Cuckoo Clock Quotes

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.

He rolled his eyes. "First, my Dad's Korean and my mom was Swedish. Second, I totally suck at math. I don't like cuckoo clocks or skiing or fancy chocolate either." I sputtered a laugh. "I think that's Swiss.

I don't feel like Nick's wife. I don't feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don't feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

I love you crookedly because my heart's been unhinged from birth. The doctors gave me strict instructions not to fall in love: my fragile clockwork heart would never survive. But when you gave me a dose of love so powerful - far beyond my wildest dreams - that I felt able to confront anything for you, I decided to put my life in your hands.

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said. Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information - That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony - That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase - That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers - That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia - That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.

Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy's thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock.

He’s like an old clock the won’t tell time but won’t stop neither with the hands bend out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm rusted silent, an old worthless clock that keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

- he's finished with that; it's like an old clock that won't tell time but won't stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

That sounds self-indulgent and gratifying without vulgar ostentation,” says I; “and I don’t see how money could be better invested. Give me a cuckoo clock and a Sep Winner’s Self-Instructor for the Banjo, and I’ll join you.

The finished clock is resplendent. At first glance it is simply a clock, a rather large black clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted, obviously, with intricately carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face, but just a clock. But that is before it is wound. Before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging steadily and evenly. Then, then it becomes something else. The changes are slow. First, the color changes in the face, shifts from white to grey, and then there are clouds that float across it, disappearing when they reach the opposite side. Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a puzzle. As though the clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully. All of this takes hours. The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle shades of white and grey. And it is not just pieces, it is figures and objects, perfectly carved flowers and planets and tiny books with actual paper pages that turn. There is a silver dragon that curls around part of the now visible clockwork, a tiny princess in a carved tower who paces in distress, awaiting an absent prince. Teapots that pour into teacups and minuscule curls of steam that rise from them as the seconds tick. Wrapped presents open. Small cats chase small dogs. An entire game of chess is played. At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the juggler. Dress in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that correspond to each hour. As the clock chimes, another ball joins the rest until at midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern. After midnight, the clock begins once more to fold in upon itself. The face lightens and the cloud returns. The number of juggled balls decreases until the juggler himself vanishes. By noon it is a clock again, and no longer a dream.

We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

Give me a cuckoo clock and a Sep Winner's Self-Instructor for the Banjo, and I'll join you.

Tockytock, tockytock clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock, slung with strangled, wooden game.

I don't feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don't feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

Firstly: don't touch the hands of your cuckoo-clock heart. Secondly: master your anger. Thirdly: never, ever fall in love. For if you do, the hour hand will poke through your skin, your bones will shatter, and your heart will break once more.

The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.

All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney in the mill-kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary, and sometimes it seemed to Nello a little hard that whilst his gift was accepted he himself should be denied.

I live like a cuckoo in a clock, I'm not jealous of the forest birds. They wind me up—and I cuckoo. You know—such a fate I could only wish For someone I hate.

If you spend your whole life being careful not to break anything, you’ll get terribly bored, you know … I can’t think of anything more fun than being impulsive.

Out along the dim six-o’clock street, I saw leafless trees standing, striking the sidewalk there like wooden lightning, concrete split apart where they hit, all in a fenced-in ring. An iron line of pickets stuck out of the ground along the front of a tangleweed yard, and on back was a big frame house with a porch, leaning a rickety shoulder hard into the wind so’s not to be sent tumbling away a couple of blocks like an empty cardboard grocery box.

We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears. In the aftermath of loss, we do what we’ve always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can. My pastor, Veronica, one Sunday told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, sweating a little under its feathery arms. A warhorse walks up to the bird and asks, “What on earth are you doing?” The sparrow replies, “I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help.” The horse laughs a big, loud, sneering horse laugh, and says, “Do you really think you’re going to hold back the sky, with those scrawny little legs?” And the sparrow says, “One does what one can.

I wanted to create a voyage to the moon just for her, but what I should have given her was a real journey on earth.

We don’t talk, we just catch fire instead.

A finely carved Black Forest cuckoo clock hung just to the right of the hutch. Phil would love that, Reuben thought. Phil had once collected cuckoo clocks, and their constant chiming and tweeting and cooing had driven everybody at home a little nuts.

Moi Aussi I need to know you even as I never know my self that phantom ache of amputated innocence You, the stirrings of a curtain, dust settling on sepia cuckoo clocks covers obscuring Perhaps one day you will become a benign sentence an agency through which to be. Return

He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don't feel like Nick's wife. I don't feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don't feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night - throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light's screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like a sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off the pace on that clock-dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal.

Her dimples are a never-ending game, her smile is always changing, I could watch her forever.

