Clockwork

[TW: Mental health, sexual abuse, physical abuse, death and grief]

"Do you believe in heaven?"

The clockmaker looks up from his winding gears.

"Why do you ask?"

"I'm just wondering," the student replies, skating a single finger over a line of dust on the mantle. "I mean, with someone with a profession like yours, you'd have to wonder."

The clockmaker raised his eyebrow, quizzically.

“You know,” the student continued, “Clockmaker? Time? Life? Death? C’mon, it’s totally on the nose.”

The clockmaker scoffs. "My job is no metaphor, child. I come in early, I leave late. I earn my paycheck from my handiwork. I feed my family."

"You live and you die."

"Yes, I suppose I do. But there's more to hard work than that."

The student scoffed. "The last time we talked, you said it was the divine plan. That we all just live and die. Now you're saying there's more than that? Make up your mind."

The door jingled as the last few customers left. The sun sunk low in the sky, and beams of heavy orange glow shone through the musty windows.

"I'm not saying that we simply live to die, nor that there is some overarching mystery that we must unsolve. I mean that we must find little joys in our monotony."

"And that's all life is?"

"In the end, yes. That's all."

The student kicked her feet. The clockmaker's hollow worktable wobbled. He would have to remember to reinstall the broken shelves.

"You didn't answer my question," the student observed.

"Which question?"

"Do you believe in heaven?"

The clockmaker wound his watch some more. The gears clicked and creaked, like a cricket at dusk. "No."

"But what about the 'divine plan'? I assumed you'd believe in an afterlife."

"I believe in an afterlife. Just not heaven."

The student looked at him, dubious, and he chuckled. "I mean, I don't believe in this acclaimed, cloudy palace in the sky with parties and virgins and angels. That's entirely unrealistic, and after all, it wouldn’t be a proper heaven–Even parties get boring after a while, and if everyone is displeased and bored, it would just become another Earth, not paradise."

"I never thought of it that way."

"Yes, well, I'm glad you're learning something while you interrupt my work."

"You love me!"

The clockmaker grinned, but still insisted, "I'm trying to be a contributing member of society, ever heard of that?"

The student giggled, resuming kicking her feet. "I’m too young to get a job! It sucks. There aren’t even any little kids around here to babysit."

"Enjoy being young. What comes after is long, and you'll soon tire of it."

"Oh, great, something to look forward to."

A couple swung past the windows, cutting deep gashes in the sunbeams and rustling the sign on the front door: SALE--Everything Must Go.

"What do you believe in, then," the student asked, watching the couple round the bend, "If not heaven?"

"The afterlife."

"But how is that different?"

The clockmaker sighed, placing down his tools. "It's not a reward for living well, or a punishment for living in sin; it's simply the end. A rewind of the best of life. A treasure trove of memories, where the best can be relived and new ones can be built from the scraps."

"And you think we stay there forever?"

"Well, obviously we're not there forever, we'd run out of things to dream about."

"Hah," the student said, eyes alight with humor, "I thought you'd be the kind of person to say that one can never run out of things to dream."

"Oh, hush. I'm logical, not some wishy-washy ancient wizard."

The student laughed aloud this time. The sun sank lower.

"I don't know how long we may exist in this dream state," the clockmaker continued, "it may only be for a moment, a second before we're truly gone, but I'm sure it's real. After that, we’re nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Energy. Breath. Absorbed into everything, lost into the world."

The student scoffed, and looked out the window once more. The sun was slowly hiding behind the buildings. It was getting late.

“I’ve got to go,” the student said, jumping down from her perch, “School tomorrow!”

The door jingled as she left.

The student didn’t cry when her father died.

She didn’t cry. Not once. She did try, though. She sat in a school bathroom stall during the lunch period, her head in her hands, thinking of every fading memory, every passing remark, every cat of hers that had ever ran away to try and squeeze a tear out. Nothing.

She always heard stories about cold, awful people who don’t care about death. She’s pretty sure it’s a symptom of being a sociopath, and if that was true that means that she’s truly evil, like the world keeps telling her she is. What if she kills someone some day and finds it eerily easy to hide the body and go on with her life? What if she’s built to be some narcissist CEO, running a company that profits on suffering and pain? What if not being able to cry about her father’s death is just the first indication of many that she was always meant to be a monster?

Other times, she doesn’t think she’s a monster. After all, she’s cried at other things: Her friendships ending, a redundant news report, the first little black C that had appeared on her fifth grade report card. She never had to force any of those tears– they came naturally, a stampede, announced by the rumblings of salty hooves that set her nose wobbling. Impossible to stop. Her mother tells her that when she was younger, nobody could stop her tantrums. She cried like her world was ending.

