Tinkers

“The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untucked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.”

As George lays on his deathbed, he begins to lose himself in dreams and memories. This is one of the first hallucinations he experiences and it foreshadows George’s coming death. Life as he knows it—his house, the sky, the stars—crumbles and falls, ending with George’s “obliteration.”

“When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture.”

As George gets ill and old, his body visibly changes—in this case, his legs turn stiff. This reminds his wife of wood, and she associates George with furniture. Even in this grim association, there is a sense of tinkering, in which a character seeks to work on or perfect the objects around them.

“Poke your finger into the clock; fiddle the escape wheel (every part perfectly named—escape: the end of the machine, the place where the energy leaks out, breaks free, beats time).”

Clocks are frequently referenced in Tinkers as objects that bring order to chaos, record activity, and measure time perfectly. They are also frequently compared to people. This excerpt refers to both ideas: the efficiency of the machine, and the inevitability of energy running out and escaping just as a person’s life force is slowly drained as time progresses.