Here, for your enjoyment, is a story created by David Hammitt and written by me. Read and think.
Jingle
Jingle.
The bells over the door of this coffeehouse used to jungle,
but lately they had gone “clunk”, a sound which fell like a brick to the worn
hardwood floor rather than dancing around the ceiling like crystal butterflies.
They used to make people’s eyes leap to the door smiling, now they seemed to force
their gaze to the ground. The door, too. The door used to whisk across the
floor, but it had developed a scrape of late which gouged the ears almost more
than the rut in the rough planking. He pushed the door back closed to keep out
the hot, humid July air. It used to shut itself, but the piston was worn, and of
course it was scraping on the floor.
“Be with you in a minute, Cal.”
Sarah, the waitress, sighed the words more than spoke them.
Cal glanced at her as he slumped into his usual seat by the window, which
creaked as it usually did. She must’ve woken up late. Her hair had a few more
strays, her makeup was colored outside the lines a little bit. Maybe it was too
humid. Maybe someone had left the door open too long.
“You want a chai, Cal? We’ve been having a heck of a time
with the steamer, so you can’t get your cappuccino.”
“Can I get just a shot of espresso? I’m sort of in a rush.”
“Sure thing. Noticed you were in here late.”
“Thanks.”
Cal set his elbows on the table and picked at the notch in
the edge. He stopped. This table is pretty beat up, maybe I oughtn’t make it
any worse.
“Here’s your… thing-sorry, I’ve been having a rough day.”
“No problem, thanks.”
Cal drained his espresso, wincing at the bitter bite. I
wonder where these beans come from. He’d seen in the paper about a drought in
Colombia.
Creak, clunk.
A couple entered the door, leaving it open a crack, and
tracking a few grains of street dirt over the entry mat. Sort of inconsiderate,
I guess, but that’s not too bad. Cal drained the last dregs of the cup,
shivered, then bounced up from his squeaking chair. It wobbled more than
before, but maybe I’m just a bit jittery. He set his cup on the counter, taking
care to wipe the coffee off the bottom before he set it on the ringed counter.
He reached into his right pocket, grabbing a few coins and a buck for Sarah,
who really deserved her tip today. The old peanut butter jar, labeled in
tattered construction paper “Tipping is not a city in China” only had a few
quarters in it, probably just to weight it down. He found another quarter, and
dropped them in on the way towards the door. Jingle.
But no jingle. Cal turned over his shoulder and glanced at
the tip jar where his coins should have landed. The furrow in his brow deepened
as he turned back toward the counter, then deeper still as he looked into the
jar, threatening to unify his eyebrows. He stared at the coins and the bill,
still suspended an inch into the jar, the bill in mid-expansion from wadded in
his pocket to merely crumpled in the jar. But not expanding. The coins
had…stopped. Cals eyes darted about
around the jar, then slowly rose to see Sarah in mid step, her flats just beginning
to catch in the deepened groove cut by the door. She hadn’t yet spilled the
drink in her hand, but she would. If she hadn’t stopped. Everything had
stopped. The steam from the broken frother was a frozen cloud. The fork dropped
by the old man in booth 3 had come to rest 3 inches above the floor, the man
who dropped it just coming to the end of a rather violent (and now visible)
sneeze.
Everything.
Cal’s eyes widened, and his heart jumped. Frantic, he looked
around and leaned on the counter to steady himself. It creaked, and he whirled
to face it like it was a charging bull. He gasped, and stepped back. At least
the floor was still there. That was slightly reassuring. He stared for a few
seconds at nothing, or maybe at the tiny fly, wings mid-beat, which before had
been happily droning around the grease-spattered trash can in the back of the
café. Slowly, he closed his eyes, and inhaled…exhaled. He was here, they had
stopped.
Clunk. Scrape. That
made him jump, but the old man now trudging decisively through the door was
quite calm. Slowly the man shuffled on tattered pant hems across the door
groove, past the stumbling waitress and to the tip jar. Oblivious to Cal’s
gape, he reached his veined hand gingerly into the jar, making sure the broken
buttons on his worn brown jacket didn’t brush the jar accidentally. He slowly
pushed one nickel slightly towards himself, then twisted the other ever so
slightly, and withdrew his hand. He surveyed the jar, then with one hand
reached around the back and twisted a frayed edge of the jar’s label against
the jar.
The floor creeked as Cal adjusted his stance, and gasped at
how loud he seemed all of a sudden. Taking great care, the man turned, and
pulled his jacket down to adjust it. He squared himself to Cal, and looked up
through scratched and crooked spectacles, his blue eyes peering through years
of wrinkling. “Oh yes, Cal. Just a minute, I’ve a few more things to do.”
Cal took a sharp
breath. “Wh…hat?”
“I must take care of my other business before I forget.” The
old man walked towards Cal, turning and bending down to investigate the
shoulder of the shirt on a red-haired man who had come in and left the door
open. “Just as I thought, starting to fray. Hmmm…” He fished a pair of tweezers
from his front jacket pocket, and delicately plucked at a minute fray near the
shoulder seam. “Who…” Cal had intended to say more, but he wasn’t sure what.
