Eight-thirty, eight-thirty!
She hears a beep. Her cell phone.
She grabs it from her coat pocket.
Victor speaks to time. “Go faster,” he says.
It has been an hour, and he is used to quick responses. It doesn’t help that all around him time is literally ticking. A mantel clock sits on his desk. His computer screen clicks off the seconds. His cell phone, desk phone, printer, and DVD player all have digital time displays. On the wall is a wooden plaque with three clocks in three time zones—New York, London, Beijing—representing the major offices of another company he owns.
All told, there are nine different sources of time in his study.
The phone rings. Finally. He answers.
“Yes?”
“I’m faxing something over.”
“Good.”
He hangs up. Grace enters.
“Who was that?”
He lies. “Something for tomorrow’s meetings.”
“You have to go?”
“Why not?”
“I just thought—”
She stops. She nods. She takes the plates to the kitchen.
The fax machine rings, and Victor moves closer as the paper slides through.
15
Dor lay on the ground beside his wife. The stars took over the sky.
It had been days since she had eaten. She was perspiring heavily, and he worried about her labored breathing.
Please do not leave me, he thought. He could not bear a world without Alli. He realized how much he relied on her from morning until night. She was his only conversation. His only smile. She prepared their meager food and always offered it to him first, even though he insisted she eat before he did. They leaned on each other at sunsets. Holding her as they slept felt like his last connection to humanity.
He had his time measures and he had her. That was his life. For as long as he could remember, it had been that way, Dor and Alli, even as children.
“I do not want to die,” she whispered.
“You will not die.”
“I want to be with you.”
“You are.”
She coughed up blood. He wiped it away.
“Dor?”
“My love?”
“Ask the gods for help.”
Dor did as she asked. He stayed up all night.
He prayed in a way he had never prayed before. In the past, his faith was in measures and numbers. But now he begged the most high gods—the ones that ruled over the sun and moon—to stop everything, to keep the world dark, to let his water clock overflow. If this would happen, then Dor would have time to find the Asu who could cure his beloved.
He swayed back and forth. He repeated a whisper, “Please, please, please, please, please …,” squeezing his eyes shut because it somehow made the words more pure. But when he allowed his eyelids the slightest lift, he saw what he dreaded, the first change of colors on the horizon. He saw the bowl was nearly to the notch of day. He saw that his measures were accurate, and he hated that they were accurate and he cursed his knowledge and the gods who had let him down.
He knelt over his wife, her face and hair soaked with sweat, and he leaned in, put his skin on her skin, his cheek on her cheek, and his tears mixed with hers as he whispered, “I will stop your suffering. I will stop everything.”
When the sun rose, he could no longer wake her.
He rubbed her shoulders. He nudged her chin.
“Alli,” he whispered. “Alli … my wife … open your eyes.”
She was quite still, her head limp on the blanket, her breathing feeble. Dor felt an angry surge inside him, a primal howl that began in his feet and shot up through his lungs.
“Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh …”
His cry wafted into the empty air of the high plains.
He rose, slowly, as if in a trance.
And he began to run.
He ran through the morning and he ran through the midday sun. He ran with his lungs burning, until, at last, he saw it.
Nim’s tower.
It stood so tall; its peak was hidden by clouds. Dor raced toward it, obsessed with one last hope. He had watched time and charted time and measured time and analyzed time, and he was determined now to reach the only place where time could be changed.
The heavens.
He would climb the tower and do what the gods had not.
He would make time stop.
The tower was a terraced pyramid, its stairs reserved for Nim’s glorious ascent.
No one dared set foot on them. Some men even lowered their eyes as they passed.
Thus, when Dor reached the base, several guards looked up, but none suspected what he would try. Before they could react, he was sprinting up the king’s special steps. Slaves watched, confused. Who was this man? Did he belong? One yelled to the other. Several dropped their tools and bricks.
Quickly the slaves began ascending, too, convinced the race for the heavens had begun. The guards followed. People near the base joined in. The lust for power is a combustible thing, and soon thousands were scaling the tower’s facade. You could hear a rising roar, the collective yowl of violent men, ready to take what was not theirs.
What happened next is a matter of debate.
The way history tells the story, the Tower of Babel was either destroyed or abandoned. But the man who would become Father Time could testify to something else, because his fate was sealed on that very same day.
As the people climbed, the structure began to rumble. The brick grew molten red. A thundering sound was heard—and then the bottom of the tower melted away. The top burst into flame. The middle hung in the air, defying anything man had ever seen. Those who sought to reach the heavens were hurled off, like snow shaken from a tree branch.
Through it all, Dor climbed, until he was the only figure still clinging to the stairs. He climbed past dizziness, past pain, past his legs aching and his chest constricting. He pulled up on each step, as bodies swirled all around him. He saw glimpses of arms, elbows, feet, hair.
Thousands of men were cast from the tower that day, their tongues twisted into a multitude of languages. Nim’s selfish plan was destroyed before he shot another arrow into the sky.
