The Time Keeper

by Mitch Albom

Publicly, Sarah took her mother’s side, said she was happy to be staying with “the good parent,” the one who hadn’t messed things up. But deep down, like many children, she missed the absent party and wondered how much she was to blame for the marriage’s collapse. The less her father called, the more she ached for him; the more her mother hugged her, the less she wanted the embrace. She looked like her mother and she sounded like her mother, and by eighth grade, she began to feel like her mother, unloved or perhaps unlovable. She ate too much and she put on weight, and she distanced herself from other kids and stayed inside studying because her father had admired that and maybe deep down she thought it would bring them closer. She sent him her grades every semester. Sometimes he responded with a note. “Good girl, Sarah. Keep it up.” Sometimes he didn’t.

  By high school, her friends were few and her routine was predictable: science labs, bookstore browsing, weekends at home on the computer, parties something she heard about—past tense—during Monday morning homerooms when other kids were bragging. She’d been approached by a few boys from her math classes and she’d gone out with a couple of them—to movies, a school dance, video arcades—even made out a few times to see what everyone was talking about, but those boys eventually stopped calling and she was privately relieved. She never felt the slightest spark and figured she never would.

  Ethan changed all that. He put an end to her deadening drift. The thought of his face replaced all her other thoughts. She would drop the world for Ethan. She had.

  But he had never really wanted her. And in the end, he exposed her for what she’d always feared she was: pathetic. After that, there was no bottom to the pit.

  She told most of this to Victor, the old man in the bathrobe, after he had told her his story about the freezing thing and his wife. They were alone in this eerie warehouse, and Sarah felt so frazzled and confused and she figured maybe he knew more than he let on. But the further she got into the Ethan story, the more she felt the old soak of depression. She stopped just before the final moments in the garage, with the vodka and the sad song and the engine running. She wasn’t going to admit she had tried to kill herself. Not to a total stranger.

  When he asked how she had gotten to this facility, she said she didn’t know—and she truly did not—she’d just woken up holding an hourglass.

  “I kind of remember being carried.”

  “Carried?”

  “By this guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “He works in a clock shop.”

  Victor looked at her as if she’d just been painted pink. From behind a cylinder, they heard a noise.

  69

  Dor coughed.

  His eyes opened, as if coming out of sleep, although he hadn’t slept in thousands of years. He was lying on the floor, and he blinked several times before he realized that Victor and Sarah were standing over him.

  They immediately peppered him with questions—“Who are you?” “Where are we?”—as Dor tried to clear his head. He remembered only the screaming colors and everything going black and a sensation of him falling through the air and the hourglass—where was the hourglass?—and then he saw it in Sarah’s grip, the top reattached, and he realized that if they were alive, he had guessed correctly. Now he could—

  Wait.

  Had he coughed?

  “What do you have to do with all this?” Victor asked.

  “How did I get here?” Sarah said.

  “Was I drugged?”

  “Where’s my house?”

  “Why do I feel healthy?”

  “Where’s the car?”

  Dor could not focus. He had coughed. In his eternity in the cave, he had never coughed, sneezed, or even breathed hard.

  “Talk to us,” Victor said.

  “Talk to us,” Sarah said.

  Dor looked down at his right hand. The flesh had returned to his fingers. His fist was clenched shut. He uncurled it.

  A single grain of sand.

  On the wall of his cave, Dor once carved the shape of a rolling pin.

  It symbolized the delivery of their first child. A difficult pregnancy in Dor’s time required midwives to soothe the belly with oils or a special rolling pin. Dor watched as they did this over Alli’s womb, and Alli cried out as they prayed for her. The baby came, healthy, and Dor often wondered how such a simple thing—a rolling pin, found in even the poorest dwellings—could affect such a monumental event.

  The answer, he was later told by an Asu, was that only a magical rolling pin could do it. Magic came from the gods. And when the gods touched something, the normal became the supernatural, the simple became the wondrous.

  A rolling pin to bring forth a child.

  A grain of sand to stop the world.

  Now Dor looked at a young girl in sweatpants, and an old man in his bathrobe, and he realized the magic of the elements had brought him this far.

  What remained would be up to him.

  “Just tell us,” Sarah said, her voice starting to quiver. “Are we … dead?”

  Dor struggled to his feet.

  “No,” he said.

  For the first time in six thousand years, he felt tired.

  “You have not died,” he began. “You are in the middle of a moment.”

  He held out the grain of sand. “This moment.”

  “What are you talking about?” Victor asked.

  “The world has been stopped. Your lives are stopped in it—although your souls are here now. What you have done to this point cannot be undone. What you do next …”

  He hesitated.

  “What?” Victor said. “What?”

  “It is still unwritten.”

  Sarah looked to Victor, who looked back. Both of them were picturing their last remembered moment: Sarah slumped in the car, inhaling poison; Victor lifted toward the ice, about to become a medical experiment.

  “How did I get here?” Sarah asked.

  “I carried you,” Dor said.

  “What do we do now?” Victor asked.

  “There is a plan.”

  “What is it?”

  “That is yet unknown to me.”

