The Wall Clock

The wall clock clicked, watching the office, watching him at his shabby desk, where he examined pages, made annotations and corrections and placed the finished copies into a growing paper tower to his right. The others discussed their days off–mostly wasted on board games or solitary trips to the cinema, as none of them were married or had lovers. The editor could never remember his days off, unless a chimerical rain fell on the streets, or he saw a flock of enchanted black birds on the way home from the bookstore or café. The only real entertainment was to smoke in a slow, meditative way, while watching cloud formations pass overhead or the waves of the sea washing the rocks. There was precious little in the world that interested him. As his pen scurried across a page, he wondered how he had come here, into this changeless gray box, always refrigerated in a way that made his cups of black tea futile. He had nothing in common with anyone. He had not wielded a shovel long enough to impress his father; he had wielded it rather too long to be of any use to his sons or colleagues. Shovels had led to reports in work offices, and reports in work offices had led to printing offices. An old dictionary, a cigar box of newspaper clippings and a discarded typewriter led to other offices. And then, like a mouse in a simple but inescapable mousetrap, he had sunken into the endless routine of this last office, where he tried to remember the other, older world, even writing monostichs of memoranda on index cards that ended up in coat pockets or between the pages of the paperbacks he read on the trains to and from work. Once in a while, a seemingly random thing–a red streetlight in the rain or the soft arm of a brunette in a leather coat brushing or pushing against him in the crush on the train–would open a gate into a vague, dark and airy space, possibly something in his memory. For days he would ponder the significance of the omen or symptom of phenomena beyond time. The red light or the texture of the stranger’s body would be noted on an index card, only to be forgotten after nothing else materialized. In the office, the workers had the habit of discussing their mysterious wounds which came from accidents that they could not remember. A hand would have salt burns, a finger would bear minute, blood-red puncture wounds, an arm had thin, parallel cuts, as if from paper. Examinations like this always ended in laughter and words of mutual encouragement. The editor had no external wounds. Generally, he was careful with the staplers and avoided picking salt up off the streets on frozen nights. The only thing that haunted him was a strange, musical tinnitus at night and then the slow, agonizing regrowth of his spleen or other organs by day. At some point in the past, he had lost his spleen, his appendix, his gallbladder, perhaps even part of his liver. There had been years without any phantom pain or inflammation. Then one quiet day, as the office grew colder, the wall clock began to tick loudly and slowly. It was so slow it could not have possibly reflected the actual passage of time. Seconds passed and he noticed a slight prick and mild burning in his right abdomen. The tiny point of heat and pain grew slowly at about 3% an hour, from the size of a lentil to the size of a crab apple, to the size of a large plum. When he was putting on his coat, his head filled with the clicking of the wall clock, the radio static of winter rain outside, the resurging gall of stomach acid and black tea burning his throat, he could barely walk out of the office. The doctor ran tests and gave him hyosine, but the tests were inconclusive. The x-rays depicted a ghostly otherworld that reminded him of that dark and profound space beyond the red street light, beyond the soft arm of the brunette who once leaned against him on the train. Then the pain disappeared altogether, and the editor wondered about the soundness of his mind. Then one evening, the clock began to tick loudly again. A stabbing pain no larger than an asterisk or a comma began to throb in his right abdomen. Once again, it grew by only 3% an hour, until his passage to the train station was a remarkable combination of torture and sleepwalking. Just as a transient asked him for some loose change, he felt a merciless spasm roll through his body; he coughed and coughed until he spat up a plum-dark organ that could only have been his resurrected gallbladder. The blood stains flickered below the station lights, and he felt a great peace enter his body. It was gone–every last trace of pain was gone. Some days later, however, the process started all over again. The wall clock, the pain, and the vomiting of a piece of spleen or liver. Most nights, he took his hyosine and other drugs, suppressing the spasms. It would be shameful to uncover his naked organs at the office, on the train, or even at home. Once everyone was asleep, he could venture into the back alleys behind his apartment or visit the industrial strength lavatory of an obnoxious late night pub and urge himself of blood and inner matter, vomiting until he was empty and pure. One night, however, he came home, and just as he was approaching the dinner table, he began to seize and declaimed a blood splatter of broken spleen all over the cutlery, bone china, an incomplete chess game, his pale wife and his sons. The youngest cried; the older sons cast dark looks of suspicion and judgment. The wife helped him clean up the mess, and sent him out onto the balcony with a glass of rum and a cigar to contemplate the rain dripping from the pines. The second time was similar. The third time saw the beginning of a languid argument amongst the others as to which organ he had coughed up this time–whether it was the gallbladder, spleen, or fragments of liver. A shortage of hyosine prevented him from continuing his futile treatment. The editor could not afford time off; he continued to commute to work, to listen to his colleagues discuss their scars and the progress of their board games, and to scratch his pen against index cards in between spells of marking up the pages on his desk. One day, he found an old book on the life of a saint, who spoke of light beyond darkness and of great silence. It was the silence beyond the red streetlights–he was sure. He bought an icon and an electric candle. At night, the pale light and gold leaf of the icon opened the gate of the great silence beyond everything, the abundant emptiness that washed the edges of the red traffic lights and the contours of her warm arm and dark hair. The revenant viscera did not return, and if they did, it did not matter to him, for they touched the great quiet darkness as well as the missing bottles of hyosine. The wall clock itself froze in incalculable, impermeable silence that fell softly like winter rain.

