Count The Clock That Tells The Time

COUNT THE CLOCK.

THAT TELLS THE TIME.

By Harlan Ellison.

When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls all silver"d o"er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer"s green all girded up in sheaves Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard; Then of the beauty do I question make, That thou among the wastes of time must go . . .

William Shakespeare, The Xllth Sonnet

Waking in the cool and cloudy absolute dead middle of a Sat.u.r.day afternoon one day, Ian Ross felt lost and vaguely frightened. Lying there in his bed, he was disoriented, and it took him a moment to remember when it was and where he was. Where he was: in the bed where he had awakened every day of his 35-year-old life. When it was: the Sat.u.r.day he had resolved to spend doing something. But as he lay there he realized he had come to life in the early hours just after dawn, it had looked as though it would rain, the sky seen through the high French windows, and he had turned over and gone back to sleep. Now the clock-radio on the bedside table told him it was the absolute dead middle of the afternoon; and the world outside his windows was cool and cloudy. "Where does the time go?" he said.

He was alone, as always: there was no one to hear him or to answer. So he continued lying there, wasting time, feeling vaguely frightened. As though something important were pa.s.sing him by.

A fly buzzed him,, circled, buzzed him again. It had been annoying him for some time. He tried to ignore the intruder and stared off across Loch Tummel to the amazing flesh tones of the October trees, preparing themselves for Winter"s disingenuous attentions and the utter absence of tourism. The silver birches were already a blazing gold, the larches and ash trees still blending off from green to rust; in a few weeks the Norway spruces and the other conifers would darken until they seemed mere shadows against the, slate sky.

Perthshire was most beautiful at this time of year. He had taken the time to learn to p.r.o.nounce the names-Schiehallion, Killiecrankie,

Pitlochry, Aberfeldy-and had come here to sit. The dream. The one he had always held: silent, close to him, unspoken, in his idle thoughts. The dream of going to Scotland. For what reason he could not say. But this was the place that had always called, and he had come.

For the first time in his life, Ian Ross had done something. Thirty-seven years old, rooted to a tiny apartment in Chicago, virtually friendless, working five days a week at a drafting table in a firm of industrial designers, watching television till sign-off, tidying the two and a half rooms till every picture hung from the walls in perfect true with the junctures of walls and ceiling, entering each checkbook notation in the little ledger with a fine-point ink pen, unable to remember what had happened last Thursday that made it different from last Wednesday, seeing himself reflected in the window of the cafeteria slowly eating the $2.95 Christmas Dinner Special, a solitary man, somehow never making the change of the seasons save to understand only by his skin that it was warmer or colder, never tasting joy because he could never remember having been told what it was, reading books about things and subject matter, topics not people, because he knew so few people and knew none of them, drawing straight lines, feeling deserted but never knowing where to put his hands to relieve that feeling: a transient man, pa.s.sing down the same streets every day and perceiving only dimly that there were streets beyond those streets, drinking water and apple juice, and water, replying when he was addressed directly, looking around sometimes when he was addressed to see if it was, in fact, himself to whom the speaker was speaking, buying gray socks and white undershorts, staring out the windows of his apartment at the Chicago snow, staring for hours at the invisible sky, feeling the demon wind off Lake Michigan rattling the window gla.s.s in its frame and thinking this year he would reputty and this year failing to reputty, combing his hair as he always had, cooking his own meals, alone with the memories of his mother and father who had died within a year of each other and both from cancer, never having been able to speak more than a few awkward sentences to any woman but his mother . . . Ian Ross had lived his life like the dust that lay in a film across the unseen top of the tall wardrobe cabinet in his bedroom; colorless, unnoticed, inarticulate, neither giving nor taking.

Until one day he had said. "Were does the time go?" And in the months following those words he had come to realize he had not, in any remotely valuable manner, lived his life. He had wasted it. Months after the first words came, unbidden and tremulous, he admitted to himself that he had wasted his life.

He resolved to actualize at least the one dream. To go to Scotland. Perhaps to live. To rent or even buy a crofter"s cottage on the edge of a moor or overlooking one of the lochs he had dreamed about. He had all the insurance money still put by; he hadn"t touched a cent of

it. And there, in that far, chill place in the north he would live . . . walking the hills with a dog by his side, smoking a pipe that trailed a fragrant pennant of blue-white smoke, hands thrust deep into the pocket of a fleece-lined jacket. He would live there. That was the dream.

And from King"s Cross Station he had taken the 2130 sleeper to Edinburgh, and he had walked the Royal Mile and gazed in wonder at Edinburgh Castle high on the bluff overlooking that bountiful city, and finally he had rented a car and had driven north out the Queens ferry Road, across the bridge that spanned the Firth of Forth, on up the A-90 till he reached Pitlochry. Then a left, a random left, but not so random that he did not know it would come out overlooking the Queens View, said to be the most beautiful view in the world, certainly in Scotland; and he had driven the twisting, narrow road till he was deep in the hills of Perth.

