5:57 p.m.
written by: Christopher Critch
Time, not enough, too much. Time is short, time keeps dragging on, people have said it all about time, but they don’t know the half of it. I do now, and the funny thing is, it didn’t do me a bit of good in the end.
My name is Robert, Rob to those I care most about, and this is the story of my death.
Weird, saying something like that. Who would ever feel comfortable writing that down? No, stranger still, how can it even be possible to do? It’s that time stuff again. Anyway, however or whenever this is, it is happening. I feel sure of that. Maybe you can learn something from it or pass it along for what it’s worth.
I was a good man. At least I thought I was.
I lived in my own little version of the good life. I grew up in an average town and became self-aware in the way we all do as we age. I married a wonderful woman and had two children, a boy and a girl. I had a great job and a nice home. I even had a classic vintage car that was just for me, and I spent a lot of my hobby hours fixing it up whenever I had the time. It was the car that led to it all.
It’s a 1967 Ford Thunderbird, complete with suicide doors, a special 428 engine, and a roll-down rear windscreen. A rare model with that specific package of options, and I’d been working on restoring it for five years. It was just about finished when I saw the advertisement for the antique car rally. It was just the sort of thing that caught my attention. Oh, I’d been to many car shows before. That’s how car enthusiasts, car nuts, Sandra, my wife, used to call them, get advice on repairs, buy or swap parts, and just hang out talking car stuff to like-minded people. But an antique rally, that was something special. The cars had to pass a safety inspection and work perfectly. They were going to organize the race on a closed section of roads around our local county. No pretty picture opportunity here. This was going to be hot oil and tense nerves all around. I immediately decided to enter the T-bird and secretly emailed in the application without telling Sandra, just in case I didn’t finish the car on time, or in case she would offer some perfectly reasonable comment on my complete lack of skills and experience in the field of rally driving. Parallel parking a minivan doesn’t count, she would say with that easy smile of hers and poke me in the ribs with something to make me laugh.
She was always doing stuff like that. Taking a potential argument situation and getting me to see the two or three sides of the issue. Better to take the time now, and sort it out, than sit around and pout! How many times has she said that in the twenty-one years we have been together? I couldn’t even listen to half of that rhyme before I’d start smiling, Jamie and Rachel too. They would just pretend to plug their ears and say Mom, I’m not listening to you. I have a right to pout if I want to, but they would be smiling too; you just couldn’t help it. It was some kind of Pavlovian response she had trained us in, or gypsy magic, or I don’t know what, but it worked every time. Time, there it is again, every time, sometimes, who knew how it was all connected. Maybe she had an instinct for the whole time thing, I sure didn’t, or I wouldn’t be where I am now.
Sandra rhymes or not, I moved steadily towards the rally deadline a step at a time. She knew I was still interested in the project and pretty much left me alone to work it out for myself. Anyway, there was a lot of work needed before I could hope to even race that machine to the end of the driveway. I got busy, and piece by piece, the car came into shape. Two weeks left, and I was ready for the first test drive. Somehow, that was the hardest thing; it’s weird how your mind works. I’m an engineer by training, so I have a pretty good head for math, science, and technology, but it’s all desk work in my area. Plus, the working world is so complicated these days; everything I do involves many other people. The whole reason I got interested in restoring old cars in the first place was that I had found something where I could use my hands and my brain in a cooperative way and see a result that was all mine. The only thing I didn’t realize at the time was that the experience of building that car was very different from finally driving it. I was somehow, I don’t know, sorry, I guess, that it was finished and not just a little scared of actually driving it around, much less racing it.
4:50 p.m. Tick…
I felt proud and happy as I got behind the wheel that last sunny Sunday afternoon and turned the key. The 428 Cobra Jet engine thrummed to life, and the car seemed to wake up as if from a long restful sleep, eager to get moving once more. I had a thought then about all the time I had invested in rebuilding this classic muscle machine and wondered who else from the past might have been associated with it. I almost figured the time paradox out right then on the spot, but like the flutter of a half-remembered dream against your mind’s eye, it was gone as quickly as it arrived. I let out the clutch and moved slowly past my waving family into the street. The old analog dash clock was working perfectly, and it showed 4:50 p.m., exactly the moment it all began. In another 67 minutes, I would be dead. Ironic, really, the 67 also matching the model year. It’s not connected, though, that would be trite. Coincidence, that’s all, they happen on the other side as well.
