Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [9]
He owned several clocks. For when their batteries failed he forgot that was the reason they stopped. Seeing some other clock and fancying it, he bought it. He bought shoes he already had. Underwear too.
Deep down he actually thought time had stopped. The clocks, then, were mementos, trinkets. Curios. Reminders of a time when people still lived and behaved as if they were going somewhere. Somewhere important. We are the Kings of the Universe was the internal mantra of almost everyone. And we are on a mission to Something, Someplace, better.
Not so. And now most people knew. Would the end be brutish and short? Or would it be long and drawn out? People dying slowly of every illness under the sun. From viruses that seeped from under jungle rocks. From infections received while making love. From fratricide. Genocide. Hatred that intensified over decades, centuries, until nothing could stop its rolling over and flattening entire peoples, races, continents. Would the passion and joy of future generations be expressed in acts of hate, as acts of “sex” were now routinely expressed in acts of violence?
The indigenous Australians thought Time was synonymous with Forever and that therefore it was ridiculous to wear it on your arm. Or to think one’s short present lifetime made much of an impression on Time at all.
It was over, he thought, the kind of Time watches measured. We should all throw them away. He didn’t though. He bought more. So that when he looked about his cluttered rooms, with their assortment of rundown clocks, he understood he had, by buying them, been attempting to preserve time, to hoard it.
I am a fool, he thought, observing this. And yet he continued to buy any timepiece that appealed to him.
While she was regurgitating over her left forearm into the yellowed grass and dusty olive green bushes, she thought of a serving dish her first husband and their child had given her for Valentine’s Day. It had been a lively red and covered with white flowers. It was these white flowers, dozens of them, that now poured from her mouth. At the time of the gift she’d stuffed her disappointment. That she was now perceived as someone who, on a day especially set aside to celebrate lovers, could be enraptured to receive a serving dish.
Look at the roses! the child had cried.
Her husband had beamed at her. They’d chosen it together, he declared.
She had forced a smile she drew out of the thin air just behind her head. And she had said patiently, with kindness, to the child: No, they are daisies.
And he had said: Aren’t they vibrant?
And she had replied: Yes, they are.
But all the time she was thinking: Am I so old now? Is the life that has Cupid in it, not to mention Eros, over for me?
And she began to think of the labor it sometimes was for her now to make love.
A lump had risen in her throat. Of sadness. Of disappointment. Anger that she had entered the unromantic era of life, so soon! That her child was in cahoots with her father in giving her this awful gift, this mirror in which she saw herself as someone whom time was passing by.
More years passed, and she stayed with them, and she saw how they ceased to really see her. They saw instead a service, a servant. And she’d gazed into their greedy eyes and saw the rest of her life being sucked away. And she had swallowed and swallowed.
Well. There it lay now, stinking in the sun beside one of the mightiest rivers on earth. The mass of rotten, once vibrant but artificial flowers, thrust upon her as a compliment when she had, in her soul, felt much too young, much too alive in her subterranean depths, to receive them. The pretense had been heavy as a car.
And to think how she had lain under him, night after night, dreaming of getting away; of being high