And there he had pulled off the road, gotten out of the car, leaving the door open, and walked away down the October hills ,to finally sit staring at the Loch, green and blue and silent as the mirror of his memory.

Where only the buzzing fly reminded him of the past.

He had been 35 when he said. "Where does the time go?" And he was 37 as he sat on the hill.

And it was there that the dream died.

He stared at the hills, at the valley that ran off to left and right, at the sparkling water of the Loch, and knew he had wasted his time again. He had resolved to do something; but he had done nothing. Again.

There was no place for him here.

He was out of phase with all around him. He was an alien object. A beer can thrown into the gra.s.s. A broken wall untended and falling back into the earth from which it had been wrenched stone by stone.

He felt lonely, starved, incapable of clenching his hands or clearing his throat. A ruin from another world, set down in foreign soil, drinking air that was not his to drink. There were no tears, no pains in his body, no deep and trembling sighs. In a moment, with a fly buzzing, the dream died for him. He had not been saved; had, in fact, come in an instant to understand that he had been a child to think it could ever change. What do you want to be when you grow up? Nothing. As I have always been nothing.

The sky began to bleach out.

The achingly beautiful golds and oranges and yellows began to drift toward sepia. The blue of the loch slid softly toward chalkiness, like an ineptly prepared painting left too long in direct sunlight. The sounds of birds and forest creatures and insects faded, the gain turned down slowly. The sun gradually cooled for Ian Ross. The sky began to bleach out toward a gray-white newsprint colorlessness. The fly was gone. It was cold now; very cold now.

Shadows began to superimpose themselves over the dusty mezzotint of the bloodless day: A city of towers and minarets, as seen through shallow, disturbed water; a mountain range of glaciers with snow untracked and j endless as an ocean; an ocean, with ma.s.sive, . serpent-necked creatures gliding through the jade deeps; a parade of ragged children bearing crosses hewn from tree branches; a great walled fortress in the middle of a parched wasteland, the yellow earth split like strokes of lightning all around the structure; a motorway with hundreds of cars speeding past so quickly they seemed to be stroboscopic lines of colored light: a battlefield with men in flowing robes and riding great-chested stallions, the sunlight dancing off curved swords and helmets; a tornado careening through a small town of slat back stores and houses, lifting entire buildings from their foundations and flinging them into the sky; a river of lava burst through a fissure in the ground and boiled toward a shadowy indication of an amus.e.m.e.nt park, with throngs of holiday tourists moving in clots from one attraction to another.

Ian Ross sat, frozen, on the hillside. The world was dying around him. No . . . it was vanishing, fading out, dematerializing. As if all the sand had run out of the hourgla.s.s around him; as if he were the only permanent, fixed, and immutable object in a metamorphosing universe suddenly cut loose from its time anchor.

The world faded out around Ian Ross: the shadows boiled and seethed and slithered past him, caught in a cyclonic wind-tunnel and swept away past him, leaving him in darkness.

He sat now, still, quiet, too isolated to be frightened.

He thought perhaps clouds had covered the sun.

There was no sun.

He thought perhaps it had been an eclipse, that his deep concentration of his hopeless state had kept him from noticing.

There was no sun.

No sky. The ground beneath him was gone. He sat, merely sat, but on nothing, surrounded by nothing, seeing and feeling nothing save a vague chill. It was cold now, very cold now.

After a long time he decided to stand and did stand: there was nothing beneath or above him. He stood in darkness.

He could remember everything that had ever happened to him in his life. Every moment of it, with absolute clarity. It was something he had never experienced before. His memory had been no better or worse than anyone else"s, but he had forgotten all the details, many years in which nothing had happened, during which he had wasted time-almost as a mute witness at the dull rendition of his life.

But now, as he walked through the limbo that was all he had been left of the world, he recalled everything perfectly. The look of terror on his mother"s face when he had sliced through the

tendons of his left hand with the lid from the tin can of pink lemonade: he had been four years old. The feel of his new Thom McAn shoes that had always been too tight from the moment they had been bought but that he had been forced to wear to school every day, even though they rubbed him raw at the back of his heels: he s had been seven years old. The Four Freshmen standing and singing for the graduation dance. He had been alone. He had bought one ticket to support the school event. He had been 16. The taste of egg roll at Choy"s, the first time. He had been 24. The woman he had met at the library, in the section where they kept the books on animals. She had used a white lace handkerchief to dry her temples. It had smelled of perfume. He had been 30. He remembered all the sharp edges of every moment from his past. It was remarkable. In this nowhere.

And he walked through gray s.p.a.ces, with the shadows of other times and other places swirling past. The sound of rushing wind, as though the emptiness through which he moved was being constantly filled and emptied, endlessly, without measure or substance.

