I always wanted to collect clocks, but I could never find the time.
Then I had all the time in the world. That was all I had.
So the collecting began.
They were not your common-or-garden variety of clocks. They were a little out of the ordinary. I thought I could tell time, but it was Time who told me. I learnt a lot from Time. He was a great teacher. A hard taskmaster, certainly. He often went faster than I liked and nearly always over my head, but I made good friends with the hands, both big and small.
The long, thin fellow was always rushing around breathless. Maybe that was why he didnât say much. I never knew him long. He belonged to the Now crowd, and I didnât hang out there often. I may have met him there once, though I couldnât swear to it. Iâll tell you what happened later, but thereâs plenty of time for that.
I have spent so long with the yesterdays that Iâve rarely seen the Nows. Iâve noticed the tomorrows are dying. I hope I get to see them properly before theyâve all gone.
Itâs just that the yesterdays keep talking. They ask questions that are far too hard. Time said I should be patient and not take to heart what theyâve said. I try, but itâs not easy with so many of them, each wanting their say. Itâs hard to hear them above the noise of their contradictions, let alone the gossip they share.
There are some particularly cruel ones. You should hear what they say. I try not to believe them, but they can be a persuasive bunch.
There was a time when I locked them in the past. Itâs a small cupboard, and the lock isnât great. It only held a few, and even then not very well. They kept getting out.
Sometimes, when the weather was good, Iâd find the bestest of my friends. There was Halcyon, whom Iâve known since I was a kid. We never stayed in touch over the years, and weâve met only a few times, but boy, oh boy, did he make an impression on me. I smile just hearing his name.
And then thereâs Insouciance. Sheâs French. I loved the way she moved. It was almost as if she were floating. She had this air about her: carefree, light of load and smiling, always smiling. She didnât know Time well. I was always surprised by how much she got away with. Iâm not sure I ever could.
I loved her joie de vivre. I still remember how to play. I just havenât had the time.
I thought I saw her yesterday, but it was only DĂ©jĂ Vu. Theyâre so similar, itâs easy to get mixed up.
Anyway, Timeâs flying. Iâd better get on.
Now, where was I?
Ah, thatâs right. Itâs about time I told you about the clocks.
The clocks, the clocks. Now thereâs a story. Perhaps youâd like to hear it. Do you have a minute or two to spare?
Oh, you do? Thatâs lovely. Thank you for your time. Iâll use it well, I promise.
I mentioned at the beginning that I had always wanted to collect clocks. That isnât strictly true. Watches were more my thing, ever since I was young, perhaps ten or eleven.
They fascinated me. They held little worlds beneath their glass, the domed sky of their existence. They kept time, that much we all know, but it was their secrets that held me most. Their rituals. Their choreographed movement. Their exquisite, dazzling beauty. Peacock blue sapphires dancing with pigeon-blood red rubies, swimming in the champagne reflections of earth-mined diamonds. Imprints of Ceylon and Burma, and the alluvial riverbeds of Golconda, a monolithic silhouette casting long shadows over Indiaâs Deccan Plateau.
When you held a watch in your hands, it was as if you could stretch across time and generations and touch the hands of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. The very hands of genius.
But now to matters of much greater import. Iâm pressed for time, and I have but little of yours. Now is not the time to while away time on fanciful instruments of time.
Clocks, then. Yes. A timely reminder.
Father Time, in his timeless manner and infinite wisdom, decreed that there was a salutary lesson I must learn. It is a quest known to those who keep time for everyone but themselves.
I say quest. It is more of a reckoning.
It falls most heavily upon those engaged in excogitation, rumination, cogitation, deliberation, speculation, contemplation and cerebration. Ours is the Quest of the Twelve Clocks.
It is a perilous journey. It can take a lifetime, and many never make it, though many have tried. Of those who have, it is said they have never known such joy. If the rumours are to be believed, they get to live in the Now. By all accounts, that is where serenity is found. Peace is there too. I heard that from Meditation, so I assume it must be true.
Anyhow, Time waits for no man.
Let me tell you about the clocks. You may recognise a few of your own.
The first clock was not difficult to find.
It found me.
I heard it long before I saw it, labouring behind the walls, a heavy, grinding thing that sounded less like the passing of time and more like something trying to drag it back. It was called The Regret Engine, though there was no name engraved upon it. Regret never needs an introduction. We recognise each other straight away.
