The Clock's Shadow

The large clock hanging over what's left of the shopping mall reads four thirty-six. It has read four thirty six for thirty years now. That was the moment it all ended. That moment remains frozen in time. The clock itself ran on electric power, even though outwardly it looks like an old mechanical clock, with roman numerals and long slender hands.

When I was young I liked to think of it as a solar system in miniature, with the three hands being like planets orbiting a central star at varying speeds. Their orbital periods ranged from twelve hours to one hour to one minute.

But no one now knows how to read a clock with a face, especially one with old world roman numerals. The clock and I are old friends, communicating with each via a lost language only we still speak. Its face remains forver frozen in time.

These days I live in an old abandoned mall with a few others. The ground floor and the main plaza have long since vanished beneath the swollen seas. I lived on the second floor for the first year or so, but the encroaching damp made my cough worse so I moved higher up. I like the sense of security it gives. An old and scuffed search and rescue dingy I found adrift provides the only way in and out.

The third floor of the mall is unreachable. Escalators are blocked with concrete rubble and elevators are boarded up. There's no longer any power for them anyway. Exterior stairwells which would have once led to the rooftop parking lot are similarly sealed off. Yet someone is up there, for there are often sounds of some muffled activity, particularly in the mornings and evenings.

The only apparent entrances are two walkways at either end which lead to multi-storey parking lots in two smaller satellite buildings. Both of them are blocked by sturdy armoured doors crowned in razor wire.

I usually try to stay out of their way, though sometimes I do catch glimpses of them coming and going.

There is also an ancient computer store that is full of stuff from the old days, mainly things that are now useless. Rows of blank faced smartphones, empty black mirrors which now reflect nothing at all. There are printers, cables, dvds, guides to long-forgotten operating systems covered in the dust of years. All the physical ephemera of a virtual world which all went away the day the EMPs cast their shadow.

The place was left alone mainly because of untrue rumours that a nearby nuclear plant suffered a meltdown, shrouding the area in deadly radionuclides.

In the winter when the waters briefly recede the plaza becomes a hub of commerce, as people from across the abandoned zone come to trade and barter. There are even basic landline networks and email terminals. Elsewhere the story spread was that the inundated coastline is a ruined wasteland populated by quasi-savages, and utterly unsafe.

The truth is somewhat more complex.

One day I came across a friend of mine that I'd known since before the war. She was sitting hunched over some book, her shoulders trembling as she cried quietly. I didn't want to disturb her in her moment of silent grief. Then she put the book aside wiped her eyes and walked off. When I picked it up it was still open to the page she had been reading. It showed an illustration of a young girl in a watercolour meadow, running along with a beautiful black and white border collie. It may as well have been a graveside memorial.

Most of the people my age, I've found, are more or less like that: you try to discuss the old days with them and they get sad and freeze up. They don't want to even think about it.

So I put myself into a kind of voluntary exile here because I needed somewhere I could be alone with my thoughts and begin writing my memoir. I need to make a record of what happened. I got lucky: in a dark corner of the computer store I came across a block of printer paper, and with the pens I've managed to salvage I can begin.