The Time Keeper

Arthur Geller is a man who lives in five-minute increments, none of which ever seem to align. For the past twenty-four years, he has been the official restorer of public timepieces in St. Augustine, a city where history is both a commodity and an atmospheric condition. His workshop, located down a narrow, coquina-stoned alley near the old city gates, is a dense forest of brass gears, pendulums, and wooden escape wheels. Geller, sixty-one, has a wild mane of silver hair and a habit of checking three different pocket watches simultaneously, none of which display the same hour. He spends his days climbing the narrow, circular stairs of historic towers to wind their weights.

The great paradox of Geller’s professional life is his notorious, almost miraculous inability to arrive anywhere on time. Clients frequently complain that he is hours late for appointments, even as he spends those late hours obsessing over the micro-seconds of a municipal clock tower. He views time not as a rigid grid, but as a fluid, slightly temperamental river that cannot be forced into a straight line. "A clock is not a machine that tells the truth," Geller said, adjusting a delicate escapement wheel with a pair of long-nosed pliers. "It is merely a machine that tells a very beautiful, highly consistent lie about the spin of the earth."

As the bells of the Cathedral Basilica begin to chime five blocks away, Geller looks up from his workbench and sighs. He is already forty-five minutes late for a meeting with the historic preservation board, yet he makes no move to pack his tools. Instead, he watches a miniature brass automaton of a monk strike a tiny bell on his desk, its mechanism clicking with exquisite, mechanical precision. For Geller, the world outside his shop is far too hurried, a place where people rush toward their ends without ever appreciating the gears that carry them there. He rolls up his sleeves and returns to his work.