The Last Predicta

This Entire Minute

20 This Entire Minute A thousand die in a good day. Obediently, the great ice-cube maker spits out its countable nothing, each minute easing into the next so seamless we set our clocks to even the most meager of hearts, boxy like a Volvo or Japanese watermelon. Sixty make an hour with its air of possession, or the TV news keeping time by its aging anchor. Propped in the green room taking five, he practices the hand sweep that brings us giddy to the next commercial. To witness the birth of an entire minute: the first tentative seconds give way to slower, surer ones through which the minute may achieve self-actualization, dissolution into the future, where it resembles us most—this yearning to be out of time with all the time in the world. In early times, before light bulbs and dyspepsia, days sped by like honest comets, burning our image into backlit cactuses, each long stalk an hour hand. Now days move with the chill of glaciers, carving their names into our spongelike cognizance. What do we care, now that each second weighs enough to merit kick-backs just to keep on keeping on? Give us the good days 21 and the Brady Bunch who aged sixty minutes each week. Legions, agile, quick to arm, line up inside the nearest clock to prove themselves temporal again. And the thought of them advancing to this particular moment—this entire minute we know we’re living in this day—becomes our only consolation. Because somewhere, we’re convinced, someone already lived this entire minute in which a woman in Japan revels in the perfection of a watermelon— the watermelon she slices, this watermelon, here, and the black seeds pregnant with possibility, aching for their hour, which passed some time ago. ...