The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything

by John D. MacDonald

  He sprang to his feet, gasping, trembling, and yanked the sunglasses from his eyes. He felt a strange resistance as he jumped up, as though a wind he had not felt or heard pressed against him. All the world was still. With the sunglasses off, the world was a pale, unpleasant red. He had seen the world look like that before, when he had looked through the prism of a single lense reflex camera with a red filter on the taking lense. But through the camera he had seen the normal unending movement of the world. Now he was in a pink desert, or a garden of savage sculpture, or inside a painting by Dali filled with the horror of a timeless motionlessness.

  A single wave, the length of the beach, curled and did not fall. The gulls of pink stone hung from invisible wires. He turned and looked down at the girl. The color of her face was unpleasant, and her lips looked black. She was caught in that eternity, hand half-raised in gesture, lips parted, tongue touching the edge of her front teeth. She had the merciless stillness of a body in a casket.

  He closed his eyes tightly, opened them again. Nothing had changed. He looked at the gold watch. The gold hand that marked the seconds was motionless. He looked at his wrist watch. It, too, had stopped. He looked at the gold watch carefully, looked at the silver hand and at last was able to detect the tiny movement of it as it crept up toward twelve. He held the watch to his ear and thought he could hear a tiny sound, a faint, sustained musical note. He had set the silver hand back to ten. It was at seven minutes to twelve. It seemed a fair assumption he had been in the red world of silence for three minutes.

  He took two experimental strides. Again he felt the odd resistance against his body. And his shoes felt as if they weighed twenty pounds each. It was difficult to lift them, to move them forward through the air and then to push them back down again. They had a strange weight and inertia, as though he walked through glue. And the pressure against his body seemed caused by an equivalent inertia in his clothing. He bent down and picked up a discarded paper cup. It was like lifting a cup made of lead. He felt the weight and resistance of it when lifting it, but when movement stopped, it seemed weightless. All the normal muscle-to-brain signals were distorted. Cautiously he released the cup. It remained suspended in the air, exactly where he had released it. He reached out and pushed it. He could move it through the air, but its motion stopped the instant he stopped exerting pressure against it. In this red world a body in motion did not tend to stay in motion. He grasped the cup and squeezed it. He could crumple it, but it was like crumpling a cup made of heavy lead foil rather than thin cardboard.

  He looked at the watch again. Three minutes to twelve. He looked down the beach at the hundreds of motionless people. He looked toward the drive and saw the frozen river of traffic. Far over the city a jet was pasted against the sky. Fifty feet away was a small boy halted in the act of running, horridly balanced on the ball of one bare foot.

  Cautiously he pressed the stem of the watch in, thinking he might turn the silver hand back to twelve, trying to believe that if he did so the world would be the same again, knowing he could not endure another three minutes of the red silence.

  When he pushed the stem in, the silver hand, like the hand of a stop watch, snapped back to twelve. The noise of the world crashed in around him and the redness was gone instantaneously. The wave struck, the cup fell, the boy ran, the flying things flew.

  “Think you could—” Bonny Lee said and stopped, stared at him, stared at the bench, looked at him again, swallowed, and said, “You can sure God move fast, sugar! Wow! You’re in better shape than I thought.”

  He looked at her and laughed. He laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks, and until he began to hear an edge of hysteria in his own voice. She tried to laugh with him and then stopped, staring at him with concern.

  “Kirby! Kirby, dammit!”

  “I’m in great shape,” he said, gasping. “I’ve never been in better shape!”

  “You losing your damn mind, sugar?”

  He dialed the gold watch back to the red world. He wanted time to think, time to control the helpless laughter. But laughter was easy to control. It sounded too hollow, too ghastly in the silence. She was again frozen, this time looking directly into his eyes.

