16

IT WAS ONLY BECAUSE of Matthew, because she used to practice guitar on his back stoop, that she knew Charlie Reilly. Not him, but his clocks, how they’d make the air ripple with odd and lonesome thoughts, fears and worries that got tangled up in her songs, and their wild, crazy ticking was almost a kind of music. They made her think about people who’d died, people who got lost. She’d have to stop and talk about them before she could go on playing.

“Do you ever wonder about Mr. Groves’ plane?” she asked Matt once.

“What about it?”

“What happened. Where it went.”

“Forget it. It’s gone.”

“I can’t forget it. There was a thing in the paper. It’s coming up to five years.”

“What do they say?”

“‘Rumours persist.’ That he took off and disappeared.”

Matt scratched his head. “Got that part right.”

“What do you mean?”

“Could have changed his name. Maybe ran off with someone. His wartime sweetheart in France, or something.”

“They don’t say that.”

“Not in The Island Banner. The family would sue.”

She’d always believed what she read in the paper, and because the reporter wasn’t more specific, she’d felt uneasy. Mr. Groves’ plane might have passed through the barrier of time. Those were the rumours. Although no one could prove them, no one ever denied them, either. Maybe this could happen to anyone — and did, every day. Time was full of cubbyholes and stuck drawers. History was old. Mr. Groves could be trapped in some other era, somewhere very bizarre.

“You mean like the Pleistocene,” said Matt.

“Something like that.”

“Wonder how you’d get out of there.”

“What bothers me,” Valerie said, “is how a plane could just — disappear.”

***

“‘All that is solid melts into air,’” said Matt. “‘All that is holy is profaned.’”

“Glad you think so.”

Matt showed her the underlined sentences in The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. He wasn’t a Marxist. He was reading it for history class.

“A cool way of putting it,” he said.

“Anyway, it’s just a story, that Mr. Groves passed through the back door of time,” Matt went on. “All that stuff you hear — phantom towers, pirate radio beacons — that’s science-fiction.”

Valerie picked up her guitar. “Then what’s true?”

“That Mr. Groves was a war vet and he was lost,” he said. “That he flew away to find peace.”

“That’s one possibility.”

“He could be alive. Maybe he ran away for reasons of his own.”

“But why?”

“To look for God,” said Matt, but he didn’t sound convinced.

Valerie’s hands plucked the strings, finding their way into a melody. “Sometimes I dream about his plane,” she said. “The day it took off.”

“You should write a song, then,” he replied. “It deserves a song.”

She started to la-la-la a tune, but all she could hear were the clocks.

***

Valerie remembered a few lines of the song she wrote:

Take me to far lands, take me to silent lands, bright wings of silver, stars in the night’s design.

Dreaming of visions, rainbows and prisms, freedom from my prison, lost in my island time.

***

Mr. Reilly’s clocks were ticking, rattling her bones. “You want to see them?” Matt asked.

His house on Groves Island was so dark indoors that smells were amplified, the way that creaking sounds at night seem louder and more threatening than they are. To a teenage kid, the place smelled dangerous, reeking of killer chicken grease from last winter’s soups and Vicks Vapo-Rub from January’s chest colds. Mrs. Reilly was sickly, a victim of polio who walked with a limp and can’t clean every day, said Valerie’s mom when she complained of the odours. Try to understand.

She’d just try not to breathe.

In the shadowy living room, the furniture looked as if it might have roots. It was as soft and lumpy as a colony of mushrooms. An ancient Victorian sofa, two wing chairs, two china lamps with tasselled lampshades and a bookcase jammed with ancient-looking books. No clocks.

“Don’t look so hard,” said Matt. “Listen.”

The bookshelf was ticking — thunk, thunk — slow and deliberate, like an elephant’s pulse. On it was a large tome with numerals and hands. The time was wrong. It read “Seven.”

“It’s July,” said Matthew.

“Huh?”

“Seventh month. It’s a year-clock.”

A gleam caught Valerie’s eye, a dazzle of light on glass, impossible in a room so dark. She thought that Mr. Reilly must have positioned a lamp to light this beautiful thing, this perfect glass cube on the mantelpiece, its tiny, meshing gears shimmering like cut jewels. On its glass face, two silver, needle-thin hands were spinning backward, then forward, as if uncertain of direction, sometimes swooping in a circle, clockwise, then counter-clockwise. Mad and exquisite and senseless — she was in awe of it until she realized that the numbers on the face were random.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“Sure it does. Time can get broken and run all crazy.”

“Like when?”

“Like when you’re dreaming. Dad’s working out the mathematics of dream-time.”

Really useful, she thought. Bulova Dream-Time.

“Random numbers interest Dad,” said Matt.

One of the chair-backs held a clock-face, set to a time zone that didn’t exist.

Matt kicked aside a hooked rug to show her a clock built under a moveable panel in the floor. It looked like a safe, only the combination dial was the clock, and each of the three numerical turns adjusted for the various aberrations of sidereal time.

A star-clock under the floor.

“This is nuts,” she said.

“My dad says the world’s gone crazy,” answered Matt.

“This is supposed to make it sane?”

He shrugged.

What unnerved Valerie most was the fact that each clock had a name, engraved in brass. Mickey the Fist, said one. Junior; Whiz Kid; Charlie Chan. Nicknames — she thought of war buddies as she glanced again at the dream-clock made of glass. Its label bore a full, majestic name: Jeremiah.

On the mantel was a framed photograph of a group of men in uniform, her father among them. He was nicknamed Jerry, but Jeremiah was his name.

***

It was a strange memory, as if crazy Charlie had set the table for a global potluck supper of anarchy and madness, and Valerie imagined time bent out of shape by fake clocks, by swerving gyrocompass needles, by the law of gravity suspended, by planes vanishing into some other sky. Poor soul, she thought. Who knows what rage Charlie felt at her father’s death, what goodness he might have seen in a man she’d hardly known.

Only young Valerie didn’t see it that way. She told her mother, who tried to explain that the odd clock was a unique and loving tribute to her father, a man who died of sorrow from the war, but Valerie said, it’s a make-believe clock and besides, he died in an accident, not the war. Her mother frowned. There are no accidents in this world, she said.

***

Valerie walked up to Matt, reading on his back stoop, in the consoling stillness of his grove. When he saw her, he put down the book and stood up.

“You okay?” he asked.

She’d come back to tell him that her father’s name on the glass clock had upset her, but the words broke on her tongue, and she hid her face in her hands. She didn’t want him to see her crying. Tears made her afraid, as if they were an acid bath that would eat away at her skin and bones. Matt took her in his arms. He stroked her hair and rocked her back and forth as she wept. Oh, baby, he whispered, this world is a sad, sad place.

***

The TV commentator’s voice drifted into Marguerite’s living room. He said that there would have been a fireball. It could have shot down the elevator bank.

Firefighters were broadcasting on a frequency of nerve and bone, the only channel left open to the world. We have no way of knowing what’s up there. If the stairwells are passable. Which was the impact floor. Who is alive below it. If there’s any water.

Valerie remembered Robert’s words. Un accident.

He sat bent forward, face in his hands.

***

There are no accidents, wrote Matt once. God holds us in his loving care. Only it seems that God “lets” bad things happen. That’s our point of view because we live inside of time. God has no “plan,” no hour, month or year from now. God just is. Yet Matt loved time and the hours, the ancient clock of daily prayer, the Church and the world as its two great hands. Prayer is a form of energy, he wrote. The air humming with voices. God listens, so we must listen, too.

The phone rang and Valerie lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

No answer.

She thought it odd, that it would ring just then.