Twenty-Three

“That will be eight dollars and twenty-three cents.”

“Bernie. This is a garage sale, not a Piggly Wiggly.”

“It’s my garage sale; I’m entitled to be specific at my own leisure,” said Bernie, establishing his authority by adjusting his Members Only jacket. He snorted and crossed his arms. 

Bernie wasn’t Jefferson’s favorite neighbor. Besides, there was something about a man with a unibrow that Jefferson found rather untrustworthy. Or maybe it was the way he wore suspenders and a belt at the same time. Maybe it was that little ugly dog of his: if E.T. had mated with an opossum, Bernie’s mutt would be the end result.

Perhaps Jefferson was being unfair or petty. But whatever the case, Bernie had a nice little clock to sell, and it had charmed Jefferson past the point of high-school caliber social antics. He turned the clock in his hand and re-examined the price tag in question.

“Twenty-three cents? Why not forty-two, ninety-two, or sixty-sixty then?”

“Oh twenty-three isn’t a random number. My mother—rest her soul—was born in nineteen twenty-three. My brother Stevie was born on September the twenty-third. I live at Fourteen Twenty-Three Willow Street, and my last cat, Gopher, lived to be twenty-three years old.”

“Interesting,” said Jefferson under his breath.

“Serendipitous,” corrected Bernie.

“Then why isn’t all this other junk marked with twenty-three cents on the price?”

“Jefferson, are you questioning my garage sale? I have attained the proper permit to hold such an affair on this particular date, and I am within my legal rights to price my property as I deem fit,” Bernie pointed at a nearby posting of his yard sale permit, along with a copy of the city ordinance that outlined the rules and regulation for such domestic commerce. Bernie had also highlighted certain sections in yellow. “For further questions, you may contact my lawyer.”

“Never mind,” groaned Jefferson, “do you have change for a ten?”

Bernie searched his pockets, slapping one at a time, “it appears I do not. You’ve been the only customer all day; must be the big golf tournament on TV."

Jefferson rolled his eyes and threw the ten into a Wedgewood teapot on the table. The clock was his. He left with no departing salutations and hastily returned to his gold Crown Victoria as if it were a bomb shelter. Jefferson sat in his driver’s seat and inspected the clock. It was clearly an antique but it had no obvious maker’s mark or any other clues to purvey its story. It was a square-shaped, rather plain and understated little machine—not currently operable. When he tilted it back and forth, there was something rolling inside concurrently. He would have to bring it to an expert to repair. A few taps on his phone screen later, the appropriate authority was located at Twenty-Three Turmeric Lane. There was that number again: twenty-three. It probably didn’t mean anything. Jefferson was not one to believe in fate or spiritual predestinations. Such preposterous ideas only colored life to be more interesting. The everyday mundane was made holy by the element of imagination. Twenty-three… It was only a number: not some ludicrous homonym.

            Upon opening the large-paned door to Time and Talisman, Jefferson was immediately in the presence of its assiduous owner and operator, Albert Shoe. He had wild white hair and black-rimmed eyeglasses that magnified his eyes to appear several times larger. Albert hustled and bustled, jogged, hopped, sped-up, slowed-down, whisked to the left, whipped back to the right, and turned-about cartoonishly as he reached for tools or small parts from their dedicated spaces; reaching for them as the ideas and instructions raced through his most able, ingenious mind. He was deliberate, meticulous, efficient, and his work was as carefully calculated and precise as the clocks he worked on.

            Albert hadn’t paused to greet his new customer and Jefferson was hesitant to interrupt what seemed to be the apex of a project. The door closed behind him, and Albert didn’t skip a beat while informing Jefferson “I close in twenty-three minutes and must have this Thwaites and Reed chimer done before ten a.m. tomorrow, as was promised to my landlord: it’s his clock. He’s a soul-sucking Ukrainian who bleeds money and I’d rather not test his patience. You must understand.”

            It was only business. Jefferson looked at the clock, nodded, “Thank you,” and turned to leave. Suddenly Albert threw his screwdriver onto the worktable, which made a loud smashing sound when it hit a tin plate. Jefferson turned around.

