The Time Keeper

by Mitch Albom

  “Sarah?”

  “Not too early.”

  “Not too early,” Lorraine said.

  Another honk.

  “I’ll call you later, sweetie.”

  She headed downstairs. She sighed when she reached the door. She was glad she wasn’t the designated driver this year. She really wanted a drink.

  Sarah had already been drinking. A bottle of vodka she had taken from the dining room cabinet.

  She would end her life tonight. It made the most sense. Her mother would be gone. The house was quiet. No chance of someone discovering her. Didn’t people call New Year’s the loneliest night on the calendar? She took comfort in knowing somewhere on the planet, someone might be as miserable as she was.

  Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

  It ended when I lost your love.

  She had downloaded that song after finding out the singer’s name and had played it on her cell phone for days. She barely left her room. Didn’t shower. Hardly ate. When her mother saw her emerge from the bathroom the day before, wearing the same black sweatpants and old green T-shirt, she asked, “What’s going on with you, honey?” Sarah lied, said she was working on college stuff and letting herself be grubby.

  She drank a swig now straight from the vodka bottle and felt it burn down her throat. Maybe they’ll ask Ethan about vodka when I’m dead, she thought, make him admit the girl he so wasn’t interested in was drinking with him a couple of weeks ago. She knew she could not face seeing him again, or anyone who knew him, or anyone who knew about the two of them, which was everyone now, wasn’t it? There was no cover. No shelter. No hiding in class behind her lowered head and outstretched elbow. She knew how this went. Everyone talking about you. Smirking behind your back. Posting more and more comments. “Seriously?” “Run, dude!” “Knew she was a skank.” God! The glee they took in ripping her, in joining Ethan’s disbelief that loser Sarah Lemon should ever try to climb out of her hole. She felt worthless and hollow. There was no hope of fixing this.

  And when hope is gone, time is punishment.

  “End it now,” she whispered.

  She took the vodka and the phone and stumbled to the garage.

  62

  Father Time had been watching them both.

  First he stood by Victor’s dying body. He saw Roger load it into a van. He followed that van to the cryonics facility, where a warehouse garage door opened with a growl.

  He saw the fourteenth-richest man in the world unloaded like a delivery and taken inside.

  It was an hour before midnight on the last night of the year. Roger and Jed lowered the side rails of Victor’s bed. A doctor and a coroner whispered to each other. They held documents. A huge tub was nearby, larger than a human body and filled with ice.

  Victor was barely conscious, his breath coming in short spurts. The doctor asked if he wanted a sedative, but he shook his head.

  “Is the paperwork right?” he mumbled.

  The coroner told him yes, and Victor inhaled deeply and shut his eyes. The last thing he was aware of was Jed, the cryonics man, removing a pocket watch from his grip and saying, “I promise to take care of this.”

  Four hands went under his body, to lift him up.

  But Dor was standing in the corner.

  He turned his hourglass.

  Meanwhile, in a garage in the suburbs, Sarah Lemon had turned the key in the ignition of the blue Ford Taurus.

  Now all she had to do was wait. The fumes would take care of the rest. So easy. She deserved something easy. She took a gulp from the vodka bottle and spit some down her chin and shirt. Through her cell phone the sad song played again and again, barely audible over the engine noise.

  I wake up in the morning and I wonder

  Why everything’s the same as it was

  I can’t understand, no I can’t understand

  How life goes on the way it does.

  “Leave me alone,” Sarah murmured, picturing Ethan and his cocky posture and his thick hair and the way he walked. He’d be sorry, she told herself. He’d feel guilty.

  Why does my heart go on beating?

  She was terribly woozy.

  Why do these eyes of mine cry?

  She slumped backward.

  Don’t they know

  She coughed.

  it’s the end of the world?

  She coughed again.

  It ended when you said good-bye.

  Her eyes began to close. Then everything seemed to stop. Through the windshield, she thought she saw a man moving closer. She thought she heard him scream.

  63

  Dor screamed in frustration.

  Having turned the hourglass, what else was he to do? He could slow time, but never stop it completely. The cars he’d examined had always been moving, just at infinitesimal speed. The people he’d studied still breathed, just so slowly they would never know he was there.

  The power of the hourglass had let him bend and squeeze the moments around him—a power beyond comprehension when granted—but Dor realized it was not enough. Eventually, time would pass. Eventually, Victor would be covered in ice and cut open. Eventually, carbon monoxide would spread through Sarah’s bloodstream, cause hypoxia, a poisoned nervous system, heart failure.

  This could not have been why he was sent to Earth—to watch them die. They were Dor’s mission, his destiny. Yet both had taken extreme measures before he could affect anything. He had failed. It was too late.

  Unless …

  It is never too late or too soon, the old man had said. It is when it is supposed to be.

  Dor crouched in front of two garbage cans. He put his hands together, pressed them to his lips, and shut his eyes, the way he used to do in the cave, trying to isolate the voice within from the millions of voices outside.

  It is when it is supposed to be.

  This moment? But then, how did he stay in this moment? Dor thought back on all that he understood about time.

