Before you measure the years, you measure the days.
And before the days, you measure the moon. Dor had done this in exile, charting its stages—full moon, half moon, quarter moon, moonless. Unlike the sun, which looked the same every day, the changing moon gave Dor something to count, and he gouged holes on clay tablets until he noticed a pattern. The pattern was what the Greeks would later call “months.”
He assigned a stone to every full moon. He notched tablets for moons in between. He created the first calendar.
And now all his days were numbered.
On the fifth notch of the third stone, he heard Alli cough.
Soon her cough grew harsher, a low explosion that threw her head forward.
At first she tried to continue as usual, tending to daily tasks inside the reed house. But she grew so weak that she fell one day while preparing a meal, and Dor insisted she lie on a blanket. Perspiration beaded on her temples. Her eyes were red and teary. Dor noticed a blotch on her neck.
Inside, he was angry. He had warned her not to touch the visitors, and now they had passed on their curse. He wished they had never come.
“What should we do?” Alli asked.
Dor dabbed her forehead with the blanket. He knew they should seek out an Asu, a medicine man, who could give Alli roots or cream to make this disease go away. But the city was too far. How could he leave her? They were alone on these high plains, cut off from options.
“Sleep,” Dor whispered. “You will be better soon.”
Alli nodded and closed her eyes. She did not see Dor blink away his tears.
14
Sarah speaks to time. “Go slower,” she says.
She slips out the door and heads up the street. She imagines the boy with the coffee-colored hair. She imagines him greeting her with a sudden, sweeping kiss.
She looks back and sees a light go on in her mother’s bedroom. She quickens her pace. It is not beyond her mother to open the window and yell down the block. Like many teenage girls, Sarah finds her mother a huge embarrassment. She talks too much. She wears too much makeup. She is constantly correcting Sarah—Don’t slouch, Fix your hair—when she’s not complaining to friends about Sarah’s father, who doesn’t even live in the state anymore. Tom did this. Tom forgot that. Tom is late on the check again. They used to be closer, but lately mother and daughter share a mutual incomprehension; each seems baffled by the other. Sarah does not discuss boys with Lorraine; not that there has been much to discuss until now.
Eight-thirty, eight-thirty!
She hears a beep. Her cell phone.
She grabs it from her coat pocket.
Victor speaks to time. “Go faster,” he says.
It has been an hour, and he is used to quick responses. It doesn’t help that all around him time is literally ticking. A mantel clock sits on his desk. His computer screen clicks off the seconds. His cell phone, desk phone, printer, and DVD player all have digital time displays. On the wall is a wooden plaque with three clocks in three time zones—New York, London, Beijing—representing the major offices of another company he owns.
All told, there are nine different sources of time in his study.
The phone rings. Finally. He answers.
“Yes?”
“I’m faxing something over.”
“Good.”
He hangs up. Grace enters.
“Who was that?”
He lies. “Something for tomorrow’s meetings.”
“You have to go?”
“Why not?”
“I just thought—”
She stops. She nods. She takes the plates to the kitchen.
The fax machine rings, and Victor moves closer as the paper slides through.
15
Dor lay on the ground beside his wife. The stars took over the sky.
It had been days since she had eaten. She was perspiring heavily, and he worried about her labored breathing.
Please do not leave me, he thought. He could not bear a world without Alli. He realized how much he relied on her from morning until night. She was his only conversation. His only smile. She prepared their meager food and always offered it to him first, even though he insisted she eat before he did. They leaned on each other at sunsets. Holding her as they slept felt like his last connection to humanity.
He had his time measures and he had her. That was his life. For as long as he could remember, it had been that way, Dor and Alli, even as children.
“I do not want to die,” she whispered.
“You will not die.”
“I want to be with you.”
“You are.”
She coughed up blood. He wiped it away.
“Dor?”
“My love?”
“Ask the gods for help.”
Dor did as she asked. He stayed up all night.
He prayed in a way he had never prayed before. In the past, his faith was in measures and numbers. But now he begged the most high gods—the ones that ruled over the sun and moon—to stop everything, to keep the world dark, to let his water clock overflow. If this would happen, then Dor would have time to find the Asu who could cure his beloved.
He swayed back and forth. He repeated a whisper, “Please, please, please, please, please …,” squeezing his eyes shut because it somehow made the words more pure. But when he allowed his eyelids the slightest lift, he saw what he dreaded, the first change of colors on the horizon. He saw the bowl was nearly to the notch of day. He saw that his measures were accurate, and he hated that they were accurate and he cursed his knowledge and the gods who had let him down.
He knelt over his wife, her face and hair soaked with sweat, and he leaned in, put his skin on her skin, his cheek on her cheek, and his tears mixed with hers as he whispered, “I will stop your suffering. I will stop everything.”
When the sun rose, he could no longer wake her.
He rubbed her shoulders. He nudged her chin.
“Alli,” he whispered. “Alli … my wife … open your eyes.”
She was quite still, her head limp on the blanket, her breathing feeble. Dor felt an angry surge inside him, a primal howl that began in his feet and shot up through his lungs.
“Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh …”
His cry wafted into the empty air of the high plains.
He rose, slowly, as if in a trance.
And he began to run.
He ran through the morning and he ran through the midday sun. He ran with his lungs burning, until, at last, he saw it.
Nim’s tower.
It stood so tall; its peak was hidden by clouds. Dor raced toward it, obsessed with one last hope. He had watched time and charted time and measured time and analyzed time, and he was determined now to reach the only place where time could be changed.
The heavens.
He would climb the tower and do what the gods had not.
He would make time stop.
The tower was a terraced pyramid, its stairs reserved for Nim’s glorious ascent.
No one dared set foot on them. Some men even lowered their eyes as they passed.
Thus, when Dor reached the base, several guards looked up, but none suspected what he would try. Before they could react, he was sprinting up the king’s special steps. Slaves watched, confused. Who was this man? Did he belong? One yelled to the other. Several dropped their tools and bricks.
Quickly the slaves began ascending, too, convinced the race for the heavens had begun. The guards followed. People near the base joined in. The lust for power is a combustible thing, and soon thousands were scaling the tower’s facade. You could hear a rising roar, the collective yowl of violent men, ready to take what was not theirs.