Timeless

/Voiceworks, #74, Spring 2008/

The bayside suburbs ticked over in a kind of mid-afternoon silence. The yellowing nature strips, the sea of black bitumen, the strange and in their number somehow terrifying rows of houses, these were Walter’s only company as he sat rocking in his van.
He savoured these kinds of service calls, for he counted this woman among those who grasped that antique clocks are of a delicate mechanism, that their telling of time is subject to quirks, and that even when embraced with the utmost concern and care, there will be occasions when their operation is less than smooth, as the years pass.
To look at Walter was to behold a visage that didn’t really match the innocence within. He was old, though he looked older than he was. He was completely bald with grim, skeletal facial features – wide blue eyes, a small protruding jaw and hollow cheeks. And at all times except the charging heat of summer, he would clothe himself in black turtle necks that ran up to the bottom of his chin and on especially cold days, days such as this one, he would drape himself in long and elegant coats into which his meagre body almost disappeared. Within these folds could still be seen that pair of eyes staring out like a child into the night.

The clock’s chime was off, the old woman said as she hobbled before him down the musty hallway. This was not an irregular complaint for an old hand like Walter. It was usually the result of a broken chime rod.
As they passed into the lounge room, Walter beheld the magnificence of the timepiece with a sensual silence. What a beauty! Oak casing, lusty deep polish, eight-hour mechanism, with a beautiful brass feature behind the ever-so-slightly tainted white clock face. The word grandfather did this clock no justice, for she was tall and slight, and in some corner of Walter’s mind, he was reminded of a young French teacher he’d lusted after as a boy.
He rested his toolbox on the cabinet that nestled alongside. It was filled with fine and diverse glassware, little frozen shards of fading elegance.
‘Well, there it is. So you can get to work.’ The old woman eased herself into a seat at a table in the dining space that came off, as a little annex from the lounge.
He pulled open a large glass door on the clock and began to examine the machinery held within. To confirm his diagnosis he set the clock for a few minutes before midnight.
‘I don’t suppose that any of us shall need our clocks anymore, not now that they’ve stitched up time.’
Walter looked at the old woman hunched over her dining table, her gnarled hands clasped in one another, her faded eyes staring thoughtfully. A bag of bread lay open before her.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Stitched up time for good! You must have heard. You know, they’ve fixed up time, you know, they’ve stopped it for little mice. For all of us soon.’
Walter stared at her.
She laughed. ‘Ha! I thought you would have been the first to know about this, you being in the business of time.’
He laughed awkwardly. ‘No, I haven’t heard anything.’ It was possible that her mind had faded much more than immediate appearances revealed. He thought about leaving, but it was such a beautiful clock. It would be a shame to leave her chiming out of all elegance.
‘The scientists, working on, you know, that big thing underground, the chronos … em. They’ve tested it and everything. It was on the news last night. A mouse living outside of time.’
Walter hardly watched the news, he found the pace of information unsettling – he could never retain anything tangible. Besides, he had enough to do working on clocks, building clocks. If he had any time left over, he’d brew tea with honey and read one of the ebulliently coloured children’s encyclopaedias he’d carried around since his youth.
The old lady set to lathering a piece of rye bread with margarine.
‘Can you believe it? I’m not going to die. Unless something happens in the next few days. Then I’ll be the last to die. Wouldn’t that just be my luck? Ha!’
He thrust his head back into the grandfather clock and began to grease up some of the parts inside for good measure. As he did so the clock struck midnight and its many chimes jangled in his ears. In his haste to withdraw from the clock’s chamber he spilled grease across the breast and lapel of his overcoat. Just as the old lady had said, there was something distinctly disjointed about the sound.
As the twelfth strike still resonated across the room he shone his torch on the chime mechanism. Indeed the chime rod was broken. He had such a knack for these things.
‘Listen, ah, this is more than I can do here, on site. I need a special part.’ He spoke loudly to her, and clearly. ‘I need to get a new chime rod for you. A new chime rod.’
‘Oh yes, that will be good, very good.’
She did sound a bit loopy, he thought as he returned to the manically still life of the suburban landscape. But then he had heard something about an experiment. A long, circular tube, underground, an electric earthworm many kilometres long built in paddocks adjoining a university campus out in the suburbs.
Time would tell, he thought. Oh God.

Within a few weeks he would be entirely and irrevocably out of business.
He flipped through a newspaper that had been discarded at a lunch cafeteria. With this technological advance, time would end, specifically, in the turning but once of the moon through its phases.
The arguments in favour were insurmountable. Education would be unrecognisable, freed from the confines of time. From here on, the entirety of human knowledge could be gained in the twinkling of an eye, less even. Computing too would be radically reformed, with answers to questions arriving before they were even asked.
But there was more than that – much, much more. Without time, without ageing, human beings would be immortal, the distance of the stars a mere stepping stone in human thought. There would be no more scarcity, the laws of supply and demand falling by the quayside.
In the end, it was Walter’s dry cleaner, Stuart, who summarised the impending transformation rather prosaically. Handing back the paper and plastic package that held Walter’s overcoat, and with a twitch of his lascivious moustache, he spoke in his Manchester accent: ‘Don’t you see, there’s no need to work anymore, no need to fight. No need.’
The confines of the universe could not hold human beings any longer, and the distance of red galaxies, distant quasars and other lonely solar systems would collapse into the singularity of an instant. Maybe there wouldn’t even be such a thing as the human individual anymore, only the collective spirit of human industriousness and endeavour unleashed across all space and all time.
There were, of course, a reluctant few who urged caution. But even these ethicists struggled to cope with the implications; though their thoughts still filled the opinion pages of newspapers. They found it awkward to voice a problem that they couldn’t really articulate to themselves, a problem that left them screw faced and twitching.
In the end, they suggested only that we ensure the technology be used equitably, that time should be stopped for all, everywhere, that it is imperative that we avoid a two-tiered chronological system, a society cleaved into ageless elephants and a time-poor underclass, living and dying like human vermin.
As it happened, their moral angst was irrelevant. The machine’s effects could not be localised, or not for long anyway. It was already online, and in twenty-eight days a bolt of lightning harvested from the clouds above would surge through its circuits and the impact would be permanent.
On this news, Walter’s business dried up instantly.
He followed up service appointments that had been booked many weeks in advance, but no one could be moved to care about this strange eccentric and his silly old clocks any longer. People found it inconceivable that he hadn’t adapted like they had to the new age, the end of ages altogether.

