Speaker 1: There are mornings in Central Hight City Park when the
Speaker 1: city's rush feels like a rumor, and the earth itself
Speaker 1: holds its breath. I've walked these paths in every weather
Speaker 1: for almost twenty years. But what happened that Monday before sunrise?
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have believed if someone else told me. I
Speaker 1: was two steps into the dew so oaked lawn, fog
Speaker 1: drifting so thick through the willows that all shapes blurred.
Speaker 1: The hedges loomed as shaggy islands. The art deco clock
Speaker 1: tower's spire vanished above a lid of mist. Not that
Speaker 1: it would have shown me the hour anyway. Most of
Speaker 1: the park's clocks were just decor now, faces frozen in
Speaker 1: whatever moment the city's budget last aloud. That's when the
Speaker 1: chime rang out. A single small bell note, sweet and
Speaker 1: clear as a glass marble flicked against crystal, floated out
Speaker 1: over the lavender fog. I stopped, rake in hand, heart quick.
Speaker 1: It seemed to travel, glancing from bench to branch, not
Speaker 1: settling anywhere I could name. For a second, I smiled,
Speaker 1: just the surprise of it. It must be six at most,
Speaker 1: I thought, But the clocks were stuck as always, tower
Speaker 1: hands at their useless static. Ten twenty birds stuttered into
Speaker 1: the silence after that brief note, and the leaves curled
Speaker 1: a little with the settling air. The chime was too finished,
Speaker 1: too real, to dismiss his imagination. Maybe someone had gotten
Speaker 1: the old bell mechanism in the tower up and running
Speaker 1: a fluke, a new city project, some volunteer tinker. Except
Speaker 1: the sound had depth movement. I circled, tried to orient
Speaker 1: myself like you might to thunder, but it didn't grow
Speaker 1: louder or fade, just passed by a traveler itself, leaving
Speaker 1: nothing behind. I finished my morning routine, picking stray cups,
Speaker 1: noting a patch of night blooming primrose that seemed fuller
Speaker 1: than last week. Yet every quiet moment I found myself
Speaker 1: half listening for a second chime. I wrote a reminder
Speaker 1: in my little spiral notebook, ask arif if clock's fixed,
Speaker 1: Not urgency, just an oddity. I'm used to little urban puzzles,
Speaker 1: a new crow flock, a misplaced statue, dog walkers adopting
Speaker 1: cryptic roots. But this sound was gentler and more precise
Speaker 1: than those. The curiosity didn't itch so much as hum
Speaker 1: insistently under the world's usual static. The park has its
Speaker 1: loyalists and regular oddities. Some would blame the haze of
Speaker 1: early spring, or something chemical in the city air. But
Speaker 1: as I made my way up the slack path to
Speaker 1: the flower beds, lining up each rake pull to the
Speaker 1: memory of that drifting chime, I realized, without dread, just
Speaker 1: a rising undismissable interest to day, I might be the
Speaker 1: only one to have heard it at all. Morning shifts
Speaker 1: in Central Heights are like tending a patient forever, half
Speaker 1: way between waking and dreaming. The grounds are my beat
Speaker 1: most weeks. It's enough to keep the beds straight and
Speaker 1: the bins from overflowing. The bushes forgive small errors. No
Speaker 1: one else keeps such private hours except a handful of
Speaker 1: recurring faces, recognizable by silhouette long before greeting. Martha's always
Speaker 1: the earliest. Her white hair is a halo in the
Speaker 1: mist as she sets out her chessboard on the same
Speaker 1: crack tile table, never waiting for an opponent. Ken, former
Speaker 1: insurance youngish for retirement, does soft laps on the cinder path,
Speaker 1: knees packed and braced, always in a fleece vest, no
Speaker 1: matter the month, aref hauls in his mechanized sweeper, humming tunelessly,
Speaker 1: eyes forever, darting to the edges, catching things before anyone
Speaker 1: else does. A dropped earring, a sapling poking where it shouldn't,
Speaker 1: an unseasonal mushroom. And there Sarah, the university student who
Speaker 1: volunteers with flower beds when her coursework weighs less, heavily
Speaker 1: keen on soil, pH quick to spot mildew from a
Speaker 1: yard away. People laugh about the secrets of the heights,
Speaker 1: chalking up oddities to city weirdness. Popes blooming in march,
Speaker 1: ducks nesting on traffic islands, the park's ability to swallow
Speaker 1: and later return lost toys. The law is affectionate, never
Speaker 1: taken seriously. Real eccentricity sits, I think in the maintenance logs,
Speaker 1: Lamps that flicker only during solstices, plaques that seem to
Speaker 1: shift position clocks with no allegiance to time. The tower
Speaker 1: especially is a veteran of failed experiments. The city in
Speaker 1: tight years used it as a platform for banners, art installations,
Speaker 1: even a pigeon deterrent trial that left a faint, unfixable whiff.
Speaker 1: Whenever the wind comes from the south. Maybe I should explain.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert, born here, but never much drawn to crowds.
Speaker 1: I see myself as a steward for the in between,
Speaker 1: not just the grass. The way a bush leans in
Speaker 1: a new direction, or a bench becomes the favored perch
Speaker 1: for a week, or the hedge that always seems to
Speaker 1: catch stray wind blown scraps. These are the marks and
Speaker 1: mnemonics of the park's real rhythm. I like to listen,
Speaker 1: to memorize the hum. Some call it habit. I call
Speaker 1: it a kind of friendship. The clocks, though, are different.
Speaker 1: Public record says they're scheduled for full restoration some day,
Speaker 1: but for now their faces are clouded with mineral film
Speaker 1: and their hands stick stubbornly. The big Tower is picturesque,
Speaker 1: but its mechanism has been gutted for safety. Martha once said,
Speaker 1: the scattered ornamental clocks, one by the lake, one at
Speaker 1: the concert rotunder, have been defunct longer than arifs been
Speaker 1: on peril. When they show an hour at all, it's
Speaker 1: pure luck or prank, which is why that bell on
Speaker 1: Monday left me unsettled in an oddly focused way. If
Speaker 1: by some unlikely grant or initiative, the clocks had been revived,
Speaker 1: even partially, some one would have mentioned it. The note
Speaker 1: itself was too clean, too precise for malfunction, and too
Speaker 1: gentle for any surviving city alarm. Was it the shape
Speaker 1: of the fog, some acoustic trick, or something unregistered more personal?
