Leaving the Almost Palindrome City
What do you do when you realize you're not the hero of your own story? I, for one, have fallen in love, and as this city squeezes itself ever tighter to fit some preordained golden proportion, I take solace in the chaos my love has caused me.
Picture a peacock clock stretching across a city block, all wrought in gold and fashioned after the automatons of old, a nest of gears and sprockets residing in a corner of Miami known as Coconut Grove, a place I've come to call the Almost Palindrome City.
My love sits on her courtyard bench, waiting for the clock to strike 11:00 while breaking the symmetry of citizenry with a multitude of subtle, unbalanced movements. If she were a clock, she'd run both fast and slow. Her yawns last eons as she scrapes graphite across paper as if trying to set it on fire.
I have spent most of the morning behind the clock's main wheel, pretending to polish parts, all while rehearsing my approach.
The clock strikes 11:00. A golden peacock the size of a small bear springs forth from the top half of the tower. Its metallic feathers rattle and shimmer, starting softly then reaching a blinding crescendo to signal the ringing of the first bell.
Sightseers take pictures in unison as I scurry unseen from station to station to make sure nothing falls behind. Bell ten sounds flat and one of the second hand dragonflies rotates slightly out of sync with the rest—I make a mental note to check hairspring E57 and escape wheel B8. The show only lasts two minutes, but I will spend the rest of the day making adjustments to ensure it happens in exactly the same way the next day.
The crowd disperses as the last bell's echo is replaced by businessman broadcasting self-important calls, but she remains on the bench as she has so many times before. The only difference being that today is the day I finally leave the confines of the clock tower to stand before her. She wear light blue sunglasses, and, by what must be some optical trick, one of her eyes seems to stare over my shoulder. I don't like the way my shadow blots out the sun rounding its way to noon, so I bow while keeping the non-symmetric side of my face hidden.
"Good morning, may I ask your name?"
"Hmm. Yes, you may."
"Wonderful, I will ask you tomorrow."
A startled laugh. "Okay, I'll make sure to have a good name by then."
Without thinking, I turn my full face towards her to smile.
She sits up straighter to inspect me. "You know they would fix that for free."
"I… I prefer to keep it as is." How could I have been such a fool? I make for the safety of the clock tower.
"Hey, hey. Stop. Look."
I obey.
She removes her sunglasses with a flourish.
I see a lazy eye that drifts to the outside, something only a madwoman would keep in this day and age when they hand out corrective surgeries like candy.
My face droops. Her eye drifts. How my heart soars as I hurry away.
I will tune the peacock clock to atomic precision, all the better to count the hours, the minutes, the seconds until I will ask her name the next day.
And that is how I met my love… or in the crude words of Buckminster F.:
