The Iron Clock

I can't remember the exact details, so this conversation is a lie, mostly. It's a figment of my imagination. And it goes like this:
Daddy, what is that?
What do you think it is? –which was said without kindness.
But what is that, Daddy?
I have work to do. If you want to keep coming into my study all the time you have to let me work.
Yes, Daddy. And I waited patiently. Three seconds later I asked again: But what is that?
I picture him sighing. He would rub the bridge of his nose if he wore glasses, or if he didn't wear glasses he would run a hand through his hair—graying at the roots.
It's a clock. Like my wristwatch, or maybe more like the Big Ben. A clock. It tells time, and it's very good at it. It's made of iron.

Today is May 22nd, a Tuesday. I'm supposed to be in school but in the morning I ditched—walked out the door of my house. My father would have given me hell if he'd been around, but that doesn't matter anymore. Nothing matters much these days. I'm free to spend my time as I please.
It is 1:31 pm. I've been wandering for three hours and eleven minutes, following a pattern my feet remember but nothing else does, and two hours and fifty minutes ago I ended up in the Janss. I was running.
It's a kind of chronic disease I've had since I was fifteen. Every now and then I would find myself out the door, gone just like that, leaping across miles of pavement, desperate for movement, for action, randomly, a girl gone mad. Nothing ever comes of it. I just run around burning off steam for a couple minutes, and then I'm back, silent and desperate and dying slowly from the inside.
Warm air breathes on my flushed face. I let the sweat soak through my shirt as the sun fries the back of my neck. I'm walking now, the disease had subsided over eleven thousand seconds ago, but now I'm lost. I don't even try to get back to school. I couldn't make it on time, anyways.
I can't tell if the Janss is different from how I remember it. I see the cars passing by in a flash of light and a brief, hot blast of wind, but there is nothing special about that. I see trees, and street lights, and a gas station, but all of those are so common I don't notice them unless I try. I walk along the path I had walked every day of my life up until three years ago, and I feel no sense of familiarity. There is nothing to be remembered about these streets.
My feet carry me away from the business district and deep into the residential area, the place with long rows of houses and neat flowers and trees squeezed into every open crack in the concrete. And I walk past the houses. They're quite nice, mostly; they display bushels of roses, jasmine vines, a fountain peppered with water lilies. For fun, I picture myself living in each house when I'm seventy years old. Gardening. Planting. Retired. Alone.
I get a bitter taste in my mouth and I stop imagining. What would be the point of that?—seventy years slaving away for a better future, and you spend your last days tending a garden all by yourself in a house that's falling apart. And then I think about how far I've gone in my own eighteen years.
It's simple math:

average efficiency of a lifetime = accomplishments/time spent

I try dividing (an almost-memory pieced together after three years of wandering) by (567,648,000 seconds). It rounds to zero.

November 3rd, 11:31 am, I first saw the intruder of my father's study. My father was forty-one and three months. I was seven. I was old enough to know what a clock was, but this machine was like nothing I had ever seen.
It towered above me on a slate gray pedestal that rose five feet up. Its frame reflected light like a halo of splintered silver. On the top there was a broad flat disc with numbers bordering it all around, and two arrows pointed from the center of the disc to the numbers. Each second was pronounced like a sermon.
Ever since it was carried through the door, the room was soaked with the smell of ancient formaldehyde. The carpet. The clothes. The stacks of crisp paper. It was somber and uncompromising and its strangeness made my father's study strange.
I hated it.
But my father didn't seem to mind, because he loved that clock and forgave its small inconveniences. Time was his life; time was everything to him. He could weave tapestries with the laws of cause and effect. When I was late for the bus, he exploded in his quiet way that was more like implosion, or a cold disgust.
You're coming with me, he said. And on the 11th of March, 11:13 pm, he dragged me to the store and bought me a wristwatch that clicked audibly and told me that to keep from being late ever again I had to imprint the interval between each second into my mind, which was apparently a form of training to develop a precise internal machine and to always be aware of the time.
Or something like that. I don't remember exactly.
From then on a muffled ticking followed me every second of the day, my plastic wristwatch in school, my father's iron clock at home. It was especially painful at night, when I could hear the clock through the wall and the watch from my desk both at the same time. They weren't synchronized. Together they formed a discordant, limping lullaby made up of two beats and one rhythm, unable to communicate. Just like everything else about my father and me.
His strategy didn't work, in the end. There was only ever one day I wasn't late for the bus, and that was May 22nd, three years ago. I reached the bus stop at exactly 5:20 pm and boarded at 5:22.
Five minutes and twenty-two seconds later I realized it was going in the wrong direction.

