Three Novellas by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

The workings of the clock had filled its maker's visions so fully and exclusively that when he closed his eyes to rest from his labors its workings filled the darkness and his dreams. And good for him that it did, for when it was done the King, jealous of its unique magnificence and the glory he believed it reflected upon him, ordered the clockmaker's eyes put out with hot pokers to prevent its duplication in some other realm.

  Those were eyes of genius and eyes that could penetrate the secrets of a sick soul as well as the secrets of time. They were dangerous eyes and the King had been mesmerized by them, had loved them, felt compelled to destroy them and had waited only until the masterpiece was complete to act upon that compulsion. Now he was the proud possessor of the finest, most magnificent and advanced time telling machine in the known world and thought that he had no more use for those eyes he had loved and feared, the eyes that dominated his dreams whether tender or violent. He would order them put out, expecting to put an end to the dreams, get some sleep finally, some respite, some blessed rest. The guard, so ordered, hesitated and the King grabbed the wooden handle of the molten-tipped iron rod and put out the eyes themselves, forever imprinting upon his own mind's eye the image of their last look.

  One

  December

  A bell rang somewhere nearby like a cowbell although the clockmaker knew that no cattle were allowed in the town. The sound must have been borne on the wind from the outskirts in that time of morning when sounds carry long distances, in their solitary clarity. The wind was warm, a prophecy of spring on that mid December morning when the clockmaker woke up blind. It smelled somewhat of a distant sea and carried a balm to comfort the injured soul with lost memories and bring visions to the wounded eyes: wounded unto death of course and forever that death, but in the earliest light of dawn, the clockmaker dreamed he saw the sun rising in the waves of warmth born on the wind. He imagined a healing that included sight.

  He began to believe in God, having nowhere else to turn. He thought he should talk to the rabbis and began to plan his journey home in that moment of quiet between the distant bell and the morning calls of the crows and the geese. By the time the birds had heralded the day and roused the workers in the town and the people began to move about and call out to one another, the noise of it, the moment of magic submerged in it, the clockmaker succumbed again to sleep, to hide a little longer from the pain he felt returning.

  It seemed only the day before yesterday he'd been whole because the days and nights since the attack had all blended into one long delirium of pain and strange sighted nightmares. A doctor had attended him at the King's command and had drugged him to let him sleep, let him heal. When he awoke screaming loudly or moaning softly, the doctor was there in the selfsame moment with the strange sweet liquor and soothing words and the clockmaker fell back into his world of dreams and visions, dreams being the only life where vision survived and therefore the more real life for him now.

  He saw the moon as well at night, knowing night by its sound. The moon was vivid and huge and bright before him with dark shadings where eyes could be, blind eyes, the moon was blind like the clock blindly counting the minutes, hours and days. If he could envision the moon so clearly perhaps it had only ever been a vision of his mind and he had always been blind and if he had always been blind then all men were blind seeing only dreams in the darkness of their minds. And if all men were blind, counting out the minutes of the hours of the days of their lives which they only imagined before they died, what then? Who imagined the ones who had imagined life? So ran the thoughts of the clockmaker.

  Sometimes he dreamed of hooded and cloaked men stepping around a sphere until they fell outward into space and became stars. Sunrises and moonrises and rising stars, all imagined.

  There came a time the Doctor said he could get up and be about. He stumbled around his room with the help of a nurse sent by the King to help him. Could it be the King was remorseful? Or could it be that the King truly loved him now he was stripped of his power, that power to create with his hands the visions of his mind, his eyes being the intermediary. He would get his power back and then see how much the King loved him.

  Although he had often walked through the dark nighttime town to the clock tower to work, the clockmaker had never experienced such a total, such an unremitting darkness, not a shadow hinted at open space or solid structure. He stepped slowly feeling the ground with his feet and sliding his hand along the stone of walls until there was no stone to touch or feel and he fell into open space as if he were one of the cloaked and hooded men of his recurring dream and then he realized this too was a dream and he was still delirious not with pain but with helplessness.

  When the clockmaker awoke from a deep sleep and remembered not a single dream he felt disappointed for his dreams were the only visual stimulation he’d ever have. Sometimes they were no more than fields of color as if he viewed the world and its forms so closely their outside contours disappeared. Over time his dreams restored other memories to his conscious mind. One night he dreamed of working on the clock in the dark seeing nothing but feeling everything with every part of his hands and this was a different kind of seeing that he realized with a bounding joy he could bring with him from the world of his dreams to the reality of his waking days.

  Later he would have his nurse walk him through the town to the clock-tower and silently he counted the steps: thirty nine steps to open space, thirty nine steps to cross it, one hundred steps along a wall of one texture, a doorway of wood: five steps, then another one hundred steps of stone differently textured and then confusion. He couldn’t remember the entire formula of textures, of solidity and open space and numbers so he had to practice once more, twice more with the nurse who would chatter as he silently counted out his secret scheme. Finally he was ready to make the dark journey alone when silence differentiated late night from early evening and he knew he’d recognize the dawn by the cry of the crows and the distant bellowing of the cattle in the country wafted in on the clear and empty morning air.

  He came to love the soothing sorrow of that early quiet with the distant country sounds as if they came from his home which he had left when such a young man. He had left his home to see the world, he laughed to himself, to see the world. He would return but not until he had destroyed the clock. He planned to do this on New Year’s Eve and he began to ask the nurse to help him keep track of the days.

  He strode though the city, even ran, so confident was he of his steps and then he realized he must have passed the clock tower and he looked back to seek it on the skyline and saw other spires and towers he had never seen before. He realized he was lost in a city he had never been in before and then his panic woke him and he was back in the darkness lit only by imagination.

  The clockmaker, master of time, calmed and measured his too fast beating heart, breathing slowly, deeply and he tried to imagine the village of his youth, the place he had once longed to escape so he could see the larger world. He laughed out loud at himself startling the nurse who inquired but he said simply it was a dream and went on with his thoughts. He was constantly struck by the irony of that desire to see more and he had indeed seen more but most of it not worth seeing. The pomp and gaudy ostentation of the rich and powerful he had despised, even as he was seduced by it, thinking to earn through his skill enough currency to buy for himself the solitary enjoyment of beautiful woods in beautiful mountains, far away from both the silly pageantry of the city and the petty intrigue of the village. He realized then that he could tolerate human beings only one at a time for only one at a time were human beings set free of envy and competitiveness and the need to impress or control or be impressed or controlled. This had made him laugh, not mirthfully but ironically, so that the nurse, her curiosity still unsatisfied, gave him a strange and searching look but to no avail of course because his eyes that might have given her a hint could not see out and were therefore no longer a window into his troubled soul. Nonetheless he could se
nse her looking at him and to ensure his privacy he sought sleep again, for that reason, and also because he ached to get up and walk in long strides across the city and he could only do that in his dreams.

  This time in his dream world he swam through fields of tall growing grasses feeling pursued and frightened. Soon he was flying above them, moving his arms as though he swam through the air. Currents of wind lifted and warmed him and he landed gently on the top of a steep mountain. There were little stone huts in rows on top of the straight-up sided mountains and monks came out of them to greet him and they pointed out to him a man below trying desperately to climb up after him but they assured him he would fail. With the telescopic vision of dreams he could see the man, tiny as an ant from that distance, was the king. After being so much afraid, the clockmaker now felt only a pity for the poor struggling king. When he awoke this second time he could feel and hear and sense the darkness that had descended on the room and knew it was night and he alone was still awake. The realization that night and day would forever be the same to him made him feel lonelier than being alone ever had.

