For information, this story is above all characters in 18 years old and above. So there's no minors or children in this story.

I would not include any minors in this story because that's bad.

P.S: This chapter has no sexual activities. Future chapters will include some especially masturbation.

Now the story...

...

The first thing I ever built that actually worked was a watch.

People have asked me, over the years, what kind of watch, and I always say it keeps time, which is a true statement in the same way a locked door is technically a door. It did keep time. That was the least interesting thing about it.

I was eighteen years old when I finished it. Eighteen, six feet one, with a skinny neck and a baby face that made barmen wave me toward the door before I'd even opened my mouth. I mention the face because the face became important later. Everything about me, in those years, seemed to be a thing I had to live behind: the face, the age, the name. Carl Voss. A name like a doorbell.

The watch changed all that. Or rather, the watch was going to change all that, as soon as I worked out what to do with it.

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I suppose I should explain the garage.

The house was my father's, and my father was not in it. He had left eleven years before for a woman in Tulsa and had never once asked for the house back, which was how I understood, at twelve, that I was not a thing he planned to return for. My mother died when I was nine, of a stroke that took her while she was folding laundry. I found her. The paramedics said she'd been gone before she hit the floor, which was meant to be a comfort, I think. Comfort had a different address in our house. After my father left, they sent me to live with my grandmother, who raised me on boiled cabbage, Bible verses, and the firm belief that I was the smartest child in three counties and would therefore be punished by God for it.

The smartest child in three counties got himself expelled from school at fourteen. Not for fighting. For correcting the chemistry teacher in front of the class, and then, when she'd asked me to leave, for pointing out that she'd written …