Clocks

I brought the clock back in from the garage today. I put it out there last winter because I got sick of listening to it tick. The sound of its blunt second hand goose stepping circles around the face bothered me. It still does. It's a cheap plastic clock I bought used for two dollars. It would be a better clock if it stopped all together. Nicer yet if Time stopped with it for a while so I could get off the train and stretch ... limber up ... flex my knee a bit.


I had a friend in Oregon named Joey, an old Sicilian fellow who grew up in New York City. Hard life. Killed a man in prison in a fight over a loaf of bread. Nice though. Joey wouldn't hurt a fly willingly. He paid me to clean his apartment just before he died. It was filled with clocks, mostly pendulum clocks, small ones, wall models, desk models, and a couple of grandfather clocks, all in a very tiny place. Joey was a dealer at an antique mall and found them on his rounds through flea markets, yard sales and second hand stores, but they we nice. He had an eye. The clocks were unsettling though because they all ticked very loudly and no two were set exactly the same. This was especially puzzling because Joey was a fastidious fellow, not one to miss the fact that each clock marked a different hour with its chimes or coo-coo. What made it even more strange was that during his last year I kept sensing that Joey was getting ready, wanted to die, nothing specific, just something about him and the clocks reinforced that impression. It seemed they were busy measuring, from their different perspectives, how much time he had left in an effort to synthesize a universal hour from all his overlaps and contradictions.


In that last year Joey had reconnected with an old lover from Paris, Queenie. He met her during the war when he was a deserter instead of going to Normandy. He went back to France determined to finally face the beach and the ghosts that had haunted him all his life but, although they hadn't talked for 50 years, hooked up with Queenie instead. She still loved him. They made plans for her to come to America and live with him. And the clocks. Instead he died. Pneumonia. Dead in a week. It didn't surprise me. Tomorrow I'm going to put that clock back out in the garage.







clocks normandy paris ghosts