Off by one

Elias Varga awoke on Tuesday at 5:59am, as he had everyday for the past fifty years. He lay in the dark waiting for the alarm to go off at 6:00. It never did. 

Elias could count a minute as easily as some men could carry a tune, it was the result of having been a watchmaker since he was sixteen, until his retirement last year. So, he was sure he’d counted sixty seconds since he awoke, but when he turned to look, the clock read 5:59 in bold red text. 

Sixty more seconds passed and finally, the alarm began to ring. Elias shut it off and sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the streaks of sunshine on the floor that were starting to spill through the window blinders. He made a mental note to go to town and buy a new battery for the alarm, since it was most definitely broken.

He carried on with his morning, a routine he’d repeated everyday for as long as he could recall. One he’d only missed once, for those three dreadful months he’d spent alternating between his home and the hospital last year. And the following two weeks, when he hadn’t found the will to get out of bed. 

He set the drip coffee going, and as he did every morning, he forgot about it until it had gone cold in the pot. It had always been Ruth who had poured him his cup and brought it to him. He still hadn’t gotten used to doing it for himself this past year. Ruth, who had also kept every clock in the house a minute fast. “So we’re never late for each other,” she used to say, and he had pretended it annoyed him. The week after the funeral, he had gone through the rooms and set them all back to the correct time.

With a cup of lukewarm coffee he stood at the window. It should have been 7:02, so the commuter train should have crossed the river bridge, its horn sounding twice the way it had every weekday since the line was built. The bridge stayed empty.

Elias counted again, lips moving. At sixty, the horn sounded twice, faint and ordinary, and the train slid across the water as if nothing at all were wrong.

He fetched his wristwatch from the nightstand, and sure enough, it read 7:02. He checked his kitchen clock, his living room clock, and the time on the cellphone his nephew had bought him last Christmas. All agreed. 

He decided, over his second cup of cold coffee, that the problem was him. What happened was that he was near turning seventy-six and most likely some wire in his head had gone loose, and he started feeling time wrong the way other men start forgetting their own names. His father had gone the same way at the end, insisting it was Sunday for three days in a row.

Despite himself, he couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that something was off. So, to be thorough, he took the old shortwave down from the top of the bookcase. It had been his father's too, and Elias had kept it tuned for decades to the government time station: a dry voice reading the minute and a sequence of beeps, each one a second. He used to set his shop by it every Monday. 

The beeps came through the static, steady and sure, and the tone marked the minute exactly when his kitchen clock said it should. So there it was. All’s in order. 

The only thing out of step was him. That frightened him more than he expected. Someone else might have shrugged it off as a minor sign of old age, but Elias had trusted his sense of time over any clock his whole life. If that was slipping, the rest of him would surely follow. 

He would go into town later in the day, buy a new battery for the alarm clock, and stop counting.

The bell over the hardware store door was still broken, so it made a dull clunking sound instead of a ring. Dana was behind the counter with a pen in her teeth, sorting through a box of hinges. 

“Good day, Dana”.

"Mr. Varga. Haven't seen you in a while." She said without looking up from her task.

"I've been busy." He hadn't been. He set the alarm clock on the counter. "Battery for this, please."

She turned it over in her hands. "Died on you?"

"It’s running slow."

"Huh. That’s strange, usually they just quit." She dug through the bin behind her. "My mom's blinks twelve every time there's a storm. She's stopped fixing it. Says it ain’t the President she’ll keep waiting at work if she wakes up late. She’ll get there when she gets there"

Elias smiled. Dana snapped the battery in, and the red numbers blinked and settled. She glanced at her phone and turned the clock around to show him. "There you go. Good as the day you bought it."

It matched her phone. Her phone matched the clock above their heads. He looked at all three and said nothing.

“Just that?" Dana asked.

"Do you have a 371? A watch cell."

"Haven’t had an order like this from you in a while. Whatcha working on Mr. Varga?"

"It's Mrs. Henderson's. She keeps bringing her watches to me like I'm still open."

Dana laughed and pulled open a drawer. "Out. I can get one on Saturday's truck. Today's what, Tuesday? Can she survive four days without knowing what time it is?"

"She'll manage."

"I'll put your name on it." She scribbled on the order pad. "Anything else?"

He hesitated. "Brass rod, three millimeter. Small level. And a spool of black thread."

Dana raised an eyebrow, and for a second he thought she would ask. Instead she went off down the aisle to find the level. He was grateful. He didn't want to explain why he meant to build a noon mark. That it was so the sun could tell him, plainly and finally, that he was a foolish old man.

