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Dunbar hadn’t always been this way. Whenever he tried to explain it to people they thought he must have picked it up as a nervous tic when he was a kid, never mind that you didn’t need to make time go slower when you were young. It slowed on its own through doctor’s waiting rooms and errands with your mother, the single hour before school let out and the many hours before a friend’s birthday party. He knew each of these moments, had spent nearly thirty years cultivating not boredom but skill in remembering what to do to make clocks tick seconds behind where they should be. The gear rotations he’d managed to save and store had already earned him tens of billions of them.
People were surprised by what did and didn’t work; shook their heads to find they’d lost an hour to watching a sunset or assumed firing a gun would be over in seconds when it slowed them to a crawl, but that was because they equated slowness with laziness. The trick was to go after monotony. Dunbar wasn’t a miserable person and had no intention of becoming one, so took discomfort in doses and weighed his gambits (gambits often being Yossarian, who affected time like an alarm clock wound over but was good company, and easily counteracted with an extra hour of button-polishing or self-inflicted coffee insomnia.) He considered himself a professional, and he couldn’t have asked for a better office than Pianosa. Cities were nothing but frustrating with their click-click-click of too many shoes and too many traffic lights; too many windows opening, closing. The timepieces plastered on everything were such a mocking reminder to hurry, that none of this was permanent and that he had no hope of stopping it, they might as well have been his epitaph. He'd been relieved to think he’d found the antidote to them in his hometown, and that was before the luxury of being stuck on an island in the middle of a lethal global conflict. Days naturally spread thinner with only one place to go for a drink and nothing to look at but scrub, and people either lay around bitching and moaning about how bored they were or did something about it only to find the world was just as small and limited as it felt. It was paradise for someone in his line of business, and as winter turned to spring he had already ranked squadron members in order of detestability, found the emptiest stretches of beach with the most rocks to be organized, and perfected his strolls between encampments.
He made sure to justify all of it too (as far as discomfort went being trapped in unwanted monologue was up there with a Wednesday church service), but most people didn’t care that time needed adjusting. The only one it really seemed to bother was Clevinger.
“It doesn’t actually go slower because you’re doing that,” he would explain crossly, watching Dunbar cut his morning piece of toast into eighths instead of halves. “Look at my watch,” he insisted, shaking his wrist in front of his face.
Dunbar glanced up at him, “checking when you’re in a good mood makes it go faster,” he explained while Yossarian snatched one of his neglected toast eighths.
Clevinger flushed in irritation, “what do you do when we’re in the air then?”
“Not be in a good mood,”
“Not wear a watch,” said Yossarian, their responses overlapping.
“Don’t even joke about that,” Clevinger snapped, turning to him, “and why are you on his side? You don’t think he’s actually slowing down time either.”
“How many times do I have to tell you to knock it off? He’s not hurting anything.”
“You’re only saying that because you get to have his breakfast.”
Yossarian raised his crust to Dunbar in a mock salute and bit into it happily. Clevinger glowered.
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” he lectured, “the way you act because you think watches don’t work, it’s sick, and it’s not good for the rest of us either.”
“I should be in the hospital then, I’ll tell Stubbs you sent me.”
Yossarian laughed at that and Clevinger raised his voice an octave trying to talk over him, “I don’t mean you should be grounded,” he admitted, looking like he’d missed a stair and was trying to figure out where to put his foot down. “I just meant you’re focusing on the wrong things.”
Clevinger, who had eyes the color of dishwater and a habit of pursing his lips at an angle when annoyed, was the kind of person people liked to make excuses for (even Yossarian; especially Yossarian.) The general consensus was that he was annoying but that his qualities as a person and even better bombardier outweighed all that, when really he was annoying above all else. A despicably patriotic centrist too smart for his patriotic centrism and barely enough of a time-stretch to be worth it. He’d plant himself in the mess hall and start conversations no one wanted to have; the combination of his unearned confidence and inability to pick up on irritation fascinating Dunbar too much for it to be a chore. He would pester him right back telling him he’d never heard of Cambridge Massachusetts or Louis Pasteur or The Goodyear Blimp and it never dissuaded him, simply started him up on rants that went in circles and proselytization that went in spades.
