10 Rhythm and Fever
“Hunger, sleep, stress, mood, alertness. We sense time without the clock. These are the internal rhythms of our bodies.”
Behind the stage, Cyril listens to the lecture through the partition while he pushes his mop around the battleship-grey floor. Illness, he thinks, that’s an important one. He stays fit by wiping the dust that settles each college day.
“Rhythm provides our keenest sense of time, but it cannot be separated from the influence of the outside world. Take the sleep-wake cycle for instance. The distinct corporal region charged with keeping time sits right above the point where the optic nerve fibres cross. Light provides clues. Without it, our circadian rhythms judge days as twenty-five hours, then twenty-six or more.”
While he goes back and forth to the bucket, careful not to disturb the students with any knocks or bashes, Cyril thinks how lucky he is to have a job that allows him to just ‘be’. He does his work and does it well. Usually, he tunes out of the chatter around him, but this lecture seems tailor-made for him.
“Internal metronomes can change in an instant. Ecstasy, pain, and danger all trigger the release of hormones which alter our perception of time.”
Cyril’s internal clock is working just fine. To him, consistent balance is life’s greatest achievement. He’s had his share of stress and pain. Now he fixes things and keeps the place clean.
“The risk of myocardial infarction skyrockets in the week following the daylight saving time shift,” says the lecturer. “Biological patterns will always trump the external construct of minutes and seconds. Regular cycles may be one of the most important aspects of overall health.”
Cyril hasn’t been ill since he was a child, and hasn’t missed a shift since his drinking days.
“Time,” says the lecturer, “isn’t merely a philosophical or physical question, but a biological one too.”
Cyril rests his mop against the wall. The floor gleams.
Cyril holds up the stopwatch for his granddaughter to see. “Ten seconds exactly. Told you it’s my superpower.”
She doesn’t believe he can do it again.
“I’ll prove it. Been able to count time since I was eight and a half.”
His granddaughter looks deep into his eyes. “Same age as me.”
Cyril waited to tell her this story for maximum effect. Part of him hopes she’ll be able to do the same, but he knows the fever gave him his unique ability.
“Well,” he says, “my sense of time broke into little pieces when I was sick with glandular fever. I was in bed for eons but all I could do was count it ten seconds at a time.”
The little girl asks questions with her eyes as she listens. Why? How?
“The doctor gave me two weeks off school, which felt like a year. I didn’t know day from night, or how long the bowls of cold soup had been sitting there.” Cyril’s pounding headaches robbed him of his appetite, and the sweat-sodden bedsheets never dried despite his mother propping the window open. The room swirled in a vortex of hours and days without sleep. “The only constant was the swollen bullets in my throat,” he says. Little Cyril was terrified.
In his world records book, he once read that the longest a man went without sleep was eleven days. He died after that. Cyril doesn’t tell his granddaughter this.
“When the fever finally broke, and I could go outside again, my mother bought me the stopwatch I’d begged her for.”
His granddaughter holds the metal stopwatch by its chain. She presses each of the three buttons – Start, Lap, Reset – just as her grandfather did.
Cyril marked the years of school and seven more as an apprentice chippy, then started a family. At twenty-eight, he had a house in a burgeoning neighbourhood, a wife, and two children, but he kept no routines apart from fifteen cigarettes a day, five coffees, and six beers. Anything to alter the monotonous tick inside. Coffee turned to pills and beer turned to whisky.
One day the foreman told them to stay off site. One of the lads had fallen from the fourth floor and impaled himself on an upright rebar. No wrongdoing, he misjudged the edge of the concrete while swinging a sledgehammer. Bad timing.
Cyril didn’t have to discuss it with anybody but himself. He gave up drinking, caffeine and nicotine. Eventually, he gave up construction too.
“You can’t outrun your own sense of rhythm,” he says. “Your body is the most important thing to listen to.”
His granddaughter, hearing nothing, moves close, virtually sitting in Cyril’s lap. She presses her ear to his barrel chest to catch the beating of his heart. She seems disappointed by its normality. To her, Cyril is just her dad’s dad, able to perform a funny magic trick on command. “Do it again, Granddad. And no peeking.”
Cyril presses start, and for exactly ten seconds, the girl’s eyes don’t leave the stopwatch.
Time elapsed: one hundred and seventy beats of a 63-year-old male’s heart