That afternoon he cleared the south windowsill of the workshop and built it: a pulled threat, a brass pin to cast a shadow, a line etched into the wood where the shadow would fall when the sun stood highest. Clockmakers had set their towns this way for centuries. He knew the correction for early October. But noon had already passed, and the sun would not give him its verdict until tomorrow.

He tried to go about the rest of his day as usual, but it kept catching him off guard, like the way your foot drops when you expect one more step on the stairs and there isn’t one. The mail came late. The St. Agnes bells rang late. The evening news started late. Nobody else seemed to notice as the whole town was hanging back half a step.

At night, he could not sleep. At half past eleven he put on his coat. 

The Starlite was the only thing open on the square after ten. Inside, a waitress named Marisol, whom he’d gotten to know the nights he’d gone to get something to eat late in the night when he was keeping Ruth company in the hospital, greeted him kindly. Yet, Elias felt the sadness in her tone. He hadn’t gone to the Starlite since Ruth passed. 

A radio murmured in the kitchen. Elias ordered a soda he didn’t want and took the stool at the end of the counter, by the window. Two truckers sat a few seats down. Through the front window, across the dark square, the face of the St. Agnes' clock glowed as if to challenge him to defy its claim on the hour.

When he was close to finishing his drink, the minute hand on St. Agnes reached the top. To his right, one of the truckers belted a laugh and swung around on his stool, his elbow caught his mug. Elias jerked on instinct to catch it. But the mug never reached his hand.

The radio had cut off mid-word, not into silence but into a kind of pressure, like being underwater. As Elias turned, he saw the ceiling fan hung with its blades at rest. A moth that had been flying over the light at the register held still in the air. Marisol stood still with the coffee pot tilted, and the man sitting in front of her waited infinitely for coffee that was not reaching his cup. The mug that should have collided with his hand, lay floating in the air.

He closed his hand around the mug, and turned it upright. The spilled coffee came with it, folding back into the cup. It was warm in his hand as he set it on the counter. It weighed what a mug of coffee weighs.

He got off his stool with his heart pounding and walked a few steps across the dinner, while nothing else in the world moved. And he counted, because he couldn't help it.

At sixty, the diner started again.

The radio finished its word. The moth hit the light. The trucker's elbow finished its swing through empty air and he grabbed for a mug that was no longer falling, that was sitting on the counter in front of him, full.

Marisol's pour filled her customer's cup and she turned to find Elias standing right behind her. She jumped.

"How'd you get over here?" she said casually, and walked away giggling.

Across the square, the St. Agnes clock read twelve o'clock exactly. It had not moved through any of it. It was beginning, only now, to count the minute Elias had already lived. He looked down at his wrist. His watch read one minute past twelve. He looked up at St. Agnes, and at the clock over Marisol's register, which agreed with it, and back down at his watch, which had never in forty years been wrong by so much as a second, and which had come through the minute with him.

At noon the next day, Elias couldn’t contain his anticipation. He didn’t entertain the idea that his mind had slipped so far from him that he could have imagined what happened yesterday at the diner. No, something was definitely at play here. So when the shadow of the brass pin crept onto the scored line, he began to count out loud.

At sixty, his watch reached noon. It had gone through the minute at the diner with him, so it was only one behind. The kitchen clock took longer. He counted all the way to a hundred and twenty before it caught up. Two minutes. He’d suspected as much that morning, waiting twice as long for his alarm. 

So it wasn’t him. It had never been him. And he had been right. The excitement lasted about as long as it took to understand the rest, the world had slipped another minute overnight, and only him and what he carried with him had been left unfrozen. If it happened again tonight, it would be three minutes. He set his watch by the sun, clamped it on, and decided he would not take it off again.

That night, he set up in the workshop the way he used to set up for a difficult repair. The lamp angled low, his loupe, a notebook ruled into columns.

Just before midnight by the house clocks, he held his breath.

The minute came the way it had in the diner, all at once. The radio’s hum cut out. The faucet in the corner sink, which had dripped for a decade because he’d never gotten around to fixing it, held a drop at the end of its spout.

On his wrist, his watch kept ticking, the only sound in the house.

He counted, steady and sure. Sixty seconds later, the drop fell, and the house came alive again.

He went up the stairs and through the house and checked every clock against his watch. Three minutes behind. One for every midnight since Tuesday. In the kitchen, a single cup sat on the counter beside the coffee pot. He did not remember taking it down.

