The Oil Eats the Brass

The hand that tightens the screw loosens the soul

The grease is thick on my thumb, a black reek that smells of iron and old blood. It is three in the morning. The lamp is a yellow eye that refuses to blink, burning the retina until the room tilts. I am holding a pocket watch, a Breguet, its casing dull with the oxidation of a century. My fingers are stiff, the knuckles swollen like knots in old wood. I do not feel the pain. I feel only the resistance of the spring.

There is a self in the corner of the room, sitting in a chair that is not there. He is watching me. He is not me. He is the one who knows that the spring is already broken. He is the one who sees the fracture before the metal gives. He does not move. He only takes the inventory. He notes the dust on the floorboards, the way the shadows stretch across the table like long, thin fingers. He notes that I am tightening the screw, and that this tightening is a lie.

I turn the screwdriver. The metal bites into the brass. It is a small sound, a click, a whisper. But it is loud in the silence. The silence is not empty. It is full of the ticking of a thousand other clocks, all of them dying. I hear them in the walls. I hear them in the floor. I hear them in the blood in my ears. They are counting down. They are counting down to the moment when I will stop turning the screw.

The watch is not being fixed. It is being unmade. Every time I adjust the balance wheel, I wear down the jewel. Every time I oil the pivot, I attract the dust. I am not preserving time. I am accelerating its decay. I am the agent of its destruction. I am the one who speeds up the fall.

The other self laughs. He does not make a sound. He just watches. He knows that I will never stop. He knows that I will continue to tighten the screws, to clean the gears, to polish the brass, until the watch falls apart in my hands. And then I will pick up another one. And I will do it again. And again.

The lamp flickers. The yellow eye blinks. For a second, the room is dark. In the dark, I see the faces of the men who brought me the watches. They are all dead. They are all gone. They left their timepieces with me, thinking that I could save them from the end. They thought that I could hold back the dark. They were wrong. I am not a savior. I am an undertaker. I am the one who prepares the body for the burial. I am the one who closes the eyes.

I look at the watch in my hand. It is beautiful. It is precise. It is a marvel of engineering. And it is a lie. It pretends that time can be contained. It pretends that order can be maintained. It pretends that the future can be predicted. But it is all a fiction. The gears will wear down. The springs will snap. The hands will stop. And I will be there, holding the broken pieces, pretending that I can fix them.

The other self remains in the corner. He does not walk to the window. He does not look at the street. He stays where he is, a static observer of the microscopic apocalypse on my workbench. He watches the fine grey powder accumulate around the escapement, the dust I have stirred up from the crevices of the brass housing. He sees the oil, once congealing, now turning into a slurry of metal filings and grit, a grey paste that grinds between the teeth of the gear train. He notes the way the friction heats the pivot, the tiny, invisible erosion of the surface, the slow surrender of the material to the very substance meant to heal it. The repair is the wound. The oil is the rust. The cleaning is the stripping.

I put the watch down. I pick up the next one. I begin to work. The screwdriver turns. The metal bites. The click is loud. The silence is full. The other self watches. He notes the grease on my thumb. He notes the dust on the floorboards. He notes the way the shadows stretch across the table. He notes that I am tightening the screw. He notes that I am lying. He notes that I am dying.

The lamp burns. The eye refuses to blink. The room tilts. The watch ticks. The spring breaks. The hand stops. I tighten the screw.