Speaker 1: The world made room for the question. I kept it
Speaker 1: tucked away as the day's business, raking repairing a bench slat,
Speaker 1: grew mundane again. By the following morning, the question had
Speaker 1: changed shape, but hadn't dissolved. I was at the East Gate,
Speaker 1: dead heading early roses when the chime came again. A
Speaker 1: second chime, unmistakably the same as yesterday, drifted through pre dawn,
Speaker 1: slicing the hush. This time I caught myself freezing mid prune,
Speaker 1: glancing at my wrist digital nothing fancy, always fast by
Speaker 1: two minutes the time five twenty two a m an
Speaker 1: odd off kilter moment, not on the hour, not the half,
Speaker 1: nor any scheduled bell I'd ever known. Most mechanical clocks,
Speaker 1: when they worked at all, were programmed for flat intervals
Speaker 1: on the hour for the tower, every quarter for garden clocks.
Speaker 1: Back when such things functioned, Five twenty two just sits
Speaker 1: there stubbornly prime, resisting all categorization. I left my tools
Speaker 1: at the base of a hawthorn and aimed for the
Speaker 1: broadest possible witness sample that morning. A little embarrassed at
Speaker 1: how eager I felt, Arif was the first to cross
Speaker 1: my path, Steering his sweeper along the avenue of Elms.
Speaker 1: I matched his pace. Aref did you hear a bell
Speaker 1: just now? He blinked, the way he always does when
Speaker 1: deciding if I'm joking. You mean the little bell wakes
Speaker 1: the birds? So you did hear it? He shrugged. Sure,
Speaker 1: but it's not always so bright to day, kinder dull,
Speaker 1: like a steel bowl, not a bell. Maybe off in
Speaker 1: the north beds. Didn't think much of it. He swung
Speaker 1: his sweeper onto a new heading, already immersed in small disturbances.
Speaker 1: I couldn't see. Ken, jogging by in his usual wide
Speaker 1: armed stride. Was less certain. You mean that high ping,
Speaker 1: I catch it sometimes feels more like. He squinted at
Speaker 1: the hazy air, like a wind chime, but from nowhere specific.
Speaker 1: Why doesn't it seem odd? I pressed, Ken grinned rob.
Speaker 1: If I started cataloging every weird thing in this park,
Speaker 1: I'd lose track of which joint I was icing. Martha,
Speaker 1: when questioned, offered only a laugh. There's always been a
Speaker 1: bell here, hasn't there? No one found it odd or noteworthy,
Speaker 1: or even particular. I was the only one whose sense
Speaker 1: of timing felt punctured. What good is a solitary oddity
Speaker 1: if every one else folds it into the ordinary? I
Speaker 1: made a circuit for certainty. The tower was locked, just
Speaker 1: as before. A nest of gray pigeons chattered on the rafters,
Speaker 1: rust flakes dry at my feet. No cables, no city vans,
Speaker 1: nothing to suggest a fix or new mechanism. The hands
Speaker 1: had not moved. At the lake, the ornamental clock was
Speaker 1: as it had ever been, a useless modern face, with
Speaker 1: water stains running down from the nine. There was always
Speaker 1: the possibility that the chime was internal, a product of
Speaker 1: my own peculiar orientation to the park's silences. But Ken
Speaker 1: and Arify each had a version of it. The notes
Speaker 1: didn't align, even the time seemed uncertain. Arif thought it
Speaker 1: later than usual, Ken maybe just before sunrise. Yet all
Speaker 1: referenced the chime like a background tone. I pressed the
Speaker 1: tip of my pen into my palm, considering what if
Speaker 1: I was tracking the wrong aspect entirely. Maybe the question
Speaker 1: was what happened, but to whom and when and why
Speaker 1: in such an off beat minute. The contradiction wasn't just
Speaker 1: the sound's presence, but its timing and how no one
Speaker 1: else seemed to press for a pattern. So I decided
Speaker 1: to become a time keeper in a park where time,
Speaker 1: it seemed, had its own peculiar pace. I brought a
Speaker 1: note book, a battered one from a city meeting, the
Speaker 1: kind with cheap glue binding and a government logo devoted
Speaker 1: solely to chime times. Every morning, for the next seven days,
Speaker 1: I made my rounds, implanned segmented paths, as if to
Speaker 1: disprove myself. If there was any pattern, I would find it.
Speaker 1: If not, at least I'd have a week in written
Speaker 1: company with my own curiosity. Monday's chime five twenty two,
Speaker 1: Tuesday no chime. By five twenty five. I circled the
Speaker 1: lilib's ears, straining. Then at six twenty three, there it
Speaker 1: was clear. From somewhere to my left, I checked the
Speaker 1: span sixty one minutes apart. Wednesday, I changed tactics, entering
Speaker 1: by the western strat, arriving at five twenty At five
Speaker 1: twenty five, the chimes sounded again, sixty one minutes later
Speaker 1: than my previous earliest record. It became an experiment. However,
Speaker 1: I varied my start. The chime returned, always at sixty
Speaker 1: one minute intervals from the last, never quite at a
Speaker 1: real time, but shifting in a cycle invisible to any
Speaker 1: physical clock. Frustrated, I switched to recording. I set my
Speaker 1: phone to run during chime. Windows playback revealed only the
Speaker 1: airy hush of wind, the scrabble of feet, faint warbles
Speaker 1: from thrushes, never the bell. I tried to the tower
Speaker 1: by the pond, among the roses, where the acoustics might
Speaker 1: contain a sound. Nothing. The chime existed for the ear
Speaker 1: and the moment, resistant to capture. I brought the notebook's
Speaker 1: findings to Sarah, catching her by the hydrangers as she weeded,
Speaker 1: she listened, hair stuck to her forehead, gloves muddy. You
Speaker 1: ever noticed a bell in the mornings, same note every
Speaker 1: time you hear it? She straightened, frowning. Sometimes, she paused,
Speaker 1: It's not always the same though. Some days it's sharp,
Speaker 1: almost a triangle note, clear bright, other days more like
Speaker 1: a hum. I don't keep track of times you think
Speaker 1: it's a speaker or a prank. I tried to record
Speaker 1: it on my phone, got nothing. She grinned, maybe it's
Speaker 1: a frequency old people can't hear. But her eyes had
Speaker 1: a question. I showed her my notebook. She paged through
Speaker 1: my growing chart of uneven hours, all sixty one minutes apart.