  “How can there be a plan if you don’t know what it is?”

  Dor rubbed his forehead several times. He winced.

  “Are you OK?” Sarah asked.

  “Pain.”

  “I don’t get it. Why us?”

  “Your fates matter.”

  “More than the rest of the world?”

  “Not more.”

  “How did you even find us?”

  “I heard your voices.”

  “Stop!” Victor raised his palms. “Stop this. Enough. Voices? Fates? You’re a repair guy in a clock shop.”

  Dor shook his head. “In this moment, it is not wise to judge with your eyes.”

  Victor looked away, attempting, as he always did, to solve things himself when others were incompetent. Dor lifted his chin. He opened his mouth. His vocal cords became those of a nine-year-old French boy.

  “Make it yesterday.”

  Victor spun, recognizing the sound of himself. Now the voice became Victor’s deeper adult version. “Another lifetime.” Dor turned to Sarah. “Make it stop,” he said, sounding just like her.

  Sarah and Victor stared in stunned silence. How could this man know their private thoughts?

  “Before I came to you,” he said, “you came to me.”

  Sarah studied his face.

  “You don’t really fix clocks, do you?”

  “I prefer them broken.”

  “Why is that?” Victor said.

  Dor looked at the grain of sand in his fingers.

  “Because I am the sinner who created them.”

  FUTURE

  70

  In Dor’s happier days on Earth, his son once asked him an unusual question.

  “Who will I marry?”

  Dor smiled and said he didn’t know.

  “But you said the stones can tell you what will happen.”
>
  “The stones can tell me many things,” Dor said. “They can tell me when the sun will come, when it will set, how many nights until the moon is as full as your round face.”

  He squeezed his son’s cheeks. The boy laughed then looked away.

  “But those are hard things,” he said.

  “Hard?”

  “The sun and the moon. They are far away. I only want to know who I will marry. If you can tell the hard things, why can’t you tell me that?”

  Dor smiled to himself. His son was asking the kind of questions he had asked as a boy. And Dor remembered his own frustration when he could not get an answer.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Well,” the boy said, “if those stones said I will marry Iltani, I would be happy.”

  Dor nodded. Iltani was the shy, pretty daughter of a brick maker. She might indeed grow to be a fetching bride.

  “What if the stones said you will marry Gildesh?”

  His son made a face, as Dor had known he would.

  “Gildesh is too big and too loud!” the boy protested. “If the stones said I would marry her, I would run away now!”

  Dor laughed and tousled his son’s hair. The boy picked up one of the stones and threw it.

  “No, Gildesh!” he yelled.

  Dor watched it fly across the yard.

  Now Dor looked at Sarah, remembering that moment.

  He wondered what became of young Gildesh—was she rejected by men as this Sarah had been? He thought about his son’s stone flying across the yard, the youthful idea that you could toss away the future if you didn’t like it—and he realized, suddenly, what he needed to do.

  He held up the hourglass, looked inside, and saw, as he had suspected, that the sand in the top remained in the top, and the sand in the bottom remained in the bottom. Nothing passed between. Time was not advancing.

  Dor squeezed the top panel and once again removed it from the ancient timepiece.

  “What are you doing?” Victor asked.

  “What I have been commanded to do,” Dor said.

  He poured out, across the warehouse floor, the sand from the upper bulb—the sand of what was yet to happen—and it kept pouring and pouring, more sand than seemed possible from a hundred hourglasses, let alone one. Then he laid the timepiece on its side, and it enlarged to the size of a giant tunnel, the path of sand leading into its center, shimmering the way moonlight shimmers on the ocean.

  Removing his shoes, Dor stepped into the sand. He motioned to Sarah and Victor.

  “Come,” he said.

  He looked at his arms. For the first time in six thousand years, he was sweating.

  Einstein once postulated that if you traveled at an enormous rate of speed, time would actually slow down relative to the world you left behind,

  so that seeing the future without aging alongside it was, at least theoretically, possible.

  Sarah had studied this in physics class. So had Victor, decades earlier. Now, in the frozen space between a single breath, they were being asked to test the theory, to move forward while the world stood still, to walk along sand into a giant hourglass at the behest of a lean, dark-haired man in a black turtleneck who—as far as they knew—worked in a clock shop.

  “Are you going?” Sarah said, turning to Victor.

  “I don’t buy any of this,” he answered. “I had paperwork. Contracts. Someone is deliberately sabotaging my plans.”

  Sarah swallowed. For some reason, she really wanted this old guy to come with her, if only so she wouldn’t be alone. He felt like the most important friend she could have.

  “Please?” she asked, softly.

  Victor looked away. Every logical bone told him no. He didn’t know this girl. And this clock shop guy could be anybody, any charlatan, any hocus-pocus fake. But the way she said it. Please. Silly as it seemed, it was the purest word he had heard in months. Few people ever got close enough to Victor to ask things in a personal way.

  He glanced around the cryonics facility. All that waited here was a frozen, untouchable panorama. He looked at Sarah.

  When we are most alone is when we embrace another’s loneliness.

  Victor took her hand.

  Everything went black.

  71

  At first, it felt like climbing an invisible bridge.

