He was late. Monstrously so. Thanks to some atrocious mixture of an extra moment taken to adjust to Daylight Savings Time, a few accidental pauses as he fiddled with the face's light, and the plain bad luck of getting the time from an idiot who had not made the effort to set their own watch correctly, Harold Crick's wristwatch was precisely six minutes and forty-three seconds off. Reliant as he was on his small, ticking comrade, he had not thought to measure its time against that of the large and considerably less trustworthy clock that overshadowed his cubicle. He had noticed a difference on his computer out of the corner of his eye, but had simply forgotten to make the correction. After all, it was a Wednesday, and he was still handling the overflow of outraged taxpayers from Monday. He had no time for his wristwatch.
And accordingly, it no longer had any time for him.
Harold had scheduled a hair appointment for precisely 5:45 that afternoon; it would have been plenty of time to take the bus, but the bus, aware of Harold's neglect of his wristwatch, had elected to leave him behind at 5:32. Ordinarily, Harold would have had no choice but to sprint to his appointment, noting twenty-seven streetlights, forty-three trees, and two hundred and thirty-eight cracks in the sidewalk along the way.
Today, however, it occurred to Harold that he had another option: take a brief shortcut through the alley leading from South Dearborn to West Adams. It was not what his wristwatch would have done; it was, however, what Ana would have done, and to her, it would have been not choice, but fate. Harold paused briefly on the corner, feeling rather than hearing the tick of his lateness growing.
It occurred to him, then, that perhaps he had been listening to his wristwatch for too long. Was it faithful? Of course. Did it love him? It did, whether he knew it or not. But did he love it? That was harder to define. It did not offer him soft curves, and the sound of the ocean, and the soft, insistent "I rock" of his guitar. Rather, it offered him the smooth regularity of a ticking motor, a life proceeding in a circle along careful, practiced lines. It offered him the count of brushstrokes, and streetlights, and cracks in the sidewalk, and stairs and taps and blinks and stripes and beams of light and all the other things that should, perhaps, be seen rather than watched.
Harold blinked and removed his wristwatch. It took a moment to pry it off, as it was insistently clasping his arm, wordlessly asking him to let it stay for another moment. It knew, after all, how little time they had left. But Harold didn't know, and he might not have cared if he did. Had he looked down at his wrist, he would've seen a small band scarcely paler than the rest of his un-tanned arm, distinguished only by a tiny red mark marking where the metal buckle tongue had licked his skin. He placed the watch in his pocket with one final, conciliatory stroke of the cool, glass face. Then, he strode boldly into the alley.
Here, even the Harold of guitars and soft kisses felt himself withdraw. The alley was filthy, though not so filthy as it would have been in a movie, and dark, though not so dark as it would normally have been after five o'clock on an unremarkable Wednesday. With that said, it was more than dark and filthy enough to make Harold's wristwatch shudder and jump in his pocket, jingling against his keys. Harold did not think to put a hand in his pocket and still its chattering. After all, the watch had made him late, and it could well afford to shiver for it.
But the sound was loud, and it attracted the attention of another man. He stepped from the shadows; Harold drew up short, staring in confusion at the new obstacle to his hair appointment, for which he would now be at least four minutes late.
"Excuse me," he half-muttered. "I need to, um – "
"Wallet," the man replied quietly, eyes on the false clink of Harold's pocket.
Harold wondered what he could say to this man to make him believe that he didn't have any money, or at any rate, that his money was not the source of the clinking. He was still wondering it when he heard the sound of a very different sort of metal.
"Wallet," the man repeated, as though Harold's reluctance were merely a matter of confusion. He did not wave the piece of metal in his hand. He did not need to.
"I-I think you've made some mistake," Harold said. "My wallet's not there." He reached for his chest. "That's just my watch. The money's – "
Sometimes, Death draws itself out, waiting patiently for the Emily Dickinsons and Margaret Thatchers of the world. Other times, it comes instantly. And on the rarest of occasions, it does both, drawing out a single instant to encompass a lifetime of years. As Harold's focus narrowed to the brilliant flash of light in the muzzle before him and the strange sensation of having lost his breath, as though he had been punched very hard in the stomach, Death pulled up a chair and settled in to wait.
There was his mother, who never baked him cookies, and Ana, who baked them all the time. There was Dave, and the silly men he caught trying to cheat on their taxes, and the sillier man who had kindly and confidingly explained that trees were trees. None of it was important. All of it was important. In the end, it was who Harold Crick was. In the end, he was neither the sound of an endless ocean nor the twang of a guitar nor the perfect problem of two hundred and twenty-eight times five hundred and forty-two.
In the end, he was his wristwatch, lying forgotten on the pavement where it fell from his pocket.
…
"I know I'm going to regret this, but why are we here?" asked Penny Escher.
"Did you know that 45% of robberies occur on the street, and that 42% involve firearms?"*
* Facts courtesy of Crimedoctor dot com.
