"Tinkers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harding Paul)

4

DURING THE DAYS, GEORGE WAS AWARE OF A large group of people murmuring and flowing in and out of the room as if on tides. At night, though, when he awoke, there was only and always one person sitting on the couch next to his bed, reading by the dim light of a small pewter lamp set on the rolltop desk at the far end of the couch. The person was always familiar to him, but he never knew exactly who it wasif the person was a man or woman, relative or friend. It was as if every time he tried to gather his senses and focus on the person-hair, eyes, cheekbones, nose-in order to recall a name, the person retreated to his peripheral vision, this even though the person remained sitting in full view.

The first night he found the benevolent stranger, he asked, Who are you? And the person looked up from the book and smiled and said, You are awake. He asked, What time is it? The person answered, It is very late. This exchange seemed to occur without him or the person speaking. George could not tell if it was the pills or his normal confusion or if, in fact, he and the person were even communicating at all. It seemed even that when he wondered this to himself, the person answered, You are right here, speaking with me. You are as clear as a chime.

George attempted to see the person clearly by looking away for a moment and concentrating on the stilllife painting at the opposite end of the room and then looking back, concentrating on trying to look straight into the person's eyes. When he did this, the person seemed like a will-o'-the-wisp, seemed not to sit on the couch, but to hover just above its cushions, and, whenever looked at, to dart to the left or right, up or down, without apparent conscious effort, as if the movement was a reflex, some natural defense, so that instead of being observed directly, he or she always presented an elusive vision flickering against a background of curtain, lamp, desk, couch.

The person was young-not a child, not an adolescent, but much younger than George's eighty years, at least in body; the person radiated a sense of possessing hundreds of years, but as a simultaneity: The person contained hundreds of years, but they overlapped, as if the person experienced any number of times at once.

I was just thinking, the person said in a silvery voice, I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you. Now, let me read you something to get you back to sleep.

Cometa Borealis: We entered the atmosphere at dusk. We trailed a wake of fire. We were a sparkling trail of white fire hurtling over herds that grazed alluvial plains. The purple plains: steppe and table, clastic rocks from an extinct river strewn over the bed of an extinct ocean. Perhaps, far away, there was a revolution-the storming of a bereft fort built on the bend of a remote, misty, woods-shrouded river. But here only heavy-coated caribou lifted their shagged heads, their velvet antlers, not even stopping their chewing while our silent blazing passed across the cold sky, followed by their wet black eyes, but only because that is the nature of eyes and of light. Winds swept over the plains. We never saw the caribou or the revolution. We were a burning fuse. We barely caught a glimpse of the darkening world below us before we burned away to nothing.

Seventy-two hours before George died, Nikki Bocheki, an old acquaintance from the Unitarian church, showed up in a red Alfa Romeo convertible and flowing scarves. She took off her large sunglasses and kissed George's wife on each cheek. When she saw George in his bed, she said, Oh George, you handsome thing! She kissed him on the forehead and her lips left a livid lipstick print. George did not recognize her but made a silly face like a cartoon character. And who's this beautiful lady? he said, which was just the right thing to say, even though he said it not only to be charming but also because he did not actually know. Nikki put a hand on his shoulder, called him an incurable gentleman, and blushed.

Nikki was an old woman who dressed like an aging former starlet whose most dramatic, and final, role was that of the aging former starlet persevering under the tyranny of time. She was, in fact, a nurse. Once she had chatted with George (who never remembered who she was) and his wife, she shooed the exhausted family from the room. I have three hours before my shift and I can't think of a nicer way to spend it than taking care of this sweetie pie. May I have a razor and a towel and some hot water? It isn't right that George doesn't have a good shave; he always dressed so smartly. He always looked so dapper.

When the family returned two hours later from their naps and furtive cigarettes and whispered arguments in the side yard, Nikki was sitting next to George, reading a glossy magazine called International Luxury Properties and chewing a stick of sugarless gum. George lay asleep beneath a white sheet, with only his head visible. His face was clean and smooth, his hair trimmed and combed. He wore his glasses. He looked as if he had fallen asleep in a barber's chair. When the family said what a lovely job she had done, Nikki said, Oh, yes, yes, well you know, all we have is our looks.

