeration in News Spread by Word of Mouth, in which the constant c represents the true quantity and the variable x represents the total number of tellings: f(x) = (c + x) - x/c. Example: John Mittach appeared responsible for saving the lives of two people, each of whom told six of their friends and relatives, each of whom in turn told three others. By the time the last person had been told, how many lives had John Mittach saved? Answer: 26 (usually expressed "between twenty and thirty", "twenty-five or so", etc.).
In other words, it wasn't long before a fair number of people began to swear by my father's treatment, not calling him Doctor, because he wouldn't allow it, but Master Mittach; they even praised the healing virtues of the elixirs he prepared out of sour wine and paprika, they called it oxblood because they claimed it made them feel stronger and because a few of them wanted to believe there were a few drops of oxblood in it.
Of course, other people, most people, swore at my father, calling him a quack and a charlatan and the devil's physician, and banning him and his family from all holy places. I think in the back of their minds people couldn't help but regard my family's fatal accidents as something like pagan sacrifices, and now that my father was trying to break this cycle, they felt a little cheated and perhaps even fearful. Then when I was born early and blind, taking my mother's last breaths along with me, the critics had their proof. I was the punishment, the symbol of my father's black art, the blindfold made flesh. They called me a devilchild, of course, but then some clever person came up with the name Pechaugen, Pitch-eyes or Badluckeyes, and that one stuck. But my father never cared what people said about him or me; to the contrary, by the time I was three he'd shrewdly figured out how to use me in his practice. Just before he was about to operate he'd call out my new name, or Pech for short, and I'd enter the room silently from a concealed door and sit down on a little covered table just opposite the patient. It must have been quite a sight; I wouldn't doubt that some of the boils dissolved out of the patient's sheer terror. Then the blindfold would go on, and the patient and I could feel each other staring at one another through our blindness, developing a psychic bond that would last throughout the painful procedure. I think they believed their screams passed right through my vacant blue eyes into the void of my black little soul, and really that wasn't too far from the truth. The sound of their pain pierced my skin and seemed to run through my nerves and veins and rise up in my throat, so that it was all I could do not to scream myself. Then just before my father was about to remove the blindfold, he'd mutter softly, "All gone now," and I would get up and slip quietly through a trap door beneath the table, so that the first thing the patient would see after his agony was my absence, a faint impression left behind on the tablecloth.
It was good theatre, and I don't doubt that in some cases it actually played a part in affecting a cure. However, one woman's screams were so particularly awful that finally I couldn't stand it any more and I began to scream myself. As a result I missed my cue, and when the blindfold came off I was still there, I even jumped off the table and clung to her legs. My father said nothing to me about my improvisation, perhaps he was thinking of incorporating my screams into the act; but unfortunately the woman died that night, and I received such a thrashing that I didn't dare vary from the script again.
Yes, my father was a cruel man, but he had no choice but to treat me well. Twice as many people were coming in now, some of them, my father's harshest critics among them, whispering at the midnight door, "I've come to see Pech." My father tried to stunt my rising self-importance, giving me to know that he could just as easily throw me to the wolves, there were plenty of blind children who could play Pech just as well, perhaps better. I didn't really believe this, and I'm not sure he did either; besides, leaving me to the wolves would have required him to leave his safe sanctuary and risk falling off a mountain or something. But since he treated me well enough, certainly far better than my brother, I played it safe and didn't test the limits of my powers.
Actually I required very little. In my infancy I was so sick, blind and motherless, that I believe my father would have strangled me had not the woman he had hired to care for me soon discovered a way to quiet me down. Rarely are people able to recall their infancies except through stories they've been told, yet I clearly, certainly remember this: excruciating pain in my chest and abdomen, a terrible queasiness, hot, sour breaths and loud, terrifying voices, all woven in and out of my own breathless, endless screams; and then all of a sudden a marvelous cessation of everything, something like sleep but not sleep--a slow, muffled thumping like that in my chest, a smooth, solid head, its face ringed with ridges and divided by two soft slivers vibrating, turning, in my hands. It wasn't long before in answer to my midnight pleas, Uhr! Uhr!--my first word, and in many ways the only one I ever really spoke with full understanding--the comforting object was placed in my crib with me, so that every night as I fell into the terrifying spiral of sleep, I could wrap it in my tiny arms and hold on tight, as though it were the only thing that kept me in the world at all.
