Melting Clock

“Twenty bucks,” I repeated.

“I’ll throw in a paint job,” he said.

“You are a saint.”

“I just like my work,” he said. “Still can’t do it till Thursday. You need another door.”

“All right. Where’s Syd?” I asked. Syd was Arnie’s day assistant, a one-eyed guy with a bad stutter.

“Army,” said Arnie, standing back to survey my Crosley.

“They let Syd join the Army?”

“Drafted,” said Arnie, arms folded, deep in thought as he contemplated his task.

It took me a couple of months to get to the Farraday Building. People admired the clock along the way. Even had an offer to buy it. Twenty bucks. I trudged on and made it to the elevator around five o’clock. I almost fell asleep on the way up. A trickle of people came out of offices and made their way down the stairs, their footsteps echoing as they passed me, rising slowly in the groaning cage.

When I made it through the door to the office and into Shelly’s house of pain, I found Dali in the chair, mouth open and Shelly hovering over him.

“Hold it,” I said.

Shelly held it and turned to me.

“What?”

“Keep your fingers out of my client’s mouth.”

“My fingers aren’t in his mouth. He-”

“I told him to look down my throat into eternity,” sail Dali, getting out of the chair. “If he can see eternity down my throat, then each time a patient sits here before him, Dr. Shelodon Minik can understand infinity, can sense forever. He will not be fixing teeth. He will be drawn into the creative vortex.”

His wide eyes turned to me and my burden.

“Gala’s clock. My painting?”

“Taylor’s dead.”

“And my painting?”

“I didn’t see anything in your throat but tonsils,” said Shelly.

“It cost half of the money. I got the clock and the guy who threatened to kill you is dead.” I didn’t see any point in mentioning Taylor’s brother.

“I’ve looked down maybe a hundred thousand throats,” muttered Shelly. “Saw double tonsils once or twice and-”

“Shelly,” I said. “Take this.”

I handed him the clock.

“It has never been wound,” said Dali. “Legend says that it should only be wound at midnight or noon. The Russians have no imagination, only gross feelings.”

“Your wife is Russian,” I reminded him.

“Gala is the eternal. The eternal is Gala,” said Dali, advancing on me, his voice dropping with each step and the name “Gala” coming out like a quiet “Amen.”

“Anybody call?” I asked.

Shelly cradled the clock and started fiddling with the key.

“Leave it alone, Shel,” I said. “Anybody call?”

“Jeremy. He says they’re in Carmel. I lost him while he was talking. I think the phones are really out now.”

“Anybody else?”

“The cop, Seidman,” said Shelly, tilting the clock over and looking at the words in Russian printed on the bottom. “He said to tell you when you show up to come in and see him fast. About a dead guy named Taylor.”

“Sal, we’d better get going. Shel, you haven’t seen me.”

Briefcase in hand I opened the door to the waiting room. Dali looked back and said to Shelly, “Perhaps it is better that you do not gaze too deeply into the darkness of man. Eternity is too frightening for some and too blissful for others.”

“Remember my smiling tooth,” said Shelly.

“I shall paint you a smiling tooth,” said Dali gallantly.

“Make it look like that guy who paints for the Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell. Now, he’s a great painter.”

Dali closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “I will consider it. Now we must get to Carmel. Tomorrow is the party.”

I had Shelly carry the clock down to the front of the Farraday and wait while I went back to Arnie’s and got the car. About ten minutes later, the clock between Dali’s legs and the briefcase under his feet, we were on the way to Carmel. We didn’t say anything for fifty miles and then Dali exploded.

“If you do not recover my painting, I shall swallow cups of paint till I die. I will become paint. I will pour it in my eyes, my ears, so I don’t see or hear the taunting.”

“You want to listen to the radio?” I asked.

“Yes, please,” he said softly and with great calm. “I believe we can still hear Snooks.”

Dali smiled through the show and nodded his head. Twice he looked at me when Baby Snooks said something that didn’t strike me as particularly important. Dali’s raised eyebrow suggested some profound depth to the statements: “But Daddy, Robespierre always eats bread and butter,” and “Robespierre, don’t sit on Mr. Goodwin’s hat.”

When the show was over, Dali looked out the window, asked, “What is the worst trip you ever took? In your life?”

I’ve been on some bad trips in my life. I told him about the time my father took me and my brother Phil to Lincoln, Nebraska, to visit his sister. I was five or six. We went on a train and had to sleep sitting up. I sat across from a woman in a black dress who took up two seats and kept eating little things she pulled out of her knitting bag. She smiled and offered me one. I was sure it was alive. I dozed off a few times but kept opening my eyes. Each time I did I found her looking at me, smiling and munching.

“Trains,” said Dali. “Ferrocarril. I know. You must come hours early, tie each bag to your body with a strong string when you get on so no one will steal them.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said.

“And sit as near the engine as you can so you will arrive earlier.”

“Makes sense to me.”

Dali told me about his worst trip in an automobile, ten years earlier, when he and his wife fled Spain. He was visiting his father in some place called Catalonia when the district declared its independence from Spain. Dali was convinced the civil war broke out because he had just spoken to his father after years and the gods were punishing him for his mistake. Gala had to find safe-conduct passes and a car to drive them to the French border through drunks and machine guns.

“I can still see the little village where we stopped for gasoline,” he said, looking out the window. “The men are carrying ridiculous but lethal weapons, while under a big tent people are dancing to the Blue Danube. Then I hear four men talking about our luggage. One of them looks me in the eye and says I should be shot. I fall back in my car seat.”

And with this Dali fell back, shaking the Crosley almost enough to drive us off the road.

“I gasp for breath,” Dali said, gasping for breath. “My little cock shrivels like a tiny earthworm about to enter the mouth of a great fish. Our driver shouts filth and orders the men to get out of our way.”

Dali went silent for a few miles, his eyes closed. I thought he had dozed off, but he suddenly said, “The driver got us to a small hotel in Cerbere, on the border. We found out later that as he was driving home, just outside of Barcelona, he was shattered by machine guns. It was the trap of that awful stupidity, civil war.”

“Hungry?” I asked.

“Androgynous,” he answered.

I didn’t ask him what he meant. I figured he was making up a word. I looked it up later.