Speaker 1: On Wednesdays, I take my usual seat by the front
Speaker 1: window of Cafe Meylange, across from the Saint Anna Church.
Speaker 1: The green awning frames my view of the market square,
Speaker 1: So the world outside arrives like a storer book, flower
Speaker 1: stalls in bright rows, shoppers shifting with their baskets, children
Speaker 1: weaving between tables. There's a certain order to it, a choreography.
Speaker 1: I used to think I understood. The church bell above
Speaker 1: Saint Anna watches everything with its immovable bronze face, and
Speaker 1: the clock next to it seems almost ceremonial in its seriousness.
Speaker 1: Most weeks, by the time my second coffee arrives, the
Speaker 1: square is at its busiest. Vendors laugh and barter in
Speaker 1: a dozen accents. Cyclists lean their bikes against the fountain's edge,
Speaker 1: and drivers start plotting their escape from the approaching knot
Speaker 1: of market goers, who will block the narrow exit with
Speaker 1: crates of hyacinths and fat bundles of clips. Watching how
Speaker 1: the swirl of people forms and dissolves is one of
Speaker 1: the amusements of retirement after a life where schedules dictated
Speaker 1: everything I did. But lately something odd has been happening,
Speaker 1: so subtle at first that I wondered if it was
Speaker 1: boredom or the fog of age. Sometimes, as I sip
Speaker 1: my coffee and sketch the scene in my notebook, the
Speaker 1: market seems to vanish abruptly, a puppet show, sliding off
Speaker 1: the stage before the curtain falls. Last week I looked up,
Speaker 1: and it was barely three, at least by my watch,
Speaker 1: when the stalls had already vanished, replaced by the slow
Speaker 1: trundle of a cleaning van and dogs nosing at leftover stems.
Speaker 1: Yet the week before, the market ran stubbornly into the
Speaker 1: early evening, people drifting and stalls open as the sunlight sharpened.
Speaker 1: In that way it does only after six, no matter
Speaker 1: the hour. Each time the ending felt inevitable, like clockwork.
Speaker 1: Sellers folding their tables, exchanging quick farewells, customers finishing purchase.
Speaker 1: They swear they could not delay. It was the uniformity
Speaker 1: that unsettled me. Each week, the same line, a round
Speaker 1: of sea you next Wednesday, always at four, in three
Speaker 1: different languages. The last flower cart would roll away, shadows
Speaker 1: still crisp on the pavement, and the church bell would
Speaker 1: ring precisely four times, as if to confirm my old
Speaker 1: Ormeloo wristwatch passed down from my father, cleaned more often
Speaker 1: than worn, clicked without fail to exactly four zero zero
Speaker 1: p m. The same moment. The square's large mechanical clock,
Speaker 1: the florist's digital display, and the ancient clock face on
Speaker 1: the belfry all showed four o'clock, regardless of how much
Speaker 1: sunlight was left or how long I thought the day
Speaker 1: had lasted. At first, I chalked it up to faulty memory.
Speaker 1: Perhaps time moved differently now that I had more of it.
Speaker 1: But the engineer in me never quite at rest felt
Speaker 1: the itch of contradiction. The market always ended at four,
Speaker 1: but sometimes four fell in the long yellowed light of
Speaker 1: mid afternoon, and others amid the slow blue drizzle that
Speaker 1: barely passed for dusk. No one seemed to find this odd,
Speaker 1: not even Madame Elk at the Tulips stall, who prided
Speaker 1: herself on timing her deliveries with the clock and not
Speaker 1: a minute off, though she'd once remarked to me that
Speaker 1: a rain storm years ago had never delayed her. I
Speaker 1: found myself replaying the end of the market each week. Methodically.
Speaker 1: I'd looked to the clock tower, then my wrist, than
Speaker 1: the florist's window, than the digital screen beside the old
Speaker 1: tram line, all displaying in perfect harmony, even when my
Speaker 1: own sense of time stuttered. If ever, I asked a
Speaker 1: vendor when they'd pack up, the answer was the same,
Speaker 1: with a kind of unchallenged certainty at four. Always. Attempts
Speaker 1: at conversation got me nowhere, a shrug, a smile. It's
Speaker 1: always at four, Monsieur Leon. If I pressed, someone would
Speaker 1: laugh or gently ask if I needed more rest. The
Speaker 1: last market day before Easter, I counted the bells chimes
Speaker 1: myself one, two, three, four just as the market closed,
Speaker 1: and watched my own watch mark four o'clock on the dot.
Speaker 1: I tried for a time to ignore it. I told
Speaker 1: myself it was a peculiarity of habit, or perhaps my
Speaker 1: own expectations slipping after three and a half decades of
Speaker 1: calibrating factory machinery down to the half second. But the
Speaker 1: itch never faded. In truth, it grew more insistent, like
Speaker 1: a tiny gear grinding where there should be silence. I
Speaker 1: kept my observations to myself mostly, though I did begin
Speaker 1: writing more in my note book, sketching, not just the
Speaker 1: market itself, but the angles of sunlight, people's rhythms, bells,
Speaker 1: and clocks. I wasn't looking for a mystery. I only
Speaker 1: wanted to understand where my own perception was going wrong.
Speaker 1: But as each Wednesday passed, the contradiction remained. Every piece
Speaker 1: of public time in my old Antwerp neighborhood seemed to
Speaker 1: an agreement nobody spoke aloud, but which every resident honored
Speaker 1: as if it were the law, an agreement that four
Speaker 1: o'clock arrived and with it the precise end of something,
Speaker 1: no matter how much or how little day remained. On
Speaker 1: my walk home from Cafe Meylange, I am greeted by
Speaker 1: a world as familiar as the lines of my own palm.