The escapement on a clock consists of a collar on a pinion, called a pallet, and an escape wheel, located at the top of the clock's works. It is placed at the end of the going train. The going train is that part of the clock which keeps time. If a clock has chimes, there is also a striking train. The striking train powers and regulates the clock's striking mechanism, which most simply consists of a gathering pallet, a mallet, and a coiled length of steel, which, when struck by the mallet, produces a chime. Each of these trains is powered by a spring. The spring, or mainspring, is a long spiral- shaped ribbon of flattened steel. The spring is attached at its end that is the innermost of the spiral to an arbor. This arbor is turned with a key to wind the clock; that is, to wind the spring. The spring is kept from unraveling during winding by a click wheel and ratchet pawl. In later clocks, it is housed in a brass drum called the spring barrel. The mainspring then unwinds and the power thus released is transferred to a series of wheels and gears, which move the minute and hour hands around the dial of the clock. At the end of this train is the escapement. This is where the energy generated by the mainspring finally escapes the clock. It is also where the clock's regularity of beat is maintained; so we have returned to the pallet and escape wheel. The power comes through the escape wheel, which, being at the end of the going train, is the finest, most elegant and sensitive of the wheels. It bids the power, which has been tamed by the successive gears from savage energy to civilized servant, to perform the most rarefied of tasks: namely, to cooperate with the pallet to mark precisely each of the 86,400 seconds in our earthly day, and, furthermore, to do so for eight days at a time, making for a total of 691,200 seconds, or 192 hours. This cooperation, and each of these hundreds of thousands of seconds, may be heard at our leisure as the calming, reassuring tick-tocks of a winter's night from the bracket clock on the mantel above the glowing fire. If we call roll through the years, Huygens, Graham, Harrison, Tompion, Debaufre, Mudge, LeRoy, Kendall, and, most recently, Mr. Arnold, we find a humble and motley, if determined and patient, parade of reasonable souls, all bent at their worktables, filing brass and calibrating gears and sketching ideas until their pencils dissolve into lead dust between their fingers, all to more perfectly transform and translate Universal Energy by perfecting the beat of the escape wheel. Listen, horologist, to the names of their devices: verge, dead-beat, tictac, gridiron, grasshopper, rack lever, gravity, detente, pinwheel. Like our greatest bards, those manly and sensitive souls who range over hill and through wood, who ponder the sheep grazing among the ancient ruins and there find rhyme and meter; in short, find the music of sweetest verse, so, too, our greatest clock men find that poetry resides in the human process of distilling civilization from riotous nature! Welcome, fellow, welcome!

– from The Reasonable Horologist,

by the Rev. Kenner Davenport, 1783

Family and close friends never knocked before entering George's house and they always came in by the back door, through the three-season porch, and into the kitchen. George would either be in the basement working on clocks, napping on the couch in the living room (his forearm over his head, his glasses on the coffee table), or, if it was lunchtime, sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the Wall Street journal and complaining to his wife that the meal was taking too long, to which she would respond, Oh, shut up and make it yourself if you want it so fast. He and his wife often bickered like this. He would complain about her cooking (which was very good) or his laundry (which she not only did but also ironed every piece of, including his undershirts and briefs) and she would bellow back that he could go to hell if he didn't like it and that she was going shopping for shoes. They'd both laugh then. So the house smelled of starch and laundry detergent and roast chicken and linseed oil and brass. Visitors appearing in his living room and waking him from his light sleep never startled George. (Even at night, as he snored uproariously, the quietest word would rouse him to complete wakefulness.)

Customers dropping off or picking up clocks came to the front door, which was located in a small entryway attached to the living room. By the time of his final illness, George's wife had tired of her days being constantly interrupted by strangers appearing with black marble mantel clocks in cardboard boxes, walnut schoolhouse clocks tucked under their arms, or decrepit long-case clocks lashed to handcarts and wheeled up the walk. She also tired of George's way of talking with his customers, a combination of easy, joking familiarity and conspiratorial regret. She became especially uncomfortable when the customers pulled out their checkbooks and asked what they owed. The price always seemed to surprise, if not actually anger them. When he had few or no customers scheduled to come to the house, George often spent the day driving all over the North Shore and Cape Ann, redeeming checks at the banks from which the funds were drawn, so that all of his deposits to his own accounts were made in cash. He also kept safety-deposit boxes at six different banks, which he worked at filling with one-hundred-dollar bills. By the time of his dying, there were these six boxes of cash, another full of treasury bills, three checking accounts, two savings accounts, and seven certificates of deposit tucked away in a total of eight different banks. George regularly visited each bank in order to soothe himself with rates and principals, compound interest and tightly banded stacks of bills.

George most often visited with Edward Billings, the manager of the Enon branch of the Salem Five bank. Edward stood a foot and a half higher than George, like a fleshy Olympian pear trussed up in a three-piece suit. Even his head seemed tall and elongated. It was topped by a bald dome, which reflected the ceiling lights of the bank so clearly that it seemed lit from within. The band of hair circling the circumference of his head was meticulously dyed, and when he did not have his hands pressed to each other at the tips of his fingers, as if in a kind of prayer or exhortation, he smoothed it down along the back of his skull with the end of a middle finger. The two looked like a vaudeville act one Tuesday morning in January, standing next to each other behind Edward's desk at the back of the bank, looking at the especially large Vienna regulator clock hung on the wall. George maintained the clock for Edward (at the bank's expense, of course), and the two contemplated the motionless pendulum as they spoke.

Damn thing just stopped, Mr. Crosby, Edward said.

George said, These things are tricky bastards. George saw, with his years of experience, that the clock had been merely brushed off level by the enormous banker as he had inserted or extracted himself behind his desk, and that the pendulum would therefore run down and stop ten minutes after whenever it was started. Edward's phone rang and he excused himself to answer it. He spoke with his head bowed and his back turned to George. As he told a Mr. White on the other end of the line that, yes, he'd have those summaries by the end of the week, George righted the clock on the hook from which it hung. Edward turned back toward George and held up an index finger and nodded to him, saying into the phone, Yes, yes, that's right, Friday at the latest, Saturday morning at the very latest, if the Lynn branch can't hop to it. George nodded back and mouthed, I have to go out to the car.

