The Glass Clock

There is an old man who lies in his bed. Withered and frail with age, he waits patiently for the reaper to take him. He knows he might be waiting for a very long while. He used to be upset that he must wait so long, that he must do nothing but lie sick and helpless in his bed, watching the youth run past his window as though they were mocking him. After a while, however, he’d made his peace with it, just as he’d made his peace with death in the first place.

Most of the man’s days are spent staring at the clock that hangs on the wall opposite his bed. Some days he scowls at it bitterly. Some days his eyes are pleading and pitiful. Some days, when he’s feeling so well he can sit up in bed with his back almost straight, he’s glad the clock is still there. Some days he simply stares, wondering when someone will come by and smash that damned clock to pieces. He does not know how his soul was bound to the clock, just as very few people understand how anyone’s soul is bound to any object. But that is how it happens, and now he must wait, held hostage by a clock that will not stop ticking.

It is a glass clock, its innards as fragile as its crystalline skin. There are cracks forming already, but it needs one last push before it finally shatters and takes the man’s breath with it. He’s ready for it to break. He’s been ready for it. But death is often a gift to no one but he who is dying.

His son is a carpenter, who invited his father to stay in his home after he fell ill. He’s gone at work all day, but often when he returns in the evening the old man will ask why he doesn’t just take one of his tools to the delicate clock and set him free from his sick bed. And the son will refuse, saying he simply can’t destroy such a beloved and beautiful clock.

The man’s daughter owns a book shop, and she lives with her husband in a quiet house not two blocks away. She visits him often, usually bringing her two children. On occasion, the old man will ask her why she doesn’t just take one of her heavy, wordy books to the fragile clock and free him from his sickness and pain. And she will refuse, saying she simply can’t allow her children to see her destroy something so precious and pretty.

The rest of his family, his friends, his colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances, have all passed, and what person would break into a home just to kill an old man who couldn’t fight back anyway? So save for his two children, there is no one on earth who could break the clock. He would do it himself in a heartbeat, of course, but his son and daughter will never place it in his hands, and he’d grown unable to walk years ago.

-

It’s a hot Monday in July that the man notes as the worst day of his old life. The heat, unbearable as it is, is the least of his problems. It’s the pain. Excruciating, nauseating, persistent pain that radiates through his body. He cannot tell from which of his many illnesses the horrendous pain is stemming, though perhaps it is all of them, tying their little battle spears together to stab at his insides all at once. Whatever the cause, it has the man writhing and moaning in his bed and cursing that glass clock as it hangs still intact on the wall.

Hours pass. The pain does not. It’s not the kind of pain you can get used to after a while. Just when it seems as though it’s beginning to dull it becomes sharp again, digging in deeper to whatever organ or muscle or bone it can find. Too much, far, far too much. To be in such agony with not even so much as a simple distraction to ease it. He needs it to stop, needs it as desperately as he needs air in his lungs.

There is a book on his bedside table that he’s read dozens of times. The man picks it up and with an unsteady hand throws it toward the clock on the wall. It hits the wall, not the clock. There’s a glass of water. He throws it, it doesn’t even reach the wall, shattering on the floor. There are pill bottles and a box of tissues, an inhaler, and a few more books, but none of them collide with the clock.

And so it is with great desperation and determination in equal amounts that the man pushes the bed covers to the side and tosses himself off the bed. He lands on the floor with a thud, and feels so heavy he half expects the impact alone to loosen the clock from the wall and send it crashing down. It doesn’t of course, and so he cracks his old frail knuckles, stretches his arms, and he begins to crawl. His long, spindly arms reach out in front of him and pull the rest of his body along beside the bed, heading for the opposite wall. It’s a slow and labored process, filled with exhausted breaks and doubts that he’ll have the strength to make it across the small room, as old and tired and pained as he is. But the clock ticks on and so, then, does he.

He’s not sure how long exactly it takes for his weak arms to pull him to the wall, just beneath the clock. But by the time he gets there he’s exhausted and barely had the energy required to sit himself up and crane his neck to look at the little glass nuisance above him. Perhaps the pain had clouded his judgment slightly, for he can now admit that he has no way of reaching the clock. Seated on the floor, he feels that it’s further out of his reach than when he was in bed.

Perhaps he can simply make it fall if he causes it to move enough. He picks up one of the books he’d thrown and hits it forcefully against the wall. He looks up, and the clock hasn’t budged, not even an inch. He grits his teeth and hits the wall even harder. There’s a crash that comes from another room in the house. A picture must have fallen and the glass shattered on impact. And yet the clock, which does not have the luxury of being framed by wood, is completely still.

He tries a few more times, hears a few more crashes in other rooms. But the clock never moves, like someone had welded it to the wall. The man can feel a stinging tear slip from the corner of one of his eyes. He’s still in pain. And now he fears he will always be in pain. His relief is right there, but he can’t reach it. Can’t do anything about the aching in his body or the dread in his soul.

He slumps tiredly onto his side, and it’s only then that he notices the worrying amount of red that has appeared on the floor. He’d forgotten in his desperation that one of the items he’d thrown from his bed was a glass of water that had shattered on the ground. He must have dragged himself right through the shards, unable to distinguish the pain of the glass from the anguish that already plagued him. Now the water is clouded with thick red blood as it passes easily from his thin skin.

It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care. Maybe he’ll be pitied and be allowed to die in spite of the clock by whoever it is that decides these things. That would be quite fine with him. So he lets his eyelids close and his body go limp, falling into a deep but not peaceful sleep.