Speaker 1: The air, always a touch damp with the canal's breath,
Speaker 1: brings the scent of cooling cobblestones and crushed stems. Madame
Speaker 1: de Heen, impeccably aproned and flower streaked, sweeps stray breadcrumbs
Speaker 1: from the step of her bakery, calling out, still taking notes,
Speaker 1: lay on, you'll wear out your pencil before the week's end.
Speaker 1: I smile and wave her eye, teasing as comforting as
Speaker 1: the scent of her loaves. Around the next corner. Monsieur
Speaker 1: Tomas steers tram five with a kind of ceremonial slowness,
Speaker 1: brass bell clanging twice as he stops for a trio
Speaker 1: of older men with playing cards tucked in their shirt pockets.
Speaker 1: I've known Tomas since we both had heired to co.
Speaker 1: He once spent an entire February arguing with me about
Speaker 1: whether rye or sourdough was proper for true Antwerp tartein
Speaker 1: my building sits above the old laundry, now a dry
Speaker 1: cleaner with windows that overlook both the market square and
Speaker 1: the tight grid of Rudesse Jardins. I have over the
Speaker 1: years lined every sill with clocks. Two were gifts, but
Speaker 1: the others are mine. A pale oak mantel clock I
Speaker 1: built in my thirties, A small brass carriage clock that
Speaker 1: still ticks faintly from its place on the second shelf,
Speaker 1: even after its minute hand snapped in the nineties. My
Speaker 1: pride is the regulator above my reading chair, a delicate
Speaker 1: contraption balanced by lead weights and wound every Sunday morning
Speaker 1: before Mass, even after I myself stopped going. Routines are
Speaker 1: a comfort to me. Bread from Dhens every Friday, pigeons
Speaker 1: by the fountain on even numbered days, Sunday readings with
Speaker 1: a thick paper, folded neatly, inks smudged as I turned
Speaker 1: the pages, timing my errands with the tram, which, despite
Speaker 1: Tomer's philosophical delays, arrives almost unfailingly at ten ten and
Speaker 1: two twenty if you believe the posted schedule. The apartment
Speaker 1: is modest, high ceilings, cooled by soft drafts, floors creaking
Speaker 1: with the memory of a hundred former tenants. My daughter Claire,
Speaker 1: visiting every other week from Bruges, calls it hopelessly antique,
Speaker 1: with the affectionate exasperation reserved for children of the chronically practical.
Speaker 1: She once caught me calibrating the bathroom clock by referencing
Speaker 1: the local radio stations atomic time, and has not let
Speaker 1: me forget it since. After Claire leaves, I make my
Speaker 1: way along Rue Desk to Earl's pockets, waited by the
Speaker 1: comforting bulk of my note book and occasionally the day's quasser.
Speaker 1: In every shop, faces feel layered a mix of the
Speaker 1: ancient and the impatient, the unhurried cafe regulars and quick
Speaker 1: talking students with earbuds flashing at their collars. At the
Speaker 1: little cheese shop, the man with the beard knows what
Speaker 1: I want before I ask. At the PATISSERII, the girl
Speaker 1: writes my name upside down on the pastry bag, finishing
Speaker 1: before I've said three words. There is something satisfying about
Speaker 1: the choreography of it, the entire neighborhood keeping time with
Speaker 1: a loose, lived in punctuality that needs no reminders, just
Speaker 1: habits worn into the paving stones. It's a comfort, a
Speaker 1: reliable stage after a life of gears and calipers, blueprints
Speaker 1: littering my retirement desk. Yet under the clock faces, under
Speaker 1: the routines I had once counted on as fixed, something
Speaker 1: gently resists perfect measurement, so many clocks, and yet never
Speaker 1: an absolute certainty. What started as a puzzle in the
Speaker 1: market now tugs at my mind in the threadbare hours
Speaker 1: of the evening, when I listen to the clock in
Speaker 1: the hall and try to forget the inconsistency hiding in
Speaker 1: plain sight. Curiosity led me the next Wednesday to arrive
Speaker 1: earlier than usual, a deliberate test of sorts. I entered
Speaker 1: the cafe quarter of an hour before three, which my
Speaker 1: phone confirmed two fifty five p m. Exactly down to
Speaker 1: the second. The market hummed with energy. The assembled crowd
Speaker 1: was still growing, children dangling from parental hands, the old
Speaker 1: accordionist tapping his shoes in time, sons slanted high and sharp.
Speaker 1: I sat near the window, keeping my phone propped beside
Speaker 1: my note book, quietly watching the digital seconds ticked by
Speaker 1: matching the nervous drummrell in my chest. I sipped a
Speaker 1: bitter coffee, made notes of stall locations, described the shifting sun.
Speaker 1: But before the display could click even to three twenty,
Speaker 1: I noticed a subtle change. The tulip cellar elk began
Speaker 1: folding up her canvas early, I thought, for such a bright,
Speaker 1: busy afternoon. The cheese man showed away, kids crowding the curb,
Speaker 1: and Madame d'hen's bread was already packed into cloth bags.
Speaker 1: I looked down my phone three thirteen p m. My
Speaker 1: wristwatch three fifty eight. I checked again, certain I'd made
Speaker 1: some mistake. The squares clock high above read three fifty eight.
Speaker 1: The church clock agreed, Yet just moments before I would
Speaker 1: have sworn by phone by sun by, feeling that it
Speaker 1: was barely past three, too soon for the days winding down,
Speaker 1: I left my table and wandered to the church steps.
Speaker 1: The bell above Saint Anna ticked another minute closer, still
Speaker 1: perched at just shy of four, my phone, still in
Speaker 1: hand and set by satellite, insisted three fifteen. The scene
Speaker 1: felt slightly absurd. Two minutes, two worlds, yet it was
Speaker 1: the physical world that moved. Stalls vanished. The last Bouquets
Speaker 1: handed off the flower cellar, seeing my uncertainty, called out
Speaker 1: time for home, Monsieur Leon always at four, you know this.