Speaker 1: After a moment, she said, I remember a note around
Speaker 1: six forty five last Friday, but maybe my class schedule
Speaker 1: threw me off. It's not like an alarm, more like
Speaker 1: a sparkle in the air. I questioned the head of maintenance,
Speaker 1: a laconic man with little patience for whimsy, any recent
Speaker 1: repairs to the park clocks or speakers installed for some event.
Speaker 1: He plucked his clip board from the equipment cage, finger
Speaker 1: trailing a column of repairs and cancelations. Nothing new, Rob,
Speaker 1: We'd need a miracle for any of those clocks to sink.
Speaker 1: Let alone chime. If you hear one, let me know
Speaker 1: city council would pay for the secret. That same morning,
Speaker 1: after a chime a bit after six, by the lakeside,
Speaker 1: I noticed a spray of forget manauts below the east statue,
Speaker 1: startlingly vivid, even though just days prior a sharp late
Speaker 1: frost had browned all the violets near by. I made
Speaker 1: a note. A gray squirrel, usually skittish and private, darted
Speaker 1: repeatedly along the same three branch path above, dropping, returning,
Speaker 1: hesitating at the same inflection, as if rehearsing a routine.
Speaker 1: Only it understood. I mentioned this to Sarah, who laughed, rob,
Speaker 1: all squirrels are at least a little mad. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: the same one each year. That night, searching for a
Speaker 1: broader sweep, I dug through old city blueprints filed online.
Speaker 1: Most maps were faded scans, but I scrolled through a
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty eight survey and noticed near the park's northern
Speaker 1: quadrant a large, unlabeled segment a geometric shape overlaid with
Speaker 1: unknown survey data in pale pencil. I don't remember ever
Speaker 1: seeing anything particular in that stretch overgrowth, yes, but nothing mapped.
Speaker 1: Still restless, I tried the city archives, scrolling for historical
Speaker 1: mentions of the park. In the local paper, there were
Speaker 1: scattered references to elusive tinkles in the morning air poetry,
Speaker 1: nothing more in editorials pennied long before I was born. Bells,
Speaker 1: it seemed, were always a rumor here with each new observation,
Speaker 1: the contradiction only deepened. The chime wasn't an accident or
Speaker 1: an easy to dismiss folk law detail. It had its measure,
Speaker 1: but that measure veered just outside ordinary systems. Sarah's memory
Speaker 1: conflicted with mine. The real time could be anything, depending
Speaker 1: on who listened. The calenders, the clocks, the mechanisms. None
Speaker 1: controlled the pattern. Yet the chime reshaped little moments and
Speaker 1: left the world restored, neither changed nor explainable. My notes multiplied.
Speaker 1: One question superseded the last. If the chime was not random,
Speaker 1: not physically sourced, and not the same in every body's ear,
Speaker 1: what law did it follow? Was it even a sound
Speaker 1: at all? Or a collective habit of noticing something rarely noticed,
Speaker 1: a pause, a blip in some inner calendar, tied intimately
Speaker 1: to this peculiar place. Determined now, I began planning more
Speaker 1: deliberate tests. I constructed a timelen, writing out every chime,
Speaker 1: every time I altered my route, every repeated questioning of coincidence,
Speaker 1: the intervals always inflexibly sixty one minutes, not sixty not
Speaker 1: sixty two. I tried entering at various times across the week,
Speaker 1: even swapping my path from the north beds to the
Speaker 1: statue circle in a bid to shake the interval. Each
Speaker 1: time I tuned in, the bell made its solitary remark
Speaker 1: at the same prime offset. I decided to break the solitude,
Speaker 1: testing subjective experiences in real time. I recruited Martha, Ken
Speaker 1: and Sarah for a little experiment. One Friday. We'd meet
Speaker 1: at the statue garden. Just before the anticipated chime. My
Speaker 1: own note book buzzed with scribbled projections. Martha set up
Speaker 1: her chess board on the stone plinth, pieces in tight rows,
Speaker 1: unwavering from her decade's old habit. Ken jogged in place,
Speaker 1: already flushed. Sara paced phone out, curious now in that
Speaker 1: way she gets when a problem becomes a puzzle. We
Speaker 1: waited at my signal. We fell quiet, watching the minute
Speaker 1: on my wrist. Tick over the chime, as far as
Speaker 1: I could tell, sounded crisp, hovering right above the wisteria
Speaker 1: arch at the garden's edge. I watched for reaction, but
Speaker 1: no one said a word. After I began my survey,
Speaker 1: What did you hear, I asked Martha. She considered there
Speaker 1: was a set of chimes, surely three quick notes, one
Speaker 1: after the other always comes that way here, Ken laughed, No, No,
Speaker 1: it was one note, but soft, like a piano's lowest key.
Speaker 1: You sure you heard it at all? Rob? Sara just
Speaker 1: frowned at her phone, then at the other's. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure there was a chime. I guess I was watching
Speaker 1: the sun hit the statue. Maybe I missed it. Our phones,
Speaker 1: time stamped audio showed a baffling spread. Ken's device marked
Speaker 1: six forty eight, mind six fifty one, Sara's already running
Speaker 1: a few minutes slow, and Martha hadn't brought hers. No convergence,
Speaker 1: no consensus. Every one seemed to inhabit their own version.