If I was demanding at all it was when I discovered at the age of two that there were other clocks in the house, and I was torn between wanting the impostors removed at once or demanding that they be brought in my room so I could claim them as my own. I accumulated about six this way, but after I became my father's accomplice I would never want for clocks again. My shrewd father knew a good prop when he saw one; from then on he began to charge his patients not only his usual fee but "a clock, for Pech." In no time at all my room was full of clocks from all over Europe, some of them remarkably ornate and well-made, because apparently word had spread that Pech would go easier on you if you brought him the nicest clock you could afford, just don't try to cheat him.
It must have been a remarkable sight, those seventy-eight clocks scattered about my room, rich shades of oak, cherry, and mahogany, sparkling gold and silver. But I didn't in the slightest care how valuable they were. The sound was perfectly mesmerizing, all the clocks ticking away at the same time and yet at a different time, a different rhythm, blending into one soft, smooth sound like locusts, or like rain falling on the roof in sheets. Some clever people brought Pech hourglasses, and Pech was most pleased, Pech would sit for hours listening to the grains of sand pouring from top to bottom, feeling, understanding, the ponderous force of gravity. For I was rapidly becoming a scientist in my own right; I broke open most every clock I ever received, disembowelled them piece by piece--how awful at first when they suddenly stopped ticking--until I understood precisely how they worked and could take one apart and piece it back together in my sleep. This skill proved most useful later when I came to understand the concepts of "correct time"--what a hilarious idea--and "fast" and "slow." I took great pleasure in diagnosing a certain clock's problem, discussing it with the patient, who was naturally quite alarmed at first--a blind surgeon!--and then performing my subtle magic on its fragile organs, sealing it up, there how's that?, needing no thanks or payment, just the happy sound of its unique, rhythmic ticking.
So despite my awful servitude in the role of Pech, my early years were increasingly filled with wonder. My brother, meanwhile, was wretched. John was six years older, the robust, beloved firstborn of our mother, who had zealously guarded him against the wild rages of our father during those uncertain early stages of his practice. I like to think that she'd made it her life's ambition to see that he would never be hurt by her husband's madness, that he would become the proud heir he would have been in any other family, the boy the town took seriously. What a shock, then, when I arrived on the scene. His protector gone, my brother now bore the full brunt of our father's failures, so that every day he prayed to a God he wasn't even allowed to see that every patient my father treated live, or at least die by some accident clearly unrelated to boils. Perhaps he was looking forward to the day when his cursed younger brother would be old enough to bear some of this burden, but then, upon the emergence of Pech, even this hope was struck down. Who could blame him for hating me? What a nightmare it must have been to see such a pathetic, frail, sightless thing elevated to such heights, while no matter what he did he was trampled down in disgrace. Oh, how my father railed at him; he was lazy, stupid, the true curse on this family, the true bastard devilchild whoreson, etc. Why couldn't he be useful like Pech? Why didn't he just go out and get it over with, fall out of the church tower like a true Mittach?
I don't doubt that as he entered his teens my brother considered just that, the situation seemed that hopeless. I was sympathetic, but what could I do? Any attempt I made to defend him (Um, Father, we aren't allowed in the church tower) was met with a similar rage. I tried to prove my solidarity in private, but John threw me off, no doubt my sympathy degraded him even more. As a result, he took to tormenting me, played cruel tricks on my blindness, rearranging the furniture and laughing as I stumbled and fell on my face. I tried to bear these retributions as best I could; when my father demanded to know how his Pech had received those bruises on his face, I shrugged and told him I supposed I was just another Mittach after all. I well knew that had I told the truth, John would have been beaten and even burned. Instead, I received the curses, the six lashes with The Strap, but only below the neck, since that was the whole point, the lesson I was learning: The rest of me could go to hell, but the face of Pech, that pale threshold of other people's pain, had to remain spotless.
It seemed the least I could do, but evidently these sacrifices on my part just riled John all the more, because one day he figured out how to strike me in a way he knew I would be unable to bear. He took my favorite clock, I mean the first one, the Ur-clock of my crib, and placed it on top of my door, so that when I opened it the clock came crashing down, first on my head and then to the floor.