            “No, no, no!”, scolded Albert, “This is the part where you’re supposed to be insistent upon my looking at your clock within the allotted time! You drove all the way here, for heaven’s sake! Your time is valuable! Figure it out,” Albert walked over to Jefferson and (with due care) ripped the clock from his hands, looked down at it, and then jumped back about three feet with a gasp.

            “My word!” exclaimed Albert, “This is a seventeen twenty-three Franz Adenauer table clock with his experimental, internally housed, lead-weighted pendulum! There is a set of opposing magnetized springs on the inside, and when all the parts are aligned and in working order, the inside pendulum moves from left to right, and right to left, and left to right, over, and over, and over, and over again with unparalleled precision. But it was designed in such a way that it could operate without the use of gravity: the pendulum moving horizontally and within such a very confined space! It does not need winding. The story of this clock begins when it’s set into motion: never to pause, never to stop,” Albert pulled a second, huge pair of glasses onto his nose, right over the others, and turned the clock about, “…that is until some blundering blockhead has dropped so carelessly onto its corner, or shaken it like an Etch-a-Sketch!” He peered at Jefferson as if he were the guilty party. 

Albert’s phone rang once. He grabbed it and said, “It’ll be done tomorrow,” then slammed the handset down on the receiver and continued, “Careless!” 

            “I only just bought the thing,” said Jefferson defensively, “From the blockhead who most likely dropped it.”

            “You have no idea what you have!” hissed Albert. He looked back at the clock and sunk down onto a wooden stool behind him. Albert wiped some of the dust off its glass face, and caressed the smooth wooden housing. A hundred different emotions crossed the clockmaker’s face as he examined it, but the one he kept circling back to was sadness. Not just sadness: it was the memory of loss, and incurable jealously. It was hopelessness reined-in; stifled by the humility one earns with age. Albert sighed, petted the clock, and then cleared his throat. He asked Jefferson halfheartedly, “When would you like it to be done by?”

            “I’m in no rush,” shrugged Jefferson.

            “No, no, no!” scolded Albert once more, startling Jefferson, “You’re supposed to ask about the clock! You’re supposed to be curious! You’re supposed to wonder how a clock could sting a grown man’s eyes, and make him wish that,” Albert paused and swallowed, “that things had turned out differently; to question every decision he has ever made; to wonder if anything he has ever done has meant anything… to wonder if,” he ran his thumb over the face of the clock, “if I have been keeping time, or if time has been keeping me.”

            Of course Jefferson was entirely curious about the clock. But there was fine line between investigating and imposition. “All of this from an eight dollar clock,” thought Jefferson. “Well, eight dollars and twenty-three cents,” he corrected himself.

            Albert looked up at Jefferson abruptly, “I wasn’t always a clockmaker! It’s not all that I am. Or all that I was.”

            “What were you before?” indulged Jefferson.

            Albert pulled the glasses from his face, and pulled his hair away from his eyes. He looked into his reflection on the face of a grandfather clock and said, “I was young.”

            “So was I…about forty-five years ago,” chuckled Jefferson sarcastically.

            “I didn’t know what time was,” explained Albert, “Back then, I worked in my father’s curiosity shop and I was a magician. My father and I sold every sort of novelty you can imagine: shrunken heads, antique medical equipment, kidney stones, straight jackets, skulls, crystals, miniature trains, supplies for practical jokes, strange paintings, torture devices, books, crosses, tarot cards, statues, canes, fossils, teeth, voodoo dolls, caskets, kids toys, dogs toys, sex toys, taxidermy, herbs, innards, poisons, marbles—oh! And candy. We used to host live music, fortunetellers, storytellers, fire-eaters, firewalkers, face painters, contortionists, and balloon artists. We would project movies onto the back of the building and invite the entire community to come watch. My father and I lived in the upstairs of the shop. I was happy every day. Not many people can say that.”

            “More or less,” Jefferson considered.