Speaker 1: Untroubled by the differences. I touched the pages of my
Speaker 1: note book, saw my neat columns of time begin to blur,
Speaker 1: less grid and more cloud. Later, in casual conversation with
Speaker 1: the other staff, I pushed at the park's culture of time.
Speaker 1: Do you keep to shifts by the clocks? Here? Or
Speaker 1: one laughed, brushing a clump of cedar drifts into a bag.
Speaker 1: We joke about park time. Rob. Some days the shifts crawl,
Speaker 1: others thereover before you notice. The official clocks are a joke.
Speaker 1: At this point, used to be. The bells helped us
Speaker 1: pace the work, but now my ears must be broken.
Speaker 1: Another admitted to never trusting their phone in the garden.
Speaker 1: There's just a kind of park hour that doesn't match
Speaker 1: anything outside the hedges. I stopped hands on hips for
Speaker 1: a second. It felt as if what I'd thought peculiar
Speaker 1: was not just common, but accepted invisible because it was
Speaker 1: art of the territory. The conclusion came uninvited. The chime
Speaker 1: wasn't simply a physical note, nor was it mere fancy.
Speaker 1: It was a shape imposed on experience by the park's
Speaker 1: very bones, independent almost of the world's shared clocks. The regularity,
Speaker 1: the way each person rendered a private chime, the free
Speaker 1: wheeling times all pointed to phenomenon unanchored to the outside.
Speaker 1: I wondered, what kind of clock keeps neither hour nor location,
Speaker 1: but measures the permutations of presents and attention itself? A
Speaker 1: question more abstract than any I had meant to ask,
Speaker 1: but suddenly essential. I found myself returning late that evening
Speaker 1: to the city blueprints, stuck on that empty, unknown survey
Speaker 1: data zone. The area in question sat north of the
Speaker 1: water garden, officially mapped but never described, tucked behind a
Speaker 1: battered chain link fence abutting a patch that most staff
Speaker 1: now avoided for its overgrowth, a tangle of brambles and ferns.
Speaker 1: No moa touched tools in hand, I let myself past
Speaker 1: a loose panel, stepping carefully through the humidity of decomposing
Speaker 1: leaves and hidden roots in the shrouded undergrowth. Only part
Speaker 1: of the sun touched ground, caught in shaking cobweb blaze.
Speaker 1: It was there after a bit of uncertain wandering and
Speaker 1: more than one scratched shin I felt my boot hit
Speaker 1: something indisputably solid, a stone, sharply cut. Bending down, I
Speaker 1: brushed aside centuries of leaf mold. The shape was peculiar,
Speaker 1: neither paving nor sculpture, but a kind of truncated ring,
Speaker 1: partially buried. The next morning, under clearer light, I returned
Speaker 1: with gloves, hand trowel and an ill advised optimism about
Speaker 1: poison Ivy hours later, sweating and dirt streaked, I managed
Speaker 1: to clear a segment. A circular structure may be ten
Speaker 1: feet across, mostly embedded, but clearly a dial of sorts
Speaker 1: carved into the surface in worn relief, not numbers, not hours,
Speaker 1: nothing as clear as X, I I or A I E.
Speaker 1: Just a ring of notches along an outer band, each
Speaker 1: under a single etched figure two, three, five, seven, eleven,
Speaker 1: and so on increments jarringly different from any clock I
Speaker 1: had ever seen. The notches ran between, sometimes unevenly, sometimes longer,
Speaker 1: but always under what I now recognized as the prime numbers,
Speaker 1: an old astronomy trick, a code. I copied the pattern
Speaker 1: into my note book, chalking the stone with careful marks,
Speaker 1: just in case on the next chime, which rang out
Speaker 1: as I carefully dusted the dial's western arc, I leaned low, and,
Speaker 1: on sudden inspiration, used a little magnifying glass. Each time
Speaker 1: I thought I saw a change, an addition, a minuscule
Speaker 1: new scratch appeared under one of the notches, or a
Speaker 1: faint nick elsewhere seemed dulled compared to minutes before. The
Speaker 1: sensation was neither magical nor menacing, just a deepening of strangeness,
Speaker 1: the kind that invites you to stare past the boundaries
Speaker 1: of what you count as possible. I invited Sarah and
Speaker 1: Ken to see for themselves. Sarah squinted, declaring it a
Speaker 1: bygone sun dial with weather damage. Ken saw only random
Speaker 1: scrapes from treefall or squirrels. But I could trace the
Speaker 1: pattern it fit with my notebooked intervals. The chime didn't
Speaker 1: touch clocks. It shifted the dial, as if each sounded
Speaker 1: note corresponded to a new prime, a new notch, a
Speaker 1: quiet sub measure of something a regular watch would never log.
Speaker 1: A final cross check. Digging through the park's oldest logs,
Speaker 1: kept by handwritten ledger, a thing more for tradition than necessity,
Speaker 1: I found layouts that didn't match. Beds labeled one place
Speaker 1: were now elsewhere. Monuments drawn in ink were missing in fact,
Speaker 1: or stood where no record claimed they ought. Talking to
Speaker 1: the senior most staff, I found more confusion that dials
Speaker 1: never been in the same spot as I remember. Seems
Speaker 1: it used to be up by the old greenhouse. But
Speaker 1: who knows? Time and storms move everything of Eventually, it
Speaker 1: was not just that the chime resisted explanation. The entire
Speaker 1: system of time and memory in the park seemed to
Speaker 1: rearrange itself gently but unstoppably, always just beyond the edge
Speaker 1: of easy skill or common measure. The prime notches, the
Speaker 1: shifting stone, the failings of clocks and recollections all pointed
Speaker 1: toward a deeper irreducible logic at the heart of Central Heights,
Speaker 1: a logic that cared nothing for standard calendars or city routines.
