The Triple Goddess (108 page)

Everyone from E Class down to the level where literacy and numeracy and comprehension were an issue received his or her instructions impersonally and electronically.

At the bottom end of the scale were the Zs, who were the most menial of menials: at the Exeat, it was the Zs who incinerated the bodies of those who had been dismembered and eviscerated in the cause of science—Hugo Bonvilian 4285D’s science, the details of which were as hidden from the public as the inner workings of Central; and even if they were not, nobody would have understood them.

Although operational matters within the Exeat Institute were what occupied Laszlo 9013J’s professional life, they most certainly did not include looking after the clock. No one was supposed to wind it or service it.

While Central had as yet stopped short of declaring that Time was dead, as a medium it had ruled it unnecessary, retrograde, redundant, discredited, subversive, and not just illegitimate but illegal. There was no longer world enough and time for Time in a world where such a concept was, not just
passé
in the archaic sense of past its prime, archaic, superannuated, but in itself anachronistic. It was against regulations to refer to it or use it as a context for defining the When and Where in the modern Now and Here society. Everyone was to stop believing in the Tinker Bell fairy of Time: for on the same principle as in J.M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan
, not only could fairies not exist unless one believed in them, but if one comes to doubt them later, they will die.

In which case instead of marching on, Time, shunned and ignored, would not only cease to exist but in so doing constitute grounds for Central to pronounce that it had been deemed never to have existed. What used to be said to go around, no longer came around and therefore, syllogistically, it had never gone around.

All of which meant that, for a public official like Laszlo to commit the symbolic but treasonous act of maintaining the clock, it was essential that he keep his weekly destination and purpose secret, and never delegate the task to a staff member who would have no choice to report it to one of the departmentally ubiquitous monitors of protocol.

Whether or not conscious recollection of the State-mandated conceit regarding the disregarding of Time was why those hurrying through the main quadrangle of the Exeat Institute never glanced at the tower clock, even surreptitiously for old time’s sake, Laszlo 9013J did not know. The workers’ routines were prescribed from the moment of discharging the first duty of the day to the first wink of State-authorized sleep, and any deviance or deviation was sure to be detected and rated.

Only 9013J’s loyal and discreet secretary and personal assistant, Pancake 4465Q, was aware that once a week her boss left his desk on some mysterious errand, and that he looked content and relaxed when he returned. A sympathetic soul, Pancake was pleased, for although like everyone else her boss had no life outside service to the State, he was kind to her.

Administration was Laszlo 9013J’s life. That he had no partner or significant other, or children, and that he was allowed the luxury of a small freshwater fish-tank in his office, were facts for the Records bureau only, and a consequence of his status rather a mark of personal recognition for diligence. In the event of 9013J’s death or disability before the date set for his retirement, a new Superintendent of equal or greater efficiency would be appointed, and no one would have any memory of him.

Central took no interest in one’s private affairs unless they had subversive potential, or affected the quality or quantity of one’s work. Workplace relationships were forbidden. Closed circuit television monitors with zoom lenses, and indoor and outdoor recording devices equipped with long-range shotgun condenser microphones and noise filters, detected and picked up, and forwarded to analytical personnel any infraction or irregularity by those on the premises.

The belfry, and its four clock-faces atop the old hospital’s chapel built of rough-cast stone, overlooked the campus of the Exeat Institute like a watch tower. A narrow but deep balcony ran around the tower where one could stand without being observed from below. The vantage was high enough that on a clear day one could see, if not forever, beyond the ugly agglomeration of modern buildings to a far horizon in all directions. Many years ago, the hospital’s original mid-nineteenth century architecture had appealed to the nobler senses; but with the exception of the outer walls, and the chapel and tower, and the wing containing Ward One, it had been gradually demolished and replaced with utilitarian structures.

The outer perimeter, topped by parallel lines of razor wire, was patrolled by armed guards. Cameras, antennae, satellite dishes, and transmission and listening devices, were mounted on steel scaffolds. Only the clock tower remained untenanted, unfortified, unguarded, and festooned with none of the instruments of surveillance that sprouted everywhere else. No supervision was necessary for the human carcasses stockpiled in its base, in the Hades through which Laszlo had to pass on his way upstairs. They were not going anywhere, unless they were called up to assist in laboratory research, like books from the stacks of a library.

The Superintendent considered himself extremely fortunate to have this ancient and forgotten zone to himself. He appreciated the tower’s mournful isolation, within its time-less setting, more every time he visited it. Occasionally his beeper or pocket phone commanded his presence to resolve some crisis, as he was on his way to the top; occasionally he had slipped or fallen, and a few times sprained or twisted an ankle, in his haste to descend the helter-skelter stairs. But 9013J ran his organization efficiently, and so long as he kept his absences to no more than half an hour, by impermissible reckoning, it did not happen often.

Reflecting its retro status, the tower’s stonework was crumbling with age. The dial of the clock was pitted and weathered, and the hands rusted. The beams were rotted from the rain that leaked through the roof, and the infiltrating damp; and the dryer parts were infested with beetle and woodworm. Nonetheless, by some miracle and using a lot of oil Laszlo had been able to maintain the clock’s accuracy and synchronization with the goose steps of modern life.

In return, instead of sulking at the lack of attention that was paid to it, except by its keeper, it continued to honour its sworn allegiance to the evolutionary force that had introduced it to the world, with such gentle authority that even the representatives of the power that most deplored it did not register its passive resistance.

In his non-biological heart the Superintendent was a traditionalist, who believed that regular winding was not just a courtesy owed to any timepiece, but that any theory that Time was dead ran contrary to the laws of nature. He would remain a closet dissenter. For was it not still the case that if the earth stopped revolving, everything on it would spin off into the void?