I fell to my knees; I didn't care about the blood streaming down my face, but when I crawled to the doorway and felt that familiar ringed face cracked open and spilling forth countless gears and springs, its soft turning slivers all twisted and worst of all stilled, I let out a piercing scream. My father rushed into the room; he cared about the blood all right, he had an operation in one hour. There was a rush of wind, a desperate fury; I heard fists endlessly smacking against a body and face, I heard a body slump against the wall to the ground. I was dragged away and dunked in a washtub of cold water. That night Pech wore a black kerchief over his head, went through the performance in a deep trance, so that the pain of the entire world might have plunged into the watery depths of his glassy eyes.
But somehow my brother survived his murder. Late that night I was elated to hear him rise from the floor where he lay and stagger slowly across the floor. I was proud of him, really it was a physical triumph; if that beating hadn't killed him, nothing could, not even the family curse. However, when I jumped out of bed and hailed him in a whisper, "Brother!" he didn't say a word. From then on he kept his distance from me and my father and from the house itself for that matter. He would come back late at night to sleep for a few hours, smelling of cows and damp straw. I guessed he was hiring himself out to the local farmers, probably only for meals. As a clumsy Mittach, as the son and brother of the devil's servants, and perhaps worst of all, as a young man who didn't know the first thing about farming, he must have had to put up with untold shame and humiliation. But I'm sure he worked like one possessed and in time proved his worth, because it was clear from this time on he was driven by the machinery of a developing plan. It was all he thought about, sometimes I could hear the most basic elements of it playing on his lips in the faintest whisper, get some land, be a goddamn farmer like everyone else.
I sincerely wished he'd somehow realize his dream, and not merely because I felt guilty for having been unfairly favored. Rather, as I grew into my middle teens, I began to cherish secret hopes for the day when my brother and I would both be free of our tyrant father. In my innocence I saw us falling at once into one another's arms, the hateful wedge our father had driven between us exploded to dust, the wounds we'd caused under duress dressed and healed. I would no longer be Pech but Peter or Paul; together we'd make up some story (which was probably true anyway) about how that's what our mother had wanted to christen me, but then our father, who art in Hell . . . Right, then we'd get some land, work day and night in the fields, marry sisters and start a whole new line of Mittachs, so that by the time we died of old age in our sleep we alone would remember the hundred years of curses we had together wiped off the books.
However, even in my wildest dreams I didn't dare imagine just how soon our chance would come. The family curse--dealing its final blow, as I saw it--finally discovered my father in his secret lair. No excuses, he wasn't even drunk; one day he was on his way to an operation, not even hurrying, and fell through the open trap door down the cellar stairs. The night after he was buried--God knows where they put him, they still wouldn't even let my brother and me anywhere near the church--my brother took me aside and asked if we might take a few minutes to discuss what was going to happen next.
I turned to him, my mouth fell open--that gentle voice! "Yes, by all means!" I nearly shouted at last, unable to hide my welling emotion. My heart was racing; I heard my brother shift once or twice in his chair, grip the arms tight. At last he opened the discussion in a serious but congenial tone, saying that he truly didn't care what I did with the money I'd inherited from our father; he had some prospects and would do just fine on his own. But he felt it was his duty to inform me, who was no doubt unfamiliar with these kinds of things, that if I planned to live as long as he did ("Oh, I do!" I broke in, but he went on as soberly as before), then the money would simply not last. True, we'd never got along, but we were still family, and it just made sense to pool our resources and buy some good land and livestock. With the skills he'd learned over the years he could guarantee that we'd never want for anything.
Then he paused for a moment; perhaps he was reading my pursed, quivering lips as a sign of displeasure with his proposal, and not as frail gates just barely holding back a flood of joy. "Not even your clocks," he went on quickly, "you could still have plenty of clocks, all you wanted."
At this, for the first time since I thought my brother had been beaten to death, my blind eyes filled with tears. All at once I threw myself onto his rock-hard frame and began sobbing into his shoulder. Was this a dream? I cried and began babbling in a confused stream that at last the curse was over, I was no longer Pech, I was Peter or Paul . . . And as for the clocks, I laughed, I was eighteen now, maybe it was time I put aside those old toys; anyway it hadn't been quite the same since I couldn't really save that first clock of mine, what a monster I'd made of it, all pieced together out of six or seven of the others--oh, not that I blamed him for all that. No really, I was anxious for him to teach me thousands of useful tasks, yes he'd be surprised at what I could do.