“All in good time.” He continued to deftly twist the fibers
of the man’s shirt into one another. “Please step back. I do need a bit of
elbow room.”
Cal stepped back, his face having approached precariously
close to the man’s hands, drawn by magnetic curiosity.
“Finished. Now, I am
at liberty to answer your questions. I assume you have some?”
“Who are you?”
“Ah, you tried to ask that one before. I suppose you’d call
me a maintenance man, perhaps a janitor of sorts. It’s my job to repair
things.”
“Did you… stop things?”
“Who else would have?” The man reached into his pocket,
extracted a large magnifying glass, and walked to the table where Cal had just
finished his espresso. “How was the coffee? I heard there was a drought in Colombia.”
He leaned on the table and knelt like a giraffe at a watering hole.
“How?”
“Yes. It smelled bitter to me.”
“No, how did you… do you…”
“Oh, stop time. It’s rather simple, really, but only because
I’m not exactly sure. If I knew, it would take hours to explain, and probably
years to understand, but for all I know it’s quite simple, like moving your hand.” Again he extracted
his tweezers, and a needle. He began to pick at the nick Cal had slowly
whittled into the table by his years of consistent patronage. Not as Cal had,
absent mindedly, but with very clear precision, every pick pulling the wood out
an indiscernible distance, and perfectly aligning the grains.
“So you-“
“Not yet” interrupted the man tersely. Then slower, “Sorry
to snap, but wood is still difficult after all these years. It took years for
the tree to shape it.”
Cal waited, impatient but frozen for fear of disturbing his
work.
“There. It’s finished.” Cal looked at the table, at the
notch in the edge.
“It’s not fixed yet.”
“It’s shallower now. Maybe took a month’s wear out of it. I
can’t take too much out, or you’d notice.” He slowly moved to stand, leaning
heavily on the newly repaired table, and grunting with the exertion. “What if
you were sitting at the table and suddenly the nick disappeared before your
very eyes? Wouldn’t that be rather suspicious? Now help an old man out. Take
this and brush some of the dust from under the booths.” He handed Cal a
toothbrush, worn and already quite filthy. “Not all of it, mind you, but mostly
from the part where it bolts to the floor. That always gets rather grimy.”
He walked to Sarah, her face frozen, eyelids low and cheeks
puffed mid-exhale. Slowly he began to tuck a few of her stray hairs back into
her hairband. Cal looked with disbelief at the brush in his hand. “Better get
to dusting, Calvin. You aren’t getting any younger.” Cal glanced at his watch.
The second hand ticked away just as it had since he purchased it, a hair too
slow. “But didn’t time… stop?”
“Theirs did. The whole world has stopped, but us, we go on.
We could go on for years like this.”
Crack! Cal’s head jolted upward into the bottom of the seat
he was cleaning. “Careful! Don’t move anything very much.”
“Wait. Wait. Did you just say we’re going to be here for
years?”
“We could. Who’s going to stop us? We won’t of course, for
your sake. And more than a few days will cause people to notice your hair looks
different. Even small changes are noticeable if perceived to be instantaneous.”
“So when will you put it back?”
“Whenever you’re ready.” Cal’s puzzled expression caught the
man’s attention. “I see you still won’t believe me. It’s normal to…”
“Has this been happening for a long time? The stopping?”
“Oh yes, for longer than either of us have been around.
Chances are, you’ve been stopped, as you call it, hundreds of times since you
walked in the door. It’s been happening to you your entire life.”
“And I never noticed?”
“How could you? For you, nothing would seem odd. We’ve
become very discrete over the years.”
“We? There’s more?”
“Oh yes. You wouldn’t expect me to fix everything all by
myself would you? That would take me very long indeed.”
“How many are you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Really, I could be the only one, but I
doubt it. I only know of one other, the man who told me. But I’m sure he’s long
gone by now.”
“Who was he?”
“He never told me that. Or maybe he did, I just didn’t
remember. There were other things I felt I should worry about, like why time
had stopped. I remember he wore a hat with a big black brim, like a rabbi’s.
And his clothes were very worn. Of course, this makes sense now, looking at
mine.” He held up his arm, and twisted it back and forth, looking at the
threadbare elbows of his jacket, the tattered, stretched shoulder seam. It had
an oddly modern cut, but had clearly been with him the majority of his numerous
years. Cal, puzzled, looked at his feet, at the rut in the floor. “Oh yes. That
was the other thing.” The man, pained by the entire motion, knelt on his hands
and worn denim knees, and with a small screwdriver from his pocket reached
under the door, and began prying at the door. A small nail popped out and
bounced across the floor to Cal’s feet.
“Wait…” Cal said, “If you’ve only ever
seen one other person who does this, why do you think there’s more?”