Only one man was allowed to ascend through the mist, one man lifted as if pulled from beneath his arms, landing on the floor of someplace deep and dark, a place no one knew existed and no one would ever find.
16
This will happen soon.
An ocean wave begins to break and a boy rises on his surfboard. He presses his toes. He steers into the curl.
The wave freezes. So does he.
This will happen soon.
A hairstylist pulls back a clump of hair and slides her scissors underneath. She squeezes. A small crunching sound.
The hair breaks free and falls towards the floor.
It stops in midair.
This will happen soon.
In a museum off the Huttenstrasse in Düsseldorf, Germany, a security guard glances at a strange-looking visitor. He is lean. His hair is long. He moves to an exhibit of antique clocks. He opens a glass case.
“No, bi—” the guard warns, wagging a finger, but instantly he feels relaxed, foggy, lost in thought. He thinks he sees the strange man remove all the clocks, study them, take them apart, then put them back together, an act that would take weeks.
Emerging from the thought, he finishes his word: “—itte.”
But the man is gone.
CAVE
17
Dor awoke inside a cave.
There was no light, yet he could somehow see. There were rocky lumps beneath his feet and jagged peaks pointing down from above.
He rubbed his hands over his elbows and knees. Was he alive? How did he get here? He had been in such pain climbing the tower, but now that pain was gone. He was not breathing hard. In fact, as he touched his chest, he was barely breathing at all.
He wondered for a moment if this was a lair of the god
s, and then he thought about the bodies hurled from the tower, and the bottom melting, and the promise he had made Alli—I will stop your suffering—and he fell to his knees. He had failed. He had not turned back the hours. Why had he left her? Why had he run?
He buried his face in his palms. He wept. The tears poured through his fingers and turned the stone floor an iridescent blue.
It is hard to say how long Dor cried.
When he finally lifted his gaze, he saw a figure sitting in front of him—the old man he had seen as a child, his chin now resting atop the staff of golden wood. He was watching Dor the way a father watches a sleeping son.
“Is it power that you seek?” the old man asked. The voice was unlike any Dor had ever heard, muted, light, as if it had never been used.
“I seek,” Dor whispered, “only to stop the sun and the moon.”
“Ah,” the old man said. “Is that not power?”
He poked Dor’s sandals and they disintegrated, leaving Dor’s feet bare.
“Are you the most high god?” Dor asked.
“I am but His servant.”
“Is this death?”
“You were spared from death.”
“To die here instead?”
“No. In this cave, you will not age a moment.”
Dor looked away, ashamed. “I deserve no such gift.”
“It is not a gift,” the old man said.
He rose and held his staff before him.
“You began something in your days on Earth. Something that will change all who come after you.”
Dor shook his head. “You are mistaken. I am a small and shunned person.”
“Man rarely knows his own power,” the old man said.
He tapped the ground. Dor blinked. Before him were all his tools and instruments, his cups, his sticks, his stones and tablets.
“Did you give one of those away?”
Dor thought about the sun stick.
“One was taken,” he said.
“There are many more now. Once started, this desire does not end. It will grow beyond anything you have imagined.
“Soon man will count all his days, and then smaller segments of the day, and then smaller still—until the counting consumes him, and the wonder of the world he has been given is lost.”
He tapped his staff again. Dor’s instruments turned to dust.
The old man narrowed his gaze.
“Why did you measure the days and nights?”
Dor looked away. “To know,” he answered.
“To know?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you know …” the old man asked “about time?”
“Time?”
Dor shook his head. He had never heard the actual word before. What answer would suffice?
The old man held out a bony finger, then made a swirling motion. The stains from Dor’s tears gathered together, forming a pool of blue on the rocky floor.
“Learn what you do not know,” the old man said. “Understand the consequences of counting the moments.”
“How?” Dor asked.
“By listening to the misery it creates.”
He lowered his hand onto the tearstains. They liquefied and began to glow. Small wisps of smoke appeared on the surface.
Dor watched, confused and overwhelmed. He only wanted Alli, but Alli was gone. His voice choked in a whisper. “Please, let me die. I have no wish to go on.”
The old man rose. “The length of your days does not belong to you. You will learn that as well.”
He placed his hands together and became the size of a boy, then an infant, then he lifted like a bee taking flight.
“Wait!” Dor yelled. “How long must I be imprisoned here? When will you return?”
The old man’s shrunken form reached the cave roof. It sliced a fissure in the rock. From that fissure fell a single drop of water.
“When Heaven meets Earth,” he said.
And he became nothing.
18
Sarah Lemon was really good at science
and how exactly did that help her? she often wondered. What mattered in high school was popularity—based mostly on how you looked—and Sarah, who could whiz through a biology exam, disliked what she saw in the mirror as much as she figured everyone else did: the hazel eyes, too far apart, the dry, wavy hair, the gap between her teeth, the doughy flesh she had never really shed since gaining weight after her parents split up. She was big enough up top but too big on the bottom, she thought, and one of her mother’s friends had said she “might grow up to be attractive” which she did not take as a compliment.