  He shuddered, shaking himself like a wet dog. He looked at the watch. He had set the silver hand at quarter of twelve. Fifteen minutes, if he wanted all of it. Or just depress the stem and let the world snap back to life. No. That was a distorted version of reality, an invitation to insanity. The world was the same. It was continuing. He had merely stepped out of it. Everything had stopped but the vibrations of light itself. And the dingy red look of the world might mean that light itself had slowed in relation to him. More logically, he had changed his objective relationship to time, so that perhaps one hour of red time would be a fractional part of a second of real time. Of course, that could lead you into conjecture as to which one was “real” time, a philosophical route to the same goal—insanity.

  Using that premise, he considered the phenomenon of the paper cup. The feeling of weight would, in that event, be the product of its natural inertia multiplied by the extraordinary speed, the “real” world speed with which he had lifted it. And when he had released it, it had dropped back to the speed of the real world, which in the red world was an objective motionlessness. When he had crumpled it, he had stopped the invisible upward motion. It had begun to fall, imperceptibly, and when the world had returned to normal he had seen, out of the corner of his eye, the rest of the fall.

  Suddenly he knew why Uncle Omar had been so extraordinarily deft at amateur magic. And he knew what had happened at Reno. He could see the plump, nervous little highschool teacher with the shabby clothing, with the tense smile, watching the dice coming to rest on the green table and, at the very instant they stopped, moving into the red world, circling the table, reaching through the silence to turn one die to the proper winning number, returning to his place, and instantaneously catapulting himself back into the “real” world.

  And he could guess where all the rest of the money had come from, and why so much had been given away. And he knew he had received his inheritance. It was as if he had been looking through a kaleidoscope, turning it aimlessly, looking at the meaningless patterns of the fragments, then had by accident turned it just so and had the bright bits form a realistic image. He marveled at the control, the caution, the lifelong guile of Omar Krepps.

  He reached out and touched the girl’s cheek with his fingertips. Her cheek felt neither warm nor cool. It seemed to have no discernable temperature. And it felt unhumanly firm, as though fashioned of some dense but very slightly resilient plastic. He touched the pale curls and they had the texture of iron wire. When he bent them, they stayed in that position.

  Again he found himself in danger of making the subjective error of assuming the world had changed. He found himself glad he had been forced, by Uncle Omar, to take the courses in Logic. Bonny Lee was in “real” time. Through her eyes he was merely movement far too fast to leave any retinal image, his touch on cheek and hair, too brief to leave any sensory impression.

  He suddenly perceived one of the rules Uncle Omar must have followed all his life. You must return to the real world in the exact space where you left it. Otherwise you can drive men mad. In spite of all the caution of Omar Krepps, he had been considered most odd and most eccentric by the rest of the world. Perhaps there had been some carelessness from time to time. Now he knew the reason why Charla and Joseph thought of him with an almost superstitious awe. In international financial intrigue, the gold watch would give Uncle Omar the insuperable advantage of a one-eyed man in a world of the blind.

  This was the edge! This was what they wanted, yet could not specifically describe. It made him feel cold to think of this device in the hands of Charla.

  Ten minutes more. He resolved he would let the time run out and see if, when the silver hand reached twelve, the result would be the same. He started to walk, but the inertia of the shoes made it a slow and difficult e
ffort. He took them off. When he dropped one, it remained in the air. He started to push it down to the sand, then realized it made no difference to leave it there. He could walk more easily, but he had to press against the inertia of his clothing, and knew that if he was naked he could walk freely. His feet did not sink into the sand as far as he would normally expect, but he did leave curiously perfect shallow footprints. He wondered about it and realized that the soft sand had begun to fall back into the prints but, in the red world, the motion was too slow to be visible. He walked by the eeriness of the red statues, all the way to the water’s edge. He stepped into the water. It offered resistance, but his foot sank into it. It was like stepping into firm jello. When he pulled his foot out, the impression, inches deep, remained. Drops of sea water hung in the air, perfect spheres, pink in the red light of the world. One was as high as his face and, on impulse, he leaned and took it into his mouth. It was like a firm little blob of gelatine. He chewed down on it and swallowed it. It left a salty taste in his mouth.