  What was the constant?

  Movement. Yes. With time there was always movement. The setting sun. The dripping water. The pendulums. The spilling sand. To realize his destiny, such movement had to cease. He had to stop the flow of time completely …

  His eyes opened. He quickly rose. He reached inside the car, and lifted Sarah by her knees and shoulders.

  The old year was nearly over. A new year was minutes away. Father Time carried the dying girl out into the snow; you could count the flakes hanging in the moonlight.

  He walked through a winter landscape of traffic and party lights.

  He walked with Sarah’s head rolled into his chest, her eyes half-opened, looking up at him. He felt sorry for this girl. One who wants too little time. That’s how the old man had described her.

  Dor thought about his own children. He wondered if they’d ever become this unhappy, wanting to give up on the world. He hoped not. But then, hadn’t he wished his own life would end many times?

  He walked along an expressway and through a tunnel and past a crowded stadium parking lot whose sign read NEW YEAR’S HIP-HOP ALL NIGHT CELEBRATION. He walked for two days on his clock, barely a second on ours, until he reached a darkened industrial park and the cryonics building.

  He had to bring Sarah and Victor together. If this moment was when it is supposed to be, then Dor could no longer traverse two existences.

  He carried Sarah to the warehouse with the large storage cylinders inside. He rested her against a wall. Then he went to the room where Victor was being prepped. He lifted Victor’s body from the bed surrounded by others, and brought him to the warehouse, too, placing him next to Sarah. He put a thumb to each of their wrists, and eventually felt the slowest bump of a pulse. They were suspended, but still alive.

  That meant Dor’s idea had a chance.

  He crouched between them and pulled their hands to the hourglass.

  He wrapped their fingers around the braided posts, hoping this would connect them to the source of its power. Then he str
etched his own hand over the top, gripped hard, and turned.

  The top came loose. He pulled it away. It floated into the air, casting a blue light over the three of them. Looking into the upper bulb, Dor saw the white sand exposed, so fine and sparkly it refracted like diamonds.

  Herein lies every moment of the universe.

  Dor hesitated. Either he was right, and his story had a yet untold ending, or he was wrong and his story was over.

  He placed his thumb and forefinger close together, and, whispering the word “Alli”—should he perish, he wanted that to be the last thing he said—he pushed into the sand, toward the narrow funnel that separated what had fallen from what had not.

  Instantly, his mind went dizzy with a billion images. His fingers tingled as the flesh melted off the bones, and they elongated into stick-like digits, growing thin as pins until they slid through the hourglass stem. Every instant of the universe was passing through Dor’s consciousness; his mind was traveling through that glass as well, traversing what had already transpired and what was yet to be.

  Finally, with a power that did not come from man, he pinched his pin-like fingertips together. His eyes seemed to explode in color. His head was thrown back.

  He had plucked a single falling grain of sand, just as it was about to hit bottom.

  And this is what happened next …

  On seashores from Los Angeles to Tripoli, ocean waves froze in mid-curl.

  Clouds stopped moving. Weather locked. Raindrops in Mexico hung in the air, and a sandstorm in Tunisia became a permanent grainy billow.

  There was not a sound on Earth. Airplanes hung silently above runways. Puffs of cigarette smoke remained solid around their smokers. Phones were dead. Screens were blank. No one spoke. No one breathed. Sunlight and darkness divided the planet, and New Year’s fireworks remained splattered in nighttime skies, drizzled purples and greens, as if children had been drawing on the firmament then had run away.

  No one was born. No one died. Nothing drew closer. Nothing went away. The proverbial march of time had gone to its knees.

  One man.

  One grain of sand.

  Father Time had stopped the world.

  STILLNESS

  64

  Victor had expected more pain.

  Beyond the cancer, beyond his rotting liver, the shock of a sudden body freeze would be, he imagined, traumatic. He’d once had a bucket of ice water dumped on his head at a sporting event—part of a celebration—and his nerve endings felt as if they’d been raked with knives. He could only imagine the effect of full ice immersion. When he’d closed his eyes in the cryonics facility, he’d braced for that.

  Instead, there was a sudden lightness to him, and a freedom of movement he had long ago forgotten. He gripped one side of the bed—only he saw now that it was not the bed he was gripping but an … hourglass of some kind, and he was in the warehouse with the huge fiberglass cylinders and … what happened?

  He stood up.

  No pain.

  No wheelchair.

  “Who are you?” a girl’s voice asked.

  65

  Sarah had thought she was gripping the steering wheel.

  But as her vision cleared, she saw her hand was on the post of a strange-looking hourglass. A dream, she figured. It had to be. A room she’d never seen before? Some old guy in a bathrobe, asleep on the floor? She felt OK, not even dizzy from the alcohol, so she stood up and looked around, free and light, the way you feel in dreams when your feet don’t touch the ground.

  Wait …

  She stomped her feet. She did not feel the ground.

  Wait …

  Where did the garage go? The car? That song? She suddenly remembered the darkness that had strangled her, so thoroughly she wanted to die. But had she? Where was she?