Dunbar glanced over at him during the latest in a long line of Bologna briefings, chewing a pencil and staring wide-eyed at Cathcart lording himself over them like a parade float. Clevinger looked a little like a pencil, he thought, then wondered why he was thinking of Clevinger at all. He’d been nothing but trouble over the past few weeks considering the number of fights he’d started and, worse, the number of fights he’d tried to stop. Dunbar wasn’t resentful, he couldn’t afford to divide his focus by feeling self-conscious about what people like Clevinger thought of him, but he also wasn’t in the mood to be policed by someone who could talk about wine for hours and didn’t know how to tell when grapes were ripe. He did his job well enough that ‘unruly’ never crossed into 'insubordinate’ and so continued to toe the line, not bothering to think too hard about what came next. He assumed it would be more of the same. Destroy some things to save others, ask to be sent home, destroy more things, be sent home, marry a woman he liked but did not love, never have children, find contentment where he could.
“Where’s Yossarian?” He hissed at Clevinger, turning all the way around in his chair to look.
“Shh,” he instructed, annoyed. “I don’t know,” he admitted more quietly.
They lapsed back into silence. Dunbar listened to Clevinger’s (numbered) questions through half-lidded eyes, decided to join in and raise a bunch of meaningless (unnumbered) concerns about wind speeds. They caught glares as a unit and he brightened under them.
“Where is Yossarian?” Clevinger asked as they dispersed, looking around with genuine curiosity now.
“Probably still pretending to shit himself,” sighed Dunbar. It was starting to rain and he pulled his jacket over his head as they walked.
Clevinger shielded himself with a hand, “don’t talk like that. Or about that.”
“How would you rate being poisoned, scale of one to ten.”
“What? A one. A zero.”
“Cheating.”
“A one then.”
“Really? I’d say about a seven.”
Clevinger snorted, “of course you would. It wasn’t even worth the delay with Bologna, and you’d say “about a seven.”” He moved his fingers in little air quotes.
“So you’d rate it higher if the delay had been worth it.”
“What? No- ” He looked embarrassed. Dunbar liked it when he looked embarrassed just as much as he liked when he looked overconfident, and felt lucky that there seemed to be little if any in-between. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Clevinger continued, “we’ll be sent home sooner than you think.”
“Not me.”
“Yes, you.” He looked at him skeptically. “Even Yossarian thinks so now.”
“Yossarian is a dope,” said Dunbar fondly, and Clevinger laughed in spite of himself. “Look, even when I’ve met my mission quota something new will come up- "
“You don’t know that.”
“And we’ll be volunteered for it. The only way I’m getting out of here is with a blue ticket, and I don’t want a blue ticket so I’m not getting out of here.”
“But you’re an officer, and you’re not selfish like Yossarian is. How would you even get a discharge?”
Dunbar lifted his jacket off his head slightly and looked at him meaningfully. “I’m sure someone would think of something.”
Clevinger looked embarrassed again.
“It doesn’t matter anyway; I like it here.”
“You have very weird set of morals."
The rain was coming down harder now, their footsteps squelching in the mud.
Arguments were no good for hoarding time, never had been, but Dunbar enjoyed arguing with Clevinger and wondered if he felt the same way. While everyone was begging him to shut up he liked that he couldn’t keep himself a secret, and secretly liked sitting next to him in those briefings while they waited on Yossarian. Better still was the officers’ club. Clevinger would deign to show up and impress with his moderate drinking, only for his cheeks to light up with rosacea and for filters Dunbar hadn’t even known were there to come down as he started on tirades that somehow covered both the state of U.S. politics when he was thirteen and his opinions on dog breeds.
“Was he like this in California?” Dunbar asked Yossarian.
“Louder,” Yossarian admitted.
Eventually Dunbar would go find someone else to bother while he used the two of them as background noise; Havermeyer was a favorite target because he was nowhere near as annoying, but hostile in a way that made even Yossarian avoid him. Dunbar relished conversations with people he didn’t know and didn’t want to know, watching them squirm as they tried to figure out what it was he wanted. Sports were even better. He had never been good at ping-pong as it was too fast-paced to be dull and not complicated enough to be fun, but he made a habit of playing the others because it annoyed them. One night he’d missed the ball for the seventh time in a row and made a big show of lunging to the ground and slowly army crawling around to look for it while the everyone drunkenly shouted directions. “It’s under the table, Christ, it’s under the table!” Appleby was yelling, paddle raised in disgust, and when Dunbar looked up to ask if he was warm or cold he caught Clevinger grinning at him.
The best way of slowing time on Pianosa was not ping-pong but skeet shooting. When he’d first shared this discovery it had started another argument before he could fully explain it, but repetitive action and dismal reward were the perfect storm of monotony. The experience improved even further with the right company; he’d probably had more conversations with Havermeyer and Appleby about the weather in the month of June 1944 than their own mothers had over the course of their entire lives.
“You’re insane,” Clevinger announced when he saw him walking towards the range for the third time in one weekend. “You hate shooting skeet.”