  Five minutes.

  He walked back through the people. He made himself stop and look into their faces. He came upon a little girl feeding gulls. The hurled morsel of stale bread was a few inches from her fingertips. The gulls were poised. A yard from the back of the little girl’s head there was an object frozen in the silent air. It was a toy sand shovel. He looked and saw a fat boy several years older than the girl, his face bloated with hate and rage, ten feet behind the little girl, frozen in somewhat the attitude of a big league pitcher when the ball is halfway to the plate.

  Kirby reached out and put his hand against the tin shovel and pushed. He moved it several feet to the side. The fat boy wore swim trunks and a baggy T shirt. Kirby walked in front of the little girl and reached up and put his hand around the body of one of the gulls and pulled gently. He pulled it down and walked it over to the fat boy. He pulled the boy’s T shirt away from his bare stomach. It was like bending metallic mesh. He pushed the gull up under the T shirt and bent the bottom edge of the shirt back in.

  Two minutes.

  He hurried up the beach to the pavilion. He put his shoes on and positioned himself as before, and discovered he had time to spare. On playful impulse he took a cigarette out and placed it carefully between her parted lips. The silver hand moved closer and closer.…

  The bright morning was like a light turned on.

  She gave a great leap of surprise and took the cigarette out of her mouth. “What the hell!”

  “A trick my uncle taught me,” he said. He turned and looked down the slope of the beach. Gulls dipped. A bright shovel had spun harmlessly into the sand. A fat boy had gone mad, howling, leaping, whirling, until a gull, crying alarm, darted up, leaving some white feathers floating down. The perfection of his footprints was gone, and the footprint in the water.

  Bonny Lee’s face looked strained. “Tricks are fun, but I din like that one worth a damn, Kirby. Make me all cold and queasy.”

  He sat on the cement bench beside her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Honess, Kirby, first you act like the end of the world is here, then you’re laughing like a nut, then you do some spooky trick. I thought I had you figured, but now I—”

  “Something important—suddenly happened, Bonny Lee.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I want to do—a sort of experiment. Look right at this spot here on the bench between us. Look at it very carefully. Then tell me what happens and tell me how you feel about what happens.”

  “You know, I’m getting terrible nervous about you, sugar.”

  “Please, Bonny Lee.”

  He twisted himself back into the red world, this time turning the silver hand further than before. He turned it all the way around to twelve again and there it stopped and would not go further. This, then, was the limit of the red world, one hour of subjective time. He put the watch down and carefully, cautiously let go of it. Nothing changed. So it was not necessary for actual contact to be made throughout the red time interval. He saw a piece of broken shell a few feet away. He picked it up and placed it down on the cement right in Bonny Lee’s line of vision. He picked the watch up and pressed the stem with his thumb. The silver hand snapped all the way around back to twelve, and he was back in the bright movements of her world.

  She started. She looked gray under her tan. She closed her eyes and swallowed and then reached and touched the fragment of shell. She moved it a few inches and shivered. She stared at him, and sounded close to tears as she said, “You gotta stop this kinda tricks, Kirby. Please.”

  “What happened?”

  “You saw it! Gawddamn it, you did it! All of a sudden, a hunk of shell is there. It didn’t grow or fall from any place or—it was just there!”

  “How did you feel?”

  “Terrible!”

  “I mean, what did you feel?”

  “Whattaya mean, sugar, what did I feel? I’m just looking where you say and then—” She stopped and peered at him and looked angry. “I get it now, you spooky bassar! You’re hypnotizing me! You’re not supposed to be able to do it to anybody doesn’t want it done. And I don’t like it. So cut it out, hear?”

  “I’m not hypnotizing you, and stop getting sore. Now I want to try something else. If it works, it might frighten you at first, but—”

  “No more, Kirby!”

  “Didn’t you say you wanted to help me?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “And you love me?”

