CENTRAL TIME

Tick.

I'm laying awake, as usual, only this time I can't take it any more. Gasping . I can see my reflection, an awkward bundle of blankets glaring back at me in the window. The city is neon, glittering like always. The sickly-bright glow of business at two, three, four in the morning. The harsh green of my clock stares at me too, jeering. Seconds go by. Minutes. Blinking. My poor old mom asleep in the next room, quietly breathing up and down. Sometimes I love her for her sleep, other times I want to slap it out of her and steal it. Jealous. And I'm trying to relax, focusing everything on slowing down, breathing, remembering that I took a sleeping injection that month, and a top quality one at that. One of the best money can buy, I guess. And at the thought of money I'm gone again, cutting off short breaths in the faded dark, each blink of my clock is thousands of dollars, flashing in the night. Exploding in my hands into wealth, or into a thousand tiny pieces that I'm chasing after blindly, arms thrashing, screaming. I shudder suddenly and open my eyes. My room is dark and still. I'm laying in my bed. The only motion I see is from the slow clock, neon green, on, and off. On, and off. 1:45. 2:38. 4:12. Awake, as usual.

* * *

Whether or not sleep ever finds me, I'm out of bed with the alarm at 5:43 the next morning. My breakfast gets buried between the morning Split Teller and the door slam, so I grab some coffee from the dispenser on the way to work and ignore my stomach. I barely ever eat full meals anymore, anyway.

Any day later

I'm remembering now, trying to puzzle it all out. I've always been a hard worker. I was a good student in the Academy-top achievements, top CPEK scores. I stayed up late on homework, but never all night. And the ticking of a clock was never enough to send me twitching and convulsing. I take a sip of bourbon, feel the stinging warmth, and sigh. It all began with the Minuteers. We traded stock-it was a game, a petty entertainment for prep school boys with disposable income. It should have stayed that way, I suppose. But as smart, flexible, and daring boys often do, we got in over our heads. Before long the numbers we played with were skyrocketing, and the silly game turned into a paycheck.

The waitress is leaning over me, expectantly. She's pretty-long legs and a great rack. Nice eyes. I'm giving her the full up-and-down when I realize she's just asked me something and is waiting for a response. I'm too lost in my own bitter daydreams to hear her.

"How did you want your check, sir?" she repeats. "Wire or Insta-block?"

"Um... better give me the wire... thanks. RA- 24610-892."

It was the shiny things that did it. The car, the watches. The vague promise of happiness. The Eastside Skyhouse with rent to make you bleed. The goddamn girls who would come home with me just to see the rest, to feel like it was theirs. So the numbers kept on rising, and the risks I was taking flew up with them, and the sleep shrank, and the fun of it all but disappeared and here I am now on my fourth drink before lunch, checking out the damn waitress but too caught up in my own stress to remember to catch a glance of her ass as she walks away. I'm thinking it was nice, too.

* * *

The next day begins to shatter before I even get to work. My mom is already awake, knitting, smiling plastically at me. She's always knitting and smiling. I think mostly she's just lonely. The Split Teller rolls off of my news screen while I'm still in bed. Scandals, the works. The airway they were building between Tung Lao and Sydney is collapsing. The measurements didn't provide for a late-term atmosphere shift, and with what's left of the ozone lattice dissipating above the Atlantic the whole thing will collapse sooner or later.

They're planning on re-aligning all the numbers, but there's a good chance the whole thing's going to go under. Which means heavy investors are dropping right and left. Which means I've already got enough messages in my silkport to keep me busy for the next week, and as the day goes on they're going to fly in like locusts, swarming, screaming, and destroying everything in their path.

I skip breakfast and I'm online in the office long before sunrise. The market hasn't opened yet, but I've got plenty to do besides.

Any day later

Ever since international imaging took off, the market has been open seven days a week. I haven't gotten a day off in years; I can't even remember the last girl I was with for longer than a night. And I'm in the office, sweating and breathing, throwing and catching numbers as fast as I can. About thirty years ago, the name for it was "day trading." Some New York guys figured out that the stock market fluctuates just enough that if you work with large enough sums of money, you can make buckets swapping stocks by the minute. Internet guys in Silicon Valley, bored well-to-do in L.A... They bought and sold within an hour, carried pagers so their brokers could reach them. Within a few years the pagers turned into Split Tellers, and the minutes turned to seconds. So brokers like me now run to the exchange, carry headsets and monitors, and know that every second millions of dollars are wrapped so tightly around our necks that we can feel the edges of the paper slicing into skin.

