The Time Keeper

Sarah is good at science, but she doesn’t see the value in her talent since what seems to matter in high school is popularity and good looks, things Sarah lacks. In her last year of high school, Sarah doesn’t fit in. She is considered too smart and weird by other students and sits by herself at lunch and in her classes. Sarah wants to apply for early college admission at a nearby state university and needs community service experience for her application essay. In order to get this experience, she signed up to volunteer at a homeless shelter on Saturday mornings. This is where she met the boy, Ethan, who is also volunteering there. They speak to each other every week, and she has begun to believe he’s her destiny. She invited him to hang out sometime and he offered this Friday. Now it is Friday and she’s meeting him at 8:30. As she walks down the street toward where they’re supposed to meet, her cell phone beeps at her. It’s a message from him.

Victor Delamonte is one of the 14th-richest men in the world. As a child growing up in France, he lost both of his parents to violent deaths and was sent to live with an uncle in America. On the voyage to America, some hooligans threw all the food he had brought overboard, and it taught him the life lesson “that holding on to things ‘will only break your heart’” (52). He avoided attachments. Starting in high school, he began buying, selling, and investing, and he eventually became a successful businessman.

He met his wife Grace in an elevator in 1965. She was a bookkeeper at his firm, and she had lost her husband in the Korean war. To cope with her loss, she buried herself in work and Victor could relate to that. Ten months after they met, they were married. Over the years, they began to spend less and less time together and never had children.

Victor’s diagnosis led him to seek out specialists, but after a year his lead doctor said that he only had a couple months left to live. Victor refuses to accept this answer.

Dor is trapped in the cave and begins hearing voices. The voices, coming from the pool formed from his tears, make requests of time. Although Dor doesn’t eat or sleep, his body remains nourished, and he feels awake and alert. He can walk all around the inside of the cave, but he can’t escape the voices. Covering his ears does not muffle them. This is his punishment: to hear everyone else’s demand of time while he exists outside of time.

Ethan’s text asks if they can meet the following week since he has something else to do that night. Sarah is disappointed and wants to change his mind, but she doesn’t want him to think that she’s angry, so she responds that she’ll see him at the shelter. She sends her response at 8:22. She wonders what to do now. She doesn’t want to return home while her mom is still awake. She goes to a coffee shop and gets a chocolate macchiato and a cinnamon bun and sits in the back. She is frustrated but already counting down the days until next week.

Victor has always been good at identifying the weakness in a problem and cracking it. He takes the same approach to death. He had first tried conventional treatments for his cancer. Although they helped shrink the tumor, they weakened his kidneys and forced him to use dialysis three times a week. During dialysis, he made his assistant stay with him so that he could continue working.

Victor realizes that conventional treatments will not cure him. He switches his attention to time, specifically to his time running out. He feels almost obligated to stay alive, particularly since he has so much power and influence. His research team sends him information on cryonics, the process of preserving people by freezing them for later reanimation. Victor feels satisfied that if he can’t beat death, he can at least outlast it.

Humanity becomes united in its desire for more time, and Dor hears this ceaseless chorus from the pool of his tears. Although Dor cannot see how the world is changing, he senses that the Earth is a more crowded place than when he was a mortal man and concludes that humans have moved beyond just hunting and building. Dor grows to resent the very thing that once consumed him. He curses all the ways he ever measured time and all the time he spent away from Alli. In particular, he curses the fact that he will never die.