Ivan stooped with eyes squinted and hands alive: angular flecks and darts to objects that glanced the scant light every-which-way. His chrome tools lifted the shaped, metal symbols and then placed them: a pause; a tautening of muscle; a reflexive twitch; a supposed tremble; then down with utmost control before release.
It was meticulous, a calm violence of creation. Molten metal cooled with a sigh to then be clipped apart, filed smooth, and confirmed as separate, orphaned. They interlock to become part of that which he had dreamed, designed, and then birthed. The soft click where a shadow is smothered and a void displaced by a sliver, or circular cog of clean and polished metal, was metaphysical beauty; an echo of creation.
He dreamt that his chrome, monogrammed tongs lifted and dropped tiny bones into the skeletal frame of the first people; he, a vast and looming creator. The reverie chilled him - whether it was the imminent, implied pouring in of guts and blood, and wrapping of skin, or the weighty responsibility of bringing life into a fading world - he did not know.
Springs loaded, joints placed, dials hovered, the battery clicks home and - after a heartbeat - the crunched clench of mechanics twists and spins time itself into vulgar, vivid life. He scratches his stubbled chin, sips a half-cold coffee, and threatens a smile at his latest creation. He will close the front and back, then engrave the smooth surface: MMLXXXVIII above the initials IV, for this is Ivan Vainshtein’s 2088th timepiece. He, the watchmaker. He who summons form from the absence thereof, materialises the rocking, inevitable concept.
“Where do you want it?” Ivan grunted. His English was getting better but it still clung to his gums like wet curd.
The American soldier shrugged and pointed, disinterested, distracted and dishevelled by the heat of another sun-drenched summer. July was a month that snatched away your breath in the desert, made you forget what rain felt like.
He placed the watch on the nightstand beside the tidily made bed. The house smelled of freshly cut wood, sawdust and a thin varnish that threatened at dizziness. It reminded Ivan of his father’s workshop. The russ russ russ of an urgent, serrated blade and the clouds of exploded tree in sideways rays of sunlight.
He left the watch with a sadness. It would be broken in a day, cracked and smashed and launched and thudded down to the freshly filed boards that marked the floor. Everything had to be new. In all of the houses of the village, every fragment of pretend life had to be untainted by radiation so that it could be seen to react as a new entity.
Ivan cycled home through the dust.
The bike tyres crunched against the packed dirt and sent up brief orange tornadoes to a light breeze as they wound their way through the dry land that led him home. There was a stillness in the air and - as his town simmered into view on the horizon and his legs began to ache for calm - Ivan began to weep.
Home is sanctuary. He parked his bike and leant on the saddle to claim a handful of rough, panted breaths from his journey. The day had faded to a dark that seemed to smother everything: squeezing the life out of the day; a rinsed rag ahead of a new day. Ivan removed his heavy boots and leant them by the door. He moved through his house of thick wood and cluttered creations and made himself a cup of mint tea.
As the kettle sang he breathed at the night that had supplanted day just beyond his kitchen window. He closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows as he tried to capture the sounds of a distant bird-call, but it never emerged. Just another ghost.
Ivan groaned into a chair that looked at least as old as he was, and just as dishevelled. Two clocks ticked a heartbeat out of time from opposite ends of the room. A rally, an aberration. A splintering of a tightly-woven fabric. Or just another nuance. Breathing into the candle-lit dust of the room, he weighed the composite elements, how they leaned against one another and clung together in some precarious, arranged whole. Time and the considered manipulations of their being had provided a stasis that would survive his own. The wooden-framed paintings of the desolate landscape, the moulded and painted clay from a distant grandchild, the rusting rifle that had become a threat of only creeping decay.
His wife’s empty chair was a vacuum that the world seemed to move around with indifference, and he perceived it through a veil.
Sleep was not forthcoming and Ivan listened to the world as it dreamed: the scuffles of night-creatures and the groaning of the wooden foundations that contained him, the world as it breathed, the entropic churning.
He rose as the sun was a mere suggestion on the mountains in the distance. There he stood, at his window, gazing to the imminent plains that stretched away. To the timepiece and the false world that had been built around it. He could almost hear the ticking.
Then the flash: a blindness made him step back and for a moment he wondered if the sun had torn through the rockforms that squatted on the horizon. But the heat and the noise and the thrust away from the form was enough to know that the moment had come.
Ivan stooped with eyes squinted and hands alive: the metallic scrapes of re-birth were a comfort, an insemination of an intangible. Two more swipes and then the tick tick tick of a squalling, mewling record keeper. Again, he will close the front and back, then engrave the smooth surface: MMLXXXIX above the initials IV, for this is Ivan Vainshtein’s 2089th timepiece.