I live in New York, of course, the hub and core of everything that matters to money. There's a huge clock on the wall of the office that we all call Central Time. It shows the exact date and time, nine columns of numbers. The month, day and year take up three, and the time is shown to the thousandth of a second. Every working man in the office knows those numbers better than his own... well, his own hands.

* * *

It happens all of the sudden. I don't know why. I'm sitting at my desk, juggling and twitching. Suddenly my eyes start to squint-everything is in Technicolor. I know there hasn't been any actual change; I'm just seeing every line and angle around me as though it was actually there. The edge of my desk is suddenly so sharp and precise that I have to run my finger along it. I start to glance around the room, head darting back and forth. It's the first time I've looked up from the screen since lunch. The light is harsh and orangey. The neon does that. I can see shadows. There's a wire basket on the desk next to me, filled with papers so haphazard like shards of a broken bottle, and the light is hitting the basket so that there's this bright highlight in the same place on every single wire. It looks like a bright line going up the side of the thing from far away, but I'm sitting here staring at it with my eyebrows down and my eyelids up like I've never even seen the thing before. Each separate shining spot, perfectly spaced, in a square, even line, all staring back up at me. All pointing at me.

I'm seeing everything like I haven't seen it since high school. With a faded smirk I remember my drug days, then shake my head. I haven't touched the stuff since I was nineteen, but here I am, muscles clamping and re-clamping, seeing everything in italics.

And always that giant red clock, sneering down at me. Taunting me, berating me. Giant red crystalline numbers on a black screen. Some days I imagine I can see the xenon gas swirling inside the numbers like smoke in a glass tube. They seem alive, dancing, flirting with me. Other times they stand straight, solid and frozen inside steel.

Before I realize what's happening, I see shards of glass silently spraying out of the wall. The same glowing red numbers that have tortured me for so long are dripping down the wall, twisting along the lines in the wallpaper. My eyes follow them in slow motion. I reach out to touch one, and, surprised at its warmth, realize its not part of the clock, but my own blood. My hand is torn open, leaking out into the air.

That night, nothing is safe. In some wild, maniacal glee I run home and tear through my apartment looking for hammers, knives, anything destructive. I rip through the city in crazed passion, splintering anything that ticks. Wristwatches slash off of old ladies, time-towers on street corners left in shambles.

It's the rhythm of it that really gets me. The ticking, the clicking, the everlasting perfect square sounds, one after another in robotic succession. Anything that moves one step at a time, carefully measuring my life. My arms are flailing, and the destruction seems so goddamn natural. I'm screaming, there's noise and shouts and smashes and ice all around me. I'm breaking everything, I'm the sixties, tearing apart America from the underground up. I'm drugs, I'm music, I'm smashing the system. It's not some greater thing, though. I don't want to subvert the dominant paradigm, I just want to pulverize all of these goddamn ticking perfect clocks. Measuring me, tapping me.

* * *

And suddenly it stops. I look up at the sky, hair in my face, blood sticky all over me, shards of broken glass and wood in my arms. The stars are so irregular and beautiful. No two are the same distance from each other. Patterns get broken up. People long ago made animals and drawings out of these lights in the sky because you can't create anything else, you can't count them. You can't measure them. They can't measure you.

* * *

And I'm back in my apartment, eyes closed in blissful silence. This thick, soft quiet wraps itself around me. My shoulders begin to relax slowly, I can feel my muscles melting into my back. I lean back into myself and just breath. All the stress and the worry and the money and the ropes cutting into me slowly start to release.

My right hand drops its wrench onto the floor. I'm startled, because I didn't even know I was holding it. But with one last small bang it's on the floor now, my hand is finally empty.

I hear a clicking. A slow, even paced tick. My head darts up. I'm breathing through clenched teeth, so loud I can hear it. I know that soon I will try to calm myself down, but inside of this long, clear moment my inner monologue completely shuts off. I have nothing. Just this clink, clink, like soft metal. My face is frozen, but my legs start to unbend. I'm standing up now, barely moving. Each muscle like steel.

Walking across the room. Two pale, soft, earthy hands, gnarled and organic. Bobbing back and forth, weaving and twisting. She's sitting, breathing up and down, looks up at me hopefully. To ask how my day was, any sort of human contact or conversation. The yarn is moving deftly, muted and forgiving, wrapped around cold steel. And the click click of all those years, scarves and hats and vests, is coming from inside of me now, I can feel it in my chest. Square moments and right angles bouncing through my gut and my arms and out my fingertips. Before I know it one of the needles slides out of the wool and into my hand. I scream now, and throw my head back and forth. Muscle upon bone in my arm, shrieking. A shadow falls over her face.

There is a soft cry into the night. The neon flickers slightly, then returns. They never find her.

The End