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7. THE FIRST HOUR
Pushing the door open, Arthur entered the all-night clerk's office. A middle-aged woman sat at a desk, reading a newspaper in the greenish glow of a library lamp. "Can I help you?"
"I came to pick something up." Arthur stamped snow from his shoes and walked up to the counter. He laid his business card down on the worn brown countertop.
"The units are locked for the night," she said, rising and walking toward him with her arms folded together over her bosom, under a thick woolen shawl. "What a night to be out. Are you having some kind of emergency?"
Arthur didn't know quite what to say, and somehow he knew he didn't need to say much. He pushed the card forward a few inches with his fingertips.
She started to say: "Can't help you at this hour, Mister." She saw the card and fell silent . She looked at him, at the card, and at him again with a light of realization dawning on her features. "You are--?"
"Arthur Latchloose."
She nodded. "Ah yes." She extended a soft, heavy hand. "I'm Rose Attar. You can call me Rose." She was a fiftyish woman, slightly fuller and squarer than one might expect, and there was gray around the roots of her dyed-blond hair, but her features were pleasant, handsome, and symmetrical, with an angular jaw and full mouth, and sympathetic blue eyes. "Okay," she said dreamily, "I get it. You came for the clock."
"You knew about it then?"
She seemed momentarily confused. "Yes. I don't know how or why, but I knew you were coming. I'll get the night man to bring it around." She picked up a desk phone, dialed, and waited.
Arthur heard a distant ringing on the other end of the line. She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered: "I'm surprised you'd be here, or anyone working with you at this hour, in the storm."
"I want the clock very badly, and I can pay extra for quick service getting it home," Arthur said.
"We'll see what we can do," she said. Arthur heard a man's voice on the other end, from across the counter. She turned away and muttered instructions. Hanging up, she told Arthur: "The night man will be right over."
"That will be great." Arthur felt the watch in his hand, in his pocket. The watch felt warm and alive, almost like a beating heart that wanted to be reunited with its body. For a moment, he thought it wriggled like a fish. Or maybe his hand had simply twitched for no reason.
The door opened, and a man stomped in, brushing snow off his clothes. He was a thin, tall, graying man who looked as if he had been an athlete long ago. His mouth and chin had a crisp look, with small evenly set teeth, to match a hawkish nose and cutting eyes. "This the gentleman?"
"Yes, this is Mr. Latchloose." To Arthur, she introduced the newcomer as Roger Cuphandle.
Cuphandle extended a hard, vise-like hand. "I'm the night man here, and I do everything. Rose tells me you have a clock you want to pick up from storage with us."
"If you don't mind." There was something odd about Cuphandle, and Arthur couldn't quite put his finger on it. Maybe his eyes looked just a trifle shifty. Arthur was a pretty decent judge of people, and he had a nagging doubt about his fellow.
"Come on." He turned and led Arthur out into the wintry landscape, while Rose stayed leaning against the counter inside with her arms again folded under the shawl.
It was a short ride among the white-dusted lanes among the storage units. "You getting ready for Christmas?" Cuphandle said by way of making conversation.
"I'm afraid it's been some years since I bothered."
"Now that don't seem entirely right. You don't believe in Santa?"
Arthur examined the inventory of his losses. "I just don't have any reason to. My wife has died, and my children have moved away." He wished Cuphandle would be quiet and mind his own business.
"Children move away far?" Cuphandle seemed entirely at ease in the warmth of the cab, and Arthur was grateful the truck was so new and clean.
"Far enough. We've lost contact."
"Now how was that? I've got family all over the country, and we manage to at least call each other, if not visit. If you don't mind me asking. Sounds like there's some bad blood there, Mister."
"I wouldn't go that far. My wife and I, we had a wonderful life together, until she got sick and faded away. Cancer, you know."
"I'm sorry to hear."
"Thanks. Yes, it's never been the same since. And then my son and daughter, well, they went their separate ways and we all seem to have lost interest in each other. Well, to tell the truth, I was disappointed that…" Arthur stopped talking because the other man wouldn't understand, and on the surface maybe it sounded selfish of him, but he had wanted Edward to take over the business from him, and Anne not to marry a failure like this Tim Woodpond she'd dredged up at some church social, instead of a successful lawyer or banker. Not only had Gretchen betrayed him, sort of, by going off and dying, but his children had turned against him. He finished lamely: "It's a chicken and egg thing, you know? Who knew who struck the first blow or said the first hurtful words. It just went spinning out of control."
Cuphandle leaned a little bit into a corner as the truck slipped on ice and then corrected. "Yes, that's how it goes. Nobody wants to say they're sorry, and nobody wants to open the door a crack."