  They proceeded up through a deep, lightless void, seeing nothing but each sandy footprint they made drifting away behind them, glowing gold before disappearing in the blackness.

  Sarah squeezed Victor’s hand.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She nodded, yet gripped him harder as they descended. She was trembling, as if some awful fate awaited her. Sarah was not like him, Victor thought. He was anxious to see how his second life would play out. But something terrible had happened to this girl. No matter how smart she appeared, she was fragile at her core.

  They lowered into a mist. When it lifted, they were inside a warehouse, with food and beverages stacked on the shelves.

  “What is this?” Victor asked Dor. “Where are we?”

  Dor said nothing. But Sarah recognized the place immediately. It was the site of her fateful date with Ethan. “Over at my uncle’s if u want 2 come.” She had replayed that night so many times—the kissing, the drinking, the way it ended. And suddenly, there he was again, the boy of her dreams, in his familiar jeans and hooded sweatshirt, walking toward them. Sarah drew in a breath. But he passed without a glance.

  “He can’t see us?” Victor asked.

  “We are not in this time,” Dor said. “These are the days to come.”

  “The future?”

  “Yes.”

  Victor noticed Sarah’s expression.

  “This is the guy?” he asked.

  Sarah nodded. She felt pangs of heartbreak just seeing him again. If this were the future, did that mean she was gone? And if she were gone, did Ethan regret what he had done? He was alone. He was tapping on his phone. Perhaps he was thinking about her. Perhaps that’s why he’d come to the warehouse. Perhaps he was mourning her, looking at her photo, the way she so often had looked at his. She started to move toward him, when he smiled and lifted a thumb and said “Hah!” A beeping sound indicated he was playing a video game.

  A sudden knock drew his attention. He opened the warehouse door, and a girl about Sarah’s age entered, her hair blown out and styled, her hands dug in her coat pockets. Sarah noticed her plentiful makeup.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Ethan said.

  Sarah winced. Those words.

  She listened to them talk. She heard the girl say it was unfair, the way people were blaming him.

  “I know, right?” Ethan said. “I didn’t do anything. It was her fault. The whole thing is out of control.”

  The girl took off her coat and asked if it was all right to eat something from the shelves. Ethan grabbed two boxes of crackers. He also pulled down a vodka bottle.

  “Can’t lose with booze,” he said.

  Sarah felt suddenly weak, as if she’d been kicked in the knees. Her final thought as she’d sunk into death was that Ethan would be sorry, that his inner torture would somehow equal hers. But hurting ourselves to inflict pain on others is just another cry to be loved. And that cry, Sarah now realized, seeing Ethan grab two paper cups, had been as unheard as the feelings she once declared for him in a parking lot.

  Her death was as insignificant as her life.

  She looked pleadingly at Dor.

  “Why did you bring me here?” she said.

  The walls seemed to melt and the setting changed. They were now at the shelter where Sarah worked on Saturdays. Homeless men lined up for breakfast.

  An older woman was scooping oatmeal. A man in a blue cap stepped forward.

  “Where’s Sarah?” he asked.

  “She’s not here today,” the woman said.

  “Sarah puts in extra bananas.”

  “OK. Here’s some extra bananas.”

  “I li
ke that girl. She’s quiet, but I like her.”

  “We haven’t heard from her in a couple of weeks.”

  “I hope she’s all right.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’ll be praying for her then.”

  Sarah blinked. She didn’t think anyone there knew her name. She certainly didn’t think they’d miss her if she weren’t around. I like that girl. She’s quiet, but I like her.

  Sarah watched the man sit alongside other homeless clients. Despite their awful circumstances, they were going on with life, getting through it as best they could. Sarah wondered how she could have ignored this every Saturday while being so dazzled by a boy. The man who liked bananas thought more about her than Ethan did.

  The shame welled up inside her.

  She turned to Dor.

  She swallowed hard.

  “Where’s my mom?” she whispered.

  Once more, the scene changed. It was daytime, and snow was piled against the curbs.

  Sarah, Dor, and Victor were in the parking lot of a car dealership. A salesman emerged from the office, wearing a winter parka and holding a clipboard. He walked right through them and approached the passenger side of a gray van.

  Lorraine sat inside.

  “It’s freezing,” the man said through the window, his breath condensing in smoke. “You sure you don’t want to come in?”

  Lorraine shook her head and quickly signed the papers. Sarah moved toward her cautiously.

  “Mom?” she whispered.

  The salesman took the paperwork. Lorraine watched him go. She squeezed her lips tightly as tears slid down her cheeks. Sarah remembered all the times she had cried just that way in her mother’s arms, over teasing in school, over the divorce. Her mother, crazy as she sometimes was, had always had time for her, always stroked her hair and told her things would be all right.

  Now Sarah was helpless to do the same.

  She saw another man approach the car, folding papers into an envelope. Her Uncle Mark, from North Carolina. He got into the driver’s seat.

  “Well, that’s it,” he said. “Sorry you even had to come, but they wouldn’t take it if you didn’t sign.”

  Lorraine exhaled weakly. “I never want to see that car again.”