  Someone walked quietly into the room and must have awakened the sleeping nurse and the two people whispered a bit before the nurse left and the second person, a man, sat in her place. He couldn’t make out everything they said but he could tell the second voice belonged to the king’s companion and personal guard, Samson. He knew Samson was as kind as the king was cruel and had often wondered what this strong but gentle man saw in the weak but tyrannical king to make him love him as he so obviously did. Samson sensed the clockmaker only pretended to sleep and spoke softly to him.

  “The King sent me to watch over you and see that you have all the assistance and comfort you need to recover.” This much was true for the king had given his instructions but Samson, assuming goodness existed where it had never been able to thrive and grow, added his own wish:

  “The King seeks your forgiveness.”

  The clockmaker lay silent pretending to sleep, thinking that this strong man was also a fool.

  Eventually the clockmaker relaxed and slipped again into his dream world but this time he went nowhere outside his little room but lay where he was and watched Samson as he paced quietly looking out from time to time at the moon which was larger than the clockmaker had ever seen it. Slowly it was eclipsed and slowly came back to light the room that had grown spacious in the dark and the clockmaker saw many of the courtiers sitting in a semi-circle around him and among them the Queen, dead before the clockmaker had even come to the city, and they were discussing what to do about the then child king and asking his advice but he pretended to be asleep even as he dreamed.

  He slept through the morning birds and awoke in the midst of the busy part of the morning, people shouting or just speaking normally but the sheer numbers of voices made it seem a terrible noise to the clockmaker. Samson had gone and in his place there was a creature with a voice that could be male or female but she had a woman’s touch, competent and tender all at once. She put a cloth soaked in hot soapy water in his hand and instructed him it was time to bathe himself. She led him to a cupboard and guided his hand to open it and let him feel around inside it for the various articles of clothing he would need to go out. She let him feel all around each piece, to find the neck, the sleeves. She let him put his trousers on backwards and have to start over again. He was grateful to her for allowing him time to learn these simple acts. Her name was Lydia and she became his friend.

  Lydia took the clockmaker out walking in the town and she herself helped him to count the steps to the places he would need to go and she gave him a carved and smoothed walking stick to feel out the steps and cobbles along the way. At first he walked slowly but in a few days he was striding along just like in his dream. The night after his first outing with Lydia he dreamt he was in a different part of the dream city and searching desperately for a street with a woman’s name, something like Edith or Elizabeth, he couldn’t remember when he woke and the desire to remember nagged at him all day. In this dream he had ridden about on a long closed cart filled with people that was not drawn by horses or oxen but simply ran on its own and very fast, fast enough to take his breath away and the city was so large, so large, he was afraid he would never get back to where he had started.

  Two

  January

  From the night he blinded the clockmaker, the King was unable to sleep. He was driven to wander through his palace in an agony of restlessness that would not let him sit or lie down until he would be so overcome with exhaustion he would sleep while he walked, unable to still his body long enough to rest. He revisited every room of the vast palace in increasingly frantic circles expecting to find something different somewhere, expecting and hoping and fearing to find that single thing or person that would give him a new direction in his wandering, perhaps allow him to stop. He talked to himself incessantly, whispering in his sleepwalking, shouting sometimes to the ghosts that haunted him, shouting often to the clockmaker or sometimes to god and seemed to confuse the two in his weakening mind.

  He counted everything, every step, every second, every heartbeat, worried that his heartbeats came too rapidly or too slowly, never regularly, worried he would be stopped in his tracks, wishing he could stop and rest. And then one night suddenly he collapsed and slept twenty four hours right where he fell behind a large carved chest in an otherwise empty room.

  A search continued the entire time but he was not found until he awoke and presented himself, devastated that the searchers had not been more diligent. What they told him then was that the great astronomical clock had been destroyed from within, stood still and silent in its tower and he knew then it had to have been the clockmaker who had done that. He ordered the clockmaker brought to him and waited, excited and anxious to face him and decide whether to let him live and repair the clock or to order his death.

  He considered how he might have the clockmaker killed: having him thrown from the top of the clock tower seemed the most appropriate punishment but of course it was not really a punishment, death. Death was the end of everything including punishment. He shuddered to think that it would be over, forever, he would never again discourse on philosophy or astronomy with that mysterious man.

  He made up his mind and reminded himself over and over that he would allow the clockmaker to live as long as the man agreed to repair the clock. He could not imagine how a blind man could repair such a complex mechanism but he would let him try and they could talk while the clockmaker worked. He began to look forward to it. The thought assuaged his restlessness. He felt as though he’d been forgiven, for that was of course what he had craved.

  In the beginning, the King’s life was sung, a continuing lullaby of the kind that nurses sing to infants to get to them to sleep or to stop crying, although the little king never cried. And there were other songs as well for his nurse never spoke but she sang and everything that happened in the traveling encampment was described in her songs. The birth of the little king, so long promised to his people, was also, according to one song, the cause and occasion of the deaths of two queens. The one who died giving birth to the little man-child, the other executed for adultery when she gave birth to a girl, useless to her father in his struggle for power among the various tribes who warred over the land at that time.

  Soon enough they would all be massacred but for the nurse and the little king whom she hid and carried with her into another land. She stopped her singing then, became very quiet and sometimes the child thought he was abandoned but then he would hum to himself, remembering the songs, the measured rhythms of them and their melodies commanded his emotions and their meter his very breathing. He could make the nurse come back to him with his humming even when she might have thought her own journey would be easier without him and so they made their way through mountains and woods into lands ruled by more peaceful people.

  Samson also wandered about those same mountains, a man so strong but s
o mild who had been exiled because the leader of his tribe perceived in him a threat that simply was not there. It was not his nature to be long angry or sorrowful and he reveled in the beauty of the land and survived on the plants he found there, unable, because of an overly kind heart, to kill animals for food. He found the woman and the infant and took care of them in the woods and the three of them soon entered into a city governed by a town council.

  The council members were arguing about how best to defend themselves from the barbarous nomads who themselves fled before a great force from the east. When Samson walked into the town, easily the largest man any of them had ever seen, they took this as a sign and made him their leader. Samson would have preferred to decline the honor but the nurse with the infant boy encouraged him and it was she who negotiated with the nomadic tribes, of whom she had considerable knowledge, to ensure the continued safety of the town. At first she spoke through Samson but soon it became apparent that he could not remember all the intricacies of the clever plans she devised to protect the town and so she ruled outright and was accepted gratefully by the people.

  The child was frightened by the people who daily crowded around the woman he took to be his mother and angered to feel so excluded from her company. More and more she left Samson to attend to the child’s needs while she attended to the needs of the city. Lonely and bored, the boy quickly learned his numbers and his letters. He seemed an unusually intelligent child although, when nervous, he still wet and befouled himself and to cover his profound shame at this would go into a rage. Sometimes the Queen would interrupt her meetings to go sing the raging child into a more peaceful frame of mind and he thus learned how best to claim her attentions. At night when all was quiet and the Queen herself snored in her deep exhausted sleep, the boy would calm himself by counting his own heartbeats.