Under any other circumstances I would have understood my brother's stony silence, his stiffening limbs, for the revulsion it was. But at the time I was blind with happiness, I thought he was merely stunned to see that after having been driven along such widely different paths, we'd come out at exactly the same clearing. And if, during the next two weeks after the deal was done, he continued to keep his distance, never once warming to our new future together as I had, I instead reproached myself for expecting too much. I recalled again the constant beatings and humiliations he'd endured at home, imagined the degrading, subservient years of apprenticeship on the farms--no wonder his affections were encased in such a hard shell, how else could he have survived? It would naturally be quite some time before it chipped away enough to allow me in--but it would happen, that I was certain of.
However, to my crushing dismay, my brother had learned more over the years than how to milk a cow. He actually tried to steal away in the middle of the night, tiptoeing barefoot across the floor, one slow, padded step after the other--as though those weren't precisely the kind of sounds that to me were the most deafening! I just lay there and listened for a while--oh, how I wanted to disbelieve the meaning of those steps--but then at last got up and caught him at the door.
He whirled around, then rapidly worked his guilt into anger. It was too late, he said sharply, he was going far away and would never return. He'd left me the house, even hired people to take care of me, I could still keep my stupid clocks. He paused, no doubt expecting me to demand an explanation, but I remained still and silent. He was tired of a life of shame, he went on bitterly. The clumsy Mittachs, the devil Mittachs--there was too much history here, he wanted a real life, a history of his own! A creature like Pech would just get in his way; no one here would ever really respect him as long as it was known that there had once been a Pech in his life.
What a speech! He acted as though he were the only person in the world who had ever thought of starting over in America; good God, it was 19OO, there had been no apocalypse, everybody was trying to make at least some new mark on the clean slate they'd been handed, they couldn't help it. Still I said nothing, why waste my breath? I despised him now, he was nothing but a shallow fool; he couldn't even imagine that I had suffered too, couldn't even imagine that while I couldn't see his guilty face I could hear his sweaty palm squeaking against the leather handle of the brand new suitcase he'd bought with the money he'd stolen from me, a detail no doubt absent from that "history of his own," yes I could hear his descendants telling and retelling the dumb little story now, he set out alone, all his worldly possessions in one little bag.
Finally he turned and walked out, set foot on the road. There was no reason to say anything more, I hadn't blocked his way, I hadn't fallen on my knees and made him drag me across the lawn. But John couldn't help it, he just had to try and obliterate me from his life. "You want to know the reason I'm going?" he shouted, "I'm going because you can't!"
I remember these words so clearly not because they were so wounding, but because in the months that followed I was forced to admit that there was some truth in them; that is, now that I was no longer Pech, to the world I really was nothing more than a helpless blind boy. And the Kruks, the couple my brother had hired to "take care of me," made certain I never forgot it. The Kruks were lazy, negligent people who had lost all they'd ever had, apparently a good portion to my shrewd brother, because they were always cursing the day they'd ever met him. I don't know what arrangement he'd worked out with them; all I knew was that though the house was still mine I couldn't kick them out. I found their brand of selfish cruelty even worse than my father's in a way, because at least my father had had the talent and aesthetic sense to be a convincing charlatan. Of course, the first thing they did to assert their control over the house was to revive the devilchild business around town--"Pech whispers to his clocks as though they were alive!" and all that kind of thing. Then they banished me to the basement, insisted I sleep on the floor that no doubt still bore traces of my father's blood, because they were used to more space, and besides, to a blind man it was little different than any other room. Likewise, blind men didn't need to eat as often nor as well as the sighted. It was perfectly awful, but if I was in the mood, they could be very amusing. Some nights they got drunk and slurred lectures down to me through the trap door--"Sure, life is unfair, so what? . . . remember Job . . . boils and carbuncles . . . pus!"
Which reminds me, the Kruks spent most of their first few months ransacking the house in search of the secret nook where my father had hidden his magic implement. I suppose they thought they could take up his practice, or maybe that they could just rub it three times and make three wishes and all that. But as soon as they began turning the place upside down, I broke out in peals of laughter, not at the Kruks, but at myself. For as close as he'd been to the charade, even Pech had believed the fiction about the secret hiding place, had been sure that his father's magic tool was at least something he'd crafted in his devil's workshop and not merely some ordinary object we used every day, like a potato peeler. Realizing this was a great release, it was like reading the last page of a book: There, it's done, you've recognized something essential about yourself, it's now inside your body and will never leave you as long as you live; you're free to go now, free to read another if you like or must, but free as well to begin to write one yourself.
