The Time Keeper

The setting is at the “dawn of man’s history,” and a young Dor is chasing a young girl named Alli. As he runs, Dor begins to do something no one else has ever done: He begins to count, making numbers and assigning things values. Because his mind delves deeper than anyone else around him, God watches him. Alli throws a rock toward him, and he asks her to throw another so that he can count it, but he is tackled from behind by a boy called Nim. Nim declares himself king, and all three children laugh.

Sarah readies herself to meet the boy she has a crush on, planning out how much time it will take for hair and makeup and reminding herself that she is meeting him at 8:30. Her mother, Lorraine, comes into the room and asks if Sarah is going anywhere. Sarah lies, telling her that she isn’t, even though she has various outfits spread out on her bed. Sarah pinches a bit of belly fat in disgust and decides not to follow her mother’s fashion advice.

Victor and his wife Grace return home to their luxurious penthouse after the doctor’s appointment. He walks down the hallway, using his cane, past expensive artwork displaying his wealth. His abdomen hurts, and he becomes more aware of his own mortality, wondering exactly how much more time he has left.

Nim, Alli, and Dor all grow up. Nim grows up to be tall and powerful. Alli grows up to be beautiful, and Dor becomes a measurer, which no one else understands or values. His older brothers leave him behind when they go hunting, so Dor spends much of his time running up hills with Alli.

One day, when he is a teen, Dor places a stick in the ground and notes the position of its shadow and how the shadow’s position changes as the sun moves across the sky. He reasons that if he comes back tomorrow, the shadow will be in the same place at the same point in the day. From his rudimentary sundial, Dor is able to chart the passage of time. This is the first time that humans mark time.

Dor swats at a fly that keeps buzzing around him and it transforms into a pocket of darkness out of which appears an old man. The man is wearing a white robe and holds a golden staff. Dor is terrified and his fear immobilizes him. The man pokes at Dor’s sun stick, and it turns into a string of wasps. The wasps create a new line of darkness into which the man disappears. Dor runs away and never says anything about the encounter “until the end” (11).

Sarah is searching for her black jeans in a drawer. Instead, she finds the watch her parents gifted her on her 12th birthday, just before they divorced. Sarah lives with her mother, Lorraine, but she secretly hopes her dad, Tom, will come to rescue her. The watch displays the time, 6:59 pm, and she reminds herself that she is meeting the boy at 8:30. Her mom asks if she needs the car, and Sarah tells her no and again lies that she’s not going out.

Victor looks in a drawer and finds his calendar book. He scans the appointments he has scheduled for the next day, wondering how he will get through them considering the pain he is in. He takes a pill and looks at the wedding photo on his desk, when he and Grace were both young and healthy, before he had tumors and a failing kidney.

A man arrives with a wheelchair, and Victor indignantly complains that he doesn’t need it yet and has the man put it in the hallway. He ponders the doctor’s words again and wonders if there is still something that can be done.

Dor and Alli marry and have three children, a son and two daughters. They live with Dor’s family, and Dor never gains wealth because he is caught up in measuring. His mother laments that he didn’t turn out like Nim, who became a powerful king. Nim, in contrast to Dor, is wealthy, enslaves many people, and has begun constructing a massive tower.

Dor records time in multiple different ways that are later attributed to other civilizations. Because of Dor’s actions, timekeeping is part of the daily lived experience of modern-day people, but the narrator reminds readers that this was not the case before Dor started measuring time.

Dor’s childhood friend, Nim, visits him. He has become wealthy and powerful through conquest, and he is constructing a tower so that he can defeat the gods and rule from on high. He asks Dor to join him. He knows that Dor was clever when they were children, and he asks Dor to show him how time measurement works so that it can make Nim and his tower even stronger.

Dor spends the afternoon explaining how to measure the parts of the day and the movements of the sun and moon. Nim does not understand and interprets these natural phenomena as the actions of the gods. He asks Dor to help him build his tower. Dor refuses, and Nim banishes him from his domain.

It’s 7:25 pm Sarah is still getting ready to meet with the boy. The black jeans she wants to wear are in the dryer and her hair is unruly. She feels anxious about the meeting because he is “popular” and “good-looking” (22), the kind of guy who has never paid attention to her before.

Victor makes a phone call. As he waits to speak to someone in research, he looks at all the books on his shelves he’s never read and feels dissatisfied that he might not have time to accomplish all that he wants during his lifetime. When the person in research answers the phone, he requests that she send over everything she can find about immortality.