And what about “In the beginning was the Word”? If there was a Beginning, there had also to be an End, and a Middle and notches in between, like the minutes on a clock on which the hands rotated from noon to noon and midnight to midnight.
En ma fin git mon commencement
, “In my end is my beginning”: Mary Queen of Scots had been sufficiently impressed by the motto to embroider it on a sampler or screen; and the poet, dramatist and literary critic T.S. Eliot was similarly intrigued by the idea it embodied.

Now, however, Central had pronounced the cosmic law to be an elliptical fallacy based upon a spurious concept…that Time had “disappeared up its own fundament”, was the unembroidered way State had expressed it. And Eliot’s “heretical statements disguised as poeticisms regarding chronical circularity”, though nothing he had written on the subject was original, had resulted in the poet’s writings being banned.

To make a fiction of Time! To deconstruct the documented and the historical, and assert the supremacy of State-sponsored fabrication and denial over truth and fact, was a most egregious international crime. It was also dangerous, like putting a stick in the spokes of a moving bicycle’s wheel. As propaganda it had the potential to return to visit destruction upon the government that disseminated it along with those it was intended to mislead.

Rote and ritual: they were the least-respected components of life, and that was wrong, for Time was greater than any individual, greater than the sum of all peoples. It was all-encompassing. The forces set in motion by Creation were not to be opposed, as George Meredith had recapitulated in his poem
Lucifer in Starlight
:

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.

Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend

Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,

Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.

…

He reached a middle height, and at the stars,

Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,

The army of unalterable law.

For so long as there was a sun, who was to deny the accuracy of the gnomon’s shadow on the garden dial? How else were to be immortalized those savoured moments when the clouds rolled away to allow warmth to sink into the hillside, and light to preen a bird’s feather; when a puff of wind shook the leaves on a tree like ringlets on the head of a pretty girl? Such things could not be erased from universal memory, after Time had recorded them and moved on.

Laszlo had an unshakeable belief in the romance of the brief and prematurely ended. In the house where he was born, his family had a mahogany long-case clock that had been made by a Somerset clockmaker in the early nineteenth century. It stood just inside the entrance like the
lares
and
penates
of the Ancient Romans, the household gods that guarded the home and warded off danger.

The clock had a break-arch hood topped with three brass wyvern finials, and there were free-standing barley-twist columns at the front on either side of the glazed door. The arch, spandrels, and base of the metal dial were painted, in restful oils, with scenes of solitary figures outside country cottages; a person leaning over a double-arched bridge across a river; and a woman holding a child’s hand as they crossed a meadow surrounded by oak trees. Within the Roman numerals of the hours was a small dial for the seconds, which rocked slightly at every forward click as if they were aware of their subsidiary status, and did not dare to get ahead of themselves.

Above the twin holes for the winding key on either side of the centre of the dial with its ornamental finely graven hour and minute hands, a crescent aperture like a downturned mouth contained a wheel displaying the date. Beneath it the clockmaker’s name and town were inscribed in Gothic Minuscule. The waist of the clock was topped with cove moulding over banded inlay, and supported by a matching base on straight bracket feet.

In between, the rectangular door that enclosed the weights and pendulum was also inlaid with marquetry, and there was a lock and key, which had to be turned to keep the door from swinging open. Inside, the eight-day movement comprised brass plates and wheels, cut pinions, double-hung iron weights, a seconds pendulum with calibrating screw, anchor-recoil escapement, and a rack-and-snail striker on a bell.

Four minutes prior to striking the hour, the ticking slurred, as if the clock were clearing its throat prior to saying something important.

As with the mechanism in the Exeat Institute’s tower, the grandfather clock was wound once a week; and it was understood that Laszlo’s pre-numeric father, as head of the family, should be the one to do the job…though it was more of a ceremony. Although the movement would have run a day longer, it was understood that the weights ought not to be allowed to get too low, so as to avoid putting excessive strain on the cogs. Of course, it could have been rewound at any time, haphazardly when the thought occurred; such inconsistency, however, would have been disrespectful of the piece’s predictory function, and Mr Laszlo reciprocated with a similar regularity of performance, on Saturday mornings. Now that the working week was over, and his family had been provided with the bare essentials and spared serious affliction for another seven days, it was incumbent on all parties to gather strength for the next hebdomadal stretch.

When his father died, young Laszlo inherited the clock and the responsibility of keeping it going. Only then did he truly become aware of the significance it had in his life, so long taken for granted; and the role that his father, who in body and spirit had been as upright and dependable as the tree that furnished the wood to make the piece, had shouldered on his behalf.

The tock of this same clock had ticked off Laszlo’s nativity and childhood; and the sound of the second hand and hourly striking were so familiar to him, so deeply ingrained in his consciousness and psyche, that he had difficulty hearing them even when he tried, as every eleven hours, fifty nine minutes, and fifty-nine seconds the clock repeated its few simple words from the lexicon of sequentiality, as a story that would forever bear retelling.

On the one occasion when Laszlo forgot to wind the clock, the silence was audible and awful, and came as the worst kind of accusation: that he had broken his family’s tradition of procedural rectitude. As he remorsefully raised the weights again from the base of the case on their fully extended wires, his eyes pricked with tears at their greater than usual heaviness. It was as if he were hauling a sinfully laden bucket from the dark depths of the well of his soul. When the job was done, and it reached the top and daylight, young Laszlo knew that he had received a gift of forgiveness, of renewal; of being granted retirement to a point before certain mistakes had been made, so that he might behave more wisely in the future. Thereafter he remained as convinced as a Quaker that, were the day to come when the pendulum ceased to swing of its own accord, and the temporal heartbeat stopped, the greatest tragedy must have befallen him, or who or what he held most dear.