The visible man

Time was noisy when I was a boy. It was marked off by the constant metallic ticking of mechanical clocks. My dad woke to rattle of an alarm that sounded like an unbalanced clothes dryer in the throws of death with a belt buckle inside. It was the cheapest alarm clock K-Mart, or probably Kresge’s Dime Store, from which Kmart arose, sold. If I was still awake, I knew my parent were going to bed by the clicking that reverberated from the nightly winding of the spring.

When the lever on the back that regulated the speed at which it ran could no longer be moved far enough to make it keep good time, my dad gave me the exhausted clock as a toy. I kept it in the open cardboard box in the basement for storing the things that were mine. By setting the alarm hand to the current time, pulling the alarm pin, and turning the winding key in the wrong direction I could the make the alarm shake faster, louder, and at a lower pitch. There is little else to do with an old alarm clock as a toy, so of course I bent the metal tabs that held the face and back and pulled it apart, mechanical layer by mechanical layer, letting it reveal its geared secrets. Yet to a child it did not reveal its secrets, only its gears and spring and framework, which with a screwdriver also came apart and the pieces tumbled out like a pile of misshapen jacks. Since many of the parts were round and mounted on axles, I compared how each one worked as a top, how long the escape wheel would keep spinning. I imagined that the dark blue metal of the wound spring was heart of the marvel of dead pieces that had once seemed alive, fed by nightly winding. And I wished that I could have known its innards then; that I could have seen through its case to its spinning wheels and flipping levers.

When I told my dad that wished I could have seen the insides of the clock moving he took me into his bedroom and he pulled from the top drawer of his pine dresser a silver circle with a curved glass front and back. Just inside the silver ring, under the glass, was a circle of Roman numerals cut from the silver. In the space between each line of an I, a V, or and X I could see straight through to my dad’s palm. He turned it over. Through the back glass I could see the entire mechanical world by which the pocket watch ran.

I had no idea that my dad owned anything so exquisite. I had no idea that he had any appreciation for anything so carefully constructed or so beautiful. Here was a man who for a garden tractor had a machine my mom’s dad had purchased in 1936, forty years before, that required a leather strap to start, and shook and vibrated so much that it left your hands and wrists numb and all of the bolts needed to be re-tightened after each use. Here was a man whose cars came from junkyards rather than going to them. Here was a man whose luxury had once been a sailboat formed from Styrofoam that broke against a tree in the yard during a thunderstorm. I would never know him to acquire so purely an item of recreation again. Here he was, with a silver watch, finely crafted, magically revealing its inner workings.

I asked if he would wind it, so I could see it run. He told me that it didn't work anymore, but that he would someday take it to a watchmaker and have it fixed. I asked him a couple of times over the years if he had ever had that old watch repaired. I was careful to do so only infrequently, and feigning a near disinterest, afraid that my prodding might backfire and provoke a spout of anger and in defiance the watch would never be repaired.

When my father died my mother asked if there was anything of his I wanted to remember him by. She offered his penknife, missing its once decorative side grips and with a blade sharpened so many times that it was almost an awl. I told her I would like the pocket watch he had once shown me. She went back to the bedroom and brought it out. As I reached for it my hand expected to feel its heft and solidity. I anticipated the hardness of the glass and coolness of the silver. In his world of minimalistic practicality, I thought, here was the one thing that proved his unfathomable, unknown depth.

As my mother laid it in my hand I was shocked by its lightness. The smoothness I expected was not there. The curved glass front and back were scratched molded plastic. The silver was pot metal. The watch had the feel of a cereal-box prize, and from its appearance might have been. I was disappointed and yet smiled with a certain satisfaction that this tangible point of memory would not forever represent a man I did not know, but would represent him exactly as I had known him. That he had a glass face and back and that I had watched the way the movement worked.