I
“If I can be on time with these damn peg legs,” my father would say, “y’all can be on time with your God-given legs.”
The prosthetics he got to replace both legs were as rigid as the hands of his watch. It was a simple, gold-plated watch with black leather straps. None of us knew where he got it from, only that he wore it before going off to Kuwait. He revered that watch and we obeyed its commandments. We were all punished if just one of us were late for dinner, school, or completing chores. The worst of the punishments was getting locked away in the spare bathroom for the rest of the day. No food, and only water from the sink. Not even Mom was exempt.
The watch was a cruel god.
Despite this, I always felt pride in knowing that I did what I was supposed to do. I did all the things my father did when he was my age: I wrestled, played on the football team, and I looked for handiwork to do around the neighborhood. I was going to join the military until my knee exploded during my senior year of football. I thought me injuring my leg would bring me and my father closer: two warriors who put their bodies on the line and paid the price. But there was no change in his regard for me. I was damaged goods.
Unable to run or wrestle, I had a lot of time to read. At some point during my year of rehabilitation, I read enough poorly written novels to figure I could probably write something better. I was never a very imaginative person, but I figured that writing a story was no different than being a soldier. It turned out to be true. I created a schedule for each of my writing sessions during the day and quickly churned out my first novel.
By the time I began my sophomore year in college, I already had my first book deal. And by the time I began my junior year, I no longer gave a shit about classes. I was consistently churning out military thrillers over the course of each year. My biggest fans were my editor and publisher because they could depend on me to meet benchmarks on time. While my writing career began to take off, my younger brother, Two, went into the army and followed our father’s footsteps into the army. My father wouldn’t have accepted the navy or air force because he thought they were all stuck up and soft. “While the grunts toil away on the ground, they get to play with all the toys.”
My brother would come home and share stories of his tours with our father who would then open up about his own experiences.
He had nothing to share with me.
II
I was always on time, even to his funeral.
I made the necessary arrangements with my mom for the funeral. The following weekend, we went through his things to throw away, sell, or keep for ourselves. It turns out he had bought my first book. There were neither any creases in the soft cover book, nor were there any folds in the pages. He never read it.
I threw the book in the trash with his other junk. The only thing I kept was the watch he always wore. It seemed fitting that I keep the only thing he passed down to me: punctuality.
III
I put on his watch for the first time on a Monday.
The gold was cold and the black leather straps embraced my wrist with ease. I stared into the watch’s dispassionate face—still ticking away as it would for my father. I waited for it to tell me something. To give me what it gave my father.
It told me it was 7:45AM, so I went to work.
I started my morning session of the day at the usual time of 8AM, but whenever I checked the time at the corner of the laptop screen, time had passed faster than it seemed. I finally got into a rhythm around 10AM, but that was when I’d usually take my first break of the day. Something wasn’t right. I checked my father’s watch, and it only read 9AM. The watch was never wrong. My father made sure his watch was always in working condition, replacing parts when needed and cleaning it with great care. He said his watch was more reliable than anybody he knew, including his family. I knew that watch couldn’t be wrong. I decided to ignore my laptop’s clock and I finished another hour of writing regardless.
By the time I finished my evening writing session, the laptop’s clock showed 5:02PM. I was an hour late. My keyboard’s keys started to get damp from my sweating fingertips. Being late always made me feel like I had to run and escape somewhere; an internal alarm bell ringing and buzzing under my skin. The walls closed in like the old bathroom walls. I resolved to work faster the next day to get back on schedule.
So the next day, I took my laptop to the coffee shop down the street to see if a change in scenery would help. I got there by 10AM and set off to work, but I began to tire out after the first hour. I drank some coffee and ordered a breakfast sandwich. When I looked up again, it was only noon. Barely two hours into my session and I was more exhausted than I’d ever been. My words per minute had never been so low. Even the alarm bells seemed dull as they went off under my skin. A schedule I had maintained consistently for years was falling apart with no explanation or warning. I tried to double my effort, but still couldn’t catch up. I typed faster than I ever had before, but was still behind. I was so tired.
I stopped writing.
It was hard to focus on anything knowing time was passing me by anyway. At this rate, I would never get anything done. My next deadline was in a month, but there was no way I was going to make it in time. I went back home, took some cold medicine, and went to bed.
When I woke up, my watch told me it was a little before 3AM.
I checked the phone and it was midnight. The day of the week was also different.
Three days passed while I was asleep.
The alarm bells under my skin started to sound off, rumbling like angry hornets trying to make their way through my veins. I didn’t sleep for long, yet I had lost entire days. I had lost my mind.
I went over to my laptop and checked the draft of the novel I was working on. It had the same word count as when I last opened it the previous day. Or, at least the previous day according to my father’s watch. The watch was the only thing that gave me a sense of how time was supposed to have passed. Losing all grasp of reality, it was my only anchor to what used to be.