In her final year of high school, Sarah Lemon was seventeen years old and considered, by most kids, to be too smart, too weird, or both. Her classes were no challenge; she would grab desks by the windows to fight her boredom. Often she would draw in her notebook, pouty self-portraits, using her elbow to block others from seeing.
She ate lunch by herself, walked home by herself, and spent most evenings in the house with her mother, unless Lorraine had plans with the clacking women Sarah referred to as “the divorce club.” Then Sarah ate alone by her computer.
Her grades ranked her third in her class, and she was waiting on an early admissions application to a nearby state university—the only school Lorraine could afford.
The application had led to The Boy.
His name was Ethan.
Tall and bony, with sleepy eyes and thick, coffee-colored hair, he was also a senior, well-liked and surrounded by male and female friends. Ethan ran on the track team. Played in a band. In the astronomy of high school life, Sarah would never have entered his orbit.
But on Saturdays, Ethan unloaded food trucks at a homeless shelter—the same homeless shelter where Sarah had been volunteering since the college application called for an essay on “an influential community experience.” She’d had none up to that point, so, to fulfill the essay honestly, she offered her services and the shelter was happy to have her. True, most of the time she stayed in the kitchen, filling plastic bowls with oatmeal, because she felt self-conscious around the homeless men (a suburban girl with a down parka and an iPhone? What did she have to say to them except “I’m sorry”?).
But then Ethan arrived. She noticed him by the truck on her first day—his uncle owned a food supply company—and he noticed her, too, the only person close to his age. As he dropped a box on the kitchen counter, he said, “Hey, what’s up?”
She clutched that sentence like a souvenir. Hey, what’s up? His first words to her. Now they spoke every week. One time, she offered him a pack of peanut butter crackers from the shelf and he said, “Nah, I don’t want to take food away from these people.” She found that lovely, even noble.
Sarah began to view Ethan as her destiny, the way young girls often do with young boys. Far from school and its unwritten rules of who can talk to whom, she had more confidence, she stood up straighter, she left behind the social message T-shirts she sometimes wore in favor of lower-cut, more feminine tops, and she would blush when Ethan said, “Nice look today, Lemon-ade.”
As the weeks passed, she grew bold enough to believe that he was feeling for her what she was feeling for him,
that this was not an accident, the two of them winding up in this unlikely place. She had read about fate in books like Zadig by Voltaire, or even The Alchemist, and she believed fate was at work here, too. Last week, she had mustered the courage to ask if Ethan wanted to hang out sometime and he’d said, “Yeah, OK, maybe Friday?”
Now it was Friday. Eight-thirty, eight-thirty! She tried to calm herself. She knew she shouldn’t get too worked up over a boy. But Ethan was different. Ethan broke the rules of her rules.
In her raspberry T-shirt, black jeans, and heels, she’d been two blocks toward the big event when her cell phone went Buh-duh-beep, the sound of a text message.
Her heart jumped.
It was from him.
19
Victor Delamonte was the f
ourteenth-richest man in the world, according to a national business magazine.
The story ran an old photo, Victor’s chin in the crook of his hand, his heavy jowls pushed up, a pensive smile on his ruddy face. It noted that “the private, bushy-browed hedge fund mogul” was an only child, born in France, who came to America and made it big, a true immigrant rags-to-riches story.
But because he refused to speak with the magazine (Victor shied from publicity) certain details of his childhood were omitted, including this: when Victor was nine, his father, a plumber, was killed in a fight in a seaside tavern. A few days later, his mother left the house wearing only a cream-colored nightgown and jumped from a bridge.
In less than a week, Victor was an orphan.
He was put on a boat to join an uncle in America. It was better, everyone thought, that the boy live in a country with fewer ghosts. Victor would later credit his financial philosophy to that ocean voyage, during which his only sack of food—three loaves of bread, four apples, and six potatoes, packed by his grandmother—was tossed into the water by some hooligan boys. He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a valuable lesson: that holding on to things “will only break your heart.”
So he avoided attachments, which served him well during his financial ascent. As a high schooler in Brooklyn, he purchased two pinball machines with money saved from summer jobs and he put the machines in local bars. He sold them eight months later and, with the profits, bought three candy dispensers. He sold those and bought five cigarette machines. He kept buying, selling, and reinvesting until, by the time he was done with college, he owned the vending company. Soon he bought a gas station, which led him to oil, where he made numerous well-timed purchases of refineries that left him wealthy beyond any possible need.
He gave his first $100,000 to the American uncle who’d raised him. He reinvested everything else. He acquired car dealerships, real estate, and eventually banks, first a small one in Wisconsin, then several more. His portfolio mushroomed, and he started a fund for people who wanted to ride his business strategy. Over the years, it became one of the highest-priced—and most sought after—funds in the world.