The Horologist Page 8

  “Oliver?”

  His feet stopped. Their eyes met. The boy looking at Leo wasn’t the same person. Leo was staring into a face of malice, a face fresh with anger. Both boys stood still. People zipped around them like a rock in a stream. Slowly, the spite washed away from Oliver’s face.

  “It’s good to see you, old friend.” They hugged.

  The boys walked and walked without plan. Here was a new chapter in life, and they both were willing to let it develop when it would. They talked without break, calm and leisurely, and friendly.

  The walking stopped at a food truck under a bridge, and as he stood beside the trolley, Leo could see what was coming from far away.

  Over Oliver’s shoulder, Leo watched as an elderly man in an oatmeal raincoat shuffled towards them, fully immersed in a bowl of soup. Behind him, two teens were racing down the street on bicycles. There clearly was not enough space for them all to pass.

  Dring. Dring. The biker bells rang as the teens came up on the man. But the clam chowder was so good. He was so absorbed in its taste.

  Dring. Dring. Dring. Dring.

  No response.

  Leo moved quickly. The bikes whooshed past as Leo pulled the old man out of the way and he and the oatmeal raincoat toppled backwards. Above them, in slow motion, the chowder floated upward, hovered, then fell back to earth, spattering them both.

  Oliver rushed to help them up, catching the stink of the sea floor as he did.

  The old man stood, quite perplexed, examining the stringy mess all over Leo and himself. He had a thick walrus mustache and baffled white hair. Suddenly, a lightbulb clicked on in his mind.

  “Hmm. Sodium nitrate. No, potassium nitrate. No, maybe trimethoxy benzoic acid. Yes. Yes!” Something extraordinary happened in his face. “I have just the thing. You!” The old man pointed to Leo. “Follow me.” And he turned to race off.

  Leo exchanged awed eyes with Oliver, then called to the man, pointing at his friend. “What about him?”

  Mid-sprint, the oatmeal raincoat dug into his heels and looked back. “Oh, him. Right. He can come too!”

  Oliver and Leo followed in a brisk jog to keep up. When they stopped seven blocks later, they were outside a university hall. The boys followed the old man in, anxious as they tried to figure out what would happen next. They went in a door with a sign outside:

  Professor Charlie Evans

  College of Natural Sciences

  Professor Charlie’s classroom was more of an auditorium; there were twenty rows of amphitheater seats to their left and a long desk with lab equipment and sinks in front. To the right was a mountainous blackboard and two small doors. One was open, and clearly his office, and the other was shut and read: Controlled Chemicals.

  The boys set down their packs and looked at the chalkboard, which was the size of a soccer pitch. On the left side were lecture notes, and the rest was covered in integrals, algebra, quantum mechanics, and, oddly, caricatures. Little childlike drawings were scattered throughout the mathematics.

  While the boys were taking things in, Professor Charlie had his nose in boxes of chemistry equipment. He pulled a few flasks, then unlocked the closet and returned with two large liters, one labeled gallic acid and the other dimethyl sulfate.

  While he measured out the chemicals, Professor Charlie noticed the boys examining a sketch of a dog’s face. “It’s the exaggeration of doodling that I like. I work on math and physics and chemistry all day, and eventually the equations bore me and my mind runs wild. So, I doodle. And I doodle only exaggeration, things that can never be real in our rigid world.”

  He glared at a set of integrals. “The reason my sketches are chalked all over the place is because as I crack into theorems and paradoxes, sometimes a little puppy pops into my head. And I care more about the puppy than the numbers, so I stop solving and bring the little pup to life!”

  The boys didn’t question whether the puppy actually had life. Who were they to decide? But they did want to give his caricatures more life, so they asked, “Can we name them?”

  Professor Charlie beamed. “Go ahead! Just be sure to use your imagination as you do.”

  Oliver and Leo faced the blackboard. They carefully assigned names: Fido, the dog with planet-sized eyes; Snippy, the cat with a pistol in his hand; Lars, the lion rollerblading down the beach; and Zane, the zebra horse lounging in the pool.