Arthur suddenly tired of the conversation and didn't answer. It opened too many old wounds, and didn't solve anything. He had not spoken with Edward and Mary in three years, and Anne and Tim in four. It seemed like an eternity…an eternity since the days of those smiling family portraits, the little kids, the innocence, the hopes, the family trips. Come to think of it, he'd never actually planned any of it. Gretchen had always organized all those things, be it the trip to the Grand Canyon, or a trip to the photographer's for a family portrait. Arthur had always been too busy at the bank to think of those things. He still really missed Gretchen , though that last pain-filled year of her dying from leukemia was now six years ago.
"Here we are," Cuphandle said, and Arthur was grateful for the break in his dreary thoughts. They got out and Cuphandle punched in a number code on a pad beside a door, and then they were in the dry, temperature-controlled storage building. The stairs were unfinished plywood, the walls unfinished drywall. It was all as utilitarian and spare as could be. Cuphandle said: "Here's your unit."
"So how long has this clock sat here?" Arthur asked as the door swung open.
"As long as I've been here, and that's about two years." As he spoke, Cuphandle seemed to grow larger somehow, or was it his shadow thrown on the rough wall behind him by the hallway light? The closer he stood to the clock, the stronger his beard shadow, the bigger his forehead, and the larger his folded-together muscles. At first, Arthur didn't quite notice these apparent changes much.
There it was: every bit as lovely and complex as Major Jarlid had said. The clock was feminine, with a full bottom and a narrow waist and a tapering top. Its clockface shimmered like an engraving with a thousand fine lines whirling in fingerprint complexity. Its numbers were Roman, large, stark, and black. Every available corner, surface, and edge was decorated with the finest carvings on marble and metal surfaces. It gleamed, and seemed to call Arthur to it.
"Do you have the vest pocket watch?" Cuphandle asked.
"The what?" As Arthur regarded him, he noticed that the man seemed to have changed. Startled, Arthur pulled out the stop watch. "You mean this?"
"Yes." Cuphandle grinned and rubbed his hands together. "Then you signed the contract, I take it, and the clock is yours?"
"Yes," Arthur said almost breathlessly. He hardly noticed the other man's excited breathing, flushed cheeks, and gleaming eyes. The trainman's watch burned in his palm as he took it out and held it up to the grandfather (grandmother?) clock. The clock almost pulled his eyes toward it, and there, just under the round clockface, was a depression shaped just like the watch.
"Go on," Cuphandle urged. "You have to do this yourself. Go on, listen to your heart. The clock is telling you what to do."
In modern parlance, this was a kind of docking station for the watch. Without debating, Arthur held up the watch and moved it close to the concavity. The watch fit in, was almost sucked in, with the satisfying click of an expensive car door whispering shut. Levers and ratchets ground powerfully as the clock pulled its heart close, its child, its nestling. In that moment, something came over the clock and indeed over the entire room. Arthur half expected the clock to begin booming out the hours. Instead, a change happened in the clock face. He saw now what it was: He'd seen only the hour and minute hands, typical of clocks of its era. Now it seemed the clockface became animated in greater detail. A second-hand began sweeping around the circle, and the clock's ticking grew in intensity. Arthur wondered who had kept it wound all this time. Did it have an atomic engine of some sort? Had alchemists at the court of the Sun King, or at the divan of the Sultan, contrived to stoke this grand clock with a smidgin of the sun's almost inexhaustible power? Did the fire of the sun and the gravity of the moon somehow keep its esoteric engines grinding in refined synchronicity?
Cuphandle seemed to have grown until he was eight feet tall. His upper arms had grown massive, rippling with muscles as he folded them across his chest. His clothing had changed, also, to something resembling a hybrid between a khaki flight suit and Turkish dress with pantaloons and puffy blouse. "Do you know who I am?" he boomed at Arthur.
Arthur shook his head. Oddly, he didn't feel afraid. He had that same groggy feeling he got when awakening in the middle of the night to stagger down a dim corridor for a glass of water, then returning to sleep in his bed without ever having fully awakened.
"I come with the clock," Cuphandle said. "I am the djinni or genie of the clock. When you bought the clock, you got a piece of me too."
Arthur stood with his mouth hanging open, and could only manage to say "What?"
"You probably thought djinn only live in jars, stuck there until someone lets them out. Actually, virtually every place and thing has its djinni. It's just that some djinns are smarter than others, and I'm one of the smartest. For example, smarty pantaloons, djinn is the plural of djinni."
Arthur put his hands on his hips. "That's all so utterly ridiculous, Mr. Cuphandle. Have you been drinking?"
Cuphandle raised his hands in a 'search me' gesture. "Not a drop, Mr. Latchloose." Now it was Cuphandle's turn to put his hands on his hips. "See here, Latchloose, you've got limited time and you don't want to waste any of it, so start believing in me and let's not waste a lot of time arguing about your doubts."
