The Bone Clocks

MY OLD HOUSE LOOKS haunted tonight, silhouetted against Toronto’s smeary glow. Stars are caged like fireflies in the interlacing twigs. I tell the car, “Headlights off, radio off,” and Toru Takemitsu’s From Me Flows What You Call Timestops in midphrase. 23:11, says my car clock. I’m too weighed down to bestir myself. Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? Or are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths, only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us? “To what end?” I ask my car, the night, Canada. My bones, body, and soul feel drained. I rose before five this morning to catch the six fifty-five flight to Vancouver, and when I arrived at Coupland Heights Psychiatric Hospital I found not a patient presenting Messiah Syndrome and acute precognition, but a press pack besieging the main entrance. Inside, my ex-student and friend Dr. Adnan Buyoya was enduring the worst day of his professional life. I sat in on a meeting with Oscar Gomez’s wife, her brother, their lawyer, and a trio of senior managers. The representative from the hospital’s private security company was “unavoidably absent,” though their lawyer was taking notes. Mrs. Gomez’s face was a mess of tear streaks. She swung from misery to fury: “There are TV cameras outside our house! The kids saw their dad on YouTube, but they don’t know if he’s a miracle worker or a criminal or a lunatic or … or … We daren’t switch on the TV or go online, but we can’t help it, either. Where ishe? You’re a secure unit—it says so on the signs! How can Oscar just vanish into thin air?”

Adnan Buyoya is a gifted young psychiatrist, but all he could say was he didn’t yet know how Mr. Gomez had escaped from a locked room, unnoticed by hospital staff and unrecorded by the CCTV, which must have malfunctioned. The male nurse who was on duty last night had told Adnan that Mr. Gomez was claiming that Saint Mark had promised to bring Jacob’s Ladder down during the night and take him up to heaven to discuss the building of the Kingdom of God on earth—but, of course, the nurse had hardly taken the warning seriously at the time. The hospital manager assured Mrs. Gomez that the first priority was to locate her husband, and promised a full inquiry into the security breach. Adnan observed that after 750,000 YouTube hits—probably millions by now—it could be only a matter of time before “The Seer of Washington Street” was identified. I said nothing until called upon to predict Mr. Gomez’s next move. I noted that a majority of Messiah Syndromes are short-lived, but owing to Mr. Gomez’s lack of a case history, I had no data upon which to base a guess. “Friggin’ A,” muttered Mrs. Gomez’s brother, “yet another expert who can tell us doodly friggin’ squat.”

I could, in fact, have told Mrs. Gomez’s brother doodly frigging everything, but some truths are inadmissible in the court of the sane. Anyway, Mrs. Gomez would not have believed that she is now a widow, and that her children will die wondering what happened to their father on April 1, 2025. After the meeting, all I could do was to stop Adnan apologizing for summoning me across three Canadian time zones to meet a patient who had escaped hours prior to my arrival. I bade my ex-student and colleague good luck and left Coupland Hospital via the kitchens. It took a while to locate my rented car in the vast, rainy parking lot. When I did, my day took an even stranger turn, and not in a good way.

A barn owl hoots. Move. I can’t sit here all night.

A SHOEBOX-SIZED PARCEL forwarded by Sadaqat is waiting on the kitchen table, but I haven’t eaten all day, so I put it aside and microwave a dish of stuffed aubergines prepared by my once-a-week housekeeper, Mrs. Tavistock. I crank up the heating. The snow’s all melted but it doesn’t yet feel like spring. I wash down my supper with a glass of rioja, and read an article in the Korean Psychiatric Journal. Only then do I remember the parcel. The sender is one Еge Nжss-Шdegеrd from a school for the deaf in Trondheim, Norway, a country I haven’t visited since I was Klara Koskov. I take the parcel into my study to check it with a handheld explosives detector. The LED stays green, so I remove the two outer skins of brown paper. Inside is a sturdy cardboard box, containing a cocoon of bubble wrap enclosing a second box crafted from mahogany. I lift its hinged lid to find a Ziplock plastic bag containing a Sony Walkman of a chunky 1980s design. Plugged into it is a set of earphones made of metal, plastic, and foam. The Walkman contains a C30 BASF cassette, a brand whose very existence I had forgotten. After deploying the explosives detector on the Walkman, I read the three-page letter that was also stowed in the mahogany box:

Шvre Fjellberg Skole for Dшve

Gransveien 13,

7032 TRONDHEIM

Norge/Norway

15 March 2025

Dear “Marinus,”