  Professor Charlie continued mixing chemicals before he perked up and rushed the blackboard. Heavily, he marked up a new explanation to one of his theorems, then stepped back and thought out loud. “Variables. Where would we be without them?”

  He wiped his brow with the inner elbow of his lab coat, then grabbed an eraser and swept away the previous iteration of his solution. “I wonder where they all go.”

  The boys replied together. “Where what goes?”

  “The erased. Look here.” He had his eraser hinged against the board just above a chalked equals sign. He wiped it away. “See. Where did those lines just go?”

  He came back from his office with a textbook, poking his nose in, then snapping it shut. “Perhaps that is why the universe is so grand. All the other stuff is out there, and all the non-other stuff is here with us.”

  He grabbed his chin with chemical risk and muttered, “Perhaps what matters is not where the erased equals sign went, but where it came from in the first place.”

  He walked back over to the blackboard and outlined a caricature of a woman’s face. “Where do those lines come from?” He tapped the chalk to the side of his dome, planting white bumps of sediment into the pores at his right eyebrow. “And why do they come from this hand?” He studied the palm with chalk in it. “Unusual, very unusual.”

  Professor Charlie began amalgamating quantum mechanics on the board. Oliver and Leo watched numbers and letters move through a web of logic.

  “Ahh. Boys, watch.”

  He drew a simple four-by-four matrix. “Imagine the entire blackboard is the universe, and each box in this grid represents one person. Now, each box, each person, is a member of a larger system.”

  Charlie pointed to Leo. “You. You are this box.”

  He placed a finger on the bottom left square. “You, as this box, can’t see the larger system. You only see and affect what is in your reach—yourself, and the boxes around you. And that is what you must focus on. Yourself, and those around you. If we all make ourselves and those around us better, the larger grid, the larger system, will be better as a whole.”

  Oliver looked at the squares, at their uniformity and their rigidness. He felt a spark in his stomach, a little ember crackling within. He felt enraged, enraged at the idea of perfection, of concreteness, at a society who wants everybody to fit into a mold. He reddened as he thought of Isabella’s stepfather, and how Antonio had wanted him to be a mail-ordered suitor for his daughter.

  The little ember in Oliver heaved and roared. This was his first taste of manhood, of a primal instinct to seek retribution for things of the past. This was his first taste of the destructive potential that comes with being an impassioned creature of biology. This was the first time that Oliver began to break from his boyish shell.

  Leo had been attentively following along and listening to Professor Charlie, but he had that look of astonishment that said he hadn’t understood. Leo politely responded to the analogy, “I see,” even though he didn’t.

  Professor Charlie read Leo’s face. “I’m not trying to solve the question of the universe. I’m merely explaining the ease of which every person can help to change it. A nice idea!”

  Leo grinned, now understanding. “What about the blackboard?”

  “A much tougher question. The blackboard has many names, and each is equally as likely as the next. A paradox, an equation, a guiding hand, a vacuum. That is not for me to know.”

  “Why?” Oliver and Leo again spoke in unison.

  “With some things, it is best to learn to like the idea that you don’t know, and probably never will. Pe
ople who say otherwise have closed themselves off to alternative solutions, and the thoroughly informed person is a dreadful thing.”

  Professor Charlie studied the small square boxes on the chalkboard. “One thing I might add is to remember how big the universe is. We all get absorbed in our own problems and forget that there is a much grander plan out there that we don’t even know about. If everyone cleansed themselves of pettiness, humanity could work as a whole, and accomplish far more than we do now. So, when you find yourself worked up over some mundane argument or trivial concern, take time to look at the stunning expanse of the sky, because it is sobering to see how much you don’t know.”

  Sapphire flames began to surge on the lab desk. Professor Charlie rushed to turn off the gas, then dipped a brush into the mysterious potion and strutted over to the stains on Leo’s coat. He moved the bristles along the chowder spill and, like ruby slippers in Oz, it disintegrated into thin air. It was strange how unimportant the stain was by then, but Leo was still appreciative. “Professor Charlie! You’re brilliant!”