In other words: Pech was dead, long live Pech. For my brother had been right when he'd said I couldn't follow him into history, not because I was blind, as he'd meant, but because at bottom I was Pech, there was no point in pretending I was anything else. I don't mean Pech, the puppet in my father's grotesque theatre, but the Pech whose only passion was in the workings of a clock, whose true ambition in life was to understand Time itself. No, I had no business being on a farm, no matter how dreamy and productive a life it had seemed, certainly not yet anyway. I didn't want to put aside my clocks, indeed I couldn't have if I'd tried. The clocks, or rather what they represented, were far more real to me than any chunk of land could be. They were the only lens through which I could see the world at all, through which I could see and know myself. And while it seemed possible that someday I would understand how to reconcile the two, fenced land and boundless Time, that wasn't necessarily my goal. Maybe it would happen, maybe not, but if it did it would be solely the result of my complete surrender to the latter, to the impalpable reality of Time.
So for the next six years, I gladly spent most of my time in my basement, listening to and through the rising, falling locust hum of my clocks, their number doubled by the room's echo. I no longer took them apart to perform my subtle surgery, except occasionally to amuse myself. My inquiry had shifted from biology to metaphysics; now my single desire was to pierce the mystery hidden behind the endless cycles of numbers on the outside and the grinding of gears within.
As a result, I don't know how long it was before I realized that I was alone in the house, that the Kruks had fled or died; one day I woke up and noticed that the smell of sour wine and bad cabbage was completely gone out of the air. I crawled out of the basement, went outside. I had always been free to go up and around, I'd simply chosen not to; but now I had to go out into the world, I had to eat. I was not at all frightened, nor was I upset that my studies had been suddenly interrupted; to the contrary over the past few years my inquiry had led me to develop a sense by which I could always tell whether or not I was pursuing the right course, and as this was obviously a good test of it, I was most interested to see what would result.
I walked down the road, the early summer sun hot on my pale, basement face, and came to a stop on the green just outside the church. It was noon, the bells had just started ringing. Out of the door like a cuckoo came the pastor, whom I'd never met; evidently he was one of those husky, light-headed priests who were less preoccupied with saving and damning souls than with attending feasts after weddings and wakes. He bounced past, then stopped, as though drawn to me by some magnetic force.
"So, Pech," Pastor Speck began, then faltered. He seemed baffled; perhaps he was wondering what possible interest he could have in me, who had never even once offered him a glass of wine. He laughed nervously. "You're not casting a spell on the church, are you?"
What an idiot. "Not at all," I said. "I was just thinking how it no longer bothered me that your clock was so hopelessly inaccurate." This was true on both counts. All my youth I'd been vexed by that clock, ticking dumbly along, fast and slow in no regular pattern. Oh, how I'd wanted to get my hands on that leviathan for a month of major surgery. So I was truly surprised to see that now, no doubt as a result of my studies, the question of whether or not this or any clock kept good time seemed laughably irrelevant.
However, to Pastor Speck, it was a matter of pride. I heard him shift his position, toward the clock and then back down to me. He scoffed. "How can you tell?"
"The same way as anyone else," I shrugged, "The bells say it's noon, yet you're already casting about six minutes' worth of shadow."
The pastor paused, smacked his lips. Like most sighted people, he didn't like being shown up by a blind man. So he treated it as a game, played his ace, asserted his obvious advantage--trump that, blind man. "I'm afraid your mistaken, Pech," he said, "I don't have a shadow."
"Then you're either a demon or a liar," I said and slowly approached him, bent down low, and placed one hand on his wrist and the other squarely on his stub of shadow. I laughed. "Fortunately for you it's the latter."
Pastor Speck was stunned, speechless. Into the void I quickly explained in deadly earnest that the shadow retains less heat than the body, and when after another long pause Pastor Speck exclaimed, "Amazing!" I could barely contain my delight--so I had picked up some of my father's craft after all! Like most people the pastor preferred to believe that the blind are endowed with magical powers instead of heightened senses and basic intelligence; because I couldn't see him, to him it was inconceivable that I could hear the lie in his voice, or simply know that he was the type of person who would lie about such a thing. To tell the truth, at times even I believed the myth; that is, the shadow did feel slightly cooler.
