The Big Clock

by Kenneth Fearing

  Not every one of these incorporated people—Funded Individuals was our registered name for the undertaking—would be uniformly successful, of course, however fortunate and talented he might originally be. But the Funded Individuals were operated as a pool, with a single directorship, and our figures had demonstrated that such a venture would ultimately show a tremendous overall profit.

  It went without saying that the scheme would mean a great deal to those persons chosen for the pool. Each would be capitalized at something like one million dollars, from the age of seventeen.

  I told the staff that the social implications of such a project, carried to its logical conclusions, meant the end of not only poverty, ignorance, disease, and maladjustment, but also inevitably of crime.

  “We can suggest a new approach to the whole problem of crime,” I concluded. “Crime is no more inherent in society than diphtheria, horse-cars, or black magic. We are accustomed to thinking that crime will cease only in some far-off Utopia. But the conditions for abolishing it are at hand—right now.”

  The idea was tailored for Crimeways, and the staff knew it. Roy said, cautiously: “Well, it does show a perspective of diminishing crime.” His thin face was filled with a whole train of afterthoughts. “I see where it could be ours. But what about those people downstairs? And what about the thirty-second floor? It’s their material, and they have their own ideas about what to do with it, haven’t they?”

  I said I didn’t think so. Mafferson, Orlin, and half a dozen others downstairs in the research bureau known as Futureways had been working on Funded Individuals off and on for nearly a year, with no visible results as yet, and with slight probability there ever would be. I said: “The point is, they don’t know whether they want to drop Funded Individuals, or what to do with it if they don’t. I think Hagen would welcome any sort of a move. We can give the idea an abbreviated prevue.”

  “‘Crimeless Tomorrow,’” Roy improvised. “‘Research Shows Why. Finance Shows How.’” He thought for a moment. “But I don’t see any pictures, George.”

  “Graphs.”

  We let it go at that. That afternoon I cleared the article with Hagen, in a three-minute phone call. Then I had a talk with Ed Orlin, who agreed that Emory Mafferson would be the right man to work with us, and presently Emory put in his appearance.

  I knew him only casually. He was not much more than five feet high, and gave the illusion he was taller sitting than standing. He radiated a slight, steady aura of confusion.

  After we checked over his new assignment he brought forward a personal matter.

  “Say, George.”

  “Yes?”

  “How are you fixed on the staff of Crimeways? After we line up Funded Individuals?”

  “Why, do you want to join us?”

  “Well, I damn near have to. Ed Orlin looked almost happy when he found I was being borrowed up here.”

  “Don’t you get along with Ed?”

  “We get along all right, sometimes. But I begin to think he’s beginning to think I’m not the Futureways type. I know the signs. It’s happened before, see.”

  “You write short stories, don’t you?”

  Emory appeared to grope for the truth. “Well.”

  “I understand. It’s all right with me, Emory, if you want to come on here. What in hell, by the way, is the Futureways type?”

  Emory’s brown eyes swam around behind thick spectacles like two lost and lonely goldfish. The inner concentration was terrific. “First place, you’ve got to believe you’re shaping something. Destiny, for example. And then you’d better not do anything to attract attention to yourself. It’s fatal to come up with a new idea, for instance, and it’s also fatal not to have any at all. See what I mean? And above all, it’s dangerous to turn in a piece of finished copy. Everything has to be serious, and pending. Understand?”

  “No. Just don’t try to be the Crimeways type, that’s all I ask.”

  We got Emory and Bert Finch teamed for the “Crimeless Tomorrow” feature, and at five o’clock I phoned Georgette to say I’d be home, after all, but Nellie told me Georgette had gone to her sister’s in some emergency involving one of Ann’s children. She would be home late, might not be home at all. I told Nellie I’d have supper in town.

  It was five-thirty when I walked into the Silver Lining, alone. I had a drink and reviewed what I would have said to Roy and Steve Hagen, had they been present to listen. It did not sound as convincing as I had made it sound this morning. Yet there must be a way. I could do something, I had to, and I would.

  The bar of the Silver Lining is only twenty feet from the nearest tables. Behind me, at one of them, I heard a woman’s voice saying that she really must leave, and then another voice saying they would have to meet again soon. Half turning, I saw the first speaker depart, and then I saw the other woman. It was Pauline Delos. The face, the voice, and the figure registered all at once.

  We looked at each other across half the width of the room, and before I had quite placed her I had smiled and nodded. So did she, and in much the same manner.

  I picked up my drink and went to her table. Why not?

  I said of course she didn’t remember me, and she said of course she did.

  I said could I buy her a drink. I could.

  She was blonde as hell, wearing a lot of black.

  “You’re the friend of President McKinley,” she told me. I admitted it. “And this was where you were talking to him. Is he here tonight?”

  I looked all around the room.

  I guess she meant Clyde Polhemus, but he wasn’t here.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “How would you like to have dinner with me, instead?”

  “I’d love it.”

  I think we had an apple-brandy sidecar to begin with. It did not seem this was only the second time we had met. All at once a whole lot of things were moving and mixing, as though they had always been there.