Speaker 1: I forced a smile and walked back across the square.
Speaker 1: I matched my stride to the echoes of a departing tram,
Speaker 1: to the jangle of shop blinds drawn down for evening.
Speaker 1: The shop clocks, three of them within sight, marched in
Speaker 1: lockstep with my old watch. My phone, stubborn in its detachment,
Speaker 1: sat nearly fifty minutes behind now. I scrolled my phone settings,
Speaker 1: checked net work and time zone. No error, no drift, Everything,
Speaker 1: according to the satellite, was as it should be. Back
Speaker 1: at the cafe, I waited, unsure whether I should laugh
Speaker 1: at myself or worry. Madame Elsk, folding away her last bouquets,
Speaker 1: must have seen my confusion. You seem dazed lay on
Speaker 1: trouble with your clocks. Her eyes sparkled, a tease aimed
Speaker 1: at someone famous for his fussiness. I asked, more honestly
Speaker 1: than I meant to. Was to day earlier than usual?
Speaker 1: It feels far too soon, she shrugged. Early. No, no,
Speaker 1: always the same. It's for right. She pointed at the
Speaker 1: big clock face, her certainty unwavering. I wanted to protest,
Speaker 1: to show her my phone, but it felt childish, the
Speaker 1: way arguing about the weather sometimes does. She only smiled,
Speaker 1: stowing away her things, stepping into a rhythm that had
Speaker 1: no need of external confirmation. On the tram home, I
Speaker 1: checked again. The bells announced their passage with perfect practice, timing,
Speaker 1: as always calibrated by the clocks in the square, not
Speaker 1: my restless phone. Riders yawned and checked watches. No one
Speaker 1: looked anxious or out of step. Even the loudest school children,
Speaker 1: noses buried in their screens, chimed in as the automated
Speaker 1: tram voice called next stop, Avenue Louise four, a clock sharp.
Speaker 1: I sat there, the contradiction, blooming like a stubborn weed.
Speaker 1: Was every one playing along in some elaborate dance, a
Speaker 1: conspiracy of punctuality, or was there another layer altogether, one
Speaker 1: hypothesis at a time. I told myself, as I scribbled
Speaker 1: in my note book that evening four o'clock local time
Speaker 1: is not a fixed quantity. What are they counting? What
Speaker 1: do I miss? Standing outside this order? The next Wednesday,
Speaker 1: determination ward with humility. As I set out, I brought
Speaker 1: my phone, of course, an old silver pocket that had
Speaker 1: belonged to my uncle and which I had overhauled the
Speaker 1: month after he died, and another cheap wind up that
Speaker 1: I had found at the flea market, just to hedge
Speaker 1: my bets. My note book, as always rowed in my
Speaker 1: left pocket, its cover grease dark from years of use.
Speaker 1: I entered the square early and walked from clock to clock,
Speaker 1: the church face, the florist's digital window, the mounted clock
Speaker 1: above Dehen's bakery, my phone, the mechanical watches. With every device,
Speaker 1: I noted the exact time as I stood at each checkpoint,
Speaker 1: sketching a crude map that soon filled with numbers and arrows.
Speaker 1: As the afternoon wore on, I caught the end of
Speaker 1: the market's hum feeling. The day lean into its exhalation.
Speaker 1: The cellars moved with effortless confidence. No rush or indecision.
Speaker 1: When the bells rang one, two, three, four, I glanced
Speaker 1: at every device, each except for my digital watch and
Speaker 1: phone shouted four o'clock exactly. The digital watch lagged three minutes,
Speaker 1: my foe ten. Yet as I watched, even the cheap
Speaker 1: digital device began to catch up, flicking forward in jerks
Speaker 1: until it too was in sync with its analog neighbors
Speaker 1: near the bakery window. That evening, I watched from my
Speaker 1: reading chair as the bakery closed its doors. I tracked
Speaker 1: the event across three devices, the shop's clock, my phone,
Speaker 1: and the big square's mechanical face. Each closure happened again
Speaker 1: on time, but only if I trusted the communal clocks
Speaker 1: over my own sense of drifting minutes, I wrote in
Speaker 1: my note book, until my hand cramped, frustration mingling with
Speaker 1: growing fascination. On Thursday, I determined to break the pattern.
Speaker 1: The city trash collector's schedule posted online with the kind
Speaker 1: of bureaucratic confidence only large municipalities achieve collection. At seven
Speaker 1: thirty a m. Sharp, I set my phone's alarm, rose
Speaker 1: well before dawn, got dressed, and took a seat by
Speaker 1: the window, ready for a clear test by my phone
Speaker 1: It was seven zero five when the first bin clattered outside.
Speaker 1: I rushed down three flights and stepped into the street,
Speaker 1: only to find the entire block already swept clean, residents
Speaker 1: rolling up their recycling bins. I stopped one of the collectors,
Speaker 1: a thick set man with a face as blank as
Speaker 1: early potato. You started early, didn't you, I asked, showing
Speaker 1: him my phone. He shook his head, glancing at the
Speaker 1: laundry's wall clock, visible through a foggy window, which read
Speaker 1: seven thirty five. Always seven thirty here, monsieur, he replied,
Speaker 1: as if no other possibility existed. I pointed to my
Speaker 1: own device, but he shrugged, wiping his hands on his overalls.