  One evening when the child could not sleep he went outside and walked about the gardens surrounding the palace. He counted his steps in each direction, and noticed each tree and flower in the moonlight for he had a terror of getting lost. Beneath one tree, silvered with moonbeams that shone through the lacey branches, he spotted a bird trembling on the ground with an obviously broken wing. The boy wanted to help the bird and tried to fix his wing. He was clumsy and did not know what he was doing, so instead of repairing the bird’s broken wing, he caused the bird great pain and anguish. The bird struggled to free itself and in the struggle expired completely. The child felt angry at the bird for struggling against him, certain that he could have repaired the broken wing. He picked up the dead bird and threw it as hard as he could into the bushes that marked the boundary of the garden. He cried then and ran back inside and around the palace toward his room, automatically, forgetting to count his steps or even watch where he was going. For a moment, he even thought himself lost until he saw his own familiar room and stopped to catch his breath before confining himself to the boredom and safety of his own bed where he lay awake until dawn.

  Later that day he went out to find the bird, feeling bad that he had flung it away in his rage. He found it under a bush with ants crawling all over it and he took a stick to try to pick it up and carry it to a small grave that he had dug under the tree where he had first seen it. He tried to insert the stick gently beneath the unbroken wing to lift the bird but it kept falling sideways and off the stick, and finally, in order to bury the bird, he had to impale it completely on the stick. For the second time in two days, he frightened himself with the intensity of his own anger. But he buried the bird and said some prayers over it for he still toyed with the idea that there might be a powerful god in the heavens.

  Thereafter he cried often and for long periods of time and the Queen and Samson could not comfort him nor could they get him to explain his grief. After a few weeks of this the boy told Samson he wanted a little bird in a cage to keep him company in his room and sing to him at night. The Queen was so delighted that there was something to cheer her son that she sent out the palace hunters to trap and bring back a beautiful bird of the woods for him. But the bird would not sing in the child’s room at night and the child killed the bird and buried it beside the other one and told his mother and Samson that he had set it free for indeed he had.

  So did the child keep his secrets and he grew up with the one face he presented to them and the other face he turned inward to himself, talking about himself to himself as if he were three people and sometimes he felt truly crowded in his soul, suffocating and angry and afraid.

  The Queen always intended that her son should succeed her and rule the city but she expected to live a long life and have plenty of time to train this child in the ways of governing. Instead she was stricken with a disease that no one could identify but she knew it would kill her. She could feel her body deteriorating inside of her skin. She could feel the blood congealing in her veins, her bones turning to dust, her muscles disintegrating. As she grew weaker and weaker during the last months of her life, she decided that the child must be installed as King before her impending death, despite his youth. She hung on longer than she thought she could, planning every detail of the grand event. She even commissioned an artist from a city far away to come and memorialize the event in a large painting.

  The painter traveled a long distance from the west and there was great excitement in the city and competition among the council members to entertain him. But the man went straight to work grinding and mixing his paints and there were rumors about the precious gemstones that he requested as necessary to his endeavors. Of course there would be a large amount of gold leaf on the painting as the Queen had specified. Soon the painter was ready to assemble the people who would appear in the portrait of the installation of the young King and day after day, before the actual event, they sat, stiff and uncomfortable, posing for the painting.

  The event itself was almost anticlimactic after the unveiling of the painting. It was resplendent with the excited faces of many courtiers dressed in robes of lapis, emerald and ruby silk, trimmed in fur rendered as if real, each hair of fox or rabbit highlighted. There was a long side table covered with gorgeous and intricately patterned brocades, each fold painted perfectly and over this, platters of exquisitely ripened and rounded and highlighted fruits and nuts were laid out. Small hidden details abounded to delight the careful eye: a squirrel stood on hind legs amidst the feast, a dog slept partially beneath the folds of a woman’s train.

  The child who was the reason for all this effort could not sit still long enough for these sessions and his likeness was painted on top of a miniature adult male body in glorious raiment. The boy often sat mesmerized in front of the painting examining every detail, counting out the buttons on his jacket, the number of pearls on his mother’s bodice. And he examined the faces, looking for the models from among the adults at court, comparing the painted faces with the real ones, fascinated with how accurately the painter had rendered them, showing personalities as well as features. It was indeed a marvel, this painting. His eyes could not get enough of it.

  After so much anticipation, the actual event was over quickly. Although they had been the center of the coronation, neither the child King nor the Queen stayed to attend the festivities that followed. They were both tired and needing sleep. A Guard was sent to help the new King to bed. The Queen, barely able to stand a moment longer, asked Samson to escort her back to her chambers. She lay herself down in all her finery and precious jewels and she told Samson that she would have loved him as he had wanted but she was old enough to be his mother and was, in fact, the young king’s grandmother and that had been her secret told to no one but him. He told her it would not have mattered and then she drifted off to sleep and he found her cold and quite suddenly ancient the next morning. Samson told himself the boy showed no grief because he was so shocked by the sudden and unexpected abandonment.

  Three

  February

  It is February, the last day, the 29th; there will not be
another 29th day of February for another four years. A train is going by in the distance and I hear its whistle and think “Once upon a time” and I think “what is time?” Last night the newsman on television talked for two minutes about “time” saying that it baffled Einstein (who was not good at mathematics in school and thereafter changed it completely) saying “time” does not exist and that it is an arbitrary measurement. I wonder, if time does not exist, what is it that is killing us minute by minute from the very first minute we are born, stretching and kneading and torturing our every particle of mind and body in a ritual that we call life until every particle is worn out and the last working particles give it up and we die and then of course and only then (“then” being a word invented to designate an element of time which we are told does not exist and yet we can contemplate somehow) only then do we understand where we’ve been in relation to where we will be (after we die that “will be” becoming where we “are”, “are” being a word to denote being-ness which might be completely unrelated to time once we’ve broken free of the finite particles to merge with infinity, a word, which also has nothing to do with “time” other than in being unbounded by its arbitrariness).

  I woke up thinking that everything I wrote about the King in a story I began years ago and let lie in a drawer for what seems like a very long time, is poorly done or just not right or relevant and does not explain with any sufficiency why he would have put out the eyes of the Clockmaker. Neither the King nor the Clockmaker have made themselves sufficiently known to me yet. But I trust that in time each will. After all, these two characters from the past which only exists apparently in some collective imagination, jumped out at me and clung to my imagination like drowning men cling to a raft in a sea of anecdotes in the thousands of books of fact and fiction and various combinations and permutations thereof that I have read, at the time, over the last half century, whatever that is. So they jumped out of the sea of words and recollections and declared themselves in whispers and riddles begging me to understand and illuminate the dark places of their souls, I almost wrote wounds, a Freudian slip, do I really consider our souls to be our wounds? . . . . .well . . . . . however, to illuminate the dark places, to them, to me and to some others neither they nor I could name but who, they assured me and I knew, would know them and recognize them once I’d written their stories in something more than the cryptic, skeletal manner of old tales. They pleaded with me in the night in my sleep and the mornings when I awoke distracted by their rambling conversations and shadowy memories. They told me to just begin writing and then the words would come to me and I would understand and be enlightened and see the next step and the next clear and brightly lit in this tunnel they had dragged me into.

  How long would the tunnel be I wondered and no one could or would tell me. I simply had to trust that eventually I would see the light at the end of it. Would it be straight like other tales I’ve wandered into and written down? No, already, I’ve learned that the tunnel through the minds and lives, the whys and wherefores of these two characters has many side tunnels that dead-end forcing me back to the beginning. Their story is a maze in a tunnel like my own life has been. Haste makes waste. I cannot stride forward humming tunes and executing little dance steps from time to time. No, I must step carefully like the blind Clockmaker himself feeling his way through the mythical city of this story, mythical because I’ve never been to Prague, unless Prague is that dream city where I am always lost.