The Sources

It was spring time. The scholar brought his paper on the revolutions of the spheres to the court of the academy. Despite the fact that his citations were all in order, the provost accused him of quote mining. The scholar revised his paper, adding summaries of the experts he cited, but this time the provost accused him of misrepresenting the sources and misusing the quotes, although the scholar could not see why. The provost demanded that for all future papers, candidates would have to supply the complete texts of the authors referenced in order to have their papers even considered for perusal. This was not a disaster for the scholar; he acquired the handful of books and departed for the office with his revised paper, but he could not even enter the courtyard of the academy, for all of its gates were cluttered and clogged with stacks and stacks of books. At first, the scholar was delighted. Is this a booksale? he asked a bystander. Clutching his head in his hands, the bystander said it was not. Some librarian had just submitted a new paper detailing the history of several ancient libraries and printers and had brought in all of his sources in accordance with the new laws. It is without question that half of these books are written in languages the provost cannot read, the scholar mused. The bystander laughed, and said, But look at all of the trees in bloom! Indeed, the streets had filled with white magnolia blossoms.

The Infirmary

A man wanted to live and work in the infirmary, but the admitting nurse would not allow it. All of our patients and staff are sick, terminally sick. In order to live and work here, you have to have our sickness. You have none of the right symptoms. The man complained of how exclusive and medieval the infirmary was. The admitting nurse said that if he really thought of it as a vocation, then he could be injected with the pathogen. The man would have none of that, even when the hypodermic was freely offered. It was not sickness that he wanted—was that not obvious? The man departed. Along the way, he happened to come across some scrubs. He dressed in the scrubs and got back into the infirmary by stealth. For days and nights, he worked as a clerk, typing charts, requisitions, prescriptions and reports, for he had always been a good bureaucrat, and he even noticed that his mere presence was good for the infirmary. Although he saw little of the patients, he heard from an orderly that there had been a few miraculous cures. One day, the admitting nurse found him, and announced his immediate expulsion. The man remonstrated and argued. Were patients not getting better? Some are, the nurse admitted, but more are dying, for you have brought your own sickness into the building, the wrong kind of sickness, and they have no immunity to fight it. Were there no other hospitals for men with your illness? It was too late. The disease was spreading fast, and within a few years, the infirmary was only remembered for its vast and ornate cemetery.

The Office

An old lecher saw a young widow praying with her palms facing upward, and having been rejected by her four times, resolved to report her deviant orisons. It was snowing as he made his way to the office of the tribunal that handled cases of heresy. The office was a maze and a library. The darkness was broken by the occasional red lantern, red as the seals of imperial rescripts. After walking for a long time, he reached the innermost sanctum, where the inquisitor sat reading romances and smoking cigarettes, an island in a sea of stacked papers and rolled-up scrolls. The old lecher bellowed out his case in one unstoppable stream, while cadres arrived embracing several unwieldly scrolls at once or carrying bundles of loose leaves stamped and tied up in string. Behold, the inquisitor said, all of the paperwork I must devour and digest. There is little chance your case will ever be found. To this court, your widow might not even exist. And you might not either. In fact, at this rate, her existence and yours is becoming a statistical impossibility. Night and day, the heretics, scientists and informers change their doctrines, their accusations and apologies, their rebukes and their rebuttals. All they do is revolt and report. Our ancient office cannot say with any certainty what the facts of any case are. The prisons are empty. All of the inmates died before the lawyers could sort it. The hangman has left to go begging; the scribes and copyists are starving. Another ice age is at hand. Before long, we will be rolling cigarettes or lighting our fires with all this paper. It is best if you depart at once. Return to your home while you can and gather some firewood.