On a Thursday afternoon, some days after the announcement of the revolution, Walter sat in his car sweating out the series of disappointments he’d faced that day: he had been ignored by some; others had slammed the door; others still had laughed in his face. He twisted his fingers in and around the arms of his turtleneck. In some anxious corner of Walter’s brain, there lay an unconscious realisation, cool and uncompromising. Only through his commitment to his lifelong trade – it was an art really, truth be told – could he prevent the malevolence of this sorry thought from pervading his life.
Finally he arrived at the home of one woman who at least let him through the doors of her brick veneer unit. She hadn’t bothered to dress and only barely clasped a fluffy pink polyester dressing gown around her plump midriff.
‘It’s stopped ticking altogether,’ she said as they walked through the short entrance passage into the lounge. The woman slumped onto her couch. The blinds were only partially open, permitting a meagre yellow gloom. He found the clock overturned, its glass pane smashed, its pendulum hanging out like the tongue of a dead animal. Around it lay the detritus of a house descended into squalor.
Walter turned and saw the slip of her naked body revealed in the parting of the polyester gown. She grinned wildly.
‘Won’t you stay?’
Walter looked around at the broken glass, the discarded plates and cutlery.
She lifted herself from the couch, walked over to where he kneeled and placed a hand under his chin, lifting his face to hers.
Walter looked up and saw her breasts dangling over her small belly but he couldn’t look at the face.
‘Please.’
He pulled away from her and scrambled up onto his feet. For a moment he stood silently in the doorway, his lips trembling, his toolbox hanging from his fingers. Then, without saying anything, he walked to the safety of his van. There he sat shivering and gasping and though it was cold, his turtleneck soaked up his sweat like a sponge.
Weeks passed. Walter played with his clocks. He’d never had so much time to himself, and now that he did, he regarded his freedom with a murky resentment. Bitterness inhabited his movements and gestures, and these he shared with nobody anyway, as he was too frightened and resentful to step outside the confines of his flat.
On the last day, Walter opened his refrigerator. Carefully, he gathered his remaining foodstuffs. He took out a loaf of dark rye bread, a jar of pickles, some Jarlsberg cheese, a red onion and a pesto he had opened a few weeks earlier. He was halfway through making a sandwich when the phone rang.
The noise was startling, coming as it did after weeks of silence.
Walter left his sandwich and walked across his kitchen to the wall phone. Tentatively, he lifted it from his cradle.
‘Hello?’
It was Shane, an area supplier of parts for antique clocks. Shane with his red hair and bulbous cheeks.
‘Shane?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re still at work?’
There was a pause before Shane’s voice crackled down the line once more.
‘I packed it in after a while, you know, it all seemed so pointless. But then I hardly knew what to do with myself. And the wife decided that she could do with the space from me. Besides, it hardly matters how I spend the last few days in time does it? After all, pretty soon you and me will be zipping across the universe like gods.’
A tick-tocking could be heard.
‘You can pick it up when you’re ready.’
‘Okay. Thanks. Thanks a lot.’
‘Hmm. Bye.’
‘Goodbye.’
The voice at the other end resolved into the soothing, even tempo of the engaged tone. Walter held the phone to his ear longer than he should, lulled by the pulses.
With the phone still pressed to his ear, Walter parted the horizontal blinds of his lounge room window and peeked into the world outside.
A part of him struggled to shake off bitterness, the other held on relentlessly. Work had always sustained him, through the loneliness that he had passed into as an adult, and now as morbidity had begun to take hold of his ageing and decrepit body.
He had never, until now, been despondent. The part of him that was brightness took hold of the opportunity that now lingered in front of him.
That beautiful grandfather clock would chime properly, even if for the last time.
He bit the skin around the edge of his fingers in a deep meditative state of frustration. This was his world. The world had returned.
Walter took his toolbox under arm, gathered his coat and hat and walked in the direction of his van. A tree had fallen since he had last stepped outside, but he hardly noticed through the thin pattering of rain refracting the streetscape through the windscreen. Settling the toolbox into the back seat he turned the key in the ignition.

On this windy Tuesday morning, the machine came online. Whiffs of timelessness spread out from the slim white buildings that were the only markings of the fateful workings of the machine underneath. They spread out over the dusty grey fields around, out past the university campus and across the suburbs. Slowly moving and veiling the landscape before them like sands carried on a breeze. Sliding inexorably across cities, countrysides, whole continents until the world was swallowed up.
Walter’s radio crackled, a sound that was followed by a slight buzz.
And at that moment, which would be forever, Walter realised what had bothered him so much, for so long. In fact, it was the last thing he ever did realise, a private pain stretched out universally across time that would be repeated over and over, a multiplicity of dissatisfactions relentlessly compounded, an infinity of thoughts with no resolution. If there had been a moment to follow, then he might have followed the realisation with a kind of vindictive pride at his own faint presaging of humanity’s folly.
But there would be no moment to follow. Trapped in an eternal magma-like present, a scream rose to humanity’s lips. But it would never be heard.