The Home for Wayward Clocks (38 page)

At midnight, more of the clock spun to life as Jesus’ twelve disciples started a march in a circle. Jesus stood above, smiling, his face solemn and sweet, his hands spread, palms turned up. All the disciples bowed to Jesus, except for Judas, who quickly turned his back. Then, as Judas skulked after the eleven, slipping back into their homes inside the clock, a raven popped out of a different archway, above and to the right. I felt James shiver as the raven opened his beak and crowed three times, a raucous sound in the softly ticking museum. Jesus’ room darkened.

We sat, silent and amazed, and then the employee pointed out the matching archway on the left, where a bugler dressed in blue stood, his trumpet resting at his side. On New Year’s Eve at midnight, the employee explained, the bugler raised his trumpet to his lips and blew in the start of a new year, a new chance. Another year of telling time in every possible way, through numbers on the face of a clock, through stars, through planets. Another year of old men dying and babies being born, of Jesus smiling at his disciples, even as one turns away, and then that cold sharp rasp of a raven’s call.

“Please,” James said on that first night. He dropped my arm and moved toward the employee, who looked startled. “Can I just touch it? Can I feel the ticking before you shut it down for the night?”

The man started to say no, but he must have seen something in James’ face. The same thing I saw when James first woke every morning, when he opened his eyes and looked out and for a moment, didn’t recognize a thing. For that moment, he looked scared and his eyes shimmered and his mouth opened as if to call for someone. In the Time Museum, he seemed to call for that clock and after hesitating, the employee nodded.

I watched James walk past the velvet barriers holding the public at bay. He moved to the center of the clock and I suddenly pictured it folding in, catching James up in an embrace. He held out his hand and touched the clock, just above its bellybutton. Then he lay his face against it and closed his eyes.

It happened so fast, but I saw it. He smiled. The smile that you see on a child’s face when he curls up in his mother’s lap and nestles between her breasts.

When the employee cleared his throat, James straightened, then came right back to me. He walked with me out of the museum and to our room. “I connected with it, Diana,” he said. “That clock has a soul, they all have souls, and I connected. I felt its pulse.”

He made love to me that night, in that hotel bed, even before I bought the clock nightgown. And I shuddered beneath him, feeling his strength all around me, feeling that connection, knowing he was there with me in that moment, in that bed, his eyes looked into mine and we were together in the way I’d grown to cherish over three year’s time.

But when he curled into me later, talking and stroking my breast in the usual way, the familiar way that used to blanket me but now left me lonely, I knew he was away again. His voice, his thoughts, were with that clock, locked into the immensity of its heart.

I wished that night, as I wished a million times before, that he could tell me more of his past. More than a story about a father who left and then died, a mother who, he said, wasn’t “all there,” but he would never explain what was missing. I wondered if he could tell anyone. I wondered if he could tell a clock. I wondered why he couldn’t tell me.

I loved James.

And the whole weekend was like that. I came upon him there too many times to count, in the clock museum, standing before the Gebhard clock. “James,” I said. “Let’s go eat.”

“Just look,” he whispered.

“Let’s go shopping, let’s go swimming,” I said. And once, I looked around quickly, then licked his ear while running one finger down the zipper of his pants. “Come to bed with me, James,” I said.

“Just look at it.”

And then I said it, just loud enough so he could hear, and just to see if the shock of it would work its way through, if the hard sound of the word would bring him back to me. “Come fuck me, James,” I said. “Let’s go fuck like dogs.”

For a moment, he trembled and I thought I had him. He started to turn toward me, but then he stopped. “A raven at every midnight,” he whispered. “Just look.”

I grabbed his hand then and squeezed it as hard as I could. “I love you, James,” I said. I said it loud. I told the whole museum and every clock heard me.

He looked at me then, looked at me clear like he did during lovemaking. And there was that smile, the smile I saw as he pressed his cheek against the heart of the clock. “I love you too, Diana,” he said and those words were mine alone.

