The Time Keeper

by Mitch Albom

  He looked down. “I was the first to do it.”

  His face was even paler now. His hair was damp with sweat.

  “How old are you?” Victor whispered.

  Dor shook his head. The first man to count his days had no idea how many he had accumulated.

  He took a deep, painful inhale.

  And he collapsed.

  77

  Dor’s lungs fought for air. His eyes rolled backward. He was stricken with an ancient plague.

  For six thousand years, he had been granted immunity from the passing moments: the planet grew older; he never used a breath. But the equation had changed. He had stopped the world. And when the world no longer advanced, Father Time did. His skin blotched quickly. His decay was catching up.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Sarah asked.

  “I don’t know,” Victor said. All around, the future was fading—the spectators, the room, the tube that contained his mortal shell, melting away like a photo in a fire. The hourglass shrunk down to its normal size, the sand gathering back into the upper bulb.

  “We have to help him,” Sarah said.

  “How? You saw what he’s been through. What do we know about helping him?”

  You saw what he’s been through.

  “Wait,” Sarah said. She lifted Dor’s left arm to her face. “Take the other one,” she told Victor.

  They covered their eyes with his hands. And both of them saw the same moment: Dor leaning over his wife, her face perspiring, her skin blotched red as his was now. They saw him kissing her cheek, his tears mixing with hers.

  I will stop your suffering. I will stop everything.

  “Oh my God,” Sarah whispered. “She had the same disease.”

  They saw Dor run to Nim’s tower. They saw his desperate ascent. They saw what others in their time had dismissed as an impossible myth: the destruction of the tallest structure ever built by men.

  And God’s sole permitted survivor.

  But when they saw Dor swept into the cave, saw him greeted by a robed old man who asked, Is it power that you seek?, both Victor and Sarah let go of his hands at the same time.

  They looked at each other.

  “You saw him, too?” Victor said.

  Sarah nodded. “We have to take him back.”

  In their normal lives, they never would have met.

  Sarah Lemon and Victor Delamonte were of two different worlds, one high school and fast food, the other boardrooms and white tablecloths.

  But fates are connected in ways we don’t understand. And at this moment, with the universe stopped, only the two of them could change the fate of the man who had tried to change theirs. Sarah held the hourglass as Victor removed the bottom. They did as they had seen Dor do, poured out the sand—this time from the lower bulb, the sand of the past—and spread it out as he had spread out the future.

  When it was done, they reached beneath Dor’s knees and shoulders.

  “If this works,” Sarah asked, “what happens to us?”

  “I don’t know,” Victor said. He truly didn’t. Dor had plucked them out from the world. Without him, there was no telling where their souls would drift.

  “We’ll stay together, right?” Sarah said.

  “No matter what,” Victor assured her.

  They hoisted Father Time, stepped onto the path, and began moving forward.

  There were no witnesses to what came next, and no telling how long it took.

  But Victor and Sarah walked the sands of time gone by, their previously glowing footprints drifting up toward their feet.

  As they descended, mists cleared. Skies lit with stars. Finally, amid hanging snowflakes and frozen traffic and people locked in celebration of a new year, one teenager and one old man stood beneath an awning at One Forty-Three Orchard.

  They waited.

  A door opened.

  And a familiar-looking face, that of the proprietor, now dressed in the draped white robe he had worn in the cave, said in a soft voice, “Bring him here.”

  78

  They stepped inside the clock shop and laid the body on the floor.

  “Who is he?” Victor asked the old man.

  “His name is Dor.”

  “He was sent here for us?”

  “And for himself.”

  “Is he dying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are we dying?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man saw the fear on their faces. His expression softened. “All who are born are always dying.”

  Victor looked at Dor, who was barely conscious, and realized he had been wrong about who he was, but he had been wrong about so many things, even about the pocket watch, which Dor had chosen not for its antique value but for the painted reminder of a family—father, mother, child—hoping Victor would realize what he had with Grace before it was too late.

  “Why was he punished?” Victor asked.

  “He was never punished.”

  “The cave? All those years?”

  “That was a blessing.”

  “A blessing?”

  “Yes. He learned to appreciate the life he had led.”

  “But it took so long,” Sarah said.

  The old man removed a ring from the throat of the hourglass.

  “What is long?” he said.

  He slipped the ring onto Dor’s finger. A single grain of sand floated out of Dor’s grip.

  “What’s going to happen to him?” Sarah asked.

  “He will finish his story. As will you.”

  Dor was motionless, his eyes closed. His hands were limp on the floor.

  “Is it too late?” Sarah whispered.