  She moved out of the warehouse, down a hallway to a smaller room. She looked inside and recoiled. She thought she saw four men around a big tub—only they weren’t moving. There was no sound. Suddenly this felt like one of those zombie dreams, and she hurried back to the big room where she’d awakened, only to see the old guy was up and moving around.

  “Who are you?” she screamed.

  He glared at her.

  “Who are you?” he snapped back. “How did you get in here?”

  She hadn’t expected a response—certainly not a scolding one. She felt suddenly terrified. What if this wasn’t a dream? What had she done? She saw a single open door near the loading area, and she ran through it into the snowy night. A car down the street had its lights on but was not moving. A gas station seemed open, but a customer held the hose in his arms, like a guard on sentry duty. Strangest of all, the snowflakes were stuck in the sky. When Sarah swatted at them, her hand passed through.

  She dropped to the ground and curled her body into a ball, covering her eyes, squeezing them shut, trying to understand if she was dead or alive.

  66

  Victor wondered if he was between worlds.

  He had heard tales of people who floated in near-death experiences. Perhaps it happened when you were frozen alive. Your body locked, but your soul was left to wander. No wheelchairs? No canes? It was not the worst thing to be free of flesh and bones until science beckoned for your second act.

  Only two things bothered him.

  He was still inside his body.

  And what about the girl?

  She’d worn a green T-shirt and black sweatpants and was not at all familiar. A loose, random thought? he wondered. One of those faces that appears in a dream but you just can’t identify?

  Anyhow, she was gone now. He moved past the giant storage tanks of liquid nitrogen and wondered if he hadn’t, in another dimension, already been placed inside one. Maybe that was it. His body inside, his soul outside? How might time be moving elsewhere when it wasn’t moving here?

  He tried to touch the cylinders, but made no contact. He tried to grab a ladder, but his palms could not grip the sides. In fact, he could not feel anything he saw. It was like trying to feel your reflection in the mirror.

  “What is this place?”

  He spun around. The girl had returned. She was holding her elbows as if she were cold.

  “Why am I here?” She was trembling. “Who are you?”

  Now Victor was lost. If his soul were projecting, there would be no explanation for this, another person equally conscious and in the same space, asking questions.

  Unless …

  Her body was inside the tanks? She, too, was being frozen?

  “What is this place?” she repeated.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’ve never seen it before.”

  “It’s a laboratory.”

  “For what?”

  “Storing people.”

  “Storing …?”

  “Freezing them.”

  Her eyes widened and she stepped back. “I don’t want … I don’t want …”

  “Not you,” he concluded.

  He walked to a cylinder and again tried to touch it. Nothing. He saw the flowers in the numbered white boxes and tried to kick them, but could not displace a petal.

  It made no sense now. His body? This girl? All his carefully controlled plans? He turned his back and slid down, sitting on the floor but feeling no floor beneath him.

  “Are people inside those things?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you were supposed to be?”

  He looked away.

  She sat down, too, a respectful distance away.

  “God …,” she whispered. “Why?”

  67

  Victor, over the years, rarely spoke about his life to strangers.

  He almost never gave interviews, believing that, in finance, secrecy was an ally. Information might be inadvertently shared, and the next day a rival would beat you to the punch. The quick and the dead. That was the joke about life forms in the business world. Only two kinds. The quick and the dead.

  Now Victor Delamonte was neit
her.

  This setting—this nothingness in the cryonics facility—was either purgatory or a hallucination. Whatever the case, Victor had no more use for secrets. So he told a girl in sweatpants what he had told almost no one else, about his cancer, about the kidney disease and the dialysis, about his plan to outmaneuver death with a second lifetime deep in the future.

  He told her he should not be here, in this warehouse. He told her he was supposed to awaken many years from now, as a fully living medical miracle, not some ghost.

  She listened to his story. She even nodded at some scientific references, which surprised him. This girl was smarter than she looked—considering she looked as if she’d slept on a park bench. He stopped before admitting he was seconds away from ice immersion in the other room. It seemed like too much.

  At one point, the girl asked how his wife felt about him freezing himself.

  Victor hesitated.

  “Oh,” she said. “You didn’t tell her.”

  Smarter than she looked.

  68

  Sarah Lemon used to talk with her parents.

  Listening to Victor reminded her of that. As a child she would sit on the floor of their bedroom, twirling the frills on a throw pillow and answering their questions about school. She was a straight-A student, gifted at math and science, and her father, Tom, a lab technician, would stand at the mirror, run a hand through his thinning blond hair, and tell her to keep it up; if she wanted to be a doctor, he expected nothing less. Lorraine, who sold radio advertising, would lean back in the bed, drag on a cigarette, and say, “I’m proud of you, sweetie. Run and get me one of those ice cream bars, will you?”

  “You don’t need another ice cream bar,” Tom would say.

  They divorced when Sarah was twelve. Lorraine got the house, the furniture, all the ice cream bars she wanted, and full-time custody of their only child. Tom got a hair transplant, a boat, and a young female friend named Melissa, who had no interest in spending time with someone else’s daughter. They married and moved to Ohio.