Story 1
The Spare Minute
The clock tower on the padang has been wound by hand every night for one hundred and four years, and for the last forty of them the hand has belonged to Encik Rahim bin Salleh, who climbs the ninety-one steps at six minutes past midnight because his knees have negotiated that particular schedule with the rest of him and neither party wishes to reopen the agreement.
Tonight he carries, besides the ring of keys and the flask of barley water, a letter from the municipal engineering department. He knows it by heart. The tower's movement will be converted to an automatic electric drive, effective tomorrow. His service is noted with appreciation. There is a form to return.
Rahim is not bitter about the letter. Machines should rest, and so should winders. What concerns him is item four of the Winders' Handbook, a document that exists in exactly one copy, handwritten, passed from winder to winder since before the war. Item four says: THE RESERVE MUST BE EMPTY AT HANDOVER.
The reserve is the part of the job he has never put on any form.
It is like this. When a person somewhere below in the city wishes for one more minute, and wishes it all the way through, meaning it in the marrow and not merely in the mouth, the wish does not evaporate. It drifts. It settles upward, the way heat does, and it collects in the tower the way dust collects in any high room, and once in a long while the winder finds it in the morning: a single spare minute, small and heavy as a coin, lying in the tray beneath the escapement. The winders keep them in a brass drum the size of a condensed-milk tin.