A pretty little coupé, as red as a prostitute's lipstick. I'm crossing the street and it closes in on me too fast. Panicked, I jolt to a stop.
It screeches past three inches in front of my toes. It sways to the left, glinting in the sun, and then veers into a cobblestone driveway viciously. A boy opens the passenger door before it reaches a complete stop.
"Adam!"
He jerks out of the car, one hand on the frame like he wants to tear it off its hinges, the other hand on a phone. He slams the door shut. His eyes are turned downwards at the phone.
"Wait!" The driver's door opens and a high-heeled shoe sticks out. "Adam! Listen to me!"
I watch. The engine is still running, which annoys me.
The boy walks with long forceful strides to the house and grabs the door handle, but it's locked. He curses.
"Jesus, we almost hit somebody." The mother emerges from the car and looks my way. "I'm so sorry about that. Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," I want to say, but the "I" gets tangled in my throat. I swallow.
"Oh, God. Adam! Get back here and apologize!"
He half-turns and snaps, "You were the one driving." I stare at him, my face blank. His mother rushes toward me and gingerly touches my shoulder like I was made of glass.
"Are you alright? I'm so sorry, my son and I were having an argument and I wasn't looking at the road…"
I nod stiffly. My brain is slowly working it out: the average human walks 4.5 feet per second, with a reaction speed at around two-tenths of a second; a car going at ten miles per hour travels 880 feet per second. Simple math.
If I'd seen the car one second later I would have died.
"Adam! Come here!" She tries to meet my eyes, but I'm looking at the coupé. "Are you hurt anywhere? Is it just shock? Let me get you a drink of water. Sit down."
"It's fine," I suddenly say. "I need to go home now."
"What? Are you sure?"
"Yes," I say flatly, and I know it's for the most part a lie. I need to go home, that's all I'm sure about. I just don't know where it is.
"Mom, stop bothering her," the boy mutters.
She pauses. "Oh. I'm—I'm sorry."
"It's fine." I add as an afterthought, "Would your son remember you if you died?"
She withdraws her hand. "What? What do you mean?"
"Nothing. Sorry. Thanks." I walk away and realize how cold my limbs have become.
"Take care on your way home," the woman calls after me. She sounds afraid.
And I replay the moment where I almost could have died, over and over in my head, bright and clear in my memory as the coupé's red paint.
And all I can think is, It ended just like that?

My last conversation with my father went something like this: I won't be back until late, so don't wait for me. Eat your breakfast, I left it in the fridge. Do your homework. Don't miss the bus. Use your time wisely. And before I could even see straight he was out the door.
It was all perfectly normal. So I ate breakfast like normal, and got ready for school, and like normal I was late for the bus.
At 11:31 am, May 22nd, my father got hit by a car and died.

It only took a moment, I was told.
And so I would ask, How many seconds is a moment? I needed to know. But people didn't understand; they'd look at me funny, and they'd say, a little hesitantly: I don't know. But it was very fast.

The sun has set when I reach the bus stop. My watch says 5:22, which doesn't make sense, because a night as black as this should be past 6:00 at least. Maybe it's stopped. Well, about time—it's been broken for three years now.
The bus is waiting for me, empty, serene, cold. The streets are empty. I stop in front of the door, and I see a pamphlet taped on it that says,

TIME TRAVEL

change one moment of your past in exchange for your future

I laugh out loud. And I say, "Take it."
The door hisses open for me, a portal of orange rectangular light in a sea of purple darkness. I mount the steps. The bus has no passengers, no driver. I sit in one of the seats and say to the air, "Three years ago, 5:52 a.m."
The door creaks shut slowly. And the bus begins to drive.

"…You've got a lifetime ahead of you, but a lifetime goes by fast. You've got to spend your time wisely."
I stare at the ceiling of my room. And then I throw off the covers and leap out of bed. "Dad!" I yell.
"What? I won't be back until 3 a.m. tomorrow morning, so don't wait for me."
I run out the door of my room and storm into my father's study, barefoot and still in pajamas. My father is slipping on his boots. He looks up at me quizzically.
"What?"
His face is stern and focused, his hair is black, cropped short to his ears. He has brown eyes. To others it might have been a nondescript face, maybe even a little ugly; but to me everything is just right. I stare at it and try to emblazon it into my memory. And then I turn, and I see it.
The iron clock is split in half, a clean fissure running along its entire length. Rusted springs and gears twitch convulsively and silently in the open air, spilling onto the carpet. My wrist is bare.
My father doesn't notice—can't notice. "What?" he asks again, annoyed.
"…Nothing," I whisper.
"Huh. Alright. Call me if you need anything."
My father's voice is like music. But the incessant ticking in my head and the painful, pounding restlessness are overshadowing it. One moment. One moment.
"I left your breakfast in the fridge."
"Dad…"
He gets up and pulls on his coat, ignoring me. "Don't miss your bus to school. Don't miss your bus back home either."
"Dad…?" So much to say. I grit my teeth, a hand on my throat.
"Watch the time." He steps through the wooden frame of the front door. One old brown loafer inside, one out. Balanced on the edge of eternity.
I grab the hem of his coat.
He turns on me, exasperated, and the purposeful expression on his face sours. "What? Come on, say it! I haven't got all day."
I open my mouth.
One moment.
I want to remember you, I want to get to know you. What was your childhood like? How did you get those lines in your face?
Who are you, really?
There's so much I wanted to tell you, but it never seemed like the right time, and you were always working. I get lost in our own house, did you know that? I can barely make it to the next block before north becomes south and the world clamps shut. I think there's something wrong with me. Or this place. I don't know this place.
When did you stop looking me in the eye?
One moment isn't enough. I can't even yell at you for abandoning me, can't tell you how much I missed you in those seconds that added up, added up, waiting for you to come back, looking for you, how much I hated you for that. Three years—how am I supposed to condense three years of longing into words that you can understand? Moments add up like sand in the desert or drops in the ocean, they pour together in an hourglass and form waves. What can a single moment do?
One moment to say the most important thing in the world.
"I love you."
He looks surprised for an instance. The eyebrows tilt. And then he smiles, the hard lines of his face crinkle around his lips like soft leather. His eyes are warm, and I know he understands.
"I love you too."
I watch his back retreat, a pale brown coat and a black suitcase in his hand. But when I close my eyes it's his face that I see. The afterimage burns for a long time.