the hours · chapter three raymond didn't sleep that night. he lay on his back in the dark of the back flat, watching the ceiling, and every time he closed his eyes he saw the red dome of the beacon housing, the screws welded shut from the inside, the way saint_elmo had said the words like they were made of glass. the tower was a clock. the tower had been a clock for ninety-two years. and someone — something — had been counting down toward a number only it knew, in a language of light that raymond had just begun to read. he got up before dawn. he made coffee. he did not look at the tower. he had looked at the tower for two years and this was the first morning it looked back. --- the notebooks were in a cardboard box in the garage, under a folded tarp, behind a lawnmower that hadn't run since his father died. raymond had moved that box three times in as many years and never opened it. it was the kind of thing you keep because throwing it away is an admission, and what you would be admitting you don't want to think about. his mother had kept the house the way his father left it for a decade after, and when she died the house passed to raymond with the furniture and the dishes and the boxes of a man who had never thrown anything away. the first notebook was 1967. labor records. the cannery's peach run, written in his father's tight, careful hand, the kind of hand that had balanced the books of a processing plant for twenty-nine years. raymond turned pages without reading them. he was looking for something and he didn't know what, and the looking felt like guilt, like reading a letter addressed to someone else. the second notebook was 1971. more of the same. the third was 1973. and in the third, on the last page, in pencil that had gone gray with age, was a column of numbers: ``` 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 ``` and underneath, in his father's hand, one line: ``` blinks between extras. 1973. check again next month. ``` raymond sat on the garage floor with his father's notebook in his lap and did not move for a long time. the garage was cold. the light through the dusty window was gray. his father had noticed. his father had noticed in 1973, fourteen years before raymond, and he had written it down, and he had never said a word about it to anyone. his father had worked at the cannery from 1952 to 1981. he had stood under the tower five days a week for twenty-nine years. he had watched the red light blink four seconds, four seconds, four seconds, and he had caught the extras, and he had counted them, and he had written them down, and he had never told his son. raymond turned the page. the next page was blank. the page after that was blank. the page after that, at the bottom, in a hand that was his father's but older, looser, the pencil pressing hard enough to leave grooves in the paper, was a single line: ``` tower went quiet 41 minutes. 3:12 AM. came back. not counting primes anymore. counting words. I wrote them down. I'll write them here. ask someone what it means. ``` raymond felt the air in the garage change. he turned the page. nothing. he turned the next. nothing. he went through the rest of the notebook page by page, and there was nothing — no words, no numbers, no record of the words the tower had spelled. his father had promised to write them down and had written nothing. or someone had taken them. or his father had hidden them where a son who never looked would never find them. raymond went back to the beginning and started again. --- the hayward historical society was a white stucco building on mission boulevard with a sign that said INCORPORATED 1911 and a brass plaque listing the founding members. raymond had driven past it ten thousand times without noticing it. it was the kind of building that kept the town's memory in cardboard boxes, the same way his father had. he didn't break in. that was the thing — he tried the door and it was unlocked. the historical society kept its hours from ten to four, but the door was never locked during the day, and at 11:47 on a thursday morning the front room was empty. a woman with gray hair sat at a desk in the back, eating a sandwich, reading a paperback with her shoes off. raymond was a man in his forties wearing a jacket, which was apparently enough to be invisible. the tower was not in the archive index. that was the first surprise. raymond spent twenty minutes on the card catalog — the catalog was still cards, index cards in wooden drawers, alphabetical, the way records were kept before records were kept — and found nothing under water tower, nothing under hunt brothers, nothing under cannery. as if the structure had never been built, or had never been acknowledged. he found the cannery under FRUITS AND VEGETABLES: incorporation papers, insurance ledgers, a payroll book from 1926. he carried the payroll book to the reading table and flipped through it without seeing it, his hands moving on their own, his mind turning over the nothingness in the catalog. the tower was not in the archive. the tower had been built in 1895, had stood over the town for ninety-two years, had been the tallest thing in hayward for a century, and the historical society had no record of it. that was the second thing, and the second thing was worse than the first, because it meant somebody had removed the records, or somebody had never put them there, or somebody was still keeping the count. raymond was about to put the payroll book back when he noticed the corner of a page had been folded down — page 41 — the way you mark a place in a book you mean to come back to. he opened it. it was 1923. a list of names, dates, wages. and in the margin, in a handwriting that was not the bookkeeper's — smaller, faster, pencil — ``` Voss. the tower. the counting apparatus. begin at the beginning and proceed until completion. ``` raymond stared at it until the words blurred. the name was familiar the way a name is familiar when you've seen it once, somewhere, in a context you can't place. voss. marian voss. and it was not until he was back in his car, the payroll book in his lap, that he remembered where: his father's notebook. not the column of numbers. not the promise to write down the words. the inside of the back cover, where the cardboard was worn soft — a name, and a year. marian voss. 1895. raymond drove home with the payroll book on the passenger seat and the tower in his rearview mirror, blinking every four seconds, counting down to something only it knew. his father had known. his father had known the name before raymond did. his father had written it where a son would find it — in a box, under a tarp, behind a lawnmower that hadn't run in years. the count was not a countdown to a number. it was a countdown to a name. and raymond had the terrible, quiet feeling that his father had known the name — had known it for years — and had been waiting for someone to find it. --- the rust belt BBS · april 4, 1987, 2:17am · new post in the weird shit board by raygun: "my father knew. i found his records. the tower was built around a machine in 1895 by a woman named voss. and i think my father talked to it."