  It is like those psychics who shake your hand and see your future, or fondle a piece of lost clothing to find the loved one, dead or alive, but for me there is no known, named person on the other ends of the endless connections that are made every step I take. Every bit of sedge and stone, every sound I hear of stream or bird or rain, every smell that wafts by, fleeting, vague, assails me through every perceptive organ, and even the pores of my skin, with vague memories, and odd details like extremely specific and minute pieces of puzzles. The constant whisper of their pain, their sudden sick survival humor, all that pours into my heart, floods my blood, permeates, inundates my brain. It makes me crazy for I am each and every one and all of them at once. And they themselves, who were they in earlier incarnations and where? I walk in hills and forests here and witness scenes from faraway places, memories of memories, back and back into time, that thing that does not exist.

  In the beginning was the word, or so universal rumor has it, the word of a Judeo-Christian God, the song lines of Australian Aboriginal people, naming things to give them life distinct from other things, light from dark, night from day and thence to cycles of time, seasons, years, lives, epochs. Feelings too, all contained in that world of darkness within, how can we know we are happy until we have a word for it? Or know that we are depressed until we have known happiness and its lack, if not in our hearts, then at least by name? We need words to determine cause and effect and we need cause and effect and some concept of linear time to create stories and we need stories to pass it all along from one life to another, from one generation to the next, “le dor ve dor” as we, the people who are known as the “people of the book”, say over and over in our books, “le dor ve dor” . . . . . with words we can imagine time and things we cannot bind, time and telepathy, incarnation and reincarnation, memory, dream and vision, reality and surreality, meta-physical and paranormal and psychic and therefrom we create the stories we love more than reality even when the stories are sad, even when they are brutal.

  So I walk and listen to music and am transported to places I’ve never seen to times before I lived and live in those places and times and speak words through the mouths of phantom strangers who I may once have been, who think they are me now. And it doesn’t matter that the stories, theirs and mine, are rejected, neglected, disrespected because for me it is not a poor choice but a pure compulsion to give voice to the voices that won’t let me rest, won’t allow me to die until their stories are told, this way and that, again and again.

  Perhaps that answers my own question about why I feel compelled to explore the motivations of a man who would blind another man in a cruel and brutal way. I heard on the news on television not too long ago a story about a man in Germany who is a cannibal and advertised on the internet for someone to consent to being killed, cut up and eaten. The story made the news because he did indeed kill, cut up and eat someone and in his own defense claimed the victim was willing and that in fact he had received hundreds of responses to his online request for willing victims. What’s up with that? A vestige perhaps of some weird religion with rituals of human sacrifice? Sounds like one of those cult films starring Vincent Price. There has been no follow up on that story nor has either one of those strange and scary individuals visited me. For this I can only be grateful.

  Four

  March

  Some people thought the clockmaker a forgiving man to be so willing to repair the clock at the King’s request. How foolish, he wondered, could some people be? He was well aware that to refuse this request would mean death or something worse, some long tortured imprisonment. He also was well aware that once the clock repairs had been finished, he himself might be finished as well, so the Clockmaker, like Scheherazade, devised a scheme by which to prolong his life. Every day he worked slowly feeling everything out with his hands, repairing the damage he’d done to the clock and then at night he snuck back and undid most of what he had done during the day or, sometimes, lest it become obvious what he was doing, he would leave the day’s repairs alone and do some other damage to some other part of the complex mechanism.

  Most days, while the clockmaker worked, he listened to the King who came to visit and to tell him stories, lewd stories about his prowess with young women. The king was already nineteen years old and still in fact a virgin. He would not admit to this of course but it was well known. Some of the council members and other land owners were pressing him to marry and each one who pressed had a daughter to recommend. Perceiving the King to
be a weakling who had inherited none of this mother’s intelligence, each of them entertained fantasies of ruling the land through the influence of a beautiful daughter wed to a puppet King. So can and does the greed for power and wealth sometimes blind otherwise intelligent men.

  The King was not interested in any of their daughters and instead had palace guards bring him strong peasant girls to play with. He imagined them with the eyes of the clockmaker when he attempted to make love to them but he proved unable to respond to any of the ministrations of the girls. Most of them pretended to be quite taken with him and cried inconsolably when removed from his august presence. These clever girls were comforted and given money to take home to their families. One girl, however, was more proud than clever and refused to play this game. She actually laughed at the young King as if he were not all powerful.

  This so enraged him that he instructed Samson to take the girl out into the woods and kill her. He further instructed Samson to bring back her head as proof that the terrible deed was done. The King by now delighted in tormenting his protector and, knowing Samson’s kind heart, could think of no better joke than this with which to amuse himself and teach the laughing girl a lesson. Nonetheless, the girl had the last laugh, albeit a quieter one, when she told Samson something he could say to convince the King that her heart (not so different from the heart of some forest animal), would be the better trophy. Samson pointed out to the King, that if he had the head preserved he would have to look upon her laughing expression for eternity but her heart could not express laughter or contempt or fear or anything at all but silence and was that not what the King wanted to do, silence her?

  Samson pretended to drag the bound girl into the woods but as soon as the sight of them was obscured by trees and the lowering dusk, he undid her bindings and they walked quickly into the depths of the forest until they came upon a deer. It was a magnificent buck with antlers in velvet and stood still and silent staring at the man and the girl. Samson stood frozen in awe and fear because he dreaded what he knew he must do. “It will be alright” he heard a voice say and assumed it was the girl by his side speaking and that her voice sounded far away because he was in such distress. “It will be alright. You can kill a deer quickly without inflicting pain.” Samson followed the instructions that seemed to come from inside his own mind.

  When the deer lay dead before him with open eyes, Samson reverently closed the lids and stroked the deer’s body, speaking slow, soft prayerful words that flooded his heart. He gave thanks to the deer for giving its life so that the girl could live and prayed that the deer would visit his dreams for never had Samson seen such a perfect and beautiful woodland creature. The girl had already disappeared as Samson knew she must and Samson then slit the deer’s chest just enough to remove the heart. He then found a small cave, a cleft in a large boulder upon which an ancient oak tree leaned, caught in mid-fall by the boulder hundreds of years earlier and then spreading its roots and branches around the boulder. It was the perfect burial spot for the magnificent animal. Samson was a strong man but he wondered at the lightness of the dead deer and the ease with which he was able to maneuver it into the small cave, almost as if the buck moved himself into the cave. Then with a huge effort Samson rolled a smaller boulder into place to cover the cave entrance to protect the body from scavengers. He prayed again for forgiveness . . . . forgiveness. . . . . forgiveness. It was the wind in the trees that whispered absolution and wind that lifted the weakened man and blew him home. Wind a gift from the sky and in his hands he held the bloody heart of the buck, a gift from the earth.

  Thus did Samson kill his first deer and it pained him greatly but he knew he had to do this to save the life of the young woman. The King commanded that the heart be preserved in a glass jar by the palace alchemist. He kept it in his room and the first month dreamed nightly of a deer hunt in the forest where the animals turned into women and the women back into animals. Because of these dreams he suspected Samson of deceiving him and began to pay closer attention to his personal companion and body guard.