I threw my slippers on and stepped out of my apartment. I took the elevator down and passed by the security guard in the lobby. I checked the clock on the wall behind him. It was almost 3:30. The guard watched me as I stepped outside. There was no traffic on the street. No people either. Not even birds. I took a big breath, letting the cool summer night fill my lungs. I looked back inside and saw the security guard get up and walk away from his post. Suddenly, a rushing gust of wind took hold of me. I looked to the dark sky to see if there were storm clouds, but the few clouds I did see turned to wisps as if carried by the same wind. I looked down the street and saw the traffic lights rapidly switching between each color. I went back inside the lobby and checked the clock. The minute hand creeped along the edge of the clock as the second hand swung around from the center of its face.
It was happening again.
The clock would not slow down, almost spitefully taking away my life from me. I considered knocking it off the wall and smashing it, but the security guard turned the corner down the hall and was making his way back to the desk. I looked back at the clock and it was no longer racing. It seemed to slow back down when there was someone else around.
I pulled up a chair in front of the front desk where the security guard could easily see me and called Two. He lived 30 minutes away from me in the suburbs. He was pissed at being woken up in the middle of the night. It was just past 4AM on my watch and my phone when he arrived. I ended up falling asleep on the drive back to his house.
Two woke me up when we pulled into his driveway. The clock on his car’s dashboard read a little after 4:30AM. Time was moving as it was supposed to for now.
We went into his house at the end of the cul-de-sac. We were hardly through the door when his German Shepherd began growling. It was a deep rumble I imagined she reserved only for strangers. My brother made a hand gesture and pointed to a corner on the far side of the living room. The dog swallowed her protests and went to her bed where he pointed. After coming back home from duty, my brother got the wife, house, and 2.5 kids. Looking around, even the inside of his house seemed like an imitation of The Cosby Show.
We went upstairs to the guest room and he told me I would explain what was going on after I took a shower and got some rest. Desperate not to be left alone, I asked if I could sleep in the same room with him and his wife. He gave me a look that was somewhere between pity and a threat. The answer was no. Humiliated, I walked toward the bathroom with some spare clothes he gave me. They mostly fit, despite the pants being short in the leg.
I raced against the clock as I did my best to take the quickest shower I could. I may have been in there for five minutes, max. The alarm bells rang feverishly beneath my skin. I hardly even dried off before putting my clothes on and brushing my teeth in front of the mirror. I looked a mess. Looking out the window, it was already dawn. I realized I hadn’t even thought to take off my watch when I checked my wrist to see what the real time was.
It was almost 5:30AM.
I went back to my room and saw that Two’s bedroom door was open. He was sitting at the foot of his bed, looking at me in the gray-blue twilight. He looked as if he hadn’t gone back to sleep.
“How you feeling?” he asked. There was an assurance in his posture that did not hide the fear in his voice.
“Tired,” I said.
“Mary is going to make breakfast. We’ll talk after, once the wife and kids are out the house.”
The thought of breakfast made me weak. I hadn’t really eaten or drank anything since the coffee shop. I quickly went downstairs to the dining room and sat at the table. Time didn’t move as fast with everyone moving around the house and preparing for breakfast. Even with the brief reprieve, I was in a house full of people and felt no different than I did in that spare bathroom. Just waiting for it to end, wondering if it would always be this way.
I put my head down, then woke up to the intoxicating smell of bacon and pancakes. Everyone was already seated around me, looking at me as if I was some stray animal that had come inside uninvited. My eyes drifted to my watch. Exactly 7AM.
“Say ‘hi’ to your Uncle June,” my brother said to his children.
“Hi Uncle June” his two sons said, their looks unchanged. His wife looked at me as if I might bite them.
Everyone seemed to trust my brother’s judgment that I wasn’t going to explode or attack. They never thought much of me. Despite my brother’s family always being polite, I never got anything beyond what my relation to him afforded. Now that I was losing my grip on my sanity, that affordance was going to be taken away.
Mary led grace over the food. Mary was a sweet, unremarkable woman whose greatest aspiration was to be someone else’s wife and mother. She had no other identity aside from the one my brother gave her. She was too much like our mother.
I pushed their looks out of my mind and started eating. The food was hot and delicious, and I scarfed it down too quickly. I was left feeling stuffed and a bit nauseated, but still happy to have eaten so well after so long. Mary took the kids off to a nearby park with the dog for a Saturday stroll, leaving me and my brother to talk alone.
“So,” my brother said, “what’s going on?”
“I don’t know Two,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to write and keep up,” I continued, “but time keeps getting away from me. Every time I’m alone, time just evaporates away. One minute becomes four and the next day that same minute becomes sixteen. And whenever I’m surrounded by people, or even just one other person, I get too exhausted to do anything. Two, I don’t know what’s going on.”
