Ben Lerner - 10:04 - A Novel

I saw my dad do it and my coaches and my friends and I did it basically without knowing it, had done it all my life, the protester said, catching his breath, and then the other day we were in the McDonald’s bathroom by the park where the manager lets us go and my friend Chris was just like, When are you going to quit acting like it weighs so much, man? Do you need help with that or something? And that was the first time I even realized I was doing it, realized that all these men were always doing it, and I just stopped. I mean, I know it’s not the point of Occupy, but I’m telling you that now I don’t size men up in terms of fights all the time and I don’t act like my cock weighs a ton and it does make me see the world a little differently, you know?

After we cleaned up together we walked to the train; I was meeting Alex at Lincoln Center. Before he got off at Wall Street, I told him to text me if he or a friend needed to shower again and that I was sure I’d see him at the park regardless, that I was often at the People’s Library, but I never did. It felt strange and unsettling to stay on the train as the protester got off and the doors closed, to continue uptown toward a center for the performing arts, but I never considered altering my plan.

Alex and I found each other in the relatively short line on Sixty-second Street for Christian Marclay’s The Clock . The twenty-four-hour video work was running continuously for one week. Wait times were unpredictable; we’d met in and abandoned the line twice before when the estimated wait was two hours or more; now it didn’t look so bad, probably because it was a work night. Alex and I hadn’t seen each other in a few days and could catch up while we waited side by side.

She had been to see her mother in New Paltz and, while her mom had looked unchanged since the last visit a month before — frail, but no more frail — much of her talk now was frankly about death, indiscriminate cytotoxins circulating through her. It’s not that she thinks she’s dying tomorrow or has given up on trying to live for many years, Alex said, but she clearly thinks of her remaining time as the prolongation of the illness and not its outside. Alex’s mother, a sociologist who taught at the state university in New Paltz, had raised her largely on her own; Alex’s father, who was from Martinique, was never married to her mother, and Alex had no clear memory of him. Her stepfather, also a professor at SUNY New Paltz, had been around since she was six; he was gentle, attentive, and, Alex reported, increasingly, if quietly, desperate now.

“Meanwhile,” Alex said, clearly wanting to change the subject, “I learned today that I have to get my fucking wisdom teeth removed.”

“I thought you did that as a kid.”

“I had two out but they left two on top they thought weren’t going to cause problems and now they’re ‘impacted’ and have cavities because I can’t reach them when I brush.”

“When are you going to do it?”

“Soon, before my health insurance runs out. It will still cost me at least a thousand dollars, by the way, because of how bad my dental is.”

“Shit. I’m sorry. Let me know when you schedule it and I’ll go with you. I’ll make you soup. I’ve been working on my cooking.”

“You’ll like this: the receptionist says I can either just do local anesthetic or a heavier IV thing and I’m supposed to choose which one to do. The dentist says just to do local but almost nobody I know has just done local.”

“What did you do as a kid?”

“That’s the thing — I can’t remember. I asked my mom and she said she thought I did something heavier. Apparently if you do the IV sedation it induces amnesia. That’s why so many people have trouble remembering what they did. The difference isn’t really in how much pain you experience but in whether you remember it.”

“I wouldn’t want them working on me when they know I won’t remember what they’re doing.”

“I’ll probably just do local.”

I thought about offering to pay for whatever her insurance wouldn’t cover, and worried she was leaning toward local only because it was cheaper, but I wasn’t sure if she’d appreciate the gesture, so I let it go.

I told her about the protester, hoping to cheer her up with the whole pissing-contest thing, and the line moved or seemed to move quickly; we’d waited well under an hour when we were let in. The Clock is a clock: it’s a twenty-four-hour montage of thousands of scenes from movies and a few from TV edited together so as to be shown in real time; each scene indicates the time with a shot of a timepiece or its mention in dialogue; time in and outside of the film is synchronized. Marclay and a team of assistants spent several years sifting through a century of film for possible footage for their collage. When we found our seats it was 11:37; the tension of imminent midnight was palpable, the twenty-three and a half hours of film that preceded us building inexorably to that climax. (I had wanted to arrive by 10:04 to see lightning strike the courthouse clock tower in Back to the Future , allowing Marty to return to 1985, but Alex couldn’t get a train back from her mother’s in time.) Now the actors in each scene, no matter how incongruous, struck me as united in anticipation of that threshold. Even though we had arrived only twenty-three minutes before the end of the day, we were immediately riveted. Several consecutive people on the screen were on the phone begging for stays of execution.

When the hour arrived, Orson Welles fell from the clock tower in The Stranger ; Big Ben, which I would come to learn appears frequently in the video, exploded, and people in the audience applauded; some kind of zombie woman emerged from a grandfather clock and everybody laughed. But then, a minute later, a young girl awakes from a nightmare and, as she’s comforted by her father (Clark Gable as Rhett Buttler), you see Big Ben ticking away again outside their window, no sign of damage. The entire preceding twenty-four hours might have been the child’s dream, a storm that never happened, just one of many ways The Clock can be integrated into an overarching narrative. Indeed, it was a greater challenge for me to resist the will to integration than to combine the various scenes into coherent and compelling fiction, in part due to Marclay’s use of repetition: at 11:57 a young woman tries to seduce a boy; at 1:19 they reappear, sleeping in separate beds; what has passed between them? It was impossible not to speculate on what had transpired in the interval, in that length of fictional time synchronized with nonfictional duration, the beating of a compound heart.

Scores of people left the theater after midnight. We remained for exactly three hours; strangely, even though you knew you’d walk out on the film eventually, it felt disrespectful to leave in the middle of an hour. I would return at different times in subsequent days and come to love how, as you spend time with the video, you develop a sense of something like the circadian clock of genre: the hour of 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. — rumored to be the first hour Marclay had completed because there are so many scenes of people “watching the clock” in that interval — was dominated by actors leaving work; around noon you could expect an uptick in westerns, in shoot-outs; etc. Marclay had formed a supragenre that made visible our collective, unconscious sense of the rhythms of the day — when we expect to kill or fall in love or clean ourselves or eat or fuck or check our watch and yawn.

At some point in the second hour of watching with Alex, I noticed she had drifted off, and I surreptitiously checked the time on my phone. Half an hour or so later, I did it again, realizing only then that the gesture was absurd: I was looking away from a clock to a clock. I was a little embarrassed to realize how ingrained this habit of distraction was for me, but decided it revealed something important about the video that I’d forgotten it was telling me the time.