Speaker 1: It was neither a trick nor a malfunction. Whatever mechanism
Speaker 1: bound the chime into the park's morning, it was richer,
Speaker 1: more deliberate, a small, benevolent error in the world, persistent
Speaker 1: only for those who lingered long enough to notice. I
Speaker 1: sat back, feeling my own understanding tip. The park did
Speaker 1: not just wring out hours or mark seasons. It harbored
Speaker 1: a structure that could bend and reform the paths of time, memory,
Speaker 1: and observation. The chime was a key, but the lock
Speaker 1: was older and subtler than any regular bell. I finished
Speaker 1: that morning with hands streaked in chalk and earth, a
Speaker 1: notebook full of impossible intervals. Around me, the city began
Speaker 1: to stir. Distant car horns blended with pigeon murmur, and
Speaker 1: the gentle hush of traffics approach. But within the bounds
Speaker 1: of Central Heights, the silence after the chime pressed in,
Speaker 1: and for once I felt I was not just hearing echoes,
Speaker 1: but participating in the gentle machinery of something quietly primarily strange.
Speaker 1: The dial became my orbit. Explanations fell away, replaced with shapes,
Speaker 1: the intersecting paths of every memory, every misaligned flower bed,
Speaker 1: every story I had ever heard in the park. My
Speaker 1: hands dirtied anew as I knelt each day among the ferns,
Speaker 1: chalking notches that sometimes melted back into aging stone, sometimes
Speaker 1: held until the next soft, lawless bell. By now the
Speaker 1: chime was no longer content to remain a curiosity. It
Speaker 1: tinged each hour, lifting at the air edge of routine,
Speaker 1: a presence I could neither catch nor let go. I
Speaker 1: started with maps. Obsession requires records, and I had enough
Speaker 1: to fill half the office at home. Central Heights exists
Speaker 1: in public record as a fixed grid, entrances marked, walking
Speaker 1: paths inked in gentle curves, gardens measured and described in
Speaker 1: city memos, cross referenced against decades worth of Friends of
Speaker 1: the Park newsletters, dog eared photographs, and the archives of
Speaker 1: a few city planners who loved paper more than convenience.
Speaker 1: Contradictions spilled out like litter after a festival. A photo
Speaker 1: from the nineties, a polaroid faded blue at the edges,
Speaker 1: showed a riot of tulips running east of the clock
Speaker 1: tower along what the accompanying caption called the upper rectangle,
Speaker 1: exactly fifty yards north of their supposed current location. I
Speaker 1: checked that quadrant. Myself counted footsteps, compared oxygeniting plantings. Not
Speaker 1: a single bed matched the location in the old print,
Speaker 1: though the pattern triangles staggered red and yellow was irrefutably
Speaker 1: the same. I surveyed the ground for any clue a
Speaker 1: bed had been shifted, but the soil offered only compacted
Speaker 1: grass and memories of heavier feet. In a nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: three park survey, typewritten with prickly precision, a path reaches
Speaker 1: through the Linden Alley cutting in a line now broken
Speaker 1: by bramble. The surveyor described the primary west walk as
Speaker 1: essential for guiding visitors to the lake. That path, to
Speaker 1: day is little more than a suggestion. The paving dressed
Speaker 1: in moss, and most regulars say it's always been closed
Speaker 1: off since before their time. Some morning I tried to
Speaker 1: trace it, brushing aside dewet leaves. The moss offered a
Speaker 1: resistance that felt personal, as if the park itself politely
Speaker 1: denied memory. One Sunday, with the chime still sparkling underneath
Speaker 1: the surface, of dawn. I watched as a flock of
Speaker 1: pigeons launched from the tower's ledge. Instead of the normal
Speaker 1: direct scatter, they rose in crisp polygons, wings catching in angles,
Speaker 1: a strange ceremony of geometry. I blinked, looked again. The
Speaker 1: flock had dispersed, yet their pattern burned against the mist
Speaker 1: for a moment. When the next chime hit the sixty
Speaker 1: first minute, a stand of birches at the park's edge
Speaker 1: began shedding their leaves in a pale, silent cascade. It
Speaker 1: was weeks early and the air was still warm. I
Speaker 1: noted the time, found myself checking the dial. My chalked
Speaker 1: primes had survived the night, but after the chime half
Speaker 1: my marks were faded or split, petals now pressed into
Speaker 1: shallow grooves in their place. I recruited Sarah and Martha,
Speaker 1: seeking not confirmation but new ways to ask why. Over
Speaker 1: tea from Martha's battered thermas, perched on the checkered grout
Speaker 1: of our unofficial council table, I recounted the dial's shifting notches. Sarah,
Speaker 1: ever practical, offered Rob, there's got to be a psychological answer.
Speaker 1: None of us are sleeping enough, not really, if you
Speaker 1: want my theory, the park changes, yes, but as a
Speaker 1: feeling when there's no nothing, fixed place plays tricks. It's
Speaker 1: just big enough to forget yourself in, and we're urban
Speaker 1: enough to need stories to fill those blanks. Martha sipped,
Speaker 1: hands folded around the cup. I remember silent summers in
Speaker 1: the war. The clocks didn't mean much. Sometimes I feel
Speaker 1: I'm waiting for an appointment that's always just left. Why
Speaker 1: wouldn't a park's memory be as pond like as the
Speaker 1: city s, never showing the same shape twice, the conversation
Speaker 1: drifted between city gossip and the faint perennial ache of nostalgia.
Speaker 1: I scanned their faces for skepticism, but found instead the
Speaker 1: easy acceptance of those who have lived too long to
Speaker 1: demand certainties of the world. The contradictions gnawed at me
Speaker 1: with new teeth. I needed to dig further, to move
Speaker 1: past the ordinary rhythm that had guided my search so far.
Speaker 1: I went to the city library, its modern stacks at odds,
Speaker 1: with the smell of dust and binding glue. Working my
Speaker 1: way through city planning fold event fliers back to the
Speaker 1: nineteen tens, I searched for pretext, some origin of the
Speaker 1: park's temporal slip. There in a sidelong reference. Buried in
Speaker 1: the minutes of a beautification committee was a name j. F. Brandt, Clockmaker,
Speaker 1: consultant donor for redevelopment nineteen hundred and twenty two twenty nine.
