Mingled
Red Eyes was the first person our tribe had known to worry about time. She said that one day it would mean more to us than our own children. Red Eyes always slept poorly, like she was feverish. She kept the counts well, always making the notches and predicting harvests and births. Once she tried to have us make a great notching ring for her out of timbers. It was lined in sacred ways with the sun, the mountains, and the stars. For nearly a season we struggled and when it was done anyone could tell when the harvest was ready or their child would be born.
Red Eyes still slept like a guilty thief. She would stay up whole nights and turned and spoke in sobs when she did sleep, though it was rare for anyone to see that. She added more and more timbers, more and more rings to the count circle. She kept saying that in the rain they would change just a little and that the snows changed them just a little, but no one else could see it. When she died of vomiting, in my mother’s last year, there were so many different timbers we could not make sense of them. We tore them all down and kept our counts roughly after that.
Red Eyes never slept well, but she could count very well, and it made her sad.
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His exile was due to the murder and for the murder Louis blamed the victim, his wife. He never stopped loving her even when he killed her. After his exile he became a sailor on Le Blanque Liona, a privateer and occasional trade ship out of Marseilles. He came on as a bosun’s mate but soon found his place with the helm due to his incessant, nearly neurotic, accounting. He served well in the position because sleep often eluded him and he could stay up nearly indefinitely. The captain even put him on lone shifts, weather and course permitting. Probably the real reason Louis rose to a fine position on the vessel was that he never left the ship. He had been exiled from Marseilles and had a sort of fear of Arabs. As the ship ran from Marseilles to Morocco and back again looking for prey in the straits or contraband in the ports he never got off. He was attached firmly as rust, yet his presence was so slight that his shadow fell on more eyes then his body.
In time, the captain had a stroke and the vessel’s future became uncertain. A conflict arose among the vessels builders and the crew. However, it turned out to be a moot point when the boson revealed he had been embezzling repair monies and scrimping on maintenance. The Liona’s bilge was so full after the months of sitting static in the port that a replacement boson pronounced it unseaworthy. It burned down in a reportedly unrelated incident a week later. Louis was without a home.
He drifted slowly and carefully to Germany then Holland avoiding the penalties of his former exile. In Holland he found a job watching a clock. The task was very simple: he sat inside the clock’s tower and wound the gears regularly to keep it on time. It was actually his former position that had gained him the job in the clock (they called it the Mare) for through complicated means his reputation of near mechanical reliability reached the gentleman in charge of seeking a clock minder. Within a year Louis had arranged to live in the clock building so that he could wind the clock day and night, a duty which his master was at first skeptical of giving to one man but eventually allowed. Louis was as sure as gravity in his diligence. In old age however his hip began to deteriorate. He woke up for an eight o’clock winding one evening and stepped on it badly. His leg folded under him and the hip snapped. He described the pain as if his leg had been that of a table and one kicked it inward until it broke off, nails exploding upward with their anchoring wood carried along in uneven splinters. He needed an assistant from then on.
The boy they hired – Louis called him “on-ree” – helped to wind the Mare until Louis died at 78. It was this apprentice that knew him best. In his memoirs late in life (for he went on to invent a significantly efficient stove pipe among other things) he scrawled these observations that serve as the only account of Louis.
“Louis had the job as tender of ‘The Mare’ because he did a few things, and only a few things, very well. There is, strangely enough, a connection between a helmsmen and a clock tender. To keep time on a ship one must constantly turn an hourglass set when the vessel leaves port. Without such a glass there is no time on the ship, no way to plot a true course. In essence the thing that makes sea life and land life simultaneous and real is lost. It is my confession that such a duty as an hourglass man’s is necessary for a clock tender too.
I do not know now if I confess the secret sin of every clock upon the world or only the private failing of our own Mare, but this I say in good faith: The clock did not keep true time. Even if winded regularly the hands would slow down bit by bit. The only answer was to keep an hourglass running that we knew to be accurate so that we could keep the clock face up to time. For the first few years Louis kept this secret from me, but one day I caught him working the hands. The scheme he had devised to keep the clock on time was to slowly advance the hands making one second into one half second every minute. With this strategy applied for five minutes once every two hours the clock kept good time. In this fashion no one noticed. It was the pride of our district to say that our clock was never late. Louis was the sinful secret reason. I think of the man fondly. He had been in legal trouble and often brooded or even wept on Sunday evenings, a fact he never knew I had observed.
More often he was happy. He would watch the hourglass, sometimes for the better portion of a day, as if counting the grains of sand. It was like a child transfixed by their own reflection. I asked him one day why he liked to watch the sand fall and he told me,
“It falls a little faster every day. You know the action of the fall sorts the sand, chips it and reforms it. Each time the grains are a little smaller and there is a little more dust inside the glass. One day you won’t be able to tell one grain from another.”
This idea fascinated him and in his last year he bought a new glass and compared the two falling watching for a difference and crying out every time the older glass came up a grain short. Even now I do not understand the man’s fixations.”
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Lana Glen was a largely unnoticed woman artist from the 50s. She was a dynamic creator working with canvas, collage, composing, and mixed media sculpture. It is perhaps such dynamism that kept her from gaining notoriety in any one field. She worked best with her hands, arranging and rearranging with curiosity and purpose that reminded an observer at once of a sparrow moving a twig here and there in its nest seeking the right fit; and again like a loose screen door banging in and out never quite content with its position. The sparrow fit her singing voice and the screen door her social life.