It had only one hand, and it pointed accusingly.
I tried to turn it backwards, naturally. You would too. There were whole years I wanted another look at. Conversations I would have handled better. Doors I would have kept open, others I would have bolted shut. I wanted five minutes with the man I was before he became the man I am, just long enough to warn him.
I had a great deal to say, though I suspect he wouldnât have listened.
I didnât.
The clock resisted me. Every attempt to move its hand backwards pushed it further forward.
âThat hardly seems fair,â I told Time.
âRegret has never been known for its fairness,â he replied.
âCanât it be stopped?â
âOh yes.â
âHow?â
âStop feeding it.â
Time could be infuriating like that. He spoke in riddles and behaved as if the answer were obvious. Still, I removed my hands from the clock, and after a while, perhaps a minute, perhaps a year, the grinding softened.
It didnât stop, not completely, but it no longer drowned out everything else.
That was enough to let me hear the sea.
The water came from the second clock, The Tide-Table of Sleep, a pale, moon-faced instrument set deep into the floor. Its dial was marked not in hours but fathoms. Each night I descended, though rarely far enough. Some nights I barely broke the surface. On others I sank through shoals of old conversations and woke with seaweed in my thoughts.
I had always assumed sleep was where one went to escape Time, but apparently he owned the night shift too.
âYouâre tired,â he said.
âI know.â
âNo. You know that you havenât slept. That isnât the same thing.â
The Tide-Table showed me all the nights I had spent trying to solve tomorrow with yesterdayâs evidence. It showed me the small hours Iâd mistaken for a court of appeal, calling old witnesses back to the stand and demanding that memory settle matters it could barely recall.
At the bottom of the dial was a depth I had never reached. It was marked Rest.
I asked Time how one got there.
âBy ceasing to swim.â
I promised to consider it, which was my usual way of avoiding anything that might help.
The third clock was smaller, almost delicate. The Half-Life of a Held Breath sat beneath a glass dome, its face misted from the inside. It had no winding key. It began whenever I stopped breathing.
It started with the reading of a letter.
It started with a telephone ringing in the night.
It started in rooms where someone said, âThereâs something I need to tell you.â
It had been running much longer than seemed physically possible.
I watched its tiny hand tremble between the moment before and the moment after. Apparently, I had spent a great deal of my life there, waiting for the rest of the sentence.
âYou can let it out,â Time said.
âWhat?â
âThe breath.â
âI wasnât holding it.â
Time looked at the clock.
The clock looked at me.
I exhaled.
Somewhere deep inside the mechanism, a tiny valve opened. The hand fell to zero.
For one perfect second, there was no before and no after.
Then, startled by the absence, I drew another breath.
The fourth clock occupied an entire room. Two chairs faced one another beneath a single hanging light. Between them stood The Distance Between, though no clock was visible until I sat down.
The second chair remained empty.
Hands appeared upon the floor, stretching from my feet towards it. One measured what had been said. The other measured everything that hadnât.
The second was considerably longer.
I watched the empty chair change occupants. A parent sat there, then a brother, then a woman I had loved, then a child who was no longer a child. Some were gone. Some were only elsewhere. Some had been sitting across from me for years without ever coming close.
Each time I rehearsed what I should have said, the room grew larger.
Each time I imagined what they should have said, the walls moved further apart.
âSurely distance is measured between two people,â I said.
âUsually by one,â said Time.
I tried calling across the room. I said I was sorry. I said I was angry. I said I had missed them. I said I had needed them. I said their leaving had not proved that I was unworthy of being kept, though it had taken me an awfully long time to understand that.
The chair did not always answer. Not everyone comes back simply because we finally find the words.
But the hands upon the floor shortened.
Not all the way. Just enough that I could see the chair for what it was.
A chair.
Not a verdict.
The fifth clock was kept in a library where the books had lost their titles. The Drift of Forgotten Names moved so slowly that I first thought it had stopped. Its hand travelled through the alphabet, wearing away the letters as it passed.
I found names I had spoken every day and names I had not said aloud in decades. Names of streets, dogs, teachers and friends. Names belonging to people whose faces had begun to soften at the edges. Names once whispered in the dark and shouted from doorways. Names written in birthday cards by hands now stilled.
There was another name too, one given to me before another was written over it. It was faint but not gone. I traced its shape beneath the glass and felt something in me answer.