“But I’m so good at it,” he said innocently, “you want me to be able to defend our country don’t you Clevinger?”
“Not against chunks of clay.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Is this really how you made lead?”
He shrugged; there’d been no use passing up a job even the others called an exercise in misery. “Do you want to come with?”
“No,” said Clevinger, still following him.
He stayed with him while he shot; gave him pointers from the sidelines on how to do it before picking up the gun for himself and demonstrating his own incompetence for a round. It was blissfully irritating in a way that made Dunbar more comfortable than he’d ever been on the range, time moving with them as they paced from target to target.
“Why do you only come out here with people you hate?” Clevinger asked eventually. He didn’t collect good questions, but quantity over quality was something Dunbar could appreciate.
“Amplifies the dullness, slows it down more.” He watched him reload. “Think of it like the difference between being stuck in traffic and being stuck in traffic with a hitchhiker.”
“You should make business cards,” Clevinger muttered, taking aim again.
“And I don’t hate you,” said Dunbar evenly.
He missed by a mile and looked at him, surprised. “Then why’d you invite me?”
“I don’t know.” He realized he really didn’t. This was usually something just for him; the others might stop by to watch but it was like having someone come visit you at work, and Clevinger was supposed to be Yossarian’s friend, not his. “Maybe I wanted it to go slower for you too.”
The two of them started hanging around each other more after that, listlessly drawn in like magnet filings. They didn’t shoot skeet anymore. Clevinger suggested the officers’ club but it felt strange there without Yossarian; their togetherness looking the way it did in school when a group fractured and people started to talk. Instead they would walk along the beach after missions, Clevinger interrogating Dunbar about ethics and philosophy.
“You need to ask better questions,” Dunbar advised him. He was trying to skip rocks over the surf and was satisfied to find it was near-impossible, Clevinger was writing out a diagram in the sand with a stick, and Dunbar felt an odd kind of affection watching him hunched over it with knees dirty and brow furrowed in concentration.
“Come over here and look at this though.”
“It’s just going to be some Plato thing again, come help me throw rocks.”
“Socrates,” Clevinger corrected, dusting himself off.
“Same difference,” he weighed another rock in his hand. Too heavy for skipping so he threw it like a baseball, the splooshing impact it made lost to the wind.
“It’s because you’re a consequentialist,” said Clevinger, sadly shaking his head like he was diagnosing him with something nasty and terminal.
“You ever think maybe the reason people don’t like you is because you say things like that?”
“You ever think maybe the reason people don’t like YOU is because you make your bad opinions everyone else’s problem?”
“All of my opinions are true.”
“If they were we’d be in a lot of trouble.”
“We are in trouble.”
“You’re worse than Yossarian.” He tossed a rock from the pile and managed to skip it once before it sank. “It’s- you’re actually smart, really smart, why do you have to be so stupid?”
“About getting in trouble or something else?”
“You honestly think time is broken?”
“Not broken, just needs adjusting,” he said, unbothered. He could practically see the gears turning in Clevinger’s head as he tried to figure out a way to compromise and still win the conversation.
“Well, playing devil’s advocate- "
“Adding a full hour to our lifespans with that phrase- "
“Let’s say time works the way you say it does.”
“That is what I’m saying.”
“When you explain it you keep mentioning it needs to be slowed down, that it’s your job to slow it down, but what if you’re wrong? What if it’s not your job?” He had always looked so earnest when he talked, so much like a future that could stretch on forever, that Dunbar had understood exactly why Yossarian picked him up back in the states.
“I don’t think I can go back to seeing things the way I used to,” he admitted after a moment. “It isn’t something I can turn off, or a job I can quit.”
“The time thing.”
“The time thing,” he agreed. They both paused, watching the tide. “What did you want to show me?” He asked. “About Plato?”
“Socrates,” Clevinger insisted. “And I’ll have to redo it so it’s clearer.”
“Tell me what to write and I’ll write it,” Dunbar offered. They transcribed lines and corrected tenses by scrubbing the ground with their boots, only for this to be connected with a pie chart explaining the first diagram that Clevinger insisted on calling ‘the main idea,’ and a graph breaking down Clevinger’s pie chart.
“You have very nice handwriting.” He said admiringly, both of them pouring over their work. “But you’re not much of a stenographer. Half of this isn’t even what I said.”
“Half of it’s yours and half of it’s mine.”
“Editorializing.”
“Problem-solving.”
