strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Sep 29 04: time
VP is now less than a week away. Rather than natter on about how I’m convinced that people are going to see right through my little charade and throw vegetables at me—tomatoes, probably, maybe an avocado that’s been allowed to go well beyond its due date—I’m going to talk about the clock.
Dad gave me the old Seth Thomas mantel clock. We drove it up from his new house in Virginia swaddled in bubble plastic and brown-paper shopping bags. Inside the door on the clock’s back there are yellowed jewelers’ stickers: one dated 1921 from a shop in Turlock, a newer one from San Mateo. I think the clock has been in Willett hands for a long while. The casing has this classical austerity, a simple semicircular arch supported by two clean pillars, all done in this rich dark wood that I figure is probably mahogany. You have to wind it with a heavy brass key. The mainspring winds through the hole next to the 4, the bell through the hole next to the 8. When you wind it you can hear the works racheting over with this really macho sort of resonance.
Starting when I was about twelve I had a long run of night terrors. I would become convinced that somewhere in the room there was an unseen and malevolent presence, watching me, waiting for…something. I would lie awake in the middle of the night, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, and listen to the clock tick in the next room. Some of the brass teeth on its internal workings were wearing down even then, and for a few seconds of each minute, time’s steady march would slide into a waltz, toc toc toc toc toc-toc, toc-toc, toc-toc, toc-toc, toc toc toc…. The bell sounds an E-natural above middle C at once reassuring and stern, a sea captain’s voice. I would listen to the bell call out hour and half-hour until the Black Thing went away and let me sleep.
Now it’s on the mantel in the living room. We’re still learning its habits, and once or twice we’ve been caught off-guard and come home from work to find it wound down completely. The uneven teeth are still there, and it picks up a minute or two a day no matter how much we tweak its tiny faster/slower switch. It may need a tune-up from the Russian ladies down on Greenwich Avenue, which I assume would add a third sticker to its door. I was surprised by how muted its voice is. The sound of its ticking doesn’t carry through the apartment, and I was sure it would. Still, as I drift off to sleep at night I can hear it chime, keeping watch over the darkness. I’ve been sleeping well.