Speaker 1: Maybe your phone is slow, he offered, not unkindly, but
Speaker 1: with the air of someone uninterested in the finer points
Speaker 1: of time keeping. I walked the block surrounding my building,
Speaker 1: double checking posted times. Each street's posted hour was met
Speaker 1: with identical certainty, but my phone, stubbornly scientific clicking, along
Speaker 1: with satellite accuracy, never agreed. As I crossed check pints,
Speaker 1: sometimes early, sometimes late, sometimes precise. Only three houses away
Speaker 1: and out of phase again by the butcher's shop, I
Speaker 1: bought myself a cheap digital wristwatch from the hardware store,
Speaker 1: Strapping it loosely beside my old analog, I called Clare
Speaker 1: and convinced her, half with argument and half with bribes
Speaker 1: of pastries, to leave her phone with me for the day.
Speaker 1: The next day, I walked from the tram stop on
Speaker 1: Rue du Pupil, across the tip of Rue Desk Jardins
Speaker 1: and up the main stretched to the square. I watched
Speaker 1: device in hand. As the minute counts diverged, my phone
Speaker 1: lagged or surged, depending on which store front I passed.
Speaker 1: The digital watch picked up the drift, ticking forward twenty
Speaker 1: minutes in the course of a six minute walk, then
Speaker 1: freezing again as I double backed distance, I wrote in
Speaker 1: my note book no longer corresponded to a single reference
Speaker 1: of time. At the cafe later that week, I invited
Speaker 1: Madame d Heen for coffee, suggesting we meet at ten
Speaker 1: zero zero by my watch. She arrived prompt as always,
Speaker 1: just as the mechanical clock above the bar ticked to ten.
Speaker 1: I glanced at my phone. Nine forty three. I asked her,
Speaker 1: a bit sheepishly this time, what time she thought it was? Ten?
Speaker 1: Nature ailment. I'd never come at the wrong hour. I
Speaker 1: considered showing her the phone, but she had a laugh
Speaker 1: brewing already. You and your gadgets lay on, and we
Speaker 1: settled into our cups. I made a habit of testing others.
Speaker 1: I asked the students who drifted into the bakery, the
Speaker 1: old men outside the cheese shop, even the young couple
Speaker 1: new to the building. Each appointment happened exactly when it
Speaker 1: was supposed to. Every device carried across a street boundary
Speaker 1: would shift to match the local consensus after a handful
Speaker 1: of minutes, blending into the analog clocks on the wall
Speaker 1: above the cash register or the door. Conversations were always brief,
Speaker 1: friends and dismissive. Nobody but me seemed to care or
Speaker 1: even notice typical laon. Someone once muttered an affectionate curse
Speaker 1: that told me how little my fussing mattered. But the
Speaker 1: phenomenon wouldn't leave me alone. If anything, its silence grew louder,
Speaker 1: each denial, deepening the mystery. In the evenings, I became
Speaker 1: obsessed with mapping the circuit of micro time across my
Speaker 1: quarter of the city. I traced lines in my notebook
Speaker 1: between market, bakery, tram stops, and all the adjacent cafes.
Speaker 1: I drew arrows for every spot where my digital watch
Speaker 1: and phone changed, circles around areas of perfect synchronization, jagged
Speaker 1: lines where the difference stretched past five minutes, then shrank abruptly,
Speaker 1: as if crossing an invisible border. One evening, passing down
Speaker 1: the narrow stretch of rue Desk Jardins, I paused half
Speaker 1: way by the old apothecary's boarded window. My phone, which
Speaker 1: had been lagging behind, suddenly began to speed up, minute
Speaker 1: after minute, ticking in frantic succession. I watched, awed as
Speaker 1: it froze for a heartbeat when I crossed the threshold
Speaker 1: in front of the shop, then snapped forward seven fifty nine,
Speaker 1: matching the brass street clock above the bakery behind me.
Speaker 1: Across the street, my borrowed digital watch, left on a bench,
Speaker 1: still showed a lag of nearly fifteen minutes. When I
Speaker 1: pocketed it and walked back across the street, it adjusted itself, reluctantly,
Speaker 1: inching forward in stops and starts until it matched the
Speaker 1: cafe's clock. Curiosity demanded proofs. I called Claire, who arrived
Speaker 1: with two of her friends from university, all trailing the
Speaker 1: latest devices, phones, smart watches, fitness trackers. They laughed at
Speaker 1: my obsessive old man routine, but gamely agreed to stand
Speaker 1: where I indicated, One at the entrance to the cheese shop,
Speaker 1: another straddling the uneven flagstone that marked the midpoint of
Speaker 1: rue Desk Jardins, another by Madame de Heen's bakery. I
Speaker 1: instruct each to start a stopwatch ap and hold it
Speaker 1: in place as I paced between them, noting differences and
Speaker 1: calling out updates. Each friend phone in hand reported minute counts, diverging,
Speaker 1: sometimes gaining, sometimes losing a handful of seconds or entire minutes,
Speaker 1: until moments later, each device clicked into unison with the
Speaker 1: clock closest to its location. We performed experiments at several doors.
Speaker 1: I could stand with one foot inside the bakery and
Speaker 1: one outside and see my phone's time match the bakery clock.
Speaker 1: The instant I crossed the lintel while outside, it lagged
Speaker 1: behind the window display by nearly a minute. Claire's friends
Speaker 1: found the puzzle amusing. It's just you getting confused, Papa,
Speaker 1: she said, rolling her eyes affectionately as one friend filmed
Speaker 1: my increasingly wild gesticulation, but then, as if by slight
Speaker 1: of hand their own phones caught up, each device adjusting
Speaker 1: itself to the new domain. Within seconds, the room filled
Speaker 1: with gentle laughter, but their certainty at least wavered for
Speaker 1: a moment. As we compared the redoubt side by side,
Speaker 1: frustration gave way to more pressing sense of wonder. The
Speaker 1: contradiction was now undeniable. The differences followed no apparent physical boundary.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they snaked diagonally through a building. Sometimes they stopped
Speaker 1: a mere step before a curb, sometimes cleaving a single
Speaker 1: cafe in two. I began spending every free moment charting
Speaker 1: these transition zones, walking the same route at different times
Speaker 1: of day, testing if the effect was related to sunlight,
Speaker 1: crowd density, or traffic. I found no connection. The boundaries
Speaker 1: held fast, midnight or noon, busy or not. But it
Speaker 1: wasn't only the devices that shifted. Whenever I arranged to
Speaker 1: meet someone, regardless of how early or late I tried
Speaker 1: to be, we always ended up arriving on time. Even
Speaker 1: when my phones clock told me I was early or late.