“Might as well stay down here,” said the man, crawling over
to the chair Cal had sat in only a few minutes ago, or a few seconds ago. “Pick
up that nail, would you, we can’t just leave it lying around, popping out of
nowhere. Now look here.” He turned the chair over gently, and gestured at a nut
on the leg, which fell off when he touched it. “I just tightened this. My
speculation is that, while you were sitting in it, someone came and loosened it
to play a prank on you. Probably someone in this shop. I’m not sure who,
there’s no way I’ll ever find out unless I ask all of them, and even then only
if they’re honest. Now, that’s a bit immature, but that nail, that took
thought. Preparation.” Cal stared at the brad in his palm. “So someone put this
here?” “I suspect, solely to gouge that groove. It wouldn’t have been noticed,
and its effect was so gradual that nobody fixed it. I certainly didn’t see it
until now, and even then left it as a lesson.” “
“For whom?”
“For you. You noticed it when you came in, didn’t you? And
the bells? And the chair? You’re perceptive.”
“So’re you. But why does that matter?” Cal now felt suddenly
watched, as though his whole life had been under observation.
“Because only those who notice can repair. And we’re running
short.”
“On what?”
“Time. People, I assume. Things seem to be getting worse quicker.”
“So, it’s like a fight. Against the people who play pranks?
Against time?”
“Oh, it’s deeper than that. We’re really fighting time
itself. Entropy and all that. But it’s more like mopping up their spills most
of the time.”
“So do you know why?
“I know only what the man before me said, and what I can
deduce. But he told me this ability used to be reserved for a few, who would
fix small things from time to time, so they would go according to the plan.”
“The plan?”
“How else would we know what to fix?”
“Do you have a copy on you? Can I see it?”
“Like I said, you notice things. That means you already know
it. You know the difference between a broken thing and a right one, even though
the broken one works just as well. Like your table.”
“Can’t everybody?”
“No, not at all. Most people only see their own purposes,
and all that is irrelevant to them. That, I think, was the problem, or so the
man said. Every fixer was responsible to the plan, only telling another about
their ability when it came time to step away. One of them was careless, and
told the strayed one, at least that’s what I call him. He realized the
potential this ability had for him, of course, we all do. But he actually used
it. He started changing things, little things, to go according to his plan,
then just to prove that he could, then he told a few others. Then, I suppose,
it exploded.”
“Surely there can’t be too many, the world would fall
apart!”
“Precisely so. And so it does. Cal, that’s why I’ve come to
you. I am getting old, I can’t be effective anymore. I have fallen prey to the
decay I worked to prevent, and need to be replaced. Cal, I know you see the
plan. I know you wish you could fix all this stuff. I’m here telling you you
can, begging you.”
“I don’t know how! Time is still, man, I can’t do that!”
“You can, Cal, but your disbelief prevented you. It doesn’t
anymore.”
“But… You said it’s just every now and then?”
The man’s face fell, and he rolled onto his side, leaning
painfully on the chair, so exhausted that he might turn to dust at any moment.”
That’s how it was, Cal, not how it is. I have to be honest with you, the plan
says so. “
Cal nodded, and sat on a booth, leaning down to hear the
man’s now faint voice.”
When you walked in the door, I had no knowledge of this. I
saw you, noticed your right shoe had a wear spot which affected your gait, and
that your part was crooked, like you’d gotten up late. I saw how gingerly you
opened the door, slowing down when you heard the scrape, and glancing up
disappointed at the bell. Then I met the man, and believed him.”
“Five minutes ato? Why’d he pick someone so… old? Why didn’t
he just get me?”
“Calvin.” The man was lying exhausted on the floor, his grey
thinned head lolling almost lifelessly on he wood, tears just starting to
glisten in the creases around his eyes.
”Calvin, you don’t realize what I’m
asking you, and I’m starting to doubt myself. I’m old, Calvin, I don’t know if
I can go much longer. The decay is too great. Every day more are neglecting
their gift, selfishly destroying the very fabric of existence for their own
pleasure or pride.”
He closed his eyes and his body convused, racked by silent
sobs. How often, with all the world stopped, had he been overcome with sorrow
for unseen losses, neglect and decay?
”Cal, when I saw you enter this shop, I was more similar to
you than you realize. I was twenty-five years old.”
Cal inhaled deeply, and his eyes shut tight.” I can’t live,
can I? There’s too many who abuse, and too few who repair. I’ll stop things,
and spend years repairing, and the next moment it’ll all be undone, and more
beside? Your entire life has been crumpled up to fit seventy lonely years into
five minutes, while the world continued oblivious. How many stop the world and
live whole lives alone, only to die ineffectual and life goes on? Countless,
countless, with no hope of a recognition?”
“Then you do understand.” The man rolled to the chair, and
his knees knocked under the weight of age and knowledge as he grimaced to his
feet.” Calvin, the choice is up to you. If you feel the pull of the plan, you
will follow my way. But if you chose to, you will resume your life, with only
the thought of what if time stopped every instant and we never notice, which
you will instantly brush away with the rush of your day filling your mind. Chose
wisely, Cal, even if you could forget it all, would you?
Ten, nine, eight,” The man turned his back to Cal, and
started to walk out the door.
“Seven, six, five…’ Cal, silent, turned to face the tip jar,
then hurriedly remembered that his hand ought to hover above it as it had. The
man left the door, and gingerly closed it, leaving it open just a crack, as it
had been. Cal could hear him count as he walked out of sight behind the grimy
glass,
“Four, three, two one.”
Jingle.