  George Stroud IV

  WE WERE in the Silver Lining for about an hour. We had dinner there, after Pauline made a phone call rearranging some previous plans.

  Then we made the studio broadcast of Rangers of the Sky; the program itself was one of my favorites, but that was not the main attraction. We could have heard it anywhere, on any set. Quite aside from the appeal of the program, I was fascinated by the work of a new sound-effects man who, I believed, was laying the foundation for a whole new radio technique. This chap could run a sequence of dramatic sound, without voice or music, for as much as five minutes. Sustaining the suspense, and giving it a clear meaning, too. I explained to Pauline, who seemed puzzled but interested, that some day this fellow would do a whole fifteen- or thirty-minute program of sound and nothing but sound, without voice or music of course, a drama with no words, and then radio would have grown up.

  After that Pauline made some more phone calls, rearranging some other plans, and I remembered Gil’s bar on Third Avenue. It wasn’t exactly a bar and it wasn’t exactly a night club; perhaps it might have been called a small Coney Island, or just a dive. Or maybe Gil had the right name and description when he called it a museum.

  I hadn’t been there for a year or two, but when I had been, there was a game Gil played with his friends and customers, and to me it had always seemed completely worth while.

  Although most of Gil’s was an ordinary greased postage stamp for dancing to any kind of a band, with any kind of entertainment, there was one thing about it that was different. There was a thirty-foot bar, and on a deep shelf in back of it Gil had accumulated and laid out an inexhaustible quantity of junk—there is no other word for it—which he called his “personal museum.” It was Gil’s claim that everything in the world was there, somewhere, and that the article, whatever it was, had a history closely connected with his own life and doings. The game was to stump him, on one point or the other.

  I never had, though all told I certainly had spent many happy hours trying to do so, and lots of money. At the same time, Gil’s
logic was sometimes strained and his tales not deeply imaginative. There was a recurrent rumor that every time Gil got stuck for something not in stock, he made it a point to go out and get its equivalent, thus keeping abreast of alert students of the game. Furthermore, his ripostes in the forenoon and early afternoon of the day were not on a par with the results achieved later on, when he was drunk.

  “Anything?” Pauline asked, surveying the collection. “Anything at all,” I assured her.

  We were seated at the bar, which was not very crowded, and Pauline was looking in mild astonishment at the deceptive forest of bric-a-brac facing us. There was even a regular bar mirror behind all that mountain of gadgets, as I knew from personal experience. Shrunken heads, franc notes, mark notes, confederate money, bayonets, flags, a piece of a totem pole, an airplane propeller, some mounted birds and butterflies, rocks and seashells, surgical instruments, postage stamps, ancient newspapers—wherever the eye wandered it saw some other incongruity and slipped rather dazedly on to still more.

  Gil came up, beaming, and I saw he was in form. He knew me by sight only. He nodded, and I said: “Gil, the lady wants to play the game.”

  “Surely,” he said. Gil was an affable fifty, I would have guessed, or maybe fifty-five. “What can I show you, Miss?”

  I said, “Can you show us a couple of highballs, while she makes up her mind?”

  He took our orders and turned to set them up.

  “Anything at all?” Pauline asked me. “No matter how ridiculous?”

  “Lady, those are Gil’s personal memoirs. You wouldn’t call a man’s life ridiculous, would you?”

  “What did he have to do with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln?”

  She was looking at the headline of a yellowed, glass-encased newspaper announcing same. Of course, I had once wondered the same thing, and I told her: The paper was a family heirloom; Gil’s grandfather had written the headline, when he worked for Horace Greeley.

  “Simple,” I pointed out. “And don’t ask for lady’s hats. He’s got Cleopatra’s turban back there, and half a dozen other moth-eaten relics that could pass for anything at all.” Gil slid our drinks before us, and gave Pauline his most professional smile.

  “I want to see a steamroller,” she said.

  Gil’s beam deepened and he went down the bar, returned with a black and jagged metal cylinder that had once served, if I properly remembered a wild evening, as Christopher Columbus’ telescope—a relic certified by the Caribbean natives from whom Gil had personally secured it.

  “I can’t show you the whole steamroller, ma’am,” Gil told Pauline. “Naturally, I haven’t room here. Someday I’ll have a bigger place, and then I can enlarge my personal museum. But this here is the safety valve from off a steamroller, this is. Go on,” he pushed it at her. “It’s a very clever arrangement. Look it over.”

  Pauline accepted the article, without bothering to look at it.

  “And this is part of your personal museum?”

  “The last time they paved Third Avenue,” Gil assured her, “this here steamroller exploded right out in front there. The safety valve, which you have ahold of right there in your hand, came through the window like a bullet. Creased me. As a matter of fact, it left a scar. Look, I’ll show you.” I knew that scar, and he showed it again. That scar was Gil’s biggest asset. “The valve off that steamroller was defective, as you can tell by looking at it. But, as long as it was right here anyway, why, I just left it up in back of the bar where it hit. It was one of the narrowest escapes I ever had.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I was right here when it happened. What’ll you have, Gil?”

  “Why, I don’t mind.”

