ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM MARCH 20, 2017 rence. Since turning forty, I’d started to PERSONAL HISTORY suffer from a heightened sense of claus- trophobia. A few years ago, I was stuck for an hour in an elevator with a man TIME OUT who weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds and his two grocery carts crammed with bags of Tostitos and bot- Confessions of a watch geek. tles of Canada Dry, an experience both BY GARY SHTEYNGART frightening and lonely. The elevator had simply given up. What if a subway train also refused to move? I began walking seventy blocks at a time or splurging on taxis. But on this day I had taken the N train. Somewhere between Forty- ninth Street and Forty-second Street, a signal failed and we ground to a halt. For forty minutes, we stood still. An old man yelled at the conductor at full vol- ume in English and Spanish. Time and space began to collapse around me. The orange seats began to march toward each other. I was no longer breathing with any regularity. This is not going to end well. None of this will end well. We will never leave here. We will always be underground. This, right here, is the rest of my life. I walked over to the conduc- tor’s silver cabin. He was calmly explain- ing to the incensed passenger the scope of his duties as an M.T.A. employee. “Sir,” I said to him, “I feel like I’m dying.” “City Hall, City Hall, we got a sick passenger,” he said into the radio. “I re- peat, a sick passenger. Can you send a rescue train?” A rescue train. My whole life I have been waiting for one. Sensing the ex- citement of someone suffering more than they were, the other passengers In October, my feelings of dread spiked, so I decided to buy a Rolex. moved to my end of the car to offer advice, crowding in on me and mak- t the start of 2016, I had a bad at a time—Jabruarch—or segmenting ing me panic all the more. One man feeling. Time was not working into Gregorian-calendar city-states. was particularly insistent. “I’m a retired right.A Some weeks were as snappy as Feb. Rue. Airy. Something was wrong firefighter,” he said. “I’ve been doing days, others were as elastic as months, with the world. this twenty years, folks. Seen it all. This and the months felt as if they were ei- One day in February, I took a ride man here is hyperventilating. That’s ther bleeding into one another three on the subway. This was a rare occur- what he’s doing. Twenty years a fire- fighter, now retired.” watch was a Junghans, from Germany, cate just how “worldly” I was, and a “I’m going to take an Ativan now,” derived from a design by the Bauhaus- subsequent girlfriend had it repaired I said, fishing a pill out of my breast influenced Swiss architect, artist, and after we had broken up, a gesture of pocket. industrial designer Max Bill. I had bought unusual kindness. “Do not do that,” the retired fire- it at the MOMA shop for what in my early, But by this time I thought of myself fighter said. “It will only make you hy- innocent watch days seemed like the as- as a writer, and, for a writer, the money perventilate more. Trust me, I know tronomical price of a thousand dollars. you make can be traded in for your cre- what I’m doing.” Its no-frills, form-follows-function shape ative independence, hence one is per- A middle-aged woman approached evoked civility in a time of chaos, a tick- manently building a rainy-day fund. me. “You have to imagine,” she said to ing intelligence in the face of a new in- I have always tried to keep on hand me, in a Polish accent, “that eventually humanity. The train slowly moved again. enough cash to cover at least two years the train will move. That eventually we The Polish woman smiled at me. We of expenses in case the public stops being will come out of the tunnel.” shuddered into Times Square and I was, interested in my work, while plowing Shamed into not taking the Ativan for a few moments in time, safe. the rest into low-cost index funds. Thrift by the retired firefighter, I looked down was comforting; material goods unin- at my wrist. I was wearing a new watch, very watch geek has an origin teresting, bordering on gauche. the first mechanical watch I had ever story. During childhood, my first And yet on April 12, 2016, I walked owned. A brief primer: Since the late Ebest friend was a watch, a Casio H-108 out of the Tourneau TimeMachine nineteen-seventies, most watches have 12-Melody-Alarm. True to its name, store, on Madison Avenue and Fifty- used a quartz movement, which is bat- the digital watch played twelve melo- seventh Street, with a receipt for tery-powered and extremely accurate. dies, including “Santa Lucia,” “Happy $4,137.25 and a new Nomos Minima- Mechanical watches, by contrast, are Birthday,” “The Wedding March,” “Jin- tik Champagner on my wrist, the sales powered either by hand-winding or, in gle Bells” (played only in the bathroom clerks bidding me farewell with a the case of an automatic watch, by the of my Hebrew school, when no other cheerful cry of “Congratulations!” motion of the wearer’s wrist, which is Jewish boys were present), and even a By the standards of luxury watches, converted into energy by means of a song from my native Russia, “Kalinka” the amount I spent was small indeed rotor. Mechanical watches are far less (roughly, “Red Little Berry”), which I (an entry-level Rolex is about six thou- accurate than quartz watches, but often listened to every hour on the hour to sand dollars), but by my own standards far more expensive, because their bear- make myself feel less homesick and I had just thrown away a small chunk, ings are more intricate. All contempo- scared. I spoke English miserably, but roughly 4.3 writing days, of my inde- rary Rolex watches, for example, are me- the watch had its own language, a com- pendence. And yet I was happy. The chanical. The difference between quartz puterese series of squeaks issuing from watch was the most beautiful object I and old-fashioned mechanical is that a tiny Japanese speaker to form pass- had ever seen. After my panic attack your child’s Winnie the Pooh watch will able melodies. My parents had bought on the subway, the urge for another likely keep better time than a seventy- me the watch at a Stern’s department Bauhaus-inspired watch had become six-thousand-dollar Vacheron Constan- store in Queens for $39.99, a signifi- overwhelming, and I compared many tin perpetual calendar in rose gold. A cant part of their net worth at the time, brands. The winner was a relatively quick way to tell the two kinds apart is and it was easily my favorite posses- new watchmaker called Nomos, based to look at the second hand. On a quartz sion, until it caught the eye of a Hebrew- in the tiny Saxon town of Glashütte. watch, the second hand goose-steps along school bully. My grandmother marched An early-spring sun glinted off my one tick at a time; on a mechanical watch, into the principal’s office and used the watch as I walked down Lexington Av- it glides imperfectly, but beautifully, hundred or so English words at her enue. I took a photograph of the Min- around the dial and into the future. disposal—“Bad boychik take watch!”— imatik on my wrist, as if at any mo- Looking at the smooth, antiquated to lobby for its safe return. ment I would be forced to give it back. mechanical glide of my watch’s second Eventually, I made human friends, There is an entire genre of watch aficio- hand, I felt, if not calm, then ready for and my musical Casio disappeared for nados who take photos of themselves whatever happened next. As the conduc- good. My relationship with watches wearing their timepieces in front of tor’s radio flared on and off with prom- from that point on coincided with the landmarks and post them on watch fo- ises from City Hall (my rescue train never women in my life. In high school, my rums. Would I become one of them? came), as the passengers around me dis- mother bought me a quartz Seiko, I ducked into a Pakistani place to eat cussed my fate, I wondered: Can you which pinched my budding wrist hair a quail, but was worried about splash- hold your own world together while the with its loose gold-plated bracelet, and ing grease on the vegetable-tanned nat- greater world falls apart? The visible pass- was a bit out of place at my next stop, ural-leather strap. The dial was cham- ing of time, second by second, seemed Oberlin, where comrades were not en- pagne-colored, with an unexpected to provide a kind of escape route, even couraged to have gold-plated things. circle of neon orange around the sec- as my body remained within the metal After college, a girlfriend bought me onds’ subdial. (“These are wild colors shell of the stricken N train. Three sec- a Diesel watch with the image of at but in homeopathic doses,” one of No- onds, inhale.