  The King even asked the Clockmaker what he thought, hoping as usual to shock the man. Of course the Clockmaker’s blind eyes never betrayed what horror he felt at the King’s casual disclosures of his own cruelty. In a voice as mechanical as the clock he worked on, he told the King that he was quite certain that Samson was incapable of disobeying the King in any way. In fact, he knew from Lydia that the girl remained hidden in the forest, disguised as a boy, a woodcutter by trade, and sometimes ventured into the town to sell firewood, safe in her disguise of rags and soot.

  At night the Clockmaker dreamed the textures of the mechanisms of the clock, the cold smoothness of the metals, the rough edges of carefully scored wheels, and he dreamed the sounds of his work, the grinding sounds, the musical sounds. He dreamed, as well, the odors of the day’s work, the sharp acrid odor of the metallic shavings, the smell of the oils he used and the odor of the King, heavy perfume that mingled with but did not disguise the man’s sweat whenever he discussed his imagined sexual exploits. Sometimes the Clockmaker could barely draw breath in the atmosphere the King made heavy and offensive with his presence, his voice, his breath. The Clockmaker longed for different dreams, dreams that would be different from his days. He longed for the days of working on the clock to end but he didn’t know how to end them without the risk of ending his own life. He smelled then his own sweat, sudden in the chilly nights, the sweat that came from fear. And once he smelled his own fear, he couldn’t get it out of his nostrils, not for hours, not for days. He worried that the King could smell it also.

  So it went until the Clockmaker became accustomed to the routine and then the King came with a new story, an even more terrible story. In this new story, the King admitted to the Clockmaker that he imagined him when he made love to the woman, a confession that the Clockmaker had sensed coming but had tried to avert not knowing how he could possibly respond. When the inevitable disclosure finally came it was part of such a rush of words that the Clockmaker had no time or need to respond.

  The King told the Clockmaker in grim detail how he had murdered the woman with his own hands, how the sight of her blood had aroused him, dwelling on that word “sight” with a sneer and a pause, causing the Clockmaker to hesitate in his work and then resume in haste as he smelled his own fear wafting up to him. He was sure the King noticed because the King laughed before he excused himself: “I must go find Samson. He will have to bury her in the forest. It will serve him right for deceiving me about the other one.” And the Clockmaker wondered if the King thought he also had deliberately deceived him and what punishment the King would think would serve him right. He sat immobile on his workbench all through the day, frozen by shock, thirsty and hungry, but afraid to call out or even move.

  When it was quite late and long dark, Lydia came for the Clockmaker. She knew something was wrong. She told him that Samson awaited him at his apartment. Samson told the Clockmaker that he had buried the girl in the forest and planted a rose bush over her. He cried and said he could not describe the terrible tortured condition of her body. Then he told the Clockmaker about something he knew that the King did not. This girl was not a peasant girl brought to the King by the palace guards but the daughter of a powerful landowner who had come at her father’s behest in disguise. The greedy and power hungry man had thought to trick the King into an alliance with his family and thereby to achieve special favor and rule the city. He couldn’t have known the King’s secret, sick propensities and now, of course, there would be repercussions. The Clockmaker was astonished and appalled that Samson could still worry about the cruel King’s fate, but Samson could not help himself. All night, in the seclusion of the Clockmaker’s chamber, Samson grieved. By morning, he had resolved that he himself would smother the King in his sleep to save him from the more vengeful fate he knew the noblemen had planned for him and perhaps as well to save the young King from his own headlong rus
h to hell.

  The Clockmaker did not fall asleep until Samson left in the morning determined to end the mad King’s secret terrors and still protect him from the full vengeance of the nobles. The Clockmaker slept throughout the day, waking now and then when he thought he heard screams, then falling back into a fitful doze and then further into a hellish dreamscape from which he struggled to emerge. He awoke at night exhausted and Lydia came and gave him something sweet tasting to drink that made him sleep throughout the night. It was forty eight hours almost to the minute after the King had left him at his workbench when he returned to the clock-tower. Again Lydia walked with him and he noticed a strange silence and a heavy humid quality to the air he hadn’t noticed before.

  “It is trying to rain” was all she said.

  As they approached the tower, Lydia stopped and whispered to someone who must have given her bad news for she cried softly. The Clockmaker asked her what was wrong and she said only that Samson was dead. When he climbed the tower steps to the room that housed the inner workings of the great clock, the King was waiting for him. He spoke as though asking a question and surely he wanted to see what reaction the Clockmaker would have when he told him that Samson had tried to kill him in his sleep. The King told the Clockmaker how he had tricked that huge, strong man, pretending to be asleep until Samson was almost upon him with the pillow he intended to smother him with, and then, just at the last moment, the crafty King thrust a long sharp knife into Samson’s heart killing him instantly.

  He told this story as though it were a child’s adventure tale. Then he described for the Clockmaker what it felt like to lie beneath the dead weight of the man and to be drenched in his blood. He must have lain there a long time before he called for help. When he did, two servants could not lift Samson off of him. They called for a third and the three men struggled to lift the huge dead man from the King and set him free. Then the King described with a particular relish how he had required three bronze tubs full of fresh water to cleanse himself of all the blood.

  Five

  April

  The Clockmaker could smell the springtime fragrance and imagine the pink and white and pale green buds spreading out like a graceful, lacey net over the trees. Then it snowed, one of those late spring snows, wet and heavy. The trees caught the wet, sticky, snow in wide nets of buds and young leaves and the branches broke beneath the weight of it. Every where lay the large, broken branches, the leaves dripping icicles. The tender sappy innards of the trees, exposed to the cold, hardened, darkened and died. The Clockmaker, feeling the cold on his skin and hearing the cracking of dying branches and the groan of dying trees, thought about the quiet cruelty of nature, wondered at it, the incongruity of breathtaking beauty and life-threatening catastrophe, of boundless creativity and careless destruction.

  In the fields around the town, animals that had come out to forage in the warm abundance of spring, ran for cover from the cold and snow. Houses at the edge of town were overrun with mice and rats, squirrels and snakes. A baby was bitten and died. People were afraid. There was talk of plague. Men roamed the town with long swords cutting snakes and small animals in half and piling their bloody bodies onto wheelbarrows to dump in the fields outside the boundaries of the town. The joyful mood of spring had turned into panic and blood thirst. In the palace the King ran out with the servants laughing as they chased and slashed the snakes that chased and ate the mice.

  They had cornered one very large rat and everyone stood frozen, afraid to approach close enough to reach and slash at it when the King decided he wanted to make a pet of it and ordered one of the guards to get a cage and trap it. It seemed the whole group stood a very long time, cutting off the rat’s escape, while the guard went to find a hunter who would have a cage tight enough to trap the rat. It felt like hours and then the entrapment happened quickly, suddenly in fact and everyone collapsed just a little in relief.

  The King had the caged rat brought to his private chamber where he fed it himself with bits of the carcasses of snakes, talking to it as if to a friend. “My only friend” he sometimes addressed it, or when he spoke about it, for he told the Clockmaker about his new friend, the caged pet rat.

