What happened next is a matter of debate.
The way history tells the story, the Tower of Babel was either destroyed or abandoned. But the man who would become Father Time could testify to something else, because his fate was sealed on that very same day.
As the people climbed, the structure began to rumble. The brick grew molten red. A thundering sound was heard—and then the bottom of the tower melted away. The top burst into flame. The middle hung in the air, defying anything man had ever seen. Those who sought to reach the heavens were hurled off, like snow shaken from a tree branch.
Through it all, Dor climbed, until he was the only figure still clinging to the stairs. He climbed past dizziness, past pain, past his legs aching and his chest constricting. He pulled up on each step, as bodies swirled all around him. He saw glimpses of arms, elbows, feet, hair.
Thousands of men were cast from the tower that day, their tongues twisted into a multitude of languages. Nim’s selfish plan was destroyed before he shot another arrow into the sky.
Only one man was allowed to ascend through the mist, one man lifted as if pulled from beneath his arms, landing on the floor of someplace deep and dark, a place no one knew existed and no one would ever find.
16
This will happen soon.
An ocean wave begins to break and a boy rises on his surfboard. He presses his toes. He steers into the curl.
The wave freezes. So does he.
This will happen soon.
A hairstylist pulls back a clump of hair and slides her scissors underneath. She squeezes. A small crunching sound.
The hair breaks free and falls towards the floor.
It stops in midair.
This will happen soon.
In a museum off the Huttenstrasse in Düsseldorf, Germany, a security guard glances at a strange-looking visitor. He is lean. His hair is long. He moves to an exhibit of antique clocks. He opens a glass case.
“No, bi—” the guard warns, wagging a finger, but instantly he feels relaxed, foggy, lost in thought. He thinks he sees the strange man remove all the clocks, study them, take them apart, then put them back together, an act that would take weeks.
Emerging from the thought, he finishes his word: “—itte.”
But the man is gone.
CAVE
17
Dor awoke inside a cave.
There was no light, yet he could somehow see. There were rocky lumps beneath his feet and jagged peaks pointing down from above.
He rubbed his hands over his elbows and knees. Was he alive? How did he get here? He had been in such pain climbing the tower, but now that pain was gone. He was not breathing hard. In fact, as he touched his chest, he was barely breathing at all.
He wondered for a moment if this was a lair of the gods, and then he thought about the bodies hurled from the tower, and the bottom melting, and the promise he had made Alli—I will stop your suffering—and he fell to his knees. He had failed. He had not turned back the hours. Why had he left her? Why had he run?
He buried his face in his palms. He wept. The tears poured through his fingers and turned the stone floor an iridescent blue.
It is hard to say how long Dor cried.
When he finally lifted his gaze, he saw a figure sitting in front of him—the old man he had seen as a child, his chin now resting atop the staff of golden wood. He was watching Dor the way a father watches a sleeping son.
“Is it power that you seek?” the old man asked. The voice was unlike any Dor had ever heard, muted, light, as if it had never been used.
“I seek,” Dor whispered, “only to stop the sun and the moon.”
“Ah,” the old man said. “Is that not power?”
He poked Dor’s sandals and they disintegrated, leaving Dor’s feet bare.
“Are you the most high god?” Dor asked.
“I am but His servant.”
“Is this death?”
“You were spared from death.”
“To die here instead?”
“No. In this cave, you will not age a moment.”
Dor looked away, ashamed. “I deserve no such gift.”
“It is not a gift,” the old man said.
He rose and held his staff before him.
“You began something in your days on Earth. Something that will change all who come after you.”
Dor shook his head. “You are mistaken. I am a small and shunned person.”
“Man rarely knows his own power,” the old man said.
He tapped the ground. Dor blinked. Before him were all his tools and instruments, his cups, his sticks, his stones and tablets.
“Did you give one of those away?”
Dor thought about the sun stick.
“One was taken,” he said.
“There are many more now. Once started, this desire does not end. It will grow beyond anything you have imagined.
“Soon man will count all his days, and then smaller segments of the day, and then smaller still—until the counting consumes him, and the wonder of the world he has been given is lost.”
He tapped his staff again. Dor’s instruments turned to dust.
The old man narrowed his gaze.
“Why did you measure the days and nights?”
Dor looked away. “To know,” he answered.
“To know?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you know …” the old man asked “about time?”
“Time?”
Dor shook his head. He had never heard the actual word before. What answer would suffice?
The old man held out a bony finger, then made a swirling motion. The stains from Dor’s tears gathered together, forming a pool of blue on the rocky floor.
“Learn what you do not know,” the old man said. “Understand the consequences of counting the moments.”
“How?” Dor asked.
“By listening to the misery it creates.”
He lowered his hand onto the tearstains. They liquefied and began to glow. Small wisps of smoke appeared on the surface.
Dor watched, confused and overwhelmed. He only wanted Alli, but Alli was gone. His voice choked in a whisper. “Please, let me die. I have no wish to go on.”
The old man rose. “The length of your days does not belong to you. You will learn that as well.”
He placed his hands together and became the size of a boy, then an infant, then he lifted like a bee taking flight.
“Wait!” Dor yelled. “How long must I be imprisoned here? When will you return?”
The old man’s shrunken form reached the cave roof. It sliced a fissure in the rock. From that fissure fell a single drop of water.
“When Heaven meets Earth,” he said.
And he became nothing.
18
Sarah Lemon was really good at science
and how exactly did that help her? she often wondered. What mattered in high school was popularity—based mostly on how you looked—and Sarah, who could whiz through a biology exam, disliked what she saw in the mirror as much as she figured everyone else did: the hazel eyes, too far apart, the dry, wavy hair, the gap between her teeth, the doughy flesh she had never really shed since gaining weight after her parents split up. She was big enough up top but too big on the bottom, she thought, and one of her mother’s friends had said she “might grow up to be attractive” which she did not take as a compliment.