            “One day, an old German man came in with this very same Adenauer clock. Franz Adenauer did make more than a few of these. He was only giving them away at the time to his friends and family—a hobby, more or less. But this one customer had one, and at the time I knew little to nothing about clocks. We purchased the broken clock from him for twenty-three dollars.”

            “Not surprising,” muttered Jefferson.

            “Superlative!” corrected Albert, “At the time, twenty-three dollars was the equivalent of a couple hundred when the clock was worth thousands. It’s not that we had swindled the gentleman, but none of us knew the worth of this clock. The German had asked for thirty-dollars, and it was haggled down to twenty-three. At first, my father had placed it in the shop window for the bird-brained price of fifty dollars. It’s such a plain thing, but there was something so charming about that little clock, and my father could not ignore its qualities. After a few weeks of its seeming invisibility to customer’s eyes, my father took it from the window, and placed it behind the front counter as décor, rather than merchandise. It became his prized possession. He had tried on many an occasion to fix it but was unsuccessful. I so very loved my father and his adoration for the clock, that I took it upon myself to learn about clocks and secretly planned to fix it when he wasn’t looking. I wanted to badly to see the look on his face when he saw it work again. So I began to tinker and explore those fascinating little devices. I was engrossed in my work, and obsessed with learning more. I approached the clockmaker in a nearby town and took on an apprenticeship with him. My father did not approve, but he surrendered at my persistence. I would not tell him my real reasons for wanting to become an expert of clocks. I thought of my newfound career as a gift to my father. I meant to return and fix the Adenauer clock. My father fell upon hard times from the moment I left and extent of which was not communicated to me. One person could not run that place; plan and hold all the events, buy, sell, consign items, clean, or book-keep by themselves. No one else could be hired to help, it was already too late and we had only ever made it by on a razor’s edge. The rent was paid later and later until it couldn’t be paid at all. In the blink of an eye the curiosity shop had been closed forever, and all that was left was that old broken clock. After the fact, a collector he met happened to notice the clock in his possession and made it known to him that the clock was not worth fifty dollars, but fifty thousand dollars. He never wanted to give it up in the first place, but the money was a blessing and he had nothing left. He never looked at me the same after the clock was gone.”

“It was never the clock that needed to be fixed. The fact it was broken was not important. My father never cared whether he could fix the damned thing or not. He just wanted to see how it was made, and appreciate it from the inside, out. It was his to take apart or put together: to fix or not fix: to buy and to sell. Had I stayed working at the shop, I would’ve had more time spent with my father. Our relationship would have never taken ill. He would’ve owned the business for many more years, and maybe I would have been still running it now, instead of watching gears tick from behind a magnifying glass. He would have never had to sell the clock he loved so much.”

“I spent years looking for another like it, but they are extremely rare. What I found was either not for sale, or more money than I could ever afford in this lifetime. My father was an optimistic man. He found a new happy life when he returned home to Maine and worked in another’s curiosity shop as a salesman. But it wasn’t the same, I don’t think. There were no movies on the wall, no fire-eaters or storytellers, and it was another’s prideful collection he sold…not his own. He was hourly as opposed to honored. But, he lived happily until he passed away in his sleep, almost twenty-three years ago now. And here I am now…in my shop…with an Adenauer clock…in my hands…you bought…at goddamned garage sale!” Albert set the clock down on his workbench, and shook his head; “I wasn’t always a clockmaker, my friend. I was once young, and I didn’t understand what time was.”

            Albert stared at the clock longingly. A hundred different emotions flooded over his face, but the one that recurred the most was sadness. Jealously. Loss. Hopelessness. Jefferson was floored and confused. He was astonished to find his eight dollar and twenty-three cent clock was a priceless artifact of museum quality, and in disbelief of the amazing story that came with it. 

            “When do you want it done by?” asked Albert again.

            Jefferson considered this question for a moment. He stared at the plain little clock; so charming yet understated. But now it seemed to be more of a symbol than a relic. It could never just be a clock to him again. 

That’s when Jefferson realized that it didn’t need to be fixed. 

            “Albert,” he replied, “This is the part where I give you the clock."