  The old man took the empty hourglass and turned it upside down. He held the grain of sand above it.

  “Never too late or too soon,” he said.

  And he let it go.

  79

  We do not realize the sound the world makes—unless, of course, it comes to a stop. Then, when it starts, it sounds like an orchestra.

  Breaking waves. Whipping wind. Falling rain. Squawking birds. All throughout the universe, time resumed and nature sang.

  Dor felt his head spin and his body drop. He awoke coughing in the dirt. A high, strong sun hung in the sky.

  He knew immediately.

  He was home.

  He struggled to stand up. Ahead of him was Nim’s tower, its top in the clouds. The path beneath his feet would take him to it.

  He inhaled deeply, then turned the other way. With the chance to do what none in life ever get to do, he did not waver. He changed the history of his footsteps.

  He ran back to her.

  Through waves of heat and fits of choking, he pushed on, driven by desperation. Although the exertion would speed his death, he would not slow down. A phrase came to his memory—time flies—and he recited it over and over, driving him on through the hills and into the high plains. Only when the rocks looked familiar, only when he saw the hut made of reeds, did he slow his pace, as man does when he approaches what he desires, uncertain if it can possibly be all he hoped. Dare he look? All that he had dreamed of? All that had sustained him for an eternity?

  His chest was heaving. He was drenched in sweat.

  “Alli?” he cried.

  He stepped around the hut.

  She lay on a blanket.

  “My love,” she whispered.

  Her voice was how he had always remembered it, and none of the billions of voices he had heard in that cave ever matched its sweetness or the way it made him feel.

  “I am here,” he said, kneeling down.

  She saw his face.

  “You are stricken.”

  “No more than you.”

  “Where did you go?”

  He tried to answer, but he could no longer see his thoughts. Images were fading. An old man? A girl? He was back on his own path, and the memory of his eternal life was fading away.

  “I tried to stop your suffering,” he said.

  “W
e cannot stop what Heaven chooses.”

  She smiled weakly.

  “Stay with me.”

  “Forever.”

  He touched her hair. She turned her head.

  “Look,” she whispered.

  The sky before them was painted by a stunning sunset, orange and violet and cranberry red. Dor lay down beside her. Their labored breathing overlapped. Once, Dor would have counted those breaths. Now he merely listened, absorbing the sound. He looked at everything. He took it all in. His hand drooped, and he found himself drawing a shape in the sand, wide at the top, narrow in the middle, wide at the bottom. What was it?

  A wind blew, and the sand around his drawing scattered. He wrapped his fingers inside his wife’s, and Father Time rekindled a connection he had only ever had with her. He surrendered to that sensation and felt the final drops of their lives touch one another, like water in a cave, top meets bottom, Heaven meets Earth.

  As their eyes closed, a different set of eyes opened, and they rose from the ground as a shared soul, up and up, a sun and a moon in a single sky.

  EPILOGUE

  80

  Sarah Lemon was rushed to the hospital.

  She stayed there overnight. Her lungs cleared and her head stopped throbbing and she reminded herself how lucky she had been that her phone had rung with a loud, heavy-metal guitar riff—programmed by Ethan—which signaled her mother, calling to wish her a Happy New Year.

  The noise had startled Sarah just enough to realize what was happening, and she pressed the garage opener and pulled the car door handle and fell out. She crawled along the concrete floor, coughing violently, until she reached the outside air. A neighbor spotted her sprawled in the snow and called 911.

  She was admitted to the emergency room as the clock struck twelve and people up and down the coast screamed in celebration.

  On the gurney next to Sarah was a man named Victor Delamonte.

  He’d been admitted moments earlier, suffering from cancer and kidney disease. He apparently had been off his dialysis, which was addressed with a blood transfusion, although the man who brought him in said only that he’d been complaining of abdominal pain.

  What was never revealed was how Victor altered his end-of-life plans. As he was lifted for immersion into ice, his eyes popped opened and he saw Roger. Victor had instructed Roger, in the whispered conversation earlier that evening, that if for some reason, any reason, he changed his mind about this idea, he would signal it by saying a single word, and Roger would abort the plan.

  Do you understand? No hesitation if that happens?

  I understand.

  It happened. A word was spoken. Upon hearing it, Roger screamed, “Hold it right now!” He forced the coroner and doctor to back away, then immediately called for an ambulance. He followed his boss’s orders, as he always did, because he’d listened for the word and the word was clear:

  “Grace.”

