Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
I GRIP THE COLD STONE STAIRS. I knew this would happen.
I knew it. It already happened once at Grand Central, and I knew the odds were that it would happen again.
It’s fine, I tell myself. I do this all the time.
Sure, not so many times in one day or even one month. But whatever. What’s one more, right?
“Sydney?” Peter says. His eyes follow mine. “Is … Is one of those things happening?”
“One of those things? Like where I see that someone is about to fucking die? Yeah. One of those things is happening.” I try to keep my breathing steady. Be cool. Be fucking cool.
By all accounts, this clock situation is a best-case scenario.
It’s not a kid. It’s not a mom pushing a stroller full of cherub-cheeked little crotch goblins.
It’s not one half of a set of lovers holding hands and smiling like they’re owed the world.
It’s just … a random white guy. Late middle-aged, probably.
He’s wearing khakis and a T-shirt with a graphic I can’t make out, and given his age and style, I can reasonably assume that this Boomer is at least indirectly responsible for climate change and the economy and probably multiple housing market collapses. He probably won’t even be missed.
“That guy?” Peter says.
I nod.
“How much time does he have left?”
“A full seventy-two,” I say, my eyes still on his Doom Scroll. “He just clocked in.”
“‘Clocked in,’” Peter repeats, like he’s trying out the words.
A surge of embarrassment snakes through my chest. This is so fucking weird. This macabre lexicon I made up for myself—clocking in, clocking out, Clockers, Zero Hour, the Doom Scroll—it’s all been inside my own mind for so long. But now I’m saying this shit out loud. To another person.
I steel myself and wait for him to say something about the term. To suggest something more sensitive or human or whatever. But he just says, “Damn. He looks like a guy who sends wholesome SpongeBob memes and Good morning! messages to the family group chat.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Him?” Maybe Peter’s color blindness is making him see things, because that guy looks like a dick. In fact, he has a full scowl going on right now. He doesn’t exactly seem like someone you’d fight to sit next to at Thanksgiving.
“Aw, come on,” Peter says, “look at him, he’s such a cinnamon roll.”
A cinnamon roll? Really? I look back at the Clocker.
He looks like your average middle-aged asshole to me.
He keeps walking in our direction, all fast and clenched, like he’s pissed Whole Foods stopped carrying his preferred milk alternative.
But then he stops mid-stride. And scratches his chin.
And pushes up his thick black glasses. And starts patting himself down like he’s forgotten something important.
And if I try hard enough I can kind of see what Peter sees.
Maybe he wasn’t actually scowling. Maybe he was, like, pouting.
Because now that I’m really watching, he doesn’t actually look frustrated or pissed, just kind of …
helpless? Even his hair is rumpled, like he’s the lead in a romantic comedy geared at forty-year-old women.
Like Oh, look at Thomas, he cannot keep mustard off his tie but he volunteers at a soup kitchen every Wednesday!
Goddamn it. Now I can’t unsee it and part of me wants to go up to Probably Thomas and ask him if he needs directions or something even though I actually have no fucking idea where I am.
Peter pulls his eyes away from Probably Thomas, who is now sitting down on a stoop himself, going through his crossbody man-purse looking for whatever it is he’s lost. “Tell me what it’s like.”
I clear my throat and look across the street to the flower stand.
“It’s fine,” I say. “I mean, it’s not, like, particularly awesome knowing when people are going to kick it, but it’s fine.
We all die. I just happen to have some extra information other people don’t.
Like insider trading with Death.” I force a laugh. “It’s weird but it’s not that bad.”
I wait for Peter to laugh with me. Or at least chuckle. He doesn’t.
“No,” he says. “I want to know what it’s really like for you.”
“It’s honestly fine.”
“Sydney.”
“Peter,” I say back. A woman across the street picks up a bouquet of flowers, smells them, then puts them back.
She smiles at the person manning the stand outside the bodega.
When the person heads back inside, she looks around, plucks a big yellow flower out of the bouquet, hides it in her oversized jean jacket, and speed-walks away. Goddamn people.
“You can tell me,” Peter says, his eyes still on me.
“Tell you what?” I say, unable to keep the edge out of my voice. “What do you want to hear?”
“The truth.”
I scoff. “No one in the history of anything has ever actually wanted to hear the truth.”
“I do.”
I roll my eyes.
“I can handle it, Sydney. I want to know.”
“Fine,” I say. He’s going to regret this but whatever, it’s his funeral.
“The clocks suck the fucking life out of me. Okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? That every time I see one of those pink motherfuckers, I wish it were over my own head. This isn’t some superpower.
It’s a goddamn curse. I’m a goddamn curse.
” A thick lump forms in my throat but I choke it down.
“Are you happy now? Did that satisfy your curiosity?”
Peter reaches for my hand, but I pull away before he can grab it.
“This isn’t a game. And I’m not some manic pixie dream girl sent to you to change your life.”
“Oh, I know. You’re far too depressive to be a manic anything.”
“I mean it, Peter.”