Speaker 1: The person I met would greet me without eyreny or apology.
Speaker 1: Convinced we landed at the appointed hour, my own memory
Speaker 1: began to slide uncomfortably. After a few minutes in a
Speaker 1: new zone, I'd grow uncertain of what my device had
Speaker 1: read before the specifics faded, replaced by the faint assurance
Speaker 1: that everything happened on time. I started asking about this
Speaker 1: phenomenon among the residents. Old Madame Renard remembered feeling confused
Speaker 1: with her TV schedule during her first month, but after
Speaker 1: a few weeks it all made sense. Newer arrivals shrugged. Yes,
Speaker 1: shop hours always seemed odd at first, but every one adjusted.
Speaker 1: It's just how it is, Monsieur Leon, give it time.
Speaker 1: It dawned on me, after several sleepless nights and pages
Speaker 1: upon pages of sketches that I was dealing not with
Speaker 1: a malfunction or deliberate trick, but with something much deeper,
Speaker 1: a fluid, shared perception that governed daily life, imperceptible to
Speaker 1: those within it, yet impossible to resist. My faith in
Speaker 1: the stability of time, so fundamental to my work and
Speaker 1: my habits, gave way to a fascination bordering on reverence,
Speaker 1: for the quiet complexity all around me, with the quarter
Speaker 1: mapped into a puzzle of invisible zones, each bracketed by
Speaker 1: clock faces and confirmed by willing unthinking residents. I finally
Speaker 1: set down my pen one evening and stared out my window.
Speaker 1: The late sunlight, far later than four o'clock ought to allow,
Speaker 1: flooded the market square once again, as it always had,
Speaker 1: as it surely always would, no matter what any device
Speaker 1: or outsider might claim. The market square below shimmered in
Speaker 1: the late gold of a sun that, by every public
Speaker 1: clock's reckoning had already set. I stood at my window,
Speaker 1: notebook open on the sill, eyes tracking each vendor's slow,
Speaker 1: dust lit retreat, each glint of bicycle wheel rolling away.
Speaker 1: The contradictions by then had become companions, familiar as the
Speaker 1: faces of neighbors. But my sense of certainty was gone,
Speaker 1: replaced by something like hunger. The puzzle was alive everywhere,
Speaker 1: mapped now to lines and sectors in my ledger, yet
Speaker 1: no closer to understanding what enforced these strange borderlands of time,
Speaker 1: or why no one else seemed to feel the weight
Speaker 1: of their peculiarity. Reason demanded I push at the edges.
Speaker 1: If I could not convince a resident to notice the irregularities,
Speaker 1: or even care, perhaps I could measure them more precisely.
Speaker 1: The next Wednesday, Claire agreed to humor me. She arrived early,
Speaker 1: carrying her phone, a glinting new smart watch, and her patience,
Speaker 1: all bundled beneath the skeptical sway of her ponatil. What
Speaker 1: are we actually doing, she asked, as we reached the
Speaker 1: edge of the square, testing if we can be late
Speaker 1: on purpose, I replied, offering her my own faded mobile
Speaker 1: and the battered brass pocket watch. You keep to your
Speaker 1: satellite time, I'll keep to mine. I drew a line
Speaker 1: on the cobbles with my shoe, marking the invisible boundary
Speaker 1: where the bakeries clocked. I'm snapped forward in my notes
Speaker 1: each week. You cross over at exactly ten past by
Speaker 1: the phone. She rolled her eyes, good natured, but with
Speaker 1: the edge of a scientist, which is how she'd always
Speaker 1: imagined herself, even as a child. If the clocks are
Speaker 1: just midstep, Papa, it's your equipment, not the universe. But
Speaker 1: she indulged me. We exchanged positions, a strange ballet, two
Speaker 1: grown adults tiptoeing across a silent division in the stone.
Speaker 1: Claire hovered outside the bakery door, her eyes glued to
Speaker 1: her phone. I waited inside, peeking at the bakery's analog clock,
Speaker 1: then my watch, then the digital display that clung rigidly
Speaker 1: to the hour overhead at Clare's signal. Now she stepped
Speaker 1: across the threshold. We both looked. Her phone's time leapt
Speaker 1: by several minutes as she entered her smart watch, spinning
Speaker 1: to match her lips parted, dubious at first, then somewhat awed.
Speaker 1: That's not she faltered. You saw it too, Yes, it
Speaker 1: just skipped forward. We repeated the test, switching rolls, stalling, moving,
Speaker 1: receinsing devices. Always each digital thing lagged or surged in increments,
Speaker 1: but never more than a minute before giving in, surrendering,
Speaker 1: blending back into what the neighborhood expected. The bakery's clock
Speaker 1: was always right, even as it ruled a domain of
Speaker 1: a few meters, undisturbed by the march of hours elsewhere.