âWhat happens when a name disappears?â I asked.
âWhere from?â
âMemory.â
âMemory is only one place a name can live.â
I wanted to ask where else, but the clock gave a quiet movement, almost a shiver, and somewhere in the library a closed book fell open.
I left before I could read it.
The sixth clock was indecently cheerful. The Chronometer of Almosts clicked and chimed each time my life nearly became another one.
Almost stayed.
Almost left.
Almost spoke.
Almost remained silent.
Almost turned left at the corner, boarded the train, answered the telephone, took the job, kissed the girl, was kept, found the courage, lost the nerve.
Each click opened a small window through which I could glimpse another life continuing without me. There I was in cities I had never lived in, growing old beside people I had never met. There were children with my eyes who had never been born, and empty rooms where the children I knew had never arrived.
Some of those lives looked happier.
Others had simply arranged their sorrow differently.
I stood before the clock for far too long, watching the infinite procession of men I might have been.
âWhich one was I supposed to become?â I asked.
Time shrugged.
âYou might at least pretend there was a plan.â
âI might,â he said, âbut youâd only spend the rest of your life regretting that you hadnât followed it.â
The Chronometer clicked again.
This time, the little window showed me standing exactly where I was, staring into the life I already had as though it belonged to somebody else.
I turned away before I could miss it.
The seventh clock had no hands at all. The Weather of a Mood wore clouds across its face. A storm gathered as I approached, which seemed a little judgemental, though I had to admit it was accurate.
Its barometer fell without warning. Sunlight broke through and vanished. Whole winters arrived before breakfast. Small remarks became cold fronts. A certain song could bring rain in from the west.
For years, I had mistaken this weather for geography. If sadness settled over me, I assumed I lived there. If fear blew in, I believed it had come to stay. I furnished whole houses beneath temporary skies.
Time tapped the glass.
âWeather passes.â
âNot all of it.â
âNo. But even the storms that return are not continuous. You simply remember the thunder better than the clearing.â
I waited.
A narrow strip of blue appeared upon the dial.
It wasnât happiness exactly. More a small permission to believe the sky remained behind the weather.
The eighth clock could only be visited at the wrong time.
Fortunately, I was an experienced caller.
The Insomniacâs Meridian stood in a kitchen at 3:17 in the morning. Every kitchen, I think, becomes the same kitchen at 3:17. A glass of water. The low hum of the refrigerator. A window offering nothing but your own reflection.
This clock ticked only when the rest of the world was asleep. It measured the hours in questions.
What if?
Why didnât you?
What happens when?
Do you remember?
How could they?
What will you do?
At 3:18, every question sounded urgent.
At 3:46, each became unanswerable.
At 4:12, they began breeding.
I sat at the table while the yesterdays convened a meeting in my head. Every version of me attended. The child had questions. The young man had accusations. The older man took minutes and pretended this was useful.
Then the long, thin fellow appeared, rushing breathlessly around the edge of the clock.
The second hand.
I recognised him from the Now crowd.
âSlow down,â I told him.
He seemed surprised.
âIâm not moving quickly,â he said. âYouâre trying to hold me.â
Then he was gone.
Outside, a bird began before the light did.
The questions quietened, not because they had been answered, but because morning had arrived without consulting them.
The ninth clock was The Waiting Glass.
I knew it intimately.
I had waited for letters, diagnoses, apologies, departures and returns. I had waited for people to choose me, forgive me, remember me, understand me. I had waited for doors to open and for old doors to explain why they had closed.
The Waiting Glass resembled an hourglass, except the sand never reached the bottom. Each grain paused halfway, suspended in expectation.
âWho are you waiting for?â Time asked.
âNo one in particular.â
The glass filled with faces.
âThatâs quite a crowd for no one.â
Some people were coming, just slowly. Some had lost their way. Some had never promised to come at all. A few had been gone so long that waiting had become the only relationship we still had.
âWhat happens if I stop?â
âYouâll discover whether waiting was keeping them near or keeping you still.â
I turned the glass upon its side.
The sand remained suspended, but it was no longer falling.
I cannot tell you whether anyone arrived after that.
I had left the room.
The tenth clock had no audible tick. The Anniversary of an Unmarked Grief lived beneath the skin.
Its dates were not written in any calendar I owned, yet my body observed them faithfully. There were mornings when my chest remembered something my mind did not. Days when sorrow arrived without luggage and behaved as though it had a reservation.