  “When we were all standing there surrounding that poor animal I suddenly remembered an experience I’d had as a boy.” The King told the Clockmaker and the Clockmaker realized he still considered the King a boy, a terrible, spoiled, out of control sick boy who would never become a man. It was not that the Clockmaker thought grown men lost their capacity for cruelty but that the cruelty of grown men was motivated by greed and lust for power whereas the cruelty of the King was random and without purpose. Then it occurred to the Clockmaker that to ascribe purpose to cruelty was hypocrisy, an excuse, the grown man’s acknowledgement that his basic instinct to inflict pain was simply not acceptable without some redemptive “purpose” and the Clockmaker felt less appalled by the naïve King as he felt more appalled by humankind generally. He began to perceive the King as innocent in the same way the rat was innocent. He began to listen with a kinder, more forgiving heart while the King described the incident that occurred years earlier when he had run away from Samson and gotten lost in the woods outside the town.

  The King reckoned he would have been about eight years old when he ran away. He had not been able to sleep, had counted his heartbeats for what seemed like hours. As soon as the stars began to disappear into the pre-dawn mist, the child had gotten up and dressed himself and crept quietly out of the palace and up the road right out of town into the woods from whence he had come as a babe in arms. Years and years he had looked longingly on the dark green secluded spots he remembered still as places of warmth and security where his nurse and Samson together had embraced and protected him. He could not possibly remember the pains they had taken to hide from the malice of strangers. Nor could he understand the very existence of strangers who would not revere him, so accustomed had he become to the respect of one and all toward his mother, the Queen, Samson, her companion and he himself, her son.

  He had frequently asked Samson to take him into the woods and Samson always obliged but never went far enough from the town to satisfy the young King’s curiosity to explore their depths. By the time the sun had burned off the morning mist, the child had gone farther than he ever had under Samson’s protective supervision. He had gotten damp and cold on his walk through wet ferns and saplings and when he saw smoke from a wood fire he thought he would seek out the source and warm and dry himself. He remembered the sweet smell of the smoke and the gladness he felt when he found three woodcutters cooking a rabbit on a stick over the crackling pine fire.

  He approached them innocently . . . . . “innocently” was the word the King used to describe this to the Clockmaker and the Clockmaker’s heart beat faster as he wondered if the King had read his mind and was perhaps baiting him. He’d come to know that the King was good at this little trick of instilling fear in subtle ways. But not this time. This time the King was remembering the subtle ways of the malicious woodcutters and how his own terror enlarged his child’s heart, how the beats quickened until he thought he might faint, how he had been unable to keep his count of those pounding heartbeats.

  “Well look at this, comrades. Something meatier and sweeter than rabbit meat has come our way.”

  “Oh look! You’ve frightened the little fellow. He really thinks we would cook and eat him.”

  “That right little man? Do you think we’re cannibals then?”

  The man looked insulted, then broke into laughter but it was a nasty laughter.

  “What’s the matter with you boy? Are you to good to talk to the likes of us? Look at him will you? Look at the clothes, clean and new and dear, you’d think he was a prince. Are you a prince little man?”

  “No prince would be wandering out here alone.”

  “Then again, maybe he would be, lost of course, maybe someone with a lot of gold to spare is looking for the little
fellow right now.”

  “If that’s the case they’d more likely use all that gold to buy our heads on pikes than hand it over with a thank you and good day for the safe return of the little one.”

  “Better just kill him and then eat the evidence. They’ll never find us. They haven’t found us yet.”

  By this time the Prince had messed himself much to the amusement of the men.

  “You two are fools. We’ve never taken a boy so well dressed as this one. You know he’s important. You leave him alone and let me clean him up and take him back to the edge of town.”

  Then turning to the gasping, choking child, the man asked him “If I take you to the edge of town you can find your way back home right? And say nothing to no one because I can turn myself into a ghost and go anywhere I want and never be seen or taken. You believe me don’t you?” The King did believe him for years after and even now telling the Clockmaker the story he half believed that all three men were ghosts.

  The kind man, the man who protected him from the other two who laughed and continued to say nasty things, took the boy to a little hut near a spring and removed all his clothes, the soiled and the clean. He washed the shivering child and wrapped him in fur pelts and laid him by a fire to dry off and warm up and urged the child to sleep a while. Then the man washed the clothes in the spring and laid them out on rocks in a small sunlit space to dry. In his sleep, the boy dreamed that the man returned and got inside the fur pelts behind him and poked something inside him that hurt terribly but when he tried to scream with pain, no sound came and he couldn’t breath and then the man pushed something into his mouth and he gagged and nearly suffocated but then he woke up and the man was sitting up next to him and told him he had had a bad dream, had been screaming in his sleep. He had the dry clothes over his arm and told the boy to get up and get dressed but the child remained wrapped in the fur pelts until the man put the clothes on the ground and left the hut.

  “OK, I’ll go outside while you dress.” He said and then laughed in a lewd manner making the eight year old boy wonder if his dream had been a reality.

  The man carried the boy on his back through the dusky woods to the edge of town and set him down. The boy stood there a few seconds and when he turned to see the man, there was no one behind him, only the ferns and the saplings strangely lit by the lowering autumn sun and he ran into the town and toward the Palace where he was met by Samson who told a guard to the tell the others the search was off, the boy had been found.

  It was not until the King had finished his story that the Clockmaker realized he had been referring to himself as “he” and “the boy” never daring to say “I” and the Clockmaker cried for him then.

  “You are a good man” the King told the Clockmaker, “like Samson was once. Do not turn on me like he did. I cannot help what I do.” The Clockmaker’s heart expanded with sorrow for the King and contracted with fear of him. Not knowing how to respond, the Clockmaker offered to show the King how the great clock worked and thereafter the King talked of nothing but time and counting it and became like an apprentice to the Clockmaker.

  As time went by the King shared strange ideas with the Clockmaker including the thought that human beings with their ticking hearts were God’s timepieces. He went on to suggest that a man when creating the ticking clock to count time imitated God. He thought he would like to be able to create a clock in the image of a man with arms and legs that could gesture and walk and even a brain that could respond to spoken commands. The Clockmaker thought this frightening but said nothing, merely showed the King how and where to fit two parts together. The King laughed, knowing he had shocked the Clockmaker.

  “But why not?” Local legends are full of such fantasies. I just believe the concept is more practical than fabulous. If you can produce this amazing piece of machinery why not produce a machine in your own likeness? Is that not what God did in creating mankind? Is it not written that God created man in his own image? And if we are indeed Godlike, why not create machines in our own likenesses?”

  The Clockmaker ventured a question: “Are you thinking that these machines would do the bidding of the men who created them?”

  “Of course.”

  “But is it not clear that men do not do God’s bidding?”

  “Who knows what God’s bidding is anymore? What men hear God speak? Or understand when they do? All I ever hear when I listen most carefully is the beating of my own heart, the ticking, the ticking, the counting and I do not know what it means. I wait for clues, for understanding, but it never comes.”

  Six

  May

  I was late and hordes of children were running out the doors, blocking my way back inside. I imagined Dougie waiting for me and probably crying when I did not appear. I worried about that, the way he would cry just like that, not worrying who saw him, not understanding how crying could provoke the school bullies.

  I was on the verge of crying myself. I had put my coat on outside my fourth grade room before walking around the playground to the kindergarten entrance on the other side of the building and while I worked against the crowd in the wide hallway I began to sweat. When I finally got inside the room it was empty and quiet. A teacher putting away pots of paint asked me if I needed something.

  “My brother” I said, “I came to take him home.” She told me that all the children had left already ten minutes ago.

  I started home looking for Dougie everywhere as I walked past the rows of closed and shuttered houses and across the streets no longer patrolled by the eight grade “safeties” and the sound of leaves skittering across the sidewalk made me sadder and frightened.