The first time he had done it had been the hardest. A part of Dunbar had known what was happening as more and more articles about a foreign war, a new one, began to appear in the paper and he began to clip them out. They spread through his things at work and at home like a greenish mold on bread and he felt them weigh on his mind the same way. Soggy. Present. Just after his twenty-seventh birthday the headlines began to scream instead of commentate, and one morning in midwinter he’d lain down and stared at the ceiling for hours, the sand in the world’s timer turning to molten glass. In some ways it had seemed childish, but it had also seemed correct. Like exactly the kind of control he wanted to exert. Moments like those had once been crown jewels in his collection, reminders that years of extra life came at the price of being a little less comfortable and completely dissatisfied.
“Why can’t you two leave each other alone?” Yossarian asked, arm draped over his eyes like a dying statue as playing cards fluttered down around them.
“I’ll leave him alone when he stops cheating,” said Clevinger, glaring at Dunbar.
“I’ll stop cheating when he actually learns the rules and doesn’t take so long to notice,” said Dunbar, politely acting as if he hadn’t just thrown the entire deck in the air.
“This game is taking forever,” Clevinger muttered, scooping up angry fistfuls of face cards.
“Then let’s stop playing,” argued Yossarian, sitting up, “let’s go do something fun.”
“This is fun,” said Clevinger, already shuffling again.
Dunbar knew he wasn’t wrong that time was speeding up, knew he wasn’t stupid to want to slow it, but hadn’t considered that he’d been wrong about how to do that.
Clevinger paced nervously around the tent, looking like he wanted to be offered a drink or a place to sit down but unsure of how to ask for it.
“What are you thinking about?” Dunbar asked. It was July, and the first time in almost five months someone had come looking for him around his own squadron. It surprised him, but then they’d both been bored these past few days what with Yossarian sprinting between Rome and Hospital at record speeds (Dunbar had been reveling in it; Clevinger had not.)
“I’m worried about you.”
“Why?”
“You haven’t gone skeet shooting in days. You haven’t been doing any of the weird things you normally do. Are you… feeling okay?” He asked lamely.
“You said I was sick before too,” he pointed out.
“It seems different now.”
“Yeah, I guess it does.” He looked at him thoughtfully. “Let’s go to the beach,” he decided.
Clevinger gave it some performative thought and agreed, perked up a little and started to complain about the lack of forethought that went into raising the missions to forty and compliment their latest briefing on raising the missions to forty.
“So really, no more weirdness?”
“No promises.”
“You know what I mean. You actually drank your coffee this morning.”
Dunbar was particularly proud of knowing how long it took for coffee to go lukewarm; he would miss it. “I don’t need those things as often as I used to.”
“Your tricks for whatever it is you think your job is.”
“Whatever my very real job is.”
“Well, that’s a good thing I guess.” His brow was furrowed; Dunbar stopped to see if their stack of rocks was where they’d left it. “What changed?”
“It goes slower when I’m with you too.” Dunbar said casually; statement rather than confession. Of course, Clevinger took it as neither and decided to be insulted.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I like spending time together.”
“Same as skeet shooting.”
“Better.” He smiled at him.
“Oh.” He hesitated, visibly confused that they were having a conversation rather than an argument. “…That bad?”
“You agreed with me that discomfort is the best way to make time go slower- "
“Seem like it goes slower," he corrected impulsively.
“Does go slower,” Dunbar corrected right back, “and it’s not true.”
“It’s not?” he murmured, only half a question as Dunbar leaned in to kiss him.
Clevinger kissed him back, tensing up then leaning in with a greedy uncertainty usually reserved for bar alleys and empty football bleachers. Dunbar smiled against his mouth and pushed him back a little, and Clevinger looked so hurt he almost laughed. Instead he took his chin and kissed his throat. “Do you know how happy I am,” he asked, slightly muffled against his neck, “that instead of shooting with Havermeyer and the rest of them, I can lay in the sun with you?”
Clevinger was, for the first time in his life since the Action Board had found him guilty, completely speechless. Dunbar wrapped an arm around him and held him closer, his other hand unclasping one of his impeccably done-up shirt buttons, and he responded in kind with another kiss. They stood on the shoreline, swaying slightly like a broken fencepost.
“Clevinger.”
“Huh?” he managed, tracing concentric circles into the back of Dunbar’s jacket.
“Wasn’t a rhetorical question.”
“You want me to talk while we- we uh…?” Dunbar pulled back from working on his shirt to look at him. “Because well, people don’t normally like it. The talking.” He twisted his mouth into a nervous smile. Even subdued he made the world feel like being on a sailboat stuck with no currents, no clouds, no wind.
“I’d like nothing more,” said Dunbar.