-

When the man wakes up, he’s lying in his bed again. On the table are his books, his medicine and tissues, and a glass of water. He wonders if he dreamed the whole ordeal. But when he looks toward the clock, he sees his son, mopping up the puddle of water and blood.

The son tells his father to be more careful and to never try getting out of bed when he’s in the house alone.

The man tells his son to take that mop he’s holding and drive it into the clock until it breaks.

His son says what he always does. That he could never destroy something so beloved and beautiful. And when he’s finished mopping he leaves the old man to lie in his bed and fall into another heavy, bitter sleep.

-

It’s autumn when the man’s son comes home carrying something behind his back, shielding it from the eyes of his father. The old man questions him, of course, though it doesn’t take much convincing before the son produces the object for him to see. It’s a small rectangular box, shiny and silver and open on one side. There are little tabs poking out from the open face; two on each edge, bent flat as if the box is meant to be mounted and secured somewhere.

The old man stares at the box for a moment. It’s about the size of a shoe box, though perhaps a bit wider. It’d be the perfect size to hold a few of his books. Or the perfect size for a little glass clock.

He asks his son what the box is for, though he fears he knows the answer all too well. His son tells him that the clock cannot and will not be broken, that he refuses to lose that clock and the man attached to it. He explains that he has a friend who’s a steelworker and he made sure it was sturdy. Once on the wall it wouldn’t so much as move. So he turns, takes a few tools out of his toolkit, and carefully positions the steel box on the wall, perfectly shielding the glass clock.

In an instant something within the old man breaks. Perhaps it is the basic, animalistic instinct of survival, the innate fear of death that finally shuts down. There was a time, when he was a young man, that he feared breaking that clock more than anything else. He’d seen it; children who’d snuck their objects away from the supervision of their parents, who ran with them in their hands, who dropped them on pavement or a hardwood floor. The sound of shattering glass, the sight of a child falling dead. Or a married couple arguing, disagreements turning to fights and fights turning to pure seething rage. One grabs the other’s little glass object and smashes it against the wall. Their spouse falls, and the regret is immediate.

He had been so careful with his clock. Too careful, it now seems. He no longer fears it breaking. He fears the now very real future in which it stays intact for eternity. What a miserable eternity that would be, one that is staring him dead in the face as he lies in his bed.

He pleads with his son to leave the clock alone, to let it break when it’s time for it to break. His son refuses after the first plea and afterward pays him no mind.

And so the old man screams, loud and shrill, filling the usually quiet little house with the deafening cry of agony. He thrashes against the bed, cursing his legs for giving out on him so long ago. He writhes and screams so violently and loud that the whites of his eyes turn red, the vessels bursting under the strain. The veins on his forehead and neck become raised and his skin is flushed so dark he almost appears purple. He curses his son for what he’s doing to him, for condemning him to live in his pain and his sickness forever.

But the son just fastens the box to the wall carefully, meticulously, like it’s the most important thing he will ever do. He ignores the wailing of his father, ignores the agony and fury in his voice. The screams and the anger he can cope with. Death, he cannot. Nor can his sister for that matter, with whom he’d discussed this course of action in length the past few months.

It’s only a matter of time before the job is done. The sound of hammering nails into drywall ceases, but the screaming and sobbing do not. The son cannot look at his father, not because he is ashamed, but because he loathes to see the old man in such anguish. Hearing it is one thing. He could pretend it’s just the television or a stranger. Seeing it only serves to make it real, and that is how the pain becomes contagious.

It isn’t that he wants to condemn his father to a miserable eternity, of course. But it’s not as though he could strip the suffering away. He cannot pick and choose the parts of the man to keep alive. That just isn’t how it works, unfortunately. One cannot take a small piece of the glass and leave the rest. The clock shatters completely or it doesn’t break at all.

After carefully checking over his work, the son gathers his tools and turns to walk out the front door, leaving the old man alone with tears, pain, and a steel box that carries inside it an end. It contains the key to the gates of Eden or the Underworld, Nirvana or Nothingness. Whatever is on the other side, he won’t get to see. He is not allowed to leave anymore. Someone decided he had to stay so they wouldn’t be subjected to watching a lovely little memory die.

-

The old man deteriorates quickly. He doesn’t speak a single word to anyone after that day with the box. No one’s entirely sure if he physically cannot speak or if he simply refuses to. It’s a matter of months before he loses muscular function in his hands, no longer able to feed himself or hold a book, no longer strong enough to sit up in his bed. In a couple years or so he doesn’t move at all, save for the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes and the opening and closing of his eyelids.

He outlives his children, who never outgrew their stubbornness or their pink-tinted memories. He outlives his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, generations of family who soon only know him as the old man who cannot die. Eventually, it’s forgotten what that old metal box holds. Children will tell each other it’s enchanted and the family will be cursed if it’s removed. Then those children grow up and explain that it’s simply tradition for the box to stay. No need to question it. Why would you? It’s been here this long, it must be important.

The man lives in pain that he can tell no one about. He sleeps quite often, though sometimes it feels like he remains awake for days, possibly weeks. It’s maddening. He stares at a white ceiling. He listens to the unintelligible words from muffled voices he can no longer hear properly. He feels a hand on his arm every once in a while, sees a face peering over him. He breathes. He blinks. He reluctantly, painfully, tiredly, endlessly lives.