Two was never much for imagination, so I was surprised how serious his face was as I described time’s newfound malice. He didn’t roll his eyes or laugh in my face. He just nodded and sat in contemplation.
“Since Sir’s funeral,” Two said, “I ain’t really been right either. In that church, I didn’t know how I’d feel. I imagined Sir burning in hell or even bursting into flames as the priest gave his prayer. I imagined him still frowning when walking up to the casket. But all I saw was a dead man. That was the first time I actually saw peace in his face.”
Two’s eyes became glass and he sucked in his bottom lip to keep it from quivering. Though we learned crying only made things worse, he could never swallow the tears down before it reached his face.
“I got angry,” he said. “I wanted to rip that fucking face off. He gets to have peace after all he did. After taking away so much. The worst thing about it was that I couldn’t shake the sadness. I still wanted a father, and now I’d never have one.” I started to get up to console him, but he waved me off before I even stood all the way up. “I ain’t that little boy no more. I’ll be fine. I’m supposed to be helping you.”
“And you are,” I said. “I didn’t know where else to turn. I’m glad you answered when I called.”
“Me too,” Two said, thankful to return the focus to me. “You looked homeless as hell. All the glitz and glam of being a famous writer and the nicest thing you had on was a dead man’s watch. Shit, I’m surprised he wasn’t buried with it.”
“I wanted to know what it was like to wear the watch.”
“And?”
I looked at the face of the watch, the mid-morning light glancing off the glass. The alarm bells began ringing under my skin and I could feel how exhausted my body had become.
5:30AM.
“It’s the only thing that’s remained the same all this time. All these years.”
“The clock ain’t even right, June,” Two said. “It’s just past ten. And I noticed that every time you look at that watch, you start shaking like you did when we were kids. Why don’t you take it off?”
The idea of taking Sir’s watch off scared me. I didn’t know if the watch would suddenly begin accelerating too.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just hadn’t thought of it.”
“Can I see it?”
I looked up at him. My brother’s eyes still sat sad and red in his recomposed face. He had reached out his hand with his question, knowing his older brother had already given it to him as he did everything else when we were boys. I did whatever I could to console him when we were let out of the bathroom. I told myself it was to keep him quiet, but I couldn’t bear to see him cry. I had no power in Sir’s house, but I could at least try to make my brother happy. Now, over twenty years later, all I could do was acquiesce to my younger brother’s wish.
I unclasped the watch from my wrist and handed it over. I felt the cool air brush against the damp, raw skin that was beneath the leather straps. The alarm bells stopped and my body started to feel lighter. Time seemed to slowly move as it had before. Two turned over the watch in his hands then stared into the watch’s face. After a pause, he gave me a face I imagined he reserved for a soldier under his command.
“Follow me,” Two said.
He quickly got up and started walking towards his garage. I chased quickly behind him. Watch or no watch, I wasn’t ready to be alone again. Two entered the garage and walked around the parked sedan to a large work bench. He put the watch on the bench and searched a drawer.
“What are you doing?”
Two pulled out a hammer.
“We’re smashing this shit.”
“What?”
“You heard me. This piece of shit should have been buried with him. It ruled our lives when we were children and I’ll be damned if it rules your life now.”
“If I break the watch, there might be no way of returning to normal.”
“Horseshit. That watch never protected you and it never will. You know what I saw when I looked into its face? Nothing. Only the wrong fucking time. Sir isn’t in there. You have to let him go.”
He handed me the hammer. The hornets started crawling in my veins again and the walls began to close in around me. I looked at the watch. It looked back, indifferent to what was happening. I wanted it to tell me something, anything as to what it showed my father. A reason why.
6:00AM.
I slammed the hammer as hard as I could into the watch and smashed in its fucking face. I hit it again, knocking it to the floor. I picked it up and put it back on the bench. I swung down again and missed. Two got a box and pressed it down on one of the watch’s straps. I brought the hammer down again. And again. And again. I could feel my voice rip my throat with rage. I couldn’t see. Then I couldn’t feel the watch under the hammer
anymore.
I don’t how long I was swinging the hammer, but eventually my arm gave out. I dropped the hammer and sat down on the ground. I wiped my eyes and could see my younger brother’s shoes take a step towards me.
“You need a moment?” he said. I looked at the floor in front of me and saw scattered glass and warped metal.
“No,” I said, voice hoarse. “I just need some sleep.”
Two helped me up off the ground and started cleaning up the mess. I thought about waiting until he finished sweeping up the glass and warped metal, but I had to get some rest. I reentered the house from the garage and climbed up the stairs to the guest room. I slept like I hadn’t in a long time.
When I woke up, the sun was already down. I rolled out of bed and reached for my phone to check the time.
Saturday, 6:00PM.
Ahhh this was so good! It’s as if I could the anxiety with him. Two is a real one, we all need someone like that to pull us out of our perception and into reality. Well done 🤌🏽