We are each a cog in some giant cuckoo clock, one man among many in a Fordist assembly line. And

I found myself buying a cuckoo clock that, instead of a cuckoo, had a large wooden penis that popped in and out of it every hour. I gave it to John Lennon when I went to visit him.

The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information-...That is closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.

Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.

The giant fish devours the living and the dead and the inanimate. Bottles, tin cans, cuckoo clocks, truck tires, a whole sheep, an intact Newfoundland dog with its collar on, have all been taken from the stomach of white.

Glad to hear what?" asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last "I see," and popped back, clapping shut the door behind her.

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wit-tuwoo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime, and tock.

I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

Various courageous Europeans in the seventies of the last century came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft-treaties and flags of the nations which they had been obliged to leave.

Orson Welles summed it up best in The Third Man. ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

From my friend Oleksandr, a.k.a. Z --I loved this IMMEDIATELY There is a famous speech from film noir The Third Man: After all, it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The next day at school there were whisperings. I tried to ignore them, though I couldn’t help hearing the odd phrase: Cuckoo as a clock. Addled as an egg. Crazy as a box of hair. Mad as a sack of hammers. And the worst: No man in the house, so what can you expect?

...[M]ost of us have figured out that we have to do what's in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice. The equation is: life, death, resurrection, hope. The horror is real, and so you make casseroles for your neighbor, organize an overseas clothing drive, and do your laundry. You can also offer to do other people's laundry if they have recently had any random babies or surgeries. We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we'd pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. That's not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

This is the house where they found Jack dead. This is the room of the house where they found Jack dead. This is the floor in the room of the house where they found Jack dead. This is the wall, splattered in red, standing next to the floor, in the room of the house where they found Jack dead. This is the door leading into the tomb. This is the wall splattered in red, standing next to the floor in the room of the house where they found Jack dead. This is the clock hanging over the door. This is the wall splattered in red standing next to the floor in the room in the room of the house where they found Jack dead. This is the bird coming out of the clock hanging over the door in the wall by the floor in the room of the house where they found Jack dead. This is the song in the heart of the bird coming out of the clock hanging over the door in the wall by the floor in the room of the house where they found Jack dead. These are the words to the song of the bird coming out of the clock hanging over the door in the wall by the floor in the room of the house where they found Jack dead. This is the man who sits in the cell. Eleven years have come and gone. Jack is dead, but he lives on. He waits in silence, but he still can hear. The ancient song echoes in his ears. The sound of time with its tick tick TOCK! The song of the bird coming out of the clock, hanging over a door leading into a tomb, where there stand four walls splattered all in red, and a floor where a good man fell and bled, in the room of the house where they found Jack dead. These are the words of the cuckoo’s song, as he asks us who will right these wrongs. The cuckoo sings and the cuckoo wails, for the dead who cannot tell their tales. Rage all you want, but at close of day, justice is mine, and I will repay.

And I still walk the sidewalk mumbling something about how it will all be fine Fine is its own crazy village on the Rhine Fine is the name of the cuckoo-clock maker Fine is the word the cuckoo cries every hour after hour on the hour— scrambling out of its dark little hole like something being chased with a knife by Time

It is not quite true that the Swiss do not have a government. What they do not have is a large central government, or what the common discourse describes as “the” government— what governs them is entirely bottom-up, municipal of sorts, regional entities called cantons, near-sovereign mini-states united in a confederation. There is plenty of volatility, with enmities between residents that stay at the level of fights over water fountains or other such uninspiring debates. This is not necessarily pleasant, since neighbors are transformed into busybodies— this is a dictatorship from the bottom, not from the top, but a dictatorship nevertheless. But this bottom-up form of dictatorship provides protection against the romanticism of utopias, since no big ideas can be generated in such an unintellectual atmosphere— it suffices to spend some time in cafés in the old section of Geneva, particularly on a Sunday afternoon, to understand that the process is highly unintellectual, devoid of any sense of the grandiose, even downright puny (there is a famous quip about how the greatest accomplishment of the Swiss was inventing the cuckoo clock while other nations produced great works— nice story except that the Swiss did not invent the cuckoo clock). But the system produces stability— boring stability— at every possible level.

The Swiss are rich but like to hide it, reserved yet determined to introduce themselves to everyone, innovative but resistant to change, liberal enough to sanction gay partnerships but conservative enough to ban new minarets. And they invented a breakfast cereal that they eat for supper. Privacy is treasured but intrusive state control is tolerated; democracy is king, yet the majority don’t usually vote; honesty is a way of life but a difficult past is reluctantly talked about; and conformity is the norm, yet red shoes are bizarrely popular. It is perhaps no surprise that the Swiss are contradictory, given how divided their country is. Since its earliest days Switzerland has faced geographic, linguistic, religious and political divisions that would have destroyed other countries at birth. Those divisions have been bridged, though not without bloodshed, but Switzerland remains as paradoxical as its people. While modern technology drives the economy, some fields are still harvested with scythes (all the hilly landscape’s fault); it’s a neutral nation yet it exports weapons to many other countries; it has no coastline but won sailing’s America’s Cup and has a merchant shipping fleet equal in size to Saudi Arabia’s. As for those national stereotypes, well, not all the cheese has holes, cuckoo clocks aren’t Swiss and the trains don’t always run exactly on time.