Alli and Dor climb a hillside to watch the sunset, as they do every night, and Dor tells her of Nim’s visit. Alli cries and is worried about what they’ll do next, but she agrees with Dor that she doesn’t want him to work on Nim’s tower. Dor, in his obsession with measuring time, uses rocks, bowls, and water to create the first clock, but in the process, he ignores Alli, who is frightened of what their banishment will mean for their family.

Dor stays awake all night to see if his clock measures the time between day and night. Measuring time makes the gods superfluous, since they are not responsible for the transition, but God takes note of Dor’s actions.

Sarah and Victor are anxious. Sarah is worried that this experience might end as badly as the last time she went out with a boy and had to have her mom come and get her. She tries to reassure herself that this time will be different. She’s determined not to be late.

Victor is waiting to hear back from research. His wife, Grace, asks if he’s hungry and offers to make him soup. He looks out the window of his penthouse and thinks about the four other homes they have that he hasn’t visited since his cancer diagnosis. He and Grace have been married for 44 years. The last 10 years of their marriage have been less romantic, though she has been kinder to him since his diagnosis. He picks up the phone to call research but then hangs up when Grace enters with the soup.

Dor and Alli pack their few possessions on a donkey and move to the high plains. They decide to leave their children with Dor’s parents because it they will be safer there, but Alli is so heartbroken that she makes them turn back twice so that she can hug them once more. On the high plain, they have a simple abode made of reeds that is weak against the elements. Dor continues to measure time, and Alli withdraws from him, mourning the loss of their children.

Dor’s father occasionally brings them food and updates them on Nim’s tower. Nim has shot an arrow into the sky and claims that it came back with blood, proving that he has wounded a god. Nim is the reason why Dor is in exile, but Dor still thinks of Nim as the boy he once knew.

One day, more than three years after their banishment, an elderly couple comes to visit Dor and Alli. They too have been cast out of their village. They have dark blotches on their skin which the people believed were a curse from the gods.

Dor tells Alli not to touch them since he fears that they might be diseased, but she is determined to show them kindness and offer them what little they have. As the old woman cries, Alli leans in and embraces her. She slips the old woman the last of the barley cakes as she leaves. Dor notes from his water clock bowl that the sun is about to set.

Dor charts the moon’s cycle and creates the first calendar. Alli begins to cough, and her condition worsens. She becomes weak and develops the same blotches on her skin that the visitors had. He knows that they need to seek out an Asu, or medicine man, but they are too far away from the city for him to leave her. He tells her to sleep and then blinks away tears.

Sarah wants time to move slower while Victor wants it to move faster. Sarah wants her experience with the boy with coffee-colored hair to be romantic. As she heads up the street to meet him, she sees that the light is still on in her mother’s bedroom. She thinks about how her mother embarrasses her, remembering how they were once close, and yet now they seem baffled by one another. Her cell phone beeps, and she reaches into her pocket.

Victor is waiting for the phone to ring. In his office, there are nine different clocks, all of which emphasize to him how slowly time seems to be passing as he waits. Finally, the phone rings, and the person on the other line says that something is about to be faxed over. Grace enters and asks who was on the phone. Victor lies, saying that it’s something for tomorrow’s meeting. She asks if he needs to go to the meeting and he responds, “[w]hy not?” (36). She takes the plates to the kitchen, and he moves toward the paper being faxed over.

Alli’s condition is worse, and she begins to cough up blood. Dor realizes that, next to his measurements, she is all he has. Alli asks Dor to pray to the gods for her. He spends all night in prayer, asking the gods to stop time so that he can get the Asu to heal Alli. However, the gods do not stop time, and morning comes. At dawn, Alli no longer wakes up. Her breathing is shallow. In a surge of anger at his wife’s worsened condition, Dor lets out a howl and then begins to run. Eventually he comes to Nim’s tower.

He has one last hope; he will climb the tower all the way to the heavens and make time stop. The stairs are reserved only for Nim, and when Dor begins to run up them, the guards pursue him. Then, thousands of people begin running up the tower in search of power. The tower bricks become molten, the top of the tower bursts into flames, and the middle staircase hangs in the air. The people attempting to climb the tower are hurled off, except for Dor who continues to climb. Those hurled from the tower begin speaking different languages. Dor continues to climb and then lands somewhere deep and dark.

Three scenarios will each happen soon, when time slows to a crawl. The first is a boy who steers his surfboard into a freezing wave, and he freezes too. The next is a hairstylist who cuts a clump of hair that will stop in midair as it falls. The last is in a museum in Germany where a security guard is about to stop a strange-looking man from touching an exhibit of antique clocks. The guard feels disoriented and thinks that he sees the man removing the clocks and then disassembling and reassembling them, but when he comes to his senses, the man is gone.