Speaker 1: We tried to frustrate the effect, deliberately lagging in one
Speaker 1: zone moving quickly into another. We challenged the smart devices,
Speaker 1: forcing them to hold the true Internet time, opening stopwatch
Speaker 1: apps side by side. A phone left just at the
Speaker 1: threshold would, after a certain spell, give up the fight
Speaker 1: and conform to the clock above the door. An alarm
Speaker 1: set outside would ring early, then fall silent, only for
Speaker 1: a new chime to sound on queue two minutes later,
Speaker 1: matching the bakery's hour. We drew the attention of Madame
Speaker 1: de Heen, who poked her head out and used, what
Speaker 1: are you playing at, Leon, Claire. Don't let him rope
Speaker 1: you into another one of his perpetual motion machines. Claire grinned,
Speaker 1: but her eyes were alight in a way I recognized
Speaker 1: from science fares and late night projects. Your bakery is
Speaker 1: some kind of event horizon, she told d Heen. Inside
Speaker 1: and outside won't agree about the hour. De Heen laughed,
Speaker 1: then made a polite shewing gesture. Life's too short to
Speaker 1: split the hour glass. My dear, you'll spoil your coffee.
Speaker 1: Come in, yes, at the proper time, she teased, holding
Speaker 1: the door Inside, we compared notes over pastries, our attempts
Speaker 1: at skepticism now giving way to fascination. Claire admitted, I
Speaker 1: can't explain this by drift or settings. It's as if
Speaker 1: everything here wants to agree. She fell into the accented
Speaker 1: rhythm of the neighborhood, the small joke of acceptance that
Speaker 1: files peculiarity away with the same efficiency as daily bread.
Speaker 1: How can clocks, objective things just concede. Her question stuck
Speaker 1: with me through the afternoon. If this remarkable elasticity was
Speaker 1: no mere glitch, if even the newest technology bent to
Speaker 1: communal will, what inforces it? What would happen if we
Speaker 1: truly disagreed? Was it fear of standing apart or something deeper,
Speaker 1: some root system woven through years of habit and unnoticed
Speaker 1: mutual adjustment. The next day I visited Akmed, the new
Speaker 1: shop keeper on Rue dess Jardin's. He was still learning
Speaker 1: the local pace. His Turkish back beat at odds with
Speaker 1: the old European rhythms. I described to him hesitantly the
Speaker 1: oddity of the clocks and the way time shifted from
Speaker 1: block to block. He nodded, looking over his own battered phone. Yes,
Speaker 1: my hours were always wrong. At first I would miss
Speaker 1: customers open late or too early. My wife laughed. Then
Speaker 1: after a month I never missed again. My phone too.
Speaker 1: It changed. At some point I stopped noticing. He shrugged,
Speaker 1: half embarrassed, half proud. Now I open on time, whatever
Speaker 1: time that is. The confession unlocked a flood of stories.
Speaker 1: As I asked around. Recent arrivals described weeks of confusion
Speaker 1: frequent apologies embarrassment at misjudged appointments, but no one remained
Speaker 1: out of step for long. They acclimated, almost unconsciously, as
Speaker 1: if the social gravity here bent their sense of the
Speaker 1: hour to match those around them, until their very devices
Speaker 1: and memories synchronized. Compliant and content, I took to observing
Speaker 1: the trams, whose conductors rotated between parallel streets with nearly
Speaker 1: religious respect for routine. On Rue d'estiearls, the posted schedule
Speaker 1: bore no relation to Rue des via chains, even though
Speaker 1: the stops were sometimes just a block apart. If one
Speaker 1: tram ran late by its own schedule, crossing over into
Speaker 1: the other street, the delay would vanish the time loud
Speaker 1: speakers counting out the next arrival as precisely as their
Speaker 1: neighbors insisted. Riders seemingly never questioned it. They stepped off,
Speaker 1: consulted the nearest analog clock, and declared themselves on time,
Speaker 1: regardless of what their phone or ticket stub might have
Speaker 1: promised elsewhere. After cafe hours one afternoon, I spotted a
Speaker 1: pair of tourists from Rotterdam standing at the junction of
Speaker 1: two shops, studying their phones in evident frostration the call
Speaker 1: isn't connecting, one muttered, shaking her head. Mine says four ten,
Speaker 1: yours says four nineteen, but Google says it's nearly five.
Speaker 1: The other shrugged, Dialing again. A minute later, their devices
Speaker 1: beaped in unison, the discrepancy raised, as if by a
Speaker 1: hidden hand. The tourists wiped their brows, perplexed, but finding
Speaker 1: no one near by who cared to explain. Curiosity burning,
Speaker 1: Claire and I resolved to test the outside world. She
Speaker 1: called her friend Jeanine in Brussels, arranging a call at
Speaker 1: four sharp by Internet time. We sat at my window,
Speaker 1: her phone in her hand, ticking according to the online clock.
Speaker 1: When the chime rang, both women answered instantly, but the
Speaker 1: video feed wavered. Audio lagged and jittered, as if both
Speaker 1: were speaking slightly out of phase. Janine claimed it was
Speaker 1: nearly five. Claire's phone still read four. When they ended
Speaker 1: the call, both devices reconciled, settling as always on the
Speaker 1: quarter's consensus. Our sense of humor returned in the face
Speaker 1: of this stubborn wonder. You were living in a worm hull,
Speaker 1: Claire teased, as I made another note, or maybe a spell,
Speaker 1: But there was no magic here, only the peculiar certainty
Speaker 1: that the world would not and could not tolerate the
Speaker 1: dissonance of disagreement. Each system, analog or digital, bent toward alignment,
Speaker 1: and in their collective yielding time itself was shaped. My
Speaker 1: experiments grew increasingly fine grained and obsessive. I mapped zones
Speaker 1: in tighter loops, checking the effect in living rooms that
Speaker 1: straddled two times, watching as a kitchen clock insisted it
Speaker 1: was twenty minutes ahead of its neighbor's bedroom. A digital
Speaker 1: watch left on a window sill between two suites blinked
Speaker 1: uncertainly before settling on one time or the other. The tenants,
Speaker 1: an elderly couple who had lived through four decades and
Speaker 1: two wars, could not recall ever being out of step.
