The Time Keeper

The sky is big and dark, like an enormous cereal bowl turned upside down, with an entire world under it. It is black, but has some pinpricks, that don’t quite reach through the orange haze that reflects back the city lights.


In one building, not looking at the sky or thinking about it is a man, bent low over a table. He wears a musty brown sweater and his gray hair is wild. His glasses look like telescopes, lens piled over lenses, until his eyes are several times their size. He has a large round nose and his mouth is a down-turned, concentrating gash, pursed but forgotten toward the maze of cranks and latches and metal wheels that are so tiny and precise as to require the comical glasses.

*

I remember a toy I had as a little girl. It was a yellow plastic tray with pegs on it, and it came with a dozen colored gears. You could click the gears on the pegs and the teeth would interlock, so you could make them all spin, all across the yellow tray, by rotating any one of them.

*

The orange haze over the city starts to lighten. On the expressway, the red and white dots of cars whiz toward the horizon like lightning bugs. If you were to look down a residential street, say, on the south side of town, by the overpass, you’d see lights coming on in houses, a few at a time, curtained window squares turning from black to yellow.

The man in the basement, still hunched over his tools, notices a kink in his neck. He does not see first light because there are no windows where he is. The lights in his empty room are low; only those necessary for his project have been employed, and he works under the yellow glow of a desk lamp. His fingers are thick, the nails trimmed down to the quick, and they smell like stale tobacco. The gray stubble on his face was not there when he started. Around him are rows of tables, each equipped with the same flexible black desk lamp and an array of tweezers and widgets and hyper-lensed glasses, but each one is dark.

*

I don’t know what makes me think of the toy this morning. I am in bed, but no one knows I am awake yet. The soft gray light from the window above my sister’s bed prevents me from falling back to sleep. I can hear my mother moving around in the kitchen; the rattle of pots and dishes is muffled by the door, but in the silence they are audible.

I don’t know why I remember that toy at all. It had no special meaning for me. I almost never played with it, and never for more than a few minutes. Even as a toddler, before I could articulate this, the toy seemed to me completely devoid of possibility. So you rotate one gear, and around go the rest. There was no imagination in it.

I pull a sheet over my eyes and manage to fall asleep briefly, seeing not so much a dream as disconnected images of churning wheels and knitted cogs, colored circles rotating fruitlessly across my eyelids.

*

In the basement, in the desk lamp’s periphery, the old man’s kink begins to scream too loudly for him to ignore. He sits up straighter, keeping his magnified eyes trained on the end of his tweezers, trying to maintain his concentration. But he has shifted position, acknowledged his discomfort, and now the floodgates are open.

He removes his silly glasses and picks up the piece he has been working on all night. It is heavy, though small. Its metal is warm from spending so much time in his hands. He turns it over. It is a timepiece, a gold circle around a simple clock face, with a gold handle arched over the 12 for affixing it to a chain. Under the delicate dome of its glass, the Roman numerals read 6 o’clock.

If that’s the right time, he knows it is by coincidence, because despite the amount of work he has put into this he has not yet fixed it. Through the glass pane in the room’s door he sees a light from the hallway turn on. There are voices, and sounds of locker doors latching shut. He places the timepiece back at his workstation and leaves quietly, through the back door, whose window pane is still dark.

*

I wake up again when my sister steps out of bed onto the creaking floor. The light from the window is stronger now. The dream of the rotating cogs leaves me feeling ill at ease; the images fade, but leave behind their vague sadness. The yellow toy, I remember, was a gift from my father, and when I was old enough to think about these things, I only played with it on the rare nights he came home from work, to make him think I liked it. My sister never pretended such things.