The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a bus. Like I felt the wind of the bus. I could even see a couple of the passengers, all shaken by a potential suicide. And out of nowhere, the guy rushes over, yanks me toward him, and escorts me out of the street.” “The birthday boy?” “No, different guy. You all start to look the same after a while, you know that? Anyway, we were both so high on adrenaline, we couldn’t stop laughing the whole night. Then he asked me out. Now one of our jokes is about that time I flung myself into traffic to avoid him.” “You were in shock.” “No, I wasn’t.” “Why isn’t the joke that he saved your life?” “I don’t know, Amos,” I said, folding my fingers together. “Maybe we’re both waiting for the day I turn around and say, ‘That’s right, asshole, I did fling myself into traffic to avoid you.’ I’m joking.” “Are you?” “Am I?” I mimicked him. “Should the day come when you manage to face-plant yourself into a relationship, you’ll find there are certain fragile truths every couple has. Sometimes I’m uncomfortable with the power, knowing I could break us up if I wanted. Other times, I want to blow it up just because it’s there. But then the feeling passes.” “That’s bleak.” “To you, it is. But I’m not like you. I don’t need to escape every room I’m in.” “But you are like me. You think you want monogamy, but you probably don’t if you dated me.” “You’re faulting me for liking you now?” “All I’m saying is you can’t just will yourself into being satisfied with this guy.” “Watch me,” I said, trying to burn a hole in his face. “If it were me, the party would have been our first date and it never would have ended.” “Oh, yes it would have,” I said, laughing. “The date would have lasted one week, but the whole relationship would have lasted one month.” “Yeah,” he said, “you’re right.” “I know I’m right.” “It wouldn’t have lasted.” “This is what I’m saying.” “Because if I were this dude, I would have left you by now.” Before I could say anything, Amos excused himself to pee. On the bathroom door was a black and gold sticker in the shape of a man. I felt a rage rise up all the way to my eyeballs, thinking of how naturally Amos associated himself with that sticker, thinking of him aligning himself with every powerful, brilliant, thoughtful man who has gone through that door as well as every stupid, entitled, and cruel one, effortlessly merging with a class of people for whom the world was built. I took my phone out, opening the virtual cuckoo clocks, trying to be somewhere else. I was confronted with a slideshow of a female friend’s dead houseplants, meant to symbolize inadequacy within reason. Amos didn’t have a clue what it was like to be a woman in New York, unsure if she’s with the right person. Even if I did want to up and leave Boots, dating was not a taste I’d acquired. The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a decision. They knew they were on trial too, but our courtrooms had more lenient judges.

High on the kitchen wall of an old farm-house on a mountain-side in Switzerland there hangs a tiny wooden clock. In the tiny wooden clock there lives a tiny wooden cuckoo, and every hour he hops out of his tiny wooden door, takes a look about to see what is going on in the world, shouts out the time of day, and pops back again into his little dark house, there to wait and tick away the minutes until it is time once more to tell the hour.

not shifting so the desk frame doesn’t go screek screek, not breathing so he doesn’t smell any smells, but sweat is trickling down his ribs, and Wesley Ohman keeps opening and closing the Velcro on his left shoe, and Tony Molinari’s lips are going poppoppop, and Mrs. Onegin is writing a huge, terrible A-M-E-R-I-C- on the whiteboard, the marker tip rasping and squeaking, the classroom clock ticktickticking, and all these sounds race into his head like hornets into a nest.

There were grandfather clocks and these things that were sort like half-grandfather clocks, and so many cuckoo clocks I suddenly felt like I was trapped in some weird pop-up book for little kids. It scared me so bad I just about had a stroke. That would have been pretty pathetic to die of a stroke at sixteen. Behind me there was this one particular cuckoo clock that looked about three thousand years old. This thing flew through the clock’s doors, and before I even realized what had happened, my hand shot up and broke it off. When I opened my hand, I was holding this totally deformed, premature-looking half chicken. It was maybe the evilest thing I’d ever seen in my life. For some reason I started kind of choking it. Now, I know that’s almost serial-killer nuts or whatever, and I’m not asking you to try to understand – I swear I’m not – but that’s what I did. I choked the thing between my thumb and forefinger as if my life depended on it.