  The street was deserted now, all the children safe at home, the fathers not yet returning from work, the mothers hidden behind the heavy drapes that covered every window. No light, no vision, no essence escaped the tightly locked houses on our block. I was afraid for my brother in this early dusk. I felt outside of time, outside of my entire world as if that entire world had moved somewhere else and I had missed it. I had mislaid my world in the space of ten minutes that seemed a recurring eternity. Then I was at our house and the door was open and my mother was home, standing there in the doorway watching me run up the walk.

  “I lost Dougie” I cried. “He’s right here” she said and smiled and there he was beaming, proud of himself because he’d found his own way home and our mother was proud of him, smiling, home to let him in. I stood outside the door looking at them, relieved, then angry, thinking then, that if he would only wait for me, listen to me, follow me, we could somehow forestall the inevitable. Even then I dreamed of losing him, got up in the night to check him in his bed, to make sure he breathed. In my dreams the chronology of our lives reversed itself.

  In the dictionary, there is more space devoted to definitions of the word “time” and phrases containing the word “time” than any other word. I do not take this to mean that the word “time” is the most exhaustively (and definitively) defined word in the language but rather that it is the most difficult to define, perhaps even impossible, given the definition of the word “define” (to state or set forth the meaning of a word, to explain the nature or essential qualities of; to determine or fix the boundaries or extent of). The dictionary distinguishes between “stating the meaning of a word” and “fixing the boundaries of” by its examples, but in fact, to define anything, a word, a quality, as well as a territory, is to set boundaries around it, to limit its meaning. With each successive attempt at definition on the two and half pages of definitions in the dictionary, the boundaries of the meaning of the word time are expanded until we lose sight of them altogether. I could say that “time” is “infinite” (another word that, by definition, defies definition). But the writers of the dictionary have an easier time dealing with the word “infinite” because they merely need to point out that infinite is the opposite of finite. They merely need to point out that whatever is “infinite” has no boundaries. F
or some reason, although “time” is “infinite” the word “time” took hold in a far more pervasive way in the language than “infinite” and we have come to use it in all sorts of odd little ways as I just did when I wrote that the writers of the dictionary had an easier “time” dealing with the word “infinite” and so on and so forth.

  One of the over sixty definitions of the word “time” (before moving on to the phrases containing the word such as time bomb, time capsule, time card, time exposure, time honored, time immemorial, etc. all the way to time zone) is that it is the system of sequential relations that any event has to any other as in past, present, future; another is: indefinite continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another. Yet another definition is: “finite duration as contrasted with eternity” which would mean that, sometimes, “time” is considered the opposite of “eternity” even though we all know that time is eternal. Other definitions refer to measurement: a system or method of measuring time such as “Greenwich time”; a particular period as distinct from other periods (of time); a prescribed or allotted period, and the examples are, in an interesting juxtaposition, “as one’s life or for payment of a debt” and that last followed by another definition: “the end of a prescribed or allotted period . . . . . . . . is this perhaps a conscious acknowledgement of our mortality? Another good word, that one, “mortality”, derived completely from the concept that time does go on even after we, each of us individually dies and will go on (or will it? and what does that mean to “go on”?) even after every last one of us dies. We all know this (or do we?) and yet the dictionary defines the word “eternal” as existing outside all the relations of time. Is time then the thing that imposes boundaries on everything else but itself? Even eternity is defined in terms of time, i.e. to be eternal a thing must exist outside of time. (But if time is infinite and itself eternal, how can it have outside boundaries?)

  What awes me completely is that we have words to ask these questions and to ponder these incomprehensible concepts. How did all this language evolve? It does seem that with the advent of writing, language itself became more self conscious and thinkers developed more and more language in order to examine the intangible. This is even more interesting when one considers that written language began primarily as a means for counting things, keeping accounts as it were, as trade among societies developed. Stories were passed down verbally, chanted to enable the memory to maintain everything, keeping rhythmic time being a memory enhancer. But keeping track of numbers of things, like those little snail shells used to make the royal purple dye or small flat pieces of precious metal, those would be hard to chant and remember. Once written language began it grew so rapidly, compared to what had happened before, unless of course it is all happening all at once or over and over again. I wonder sometimes: all those intriguing theories about the lost continent of Atlantis, cryptic biblical stories that seem symbolic of things to come, the Tower of Babel comes to mind: such a clear symbol for present civilization with its amazing, almost magical, technological feats and the fact that a nuclear holocaust could end it all, force the few survivors (if any) to start all over again. Makes you wonder how many times that has happened already.

  But if human beings were to kill themselves off completely, the computers would still be here, immune to nuclear threat although having viruses of their own. I think about all those futuristic movies about computerized robot-people. Do those directors know something I don’t? Is that in fact the plan for the future? Are we already in it? I sometimes feel like I am dealing with robots when I try to correct a mistake on a bill or see a doctor. Nice enough, the people I talk to, but with a finite list of responses, regardless of the question, like a computer. If I were a robot, would I even know it? I don’t think I’m a robot, but sometimes I am not completely certain of that or anything else either.

  Well May is the month to consider all the possibilities because May is the month of my birth and my annual reckoning of the years, the official marking of my lessening time left in this life and the irresistible urge to look back and measure against the increasing years behind me, the decreasing opportunities to make it all matter. May is when I ponder, daily upon waking, where all those years went, what I did with them (not much) and what I would do if I could do them over again. . . . . . “If I knew then what I know now” . . . . . “Youth is wasted on the young” . . . . that sort of depressing morning mental peregrination. . . . . . . .That, plus my allergies, could be the reason I prefer fall and winter to spring and summer.

  Seven

  June

  The King spent most of the spring in bed with a cold and suffering a depression that left him without the energy even for cruelty. He asked for the pet rat to be let loose on his bed. The rat sat there, confused and quiet on the mound of quilts while the King spoke to it, but when he moved to stroke it, the rat ran off. The King felt too tired and ill to be angry. He let it go. The entire city felt relief while the King hibernated.

  The Clockmaker worked steadily on making, not only repairs to the clock, but embellishments, figurines, one representing death, that would come out at certain times, brandishing a scythe. He had satisfied himself that he could continue embellishing the clock indefinitely and, like Scheherazade with her endless tales, entrance the King sufficiently that he could expect to live out the full number of his days.

  While the king remained in his sick bed, the noble landowners, who had once made up the governing town council, did in fact govern the town and, feeling emboldened, finally united around a common purpose. They plotted revenge, their vision of the King’s final demise becoming more gruesome with each warm spring day. Believing the Clockmaker to be the most badly used by the king, some of councilmen came to visit him, ostensibly to watch him work but in truth to feel out his sentiments. They knew the King, that fool (or so they reasoned) seemed to idolize the man he had victimized and they thought perhaps they could enlist the Clockmaker’s help in trapping and assassinating the King. Not a one of them came right out with these thoughts as not a one could discern the Clockmaker’s state of mind. The Clockmaker had learned to betray no hint of his thoughts and these visitors left him puzzled and relieved not to have said more of what they planned. Nonetheless, the Clockmaker guessed from the questions they asked what they were up to and he wondered if he had a moral obligation to warn the King of his danger of if he should merely let human history run its course which it probably would in any case regardless of his part in it. Then again, the King, as twisted in his mind as he was, might mistake the Clockmaker’s warning and turn on him. In the end, the Clockmaker decided to mind his own business.