Arthur kept his hands on his hips, and the two glared at each other thus. Arthur said: "I want you to either haul this thing to my home, or get someone up here who will do it for me, and stop talking drivel."
"Very well," said Cuphandle. Wrapping his enormous arms around the clock, he lifted it easily as if it were a light thing filled with air. He carried it out the door with a few easy steps.
"Easy! Careful!" Arthur cried out, dancing after him down the corridor to the stairs.
"Not to worry. Oh, do close the door and turn off the lights behind us, would you? Let's not waste energy."
Grumbling, Arthur did as he was told. By the time he pulled the outside door shut with a loud click, and joined Cuphandle by the truck, Cuphandle already had the clock wrapped in quilts, safely covered with a heavy black tarp, and strapped down with thick blue and white nylon cords.
"Where to, boss?" asked Cuphandle.
Arthur told him his address-reluctantly-adding, "You don't plan to stay there with the clock, I hope."
As they sat in the warm cab again, and Cuphandle drove bouncing over the speed bumps, Cuphandle said: "Not to worry; I have her strapped in and wrapped as delicately as eggs. In regard to my domicile, I do indeed stay with the clock-"
"Oh no!" Arthur protested loudly and angrily.
"-At least for the first twelve hours," Cuphandle finished his sentence. "You see, unlike those djinni in bottles, we clock types only award you one wish, and you have to make it, and we must fulfill it, in exactly twelve hours from the time you signed the purchase from the previous owner. He didn't explain all this to you, did he?"
Arthur shook his head. "I don't recall off-hand from whom I bought it, come to think."
"No matter," Cuphandle said. He tapped the large round clockface in his truck's dashboard. "In fact, your first hour is almost up, so you only have eleven hours left. What is it that you desire most in life?"
Arthur laughed. "Assuming I believe all this poppycock?"
"What have you got to lose?"
"That's true," Arthur said. "Okay, suppose I play along with your silly game. What is it I want most of all? Do I have to be careful what I say? Like if I wish I had another million bucks, will you drop a zillion pounds of reindeer on my head?"
"No, no, nothing like that," said Cuphandle. "That's for those dorky lamp djinni that one occasionally finds washed up on a beach. They play nasty little games like that. I'm a professional, and take pride in delivering quality service with that fawning, customer is always right smile, and of course your happiness with the outcome is the key."
Arthur thought a bit. "You know, if I had at least two wishes, maybe the first one would be that you tell me nothing but the truth."
Cuphandle shrugged. "True, but a lamp djinni would figure out some way to play with the words and lie to you. You'll just have to trust my honesty. I urge you, however, to consider your choice very carefully, because you truly will be stuck with it forever."
"Oh come on. This is just a game, right?"
Cuphandle grew a bit huffy. "Listen, you old fool who believes in nothing, and cares only about himself. Don't anger me or I'll change you into a dog and leave you at someone's doorstep. Then your only wish would be to change back into your miserable self."
"That would defeat your customer service philosophy," Arthur said with malevolent sarcasm.
"True. Okay, let's try this. See that tree over there?" Cuphandle pulled over on the narrow two-lane road, and pointed to a snow-covered tree. "I want you to point at that tree and say Poof, got that?"
"You must think I am as nuts as you are," Arthur said. He kept his hands firmly, palms-down, on the seat on either side of him.
"Let me show you," Cuphandle said. He pointed at the tree and said "Poof." Instantly, all the snow disappeared from the tree's barren, black, icy branches, and it stood fully resplendant with a full crown of midsummer leaves bursting from every branch, stem, and twig."
Arthur stared in disbelief. "Holy Mackerel. I must be dreaming."
Cuphandle seemed unperturbed, as if he did this sort of thing routinely. "Now you point at it and say fooP. Got that?"
"FooP," Arthur said numbly, looking at Cuphandle.
"You must look at the tree and point when you say it," Cuphandle said patiently as if teaching a slow child. "And put a little body English into it. That was so lame just now."
Arthur felt a bit silly, but he looked at the tree, pointed his finger at it, and said softly, "fooP." Instantly, the tree became once again utterly barren, dormant, and covered with snow and ice. "I'll be darned. So you are a supernatural being?"
"No, not at all," Cuphandle said. "I am a perfectly rational construct of the late alchemical age, about the time when Newton was co-inventing calculus on the one hand in the rational modern world, and on the other hand was making a living by casting horoscopes for a bunch of superstitious customers."
"Sort of a foot in each world," Arthur mused.
"Well put." Cuphandle pointed to the dash clock. "You only have eleven hours left, so we'd better get zipping and zooming or you'll miss out on your wish."
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