She paused on the pavement, and remembered that Diva had not yet expressed regret about the worsted, and that she still "popped" as much as ever. Thus Diva deserved a punishment of some sort, and happily, at that very moment she thought of a subject on which she might be able to make her uncomfortable. The street was full, and it would be pretty to call up to her, instead of ringing her bell, in order to save trouble to poor overworked Janet. (Diva only kept two servants, though of course poverty was no crime.) "Diva darling!" she cooed. Diva's head looked out like a cuckoo in a clock preparing to chime the hour. "Hullo!" she said. "Want me?" "May I pop up for a moment, dear?" said Miss Mapp. "That's to say if you're not very busy." "Pop away," said Diva. She was quite aware that Miss Mapp said "pop" in crude inverted commas, so to speak, for purposes of mockery, and so she said it herself more than ever. "I'll tell my maid to pop down and open the door.

I have nothing to do but watch the days draw out, Now that I sit in the house from October to June, And the swallow comes too soon and the spring will be over And the cuckoo will be gone before I am out again. O Sun, that was once so warm, O Light that was taken for granted When I was young and strong, and sun and light unsought for And the night unfeared and the day expected And clocks could be trusted, tomorrow assured And time would not stop in the dark! Put on the lights. But leave the curtains undrawn. Make up the fire. Will the spring never come?

Pete never tried anything like that again, and he never will. Now, when he starts acting up during a meeting and they try to hush him, he always hushes. He’ll still get up from time to time and wag his head and let us know how tired he is, but it’s not a complaint or excuse or warning anymore—he’s finished with that; it’s like an old clock that won’t tell time but won’t stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old, worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

The movie The Third Man takes place in Vienna immediately after the end of the Second World War. Reflecting on the recent conflict, the character Harry Lime says: ‘After all, it’s not that awful…In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Lime gets almost all his facts wrong – Switzerland was probably the most bloodthirsty corner of early modern Europe (its main export was mercenary soldiers), and the cuckoo clock was actually invented by the Germans – but the facts are of lesser importance than Lime’s idea, namely that the experience of war pushes humankind to new achievements. War allows natural selection free rein at last. It exterminates the weak and rewards the fierce and the ambitious. War exposes the truth about life, and awakens the will for power, for glory and for conquest. Nietzsche summed it up by saying that war is ‘the school of life’ and that ‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’.

What’s going on in your backyard?” He heard her chair creak. “Mr. Bluebird’s nowhere in sight. He must be out hunting for food. Mrs. Bluebird is incubating her eggs.” “They’re married?” “Of course.” “How do you know?” “Because . . . they’re, you know, they’re having a family.” “Did Audubon’s publication tell you birds who nest are married?” “I’ll have you know, sir, bluebirds mate for life.” “They do?” “They do.” “Well, then. I stand corrected.” Across the room a pair of carved cuckoo birds in an ornate clock poked out to announce the quarter hour. “Are cuckoo birds monogamous?” “Mostly.” “In that case, Mr. and Mrs. Cuckoo say hello.

The finished clock is resplendent. At first glance it is simply a clock, a rather large black clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted, obviously, with intricately carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face, but just a clock. But that is before it is wound. Before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging steadily and evenly. Then, then it becomes something else. The changes are slow. First, the color changes in the face, shifts from white to grey, and then there are clouds that float across it, disappearing when they reach the opposite side. Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a puzzle. As though the clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully. All of this takes hours. The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where the numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle shades of white and grey. And it is not just pieces, it is figures and objects, perfectly carved flowers and planets and tiny books with actual paper pages that turn. There is a silver dragon that curls around part of the now visible clockwork, a tiny princess in a carved tower who paces in distress, awaiting an absent prince. Teapots that pour into teacups and minuscule curls of steam that rise from them as the seconds tick. Wrapped presents open. Small cats chase small dogs. An entire game of chess is played. At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the juggler. Dressed in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that correspond to each hour. As the clock chimes, another ball joins the rest until at midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern. After midnight the clock begins once more to fold in upon itself. The face lightens and the clouds return. The number of juggled balls decreases until the juggler himself vanishes. By noon it is a clock again, and no longer a dream. A

All time, Father once told her, is relative: because of the speed the Argos travels, the ship clock kept by Sybil runs faster than clocks back on Earth. The chronometers that run inside every human cell that tell us it’s time to get drowsy, to make a baby, to grow old—all these clocks, Father said, can be altered by speed, software, or circumstance. Some dormant seeds, he said, like the ones in the drawers in Farm 4, can stop time for centuries, slowing their metabolisms to almost zero, sleeping away the seasons, until the right combination of moisture and temperature appears, and the right wavelength of sunlight penetrates the soil. Then, as though you spoke the magic words: they open.

