The Last Screw

The Last Screw On the quiet violence of a finished thing

The screwdriver slips, a final, microscopic adjustment that requires no force, only the surrender of tension. It clicks into place. The sound is not loud, but it is absolute, a small metallic tooth biting into the wood of the casing. I withdraw my hand. The clock stands on the workbench, a monolith of mahogany and brass, its face a perfect, unblinking eye. It is three in the afternoon. The light from the window is grey, the kind of London grey that does not illuminate but merely exposes. It falls across the clock’s pendulum, which hangs dead, a silver needle waiting for a command that will never come.

I have spent twenty years on this machine. Not the construction, which was easy, but the calibration. The tuning of the escapement so that it does not merely tick, but breathes. I wanted it to be alive. I wanted the rhythm of its heart to match the rhythm of my own blood. Now it is done. It is perfect. And because it is perfect, it is dead.

There is a heteronym within me, a clerk in a grey suit, who watches me from the corner of the room. He does not feel the grief. He feels only the inventory. He notes the dust on the shelf, the stain of oil on my thumb, the silence of the street outside. He knows that the clock is now a thing. It is no longer a possibility. It is a fact. And facts are terrible because they cannot be changed. I stopped. I chose the limit.

The tragedy is not that I killed it. The tragedy is that I saved it. By finishing it, I removed it from the flow of time. It no longer grows. It no longer decays. It simply is. It is a prisoner of its own perfection. I look at the face of the clock. The hands are still. They point to nothing. They point to the moment of my own defeat.