But then, he turned back. He turned full away and his back was to me and I could barely hear his voice, I wasn’t even sure if it was me he was talking to. “Just look,” he said and began again to name off all the functions, listing the dials and faces as lovingly as if he recited a poem.

He didn’t notice when I walked out of the room.

On that Sunday morning, car loaded and ready to go, I moved out of the archway and found a nearby bench. I sat and watched him watch the Gebhard clock until the museum closed at four. I didn’t leave to eat and neither did he. When I saw one of the employees moving toward the closed sign, I took James’ hand and led him away. During the drive home, he kept talking about the Gebhard clock, as if it was still there, still looming in his vision.

Now, as the grainy gray light brightened into a pale rose, I began to pack. I didn’t have much, mostly just clothes, and I could fit them all in our suitcase, left out from our final weekend. I closed it and set it by the bedroom door, then stood before James.

Carefully, I tucked the clock nightgown into James’ arms, so it lay where I should be in the bed. I took one sleeve and placed it on top of James’ hand, like the touch of my own fingers against his skin. As he stirred, I kissed him once on the lips and felt his warm response. “I love you, James,” I said and he settled more deeply into sleep, pulling the nightgown closer to his naked body. He had an erection and I thought of the raven, appearing every night at midnight. I draped my nightgown so it covered this most vulnerable part. Covered him and kept him warm.

I turned on the nightlight before I left, gently. I left without raging at the dying of our light. I left in tears. But I left.

S
o you live in silence then, silence while the rest of the world moves in full voice around you. Figures of perpetual motion swirl through a flat environment where nothing reverberates, nothing resounds, nothing echoes. Even your clocks speak and sing and share their heartbeats with the world, but you can’t hear a thing.

Yet how is this different, really? You’ve always lived in a world of silence. Imagine never being able to tell anyone where you came from, how you came to be. Imagine never telling anyone who you are, because to do so would be to let loose with a string of secrets, horrible secrets, that most people would never choose to believe. Secrets that only happen in nightmares or on the front pages of newspapers. Not to someone who lives across the street.

How to even work such a thing into a conversation? “Where do I come from? Well, a root cellar mostly.” Or, “Gosh, that’s a lovely collar your poodle has. I used to wear one just like it.”

To this day, you still wear high collars and long sleeves, even in hot Iowa summers. There are a few remaining marks on your skin, probably not something anyone would notice, but you need to make sure they never do. So even your body, you hide.

Your whole life is about silence and secrets and deeply hidden places.

And you saw what happened when you risked it all. When you showed your skin to a woman, let her touch it, let her love it, and you learned of the wonderful warmth of sleeping naked with another nude body pressed against yours. Skin to skin, thighs to thighs, arms wrapped and clasped around each other. She saw your body, made love to it. Made love to you.

And you even slipped and showed her the side of yourself that most scares you. When the rage comes, when it hurls out of you in a flare of shouted words and raised fists. She saw that, saw it only once, but she felt what it was like under your anger. Even though the anger wasn’t ever for her. And she said it was all right. That night, she curled against you and she wept, but she said it was all right and her skin was warm. You detected no change, no stiffness.

You never said the past out loud though. Nothing beyond a few general answers, brushed-off explanations. How could you tell her about your mother? How could you tell her about tethers and kennels and plastic food dishes and water tins? There was never anyone you could tell. Not the teachers or the other children or the doctors or grocery store clerks, bank tellers, or people who smiled at you on the street. Not even the friendly flea market folks. Not with anyone you’ve ever had contact with. Not with any of the people you’ve so wanted to care for. The past is silent. You are silent.

Yet somehow she still knew. She must have known. Through the faded marks on your skin, the raised voice, the single sharp blow, she must have figured it out, witnessed the unimaginable, and left. Face to face with the truth, the unspeakable, she left you all alone in the middle of the night. Left you in dark silence. Not a word between you. Not even goodbye.

Imagine.