Jung’s remarks about how in North Africa he “felt cast back many centuries to an infinitely more naïve world of adolescents who were preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness” may seem politically incorrect from our oversensitive perspective, but they highlight the core insight of the trip. Although Jung knew a great deal about mythology and mythological thinking, his own thinking was decidedly Western and rational—he described himself as a “thorough Westerner”26—and in many ways, Jung was a typical “left-brainer,” with his detestation of “fantasy,” his formality and punctuality, his precision and need to be “scientific.” In his travels in North Africa, and later Taos and Central Africa, Jung was looking for signs of a consciousness not as differentiated from the unconscious matrix—what in the Seven Sermons he called “the Pleroma”—as ours, with its sharp distinction between conscious and unconscious. What Jung found in places such as Tunis, Sousse, Sfax, and the oasis city of Tozeur was a completely different sense of time. Coming from the land of cuckoo clocks and appointment books, this must have been a shock. Jung had entered a “dream of a static, age-old existence,” a kind of perpetual now, a condition associated with the right brain, which lacks a sense of time; there was none of the incessant activity that characterized even a relatively small city like Zürich. Jung enjoyed the contrast, which gave him an opportunity to entertain criticisms of modernity, a practice that would become something of a habit in later years, but he also felt this timelessness was threatened. Thinking of his pocket watch, “the symbol of Europe’s accelerated tempo,” Jung worried that the “god of time” and its demon, progress, would soon “chop into bits and pieces”—hours, minutes, seconds—the “duration” he sensed here and which was the “closest thing to eternity.

This once-proud country of ours is falling Into the hands of the wrong people,' said Jones. He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. 'And, before it gets back on the right track,' said Jones, 'some heads are going to roll.' I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said. Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell — keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information — That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuebrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony — That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase — That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers — That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia —

It takes the better part of those months for Herr Thiessen to complete the clock. He works on little else, though the sum of money involved makes the arrangement more than manageable. Weeks are spent on the design and the mechanics. He hires an assistant to complete some of the basic woodwork, but he takes care of all the details himself. Herr Thiessen loves details and he loves a challenge. He balances the entire design on that one specific word Mr. Barris used. Dreamlike. The finished clock is resplendent. At first glance it is simply a clock, a rather large black clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted, obviously, with intricately carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face, but just a clock. But that is before it is wound. Before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging steadily and evenly. Then, then it becomes something else. The changes are slow. First, the color changes in the face, shifts from white to grey, and then there are clouds that float across it, disappearing when they reach the opposite side. Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a puzzle. As thought clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully. All of this takes hours. The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where the numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle shades of white and grey. And it is not just pieces, it is figures and objects, perfectly carved flowers and planets and tiny books with actually paper pages that turn. There is a silver dragon curls around part of the now visible clockwork, a tiny princess in a carved tower who paces in distress awaiting an absent prince. Teapots that our into teacups and minuscule curls of steam that rise from them as the seconds tick. Wrapped presents open. Small cats chase small dogs. An entire game of chess is played. At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the juggler. Dressed in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that correspond to each hour. As the hour chimes, another ball joins the rest until at midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern. After midnight the clock begins once more to fold in upon itself. The face lightens and the colds return. The number of juggled balls decreases until the juggler himself vanishes. By noon it is a clock again, and no longer a dream.

This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of the wrong people,” said Jones. He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. “And, before it gets back on the right track,” said Jones, “some heads are going to roll.” I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. “You’re completely crazy,” he said. Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information— That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony— That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase— That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers— That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia— That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I’ve seen in my time. And for me to attempt such a mechanical explanation is perhaps a reflection of the father whose son I was. Am. When I pause to think about it, which is rarely, I am, after all, the son of an engineer. Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself—will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows—some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history— But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.” Howard W. Campbell, Jr., praises himself. There’s life in the old boy yet! And, where there’s life— There is life.

other clocks all over the house joined in. Lewis sat entranced, listening to high-pitched dings, tinny whangs, melodious electric doorbell sounds, cuckoos from cuckoo clocks, and deep sinister Chinese gongs roaring bwaoww! bwaoww! These and many other clock sounds echoed through the house. Now and then during this concert Lewis looked at Jonathan. Jonathan did not look back. He was staring at the wall,

It was on the second Tuesday in January - WI night - that winter became a serious and dramatic matter, a cold, tiring, but exhilarating time, at least for the young, and a companionable time for all, when we were stranded, snowbound and sealed off in place and, it seemed, in time too, for the usual pattern of the day’s coming and going was halted. We had been in the town all day, and I had scarcely noticed the weather. But, by the time I put the car up the last, steep bit of hill, past Cuckoo Farm and Foxley Spinney, towards the village, the sky had gathered like a boil, and had an odd, sulphurous yellow gleam over iron grey. It was achingly cold, the wind coming north-east off the Fen made us cry. We ran down the steps and indoors, switched on the lamps and opened up the stove, made tea, shut out the weather, though we could still hear it; the wind made a thin, steely noise under doors and through all the cracks and crevices of the old house. But by six o’clock there had been one of those sudden changes. I opened the door to let in Hastings, the tabby cat, and sensed it at once. The wind dropped and died, everything was still and dark as coal, no moonlight, not a star showed through the cloud cover, and it was just a degree wamer. I could smell the approching snow. Everything waited.