Socially unprivileged and often blacklisted due to her alleged bisexuality, Lana eventually found some shelter in a husband, Richard Howell. During her five years with Howell, who she described as “of a certain kind of homely wit and thrift”, she worked mostly on sculpture making a small name for herself in Berkeley. Howell died of cancer in 1958. His decent was slow and took nearly four of their five years of marriage. He wasted away like a pin-punctured waterbed, with a morose, slow, and morbid humidity. He died more than one hundred pounds lighter than when they had married.
Lana changed her name back to Glen though kept her “Missis” and dove into her work. Her most famous sculptures were set pieces of various destiny figures such as Maut, and Anubis, The Norns, or The Fates. She sold several clock pieces as well, these being representations of Dali’s melting timepieces. A critic said of her (years after her death when the complement did her no good) “She brought to her art a silent and foreboding imperative.” Though she often spoke of children, and even sought a surrogate father shortly before her menopause, she never bore any and when she died in 1973 her family line passed with her. Only her former live-in girl friend Macy Stark knew much of her after 1958 and it was only this woman who saw Glen’s largest scale work. Sworn to secrecy by Glen, the work’s existence was not revealed until after Macy’s death some ten years after Glen’s own passing. The work was a sand stone carving, possibly of a male figure.
The carving was situated in an area of high tidal flux along the California coast so that every day the figure is submersed and then uncovered. By the time of this work’s writing the figure is only barely recognizable. Lana’s confidante wrote only secretly about the statue.
“[Lana] is obsessive about it. She deliberately put it anchored in concrete in this tidal stair. Every day she drives out, with or without me, and measures sixty points on the statue and records each (and I must say quite rigorously) in a small notebook that ever adorns her bedside in the evening. I asked her the reason and she told me that every day the tidal forces stripped a certain measure of the stone. Because this measure was taken off of the whole statue it would take quite a long time to break its form and features down. The constant movement of grains keeps sea life from attaching to the surface. She will not tell me why she does this. Every time I ask she talks about the tides, as if her morbid obsession is an adequate explanation.
She tells me that the tides will sometimes hold the wave of an earthquake for years. That the wave moves to the shore and, just like when you sit down in the bath, lurches back into the sea. It’s impossible to tell one wave from another but some of them out there are hundreds of years old, bounced and buffeted by tides and storms. To God’s eyes each wave must have a purpose and history, but to our eyes it all looks like water. Each wave is lost in time.”
Lana’s confidant never revealed the identity of the statue and due to tidal currents it is now too damaged to make any clear assertions.
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In the early days of the outer colonies we had developed split-space but not FTL-lines. This meant that often times one could travel to a destination before a relayed message would arrive; effectively you would outrun the signal. Keptek was the first person to show me that you can catch an old signal. He took me out far enough that we could hear the Declaration of Severance. I had heard the recordings before but it was certainly something to hear it live, or at least as it would have sounded live. Few living today heard that address live. Keptek explained to me that the creation of the universe still has an echo, a sort of background noise of all those waves of energy. As a wave moves out into space it gets quieter and quieter, and eventually it’s overpowered by the background noise or “the true sound” as Keptek calls it.
I learned that Keptek doesn’t just Split his ship out for fun. His wife died in the oxygen fire at Tangier in the early 80s. He had spoken to her the day before by wave, just the usual sort of nonsense talk, they planned their rec-time for the same ten hour so that they could see each other. It was Keptek’s privilege (or some would say corruption ) that he was the comptroller and arranged the schedules. He did the job well obsessing – sometimes down to the second – to run the colony efficiently and the stress of it kept him up late every night. It was probably a stress on both of them. They never got to meet after the time block conversation. She burned to death the next morning.
After that Keptek got a little more lax with time. Maybe lax is not the word because he still obsessed over seconds. It was like a Scellis crab, how they aggressively comb every weed looking for something to eat and then when they scare out a little invertebrate they stab the ground over and over even after they’ve killed it just trying to be sure. Keptek started disappearing around that time.
It was after the trip to hear the Declaration that I realized he was going out to hear his wife’s voice. He would go out every day and hear that conversation or other ones from the past. I asked him why he didn’t record them rather than go out every day, but I felt stupid right afterwards. Of course he could have if he wanted to. That wasn’t the point of it.
He kept going out farther and farther to catch the messages. He did it every day until he caught Soprone in 23’ and died. From time to time I go out to catch whatever I can of old waves, I think it’s a good pastime. But I don’t do it too often because it tends to make me melancholy. I just keep remembering what Keptek said to me the last time we spoke about the waves.
“They just keep going forever, but every inch they travel they get just a little more dispersed, a little more imperfect. In time they become so faint that we will lose them to the background noise of the universe, the True Sound. They will never really leave though, we just won’t be able to tell the difference between them and something else. They’ll be gone, their significance forgotten and their questions unanswered. Like photons intermingling so that you can’t tell what’s the light of the sun or the light from a lamp. Like drops of water joining to make a pool, you lose track of why any one of them should be important or even why all of them are.”
“Like how each grain of sand used to be a unique rock.” I ventured.
“Yeah,” he replied “or like dust.”
