How To Tell Time
2000
I open the little roll-top bread box at the end of the kitchen counter at least once a day and stare at the bag. It doesn’t contain bread. It’s adorned with a bright orange and black symbol, and dull metal glints within. It’s a cursed object — the symbol is familiar and modern, but it could also pass for an ancient sigil etched on the wall inside a witch’s tomb.
This time, I take the bag out for closer inspection. The stark, overhead light in the kitchen feels too bright as I stand there, staring, mind somehow blank and teeming with images at the same time. It’s 2 a.m., and I should sleep. But sleep is hard to come by.
I place the bag on the counter beside the sink. It’s an evidence bag, the first I’ve ever seen up close, even though I’m really into true crime. It is sealed with bright orange biohazard tape, even though it wasn’t needed for any investigation. It takes a moment before I realize why it was treated as a biological danger. The metal band and face of the watch are flecked with blood and brain matter.
A plastic yellow wall clock, 1973
My brother David thinks it is time I learn to read the hands of a clock. I am 5, can read at a 3rd-grade level, but I’ve never tried to tell time. David, 14, decides to set aside his usual impulse to tease or needle me. He sits me down on the sofa in the living room in our house that smells of my mother’s cigarettes and her White Shoulders perfume.
Okay, he says, the long hand tells you how many minutes have passed since the hour hand, the short one, settled on a number. He points at the cheap, plastic yellow wall clock over the TV, his cheek close to mine. What number is the long hand on?
He is measured and focused, which is unusual for him. And he sits with me for a long time. Eventually, he grabs his watch, which he never remembers to wear, and twists the crown to stop the hands on various numbers. Soon enough he can tell I’ve learned. I’m a fast learner. But I rarely get to sit and hang out with my wild, electric brother, who is rarely still.
2000
I search through utensil and junk drawers for something sharp with which to slit open the bag. I find an old pocket knife and hold up the bag, weighing my choice. I remember my mother handing it to me, her face like paper that’s been crushed and smoothed, her eyes red. She looked at me as she did it, not at the bag.
Just do it, I think, nothing to fear here.
But there is. As I stand there in the silence, I am convinced a ghost is in the bag. That it will rise from the opening smelling of burned gun powder and blood.
Sony Digital Clock Radio, 1978
It comes at Christmas. I also get a new sheepskin-style coat and my first bottle of cologne, which smells like musk-soaked misery. But the clock radio is the best. It has AM-FM bands, mechanical digital display. The numbers fold to mark the passing of time.
I set it up that night on my bedside table and start switching through available stations. I happen on a station that airs radio theater, by then already an artifact of an earlier age, and all the more compelling because it is rare. I listen to the radio each night as I try to sleep. Eventually, as formats change and the radio drama is canceled, I settle on the classical music station. My brother and I haven’t shared a bedroom for a couple of years and I’m glad, then. He favored stoner rock and thought classical music was for “queers.”
(The first tune I remember humming as I played around the house was the opening riff to “Smoke on the Water.”)
I leave it on all night sometimes, on Nashville Public Radio. Sometimes I wake at 4 a.m. to sad string music and watch the amber-lit number panels flip as the minutes pass.
Swatch watches, 1984–1986
They’re inexpensive, and everyone has one. A colored quartz Swatch, sometimes its face protected by a little thick rubber strap. They’re more fashion statements than anything.
I don’t pay that much attention to the time, yet I can’t leave home without one. And it has to match what I’m wearing. The first time I think I’m in love I’m wearing a white one to match my white K-Swiss sneakers and sweatshirt.
Of course, it isn’t love at all.
I lose all my Swatches over time, then don’t even wear watches for years.
Seiko Chronograph, 1986
A shirt is hung over the chair in my best friend Mark’s bedroom, a blue, button-down oxford. Its tail flaps in a draft. The tensor lamp on the desk casts a warm pool of soft light. A thickly-stuffed brown bifold wallet sits on the blotter. A pair of thick glasses are folded beside the wallet. One lens is cracked.
On one wall his record collection leans into itself. His thousand-dollar sound system is dark. He made his bed before he left that day. His leather briefcase — he was too big a dork to haul a backpack around like other college students — sits on the floor at the foot of his bed. It’s open and I see the sheet music, a tube containing a conductor’s baton.
The house is long and low and his parents are in the living room at the other end, looking gray and wilted in the low storm light of an angry April outside. It’s been raining every day since I got home.
He was walking down a dark road with five other boys — young men by then, I guess — and all managed to avoid the drunk driver in the Mercury Cougar except for Mark.
Rain taps the window. I imagine he’s just down the hall in the bathroom and about to step out and say “Let’s go” and we’ll head to the park to toss that red Wham-O frisbee or to the mall to check out girls and buy clothes we can’t afford. Or he’s in the kitchen and will come down the hall any moment with two cokes in hand.
My eyes fall on his watch, a hand’s width from the wallet. It is a Seiko chronograph, steel band and case, dark face.
The crystal is cracked, but it is still working. I check the time against my Swatch. It’s accurate.
The watch was on his wrist when the Mercury hit him. When he flailed through the air and crashed to the pavement in the buzzing dark. It was on his wrist as he tried to breathe but only gurgled. As he let go of one last shuddering breath. When the only light left in his eyes was reflected starlight, the Seiko kept ticking away.
I could take the watch. I want to. His dad said I could keep whatever I wanted before lapsing into watery silence again.
But under his bed, I see the red Wham-O frisbee. I take that instead.
Cheap Timex, 2000
I put on dishwashing gloves and place the bag bearing a biohazard symbol in the kitchen sink. I open it and slip the watch out.
It’s a nondescript Timex, probably old when he bought it. It has one of those stretchy bands that grabs your wrist hairs, a white face, and black hands. No date. As simple as a timepiece gets.
He probably bought it at a truck stop someplace between Nashville and nowhere.
Now it is in my kitchen sink, and in the cruel light, I can see my brother’s dried blood and colorless flecks I suspect are brain matter.
I remember our father telling me when I got my first watch that right-handed people wear the watch on their left wrist and vice-versa. My brother, I am sure, heard the same thing. So when he fired the shot into his head with his right hand, the watch was on his left. The blood and matter arrived on the metal through the inescapable laws of physics and death.
I run hot water over the watch for a long time. It’s supposed to be at least waterproof. I find a spare toothbrush and with dish soap and the brush, I clean the Timex thoroughly, tugging the band to inspect between each bar. Once it looks almost new, I pour a bit of rubbing alcohol over it as well.
I take off the gloves and throw them and the toothbrush away. Then I set the time on the watch by the clock over the stove.
I wear it for a long time — until the hands stop moving and nothing can make them start again.
2019
Collecting watches comes naturally to me. My collection is 20 strong and growing.