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

But then the constructors unexpectedly showed up after a leisurely breakfast, to supervise the work, and nothing suited them: this material, for instance, was no good, and that engineer was an absolute idiot, and they had to have a revolving magic lantern in the main hall, one with four pneumatic widgets and a calibrated cuckoo clock on top—and if the natives here didn't know what a widget was, so much the worse for them, considering that the King was no doubt most impatient for his release and would (when he could) deal harshly with anyone who dared to delay it.

Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information—

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The

Everything changes and breaks and stops fitting – and we know that, even with our stopped clock. The world is breaking, and changing, and dancing. Always on the move. That’s how it is. That’s how it has to be.

In The Third Man, author Graham Green observes, “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they have brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

If the parallel is the Renaissance, then we ought to remember Orson Welles’s possibly unfair but undoubtedly memorable line in The Third Man (1949): ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ These are definitely not cuckoo clock times.

A small percentage of the population can be easily hypnotized, and, when given posthypnotic suggestions, they end up doing things with no conscious awareness of why. G. H. Estabrooks notes that when this happens, the person “finds excuses for his actions and, strange to say, while these excuses may be utterly false, the subject tends to believe them.” He relates the following example: The operator hypnotizes a subject and tells him that when the cuckoo clock strikes he will walk up to Mr. White, put a lamp shade on his head, kneel on the floor in front of him and “cuckoo” three times. Mr. White was not the type on whom one played practical jokes, in fact, he was a morose, nonhumorous sort of individual who would fit very badly in such a picture. Yet, when the cuckoo clock struck, the subject carried out the suggestion to the letter. “What in the world are you doing?” he was asked. “Well, I’ll tell you. It sounds queer but it’s just a little experiment in psychology. I’ve been reading on the psychology of humor and I thought I’d see how you folks reacted to a joke that was in very bad taste. Please pardon me, Mr. White, no offense intended whatsoever,” and the subject sat down without the slightest realization of having acted under posthypnotic compulsion.2

For any flower student quickly learns that the same English folk-name is given in different localities to very different plants. For instance, the name Whiteweed is applied to ten different plants; there are in England ten or twelve Cuckoo-flowers, and twenty-one Bachelor's Buttons. Such names as Mayflower, Wild Pink, Wild Lily, Eyebright, Toad-flax, Ragged Robin, None-so-pretty, Lady's-fingers, Four-o'clocks, Redweed, Buttercups, Butterflower, Cat's-tail, Rocket, Blue-Caps, Creeping-jenny, Bird's-eye, Bluebells, apply to half a dozen plants. The

Can you forgive me? Men are complete idiots when a woman cries.” He gave her the smile he’d reserved for old ladies in the jury box. She nibbled on her lower lip, looking pensive and wary. The bluebird in his grandma’s cuckoo clock sprang from its door and chirped, breaking the silence. Maddie jumped, pressing her hand to her chest as though trying to keep her heart from jumping out. As the clock struck, he cursed himself for making her uncomfortable. How could he have made such a tactical error? From what he’d discerned, she might as well be a virgin. He’d simply forgotten himself. Lost in her charm and good-girl complex, he’d said the first teasing thing that sprang to mind. And since he was a guy, it had been sexual. He took two cautious steps toward her, hoping she wouldn’t bolt upstairs. “That wasn’t the best thing to say when I’m trying to get you out of your clothes.” Auburn brows drew together in what he could only suspect was disapproval. He shook his head. What the hell was wrong with him? This wasn’t the time to mention seeing her naked. Shit, it was like he had no experience with women. She still said nothing, just stared at him with those uncanny green eyes. And damn if it wasn’t making him a bit unsettled. It had been so long since he’d been anything but cool and detached, even before his troubles in Chicago. The knowledge caused a stirring of unease. “I swear, I didn’t mean it.” He was starting to sound like a sixteen-year-old apologizing for trying to get to second base. Quietly, she toyed with the fabric of her dress, picking at one of the sparkly beads. At a loss for how to make the situation right, he offered the one thing he wanted to avoid, but was guaranteed to put her at ease. “Do you want me to call my neighbor, Gracie, to come help you out of your dress? She eats shit like this up, so you’ll make her day.” Maddie shifted on the balls of her feet. He narrowed his eyes. No matter how hard he peered at her, she remained a mystery. He sweetened the offer. “She’s a baker, so I bet she even has some cupcakes or cookies lying around.” Maddie placed her hand on her stomach. Why wouldn’t she speak? He raked a hand through his hair. “Princess, take pity on me here. I can’t begin to guess what you’re thinking. Did I scare you away forever?” She blinked, her face clearing as though she’d suddenly come out of a trance. “I’m sorry. Other than being an emotional basket case, I’m fine.” This