  He hugged the professor, who embraced Leo in a way that said he hadn’t been hugged in a long time. “What is brilliance but a few odds and ends?”

  As Leo backed off, Professor Charlie continued. “What an accusation that is. Brilliance runs parallel with madness in our world, because most people can’t see beyond the realms of their own perception. But I guess it doesn’t really matter what anyone thinks. The hands on the clock will turn regardless, and the universe will endure, brilliant or not.”

  He dabbed the brush on his own shirt. “Enough of me. You boys have spent too much time in my cage of equations. But listen, you two, I am quite jealous. You are young and your blackboards still have a lot of room to be drawn on. Just remember that in real life, there are no erasers.” He turned to the board muttering to himself, “Youth, a marvelous thing.”

  The rest of that sentence floated into the ether as Professor Charlie began sketching with a piece of blue chalk. Oliver realized that Professor Charlie was so gifted, such a divine accident of brainpower, that he probably didn’t fully understand himself as a person.

  Professor Charlie outlined a caterpillar with a thin nose and a wide grin. Then came a wing on the left, and a symmetrical one on the right. It was a butterfly. Professor Charlie radiated with delight as he added stripes to the wings and the realness of the butterfly became clearer and clearer.

  Oliver stared at the sapphire sketch, shaken. He searched for a rational connection in the depths of his mind, and within the innermost valley of the latticework, something fey echoed back.

  THE MISCREANT

  THE PLATFORM WAS full of commuters when the train sang in from the tunnel and rolled down the track. Like a stampeding herd, the impatient crowd piled in through the car doors and searched for empty seats.

  The boys pushed into the metal train to find benches lavishly upholstered and every other car lined with private cabins. They were making their way through when Oliver saw a long, thick nest of hair with a deep-blue flower set over the ear. He slowed in the aisle, and edged forward.

  “Oliver, hurry up, you maniac!” Leo had the trolley door open and was very concerned about getting a good seat. Oliver moved past the girl, and glanced back just in time for a clear sight. It wasn’t Isabella.

  Leo was growing anxious. It was their second car and they hadn’t found their seats. They were evaluating options when a slim-shouldered man exited a cabin a few yards down. Leo sprinted and slipped in. Oliver followed to find the cabin vacant.

  The train wheels began their rotation as the boys set their packs down and leaned their elbows on the foldout table to watch the beehive of commuters swarm about the platform.

  The train was in the eighth notch and must’ve been about midway along in the trip when their cabin door opened. It would be difficult to describe the man who entered. He was a salad of racial genes, medium height, medium build, with no visible scars or markings, and wearing a nondescript black coat, a white Oxford shirt, and black military boots.

  The stranger didn’t acknowledge the boys as he sat. He placed his black bag by his hips and flapped open a newspaper. On the front column, in thick-bodied black lettering, the headline read, “New York investment wizard, Anthony Moses, continues expanding his empire in the UK.” Cached below was a photo of that same man from the magazine, with vulpine good looks, crystal-white eyes, and a chin which made him look invincible. Oliver tried to read the article underneath, but when the strange man noticed Oliver looking at him, he folded the paper up and placed it over his bag.

  Then he just sat there with wide eyes, stiller than a stone wall, not blinking, looking at a panel of wood above the boys’ heads. For a long minute, the scaly texture of an awkward silence lingered in the cabin. Then, without word, the miscreant removed a small, pewter chess set from his briefcase. He placed it on the table and used his skeletal fingers to arrange the board so that each edge paralleled the edge of the table and there was precise proportion in those distances. His tongue slithered out of his mouth as he asked, “We only know as much as our mind can work out, don’t you think?”

  Oliver shivered at the strange idea.

  Neither boy was in the mood for chess, but the miscreant just stared at the board with his head cocked. It was unnervingly obvious that one of them needed to play his game, so Oliver slid along the bench.