George brought a stepladder and a tackle box full of tools back into the bank. He set the ladder up in front of the clock, opened its large glass door, mounted the ladder, and peered up into the clock. He grunted and swore and dismounted the ladder to change tools three times, all while thinking of his children and his grandchildren, their winter clothes and their new roofs, their failing transmissions and foundering marriages, their fifth years at private colleges. At the end of half an hour, he finally said, Aha, I got you, you little son of a- And he climbed down the ladder, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. Edward filled out a yellow form and drew three one-hundred-dollar bills from one of the tellers' drawers, which George promptly handed back to the teller, a middle-aged woman named Eddie, who had worked at the bank since it had opened in 1961, and told her, just put these in that little gray box I have out back, my dear, along with all the others. How did I ever know you were going to say that, Mr. Crosby? she said, laughing and making her chewing gum pop. She took the bills and licked her thumb and snapped each one twice, counting, One two three, One two three, and buzzed herself into the bank's vault. At that moment, the bank, quiet and ordered, bland music quietly burbling overhead from the speakers in the ceiling, seemed to George bathed in a golden light.

The wallpaper in George's basement workroom had a pattern of larch branches on a dunn-colored background. Clocks in various states of repair and disrepair hung on wall, some ticking, some not, some in their cases, some no more than naked brass works fitted with their pairs of hands. Cuckoos and Vienna regulators and schoolhouse and old railroad station clocks hung at different heights. There were often twenty-five or thirty clocks on the wall. Some of them were clocks he wanted to sell. None was marked. The closet to the left of his desk was made from raw pine planks and took up the space beneath the stairway. Between the pine planks and the arboreal wallpaper and the wood of the clocks, and the fact that the only windows were two small dry wells high in the wall near the ceiling, one felt one was in some odd, ticking bower. George sat at his desk at all hours of the day, looking down through his bifocals and often through one or two lenses of a clip-on set of jeweler's loops down into the brass guts of clocks, pushing and pulling at arbors and gears and ratchets, humming non-existent melodies, which evaporated as he unconsciously composed them. In this setting, he drove numerous fidgety grandchildren to near madness, insisting that they sit in a hard chair and watch him hum and poke around to no apparent effect. This is the thing to get into, boy. I tell you, this is how you can make some bucks. There was little to do but try to pick out recognizable bits of songs from his humming, which none of the children could do, and listen to the way that the tickings of the different clocks, which not only lined the walls but were also crowded onto several folding card tables, an old cot, and the shelves of a built-in bookcase, fell into and out of beat with one another. On rare occasions, every clock in the room seemed to tick at the same time. By the next tock, however, they all began to drift away from one another again and George's hapless victim would nearly weep at the prospect of having to sit still and listen again for the confluence. The only light in the room was one small wall lamp fitted with a forty-watt bulb and George's flu orescent jeweler's lamp, which was clamped to the desktop and could be pulled into almost any conceivable angle in order to illuminate almost any depths the works of a clock might present. This light provided the only other source of diversion for the child condemned to witness the mysterious, agonizing, glacial, undramatic doings of antique clock repair: watching the dust float. The jeweler's lamp brilliantly lit the dust in the air near whatever clock was being worked on. The rest of the room was dark with clocks and the evergreen wallpaper and so provided a perfect contrast to the front-lit specks of dust that floated down into or across the lamp's halo. The child imagined the flecks were miniaturized ships exploring inner space: The giant is fixing the time machine. We can only hope he doesn't sneeze or make any sudden moves and create a vortex that will send us hopelessly off course. The ship is made only of lamb's wool and dander!

How to Make a Bird's Nest: Take a wafer of tinker's tin. With heavy scissors, cut four triangles. The triangles shall be small, no taller or wider than half an inch, preferably smaller, if possible. Punch holes near the two angles at the base of the triangle, using a small hammer and the slimmest nails or brads possible. A large, sturdy sewing needle is even better, as it will yield a finer hole. Fold each triangle along an imaginary line extending from the top point to the middle of the base. The angle of the fold should be as close to ninety degrees as possible, using only the naked eye (as the utility of the tool does not depend on exact mathematical measurement). Thread each of the pieces with a length of fishing line or kitchen string or strong sewing thread. Now, patience is required; place in turn each piece of shaped tin over the nails of the forefinger and thumb of each hand so that the end point of each piece extends approximately one-quarter of one inch beyond the fingertip. Fasten each piece to the finger by tightly tying the thread around the finger at the first joint (but not so tightly that circulation is lost). This may take practice. Join the thumb and forefinger at their pads. By rolling them together forward and back, the two folded triangles should variously meet and separate; these are your beaks. It is with these that you will pick up grass and twigs and tinsel and stray bits of string and weave them together in the branches of a chosen tree or bush or thicket, depending on the species whose nest you wish to undertake. (This in itself requires preparation and it is suggested that as many examples as possible of the desired type of nest be studied before attempting one's own version. Even more desirable is to spend as many a spring afternoon as manageable watching the birds themselves weave their homes; such observation will help immensely in learning the particular stitch required.) Keep in mind, though, that the materials for the nest must be col lected and woven strand by strand. Birds do not gather their lumber, so to speak, all at once, but, rather, search out each plank and shingle one at a time. Such a birdy method may at first seem absurd to the forwardthinking nest maker, but soon it will be found that the pleasures of the project are not derived from efficiency. (Another desired eventuality is that as one becomes more and more dexterous weaving nests, one will begin to do so with only one beak, as it were. And here, then, too, is another temptation to overcome-keeping one's free hand behind one's back and refraining from giving the birds a helping human hand!)

