Free Salamander by Thomas Wharton Page B

jerk to life like marionettes, pat one another on the back, drink toasts, observe that the ships were early this year, or late, or right on time, and place bets on just when the wind was likely to bring them into port.
    Every year, the same performance.
    He burned with the feverish desire to grasp time, hold it and cage it, so that he might find out what was left in its absence. He wanted not so much to escape his enemy as to subdue it. He became obsessed with numbers, and during Mass would keep a running tally of coughs and sneezes, or do sums with the rows of pearl buttons on his coat, in the hope that even such exercises in futility would use up a little more of that hated all-pervading element.
    On that particular Sunday, he was attempting to count slowly enough that one tally of all the buttons from collar to skirts and back would last from the opening hymn to at least the profession of faith. But he swiftly tired of this old ritual and was left with things as they were, with himself as he was, stiff and itchy in his starched jabot, trying to ignore his older brother’s finger jabbing him mercilessly in the ribs under cover of his folded arms. Far from a state of bliss.
    All at once he felt the dim approach of something, a presence, first as the faintest trembling in the air. Then the wooden pew beneath him began to vibrate, like the grinding of the river ice as it broke up in the spring. He glanced furtively at his brother and sisters, his parents, the other members of the congregation. No oneseemed to have noticed it. No one else but him even seemed to be breathing.
    And then, descending towards him through the clouds of incense came a dark sphere, revolving and growing larger by the moment, the deep vibrato of its ponderous spin growing louder, pressing like a physical force against his eyes, drumming through his bones, roaring in his blood.
    His adversary.
    – Each instant, the Abbé said, gazing out across the wintry valley, and every insignificant thing it contained, like the counting of those buttons on my coat, all my moments of weakness and humiliation, my every movement and eyeblink and thought, every twitch and tremor and cough of each and every other soul in that church, in the colony, in the world, not only flowing into the next moment and the next incarnation of itself, but solidifying. Each instant, each button and jab and cough and thought accreting into this grey impenetrable mass. This was the universe, and the universe was only this, an iron prison I was helping to build with every breath. This was time.
    The Abbé smiled.
    – You look pale, Mr. Flood.
    – For a child to see, or even to imagine, such a thing …
    – Well, I assure you its terrors have faded somewhat in the intervening years. I’ve come to see it as a sign, if you will, that with such powers of fancy I was destined to be an author. But at the time, yes, it did make quite an impression.
    It was then that he suffered his first bout of the recurring apoplexy that was to leave him unfit for any careerbut the church. A thunderclap to the brain that pitched him forward, the crown of his head colliding with the back of the pew in front of him. His body lying rigid, his mind aware of everything that was happening but unable to will a limb, a muscle, an eyelash to move, staring up at the vaulted ceiling of the church and into the indifferent gaze of an archangel, until he was at last lifted and carried out by his red-faced and puffing father, his weeping mother dabbing at his bleeding head with a handkerchief, his older brother, Michel, and his sisters trailing after, their eyes fixed on him in mingled fear and suspicion.
    He was brought home and installed on the sofa. The doctor, who had followed the family from church, knelt to examine him, lifted his hand by the wrist and let it drop, poked the soles of his feet with a penknife, waved a lit taper in front of his unblinking eyes. When at last he ushered Ezequiel’s parents out for a