He sat in the kitchen for a while. At this rate, by Christmas the sun would be rising more than an hour late by every clock, and someone would notice: an astronomer, a pilot, some bored teenager with a telescope. His hands wouldn’t stay still on the table. Fifty years at the bench had taught him that anything running slow could be fixed. Open the case and find the issue. But there was no case to open here. He couldn’t take the world apart on a cloth and set it right. And who would he even tell? Dana, who’d smile at him the way you smile at old men who tell you bizarre stories? His nephew, who’d have him in a home by spring? He sat there turning the cup in his hands and listened to every clock in the house go on being wrong.

The next night, he went outside. He stood at the end of his front walk just before midnight in his coat and slippers, the street quiet and lamplit, a dog barking somewhere down the street. When the clocks reached twelve, the barking stopped, and the silence pressed against his ears, and the smoke from the Hendersons' chimney stood above their roof in an unmoving shape.

He went down the middle of the road, where no car would hit him, past a cat frozen in a crouch on the Morrows' porch with its eyes catching the streetlight. He looked down the long slope of the street toward the square, every window either dark or lit, but unchanging.

Except for one. His own. Turning back to his house, he saw the kitchen light was on. He hadn’t left it on.

There was a figure against the glow. Someone standing at the sink, looking out at the dark yard. Elias’ breath caught. It was too far to see a face. He saw the line of the shoulders, and the head tilting slightly to the right.

At sixty, the dog finished its bark, the kitchen window turned dark, and Elias let out his breath.

Lying awake, he kept returning to the way the figure had tilted its head. He had not been afraid to enter his home after seeing it. He knew that gesture. He had known it for forty years, across rooms and kitchens, lights on or off, he knew exactly whose gesture that was.

The next night, he did not go outside. He sat in the dark kitchen in his coat, his watch on, and waited for his visitor. 

When the clocks reached twelve, the refrigerator went quiet. Then the light over the stove came on.

She was at the counter, as if she had always been there. Gray cardigan, hair pinned up loosely, a few strands come down at the neck. Two cups sat beside her, handles turned the same way. Beside them, steam hung above the coffee pot, white and still as carved stone.

"Ruth," he said. It came out hoarse, like a word he hadn't used in a long time. It was.

She didn't turn. "You let the coffee go cold every morning," she said to the window. "All year, Eli. Every single morning."

"I forget I put it on."

"You forget I'm not here."

Then she turned around. She looked the way she had before the hospital, and she looked at him with such ordinary fondness that his eyes stung. “You’ve lost weight. And you’re sitting in your own kitchen in your coat like a man waiting for the bus.”

"When have I ever not tried to look nice for you Ruthie? I knew you’d come."

"I've come every night. You kept looking in the wrong places." She shook her head. 

He laughed, and it hurt. He looked at the clock over the door. “It’s been you. All those minutes.”

"Borrowed." She took his hand. Her fingers were warm. "You set every clock in this house back the week after. I watched you do it."

"I couldn't stand them being fast. I kept being ready too early and stood here like a fool."

“I know. So every night, I kept one for us.” She squeezed his hand. “The first one was only enough to watch you sleep. Last night, you saw me in the window. Five minutes, and there’s finally enough of me to hold your hand.”

His watch ticked on his wrist. He glanced at it, because he hadn’t been counting. 

"How long do we—"

"Tonight? A minute." A small shrug. "If you stay, I don't think anyone's counting. Except for you, maybe."

"And if I don't stay?."

"Then you don't. I’ll stop coming" She tilted her head, the way she had in the window. "I wasn't going to just take you, Eli. I wanted to ask. You always hated being rushed."

Elias thought of his quiet house, the clocks keeping their correct and lonely time.

He unbuckled his watch and set it on the counter beside the cups.

Ruth smiled. Behind her, the coffee pot began, very slowly, to drip.

Dana came by the following Wednesday with Mr Varga’s watch batteries, because he hadn't been in all week to retrieve them. And he was not a man who forgot things.

The door was unlocked. The house was tidy. Two cups sat washed on the drying rack. His wristwatch lay on the kitchen counter, stopped at twelve.

She called his name once, then twice. Nothing. So, Dana left the battery on the counter beside his watch and let herself out. 

Down by the river, the train crossed the bridge and sounded its horn twice, right on time by every clock in town. Five minutes late by the sun. But nobody’s counting these days.