The gentleman who entered Franz Neumann's shop on a Tuesday afternoon was impeccably dressed, excessively polite, and smelled faintly of sulfur Street and which was, in fact, sulfur. The smell settled in Franz's sinuses and stayed there for three days after the visit — a metallic sweetness that made his morning coffee taste of matches and that woke him at 4 a.m. with the sensation of something burning in a room he could not find.
"I need a clock repaired," the gentleman said.
"Everyone does," Franz said.
"This clock is unusual."
"They all are."
The gentleman placed a clock on the workbench. It was black. Not painted black — made of a material that was black the way a hole is black: not a surface but an absence. It had no hands. It had no face. It had no mechanism visible through the case. It was, as far as Franz could determine, a box that contained nothing and measured nothing.
"What does it measure?" Franz asked, because he had learned to ask this question of unusual clocks, and because the answer was always more interesting than the diagnosis.
"Remaining time," the gentleman said.
Franz looked up.
"Everyone's?"
"Just the person holding it."
Franz looked at the clock. He did not pick it up. He had been a clockmaker for forty years and he had learned that some things should not be held until you understood what they held.
"How does it display the measurement?" he asked.
"It gets heavier."
Franz stared at the clock. The clock, if it was a clock, sat on his workbench with the dense patience of something that had waited in many rooms and would wait in many more.
"And you want me to repair it?"
"It has stopped getting heavier for one person. A man in this city. I need it recalibrated."
"Who is the man?"
The gentleman smiled. It was a smile Franz had seen on certain clocks — the ones that told time too accurately, the ones that made their owners uncomfortable because the truth of the hour was always slightly worse than the estimate.
"The man," the gentleman said, "is a security guard at a warehouse in Prague 7. He claims to be from another planet. He claims that his time here is a curriculum. And when he holds this clock, it weighs nothing. Zero. As if he has no remaining time at all — or infinite time. The clock cannot distinguish."
Franz sat with this.
"Perhaps," he said carefully, "the clock is not broken. Perhaps your man is simply not subject to it."
The gentleman's smile disappeared. Not gradually. It was there and then it was not, the way a flame is there and then it is not, and the room became colder in exactly the way rooms become colder when something very old stops pretending to be amused.
"Everyone," the gentleman said, "is subject to it."
"Then perhaps," Franz said, "you should ask him what he knows that you don't."
The gentleman picked up the clock. The clock, in his hands, was clearly heavy — so heavy his wrist dipped. He placed it in a leather bag that should not have been large enough to contain it and walked to the door.
"You are a precise man, Herr Neumann," he said. "Your clocks tell two kinds of time. That is one more than most people can bear. I wonder: have you ever built a clock that tells three?"
"What would the third kind be?"
"The time you have left after you stop being afraid."
He left. The bell above the door rang once — a clear, cold note that hung in the air longer than any bell should, long enough for Franz to understand that the sound was not fading. It was choosing when to stop.