Anyway, Pastor Speck was so astounded by this trick that at once he gave me the job of caring for the church clock. Needless to say, the clock in Glanz became one of the most accurate in the world. After I'd removed and cleaned every piece and rearranged them according to what seemed a more efficient design, I spent many days and nights with the clock, even slept inside it as it wound slowly down, listening to and absorbing its unique rhythm. Most people don't realize that in order to keep a clock unwinding at the regular rate its design prefers, you must be extremely vigilant. I usually gave the clock a full turn in the morning, two half turns around noon and six, and two full turns at midnight, but this routine too varied depending upon the weather; in excessive heat the gears expanded and slowed, while in bitter cold they contracted so much you could barely keep up with them.
It was a most pleasing time in my life. What a joy to be the caretaker of such a fine clock, something like being a poet paid to read poetry. It was interesting too to be a functioning member of society, yet at the same time to remain a mysterious figure at its shadowy fringe. Of course, there was the predictable nonsense going around that Pech had been exorcised and was now working his way toward salvation, but far more interesting was the sense I received that people regarded me not only as the clock-winder, but rather more abstractly, that is, as the clock itself.
To me this was a sign that my studies were entering their last phase. So as much as I appreciated them--the church clock, the kind people I met--they were still not my passion, one might even say they were distractions. The house too--I signed it over to the town to use as they pleased, for meetings, dances, and the like, an act of generosity that surely placed Pech at the very gates of heaven. After a while I didn't even hear them stomping around just above, so immersed was I in grasping the true nature of Time, in seeing through our fiction of measurement to the core of infinity pulsing beneath. Apparently other such inquiries were in the air--Rontgen's x-rays, Planck's quantum leap, Freud's dreamworld, all of them lifting the worn lid of established causes and effects and peering into the formless dark beneath, rediscovering a language we'd somehow forgotten how to speak. And Einstein, of course, there in his own basement just across the Alps--I don't doubt that the faint cracklings I sometimes heard at the very heart of my clocks' steady downpour were merely reverberations of the silent explosions taking place in his brain, as he began his marvelous blasting of the universe.
Not that I would dare try to claim a place in this pantheon; no, my fascination was more personal in nature and as far as I could tell had no practical applications. Still, I would have liked the chance to show these great theorists the clock I invented. Actually I'm not entirely sure if I ever really constructed one, because by that time I could make little distinction between imagining a thing and doing it. But it had always bothered me how conventional clocks emphasized the competitive, mutually hostile relationship between people and Time, each trying to master the other, prove the other a mere mortal by comparison, when this was only part of the story. I wanted to conceive a clock that would tell the rest, demonstrating to the contrary our perfect coincidence with Time. I don't know if I can really describe it in words--let's see, it's comprised of two small spheres, soft and pliable like boiled eggs, joined at the center and punctured with billions of pinprick holes. The outside layers peel away to reveal another set of spheres, and then within those still another. In the material world, of course, the number of spheres within would have to be finite, but the idea is to create a rising tension in the person reading the clock, because you know very well the spheres can't go on forever, and yet even so about two-thirds the way through you start to get nervous, because you fully expected the previous sphere to be the last. It's the same with the next one and then the next and even the next after that, so that at last you perceive the possibility that the spheres would indeed go on forever, and when you get to that point you've read the clock correctly, for with this instrument you don't tell the time of day; rather, this clock is like a pair of eyes that enable you to see Time, even if you can't, as a pair of eyes looking back, mirroring your essential astonishment, which likewise has been buried under just as many layers for far too long.
I don't know how long it took me to come up with this nifty invention, it could have been six years or sixty; even though my duties as the clock-winder required me to pay strict attention to each passing day and season, my consciousness was always elsewhere, was down in that basement. Then suddenly one day or night I woke or fell asleep and knew it was time, time at last to put the theory into practice. I did not get up to wind the church clock, I no long-er even wound my own clocks, no longer even ate, but instead just sat in the darkness, absorbed in my own darkness.