Speaker 1: The archivist dug out an inventory sheet, and in a
Speaker 1: stroke of rare luck, offered, there's a box labeled park
Speaker 1: clocks and loose gears up in the maintenance storage loft
Speaker 1: above the old changing rooms. Go on up. If you
Speaker 1: find mice, just mind your ankles. The store room was
Speaker 1: the kind of place that tempers curiosity with allergies, a
Speaker 1: haphazard jumble of decades old tools, campaign ribbons, and lengths
Speaker 1: of cracked rubber hose. My flashlight caught the outlines of
Speaker 1: a battered wooden box just as listed J. F. Brandt
Speaker 1: time inside second hand grandeur brass gear, fragments, several musty
Speaker 1: envelopes sealed with twine, and at the very bottom a slim,
Speaker 1: battered leather bound journal, spine bent by long fingers. I
Speaker 1: sat cross legged among the cleaning supplies and leaf mulchres,
Speaker 1: peeling open the cover. The first pages held sketches gears
Speaker 1: not quite circular cogs, interleaved prime tooth by prime tooth,
Speaker 1: the dial's ring replicated with obsessive care. The entries were
Speaker 1: a pastiche of lucid engineering and wandering poetry. Some read
Speaker 1: like design notes interval two short pulse dare not align
Speaker 1: with the city bell. Others morphed into reverie. To miss
Speaker 1: a second is to open new hours. Memory as a mirror,
Speaker 1: always polishing, never reflecting the same star twice. The phrase
Speaker 1: that burrowed under my skin a place to keep hidden times,
Speaker 1: times that do not coincide. Brandt's logic was idiosyncratic but rigorous.
Speaker 1: He believed time, as marked by the city clock time
Speaker 1: calendar time was an imposition a grid on something rounder
Speaker 1: and stranger. Parks for him were islands on strange rivers,
Speaker 1: gathering eddies and off currents of hours displaced from the
Speaker 1: rest of life's traffic. He referenced the construction of a
Speaker 1: dial as a way of indexing these hours, scored to
Speaker 1: prime intervals for the safest concealment from sequence a section
Speaker 1: near the end. Some listeners may hear the bell, they
Speaker 1: will not agree on its hour or note. The dial
Speaker 1: may change to reflect the sum of their noticing this
Speaker 1: is the only time I wish to keep measured, not
Speaker 1: in clocks, but in the pattern of who remembers and how.
Speaker 1: There were pages describing the assembly of secret devices beneath
Speaker 1: the park, components never cataloged, prime aligned beneath the foundation,
Speaker 1: but exactly what was built. Brandt did not or could
Speaker 1: not say, No mechanism endures alone. He wrote, it is
Speaker 1: always walked upon, gazed past, and altered by witness. In
Speaker 1: this way, the dial survives, as does the hour it keeps.
Speaker 1: If you find this notebook, ask what is being counted
Speaker 1: and who chooses it. Reading this, I realized I needed
Speaker 1: new perspective. Whatever was happening was not reducible to a
Speaker 1: trick or even a solitary curiosity. Brandt meant what he
Speaker 1: built to withstand questions and outlast certainty. Needing expertise, I
Speaker 1: called doctor Wu, an old acquaintance and a physicist at
Speaker 1: the local university. Lured by the promise of impossible clocks
Speaker 1: and a city park anomaly, she arrived on a raw,
Speaker 1: gusty morning, notebook full of equations, and her eyes quick
Speaker 1: as always, She examined the stone dial with the scrutiny
Speaker 1: of someone trained to dismiss the improbable. I recited my findings,
Speaker 1: the sixty one minute cycles, the vanished chime in audio,
Speaker 1: the prime numbered notches seeming to shift as we observed them.
Speaker 1: Doctor Wu listened, measured, and finally shook her head, a
Speaker 1: delighted irritation in her voice. Robert, you're offering me either
Speaker 1: the world's most esoteric art installation or a case study
Speaker 1: in collective suggestion. I don't doubt your data, but time
Speaker 1: doesn't work this way, not for the world, not for objects,
Speaker 1: unless you count quantum weirdness, which, forgive me, does not
Speaker 1: scale up to squirrels and garden beds. Psychological resonance perhaps,
Speaker 1: or a form of acoustic suggestion so subtle the city
Speaker 1: could never afford it. I pushed her further, offering up
Speaker 1: Brandt's journal. She paged through, whistled at the sketches, but
Speaker 1: stopped at the phrase prime intervals. Mathematically, it's clever. Primes
Speaker 1: aren't periodic. They never repeat at regular intervals. If you
Speaker 1: mapped an experience to prime sequence, no one would ever
Speaker 1: sink at the same rate. You'd always be out of
Speaker 1: phase with any one else. But physically, now, there's nothing
Speaker 1: in known physics that lets a place reset on a
Speaker 1: schedule of prime intervals. Memory, though, that's another beast. We
Speaker 1: spent an hour with her instruments, a portable EIRF reader,
Speaker 1: a higher microphone, a GPS tracker that showed with unsettling inaccuracy.
Speaker 1: Are spot flickering five meters east and then west again
Speaker 1: at each chime point. You're sure you're not orchestrating this,
Speaker 1: she asked, half in jest. It's a freakish feedback loop
Speaker 1: if so. But if not, then I'm left with some
Speaker 1: new third thing, a park that's engineered intentionally or not
Speaker 1: to keep a kind of time no clock can count,
Speaker 1: or at least to convince people that it does. The
Speaker 1: exchange left me shaken but vindicated. The boundaries of the
Speaker 1: anomaly had outgrown personal obsession. The records, the memories, the plants,
Speaker 1: and now the very measurements of physics were either complicit
Speaker 1: or confounded. I changed tack, seeking pattern in the people
Speaker 1: instead of the stones. Chess tables became my forum. The
Speaker 1: park's oldest devotees, my interlocutors, my first group three pensioners, Gerald, Loretta,
Speaker 1: and Martha match. They gained glacial voices, gentle tell me
Speaker 1: about the bell in the mornings, I opened notebook in hand.
