Jin wears gloves now always, bulky thick cotton gloves, can not open his pop cans, button his coat, has to use big clunky utensils, becomes thick with the food that goes on such forks. At night he takes off the gloves and looks at his fingers by the light of the neon sign outside his hotel room, because he left his wife, left his home, and had room service bring him a TV remote with large buttons.

The prot‚g‚ is meek, plays badminton until Jin reacts in horror to this news. His name is Kile. He has too much hair which floats above his head and around his ears, hides his eyes. He despises design. He hates creation. He likes to take watches apart, timepieces inside computer machinery. He rarely replaces parts, but repairs what's there. At the end of the day his desk is as clean as when he begins. Kile is so good, he removes the dust from his workspace grain by grain as the grains fall one by one around him.

Jin wants to take him to La Blaise, but is afraid of muggers. Jin flips channels on the hotel television, comes across a boxing match, an interview. The way they tape up the large man's hands, carefully, quickly but smartly, and then the gloves, the thick red gloves, a bright warning to the nose or jaw of anyone who would fight back. Jin goes down the street from the hotel. He goes into the gym, where the men smell like ammonia from salt lost to sweat and everyone's got an angry, confused look on his face. Jin jumps rope, does a million sit-ups, jogs and jogs and jogs. His thickness goes away, but he won't take off the gloves until they give him a pair of red ones. He lets them tape up his fingers, he lets them laugh at how small and fine his bones are, even though they are thick and rough and callused from not touching a pair of tweezers, a fine needle, a screw too tiny to see without a magnifying glass, for months and months.

Imagine your old man, they say, as he stands in front of a tiny bag hanging at face level. Jin imagines the mugger, the thick mustache, the heavy brow, the hands holding the hammer, so thick and rough, the skin bunched up, calluses cracking when he made a fist. But Jin's arms were made for small patient movements, and they grow tired before the bag moves enough to rub out the mugger's face. But he does it the next day, and the next, and for several days after that.

And Kile is starting to become his master's teacher. Jin isn't telling him secrets anymore, Kile is discovering them himself. He takes watches apart less and less, instead uses the flexible needle to move around the parts. Moving by feel alone. He spends hours at his workspace, the clock ticking a cadence twice that of his heart beat, Kile seemingly still as a statue, collecting dust, but in front of him a dead watch face slowly begins to tick, slowly, as if he alone is the spring which advances the hour hand one three-thousand six hundredth of the way around the face, so slow as a day for the watch is a month for everyone else, until he releases it to jump forward and Kile comes out of his trance to blink the dust off his eyelids, cup his hands inside his shirt, and walk to the water fountain, which works off a foot pedal.

The speed bag soon learns to blur as Jin finds a rhythm with it, and learns to vary the rhythm, to make the bag sing, a kind of primordial floating drum, the face of the mugger dances. Before, Jin was a genius from his elbows to his fingertips but now he finds tiny nuances of muscles in his biceps, triceps, shoulders and back. Before, he knew how to use his back to isolate the air around a watch face or a tiny clock so currents could not disturb the hair-width springs and wires; now he plays with the currents that swirl around the gym, feels them move around the tiny hairs on the back of his neck, around his eyelashes, and knows how to augment them or subtract from them to make the bag shimmy, to blur and hum as he makes it go this way, that way, until only his Swiss-trained eyes can tell the difference between a thousand ways to make the bag bounce.

Kile stops working on Timeworks pieces, too big, too bulky, a man with a hammer could fix them. He is the world's smallest tweezers and they are ten-foot piles of sand, needing to moved over the space of a few inches. Jin puts him in research and development, working on robot-made watches and timepieces so tiny, elements so delicate, changes in temperature as little as one degree celsius warp their gears, make it impossible to transfer the energy of a small pile of chemicals into a realistic division of hours, minutes, seconds. Jin is proud of Kile. Kile memorizes every second that passes, can count out an eight hour work day in his head as he works, knows exactly when closing time appears, better than even the large white clock which perched on the wall above the desk in reaserch. Of course.

Kile doesn't need clocks anymore.

Jin, a wizard on the speed bag, so next they gave him the heavy. Large, red like his gloves, faded in places where a thousand men before him spent years and years pounding dents in its kidneys, solar plexus. A boy, half Jin's age and twice his size, holds the bag while Jin works it over. Pain starts off as a small hot spot in his back and work its way around his shoulders and down through his hips as the boy urges him to put his meat into it, to slow down enough to make the bag feel every ounce of Jin's muscle. Imagine that retired teacher who married your wife, the boy says. Jin imagines the mugger, his greasy red and green sweater, the pockets of fat that bulged at his waist.

Jin introduces new employees to Timeworks pieces, shows them the instruction manual, helps them refine their technique until they can repair or create ten to twenty watches per hour. And he continues to guide Kile. Kile is his inspiration. He creates projects that only the skill of a Kile could realize. He gives him smaller and smaller projects, so delicate it's as if Kile moves a molecule of himself at a time, using the lever of an atom's width wire to transfer a gear as a large as a biological cell from one side of an equation to the other, solving entropy to so many decimal places it becomes a matter of grace not necessity. Until one day Kile's eyes snap open at quitting time. He asks Jin to give him more to do. He does not want to go home. He wants to work. But Jin can't stay, can only be inspired so much, he has to go to the heavy bag, he has to work it over, find ways to make it fight itself, it's own weight. Jin's shoulders are large, his neck as wide as his head, his chest juts out the way his stomach used to. He sweats ammonia, drinks salty beverages like the other men at the gym. He tells Kile that if wants to stay, he must create his own work. Kile scowls. It's the first facial expression he's made in months.

