Free Imperium by Christian Kracht Page A

on April 1 shortly before the turn of the century, ensured that a uniform hour could be read from the clocks of His Imperial Majesty’s German subjects throughout the entire motherland. In the colonies, meanwhile, one told time according to the respective world time zone, while on the isle of Kabakon, in a sense, a time outside of time prevailed. Which is to say Engelhardt’s clock, which he had placed on a piece of driftwood serving as a night table and wound with considerable regularity by means of a little key, had gone into arrears, temporally speaking, due to a single grain of sand; the granule had made itself comfortable within the clock between the spring and one of the hundred whirring cogs and, since it consisted of hard, pulverized corallite, was inducing a minute deceleration in the progression of Kabakonian time.
    To be sure, Engelhardt did not notice this fact right away, nor even after a few days; in fact, a few years had to pass on Kabakon before the effect of the grain of sand made itself felt. The retardation was such that the clock did not lose even one second per day, and yet something gnawed and ate at Engelhardt, who expected something like a secure footing in space from a correct indication of time. He thought himself in the ethereal, cosmic present—should he have to forsake it, that would mean for him stepping out of time, which is to say, going mad.
    That in faraway Switzerland another young vegetarian working in a patent office was compiling the theoretical underpinnings for his dissertation at precisely that moment, the contents of which but a few years later would turn upside down not only all of mankind’s previous knowledge, but to a certain extent also the viewpoint from which one perceived the world and this knowledge, and even time, was unknown to Engelhardt.
    When he contemplated whether his clock might not be running more slowly—it just seemed to him that way since he of course could not draw any comparisons to genuine, real time (the pendulum clock in the governor’s residence over in Herbertsh ö he, which one might look to as the standard time for the protectorate, had stopped due to the negligence of the staff while Hahl was convalescing in Singapore)—he suddenly had the feeling he was going to fall backward; a painful, nagging twinge in the left upper arm stabbed into him, just near the heart, as if a stroke were actually felling him at his young age. He distinctly saw the clock ticking away, his by-now-finished rattan cot, and the mosquito net attached above it with a coir rope. He was already falling into time when there appeared before his eyes, at first hazily, then in downright razor-sharp focus, not only the canary-yellow and violet painted walls of his childhood nursery, but the perfumed manifestation of his mother, bending over him with the tip of her tongue stuck out in worry and working over his hot forehead with an iced cotton cloth. His mother could not only be seen; she could in fact be felt, as if she were not long dead but present and infinite in the extreme—the boundless love that he felt for her was indeed a cosmic, a divine sensation.
    With gentle and calming words, his mother led him out onto the terrace of his parents’ home, and he became aware of the rosebushes that grew down in the garden exuding their heavy scent. It was the middle of the night. The summer crickets were putting on their somniferous night concert when his mother gestured toward the sky to show him that enormous wheel of fire rotating above in the inky firmament. To the child it looked like a savagely hungry, insatiable mouth devouring everything.
    Trembling with fear, he closed his eyes to the monstrous, burning portent, hiding his face in his mother’s bosom, the cozy fullness of which instantly sent him falling deeper, which is to say, further up, the current of time, until he came to lie in a perambulator, immobile, as his infant body was not able to turn or stretch out its little