Instead, Dor ran up the hills with Alli, and his mind raced ahead of him, beckoning him to follow.
And then, one hot morning, a strange thing happened.
Dor, now a teen by our years, sat in the dirt and wedged a stick in the ground. The sun was strong and he noticed the stick’s shadow.
He placed a stone at the shadow’s tip. He sang to himself. He thought about Alli. They had been friends since they were children, but now he was taller and she was softer and he felt a weakness when her lowered eyes lifted up to meet his. He felt as if he were being tipped over.
A fly buzzed past, interrupting his daydream. “Ahhhh,” he said, swatting it away. When he glanced back at the stick, its shadow no longer reached the stone.
Dor waited, but the shadow grew even smaller, because the sun was moving up in the sky. He decided to leave everything in place and return tomorrow. And tomorrow, when the sun cast a shadow exactly to the stone, that moment would be … the same moment as today.
In fact, he reasoned, wouldn’t every day contain one such moment? When the shadow, stick, and stone aligned?
He would call it Alli’s moment, and he would think of her each day at that juncture.
He tapped his forehead, proud of himself.
And thus did man begin to mark time.
The fly returned.
Dor swatted it again. Only this time it stretched into a long, black strip, which opened into a pocket of darkness.
Out stepped an old man in a draped white robe.
Dor’s eyes widened in fear. He tried to run, to scream, but nothing in his body responded.
The old man held a staff of golden wood. He poked Dor’s sun stick and it rose from the dirt and turned into a string of wasps. The wasps created a new line of darkness, which opened like a pulled curtain.
The old man stepped through it.
And he was gone.
Dor ran away.
He never told anyone about that visit.
Not even Alli.
Not until the end.
5
Sarah finds time in a drawer.
She opens it looking for her black jeans and instead discovers, buried near the back, her first watch—a purple Swatch model with a plastic band. Her parents gave it to her for her twelfth birthday.
Two months later, they divorced.
“Sarah!” her mother yells from downstairs.
“What?” she yells back.
After the split, Sarah stayed with Lorraine, who would blame Tom, her absent ex, for every wrong thing in their lives. Sarah would nod sympathetically. But each of them, in a way, was still waiting on the man; Lorraine to admit he was wrong, Sarah to have him rescue her. Neither thing happened.
“What, Mom?” Sarah yells again.
“Do you need the car?”
“I don’t need the car.”
“What?”
“I don’t need the car!”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere!”
Sarah checks the purple watch, which still runs: it is 6:59 P.M.
Eight-thirty, eight-thirty!
She closes the drawer and yells, “Focus!”
Where are her black jeans?
Victor finds time in a drawer.
He takes out his calendar book. He sees the next day’s itinerary, which includes a 10 A.M. board meeting, a 2 P.M. conference call with analysts, and an 8 P.M. dinner with a Brazilian CEO whose company Victor is buying. The way he feels, he’ll be lucky to get through one of those.
He swallows a pill. He hears a buzzer. Who is coming at this hour? He hears Grace walking down the hall. He sees their wedding picture on his desk, the two of them so young, so healthy, no tumors, no failing kidneys.
“Victor?”
She is at the study door with a man from a service company, who pushes a large electric wheelchair.
“What’s this?” Victor says.
Grace forces a smile. “We decided, remember?”
“I don’t need it yet.”
“Victor.”
“I don’t need it!”
Grace looks to the ceiling.
“Just leave it,” she tells the service man.
“In the hallway,” Victor instructs.
“In the hallway,” Grace repeats.
She follows the man out.
Victor closes the calendar and rubs his abdomen. He thinks about what the doctor said.
There’s not much we can do.
He has to do something.
6
Dor and Alli were married.
They stood at an altar on a warm autumn night. Gifts were exchanged. Alli wore a veil. Dor poured perfume over her head and declared, “She is my wife. I will fill her lap with silver and gold.” This was how it was done in their day.
Dor felt a warm, calming feeling when he said those words—She is my wife—because ever since they were children she was like the sky to him, forever around. Only Alli could distract him from his counting. Only Alli could bring him water from the great river and sit beside him and hum a sweet melody, and he would sip from the cup and not even realize how long he had been staring.
Now they were married. It made him happy. That night he observed a quarter moon through the clouds, and he used it to mark the moment, the light of the night they were wed.
Dor and Alli had three children.
A son, then a daughter, then another daughter. They lived with Dor’s family in his father’s house, near three other houses made of wattle and daub. Families lived together in their time—parents, children, and grandchildren—all under one roof. Only if a son acquired wealth would he move to a house of his own.
Dor would never acquire wealth.
He would never fill Alli’s lap with silver and gold. All the goats, sheep, and oxen belonged to his brothers or his father, who often swatted Dor for wasting his time with silly measures. His mother cried when she saw him hunched over his work. She felt the gods had left him feeble.
“Why could you not be more like Nim?” she asked.
Nim had become a powerful king.
He had great riches and many slaves. He’d begun construction of a massive tower, and on certain mornings, Dor and Alli would walk past it with their children.
“Did you really play with him when you were a boy?” his son asked.
Dor nodded. Alli took her husband’s arm. “Your father was a faster runner and a better climber.”
Dor smiled. “Your mother was faster than us all.”
The children laughed and pulled at her legs. “If your father says it, it must be true,” she said.
Dor counted the slaves working on Nim’s tower, counted them until he ran out of numbers. He thought about how differently his life and Nim’s life had turned out.
Later that day, Dor carved notches on a clay tablet to mark the sun’s path across the sky. When the children reached to play with his tools, Alli gently moved their hands away and kissed their fingers.
History does not show it,
but as Dor grew older, he dabbled in every form of time measurement that science would later credit to others.
Long before the Egyptian obelisks, Dor was catching shadows. Long before the Greek clepsydras, Dor was measuring water.
He would invent the first sundial. He would create the first clock, even the first calendar.
“Ahead of his time.” That’s a phrase we use.
Dor was ahead of everyone.
Consider the word “time.”