The last true time she cried, as a grown up, not a baby, she was at a sleepover, and the student and her friends watched some old space movie that moved at the speed of molasses. The other girls scrolled on their phones, reading, gossiping, groaning loud arguments. The student didn’t. The universe hummed along on the screen as various TikTok sounds droned; The student sat upright, raptured, holding a tipping bottle of her best friend’s parents’ liquor.

By the early morning, she had ended up sprawled on the floor of her best friend’s bathroom, heaving, as her face grew more and more soaked, tears stewing with sick and sweat.

Her best friend’s parents sent her home.

But no, she didn’t cry when her father died. Not at his funeral, as she sat in the back, staring at the mud on her boots while her mother shook hands, wincing and adjusting her cast. Not in the aftermath full of quiet sympathizers and pitying voices. Not at the moment of his passing, when her mother opened the door from his room and she forgot, for a moment, that she was supposed to be sad, and tried to make a joke to one of her cousins.

Sometimes she wondered, in the months following, if her apathy had something to do with the clockmaker. She had spoken to him years ago, now, when her father had just started treatment. She hadn’t even seen the man since, yet she wondered if his words eased her pain, somehow, and helped her see the beauty in the end of life– especially when that life had given her her own.

It was a beautiful excuse.

On the one year anniversary of his death, they held a memorial. The student stood as her mother cried, as her uncle wept, as her sister gave a concealing cough. She stood straight through it all, and then similarly in her bathroom mirror many hours later, late at night, wondering if she was a monster.

When she was young, the student died.

Not really, of course, but her heart stopped for a minute. The well told story was that someone (her mother, her father, they all told different versions) found her choking on a bench, blue lipped, crying, during a friend’s birthday party at a trampoline park. She wasn’t really sure why she went, since he was a boy and none of the boys at school ever liked her. They said she was too mean to be fun. Naturally, this made her more mean. Who cares? They’re boys. None of them cared.

But it didn’t matter now, because she was dying. She cried, because she was in pain.

They rushed her to the hospital, and they plugged her in. A tube in her spine, a rebreather in her mouth, a needle in the crook of her elbow. They kept her alive.

She woke up surrounded by people: a nurse, her parents, her uncle, her sister asleep in the hallway. Her mother bent down and kissed her cheek, leaving a smear of wetness in her wake, and the student kissed her back with chapped lips. In the back of her mind, a small voice whispered, In another world, you’re dead now.

The student began to forget after a while.

This was the time when the world smelled like laundry detergent and trees, sounded like worn pages turning and the hum of radiators, tasted like pancakes and plaque. Some might say that sounded monotonous and pleasant, but the student itched. The air around her always seemed too fragile, like something in it threatened to break if she snapped her fingers. Like magic. But magic was supposed to be beautiful.

She feared that quiet, ever present tension. She breathed in day and night and choked. But she never quite realized that it was abnormal. Sometimes, in mundane moments, her eyes would linger on the kids her age and she would wonder, noncommittally, if they were aching for escape as well.

More than anything, though, the student was tired of existing. She remarked many times to herself the irony of this, since she’d barely existed at all. She figured that was something that would only be funny to her.

There’s a sort of gooey middle between wanting to die and hating being alive, where thoughts such as “tragic accident” and “run away into the woods” reside. She plotted how far she would get before someone found her. Or, more accurately, before she started to taste the guilt.

Luckily, she had still not yet shaken off some of the clockmaker’s gifted ingenuity, and so her most-returned-to fantasy was one of a complicated little device that would be rigged as follows:

A slight silver knife would dangle from a rope that would be looped through a series of braces attached to the ceiling, which then led to a starting motor. The motor would, on command, release the rope and therefore the knife from where it hung, suspended over the student’s bed, where she would presumably be sleeping. The knife would fall in a strategic place, and the student would die peacefully and painlessly in her sleep.

All in all, she didn’t mind this way of going. Fitting, she thought, for her short, slow life to end swiftly.

She might have done it, but she never managed to find a knife sharp enough.

Her mother once asked her if she wanted therapy. The student refused. Why waste money?

Her mother countered that it might help. Help what?

She looked the student up and down, silent for a moment. What, Mom?

You do realize your father died, don’t you?

She said nothing. Her mother had finally stopped wearing turtlenecks.

He was a wonderful man.

Outside the window, a blackbird sang a single note as the moon stretched higher. The student said, I know, Mom.