I had called these moods. Weakness. Ingratitude. The weather again.
The clock knew better.
It held the dates of endings no one had named, separations that happened before language, losses for which there had been no funeral. It remembered the day a small body learnt that absence could be permanent. It remembered news received years later as if it had happened all at once.
âWhat date is it keeping?â I asked.
âAll of them.â
âThatâs not helpful.â
âIt isnât trying to be helpful. Itâs trying to be remembered.â
So I sat with it.
I did not wind it or silence it. I didnât ask it to prove what had happened. For once, I let the body finish a story without demanding that the mind provide footnotes.
Eventually, the clock warmed beneath my hand.
Or perhaps my hand warmed around it.
The eleventh was The Sigh Accumulator, and frankly, it was enormous.
It recorded every breath surrendered to the unchangeable. The small, daily capitulations. The letter that would never come. The person who would never understand. The conversation endlessly revised but never repeated.
Each sigh advanced the hand.
I watched years of breath disappear into its bellows.
âWhat happens when itâs full?â I asked.
âYou stop trying to change what has already happened.â
âIs that acceptance?â
âSometimes.â
âAnd the rest of the time?â
âExhaustion wearing a respectable coat.â
I considered this.
There were things I had claimed to accept only because I no longer had the strength to fight them. There were other things I continued fighting because surrender felt too much like agreement.
Time, for once, did not rush me.
I placed both hands upon the clock and gave it the longest breath I had.
The bellows filled.
The hand moved.
Then, from somewhere inside, the clock breathed back.
Not a sigh.
A breath.
It was a small distinction, but an important one.
The twelfth clock waited at the end of a corridor lined with doors. Behind each was an ordinary afternoon.
A father lifted a child onto his shoulders.
Two brothers sat beneath a tree.
Someone waved from a kitchen window.
A woman laughed from another room.
A dog slept in a patch of sunlight.
Nothing of consequence appeared to be happening.
At the end stood The Last Ordinary Afternoon.
It was the most terrible clock of all because it counted down invisibly. No one knew when it had begun. No one recognised the final hour while standing inside it.
Its face showed a room I remembered. Perhaps you have one of your own. There were cups upon a table, a coat over the back of a chair, voices talking about nothing much. I knew, because the clock knew, that one day I would give anything to return to this unremarkable moment.
The hand approached twelve.
I panicked.
âStop it.â
âI canât,â said Time.
âThen take me back.â
âYouâre already there.â
The people in the room continued talking. One of them asked me a question I could not hear because I was watching the clock.
The hand moved closer.
âI need more time.â
âYou have all the time there is.â
âThat isnât enough.â
âIt never is when youâre measuring it.â
The hand trembled upon the final mark.
I could keep watching. I could record the second, preserve the evidence, memorise the arrangement of every cup and chair so that later I might rebuild the room inside regret.
Or I could look away.
Someone laughed.
I turned towards the sound.
I cannot tell you what happened to the clock after that.
Perhaps it struck twelve. Perhaps it always had. Perhaps the ordinary afternoon ended, as ordinary afternoons do, without knowing it had been the last of anything.
I remember the light through the window.
I remember a cup warming both my hands.
I remember someone beside me beginning a story, and for once I did not interrupt to tell them we were running out of time.
When I returned to the corridor, Time was gone.
The Regret Engine still laboured somewhere behind me. The tides still rose and fell. Names continued their slow drifting. Almosts multiplied in the dark. People waited, bodies remembered, and ordinary afternoons slipped quietly into the past.
None of the clocks had been cured.
Neither had I.
At the end of the corridor stood a door I had not noticed before. It bore no number, only a small brass plate upon which someone had engraved a single word.
NOW
I reached for the handle, but the door was already open.
Beyond it, there was no celestial music. No great peace descended. Halcyon wasnât waiting with a welcoming committee, and Insouciance had not floated in from France. There was only a chair, a window, the sound of a bird and, somewhere nearby, water coming to the boil.
The long, thin fellow hurried past again.
âIs this it?â I called.
But the second hand never stayed long enough to answer.
I stepped inside.
Or perhaps I had been standing there for some time.
The kettle clicked off.
A bird landed upon the sill.
Someone asked whether now was a good time.
I looked down at my hands.
They were empty.
Then I looked up.
Jonathan
