A man of a certain age wakes up one morning and he knows he's had a traumatic dream concerning a clock, but the trouble is he can't remember one thing about it except for a fading memory of a battered clock cabinet and one missing hand.
So he rubs his head for a moment and then decides to write the back-story of that clock. He plucks two innocents from the fifties - not real people at all - and gives them lives. And the story grows until it's the document you see before you. A love story, maybe, a gritty love story (minus the sex, there's no call for that in this kind of saga) emerges at the end of the process.
And, of course, this is it.