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The most famous improvised lines in the history of the movies are the ones Orson Welles came up with while playing Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949): “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

I know someone who has never been able to read _The Cuckoo Clock_ since leaving her girlhood home, because it had to be read sitting halfway up the stairs, where the light through a stained-glass landing window fell on it, staining the pages red and blue and green.

Dear Reader, In Claudia and Crazy Peaches, we get to know Aunt Peaches better, and to see the special relationship Claudia has with her aunt. I have three aunts — Aunt Adele, Aunt Martha, and Aunt Merlena — and I have special memories of all of them. Aunt Martha is my father’s sister-in-law. She and Uncle Lyman used to give my sister and me the best presents. One Christmas, when we were very little, they gave us stockings with garters. They were meant for grown women, and we thought they were hysterical! Another year they gave my sister a red cuckoo clock, and they gave me a music box with two dancing figures under a glass dome. I still have the music box. Aunt Merlena, my mother’s sister-in-law, was my only aunt who lived nearby. And she loved arts and crafts as much as I did. We made puppets together once, she showed me how to make doll clothes, and one summer day she invited me over especially so that we could make my birthday party invitations together. Aunt Adele is my father’s sister, and we are extremely close. We talk on the phone a lot, and we share a love of sewing and needlework. We exchange patterns in the mail, we give each other sewing tips, but mostly we just enjoy talking. I’m very lucky to have three such wonderful aunts — maybe that’s where the idea for Claudia and her wonderful aunt came from. Happy reading,

A haunted look passed over Rose. “She was healthy,” Charlotte continued. “I made sure to keep up with her aches. She was respected. Her biggest worry was trying to keep a cuckoo clock in her hair.

I looked for the clock over the front desk, which is made from the taxidermied body of a cuckoo and resembles a dad joke given flesh.

This ad in the middle was placed by some arm of the G-5-to-be, trying to round up a few 're-education' experts. Vital, vital stuff. Teach the German Beast about the Magna Carta, sportsmanship, that sort of thing, eh? Out inside the works of some neurotic Bavarian cuckoo clock of a village, were-elves streaking in out of the forests at night to leave subversive handbills at door and window—'Anything!' Roger groping back to his narrow quarters, 'anything at all's better than this. . . .

As they say, the broken clock may be right but twice a day, but a silent cuckoo will never reveal how wrong it is.

The other night I was invited out for a night with the 'girls.' I told my husband that I would be home by midnight, 'I promise!' Well, the hours passed and the Blue Wkds went down way too easily. Around 3 a.m., a bit pissed, I headed for home. Just as I got in the door, the cuckoo clock in the hallway started up and cuckooed 3 times. Quickly, realizing my husband would probably wake up, I cuckooed another 9 times. I was really proud of myself for coming up with such a quick-witted solution, in order to escape a possible conflict with him. (Even when totally smashed... 3 cuckoos plus 9 cuckoos totals 12 cuckoos MIDNIGHT!) The next morning my husband asked me what time I got in, I told him 'MIDNIGHT'... he didn't seem pissed off in the least. Whew, I got away with that one! Then he said 'We need a new cuckoo clock.' When I asked him why, he said, 'Well, last night our clock cuckooed three times, then said 'oh shit.' Cuckooed 4 more times, cleared its throat, cuckooed another three times, giggled, cuckooed twice more, and then tripped over the coffee table and farted.

Day and night, I was free to explore the house-- and I went everywhere that I could, for my key opened almost half the doors. I found a rose garden under a glass dome; the roses formed a labyrinth in which I always got lost, and yet-- according to the cuckoo clock at the door-- I would always stumble out again in exactly twenty-three minutes. I found a greenhouse full of potted ferns and orange trees. The air was thick with the warm, wet smell of earth. Bees hummed through the air; the glass walls were frosted with condensation. I found a round room whose walls were covered in mosaics of naiads and tossing waves, and the air always smelled of salt, and no matter which way I turned, the door was always directly behind me.

stole

The many clocks scattered throughout our giant house confused me even more. The grandfather clocks in the halls chimed out different hours; the cuckoos in their wooden Swiss clocks popped in and out of small ornate doors, each contradicting all the others; the fancy French clock in my parents’ bedroom had stopped long ago at midnight or noon, and a Chinese clock ran backwards. To my great distress, though I searched everywhere, there were no calendars in our house, not even old ones. And the newspapers never came on the day they were due. Our only magazines were old ones, stacked in closets, hidden in the attic. Nobody threw anything away in our house. It was kept, saved for our descendents, so they could sell it one day and make a fortune.

