HOW TO FOOL TIME

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The man who sold me the elephant said it had belonged to a clock.

“Does it keep good time?”

“It keeps whatever time you give it.”

I gave it a Tuesday from 1963. It ate slowly, leaving the afternoon.

That was when I understood I had made a useful purchase.

I lived in a palace built by somebody who had never had to clean anything. Gold leaves grew around the windows. Marble women held lamps above their heads, waiting for a bus that had stopped running during the Renaissance.

Outside, the stars came down a staircase in the form of water.

My job was to stand on the elephant wearing a red hat and distract time.

The pay was small, but I was allowed to keep any minutes that fell out of its pockets.

At first I tried jokes.

Time had heard them.

Then I tried standing perfectly still.

Time was particularly good at that joke.

Finally I invited it to dinner.

“What are we having?” time asked.

“Something from before you were born.”

This interested it.

I put two empty plates on the table and opened a bottle of wine I had been saving for an occasion that had already happened.

We sat there a long while.

The elephant watched through the window. Behind it were smaller elephants, each carrying an earlier version of me. One was twelve. One was thirty. One had just said something to a woman and was waiting to find out whether it had ruined everything.

I wanted to call back to him.

Instead I passed time the bread.

“There isn’t any bread,” it said.

“You’ve eaten it already.”

It checked beneath its napkin.

While it was looking, I slipped away.

I found my mother in the kitchen of a house that had been demolished forty years ago. She was peeling an apple in one long piece.

“Where have you been?”

“Working.”

She nodded. This had always been an acceptable explanation for being absent from your own life.

I sat down.

There was a small brown mark on the table. I had forgotten it completely. Now it seemed extraordinary that anything could have survived so long by being a mark on a table.

My mother gave me a slice of apple.

I heard time moving through the palace, opening doors. It asked a marble woman whether she had seen me. Apparently she was glad to have somebody to talk to.

“Can you stay?” my mother asked.

“A little.”

We watched the apple peel curl into her lap.

When I returned, time was asleep beside its empty plate.

I climbed onto the elephant. Somewhere behind us a boy was still waiting for a woman to answer.

“Did it work?” the elephant asked.

“For a little while.”

It lifted one enormous foot, and we went carefully over midnight.