Odd Sympathy

The two clocks on the east wall of Varga Clock Repair had kept the same time for thirty-one years, and nobody had ever asked them to.

Theo Varga hung them there the week he opened: a pair of walnut regulators from an estate sale, one shelf, one wall, a foot apart. Within a month their pendulums had fallen into perfect opposition, one swinging left as the other swung right, and they never broke step again. Years later he read that Christiaan Huygens had noticed the same thing in 1665, sick in bed, watching two clocks hung from a common beam. Huygens worked out that the beam was carrying whispers. Each clock nudged the wood, the wood nudged the other clock, and neither one was in charge. The agreement belonged to the pair.

Theo liked that. He was sixty-eight and had never been in charge of anything either, least of all the dog.

The dog was named Fermata, which in music means hold, and she had never held anything in her life except a grudge against the mail carrier. She was forty pounds of shepherd and question mark, with one ear that worked and one that had retired early. She ate socks recreationally. She regarded the vacuum as a political enemy. On walks along the river path she would trot happily for half a mile, then stop at the same spot every time, beside a dead cottonwood, and sit, and refuse. Theo called it stubbornness. He bought treats about it. The treats did not help.

At 2:51 on a Tuesday morning, Theo was at his workbench, because sleep and he had parted ways years ago and now saw each other only at weddings. He was cleaning river mud out of a mantel clock that belonged to Mrs. Delgado, whose house on Water Street had flooded in April. The river had been high for nine days. You could hear it from the shop if you listened, which Theo never did. That was the point of a shop.

Fermata was not asleep either. She was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the floorboards.

Not the door. Not the window. The floor.

"Mice," Theo told her. "Unionized. They have a contract."

She didn't look at him. Her working ear was flat.

Then he heard the clocks.

Thirty-one years of tick and tock, interleaved like a horse at an easy trot, and now one tick landed late. Barely. A cough in a choir. A moment later the other clock tugged it back into step and the trot resumed. Theo, who had spent his life listening to escapements, put down the tweezers.

He listened for ten minutes. It happened again, and again. Each time one pendulum drifted, the other pulled it home, and each time the pulling took longer.

That was the part that raised the hair on his arms. Clocks that fall out of step are a nuisance. Clocks that take longer and longer to find each other again are telling you something about whatever lies between them. The clocks had never spoken to each other directly. They spoke through the shelf, and the shelf was on the wall, and the wall stood on the floor Fermata was staring at, and the floor stood on a riverbank that had been there since before there were clocks, without anybody giving it a thought.

That, he would think later, had been a gift. Thirty-one years of not lying awake listening to water. You can't live on an edge you're watching; you can only live on one you've forgotten. He had lived well on this one: apprentices and anniversaries, and a cuckoo clock that sang the wrong hour for a whole winter and made a little girl laugh until she hiccupped. None of it would have happened to a man who spent his nights with his ear to the floor.

But a ground like that doesn't announce itself by getting louder. It announces itself by getting slower to answer.

Not every edge does. Theo knew mainsprings. A mainspring says nothing a clockmaker can hear for ten years, and then some Tuesday it lets go, and what you hear is the break, not a warning. You don't sit up with a mainspring. You replace it on a schedule, and you keep it where its letting go can only hurt itself. One kind of edge you can listen for. The other kind you can only build around.

At 3:07 the clocks began to trade places. For a few swings they fell into step together, in phase like soldiers, which they had never done in their lives. Then they jumped back to opposition. Then together again, then apart. Where there had been one habit there were now two, and the clocks flickered between them as if they couldn't decide which world they lived in.

Fermata whined once and went to the back door.

Theo got the leash. He also got Mrs. Delgado's mantel clock and tucked it under his arm like a football, for reasons he would later put down to either professional ethics or mild brain damage. He did not get his wallet, his phone, or his shoes.

He meant to go out the front, to the street. Fermata disagreed. She hauled him down the back steps and along the alley, forty pounds pulling like eighty, past the dumpsters and the Ortiz garage, to the old acequia. The irrigation ditch ran behind the whole block, lined with river rock by somebody's grandfather in a year nobody remembered. Fermata crossed it. Then she sat.

Theo stood beside her in his socks, holding a mud-caked clock, and felt foolish for almost eleven seconds.

Then the bank went.

It did not go all at once. It went the way collapses go, one handful at a time, each handful deciding the next: a slump, a pause, a long tearing sigh, the sound of a decision being made by dirt. Each handful that let go leaned its weight on its neighbor, and the neighbors were nearly out of give. That was what the clocks had been hearing: not the collapse, but the give running out. Nobody had a number for how much would fall. The bank found out the same way Theo did, by doing it.

The back third of Varga Clock Repair went into the river. The workbench went. The parts cabinet went, with all eleven hundred drawers of screws and springs Theo had sorted over three decades, raining into black water like a dropped jar of stars.

The collapse came up the yard, ate the back fence, ate the Ortiz garden, and stopped at the acequia.

Nobody had said where the bank would stop. But anyone with a shovel could say where it couldn't go, and somebody's grandfather had. He had lined a ditch with rock because water goes where you let it, and he hadn't let it go there. He had never heard of Theo, or of cascades, or of anything much except water. He had simply set an edge where he could see it.

When the dust settled, the east wall of the shop was still standing, attached to nothing on one side and enjoying a fine view of the river. On it, the two walnut regulators were ticking in perfect opposition, one left as the other swung right, as if nothing had happened.

To them, nothing had. The wall had stopped moving.

---

Rebuilding took a year. The insurance adjuster, a young man who used "per se" incorrectly, explained that the new shop could go back on the same footprint. Theo said no. You don't get back to where you were by going back to where you were. The river had taught him that, and it had charged tuition. He rebuilt thirty feet uphill. That was farther than the old line of safe and farther than he strictly needed, and it felt about right.

When the water finally went down, the new bank ran past the dead cottonwood within a yard of the spot where Fermata had always sat down and refused to go on.

Theo stood there a long while. Then he did something the adjuster had no form for.

He sank a cedar post at that spot, bolted a single board across it, and hung the two regulators on the board, a foot apart. Before he hung them he gave one pendulum nut a quarter turn, so the clocks ran the faintest hair apart. It wasn't enough to break their sympathy. It was just enough that they were holding hands at arm's length. He gave them less margin than the post had. A pair that locks easily will hold on through almost anything, and he wanted these to let go first.

"They'll stay together as long as the post stays put," he told Mrs. Delgado. She had come to collect her mantel clock and stayed for coffee, which she now did on Thursdays. "The minute the ground so much as sighs, they'll start arguing. Every stumble is a click. You can count them. I'll hear it from the house."

"So you put the edge where you can watch it," she said.

"I put it where they can watch it," Theo said. "Then I only have to listen."

"And if they never say anything?"

Theo considered that. "Then the ground is holding," he said, "or they've gone deaf to it. Same silence either way. That's what the fence is for. And I check the post on the first of the month."

That was the trick, he had decided. Not knowing had given him thirty-one good years. Knowing had gotten him across a ditch with his life and a stranger's clock. But the best was the third thing. You choose where the edge is. You make it small and loud and somewhere you'll hear it, and you let something else keep the watch, and now and then you check that it's still awake. Then you go back to living as though it weren't there, which is the only way anyone has ever lived.

He put up a fence too. He didn't need a surveyor. He ran it along the line Fermata had been drawing for years, the one he'd been buying her treats to cross.

She still sits there most evenings at the fence, good ear up, facing the water. Holding.

She still hates the mail carrier. Some edges are personal.