  Gil turned and earnestly poured himself a drink, his honest reward for scoring. We lifted our glasses, and Gil jerked his gray, massive head just once. Then he went down the bar to an amateur customer who loudly demanded to see a pink elephant.

  Gil patiently showed him the pink elephant, and courteously explained its role in his life.

  “I like the museum,” said Pauline. “But it must be terrible, sometimes, for Gil. He’s seen everything, done everything, gone everywhere, known everyone. What’s left for him?”

  I muttered that history would be in the making tomorrow, the same as today, and we had another drink on that thought. And then Gil came back and Pauline had another experiment with his memories, and the three of us had another round. And then another.

  At one o’clock we were both tired of Gil’s life, and I began to think of my own.

  I could always create a few more memories, myself. Why not?

  There were many reasons why I should not. I weighed them all again, and I tried once more to explain somehow the thing that I knew I was about to do. But they all slipped away from me.

  I conjured all sorts of very fancy explanations, besides the simple one, but either the plain or the fancy reasons were good enough; I was not particular on what grounds I behaved foolishly, and even dangerously.

  Perhaps I was tired of doing, always, what I ought to do, wearier still of not doing the things that should not be done.

  The attractions of the Delos woman multiplied themselves by ten, and then presently they were multiplying by the hundreds. We looked at each other, and that instant was like the white flash of a thrown switch when a new circuit is formed and then the current flows invisibly through another channel.

  Why not? I knew the risks and the cost. And still, why not? Maybe the risks and the price were themselves at least some of the reasons why. The cost would be high; it would take some magnificent lying and acting; yet if I were willing to pay that price, why not? And the dangers would be greater still. Of them, I couldn’t even begin to guess.

  But it would be a very rousing thing to spend an evening with this blonde mystery that certainly ought to be solved. And if I didn’t solve it now, I never would. Nobody ever would. It would be something lost forever.

  “Well?” she said.

  She was smiling, and I realized I had been having an imaginary argument with a shadow of George Stroud standing just in back of the blazing nimbus she had become. It was amazing. All that other Stroud seemed to be saying was: Why not? Whatever he meant, I couldn’t imagine. Why not what?

  I finished a drink I seemed to have in my hand, and said: “I’ll have to make a phone call.”

  “Yes. So will I.”

  My own phone call was to a nearby semi-residential hotel. The manager had never failed me—I was putting his sons and daughters through school, wasn’t I?—and he didn’t fail me now. When I returned from the booth, I said: “Shall we go?”

  “Let’s. Is it far?”

  “Not far,” I said. “But it’s nothing extravagant.”

  I had no idea, of course, where in that rather sad and partially respectable apartment-hotel we would find ourselves. Pauline took all this for granted, apparently. It gave me a second thought; and the second thought whisked itself away the moment it occurred. Then I hoped she wouldn’t say anything about anyone or anything except ourselves.

  I needn’t have worried. She didn’t.

  These moments move fast, if they are going to move at all, and with no superfluous nonsense. If they don’t move, they die.

  Bert Sanders, the manager of the Lexington-Plaza, handed me a note when he gave me the key to a room on the fifth floor. The note said he positively must have the room by noon tomorrow, reservations had been made for it. The room itself, where I found my in-town valise, was all right, a sizable family vault I believed I had lived in once or twice before.

  I was a little bit surprised and dismayed to see it was already three o’clock, as I brought out the half bottle of Scotch, the one dressing gown and single pair of slippers, the back number of Crimeways—how did that get here?—the three volumes of stories and poetry, the stack of handkerchiefs, pajamas, aspirin tablets comprising most of the contents of the valise. I said: “How would you like some Scotch?”

  We both would. Se
rvice in the Lexington-Plaza perished at about ten o’clock, so we had our drinks with straight tap water. It was all right. The life we were now living seemed to quicken perceptibly.

  I remembered to tell Pauline, lying on the floor with a pillow under her head and looking more magnificent than ever in my pajamas, that our home would no longer be ours after noon. She dreamily told me I needn’t worry, it would be all right, and why didn’t I go right on explaining about Louise Patterson and the more important trends in modern painting. I saw with some surprise I had a book open in my lap, but I had been talking about something else entirely. And now I couldn’t remember what. I dropped the book, and lay down on the floor beside her.

  “No more pictures,” I said. “Let’s solve the mystery.”

  “What mystery?”

  “You.”

  “I’m a very average person, George. No riddle at all.” I believe I said, “You’re the last, final, beautiful, beautiful, ultimate enigma. Maybe you can’t be solved.”

  And I think I looked at our great big gorgeous bed, soft and deep and wide. But it seemed a thousand miles away. I decided it was just too far. But that was all right. It was better than all right. It was perfect. It was just plain perfect.

  I found out again why we are on this earth. I think. And then I woke up and saw myself in that big, wide bed, alone, with a great ringing and hammering and buzzing going on. The phone was closest, so I answered it, and a voice said: “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Sanders says you have no reservation for today.”

  I looked at my watch; 1:30.

  “All right.”

  I believe I moaned and lay back and ate an aspirin tablet that somebody had thoughtfully laid on the table beside the bed, and then after a while I went to the door that was still pounding and buzzing. It was Bert Sanders.