Pete

Splash!

found

Pam

I’ve never been to America,” he said. “But I’ve read that you tend to put people on a pedestal or tear them down. They’re heroes or traitors. But man is by nature flawed, and he has to live with the fact that he contradicts himself. That’s what makes him a man. Otherwise, he would be a cuckoo clock.

This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of the wrong people,” said Jones. He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. “And, before it gets back on the right track,” said Jones, “some heads are going to roll.” I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

It was time to move on, which is why I’m now living here in the land of the cuckoo clock. Didn’t someone once say, “all successful careers in finance end up in Switzerland?

I pause as the clocks from Mother’s collection sound the hour. From every room come staggered chimes, cuckoos calling out. A moment later, the sound of ticking. The house a metronome. We are empty, as if our insides have been carved out. That is what death does, I think. It makes us into ticking clocks, in need of winding, hollow and mechanized.

had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. —Orson Welles as Harry Lime, The Third Man (1949)

My biological clock may be ticking, but I can’t hear it properly due to the singing cuckoo.

Zoe emerged from the woods behind me and gasped in dismay. “Okay, this is completely ridiculous! There is no possible scenario where we are ever going to have to face giant pendulums! What’s Macauley think, someday we’ll to have to fight the enemy inside an enormous cuckoo clock?

I’m sure our newcomers appreciate hearing that being diagnosed with HIV is not all doom and gloom.” The leader’s gaze swept over all the others in the circle. “With an attitude like Duncan’s, great things will happen to you. Don’t let the disease define you. Make the disease work for you instead.” An hour later, the meeting was over. John had gotten the opportunity to introduce himself to the group, something he would have preferred to have skipped, but that wasn’t allowed. Everyone must participate in that part; only the question and answer session that followed was optional. He hadn’t mentioned that he used to be a cop, certainly not that he had been fired. He’d just said that he was a private eye and that he would be happy to be their spy if they needed one. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” Linda asked John when they were outside the room and in the hallway, where donuts and coffee and tea were served. Most of the participants milled around there, connecting with each other. John shrugged and grabbed a jelly donut. “I guess not.” The bespectacled leader named Robert came up to them then. He was on the short side and had an emaciated face with delicate features. He stuck out a bony hand toward John. John took it and gave it a firm shake. “John, it’s so nice to have you join us today,” Robert said with a broad smile that displayed big, graying teeth. Robert was HIV-positive as well, and in the chronic HIV stage. “Thank you for having me,” John said and returned the smile as best he could. “It’s been very…educational. I’m glad I came.” “Great,” Robert said, then his attention went to Linda. “Thanks for bringing your friend, Linda. And for coming again yourself.” “Oh, of course,” Linda said and smiled. Her hazel eyes glittered with warmth. “It’s a great group and you’re a great leader.” “Thank you. That’s so kind of you to say.” Robert tossed a glance over his shoulder, then leaned in toward John and Linda. “I just wanted to apologize for Doris.” “Apologize?” Linda repeated. “What did she do?” “Well, for starters, she’s not 33. She’s 64 and has been infected for thirty years. She’s also a former heroin addict and prostitute. She likes to pretend that she’s someone else entirely, and because we don’t want to upset her, we humor her. We pretend she’s being truthful when she talks about herself. I’d appreciate it if you help us keep her in the dark.” That last sentence had a tension to it that the rest of Robert’s words hadn’t had. It was almost like he’d warned them not to go against his will, or else. Not that it had been necessary to impress that on either John or Linda. John especially appreciated the revelation. Maybe having HIV was not as gruesome as Doris had made it seem then. Six Yvonne jerked awake when the phone rang. It rang and rang for several seconds before she realized where she was and what was going on. She pushed herself up on the bed and glanced around for the device. When she eventually spotted it on the floor beside the bed, it had stopped ringing. Even so, she rolled over on her side and fished it up to the bed. Crossing her legs Indian-style, she checked who had called her. It was Gabe, which was no surprise. He was the only one who had her latest burner number. He had left her a voicemail. She played it. “Mom, good news. I have the meds. Jane came through. Where do you want me to drop them off? Should I come to the motel? Call me.” Exhilaration streamed through her and she was suddenly wide awake. She made a fist in the air. Yes! Finally something was going their way. Now all they had to do was connect without Gabe leading the cops to her. She checked the time on the ancient clock radio on the nightstand. It was past six o’clock. So she must have slept