Speaker 1: We have always eaten at five, not a minute early
Speaker 1: or late, the husband told me, as if daring the
Speaker 1: universe to disagree. I walked the alleys and corners with
Speaker 1: my note book, stopping to jot the routines of the
Speaker 1: trash collectors, the opening notes of the bread delivery van's horn,
Speaker 1: the precise minute when the newspapers arrived. Every routine sustained
Speaker 1: its immaculate timing, but only within its own invisible territory.
Speaker 1: From block to block, hour to hour, each chain of
Speaker 1: routine held the only law that mattered was agreement. Agreement,
Speaker 1: even against the outside world, even against machinery, even against
Speaker 1: memory itself. What kind of order was this? Not a
Speaker 1: conspiracy nor a simple illusion, but a quietly wondrous act
Speaker 1: of collective authorship. Here the deltas and decimals of official
Speaker 1: time were overruled by custom, and that custom enforced itself
Speaker 1: on flesh and firmware alike. With this realization came a
Speaker 1: shift in my expectation of investigation. No longer did I
Speaker 1: expect a single culprit or centralized authority. Instead, I began
Speaker 1: to search for the history. Was this neighborhood merely preserving
Speaker 1: a local quirk or had something subtler and deeper accrued
Speaker 1: through centuries of practice? The answer, when it began to emerge,
Speaker 1: did so as quietly as everything else. In the town archives,
Speaker 1: I found layers of old city records, scraps of by laws,
Speaker 1: grainy news clippings, faded town plans annotating boundaries in the
Speaker 1: market quarter. Tracing them, I realized how often the fabric
Speaker 1: of the city had been torn and repaired post war
Speaker 1: rebuilding canal floods that forced entire blocks to relocate. The
Speaker 1: piecemeal expansion and contraction of the market in the face
Speaker 1: of shifting trade. Each upheaval was met not by bureaucratic consensus,
Speaker 1: but by a slow accretion of compromise. A bell rung
Speaker 1: at a certain hour, a merchant's cart set up when
Speaker 1: the first sunlight breached a certain alley, A communal meal
Speaker 1: rescheduled as work day rhythms shifted. The church Saint Anna
Speaker 1: had maintained two conflicting records of mass for almost a century,
Speaker 1: each marked official, each legible to a different set of parishioners.
Speaker 1: The market, too, bore overlapping entry and exit times, with
Speaker 1: a scribbled note identifying when the new gate opened while
Speaker 1: the other still closed. In oral histories gathered from old families,
Speaker 1: I heard tales of children walking three streets to school
Speaker 1: because their eight o'clock was not our eight o'clock, and
Speaker 1: accounts of bakers delivering on both sides of a disputed
Speaker 1: cross roads, each side swearing their bread arrived. First tradition,
Speaker 1: it seemed, had never quite resolved these fissures. Instead, the
Speaker 1: city had accumulated them, embraced them, lived with them, smoothing
Speaker 1: the jagged edges through the simple machinery of expectation and
Speaker 1: daily performance. People agreed, then forgot they had agreed, then
Speaker 1: inscribed their certainty upon their clocks, their shops, their greetings.
Speaker 1: Some elders could recall moments of friction, tempers when the
Speaker 1: schedule shifted for city wide events, murmurs of confusion when
Speaker 1: new schools or businesses arrived. But soon everyone fell in
Speaker 1: step again, Madame Renaud stated, finishing stories of ration cards
Speaker 1: and brief blackouts in the fifties, A day or two,
Speaker 1: that's all it takes. The key I began to see
Speaker 1: was not the imperfection of clocks or the inertia of tradition,
Speaker 1: but something more luminous. The neighborhood's routines themselves had become
Speaker 1: a mechanism, quiet, sure and more robust than any clock
Speaker 1: work I had ever engineered that kept time by continually
Speaker 1: rewriting what on time meant. Technological innovation had tested this,
Speaker 1: of course, but not overcome it. With each fresh incursion radios,
Speaker 1: digital watches, atomic times, smartphones, the collective mind of the
Speaker 1: place simply enfolded the new, stretching the boundaries until the
Speaker 1: machines too learned to play along. Perhaps it was something
Speaker 1: in the air, or the overlapping wireless networks, or perhaps,
Speaker 1: as Claire laughingly suggested, the world bends to avoid embarrassment.
Speaker 1: But what I suspected, and what the evidence increasingly bore out,
Speaker 1: was subtless. Still, the world here remained untroubled by contradiction,
Speaker 1: because everyone consciously unconsciously may be somewhere beneath the threshold
Speaker 1: of awareness preferred the comfort of shared reliability over unyielding accuracy.
Speaker 1: Where my work as an engineer had always sought the
Speaker 1: smallest possible error, this quarter had ad through generations, designed
Speaker 1: instead a system that tolerated difference by subsuming it gently,
Speaker 1: until agreement became nature and disagreement all but disappeared. I
Speaker 1: stood at the boundary of Rue dess Jardin's one afternoon,
Speaker 1: a visiting academic from the University Jan a friend of Clare's,
Speaker 1: joining me. He brought with him recording equipment, determined to
Speaker 1: chart even the smallest drift on video, audio and electromagnetic redoubts.
Speaker 1: We repeated the experiments, walking across boundaries, recording clocks, narrating
Speaker 1: the changes on every device, the same effect. The footage,
Speaker 1: when played back, revealed the jumps in time, with the
Speaker 1: local analog clocks undisturbed, the digital ones reluctant but yielding.
