Hawley said, “Maybe I do.”
The girl was still scratching at her chin, the skin there growing red, the bird tattoo fluttering its wings open and closed. “Can’t we get this over with? I just want to get this over with.”
Steller moved close and touched the back of the girl’s neck again. Hawley waited for the girl to shrug it off. He wished the girl wouldn’t. But she did. And this time something crossed Steller’s face, like skin tightening up over a scar.
“Behave yourself,” Steller said. Then she ducked down and crawled inside the tent. When she came back out, she was holding a square wooden crate, about the size of a small television set. She set it down on the beach, pried the top off with the back of a hammer and started pulling out handfuls of straw.
Inside was an old ceramic bowl, the color of sand. The sides were covered with engravings. Figures of people and some sort of writing. There were also bands of rings, circling all the way down to the base, chips along the edges and a hole pierced through the bottom. It looked like a crusty old flowerpot.
“What the fuck is this?” Hawley asked.
“It’s a clepsydra,” said Steller.
“It’s supposed to be a clock.”
“It is a clock.” She ran her finger along the rings. “You fill this with water, and as the level goes down, you know a certain amount of time has passed. Like an hourglass,” she said.
Hawley picked the clepsydra up and turned it in his hands. He thought of all the money stashed in the aluminum suitcase. “A bowl,” he said.
“A clepsydra,” said Steller.
He set the piece back down. “How do I know it’s not a fake?”
“There’s only seven of these left,” said Steller. “The rest are in museums. This one should be, too.”
“How’d you get your hands on it?” Hawley asked.
“You don’t want to know,” said the girl.
The gashes and shapes along the sides of the bowl seemed to hold meaning by the way they repeated. There was a wedge that looked like a double cross, another that resembled a mountain turned on its side. Hawley peered into the bowl, ran his finger along the rings. He wondered what this clock had measured. Hours. Weeks. Years. Maybe entire lifetimes.
The women flanked Hawley on either side. As they stood there he imagined two bowls full of water. One for Steller, another for the girl. The time they had left streaming through. He touched the hardened clay around the base of the pot, then slid his finger through the hole in the bottom. The channel felt cool and smooth, deep as an exit wound. When he removed his hand, his knuckles were covered with a thin powdering of dust.
“Next time,” Steller said, “they should send someone who can read cuneiform.” She reached and fixed one of her pigtails again, and as she did Hawley realized that all this time, as they’d been standing there on the beach and talking, she’d known that he was thinking of ways to kill her.
“It’s breaking!” shouted the girl.
They all turned. A spray of ice slid down the side of the glacial shelf and fell into the river. It looked like a waterfall of snow. For a moment the white powder seemed to be gathering in force, and then it trickled away. Some one hundred feet above, inside a dark furrow of blue ice, another waterfall began, arcing in a shimmering line. Then that, too, stopped.
Hawley felt the air get thin.
The girl had gone back to her camera, crouching before the viewfinder. She twisted the lens back and forth with her hand, scanning the glacier. One last plume of snow spattered into the river, underneath a giant overhanging block of ice the size of a three-story building. The shower of flakes slowed, then stopped, and the river evened out and became calm.
Hawley waited with the women. They waited some more.
“Ah, man,” said the girl.
And then the air cracked and split and roared. The front of the glacier was breaking apart. Chunks of ice, one after the other, and then the giant block came loose. All three of them froze, rooted in place, as if they’d been cast under a spell. Time slowed as the hunk of ice traveled, and when it finally smashed into the river, a ripple went back up the side of the glacier, and then the whole face of the shelf came loose and started sliding down.
It was as if the earth were collapsing. A skyscraper thrown over a cliff. The sight made Hawley ill, like some part of himself was falling with the ice. Everything that ancient, frozen water had seen, the passing of millennia, the formation of the continents, and now, here it was—the end of the road. When the slab finally hit, the river exploded in a spray of brown and white, shooting columns of ice and water so high into the air they transformed into clouds of smoke and sparkled like glass, splintering and shimmering and shooting directly for the beach.
Hawley stumbled backward and fell over the wooden crate, scraping his ribs. All along the shoreline the river sank and pulled away, like a drain had been pulled. Chunks of floating ice were sucked under as the river displaced and began to crest. Steller and the girl were already making a run for it, the camera slung over the girl’s back and the aluminum case banging between them. Hawley snatched the clepsydra and followed. The women were yelling something but the roar of the water covered it all. Together they scrambled over the rocks, up the incline toward their car. Hawley caught his ankle and fell again. Up ahead, the girl had reached the parking lot. She turned and threw her arm back. Steller dropped the suitcase and the women grabbed hold of each other and then the wave was upon them.
The force of the water caught Hawley up from behind. The shock so arctic-freezing-cold it knocked the wind out of him. As he struggled for air, he had the sensation of being carried along, pushed toward some higher plane, and then his feet lost hold and he was tumbling in the froth of white, his body flipped and the weight of the water crushing him down against the rock bed, then dragging him backward by the ankles. He was inhaling water. Sand and dirt and salt. The clepsydra was filling, filling, filling, an anchor pinning him in place, and then the river tore it loose from his hands.
His only thought was that he could not breathe. He fought the current but he could not find the surface. His father had always been afraid of drowning, so he’d kept Hawley from going in over his head. He’d wanted to protect his son, but as another wave of ice crashed into Hawley he understood that by doing this, his father had failed him. And that he did not want to be a father who failed.