  When the King finally felt well enough to venture from the warmth of his bed and fire, he went first and predictably to the Clock tower to see what progress the Clockmaker had made and he was delighted with the new toys the Clockmaker had created for him. He was so inspired by the little parade of figurines that he resolved to go on a walking tour of the countryside with his own parade of guards and advisors and perhaps pick up some children along the way. The King decided that he would not worry about finding a wife and having a son. He would adopt a son from among the children of the countryside. He couldn’t have been more pleased with himself and with the Clockmaker for giving him the idea. He began to feel as though he himself were the clock that ticked at the Clockmaker’s whim and he realized he must never again hurt the Clockmaker who instilled in him ideas, spirit, heart. It was as close as the King would ever come to feeling love. The Clockmaker for his part was relieved that the King would be gone away from the imminent danger and that he now did not have to grapple with his own conscience on the matter. He decided he himself would be gone when the King returned.

  The King began to plan his excursion into the countryside, collecting the youngest and hardiest of his usual retinue. The King knew he must take plenty of armed guards for his protection. Even before there was a plot against his life, he alway
s feared one. He didn’t know but would not have been surprised to learn that one of his own guards had been bribed by the council members and that one man was feeling out the loyalties of other guards, planning to win enough of them over to be able to assassinate the King without repercussions.

  The King for his part had already been bribing the loyalty of his guards, poor peasant boys all, to whom he gave pieces of land once part of the council members’ large estates. He merely followed the example of his mother who had requested and been given large areas of land in exchange for her negotiating peace with the marauders from the east. She then divided more than half of what she received into small farms which she gifted to guards recruited from poor tenant farming families so the heads of these families could vote (land ownership being a prerequisite of voting) as well as produce their own surplus food to store and to sell. The guards were grateful for their small farms and the chance to cast votes on those matters upon which votes were cast. The King, again following the example of his mother, often requested the vote of the people on many decisions, albeit nothing that impacted his own power.

  The King consulted the painting of his coronation for ideas about costumes to wear on the parade he decided should begin the day of the summer solstice. He put one of his guards to work on planning their route and ordering luxurious tents made for their overnight accommodations as the King expected to be out on the road for many days, making a leisurely tour of the lands that surrounded and supplied the city. He instructed the guard to tell no one the route beforehand and he trusted no innkeepers. He cleverly put his safety entirely into the hands of this young guard who swelled up with pride at his sudden promotion to the King’s special confidante and entertained himself with dreams of glory.

  The palace chefs were expected to come along and to carry with them their implements, spices and condiments with which to prepare the wild game they would hunt and eat along the way. Chefs and hunters, guards, musicians with pipes and drums and lutes, jugglers and magicians with their tricks all were needed to accompany the King on this celebration of the summer solstice and, as it happened, the seventh anniversary of the King’s coronation. He had decided seven years was a good time to mark with appropriate festivities. Astronomers were ordered to come along to watch and interpret the night skies from wherever they stopped each night. Alchemists and philosophers were expected to drop what they were doing in the city and join the mimes and jokers and follow the King on his long and well protected walk into the woods and out into the lands. The excitement was palpable and the preparations required all the weeks leading up to the solstice and even then, there was a feeling, a sense that something more was needed, something had been forgotten or left undone but then they began their walk, lighthearted and joyous, one and all, for how could anyone resist the music, the colors, the warmth of that day?

  They left the same way the King had gone as a child when he’d been nabbed by the three ghostly woodcutters and he half hoped they might find those men, unchanged around their fire, cooking a rabbit and the King imagined what he would do to them if he found them. The image of the men spitted and roasting over their own fire amused him but it was not to be, the men were never found. They did find children, playing in the woods, against the wishes of parents no doubt, and these they invited to come with them and the children were happier than they had ever been to do so. A young woodcutter with a girlish face and no beard joined them also, toward the end of the long retinue, blending in with the crowd, singing and dancing when they sang and danced, but never taking his eyes off the King, waiting for him to wander off, waiting for dark, waiting for some opportunity to accost the King alone, having all the time in the world.

  In another time and place a parade of soldiers marches through the streets of a small dream town: the dreamer sits upon a stoop watching it. The soldiers are marching in the early 1940s, and the dreamer, dreaming twenty years later, knows this, understands it is a dream; thank god it is a dream. The soldiers wear the uniforms of the German SS troops and Hitler is at their head and they all salute him. The townspeople are expected to salute Hitler as well. The dreamer is still a child, but knows. The dreamer goes inside the house to avoid saluting Hitler and to investigate opportunities for hiding because the dreamer understands there is no escape, not that day. Also there is a baby in the house who must be protected. For herself nothing matters that very much, but the baby must be protected. Inside, between her and the baby, there is a very large, very fat soldier standing in the middle of the main room of the house. The dreamer finds in her hand the fork from her mother’s fancy carving set from Toledo Spain. The dreamer, enveloped by the fat arms and chest of the soldier, begins to stab the soldier in the chest with the fork, over and over and over again but the soldier does not die, does not even bleed, and the two wrestle until the dreamer prays to wake up and be delivered from the struggle. First the dreamer wakes up enough to be delivered from the struggle but not from the house in the town. The dreamer falls back asleep and hides there in that house with the baby, hardly daring to breath, until the morning birds wake her up into the 1960s in a ranch style home in Denver, Colorado, out of breath from fear, her baby brother in the next room, grown larger than she is, already growing a beard.

  I read The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski and could not rid my mind of the most awful images. They were beautiful and terrible at the same time. The painted bird: painted beautifully and dreadfully and cruelly in order to create such a terrible spectacle of the bird being torn to shreds by its own kind, birds who did not recognize it after the painter had decorated it. Did God decorate human beings differently to ensure that they would destroy each other? Why is violence as instinctive as love? Why? Where did Bosch find his images? I saw the paintings done by patients in a mental hospital, imprisoned for life by and because of their madness, and the paintings were wonderful but terrible like the paintings of Bosch. Where do they come from these images? Does God find our blood more beautiful when spilled? Is the sanity we claim nothing more than denial of our nature?

  The Clockmaker, left alone now, begins to live outside the Clock Tower. He takes his own walks outside the town with Lydia, touches the grasses and trees, listens to birds, the sounds of streams, rejoicing in his senses, in his freedom from the tyranny of the great clock and his terror of the small King. He remembers in his imagination faces and forms and colors more vivid in his mind’s eye than in reality. He sleeps in the daytime, lying on the warm grass, feeling the light tread of lady bugs across his chest. He dreams in the day. He imagines the parade, hears them singing from the distance or is that the buzzing of flies? He hears a quiet grunt and feels faint from loss of blood when the young woodcutter, finally revealed to be a girl, stabs the King and the King does not even fight back but offers his breast like a sacrifice, relieved it is finally happening and his fears can be ended and neither the King nor the Clockmaker can know if the distant sobs they both hear are for relief or sorrow at this murder. The King wants to pardon her, forgive her, for he is finally free of his own burdens and sorrows and had he known how relieved he would feel, he would have done this himself years ago.

  The Clockmaker wakes, wondering if his dream could have been real. He says nothing to Lydia who has been gathering wild flowers. They walk back into the town where it is very quiet as if nothing special has happened and he begins to doubt what he thought he knew about dreams, about prophecy and premonition, about the myth of time and space and stars, about life and death and God.

  Part Two:

  The Clockmaker’s Journey