The heavy bag doesn't move anymore. Jin doesn't need anyone to hold it. Other boxers stop their training and watch as he moves around it, punching it, the only evidence of his blows the loud whap that bounces off the walls, makes the other boxers nervous. And the bag does not move. Sometimes it shudders.

When Jin comes into work the next morning, Kile is still there, sitting at his work space. Is he asleep? He snaps his eyes open, then closes them against the harsh light of the exit sign, the only illumination in the room. Everything at Timeworks runs off of automatic clocks, including the lights, most of them Jin's design, and it's too early for them to know to come on. But Kile didn't need them. He wasn't asleep. On his right arm, an intricate tattoo, gears and cogs and spin wheels and flying J's and hammer weights and levers and pins and watch faces, hundreds of watch faces, most of them blank. The tattoo runs from his shoulder to his wrist, even onto his fingers and the palm of his hand. Jin just stares. Kile has carefully undone the stitching of his shirt at the shoulder to get at his own skin, has carefully not plucked but severed each hair at the root. Jin is fascinated. Kile explains that he doesn't use his right arm anymore, anyway. It's just an ornament.

Jin sits at his desk, ignoring phone calls, brushing away new employees, trying to decide what to do with this Kile. He gives him three, four watches to repair at a time, tiny clocks, molecular timers, atomic clocks responsible for dispensing hormones at such a precise rate even the human body is fooled and confuses the precision with the phases of the moon. Kile sits at his desk as Jin watches, his right arm still, the tattoo so detailed the gears seem to move, Kile fixing and repairing and building and improving timepieces four at a time simultaneously.

The machine Jin conceives will be impossible to construct. It will be too complicated, too specific from point to point, the gears will be like dust and the thickness of a man's skin, the ridges of his fingerprints, will make anyone unable to even begin to make it the same way twice. It will take weeks to make, a marathon of stillness, allowing only one breath every few minutes. Jin gives the design to Kile. He shows him how to build the cogs, how to arrange them. He will have to work from the inside out, his hand up to the elbow within the shell, slowly descending a millimeter per hour as he places the gears and wires. Kile's smile is tiny, imperceptible, beatific.

A small drop of water, Jin's own sweat, every few hours, placed on Kile's lips. Jin moves between the gym and the lab, snatching sleep on the subway. No one will spar with him at the gym, he doesn't box like a normal person, they watch him dance, his foot work is mesmerizing, but he doesn't block their punches, or dodge. He bobs and weaves, but when they throw the glove at his nose or his chin or his gut, the punch seems to change direction, ends up over his shoulder, moving to perpendicular from the direction it was moving. And when he hits them, they don't feel it. The head snaps back, the body is pushed as if by a sudden, fierce but very short gust of wind. But they feel nothing. It doesn't matter, the judges don't know how to score the matches anyway. So Jin works on the bags, moves weights up and down with his muscles, sweats precision and feeds the salty water to Kile.

It is done. Jin and Kile sit in the dark, looking at Jin's machine. Kile asks what it is. Doesn't he know? Jin looks at him. Didn't Kile work on it for weeks, literally touched every molecule of the machine? Doesn't he know, better than anyone, even Jin himself, what it does, and why? No. A small tear, precious energy left over, emerges out of Kile's eye and begins a slow, imperceptible trek down Kile's cheek. Jin watches, fascinated, only his eyes able to see that Kile is absent-mindedly playing with the tear, changing his heart rate and blood pressure and the vibrations in his skin to work the tear left, right, down his neck, over his bare shoulder, down his left arm, onto his fingertip, making it bubble, bounce, diving it in two, in four, into eight tinier droplets, and more, and more, smaller and smaller, until he absorbs them into his skin again

Jin tells Kile what it is. It's a bomb. It's a reusable bomb. It collects energy from the motion of the earth beneath it, the spinning of the sun, the drift of the Milky Way through the galactic cluster, from changes in temperature around it, changes in temperature from stars set in motion fifteen billion years ago, fifteen billion light years away. It counts atomic decay, compares it to the bounce and vibration of it's own atoms, and when it gets to the right number, it explodes, and it explodes with such precise force that it puts itself and everything else back together again. And starts over. Perfectly. It is a perpetual bomb, it will last forever, even after the heat death of the universe, it is perfectly balanced to eat entropy and reverse the very flow of time itself.

Kile wants to know if it will kill everyone.

Does it matter? Jin asks Kile if he even cares.

Kile doesn't care. But he wants to know.

Yes, it will kill everyone, over and over again.

Why?

Because Jin can't fix watches anymore. Jin hates time. He wants to beat time into submission He has to kill time.

When will it go off?

Doesn't Kile know?

No, there was no quartz in it, no cesium atoms, nothing to measure the flow of time.

That's because, eventually, nothing is forever, even cesium atoms have an nth decimal place where they err.

So how does the bomb measure time?

It IS time. It IS the very passage of time. And it explodes continuously, non stop, from the moment it is turned on.

Another tear appears on Kile's angelic face. I turned it on hours ago.

Jin smiles. In know. We've died a million times already.