S. Grove: The Glass Sentence

It was Shadrack who had persuaded his sister Minna and her husband to leave Sophia with him. The message they had received suggested unpredictable dangers for which even he could not prepare them. If Shadrack Elli, Doctor of History and Master Cartologer, could not ensure that the route would be a safe one, surely it posed too many risks for a child of only three years. Who better to understand the potential of those risks? Who better to leave her with than her beloved uncle Shadrack? They had finally departed, anxious but determined, for what they hoped would be only a brief journey.

But they had not returned. As the years passed, the likelihood of their reappearing alive diminished. Shadrack knew it; Sophia sensed it. But she refused to fully believe it. And now the anxiety Sophia felt at the thought of the borders’ closing had, in fact, little to do with the grand ambitions of exploration described in Shadrack’s speech. It had everything to do with her parents. They had left Boston in a far more lenient age, when traveling without papers was commonplace, even wise, in order to avoid theft or damage on a dangerous voyage. Bronson’s and Minna’s paper were safely stowed in a little bureau in their bedroom. If New Occident closed itself off to the world, how would they get back in? Lost in somber speculation, Sophia closed her eyes, her head resting against the seat.

With a start she realized that the air around her had grown dark and oddly cold. Her eyes snapped open. Is it night already? she thought, panic rising in her chest. She reached for her watch, looked around quickly, and realized the trolley had stopped in a tunnel. Far behind them she could see the bright entryway. So it was still daytime. But when she squinted at the watch, she discovered that it was already fourteen-hour. Sophia gasped. “Four hours!” she exclaimed out loud. “I can’t believe it!”

She hurried to the front of the trolley and saw the conductor standing on the tracks a few meters ahead of the car. There was a sharp metallic clang, and then the man lumbered back toward her.

“Still here, are you?” the conductor asked amiably. “You must like this loop to sit through it twenty-three times. That, or you like my driving.” He was heavyset, and despite the cool air in the tunnel, sweat poured off his forehead and chin. Smiling, he wiped his face with a red handkerchief as he sat down.

“I lost track of the time,” Sophia said anxiously. “Completely.”

“Ah, no matter,” he replied with a sigh. “On such a bad day—the sooner it ends the better.” He released the brake and the trolley began to roll slowly forward.

“Are you going back into the city now?”

He shook his head. “I’m heading out to the yard. You’ll have to get off at the wharf and look for a trolley heading back through downtown.”

Sophia had not been to this part of Boston in years. “Is it the same stop?”

“I’ll point you to it,” he assured her. They picked up speed as they made a sudden sharp turn to the left. Then they emerged from the tunnel, the light dazzling Sophia’s eyes. The trolley stopped once again almost immediately, and the conductor shouted, “Wharf trolley. Final stop. No passengers.” A waiting crowd looked impatiently at the tunnel for the next trolley to emerge. “Walk about fifty paces that way,” he said to Sophia, pointing past the crowd. “There’s another stop there that says ‘inbound.’ You can’t miss it.”

— 14-Hour 03: At the Wharf—

NEWS OF THE borders’ closure had already reached Boston harbor. People rushed this way and that through a confusion of carts, improvised market stands, and piles of crates, shouting orders, hurriedly unloading cargo, and making hasty arrangements for unexpected journeys. Two men were arguing over a broken crate full of lobsters; claws reached feebly through the cracked wooden slats. Seagulls cried out from every corner, dipping lazily, snapping at the stray pieces of fish and bread. The smell of the harbor—brine, tar, and the faint, enduring scent of something spoiling—wafted by on waves of hot air.

Sophia tried to get out of the way and found herself repeatedly pushed aside. As she struggled to find the trolley stop, she gave in to that familiar sense of defeat that always came with losing track of time. Their housekeeper, Mrs. Clay, would be worried sick. And Shadrack—he might still be looking for her at the State House and fear the worst when she failed to appear. As she stumbled along, Sophia suppressed the tears of frustration that threatened to spill over.

It was a frustration she felt all too frequently. Sophia, to her infinite mortification, had no internal clock. A minute could feel as long as an hour or a day. In the space of a second she might experience a whole month, and a whole month could pass in what felt to her like a second. As a young child, she had fallen daily into difficulties as a consequence. Someone would ask her a question, and Sophia would think for a moment and suddenly find that everyone had been laughing at her for a full five minutes. Once she had waited for six hours on the steps of the Public Library for a friend who never arrived. And it seemed to her that it was always time for bed.

She had learned to compensate for her missing internal clock, and now that she was thirteen she rarely lost track of time during conversations. She observed the people around her to know when it was time to eat or finish school or go to bed. And she had become accustomed to keeping a tight hold on her watch, which she checked constantly. In the drawing notebook that was always in her satchel she kept careful records of her days: maps of past and future that helped guide her through the vast abyss of unmeasured time.

But having no sense of time still troubled her in other ways. Sophia took great pride in her competence: her ability to navigate Boston and even places farther afield, as she grew older and traveled with Shadrack; her carefully disciplined work at school, which made her popular with teachers, if not always with classmates; her capacity to order and make sense of the world, so that all of Shadrack’s friends commented that she was wise beyond her years. These mattered deeply to her, and yet they could not compensate for the flaw that made her seem, in her own eyes, as flighty and absentminded as someone who had none of these abilities.

Being from a family famous for its sense of time and direction made it all the more painful. Her parents reputedly had inner compasses and clocks worthy of great explorers. Shadrack could tell the time down to the second without looking at his watch, and no amount of encouragement on his part could persuade Sophia to forget the piece of herself she felt was missing. Their joint creation, Clockwork Cora, made light of a problem that Sophia only pretended to take lightly.

She never spoke of it to her uncle, but she had a dreadful suspicion of how she had come to lose her sense of time. She pictured herself as a very young child, waiting for her parents at a dusty window. The little Sophia’s clock had ticked on and on, patiently and then worriedly and finally desperately, counting the seconds as her mother and father failed to come back. And then, when it became clear that the waiting was futile, the little clock had simply broken, leaving her without parents and without any sense of time at all.

However much Shadrack loved his niece, he could not spend every second of every day with her, and the steady stream of graduate students whom he hired to assist with the combined tasks of cartology and child care were prone to the same distractions he was. While her uncle and his assistants pored over maps, the three-year-old Sophia had spent plenty of time alone and had, in fact, sometimes waited for her parents with hands and face pressed up against a window. In her memory—in her imagination—those moments contained long hours of endless waiting. The sun rose and set, and people passed the window in a constant stream, but still she waited expectantly. On occasion, the figure of her imagination blurred, and it seemed that not a near-infant but an older child—one who had waited for many years—stood at the window. And in fact her uncle sometimes found the grown Sophia sitting at her window, lost in thought, her pointed chin tucked into her hand and her brown eyes focused on something far out of sight.