“So do I,” he says. “I see you, Sydney. I promise I do. Or—” He pauses. “At least I’m trying to see.” Everything feels charged and dangerous, the distance between us like a live wire inches from water, ready to explode into an electric fire.
I open my mouth but the words are stuck, jammed in my throat.
And still, Peter just waits. Waits while I swallow and look back at Probably Thomas, pushing his glasses back up for the hundredth time, all his earthly belongings splayed across the steps of his stoop.
One of his fountain pens rolls off a step and he lunges after it, scrambling, while attempting to keep his glasses on his nose.
“There’s nothing I can do,” I start, the words barely a whisper. It feels so fucking dramatic, but I can’t get my voice to cooperate.
Peter doesn’t speak. It looks like he’s holding his breath, afraid to move, as if I’m an escaped house cat that he’s trying to corral back inside without chasing it farther away.
“I tried, before. To save people. But it doesn’t work.
And telling people …” A pain so big it threatens to crush me on the stone step swells up around me, and I decide not to finish that sentence.
Not to even finish the thought. “It’s like …
you know those dreams where you can’t scream?
You open your mouth to let the terrible thing out, but nothing happens? ”
Peter nods.
“It’s like that, every time. Except I don’t wake up.
It’s not a nightmare. It’s real. I have to watch everything happen, but I can’t say or do anything.
And everyone else just keeps going like nothing strange or horrible is happening.
Because to them it isn’t. And I’m there—in this living nightmare, screaming in my head—alone. ”
I close my mouth, instantly regretting the words that are hanging in the cool New York air just in front of us. The sound of them still ringing in my ears.
Peter lets the seconds tick by, waiting to see if I’m done. When I don’t say anything else, he finally clears his throat. Here it comes. He’s going to want to fix it. He’s going to jump in with some plan, some golden-eyed vision for how to Make It Better.
“You can scream to me,” he says. “I’ll hear you.”
A sarcastic comment burns the back of my throat, waiting to be spat out. Something sharp and barbed to pierce right through Peter, to jab at him until he goes away. But for the first time, I can’t bring myself to say it. I don’t want to say it.
Probably Thomas starts dejectedly putting his yellow legal pads and other random things (a whole stapler and a mango?) back inside his bag, his pen between his teeth. The pink clock now reads 71:42:39. He’s wasted eighteen of his last 4,320 minutes searching for something he’ll probably never find.
The poor guy looks like he’s going to cry.
“I mean, would it be nice if I could just … do something for these people? Sure,” I say. “But that’s not how this works.” There was nothing I could do for Ms. Jegstrup, or the man at CVS, or the woman at the hotel, or my mother, or …
“Hold on,” Peter says. He stands up, suddenly all full of energy and life.
I thought we were having a sad hopeless moment here.
“What’re you doing?” Oh god, he’s looking at Probably Thomas like he’s going to save him.
Fuck. Shit. “Peter, listen. Whatever you’re thinking, it isn’t a good idea.
I’m telling you. Seriously.” But Peter just smiles at me, big and full of confidence.
“Just trust me.”
“I don’t.”
He shrugs. “Oh well.” And then he takes off, not in the direction of Probably Thomas, but across the street. To the flower stand.
Wait. No. To the hot-dog stand. He says something to the hot-dog guy, who laughs and hands Peter two hot dogs cradled in foil paper. Peter hands him cash and then throws more into his tip jar. I’ve never seen someone our age with so much actual paper money.
Peter jogs back across the street, walks up the three steps to where I am, and holds out one of the hot dogs. “A street dog for you.” He winks.
I take the warm hot dog and look up at him. Are we seriously going to just sit here and eat hot dogs together?
That’s his big idea? “Peter—”
But instead of sitting down next to me, Peter walks back down the steps toward the Clocker. My heart leaps into my throat. What the actual fuck does he think he’s doing?
He gets closer to Probably Thomas and says something that makes the guy look up.
I lean forward to get a better look through the stoop’s wrought-iron handrail.
Peter says something else, then gestures back toward me.
Probably Thomas nods, slowly, and then gives me a little head-tilt hello.
I raise my hand and give him a half wave back.
And I am fully outside my body because literally what is happening right now?
Peter turns back to the Clocker and keeps talking.
The corners of the guy’s mouth curl just slightly.
Peter keeps gesticulating and chatting until Probably Thomas laughs and shrugs.
Peter hands him the hot dog. The guy looks down at it like it’s a bar of gold.
He says something back to Peter, but Peter waves him off in this It’s no big deal sort of gesture.
He holds out his hand to shake Peter’s. They shake hands.
Probably Thomas pauses. And then pulls Peter into a hug.
The Clocker slides his bag over his shoulder and takes a bite of his hot dog at the same time I take a bite of mine.
I’m totally wrapped up in this insane scene I’m watching play out in front of me.
Then he pats Peter on the shoulder one more time and heads back down the street in the other direction.
Peter waits for a second, watching him walk away, before turning around and heading back toward me.
“What,” I say, “the fuck was that?”
Peter shrugs. “I gave him a hot dog.”