Hey, Look! . . . A New Short Story

Colonization of Time

This is how the man of Nigeria died: With melancholy and great difficulty in a London bordello. His name was Mister Johnson, and he had come to London looking for Mister John White, an Englishman who sold wrist and pocket watches, chronometers, time-pieces, clocks both bedside and grandfather; brass clocks, watches with leather straps, and great oaken cabinets for heavy, swaying, swinging pendulums sold by the photograph, since they were too large to pack away in his leather travel satchel. At first, when John White had come to Mister Johnson's village, he had been ignored and avoided. Sometimes he had traveled with other white men, who wore white clothes, or sometimes suits which had once been black but had been bleached by the sun, stripped of pigment until the cloth was the same gray as the clayey mud churned by passing carts, veined by soil leached from the fields.

Then John White came to him at the funeral and professed the open satchel where watches clung to leather straps or lay like virgins on beds of red velvet. John White said, “Who wouldn't want a watch?” Mister Johnson looked away and thought to summon memories of the dead.

The priest, quiet for a Frenchman, who spoke passable English, stood over the three small coffins and said, “How shall they believe of which they have not heard?”

John White then took out a pocket watch with a hunter case. It was gold and gleamed in the stolid sunlight. “Have you ever considered how much time you lose not knowing what time it exactly is? With a piece like this never again will you have recourse to the sun to divine night from day. Always will you know when you should sleep, wake, eat and work. Never an idle moment.”

The priest neared the end of his benediction. “To everything there is a season,” he began, and then closed the book and intoned, “What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth? I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. Amen.”

The flock of women in mourning black fragmented, some following the priest, most drifting down the cemetery hill, and Mister Johnson turned to go with them. John White plodded after, taking great sideways steps with his hands curled round the wooden handles of his bag to hold it open. “Look here,” John White said. “I realize the gravity of the occasion, and I would never presume to impinge on your mourning, but really you must apprehend the boon I represent. A time-piece, man! Even you have to appreciate something of such fine craftsmanship.”

Mister Johnson paused to placate one of the mourning women, who'd turned to frown at John White. “I have no interest in such things,” Mister Johnson said.

“Of course you do.” Now that they had stopped, John White set the bag on the ground and withdrew two watches, one on a long brass fob, the other thick as an egg. “Hour and minute hands may satisfy most, but I can see you are a man of fine and discriminating taste, and ordinary features will not suffice. Indeed, with this watch you'll even save time.” He held up the watch with the crystal face and brass fob. “Never again oversleep, or arrive early or linger a moment too long over an aperitif.”

“Go away.”

John White stood while Mister Johnson turned to go, the large watch still in his hand, the bit of fob dangling out of his palm like the final breath of a child. “What about a watch that will tell you when you are to die?”

“Such things are not so.”

“Why not? The moments we divide into seconds and minutes, but really can you tell me that a moment is not something more? I can see as the hand turns and perceive time between. With a watch that tick-tocked fast enough, divining morning from afternoon from evening, surely the genius of man can create a watch fine enough to distinguish life from death. It is Swiss.”

Mister Johnson looked at the watch, then at the face of the Englishman. His features were set like a table for supper; nothing askew. Finally, Mister Johnson smiled, “I know my sums and my letters, and I know also when I am being mocked. No.” Unlike Lot's wife, when he went, he did not look back.

***

In Lagos, a man told Mister Johnson that he should help protect their city London from the enemy. He said that the native was being ungrateful if he did not fight. So Mister Johnson went and put his name in a book and was festooned with a brass numbered ticket and given a trench watch.

Trains came. They began in the distance while the minute hand trembled at the top or bottom of the station clock and ended as the second hand stole after and then the train doors opened when the two met like lovers reunited at the XII or the VI. Mister Johnson went somewhere. The air was cold. Azure sky. A color unlike the sun-bleached whiteness over his home. They put him on a ship with other men from Lagos and with men from Bassa Province, from the Benin and Sapele Districts; men from Zungero, Lokoja and Kano, as well as Warri, Calabar and Onitsha. Christian and Musulman. They disembarked somewhere else, where the air was colder still and often it rained.

The mud was ocher and ruddy and a kind of rust. In it he saw pebbles, stones, the coarse grains of sand that glittered whenever the sun broke through clouds so thick and dark he came to believe that they captured the great clods of dirt cast heavenward when the bombs exploded. The shells had a kind of odd precision, a thump thump thumpthump that was not unlike the pattering of his heart. The tick of his watch. He stared at the second hand while his feet sank into the mud, while he leaned into the muddy walls and felt himself sink deeper into the mud; while the unseeing eyes stared out at him, bony fingers clutching the mud, but even they gradually sank into the mud. The war would end when everyone sank into the mud.

An Englishman looked at his pocketwatch. Men panted and gasped. Rain fell. Shells rained down. Silence reigned between the bursts, before ears stuffed and muffled realized the shelling had stopped and men tried to rein in their fear. The fob dangled from the Englishman's palm like a sob half-gasped.

He wondered: is this my time?

***

In Paris Mister Johnson saw a man dying in the street. A young woman crouched beside him in a dress like a silhouette. He was much older and his hat had come off his head, lying forlorn in the gutter while the murmur of lookers-on was like a worried bee-hive. It was after the war and people congregated as though it had never occurred.

When the ambulance cart finally arrived and a man emerged in white frock, he knelt over the dying man and grasped the dying man's wrist. The ambulance orderly removed a pocket watch and looked thoughtful, then nodded and put it away. Somewhere between the ticks the old man had died. As ineffable as the span between I and II, life passed into death.

***

“Is he here?” Mister Johnson asked Richmond Draper, the man who rented a downstairs room from the widowed Dame Roger, whose husband had simply failed to awaken one morning. Her two other tenants were Susanne and Mary, who shared a room and offered illicit favors to men for seven shillings three after 6, post meridian, until 10:30 when Jack Payne and his Dance Orchestra played on BBC radio. Dame Roger was a kind woman. As he lay dying, she charged him three-quarters for his board.

“Your son has been sent for,” Richmond Draper replied. He was an anxious man, with the sort of drooping, splotched face Mister Johnson had come to associate with Englishmen who'd never left London.

Mister Johnson shook his head. “Is it time?”

“I should think so,” Richmond Draper said, looking at the wrist watch he set every morning to the tolling of Big Ben. The salesman had told him, there is no finer time-piece in all of Britain. A perpetual calendar, and crystal mechanism accurate to the millisecond assured that Richmond Draper would never miss afternoon tea or forget leap year. “Any time now.”

“But you don't know,” Mister Johnson said.

“Really, how can any man know? That is for the Lord and not for anyone else.” He looked at his wrist watch again. “But really, I must be going. Time and tide and all that.”

Mister Johnson turned his head to face the window, where sunlight played against filigrees of cloud and he imagined he could hear the soft rumble of the underground and the bang of workmen pounding out new lines to Piccadilly and the shuffle of feet along walkways and up and down stairs like the grumbling of stones beneath the waves; and as he lay there he heard the tick of the grandfather clock in the foyer, and the clatter of some bit of piping and underneath all that the slow turn of the world.

And he imagined, or liked to believe, that somewhere far away a man woke with the sun, slept when he was tired and when he was hungry broke bread.

This is how the man of Nigeria died.