And what happened then, what next? Well, the first thing that happened, had already happened, was always happening, throughout this meditation, was that "then" and "next" dissolved into one fluid pool of "all at once." Time passed slowly, rapidly, not at all. I gave myself over to dreaming until it was no different than waking, how could it be? just a rising and falling mass of sounds and textures which at startling moments slid into distinct voices and footsteps, perhaps just some people upstairs, except that then (or all at once) I began to recognize the voices and footsteps as belonging to certain individuals. First came my father's patients, a terrible howling and writhing in my throat, and then all of them suddenly swirled into my father's voice yet no different from my own, repeating over and over, "All gone now . . . All gone now . . . All gone now . . .," each a shade fainter than the one before, as though descending one tiny step at a time into an unbreakable silence. The voice had just about vanished altogether, when, as though on cue but again all at once, from far away another voice pricked through the darkness, just a speck of flickering, vibrating sound but moving in toward me this time, or else I pursued it, it was all the same, until at last I recognized the voice of my brother John out there in the midst of his history, cursing every time he looked at the clock, because the expected shipment of seed was late, but also or really because it reminded him of what he'd left behind, of the brother who was not a fact in his history except in his dreams, so that in a way he longed to get rid of all his clocks except that he couldn't even if he'd tried, he needed them so to build his history, what a bind. Because no matter how hard he tried to forget it, the untold was just as much a part of his history as the spoken, per- haps even more so. I was the clock on his wall, the watch in his vest pocket beating right next to his ticking heart even after the latter finally wore down, burst a spring and stopped cold. And just as his blood still flowed in the veins of his descendants, so too did I still tick on on their walls, their wrists, as they continued John's history on the other side of the thick black line my brother had drawn through his heart, a line they needed in order to see themselves more clearly but which prevented them from seeing me, because when they looked at the line they saw nothing beyond but a black void and couldn't recognize that this too was a part of their history, that this black nothing was me. So I crossed this line, passed over invisibly in the night, was pulled over, I should say, by a sudden, overwhelming desire to be heard among all those voices on the other side, a passion to be recognized, even if I had to do it myself. And then--it was like stepping off a cliff, I fell into a deep forgetfulness, fell into the absence I was among them.
Who knows, maybe I died, maybe they found me a few days later when the clock stopped, but not this time, not in this story. Instead, all at once I found myself standing in the middle of a town that seemed incredibly familiar and yet altogether different from anything I'd ever experienced. All was so perfectly still and quiet, dim shapes formed from a blueprint in my head and therefore less solid and real. I took a few uneasy steps, drifted down the road, until I heard and felt a woman approaching from the distance in a way I'd never before heard and felt anything, the rustle of a bag against her skirt, the heads of lettuce shifting around within, all condensed, silenced I should say, into a sudden splash of light. The old woman saw I was no more than a question and stopped right in front of me, and I spoke to her in faltering bursts, as though the language were new to me, as though I were piecing the words together like so many bricks.
But imagine my joy as she told me the bare outline of the story into which I'd dissolved and out of which I was even now emerging as someone else entirely, someone who by contrast had feared clocks and time so much that he was about to throw off the history that had enfolded him like an infant's blanket, a history he'd happened upon by virtue of his surrender to the infinite, but which he chose to disbelieve because it was too much like a dream, when that alone was reason enough to believe. He'd come to his senses, he probably thought, when in fact he'd fled from them at the precise moment he needed them more than ever, because now it was time to act, now it was up to him to imagine a new history for himself, to start something new in this old world, some new way of looking at things in which fenced land and boundless time pulsed as one; to embrace his father's cousin's cousin's cousin's daughter, perhaps, and fill in the bare outline of the story with flesh and blood and 156 descendants, who would never forget him, because the turning of the hourglass, the proof that life was an hourglass, a shifting pool of sand forever turning and returning, that alone was something worth recording. And hearing my story, he must have glimpsed this possibility and was drawn further toward it, past the gate, through the door, and up the aisle like a bride to the open trap door, where he peered down into the fluid darkness like that at the bottom of a well, a total eclipse, a night as black as infinite forgetfulness, as black as pitch.
Who knows, maybe he fell in and died, maybe they found him a few days later, a true Mittach, but not this time, not in this story. Instead, he kept his gaze fixed on the darkness, it would be redundant to say "for an eternity," until at last to his infinite astonishment he saw a glimmer of a reflection, recognized a fleeting silhouette of light against the black, which slowly began to resolve itself into a clear disk that was above him now, above me, a single pupil in the midnight sky, a face without hands, inviting us to come up out of the basement and fill it in with our long history, to write it all down just as we'd lived it and would live it from then on, our eyes wide open to everything we couldn't see before.