Once the nest is complete, then what to put in it? Anything your heart desires, of course: acorn eggs plucked from their cups; stones smoothed in a river; a lock of your sweetheart's hair; your firstborn's milk teeth-anything you choose that will fit into the nest and give you pleasure to consider whenever you visit. Over time, one's whole countryside might be fitted out with a constellation of such nests, each holding its own special treasure.

– from a lost pamphlet by Howard Aaron Crosby, with accompanying illustrations and instructional diagrams, 1924

Howard entered North Philadelphia at seven in the morning on a Saturday. By nine, he had sold his cart and wares for twenty dollars and was a bag boy at the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. The manager Harry Miller, asked me my name and I thought, I stole the wagon and all of the supplies and sold it as my own, so my name is no longer Crosby, and I said to him, Lightman, Aaron Lightman, not sure if I should even keep my first name but not wanting to lose my name altogether, not wanting to cut the last thread, so I used my middle name, so here I lie on my bed next to my wife, not Kathleen Crosby, nee Black, but Megan Lightman, nee Finn, Aaron Lightman. He started as a bag boy. He loved the job, the smell of the fresh coarse brown paper, the bundles of bags, sharp blocks of pulp, peeling bags off the piles, snapping them open. And he loved packing the bags-fitting boxes and jars and bottles and cans and the meat snugly in butcher paper, stringed tight, and fresh loaves of bread in their own bags. He took pride in fitting each bag like a puzzle, fitting the most items in that hollow rectangle of a cubic foot or two without making it too heavy for a woman to carry and balancing it perfectly so that the bag would not tear. The moment a woman began to pile her groceries on the checkout counter, Howard began to sort them and order them in his mind, so that by the time the crackers and the pot roasts and the sacks of flour were pushed his way, he already had them bagged in their neat brown wrappings and all that was left to do was embody those bags in his mind out of the actual apples and cans of lard and boxes of salt. Two months after he was hired, he was promoted to head of the produce section and he made a paradise of fruit and vegetables. He made Thebes in oranges and lemons and limes. He made primeval forests of lettuce and broccoli and asparagus. He was enchanted by the smells of wax and cold water and packing crates, of skins and rinds breathing rumors of the sweet pulp beneath. In six months, he was an assistant manager. He worked seven days a week and wrote poems extolling his company over the competition (The floor's a mess and I feel a dope, I scrubbed it down with Red Lantern soap). He married a woman named Megan Finn who talked without pause from the moment she woke-Well the good lord has given me another day! shall I cook eggs and ham or flapjacks and bacon? I have some blueberries left but those eggs will go bad if I don't use them and I can put the blueberries in a cobbler for dessert tonight because I know how much you love cobbler and how the sugar crust soothes you to sleep like warm milk does a crabby baby although I don't know why because I saw somewhere that sugar winds a person up but I'm not going to argue with what works-until she went to sleep: Oh! Another day tucked away and here we are tired and honest and in love and happy as two peas in a pod, two peas in a pod! isn't that silly? peas don't come in pairs! if they did it wouldn't be worth it snapping them open, it'd take too long to even get a spoonful never mind enough to fill from nine o'clock to twelve o'clock, that's how the blind know where the food is on their plates, like a clock, ham at six-thirty! biscuit at four! just like that, that's how Helen Keller did it, I bet, just like that, potatoes at high noon! goodnight my love.

Megan worked as a sorter in a canning factory. Well, I sort the beans and the peas and the carrots… Oh, it's terribly hard and boring and you have to go so fast! In comes the asparagus and just like that I have to sort it by size, color, and quality into the different bins-and fast, fast, fast!-but it's for a good cause and canned food is better than fresh-I'm sorry, Mr. Produce Man!because more vitamins get cooked away in the steam that comes out of the pot at home than when the wee peas are cooked right in the can. I know because they told us that they know that there are more vitamins in the canned peas because of all the experiments they do on white rats. It takes them five times as little canned food as fresh not to get scurvy!

Howard brought her flowers every day, and oranges. Each night before he left the store, he stopped in the produce section and lingered at the fruit bins, inhaling the clean smells of lemons and oranges, their citrus perfume. These sharp odors invigorated him. He lifted his nose from a crate of limes, refreshed and eager to get home to a wife who spoke words out loud as she thought them up and held nothing to whirl and eddy and collect in brackish silences, silences that broke like thin ice beneath you to announce your drowning.