  81

  This is a story about the meaning of time,

  and it begins long ago, but it ends years from now, in a crowded ballroom, where a respected research doctor is applauded by a crowd. She credits her colleagues. She calls it “a team effort.” But the man who introduces her expresses the worldwide opinion that Dr. Sarah Lemon has found a cure for the most dreaded disease of our time; it will save millions of people, and life will never be the same.

  “Take a bow,” the man says.

  She lowers her head. She waves meekly. She thanks her teachers and research partners and she introduces her mother, Lorraine, who stands, holding her handbag, and smiles. Sarah also notes that this would never have been possible if not for a benefactor named Victor Delamonte, who, back when she was applying to colleges, had generously bequeathed her entire tuition costs to an Ivy League university—undergraduate, medical school, as far as she could go—in his last will and testament, a document that was changed drastically just before he died from the very disease for which Sarah had now found a cure. He had survived only three months beyond their night together in the emergency room. But his wife, Grace, said those were the most precious months of their marriage.

  “Thank you all very much,” Sarah concludes.

  The crowd rises in an ovation.

  Meanwhile, at the same time, on a cobblestone street in lower Manhattan, a new tenant is moving into One Forty-Three Orchard. A construction crew is knocking down walls, as per the blueprints.

  “Whoa,” one of them says.

  “What?” says another.

  Flashlights shine into a cavernous space, previously hidden below floor level. On the walls are carvings, every shape and symbol imaginable. In the corner is an hourglass, holding a single grain of sand.

  And as that glass is lifted by curious workers, someplace far away—someplace indescribable in the pages of a book—a man named Dor and a woman named Alli run barefoot up a hillside, tossing stones, laughing with their children, and time never crosses their minds.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First, thanks to God. I do nothing without His grace.

  Some books are tougher than others. Thanks to all who showed patience with me on this one and who believed in the idea right from the start. My family, my siblings, my siblings-in-law, and my dear pals.

  A special thanks to Rosey and Chad, who redefined the word “friend”; they filled the unforgiving days with endless support. I will never forget it. Also, a deep thanks to Ali, Rosey, Rick, and Tricia, who gave this book its first look and encouraged me that Father Time had a story to tell.

  An unending thanks to Kerri, who not only read and copy-edited these pages, but fended off all disturbances, allowing the story to breathe and find its place in the world. And to Mendel, who is a bum, but who arrived in the office to save the day.

  Thanks to David, for a quarter century of believing in me, and to Antonella, Susan, Allie, David L., and the rest of Team Black Inc., for being the raft in the ocean that they always are. Thanks to Ellen, Elisabeth, Samantha, Kristin, Jill, and all the gang at Hyperion, and to SallyAnne for publicity. And a deep thanks to my editor, Will Schwalbe, who said yes when we asked, and who made me happy that he did.

  A special note of thanks to the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan, and the staff members who shared information freely for this novel. While Victor learns a certain lesson in these pages, no judgment is meant to be passed on the science of cryonics or the choices of its practitioners and patients. This is, after all, a fictional fable.

  As with everything, a thanks to my mother, father, Cara, Peter, and all my extended family.

  Finally, there is only one Alli in my life, and all that Dor saw in his, I see in mine every day. Thank you, Janine.

  And to my faithful readers, the ones who picked up this book without even asking what it was about—you are the backbone of my work, and the eyes I have in mind when I type my sentences. May I continue to provide you a fraction of the hope and inspiration that you provide me.

  Mitch Albom

  Detroit, Michigan

  May 2012

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mitch Albom is an author, playwright, and screenwriter who has written seven books, including the international bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, the bestselling memoir of all time. His first novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, as were For One More Day, his second novel, and Have a Little Faith, his most recent work of nonfiction. All four books were made into acclaimed TV films. Albom also works as a columnist and a broadcaster and has founded seven charities in Detroit and Haiti, where he operates an orphanage/mission. He lives with his wife, Janine, in Michigan.

  COPYRIGHT

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  Words by Sylvia Dee

  Music by Arthur Kent

  Copyright © 1962 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP)

  International Copyright Secured. U.S. and Canada rights owned by Music Sales Corporation and other international rights owned by Music Sales Corpora
tion and Edward Proffitt Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Copyright © 2012 Mitch Albom, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, 10011.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the original print edition of this book as follows:

  Albom, Mitch

  The time keeper / Mitch Albom.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4013-2278-6

  1. Time—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3601.L335T57 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  2012019424

  eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-0470-6

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  Author photograph © Glenn Triest/Triest Photographic

  Cover design by Laura Klynstra

  Cover illustrations by Shutterstock

  First eBook Edition

  Original hardcover edition printed in the United States of America.

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