Speaker 1: They glanced at one another, each waiting for the other
Speaker 1: to answer. Loretta spoke first. When I was a girl,
Speaker 1: the bell came at dawn, tint and abulation. My mother
Speaker 1: called it always near the fountain, right before the pets woke.
Speaker 1: Gerald counted, nonsense. There were two bells, one sharp, one flat,
Speaker 1: by the old rhododendrons. If you missed them, the day
Speaker 1: never turned out right. Martha smiling. I remember the bell,
Speaker 1: but only in midsummer. The winters were too fierce. Even
Speaker 1: the birds went silent. Still, there's always been some kind
Speaker 1: of marker. You ask me. The park is timeless, except
Speaker 1: for the moments you remember too well. They traded stories,
Speaker 1: lost shoes found on distant benches, flower beds that moved,
Speaker 1: goodbyes delivered to people who in subsequent days insisted they'd
Speaker 1: never met. The chime threaded through a motif to which
Speaker 1: each gave private rhythm and geography. I tried once more
Speaker 1: for objectivity, enlisting a professional surveyor, Denise, to chart the
Speaker 1: stone dial's surface with a laser level, calipers, photos, every
Speaker 1: digital measurement she could muster. We tracked the notches after
Speaker 1: each chime. Denise scrolled through her cloud of data, frowning.
Speaker 1: If this is just erosion, it's the most targeted weathering
Speaker 1: I've seen. The shifts aren't random, but I can't call
Speaker 1: them human work either. I mapped every change in the
Speaker 1: dial alongside my chime log, a blur of primes and intervals.
Speaker 1: Each new chime, sometimes erased a scratch, sometimes carved a
Speaker 1: new one. Yet the sequence never repeated, never cycled through
Speaker 1: the same combination. The pattern flirted with coherence before darting
Speaker 1: back into enigma. That night, I dreamed of prime numbers
Speaker 1: skipping like stones across water, each ripple a garden path,
Speaker 1: a chessboard, a face receding into the mist. Before I
Speaker 1: could recall whom I had come to meet, I woke,
Speaker 1: resolved to test the park itself, not its records or people. Sarah,
Speaker 1: increasingly invested, agreed to a new experiment. We divided the park.
Speaker 1: She stationed herself near the botanical enclosure with a journal.
Speaker 1: I kept to the dial. Ken ran laps anywhere he wished.
Speaker 1: Each of us was to document plant and animal behavior
Speaker 1: at every chime. Our findings, reviewed over warm quass Us,
Speaker 1: read like case notes from parallel worlds. At the sound
Speaker 1: of the bell, Sarah recorded a patch of lilies blossoming
Speaker 1: all at once, a spray of water from a broken fountain,
Speaker 1: inexplicably arking against gravity, children spinning in chase with improbable synchrony.
Speaker 1: Ken meanwhile wrote of runners appearing and vanishing like time lapse, ghosts,
Speaker 1: dog barks, echoing before the dogs themselves had entered view.
Speaker 1: When I read my own note, squirrels doubling back from
Speaker 1: twig to stone, petals wrinkling as if closing through an
Speaker 1: invisible dusk, I felt something click. None of our observed
Speaker 1: phenomenon matched. The chime was real, but it was never
Speaker 1: the same phenomenon for more than one observer. The only
Speaker 1: commonality was the act of attending. When we tried to
Speaker 1: catch the chime, reality replied in kind, but always individually.
Speaker 1: The realization struck active participation was the catalyst. The chime
Speaker 1: revealed not an objective event, but a set of possible events,
Speaker 1: each co existing, reshaping memory and arrangement around whoever noticed
Speaker 1: it was in Brandt's phrase, measured by the pattern of
Speaker 1: who remembers and how I tested the dial with tokens
Speaker 1: now pebbles, leaves, a small carved rook wrapped in string.
Speaker 1: I placed them on prime marked notches, left them overnight,
Speaker 1: checked each after the chime. Sometimes they vanished. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: showed signs of inexplicable aging. A beef brittle and pale,
Speaker 1: as if sun dried. A pebble darkened with an algae
Speaker 1: that only grew in winter. The chest piece split cleanly
Speaker 1: across its base. No pattern held for long. The more
Speaker 1: I tried to systematize, the more the park seemed to
Speaker 1: treat each attempt as a unique request, gently undermined by
Speaker 1: whatever restless intelligence flickered beneath its design. Worse or more wondrously,
Speaker 1: the city's official records declined coherence. Digital PDF blueprints, when downloaded,
Speaker 1: offered subtle variations. On some the northern flower beds extended
Speaker 1: deep into the playground. On others, the dial itself was missing.
Speaker 1: Even my print outs, stuck to the fridge with magnets,
Speaker 1: sometimes sported annotations I didn't recall making yet. Sarah checking
Speaker 1: her copies, found my markings, but in different spots. The
Speaker 1: irreducible truth time, as we conceived it, was not the
Speaker 1: constant in the park. It bent not in grand flourishes,
Speaker 1: but in price it weed laced increments, seasons overlapped in
Speaker 1: the foliage, memories drifted out of focus or sharpened with intent,
Speaker 1: and only the chime, meeted by prime intervals, offered the
Speaker 1: faintest kind of order, an order that refused to coincide
Speaker 1: for more than one observer at a time. Ken, summoned
Speaker 1: to share his shift schedule, opened a spiral bound notepad
Speaker 1: and laughed, rob I never trust my phone here. Some
Speaker 1: days the jog feels like half an hour, others a marathon.
Speaker 1: Lately I dreamed clocks moving backwards. He shrugged, stretching as
Speaker 1: though time itself were a muscle. Martha meanwhile reported her
Speaker 1: chest matches, stretching, warping. Sometimes ten moves take an hour.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they're finished before the tea cools. I like it.
Speaker 1: It reminds me I'm still a piece on the board.
Speaker 1: I looked inward. Had I changed? I found my own
Speaker 1: sense of routine, less solid, hours packed tight, Then ran thin.