George woke at night. He could barely speak. One of his grandsons was sitting on the couch. He said his wife's name, Erma. What, Gramp? Erma. No more than a whisper, the name sounded remote in his mouth. He could not shape the air, was unable to make the first syllable with his tongue against his upper back teeth, could only get the second syllable to work-ma -so that it sounded as Uhma. Uhma. Water? Do you want some water? Uhma. Erma? You want Nanny? Uh. Uh. Yes.

His wife came from their bed, where she lay in shallow sleep, alone, for a few hours each night as he died. She wore a light blue cotton robe with darker blue piping. Her slippers scuffed on the wood floor of the hall because she walked with small steps and shuffled a bit with sleep and fatigue. The scuffing stopped when she stepped onto the Persian rug covering the living room floor. She stood by his head and leaned down to him and stroked his face. Oh, George, you are my heart's delight. Haven't we had a wonderful life together? We've been around the whole world together. She gave him a sip of water from a juice glass with painted birds on it. The water helped his mouth and he spoke. Who is reading to me? Who is reading? What is that book? She said, What book, George? Have you been reading to Gramp, Charlie? Charlie said, No, Nan. She turned back to George and said, No one is reading to you, George. George said, The big book. No, my love, there is no book; no one is reading to you. There is no one here at all.

Howard had fewer seizures in Philadelphia. They still left him dazed, still left him feeling acrid and burned, as if an electric fire had swept through him. But afterward he enjoyed the cheerful ministrations of Megan. She led him to bed and rubbed his temples and gave him hot tea. Sometimes she read to him from one of her dime novels. The seizures did not upset her. She had read somewhere that they were considered holy in some cultures. Oh, my sweet, sweet Aaron, what an awful fit that was! I thought you'd break all of our finest china, the way all the cups and plates rattled in the cabinets. My goodness, you must feel terrible. Let's get you into bed and warm you up. What do you smell this time? Do you taste anything? I hope it's pork chops, because that's what's for dinner tonight, or apple pie, because I baked one this morning. I'm so glad there wasn't so much blood this time. You didn't bite your tongue at all, did you? That broomstick works so well. It's just the right size and I don't think you could ever bite through it. It looks like it's been chewed by a dog!

Eventually, she persuaded him to see a doctor, who prescribed bromides, which further lessened the frequency of the seizures. Lordy, I don't know what sort of witch doctors they have up in Canada, but here in the USA they are the best in the world. From the sounds of it, you were lucky they didn't shoot you like a dog with rabies. My dog, Mr. Jiggs, had rabies when I was a girl and he foamed at the mouth and stumbled in circles around the yard and my father rushed home from the mill with Charlie Weaver's shotgun and shot Mr. Jiggs dead right there on the spot and I cried for a week. He was such a free spirit! He chased all the boys and tore their pant cuffs and dug up all the neighbor's flower beds and ate a cat for dinner every day. Poor Mr. Jiggsy!

Domestica Borealis: 1. New Year's morning we watched crows collect tinsel for their nests from the discarded Christmas trees along the road. 2. We watched the leaded glass of our windows knit frost into lace. 3. We lashed fishing line to playing cards and raised a house. 4. After Sunday dinner we changed into our sackcloths and threw crab apples at our younger cousins. 5. We drew straws and flipped coins and played Chinese checkers. 6. When it came time to pick bedrooms, we arm-wrestled for choice. The winner chose the room resplendent with crowned kings, queens bestowing benedictions, mocking jokers, jacks with sly smiles. The loser was stuck with a more modest space of twos and fours and sevens, although we were all smitten with the glossy clubs and spades, the livid diamonds, the hearts so bloody red, they seemed nearly to beat.

George awoke for the last time forty-eight hours before he died. He had been unconscious for two days. This was when he understood the situation and needed to tell people things. There was $2,400 in cash hidden in his workbench downstairs. The Simon Willard banjo clock on the wall was worth ten times more than he'd ever told anyone. There was an inscribed first edition of The Scarlet Letter in a safety-deposit box. He loved everyone dearly.

He roused at a time when the last of his body's major systems had begun to stop. His lungs were full of liquid and he felt like he was drowning. When he tried to speak, he could only make noises that sounded like a rusted pulley turning over a dry well. He looked from person to person around his bed for help. This upset his family, particularly Marjorie, his sister, who cried and looked at his wide eyes and said over and over, He looks so scared. He was like my daddy, he looks so scared, he was like my daddy-until she was taken to the kitchen by one of the cousins. A grandson said, just relax, Gramp, panicking just makes it harder to breathe. He gasped more, gasped faster. The grandson said, I know how it feels, Gramp; it happens when I get an asthma attack. I get scared, too, scared I can't breathe, but I just relax and I can always breathe. It happens to me, too. He looked at the young man, someone he knew and trusted. As his eyes closed, he still heard the gurgling and felt the nerveless weight of his body, but also felt himself falling away from it, as if he were lying just beneath the contours and boundaries of something that had formerly fit him perfectly, and which to fully inhabit meant to be in this world. It was as if he lay faceup just beneath the surface of water. Voices rose and fell and the sounds of bodies in motion thumped above him. All seemed increasingly foreign, other. He just made out someone saying, No way, no way; I'm keeping him under now.

