Time out of Mind

Mystery doesn't always come enshrouded by fog.  You may meet it in a sunlit room and be no less confounded by it.  Our class at Science High, for example, faced the baffling problem of the auditorium clock.

Every other timepiece in the building ran, and ran on correct time: the auditorium clock remained steadfast at 2:50.  We would've dismissed this strange dereliction on its part as trivial had not one of the seniors attempted to explain it to us.

"Yours is the first coed class here," he reminded us enviously, "and you took your entrance exam in front of that clock.  My theory is that it was so horrified by the mingling of the sexes that it went into a Victorian swoon.  Nothing but our return to an all-boy setup will revive it."

We newcomers rejected his hypothesis.  "That clock isn't Victorian," we insisted.  "It's antediluvian.  It simply died of old age."

"It's no older than the others," he pointed out.  "And in this school you'll learn to leave no mystery unplumbed.  At any rate the senior class is bequeathing that clock to you, so the problem's now entirely yours."

Thus the seed was planted.  Why did that clock‑-and only that clock‑-stand still?  It was a question that haunted our class for the three years we attended our high school.

Some of us adopted the relativity theory as an explanation.  Study halls were always held in the auditorium: compared to the passage of time in them, the clock's movements would have surpassed the speed of light.  Since this couldn't be done, the clock had stopped altogether.

More widely held was the Black Mike theory.  Each shift of students (there were three) had to assemble in the auditorium before reporting to homerooms.  Our entrance was greeted daily by a thundering, "All right, you kids, we'll have none of that noise!"  This bellow from the gargantuan lungs of Black Mike Levenson, the gym teacher, served only as an introductory remark and was generally ignored.  True silence wouldn't prevail until a stentorian recital of our sins was climaxed by a boom of, "You wouldn't do that in your own homes, and you won't do it here!  Detention if you try!"  When this ultimatum resounded through the balconies, the hush was total.

Advocates of the Black Mike theory divided into two groups.  The first conjectured that there'd once been a foolish creature who'd defied the daily injunction.  Such temerity, they pointed out, would've provoked reverberations so intense that sonic shock waves were set up.  If we could only peer inside the clock, we'd find proof that its works had been shattered by such waves.  And as for the transgressing student‑-a shudder replaced all speculation on this point.

The second group who connected the clock's lack of performance with Black Mike turned to the behavioral sciences for an explanation.  They maintained that the first time that stalwart gym teacher had roared, "Quiet!" the clock had stopped in abject fear.  A man capable of silencing three hundred teenagers, they reasoned, would have no trouble stilling a mere tick-tock.  Mr. Levenson's gym classes firmly supported this view.

But our class was rife with dissenting hypotheses.  One put forth the clock as a new Prometheus, dedicated to student freedom.  Disciples of this view adduced the Monday schedule in evidence: on that day each week the entire faculty met in conference, and we were released forty-five minutes early.  The clock, to signify its blessing of the shortened day, now pointed fixedly at the ultimate goal: perpetual early dismissal.  Even those who didn't agree with this theory supported its cause.

Another explanation was offered by the select few fascinated with psychology.  They claimed it wasn't saintliness but schizophrenia that made auditorium time so constant.  They attributed the clock's frozen position to the consternation caused by assembly days.

The auditorium, even with its balconies, couldn't hold more than half the student body.  Assemblies, therefore, were given twice, beginning at the end of the second period.  Students attending the first show reported immediately afterwards to their third period class.  Those who were scheduled for the second program went to their third period class beforehand.  To make up for the time lost through assemblies, the eighth period was eliminated entirely.

Now that elimination by itself would have dazed a dozen clocks, but the time masters at Science High went still further.  In a frenzy of mathematical inspiration, they realized their scheduling would work only if assemblies lasted no more than forty-five minutes.  Since none of them could remember the last program to run so short a time, they proclaimed an additional refinement: any extra minutes taken up by assemblies would be subtracted from the end of the seventh period.

With this, chaos reigned triumphant.  The school, remember, worked a three shift day.  One third of the student body finished classes with period nine, and ate their lunch during period seven.  The wild Wednesday time warps deprived them of eating time, an abuse no teenager bears lightly.

Nor were they the only ones to feel cheated.  While everyone with an eighth period class profited from its cancellation, a third of the school always ended their day with the seventh period.  They gained little from the morass of assembly day scheduling, and their screams of injustice also rent the air. 

This bitterness and confusion, it was claimed, had induced in the auditorium clock feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  When that time piece was repeatedly confronted with the assemblies that gave rise to our dissension, it retreated into catatonic escape.  Proponents of this theory adjudged the clock's case hopeless, and their prognosis for the rest of us was equally dim.

However the orchestra members, to a man, favored still another explanation.  Band rehearsals were held on Tuesdays during the last two periods of the day.  Many in the band, to say nothing of the rest of the student body and its faculty, were Jewish.  Though the school didn't close on Jewish Holy Days, attendance was so sparse that study halls or game playing was the rule.

One autumn a series of Jewish holidays occurred on Mondays and Tuesdays.  Not only did the orchestra fall behind in its practice, but anyone scheduled for a lab or a shop on those days was similarly hard pressed.  Consequently the administration declared that on an upcoming Thursday the entire school would follow a Monday schedule.  This decision governed only the main building, which didn't house the freshman class.  The annex, which did, was a half mile away.  It had its own administrators and was a world unto itself.

On the Thursday in question Eleanor and I were at our locker which, like the mysterious clock, was in the back of the auditorium.  Fiddling with the combination, Eleanor was accosted by a freshman member of the band who'd recognized her as another orchestra player.

"Hey, Eleanor, where's the band meeting?"

"There's no rehearsal today, you dunce!  It's Monday."

"No it's not, Eleanor.  You're mixed up."

"Yes it is," insisted my locker mate.  "It's Thursday but it's Monday."

"No," he corrected her.  "It's Thursday but it's Tuesday.  The annex administrator told us."

Eleanor regarded the lower classman with speculative disdain.  "Brace yourself, kid," she muttered.  "Creston Avenue has just been made the International Date Line."

I glanced at the clock behind the freshman.  "That's why the clock doesn't run," I elaborated, waving at it airily.

The freshman violinist stared at both of us.  "This whole building is nuts," he opined at last.

Neither Eleanor nor I disagreed with him.

We never solved the riddle of the clock.  When we graduated, its face still beamed a motionless enigma, and we accepted it as a phenomenon no science could explain.  But now, years later, as I rush from chore to errand, and from errand to appointment, I think back on that clock gratefully.  I wish there were more like it, and I wish it more times than one.