Speaker 1: What do you make of it, Jan Claire asked, eyes
Speaker 1: brimming with the pleasure of having her suspicions validated, if
Speaker 1: not explained, Jan frowning in delight, replied, it shouldn't be possible.
Speaker 1: It's not just perception. Even our equipment bends. Maybe there's
Speaker 1: a mesh of network devices, old or new, propagating consensus.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a form of viral programming, though that wouldn't
Speaker 1: explain the analog devices or the memories. He looked at me.
Speaker 1: You could do algorithmic voting a distributed system if you
Speaker 1: had enough devices on the network, But why would the
Speaker 1: boundaries follow no electrical or municipal plan, Claire shook her head.
Speaker 1: And why do people just fall in with it? We
Speaker 1: watched a mother scold her young son for dawdling, ushering
Speaker 1: him along with the demand hurry or you'll be late.
Speaker 1: He asked, late for what exactly, but she offered only
Speaker 1: late enough. They disappeared into a shadow, the clock above
Speaker 1: the alley spinning a minute forward. The instant they vanished
Speaker 1: from sight. There were no official explanations, no signs, no postings.
Speaker 1: The local government, reached by phone, simply insisted the posted
Speaker 1: times were correct, and that any confusion was due to
Speaker 1: citizens failing to read updates. No record existed of an
Speaker 1: official switch to neighborhood time. The few instances where city
Speaker 1: wide events required uniform hours, temporary signposts appeared, then vanished,
Speaker 1: as if the necessity of compliance was as quickly forgotten
Speaker 1: as imposed. One evening, after a particularly fruitless round of
Speaker 1: debates with Claire and Jan, I found myself sitting on
Speaker 1: the front step, notebook in hand, as the last light dwindled.
Speaker 1: A few older residents ambled past, calling out good nights
Speaker 1: to nobody in particular. I asked one of them, Monsieur
Speaker 1: van Horton, life long, inhabitant with a limp and the
Speaker 1: patience of the cathedral stones, how it was that time
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood seemed so inflexibly flexible? He shrugged, It's
Speaker 1: always been this way. Time moves with us, or maybe
Speaker 1: we move with time. He paused to light his pipe,
Speaker 1: smoke curling in a spiral that caught the fading sun
Speaker 1: as long as the bread is delivered, the children in school,
Speaker 1: and the cafe open, and what else matters we all
Speaker 1: need to agree on? Something might as well be the hour.
Speaker 1: He patted my shoulder and hobbled away. That single conversation
Speaker 1: stayed in my mind long thereafter, and it was as
Speaker 1: close to an answer as any one would offer. There
Speaker 1: was no conspiracy, no authority requiring obedience, only the weight
Speaker 1: of countless tiny negotiations, early risings, late meals, apologies smoothed
Speaker 1: over jokes about tourists out of step, children napping until
Speaker 1: the proper hour, lover's meeting at four, regardless of which
Speaker 1: four it was, I stopped trying to catch the clocks out.
Speaker 1: The satisfaction id once found in perfect calibration, dissolved into
Speaker 1: a fascination with the quarter's living architecture, a system so intricate,
Speaker 1: so gentle, and so habitual that it overtook every attempt
Speaker 1: at intervention. My friends teased me for having gone native.
Speaker 1: I laughed and invited them to coffee exactly at four,
Speaker 1: confident now that whatever time we arrived would be by
Speaker 1: that bakery undeniably four o'clock. The sense of order I cherished,
Speaker 1: the need for measured regularity returned, transformed my neighbour's laughter,
Speaker 1: The reliable jangle of the tram, the undulating arrival and
Speaker 1: departure of market stalls. Each was a cog in the bigger,
Speaker 1: invisible engine of our piece work time. I took comfort too,
Speaker 1: in knowing that if such a world could exist, if
Speaker 1: an entire community could quietly, unthinkingly overwrite official reality by
Speaker 1: the gentle weight of agreement and repetition, then what else
Speaker 1: might be possible woven invisibly into the fabric of communal life?
Speaker 1: What other realities did we constantly shape, not by decree,
Speaker 1: but by the thousand tiny convergences of memory and intention,
Speaker 1: until we could no longer see them as choices at all.
Speaker 1: One late afternoon, as the market wound down and the
Speaker 1: sunlight burned honey thick between the buildings, I found myself
Speaker 1: back at the cafe, window notebook closed. Claire joined me
Speaker 1: her smile, the sort only daughters where when they find
Speaker 1: their fathers melded with the city. As the church bell
Speaker 1: told four chimes and the last bouquet changed hands, she
Speaker 1: raised her coffee to the moment. Papa, She said, exactly
Speaker 1: on time. I lifted my cup and clinked hers. In
Speaker 1: that instant, I realized my curiosity had shifted from the
Speaker 1: mechanism of clocks to the greater mechanism of belonging. Here,
Speaker 1: in this tangled, ancient patch of Antwerp, we kept time together,
Speaker 1: bending it quietly and automatically year after year, not because
Speaker 1: we feared the alternative, but because shared trust was sweeter
Speaker 1: and infinitely more reliable than precision. As I gazed over
Speaker 1: the market square, the world returned my look, layered in
Speaker 1: shadow and sun, every person in step with a rhythm
Speaker 1: they would never claim as their own invention. If this
Speaker 1: was how we held time softly in the hollows of
Speaker 1: our days, what greater secrets might we have shaped simply
Speaker 1: by agreeing gently and persistently to see the world as
Speaker 1: we wished it to be. The thought steadied me a
Speaker 1: small revolution in the quiet machinery of my heart. I
Speaker 1: closed my note book and smiled, ready for whatever the
Speaker 1: next four o'clock, whenever it might arrive, would bring. And
Speaker 1: that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I
Speaker 1: will see you in the next one.