Choose any hour on the clock. It is possible, then, to conceive that the clock's purpose is to return the hands back to that time, a time which, from the moment chosen, the hands leave and skate across the rest of the clock's painted signs and calibrations and numbers. These other markings on the face become irrelevant in themselves; they are now simply clues pointing in the direction of the chosen time. It is then possible, too, to conceive of the clock's gears and springs as each having its own intrinsic function, but within a whole mechanism, the larger purpose of which is to return to the chosen time. In this manner, the clock resembles the universe. For is it not true that our universe is a mechanism consisting of celestial gears, spinning ball bearings, solar furnaces, all cooperating to return man (and, indeed, what other, unimagined neighbors of whom we are ignorant!) to that chosen hour we know of from the Bible as Before the Fall? And as an ignorant insect crawling across the face of that clock, who sees not the whole face, the full cycle of numbers, the short hand and the long (which pass in his sky with predictable orbits, cast familiar shadows, offer reassurance through their very repetitions, but which, ultimately, puzzle and beg for the consideration of deeper mysteries), but who merely treads over the surface which hides the gear train and the springs without any but the most indirect conception of what lies beneath, so does man squirm and fret on the dusty skin of our earth, ignorant of the purpose of the world, indeed, the cosmos, beyond the fact that there is one, assigned by God and known only to Him, and that it is good and that it is terrifying and that it is ineffable and that only rational faith can soothe the desperate pains and woes of our magnificent and depraved world. It is that simple, dear reader, that logical and that elegant.

– from The Reasonable Horologist,

by the Rev. Kenner Davenport, 1783

One January night in 1972, Howard's attention strayed from the book he was reading in bed. He imagined his own sleeping form, imagined that if one could pan back from peaceful face to bird's-eye view, one could see the supine figure floating not upon the vastness of a dark ocean of sleep but reposing in the vastation itself, the soul or whatever name one cared to give it divested of the body, so that what seemed reposing body was sim ply the most likely image of the whatever named soul, freed of its salt like seawater evaporating in the sun, so that the actual body, resting in bed, sighing, mumbling, came to be more like a scurf, more like that saline column of myth, while the soul or whatever one named it reattached itself in some way to the actual thing of itself like a shadow, as if when his waking self walked down the street on the way home from work, the shadow he made, of man with a paper bag holding six oranges under one arm and a small bouquet of lilies beneath the other, was some reduced version of himself, which, freed from its simple two dimensions defined by an obscurity of light, a projection of dark, would be autonomous and free to move independent of the silhouette cast by the man, and which, for all he knew, when the sun went down and the lamp was turned down, when all light, in fact, was removed from possibly coming between the body and the planes and surfaces upon which its form might be projected by sun, lamp, or even moon, actually did; he saw no reason to doubt that his shadow dreamed just as he did for the reason that he could imagine himself to be a shadow of something-someone-else and that perhaps even his sleep, his dreams, constituted his duty as a shadow of someone else and that perhaps while that someone else dreamed, he was free to live his waking life, so that this alternating, interdependent series of lives formed a sort of intaglio; the waking day of each shadow was the opposite side of its possessor's sleep. When he tried to explain this to Megan as they lay in bed, he with a copy of The World's Book of Favorite Popular Verse tented on his chest, she keeping her place in The Poor Orphans of Tinsley Grange with a forefinger, she said, That must be why you can't sleep some nights and have those awful nightmares about those big dark houses full of all those people you know but who don't recognize you, or that woman and her twin daughters frozen in the lake ice with all their long hair tangled up; your shadow wants a nap and so you have to get up so that it can sleep. Imagine that! And if your shadow wakes you up and you wake me up, my shadow must be taking a nap, too! Maybe our shadows are in cahoots, sweet pea; maybe they're partners in crime, just like us! Howard said, Maybe, my love. Maybe that is so, and he kissed Meg on the ear, closed his book, fell asleep, and died.

As George died, the dark blood retreated from his limbs. First, it left his feet, then his lower legs. Then it left his hands. He was aware of this only from a great distance. When the blood left, it was as if it had evaporated; it was as if the blood had turned to some fumy spirit too thin to carry its own minerals. And so, it evaporated and had left a residue of salt and metal along the passages of his dry veins. His bloodless legs were hard like wood. His bloodless legs were dead like planks. His bone-filled feet were like lead weights that were held by his dried veins-his salt-cured, metal-strengthened veins, which were now as tough as gut, as strong as iron chains. It was as if it would be possible to reach into his chest and grab the very vessels leading from his heart and pull at them and hoist the heavy bones of his feet up through his legs and trunk until they hung just below that nearly exhausted engine, and might, as their ponderous weight pulled at arteries and veins and they began to lower back down through his body, drive that worn-out organ just a little longer. But his heart was brittle and worn and out of beat. Its bushings were shot. It was caked in gummy scar. Now his blood trickled through its chambers with the weakest of ticks, whereas before it had flowed and eddied, tended, administered by supple and strong muscle.