  When the pawns were up-board, the miscreant gripped the knight and leapt it two checks north and one check west. He had alarming fixation with the leap, like the asymmetry of the knight’s movement aroused him. Oliver countered with his white bishop and took the enemy knight. The miscreant looked at Oliver, unhappy to see an opponent who knew what he was doing.

  As the game went on, Oliver studied the miscreant in detail—the way he flinched when a passenger walked by the window, the way he wore his clothes with disdain, the way he nervously rubbed his hands across his neck, the way he would not let his briefcase leave his touch. The miscreant’s mannerisms left Oliver optimistic that he would soon reveal his agenda.

  As the match progressed, the three commuters in the cabin quietly focused on chess.

  “You appear to be in an unwinnable position, sir,” Leo chimed in as Oliver slid a white pawn up and announced, “Check.”

  The miscreant let out a cackle and glanced at Leo from the corner of his eyes. The train conductor’s voice then broke in over the intercom to announce that they were nearing their Dublin arrival. The miscreant stared at the speakerbox with huge paranoid eyes, turning white and sweaty with the news. He’s definitely not a tourist, Oliver thought. I wonder where he’s going?

  Oliver pretended to stretch his triceps while putting his voice high and small. “So, what’s in Dublin for you?”

  The miscreant’s bony face twitched across the cabin and looked at his. His cheeks were taut as he searched Oliver’s eyes, looking for a reason to trust the boy. There was none. Oliver was probably wearing a wire beneath his shirt. The miscreant hissed, “I’m really not sure.”

  He loosened his collar as he sacrificed a rook. The miscreant was now an acrobat spanning the tightrope, meticulously observing each inch ahead of him. This read gave Oliver all he needed to win.

  Leo probed, “How do you not know what’s in Dublin? There must be a reason you’re on this train.”

  The cabin turned cold and quiet like a dreadful, silent ballet. Oliver kicked Leo beneath the table to tell him not to pry any further, and Leo began to regret his question.

  The miscreant swallowed his venom and reflected. Perhaps he thought about what he would do in Dublin, or his next chess play, or if he had already said too much. Or maybe about why he was really here—how his shady accounting scam had swindled millions of dollars from mom-and-pop businesses.

  Finally, he spoke. “But I’m not here.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m on a plane to Istanbul.”

  The boys exchanged a nervous look. Leo took a big gulp of saliva. “How can you be two pla
ces at once?”

  “Let’s just say that people will be expecting me in Turkey, but it serves me best to head in the opposite direction.”

  Oliver remained quiet. Leo continued, “And what’s waiting in Istanbul?”

  The miscreant flashed his sharp teeth as his lips parted into a devilish smile. “Handcuffs.”

  Oliver became defensive. “For what?”

  The miscreant sidestepped the question and blabbered elusively without even appearing to believe what he was saying. His message meant nothing to him; it was a practiced anecdote of lies, and the boys could tell they were dealing with a recent member of society, a masked man with the stench of corruption.

  “By the way, I’m Leo. This is Oliver.” Leo tried to brighten the mood by sticking his hand out, even though he knew the shake would not be usual by any means. Oliver nodded, fidgeted, then looked at the board, trying to figure out how to get out of the cabin.

  “Nice to meet you both.” The miscreant spoke off-key and didn’t bother to give his name. He reached his hand across the table and shook Leo’s with an icy palm.

  The players approached the end of the game when the train began decelerating. The miscreant retreated his bishop to protect his king. And when his fingertips left the piece, Oliver could see his slithery face darken, like he was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling that is common in chess, a disturbing sense that you have just done exactly what your opponent wanted. The miscreant’s internal alarm pierced his eardrums as red sweat began accumulating at his hairline. The boy could collect his queen.

  Oliver noticed too, but demurred for a minute to analyze the board. It was a clean shot. He thrust over her majesty and declared, “Mate.” He had won in only twenty-two moves.

  The locomotive settled into its berth and came to a stop. The boys grabbed their packs and stood. No need to say goodbye. They didn’t know exactly what the miscreant had done, but they knew he had done something.