James knew silence well. He lived side by side with silence, took it to bed with him at night, carried it on his tongue during the day, like a hard candy that was sour and never ever went away. Throughout his life, he made sure that people only knew him in the present, just in the moment, and nothing more. They didn’t know his past, they wouldn’t know his future. He was rather like a clock himself…ticking forward, moving ahead in time, but really only there in the everyday world when someone looked at him, nodded in his direction, then moved on.

Silence and loneliness are not easy company.

I
t was late when James checked into the Clock Tower Resort in Rockford. He told the desk clerk he would be staying a couple days, then he unloaded and set up the clocks and went to bed. He was tempted to sneak down into the belly of the resort and look in the closed doors of the Time Museum, but he knew it would be dark and he wouldn’t be able to see a thing. Still, James wanted the Gebhard Clock to know he was there. And in some odd and impossible way, he hoped he would run into Diana.

The only time James was here, Diana was with him. When she disappeared, she left behind a silk nightgown, purchased at this resort’s gift shop. It was covered with clocks. James unwrapped her that weekend like she was a present just for him. A special gift. Which she was. When she left, James slept with the nightgown for a couple months. He hoped she would come back. When she didn’t, he threw the nightgown away. James tried to throw her away, but he just couldn’t. He thought of her almost every day, especially when he wound her clock.

So James fell into the hotel bed and a heavy sleep, secure in the knowledge that a few floors below, clocks moved in subtle precision through the night. The Gebhard Clock, James knew, was silent. It was only allowed to run a few times during the day, the curators said to keep its maintenance to a minimum. James wished he owned the clock. He would give it a room of its own. It would take up the entire space. And James would let it run all the time, the way clocks were meant to, and each day, he would tend to it to make sure it was all right. He didn’t understand why the museum people thought shutting the clock down would keep it moving. Its joints would stiffen after so much stillness, like James’ knees and elbows when he got up in the morning.

James vowed to talk to them about the clock’s maintenance the next day. He pictured them suddenly giving the clock to him, sending it to the Home for purely humane reasons, and then that big old clock would hunker down in its private room and run and run and run. James fell asleep, thinking about its new and multi-faceted voice blended in among all the others.

Perhaps it was the clock’s proximity that made James dream of it that night. He saw all of its faces and globes, its dials and instruments. He went from one to the other and told himself the time over and over again. He saw where the earth was on its axis, where the stars were in the night sky, saw the position of six different planets around the sun. James saw a child grow old and then die, hidden within the folds of a hooded figure’s cloak. And the twelve disciples bowed to Jesus, all except Judas, who looked directly at James. When the raven opened his mouth to crow, James didn’t hear a thing. The raven became angry and crowed louder, shutting his eyes and straining so hard, he fell off his perch. He broke into pieces on the floor and Jesus wept and while the bugler blew taps, James wondered where he would ever find a cuckoo bird big enough to fit in that clock.

James woke in a tangle of strange sheets and a too-thin blanket. Sitting up, he grabbed the miniature mantel clock and held it while he looked around the room at all the others. Their pendulums moved steadily and James slowed his breathing and relaxed. It was four in the morning, but he knew he wouldn’t get any more sleep. He had to see the Gebhard Astronomical and World Clock.

Pulling on his robe and slippers, James pocketed the room key. In the hallway, he carefully held the door as it closed, so its echo wouldn’t disturb any of the other guests. Then he started making his way toward the museum.

James hadn’t been there in over forty years, but he still remembered the twisted path. Taking the elevator to the first floor, James went down the hallway past the swimming pool. It was empty, but the water still shivered as if someone was there. Turning a corner, James went past the darkened restaurant, then down a ramp, then a circular flight of stairs. At the base, he stopped.

There was no Time Museum. Just a big room set up like a banquet hall, filled with white-clothed tables and deep blue chairs.

James must have made a wrong turn. He reasoned that a big place like this one probably had dozens of identical passageways. Quickly, he retraced his steps back to the elevator. Setting out again, he walked past the pool. There was only one pool in the resort, so up until there, the path had to be right. Then, instead of going by the restaurant, James went the opposite way down the hall.