  “I guess so, but—”

  “Then let me try this, and I swear it won’t hurt you in any way, and I’ll explain it to you if it does work.”

  She looked at him sullenly, dubiously, and then gave a nod of agreement. He moved over close to her and put his arm around her. He held the watch in both hands in front of her. “Put your hands over mine.”

  She did so and said, “What has that old gold turnip watch g—”

  The world was red and she was frozen, unyielding. Maybe you couldn’t take another person into the red world, take someone out of “real” time. He snapped the silver hand back.

  “—ot to do with it?” she said.

  “Try touching the watch this time.”

  “Make up your mind,” she said. Again she was a statue in the redness.

  He came back to reality. “This time, get your fingers like this, your thumb right against the stem, and now as I press down, you press down too and give a little turn and—”

  He was alone on the bench, his arms holding a girl no longer there. The watch was gone also.

  He had the immediate memory of closeness, of the lithe warmth of her. She had winked away into nothingness, and in its own special way, it was a nastier, more gut-wrenching shock than his initial foray into the red and silent world.

  No, two could not go.

  Kirby sat stunned with the realization of what he had done to her. She had neither the maturity nor the background to cope with the silent horror of that other world. He stared into distance and did not see her. Her primitive mind, shrewd though it was, would shatter under such an impact. He had a horrible thought. Perhaps, believing the watch to blame, she would hurl it into the sea. It would stop, and leave her forever trapped in that red time, where no one could see her or hear her, where all the rest of her life might pass within, perhaps, a half-hour of real time.

  He sat dazed by guilt, by the enormity of what he had inadvertently, stupidly done to Bonny Lee Beaumont.

  Nine

  NOT UNTIL KIRBY STOOD up did he see, beyond the end of the concrete bench, a little pile of clothing—a pair of lime slacks, white sandals, a white blouse with a yellow figure, a yellow jacket, a white purse. He picked them up and put them on the bench. The items missing were the blue-green nylon bra, the matching panties.

  Her voice came from ten feet behind him. “Hey! Hey, sugar, this is more damn fun!”

  He spun and saw her there in the sunlight, brown and beautiful, winded, glowing with excitement. The sun glinted on th
e gold watch in her hand. She put her fingers on the stem of the watch. “Give it to me!” he yelled, but she was gone before he could say the last word.

  He heard thin cries, almost but not quite like the yelping of the gulls. He looked far down the beach to the north where the crowd was the thickest and it seemed to him that all the people down here had gone mad simultaneously.

  He squinted against the glare and thought he saw Bonny Lee appear and disappear again in the middle distance, but he could not be certain.

  He began to realize that he had made a poor estimate of her response to the red world. Bonny Lee had a totally pragmatic mind. She would not give a damn for theory. All that would concern her was that it worked, and he had given her the clue as to how to make it work. Though—from the viewpoint of his limited experience—she had given him ample, skillful and luxurious proof that she was a woman grown, and even though she had devised a philosophy of existence which seemed to suit her and seemed to work for her, he remembered that she was but “twenny, practically,” that there was a child inside the woman, and the child had never had much chance for the games of childhood, and that she was a hoyden, reckless, irreverent, comical and inventive. He remembered, too, that she was in bursting health, firm, fleet and tireless.

  He squinted at the people running to and fro in the distance, yelping, and he wondered if he had not inadvertently loosed upon them on this pleasant Tuesday morning something just as fearful as a playful tiger. He remembered the mischief and the satisfaction of tucking the gull under the fat boy’s shirt. He had astonished himself with that act. Surely Bonny Lee would go a good deal further than that before astonishing herself.

  He wondered if he should walk down the beach and see what was happening. But Bonny Lee would expect to find him at the bench.

  He saw two figures coming up the beach at a dead run. They seemed more energetic than fleet. He stared at them as they went by. First one would hold the lead and then the other would overtake her and pass her. They seemed to be heading for the parking lot. They were a pair of young women of rather generous construction, naked as a pair of eggs.