He would’ve drifted off again except that this time he began to snore just before he lost consciousness. He opened his eyes. Checked the clock: 5:59. This particular minute, apparently, was longer than usual. The entrance into the realm of not-quite-awake-slash-not-quite-asleep had allowed him to misperceive time, maybe. No big deal. He stared down the clock. As soon as it hit 6:00, he told himself, he’d slide out of bed. He’d walk quietly across the bedroom floor so as not to wake his wife, step into the hallway, close his son’s door, let the dog out to pee.
5:59.
He counted down from ten to one, a little thing he did sometimes when waiting for numbers on a clock to change or anticipating a traffic light switching from red to green, enjoying the momentary illusion that he had even a modicum of power over the world and the things in it, that simply by thought control he could enact transformations upon things that were otherwise autonomous or, at the very least, programmed to give that impression.
5:59.
He repeated the countdown.
The clock remained unchanged.
He glanced toward the window. The light—a paleness that signaled a summer sunrise—was believably 5:59-ish. Back to the clock.
5:59.
He repeated his countdown thrice more, but only to make it absolutely certain in his mind: the clock was stuck. Maybe, he thought, it had malfunctioned. He’d seen plenty of stopped clocks, but they’d all been analog. This thing, despite being digital, was old. It’d been a wedding present, probably appeared on a gift registry, back when he and his wife had toured a store that specialized in domestic merchandise, carrying a little gun they fired at the UPCs of items they wanted, so as to create their own personalized wish list, an event that had seemed to both of them like the closest they’d ever come to a shopping spree. When he really thought about it, he had to admit that it was kind of amazing, what with the planned obsolescence of all things digital, that such a clock had lasted as long as it had. Back in their old duplex—the first place they’d ever lived together, right after they’d gotten married—they’d left a bedside lamp on too long, its head positioned (who knows why) only inches above the snooze button, and the resultant heat had melted the plastic, warping the button and merging it with the clock body, thus rendering it impossible to delay the inevitable, not that either he or his wife were ever the kind of people to punch a snooze button.
He slid on a pair of blue shorts with an elastic waistband and three stripes down the sides. In the kitchen, the oven and microwave clocks both read 5:57. As they had never been synchronized with the bedroom clock, which magically set itself once a user plugged it in, they had remained, since the last power outage, two minutes behind, like the watch that the man wore. The watch, as its battery had died a couple of days ago, and had not been replaced due, in part, to procrastination, and in part to the man having visited the one jewelry store he knew in town and finding it closed, showed no numbers at all.
The man performed the countdown again. And again. Each time, the act only emphasized his powerlessness. He went downstairs to his office, which was on the lower floor of the house, and to get there he had to cross an unfinished storage room, which was vast and windowless and dark. He flicked the light switch but remembered that both bulbs had burned out and that for some reason, when he’d attempted to replace them, the new bulbs hadn’t worked. He’d been meaning to call an electrician. Today, he thought, as he had for over a week now.
He wiggled the computer mouse. The screen failed to brighten. He tapped on the keyboard. Nada. He unhooked his smartphone, pressed its power button. Nothing changed.
Back upstairs, he nudged his wife. Said her name. She didn’t respond. He grabbed her wrist. Thought, at first, that he felt a pulse, but couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t his own heartbeat in his fingertips. Still, she was warm. He peeled back her eyelids. He yelled into her ear.
Nothing.
He picked up the landline, which his wife insisted they continue to pay for, in case of emergencies. This seemed like it might be one, but there was no dial tone. Outside, on the porch: no breeze. The trees didn’t move. The traffic light in the distance appeared to be stuck on red. No cars appeared on the road.
He crawled back into bed. What else was there to do but wait? He had a bad feeling, like this wasn’t the kind of dream he could stop by making himself fall asleep inside it. He turned over, faced the wall, and pledged that he wouldn’t open his eyes until he heard a sound: the dog’s collar shaking, the squeak of the wooden ladder as his son descended his bunk, the rustle of covers as his wife finally woke. And then, and only then, he would make a sound of his own, a kind of whine or grunt to protest the fact that she’d gotten up without hugging him first, a sound that his wife, who knew him better than anyone else in the world, would knowingly interpret and most likely indulge, by hugging him before she got dressed. Yes, he told himself. He could wait, and he would, for however long it took, not knowing, even now, as he was drifting into the dark, imagining his wife’s hand on his face, that she was trying, without success, to shake him awake.