5:06 p.m. Tick, Tick…
Settling in now to the feel of the car as I drove slowly down my neighborhood streets. I thought that maybe the reason people like driving so much is because they feel a special link between being alone and being together all at the same time. You know what I mean, the vehicle traffic seems alive, the pedestrians, the bicycles, folks everywhere going where they need to be, and you are in your car moving through it all. People somehow get the feeling they are disconnected when driving and will do things they wouldn’t dream of doing outside of their cars. Honking and rudeness are extreme examples of this, but others drive around talking to themselves, singing or playing loud music that they would not enjoy in the same way at home. All this, just because they are driving in a car. I understand it all a whole lot better now that I am dead, but at 4:50 p.m. on this last day of my life, I was no different from anyone else. Gripped by that feeling and just accepting it as a commonplace state of mind. Just taking the time for a relaxing Sunday drive, as people often say. People who don’t know anything about the nature of time, that is.
The T-bird was running like a dream. Anyone who ever sat in one will know what I mean. This model of car was a real head turner back in the sixties, and seeing one on the road today is a definite attention grabber. Ever since the car was introduced in 1954, they have caught the attention of people from all walks of life. I thought for a moment about some film footage I once saw about John F. Kennedy and his passion for the same model of car. He included 50 T-birds in his inaugural motorcade procession shortly after his election to the presidency of the United States. The sight and sound of so many identical luxury cars all moving together with purpose made an epic statement at the time. The public saw both a youthful leader and the car he loved as symbols of pride and a nation’s success. You could never buy that much publicity today at any price. T-bird sales rocketed upwards, and later, after his death, the sight of those cars gave people an everyday something to remember him by. Those were 1961 models, however, and my car was an entirely different design. Longer, faster, and better than their predecessors, at least in my own small opinion. I squeezed the accelerator a little harder, the Cobra responded, and the car shot up the highway on-ramp.
5:30 p.m. Tick, Tick, Tick…
Around our part of the country, we have some beautiful roads, and at this time of the day, anyone heading East, as I was, was treated to a truly beautiful collage of road, land, and sky bathed in a glow of the early evening light. It’s not like a sunset, mind you, it’s better than that. It’s still bright, but there is softness to the sun’s illumination that eliminates any glare and allows you to relax. I felt happy at that moment and imagined it would be great to just drive on like this forever.
It was about then that the time thing really started to happen. It began slowly at first and put thoughts into my head that I didn’t realize weren’t my own. It was sort of listening to a conversation in a restaurant, just at the limit of your hearing perception. Snippets of half-formed sentences, soft laughter, and the general shape of concepts that you only half heard. You have to fill in the blanks yourself to make any sense of it. They were all coming from the car. No, no, I was wrong about that. They were coming from somewhere else, I was sure of that now, but they were focusing inside the car. Sort of like a radio with a lot of static. As you slowly dial in the broadcast to get better and better reception. The static fading and the voices becoming ever clearer. Voices now, so many of them.
I imagined, or maybe I was actually, somehow, present in an executive meeting room in Detroit way back in the 1960s, understanding that the 1967 Thunderbird was a genuine risk for the Ford Motor Company. They already had a winning product that sold very well. Why change it at all? The answer was that the executives wanted to broaden the market appeal for the car and felt that they needed a sedan version to attract customers with families. The original T-bird was a two-seater sports convertible, and even the later hardtop models were small in the creature comfort rating, allowing only room for four average-sized adults. No, the T-bird was a luxury toy for people who also had another car for regular use. Enter the 1967 model year. Longer, sleeker, and equipped with those fantastic, and futuristic rear suicide doors. If you have never seen them, they open opposite a regular rear car door so that when both front and rear doors are open, the entire side of the car is gone. This trick allowed full-sized adults to easily get in and out. The doors looked so wild, everyone wanted to try them out. That, plus a roll-down rear windshield, gave a pretty close approximation to the windblown feel of the previous convertibles. The new design also allowed the car to be driven in areas with heavy winter snowfalls. All great ideas, the only problem in 1967 was weight. Bigger cars are heavy, and with the extra weight disappears much of the sports car driving magic.
However, the good parts of the new design were so interesting the executives insisted on a new engine that was up to the challenge, and boy did they get one. The 1967 was offered standard with a 390 cubic inch version producing 315 hp and an optional 428 cubic inch engine with 345 hp. Then there were a few, a very few, equipped with the Cobra Jet. This eye-popping monster was a high-performance racing version of the 428 with over 400 hp. Ford used a racing consultant to help in developing the Cobra engine and put them in T-birds by special request only. I found mine rusting in a barn five years ago and nursed it back to life.
How can I know all these things that happened long ago and far away when I was only a child? I knew at some level that these weren’t facts running through my mind that I had read somewhere about vintage Thunderbirds. I was seeing or experiencing what seemed like personal memories. I was hearing actual conversations between other people who worked on designing and building these cars.