Speaker 1: I'd crossed from tulip beds to the greenhouse, and for
Speaker 1: get for a moment why I'd gone, until the hush
Speaker 1: of the chime pooled between my ears. My memory wasn't unreliable, quite,
Speaker 1: it was collaborative. When I stopped chasing patterns and let
Speaker 1: the day happen, things fell neatly into place. When I pressed,
Speaker 1: the park pushed back, never with hostility, just a smile
Speaker 1: under the surface, nudging my certainties into motion. Sarah and
Speaker 1: I tried to break the system, to force it to
Speaker 1: a line. We set up cameras, established synchronized phone alarms,
Speaker 1: left coded notes for ourselves before each chime. Each time
Speaker 1: our observations drifted apart, the park responded only with gentle disorder.
Speaker 1: A dog pausing to stare at an empty patch of grass,
Speaker 1: a flower bed blinking from one corner to another. In
Speaker 1: a series of photos, with nothing else shifted, it grew
Speaker 1: impossible to deny. This was not a prank, nor a
Speaker 1: riddle to solve. It was a property, a resonance between seeing, listening,
Speaker 1: and the acute emulation of lived attention. The chime might
Speaker 1: be the artifact, but the park itself was the mechanism,
Speaker 1: a system choosing flexibility over fact, uncertainty over order, belonging
Speaker 1: over measure. Doctor Wu returned more intrigued than ever, clutching
Speaker 1: a sheaf of annotated formulas, and half formed hypotheses. Best
Speaker 1: I can offer, she mused, is a metaphor. The park
Speaker 1: is not just a place but an overlay, like a
Speaker 1: photographic exposure. Stacking slightly different moments on top of each
Speaker 1: other prime numbers would make that impossible to predict, always
Speaker 1: misaligning anything repetitive. What I'm hearing from your stories is
Speaker 1: a kind of time keeping by osmosis. Every visitor gets
Speaker 1: their own overlay, never quite matching any one else s.
Speaker 1: If you mark it, it moves. If you remember it,
Speaker 1: it's already shifted. I'd call it a stable uncertainty, she paused,
Speaker 1: considering not a trap, more like a kindness to time,
Speaker 1: a way to make space for difference without declares, glaring
Speaker 1: anything wrong. I let her words rattle around my head.
Speaker 1: The dial, the stones, the flowers, even the regulars. Each
Speaker 1: was a pointer, not a pin. The park gathered stories,
Speaker 1: re arranged details, and allowed each person, at every chime
Speaker 1: to live a slightly variant hour, harmonized not by consensus
Speaker 1: but by the willingness to listen for one's own note
Speaker 1: in the air. The central realization built itself not with logic,
Speaker 1: but with feeling. The park offered not a single truth,
Speaker 1: but a plural. To witness a chime was to participate
Speaker 1: in the emergence of possibility. Time as a quietly democratic mechanism,
Speaker 1: both in and out of joint, flexing around attention instead
Speaker 1: of dictating it. The wrong chime, the prime cycles, the
Speaker 1: vanished paths. They were not errors or hauntings, but a
Speaker 1: celebration of those who lingered, those who attuned themselves to
Speaker 1: more gracious clock, a final test, but not a measurement.
Speaker 1: I went to the dial before dawn, left the tools
Speaker 1: at home, brought only myself, a blank page in my
Speaker 1: note book, and hands open on my knees. Mist feathered,
Speaker 1: the grass, cloaking the stones inde. The city rumbled distantly,
Speaker 1: its machinery waking with the day. I closed my eyes,
Speaker 1: not to exclude, but to attune, to await, not to catch.
Speaker 1: The chime arrived not as a note nor a tone,
Speaker 1: but a shimmer in the damp, a halo of fog
Speaker 1: curling above the dial, the faintest echo, sparking where birds
Speaker 1: ruffled their wings, petals shimmering on a breathless stem. There
Speaker 1: was no anxiety, no rush to mark the time. The
Speaker 1: world contracted gently around the moment, the chime I knew
Speaker 1: was wrong for the hour by every outside measure, yet
Speaker 1: perfectly aligned to me, my own clock briefly in phase
Speaker 1: before the park gathered up uncertainty and folded it away
Speaker 1: for another hour. For those seconds, I felt an unforced tranquility,
Speaker 1: a contentment rooted in friendly humility, a placeness that persevered
Speaker 1: not because every detail was accounted for, but because it
Speaker 1: offered so many stitched, independent versions of itself. I realized
Speaker 1: that my long vigil had not been one of exclusion,
Speaker 1: but of gentle enrollment, joining a sequence measured in overlaps,
Speaker 1: not alignments. Around me. The park's people resumed. Martha arrived
Speaker 1: with a chess board, Ken with his slow swinging stride,
Speaker 1: Arif with his sweeping brush, each to their own rhythm.
Speaker 1: Each I sensed, measuring the park not by clocks, but
Speaker 1: by the notes. They heard, the patterns they remembered. The
Speaker 1: dial recalcitrant as ever, greeted the day with a half
Speaker 1: glimpse of prime perfection, changing elusive at peace, I wrote
Speaker 1: in my note book, no longer tabulating, simply bearing witness.
Speaker 1: The chime comes as it does. The park keeps more
Speaker 1: hours than any city, and each of us on hearing
Speaker 1: its bell shapes our own stretch of morning. Let memory
Speaker 1: stay fluid, Let the dial shift. Some mysteries want keeping
Speaker 1: the city flourished. Beyond the hedges, cars horns, the first
Speaker 1: street vendor shouting for custom. Here the boundaries blurred. No
Speaker 1: clock governed what came next except this moment, arranged by
Speaker 1: prime logic, shaped by attention, left open to be lived
Speaker 1: rather than solved. And I wondered, as the next chime
Speaker 1: waited in the wings of time, what sort of hour
Speaker 1: the world would keep if we chose only to listen
Speaker 1: instead of counting. And that is the end. Thank you
Speaker 1: for listening, and I will see you in the next one.