Had he known what emotions to call on for release, he would have done so. But he was numb in his skin. Not merely chilled, as this empty place was chilled, but somehow inured to feeling from the edge of his perceptions to the center of his soul. Sharp, clear, drawn back from the absolute past, he remembered a day when he had been 11, when his mother had suggested that for his birthday they make a small party to which he would invite a few friends. And so (he remembered with diamond bright perfection), he had invited six boys and girls. They had never come. He sat alone in the house that Sat.u.r.day, all his comic books laid out in case the cake and party favors and pin the-tail-on-the-donkey did not hold their attention sufficiently. Never came. It grew dark. He sat alone, with his mother occasionally walking through the living room to make some consoling remark. But he was alone, and he knew there was only one reason for it: they had all forgotten. It was simply that he was a waste of .time of those actually living their lives. Invisible, by token of being unimportant. A thing unnoticed: on a street, who notices the mailbox, the fire hydrant, the crosswalk lines? He was an invisible, useless thing.

He had never permitted another party to be thrown for him.

He remembered that Sat.u.r.day now. And found the emotion, 26 years late, to react to this terrible banishment of the world. He began to tremble uncontrollably, and he sat down where there was nothing to sit down on, and he rubbed his hands together, feeling the tremors in his knuckles and the ends of his fingers. Then he felt the constriction in his throat, he turned his head this way and that, looking for a nameless exit from self-pity and loneliness; and then he cried. Lightly, softly, because he had no experience at it.

A crippled old woman came out of the gray

mist of nowhere and stood watching him. His eyes were closed, or he would have seen her coming.

After a while, he snuffled, opened his eyes, and saw her standing in front of him. He stared at her. She was standing. At a level somewhat below him, as though the invisible ground of this nonexistent place was on a lower plane than that on which he sat.

"That won"t help much," she said. She wasn"t surly, but neither was there much succor in her tone.

He looked at her and immediately stopped crying.

"Probably just got sucked in here," she said. It was not quite a question, though it had something of query in it. She knew and was going carefully.

He continued to look at her, hoping she could tell him what had happened to him. And to her? She was here, too.

"Could be worse," she said, crossing her arms and shifting her weight off her twisted left leg. "I could"ve been a Saracen or a ribbon clerk or even one of those hairy pre-humans." He didn"t respond. He didn"t know what she was talking about. She smiled wryly, remembering. "First person I met was some kind of a r.e.t.a.r.d, little boy about 15 or so. Must have spent what there"d been of his life in some padded cell or a hospital bed, something like that. He just sat there and stared at me, drooled a little, couldn"t tell me a thing. I was scared out of my mind, ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. Wasn"t till a long time after that before I met someone who spoke English."

He tried to speak and found his throat was dry. His voice came out in a croak. He swallowed and wet his lips. "Are there many other, uh, other people . . . we"re not all alone . . . ?"

"Lots of others. Hundreds, thousands. G.o.d only knows; maybe whole countries full of people here. No animals, though. They don"t waste it the way we do."

"Waste it? What?"

"Time, son. Precious, lovely time. That"s all there is, just time. Sweet, flowing time. Animals don"t know about time."

As she spoke, a slipping shadow of some wild scene whirled past and through them. It was a great city in flames. It seemed more substantial than the vagrant wisps of countryside or sea scenes that had been ribboning past them as they spoke. The wooden buildings and city towers seemed almost solid enough to crush anything in their path. Flames leaped toward the gray, dead-skin sky; enormous tongues of crackling flame that ate the city"s gut and chewed the phantom image, leaving ash. (But even the dead ashes had more life than the grayness through which the vision swirled.)

Ian Ross ducked, frightened. Then it was gone.

"Don"t worry about it, son," the old woman said. "Looked a lot like London during the Big Fire. First the Plague, then the Fire. I"ve seen its

like before. Can"t hurt you. None of it can hurt you."

He tried to stand, found himself still weak. "But what is it?"

She shrugged. "No one"s ever been able to tell me for sure. Bet there"s some around in here who can, though. One day I"ll run into one of them. If I find out and we ever meet again I"ll be sure to let you know. Bound to happen." But her face grew infinitely sad and there was desolation in her expression. "Maybe. Maybe we"ll meet again. Never happens, but it might. Never saw that r.e.t.a.r.ded boy again. But it might happen."

She started to walk away, hobbling awkwardly. Ian got to his feet with difficulty, but as quickly as he could. "Hey wait! Where are you going? Please, lady don"t leave me here all alone. I"m scared to be here all alone. I"m scared to be here by myself."

She stopped and turned, tilting oddly on her bad leg. "Got to keep moving. Keep going, you know? If you stay in one place, you don"t get anywhere: there"s a way out . . . you"ve just got to keep moving till you find it." She started again, saying, over her shoulder, "I guess I won"t be seeing you again: I don"t think it"s likely."

He ran after her and grabbed her arm. She seemed very startled. As if no one had ever touched her in this place during all the time she had been here.