5:55 p.m. Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick…
Things were becoming clearer for me now. While the background rhythmic chop of the exhaust note thundered under the car, some of the time links intersected inside the cabin. I began to think about, no, I think I could somehow actually see them, if specters from time can be seen at all. It was a bit like the sense of awe one experiences when witnessing a great architectural masterpiece for the first time. Stonehenge, the great pyramids of Giza, places like that, you get the point. When you are there, the mist of the everyday clears for a moment, and you just sit in silent awe and contemplation of the significance of the human accomplishment in front of you. Who were they? How did they build this place? Guess what, the answers are all around us in the time links. It’s just that without a lens, we are not able to observe them.
5:56 p.m. Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick…
Time ages all. Sounds sort of banal, doesn’t it? Well, I’m not talking about wrinkles and sore backs here; I’m talking about the sum total of our life’s work and loves. See, it gets spread out here and there, a little at a time, and then ages and blends with others’ life experiences into something better, much better, than it was before. Then every so often, something acts like a magnifying glass and focuses that collective human time experience into a perceptible, pulsating force. Even when the focus isn’t perfect, you can still feel it; some people call it a vision. Anyway, the T-bird was a polished lens of time focus, and I was about to get a cosmic jolt of enlightenment.
The faster I drove, the stronger the time memories got, and the faster they settled into some sort of filing cabinets in my mind. I was instantly so certain of that connection, I stiffened in my seat and pushed the accelerator pedal all the way into the carpet. The Cobra Jet roared with a sound unlike anything I had ever heard, and the car literally lurched into top speed. The ticking of the clock was deafening now, drowning out the engine and everything except the flood of memories and the millions of voices buzzing like a beehive, flying to file each respective memory in its proper storage drawer.
I have no idea how fast I was traveling since the speedometer only registers up to 120 mph. The needle was pointing down into the extreme edge of the dash. The time memories, images, and sounds were coming in so fast now, they overlapped into a continuous colourful blur. A millennium of collective human experience was passing by and into my memory in only a few seconds.
I wasn’t the least bit afraid. Then it snapped.
5:57 p.m. Tock…
Everything stopped. In that silent, frozen instant, I knew what it was, and back home in the comfort of my garage, I could have repaired it in an hour or so, but that would never happen now.
The T-bird was vaulted high into the air as the broken driveshaft hit the highway and dug in with the full power of the Cobra behind it. The kaleidoscopic vision of the land and sky I saw at that moment was a result of the twisting and tumbling of the big car as it tore itself to bits. I watched it all calmly with the accumulated knowledge of the ages. I didn’t even take my foot off the accelerator.
The beauty of it all, the symmetry, the utter simplicity of how the days and minutes of our lives all intertwine was revealed to me with a shock greater than the crushing blow delivered to my sternum as the steering column pushed back into the car’s interior during that final instant of impact.
I learned one last thing. 5:57 p.m. wasn’t then in the sense I used to think of time; it was more like, well, like now, and that is why I can tell the story of my own death.
Epilogue
Constable Stanton waited patiently until Detective Robertson finished reading the crumpled typewritten pages given to him by the young highway patrol officer.
“Since you found this document inside the wreck, it seems to point directly towards suicide,” said the Detective as he looked up after reading the last page.
“How do you explain the accident details and the timeline?” asked the Constable. “If he planned on killing himself, how could he make the car break down and crash just like in his story at exactly 5:57 p.m.?”
“How do you know what time the crash occurred?” asked Robertson.
“We have confirmation from a traffic cam video that recorded the accident, and the analog dash clock in the wreck stopped exactly at 5:57 when the tumbling car ripped the battery out of the engine bay,” said Stanton. “Also, the Coroner confirmed a crushed sternum was the cause of death. He definitely died exactly as he predicted in the story, or his ghost wrote it all down after he was dead.”
“Ghosts!” said Robertson. “OK, that’s a new one for me. I’m a detective, not a medium. How long have you been on the job, Stanton?”
“This is my rookie year,” said the young Constable.
“So, Stanton, the way I see this going down, you have two choices. You can take this time lens ghost story theory of yours to the Captain yourself and see how long you get to stay on active duty, or you can let me finish this accident report, and then you sign it as the responding officer, citing suicide by car with the story you recovered from the wreck taken into evidence as proof. This guy was clearly off his rocker, dreaming up time travel or whatever. He planned on killing himself in that old car just to make the story come true. That’s what I conclude from the evidence,” said Detective Robertson.
“What do you say, Constable Stanton?”
“It’s suicide,” said Stanton quietly.
- 5:57 p.m. - October 4, 2026
- The Collector - July 26, 2026
