Part 19 (1/2)
”The world has been stopped. Your lives are stopped in it-although your souls are here now. What you have done to this point cannot be undone. What you do next ...”
He hesitated.
”What?” Victor said. ”What?”
”It is still unwritten.”
Sarah looked to Victor, who looked back. Both of them were picturing their last remembered moment: Sarah slumped in the car, inhaling poison; Victor lifted toward the ice, about to become a medical experiment.
”How did I get here?” Sarah asked.
”I carried you,” Dor said.
”What do we do now?” Victor asked.
”There is a plan.”
”What is it?”
”That is yet unknown to me.”
”How can there be a plan if you don't know what it is?”
Dor rubbed his forehead several times. He winced.
”Are you OK?” Sarah asked.
”Pain.”
”I don't get it. Why us?”
”Your fates matter.”
”More than the rest of the world?”
”Not more.”
”How did you even find us?”
”I heard your voices.”
”Stop!” Victor raised his palms. ”Stop this. Enough. Voices? Fates? You're a repair guy in a clock shop.”
Dor shook his head. ”In this moment, it is not wise to judge with your eyes.”
Victor looked away, attempting, as he always did, to solve things himself when others were incompetent. Dor lifted his chin. He opened his mouth. His vocal cords became those of a nine-year-old French boy.
”Make it yesterday.”
Victor spun, recognizing the sound of himself. Now the voice became Victor's deeper adult version. ”Another lifetime.” Dor turned to Sarah. ”Make it stop,” he said, sounding just like her.
Sarah and Victor stared in stunned silence. How could this man know their private thoughts?
”Before I came to you,” he said, ”you came to me.”
Sarah studied his face.
”You don't really fix clocks, do you?”
”I prefer them broken.”
”Why is that?” Victor said.
Dor looked at the grain of sand in his fingers.
”Because I am the sinner who created them.”
FUTURE.
70.
In Dor's happier days on Earth, his son once asked him an unusual question.
”Who will I marry?”
Dor smiled and said he didn't know.
”But you said the stones can tell you what will happen.”
”The stones can tell me many things,” Dor said. ”They can tell me when the sun will come, when it will set, how many nights until the moon is as full as your round face.”
He squeezed his son's cheeks. The boy laughed then looked away.
”But those are hard things,” he said.
”Hard?”
”The sun and the moon. They are far away. I only want to know who I will marry. If you can tell the hard things, why can't you tell me that?”
Dor smiled to himself. His son was asking the kind of questions he had asked as a boy. And Dor remembered his own frustration when he could not get an answer.
”Why do you want to know?”