His face was pale. It no longer showed expression. True, it showed a kind of peace, or, more precisely, seemed to predict that peace, but such peace was not a human one. It captured breath and let breath escape in fluttery little gasps and sighs. It no longer reacted to light. Shadows passed over it and it merely registered their angles, registered the pilgrimage of the day by their lengths. Certainly, George's family did not allow the direct glare of the rising or setting sun to fall upon his face, but their adjusting of curtain and shade was a palliative for themselves, for living eyes and living skin, and had nothing to do with the vision of their husband, brother, father, grandfather lying on the hospital bed. Human consideration was no longer to be his, for that consideration could be expressed now only by providing physical comfort, and physical comfort was as meaningless to him (to it, for that was what lay before his family now-the it formerly he-at least to the extent that the he, although still figured by the struggling, fading, dying it, was plumbing depths far, far from that living room filled with a weeping sister and daughters and wife and grandchildren and the it merely maintaining a pantomime of human life), was as meaningless to him now as it would have been to one of his clocks, laid out in his place to be dusted and soothed with linseed oil, fussed over and mourned even before it was was (because that is how the living prepare, or attempt to prepare, for the unknowable was-by imagining was as it is still approaching; perhaps that is more true, that they mourn because of the inevitability of was and apply their own, human, terrors about their own wases to the it, which is so nearly was that it will not or simply cannot any longer accept their human grief) as its broken springs wound down or its lead weights lowered for the last, irreparable time.

Thought that he was a clock was like a clock was like a spring in a clock when it breaks and explodes when he had his fits. But he was not like a clock or at least was only like a clock to me. But to himself? Who knows? And so it is not he who was like a clock but me.

Two things happened in 1953: The new interstate highway opened and Howard's second wife's mother fell sick in Pittsburgh. Megan told him he could not go with her to Pittsburgh. Mother was the strictest of Catholics and if she ever found out that her daughter was married to the son of a Methodist minister, any chance she had of recovering from her illness would vanish. Mother would die with her mouth full of curses mingled with my name, she said. This meant he had to spend Christmas alone. Megan baked a banana cream pie and a meat loaf. He walked her to the bus station and helped her onto the four-thirty to Pittsburgh and all points between. She talked the entire time. She opened the bus window to tell him to take the vanilla ice cream out of the freezer fifteen minutes before he had it with the pie, that that made it soft, just like he liked it, and said, I love you. He said, I'll be fine, I'll be fine, still baffled that she had a mother in Pittsburgh. Twenty-five years she had a mother in Pittsburgh.

Five months before, the interstate highway had been finished. It ran in one long line up the eastern seaboard. Immigrants, hobos, manual laborers pounded, carved, blasted, and peeled the earth open through forests, rivers, and gorges, mountains and swamps, then lined the path with good clean gravel, filled it with piping-hot blacktop, rolled it smooth, let it set to cool, and painted a line down the middle. These new superhighways had numbers for names. On the day before Christmas, he put a cold meat loaf sandwich and six bottles of cola in a paper bag, along with his dopp kit, and called his friend from the A amp;P, Jimmy Drizos. He asked Jimmy if he could borrow his car, an old Ford sedan. Jimmy said, Sure, sure. The in-laws are coming here this year. Sure, sure you can, pal. He took a bus to Jimmy Drizos's house in the Greek part of town. Jimmy was replacing bulbs on strings of lights he had threaded around the iron handrails of the steps to his apartment. Jimmy offered him a drink. He said, No, thanks, Jimmy, no. Jimmy offered him some food to take back home. He said, Thank you, Jimmy, thank you and your wife. Jimmy gave him the keys and a plate of lamb and said, Easy on the clutch, pal. He nodded and pressed the clutch pedal and let the car roll out of the driveway, running in neutral. He shifted the car into first gear and let out the clutch as he pushed the gas pedal. Gears whirred, meshed, then jammed. The car lunged and stalled. Jimmy Drizos looked from his stairs, a colored Christmas bulb in each hand, and yelled, Whaddya', been drinking, pal? and laughed. Howard waved, got the car into gear, and crept away at five miles an hour until he reached the corner, drove over it, turned, and stalled again, this time out of Jimmy Drizos's sight. He spent four hours lurching through the streets of Philadelphia on Christmas Eve, teaching himself to drive. At nine o'clock in the evening, as a light snow started to fall, he drove Jimmy Drizos's Ford onto the highway heading north.

Megan's secret from him was that she had a mother in Pittsburgh. His secret from her was that he had tracked his first family and their migrations throughout New England. He had called post offices to confirm addresses. He called operators and was given new phone numbers. When his son George moved to Enon, Massachusetts, there were two G. Crosbys given by the operator. Howard called the first number. An old woman answered and said, This is Mrs. Gus Crosby. To whom am I speaking? Howard hung up and wrote the second number in his daybook.