The student woke very suddenly.

Her bedroom was messy. Ratty bits of paper from scattered work littered the floor, along with bits of the material of her desk chair, having been peeled off from long hours of sitting and shifting. The carcasses of various projects and adventures lay forgotten in corners, collecting dust in the deep blue light of the earliest morning. On her side table, milk collected on the surface of old tea, curling and wrinkling like veins in the mug.

The student gasped. She felt exposed. Too loud. Too big. She couldn’t move. Someone was in the room with her.

Run.

She couldn’t breathe. Why can’t I breathe?

Something bubbled up inside her, thick like blood, a flood from her stomach to her lungs to her chest and finally behind her eyes. Her vision went white, her mind reaching for memories that were long gone– but just for a moment. The blood receded, ebbing as quickly as it had arrived. There and gone.

The student fell back to sleep, at least for the next few hours. She had school in the morning.

It happened many more times.

The student kept going to memorials. Vigils, year after year. Watching over someone at peace.

More joined her father: her grandparents, an uncle, a friend; the same friend whose birthday she had gone to all those years ago. The list grew, and she never cried.

People thought she was angry. She scowled through eulogies and crossed her arms in front of coffins, and people scolded her for being disrespectful. I’m not being disrespectful, she said over and over again, every time, her dress ridden up by spread legs.

She really never knew what she felt. Not anger, surely. Anger doesn’t gnaw at the lungs, weigh down ribs and fall, hitting every bone on the way to the gut. Anger doesn’t swim, flailing, in the boiling acid of the stomach, writhing against the walls.

Maybe it was the ignorance, the blindness, that made her feel this little creature in her body. How, when a person dies, their life becomes a sainthood in the eyes of others. Of course, the world says, no man who suffered in death could have possibly been a bully.

At her father’s funeral, her mother still had bruises.

The people who thought they were angry were wrong, of course. She couldn’t be angry, not at people who still loved her. What kind of person would be mad at someone who only wanted the best for them? Even her friend, her friend who had died and never hurt her at all– she never cried when she saw his body. When she attended the school’s mental health lecture. When she hugged his mother in a black dress. It was just that little creature, the one that reared its head when she remembered how she would pretend to be asleep when her friend needed someone to speak to, or change the subject when he got too close to crying. After all of the history, how could she still not manage a tear?

At his funeral, she looked at her uncle's folded hands in his casket and remembered how they felt fumbling over her body.

In the end, she decided that she just didn’t know them well enough. The people who died had never much impacted her life. Not as much as other, living people, the ones who raised her and taught her how to be. So in that case, it was perfectly natural. One can’t mourn someone one doesn’t know.

She met him again on the last day of school.

In high school, life is about empty promises. There are coming of age books about lost chances, and romance movies about failed schoolyard loves, and every time, the audience groans and rolls their eyes and says that it’s so unrealistic, and then goes home and flips through the notes in their yearbooks. Young people hate their inability to live, and the middle aged yearn for their reckless, empty pasts.

There’s a difference, the student realized, between the last day of school and the last day of school ever. One is a blissful prison break with the promise of endless freedom. The other is Stockholm syndrome.

The student was missing her prison.

"Are you feeling good about the graduation tomorrow?" The clockmaker asked, without a hint that any time had passed. The student had remembered him out of the blue one night when she was on break from work. She stood outside in her stupid shorts and stupid reflective gear, and heard a car alarm and obnoxious shouting at the pizza place next door. Her coworker came out on their break, and without looking up from their phone, walked across an active street to the vape shop next door. When the student looked up again her coworker was vaping behind the dumpsters, and she watched her, and listened to an ad between songs on her playlist about inhaling toxic metals into her lungs. And she remembered him.

They sat together as they did so many years ago, him tinkering, her sitting on his desk. His shop had long since closed, and the fluorescents in the senior center were much too bright for philosophical conversations.

"God, not at all."

"Why not?"

The student swallowed, wondering. Why is it that those deepest, most important, visceral feelings were the hardest to transcribe into phrases?

What came out of her was: "I don't want to start my story yet."

The clockmaker looked close to laughter as he retorted, "And I don't want to end mine, but time will pass whether we like it or not."

“I suppose,” the student said. They were quiet. The student fidgeted, and the clockmaker placed his hand over hers.

“I’m sorry– I don’t know why I keep doing that,” the student laughed, “I can’t stop.”

The clockmaker smiled. “Our bodies know things we don’t.”

The girl choked a watery smile. The grandfather squeezed her knee.