Somewhere in Connecticut, he stopped and slept in the backseat of the Ford for four hours. He awoke freezing. He had stopped behind a gas station. He took his dopp kit and used the station bathroom. He brushed his teeth, combed his hair and ran a splash of tonic through it, and shaved with the straight-edge razor his father had given him when he was sixteen and which he still kept sharp enough to cut skin with only the weight of the blade. At noon, he left the highway at exit 24. He took a left and followed Main Street for three miles. He took another left onto Arbor Street and slowed, looking for street numbers on door frames and mailboxes. He came to a small yellow Cape Cod-style house with green shutters. The mailbox at the end of the flagstone walk leading to the front door read GEORGE W. CROSBY. Without turning the engine off, Howard got out of the car, walked up the walkway, and knocked on his son's front door.

Homo Borealis: 1. We kicked the bark off of dead trees and the soft wood beneath was as pale as sawdust and sometimes covered with strange designs that looked like writing that had been drawn into the wood with a stylus or fine-carving tool and the bark then fitted back over the trunk-a rough skin, a splintery hide that protected the secret language. These hieroglyphs we discovered like revelations, like messages someone had left for us alone to discover and to ponder and to poke and scratch at with our sticks but not to understand and to leave like totems for whomever they were actually meant while we crashed away through the bushes. 2. We made up stories about men who had been tattooed with intricate and important instructions. The tattoos were inked into deep layers and the men would be recognized by long, I-shaped scars on their backs, which would have to be recut and the skin opened like a pair of doors to reveal braids of muscle and the secret script. Of course, the men would not know that they were the bearers of these signs. And of course the people who were supposed to read these messages had to go through a very long and difficult process of deciphering obscure clues and directions in order to find these special couriers, in order to protect both the man and the message. The seeker would find the messenger; he would find himself recognizing the messenger as the messenger was trying to sell him an old horse, or serving him breakfast at an inn, or com plaining about politicians during the morning coffee break. 3. Those stories were ignorant. We sensed, finally, the foolishness of attributing the unknown to secret cabals, to conspiracies. Everything was almost always obscure. Understanding shone when it did, for no discernable reason, and we were content. We built our town, then, out of whatever came our way, or whatever we got in the way of, so that we dwelled in huts of hair, in nests of wrappers and tinsel and string, which we looped through nuts and hung from the ceilings with a bit of tape or a piece of old gum because they all had different threads from the bolts we found. Town Hall was constructed of drinking straws (some with elbows, most not) and hubcaps and the foil from cigarette packages. Any number of people lived in the crooks of trees beneath tented Sunday newspapers, which were aged brown by the sun. When it rained, these buildings swelled and then turned to pulp and washed away and the tenants would dry themselves in the sun when it came back out and begin again to collect tin cans and nickels and matchboxes and greasy paper boats that had once held french fries or onion rings. 4. The green sea turned gray and its surface rolled like a membrane. When we dived for shells, it parted for us without resistance and sealed itself behind our up-pointed toes. We felt around, blind, in its slick graphite body, we sifted its sand and came up with smooth stones for our mantles of wind and mist, and whatever of it was held in our hair when we surfaced ran out like quicksilver and rejoined the rest of itself, seamless, molecular, slick, atomic. We traveled in pods. We breached surfaces and caught glimpses of sheer cliffs, columns of flint capped in fir, boreal. We saw beaches of snow and blizzards of sand. 5. When it came time to die, we knew and went to deep yards where we lay down and our bones turned to brass. We were picked over. We were used to fix broken clocks, music boxes; our pelvises were fitted onto pinions, our spines soldered into vast works. Our ribs were fitted as gear teeth and tapped and clicked like tusks. This is how, finally, we were joined.

The last thing George Washington Crosby remembered as he died was Christmas dinner, 1953. The doorbell rang just as he and his wife and two daughters-Betsy and Claire, the two daughters who now sat at his bedside haggard, pale, exhausted; the daughters he loved and whom he realized would be daddy's little girls as long as he allowed them, which was until the day he died, which was today-were sitting to eat. As he died, he did not remember getting up from the table and muttering, For Christ's sake, what is it now? and walking to the door. He remembered all of the time that stood between himself as a boy of twelve and himself as a middle-aged husband and father contracting to zero as he recognized the old man on his front steps as his father, whom he had not seen since he, his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, had come upon the family house in West Cove, Maine, one night after making rounds through the county selling brushes and soap to housewives, seen his family in the dimly lit kitchen window, hit his mule, Prince Edward, with a hickory switch, and kept on down the road in his cart until he arrived, nameless, in Philadelphia.

His father sat on the edge of the couch with his hat in his lap and the motor of his rented car idling outside. Food steamed on the table and he said No, no, he couldn't stay. He asked how things were: Are you well? How are your sisters? Your mother? Joe? Oh, I see. And this is? Ah, Betsy. And you are? Claire, yes. Yes, yes, of course you are shy-I am a strange old man, yes. Well, no, I'd better be going. It was good to see you again, George. Yes, yes, I will. Good-bye.