14
BUT SHE DIDN’T RETURN in two and a half hours. He waited for her as the others straggled back; he looked for her in the distance. She didn’t come. Occasionally this happened, since there was another boat later that evening. After ten minutes passed he took his other passengers back to the mainland; he realized only later that he’d forgotten to collect the fares.
15
ON THE LAST RUN of the day, he was searching the edge of the island for her as soon as it came within sight. But she wasn’t there; patiently he sat on deck staring at the island, rather than away from it, the noise of the nightcrowd coming from town. At this point in his life he’d become too locked in with the rhythms of resignation and instinct to think profoundly upon the impact of this girl. He contemplated the frequency of destiny she transmitted and what its exact nature might be; he mused that she might be his daughter, or his future wife. But he didn’t muse on such things for long. He knew by now these frequencies were unnamable, in a century that tried to name everything that was particularly unfathomable. Time passed and the rest of the tourists found their way back; of course they were always drunker on the evening run. He kept looking for her. There wasn’t any doubt she’d appear; there was no other way off the island, after all, and there was nothing to do other than leave it. In fifteen years there hadn’t been a single instance when someone stayed, or had been left behind. So there just wasn’t any doubt she’d appear. But when they were all back, and waiting to leave, and she still wasn’t there, he delayed five, ten, fifteen minutes. “The buses are waiting for us,” someone said, “when are we going back?” We’ll go back when I say we go back, he said. Twenty minutes passed. The passengers became incensed. When he couldn’t delay any longer, he took them back without her. After returning everyone to mainland, he did what he’d never done before—sailed back to the island and spent the night there, on the boat.
16
HE HAD THIS IDEA she’d be there every time he opened his eyes. He had this idea she’d be there at sunrise, cold and frightened from her night on the island. But she wasn’t there at sunrise and she wasn’t there when he opened his eyes; and by late morning he was the one who was hungry and cold, and there would be people on shore waiting for the first run of the day. He went back. It was a sunny day. He loaded up the boat quickly and disembarked almost immediately; he found himself searching the island for her all the way across the river. He lost track of the speed with which the boat made its way over the water; people on deck were looking around anxiously and hanging onto the rail as the boat bounced along the surface. Two people actually toppled over; husbands looked at him in outrage as they scooped their wives up off the wet wood. “Do you think you could slow down a little?” someone asked him; he ignored it. At the island she wasn’t there. Gratefully the passengers pried themselves loose from the boat and climbed ashore, leaving him with abhorring looks and sarcastic thanks. He didn’t hear them.
He paced his boat, oblivious to everything else as he’d been since her first failure to return the day before. Now it seemed as though this had been going on not a single day but many days, maybe weeks. He hastily sailed the passengers back a couple of hours later, even leaving behind one or two latecomers calling from the beach; people began tying themselves to the boat in the manner of Zeno’s skeleton tied to the boat’s bottom, so they wouldn’t be thrown over from the captain’s assault on the river. “My God, man,” someone said to him, “do we have to go this fast? Everyone’s frightened.” There was a girl, the boatman answered, she wore a blue dress. You see a girl in a blue dress? All of them just shook their heads a little. He turned back to the black water; he seemed to push the boat a little faster. Passengers clung to the vessel whitefaced, teeth clenched.
On this trip back, or perhaps the next, he realized it. After fifteen years it was a little unthinkable he wouldn’t have seen it immediately; but it happened several times before he noticed. Rather, it didn’t happen. The Moment. The Moment didn’t happen. That moment in which time and space belonged utterly to his boat, destination and point of departure disappeared. And now that he thought about it, he realized it hadn’t happened this morning either, when he woke at the island; and now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember it happening the evening before. For that matter he couldn’t remember it happening since she’d left the boat. And it didn’t happen the rest of the day; and for all the fear and desolation of every time it had happened every day over the preceding fifteen years, now the fear and desolation of it not happening were such as to trivialize everything he’d feared before.
And he began to fear that she was not going to come back to his boat. In the way he’d told himself before that there simply couldn’t be any doubt about it, now he told himself there was nothing but doubt; now every time he sailed up to the island, and all through the time he waited there, he knew she wasn’t going to come. It was as though she’d taken with her that moment on the river; she’d taken it and was living in it somewhere there on the place he’d sworn to leave forever. There’s a girl in a blue dress, he’d call to the tourists going into town, keep your eyes open for her. And when they came back he’d ask if they’d seen her. When they came back, he interrogated them one by one. He stood in the middle of the boat barking at them, and they shrank from him, and lied. They lied that they’d seen her in the bar, they lied that they’d seen her at the hotel, where no one but his mother had lived for over forty years. They lied they’d seen her walking along the street. They lied they’d seen her among the ice, or the graves, and those were the lies he believed most, since he’d thought of her long before he knew her, or long before she even was, when he lay amidst the ice as a boy; and since she had, after all, come to bury something.
The group of them sort of huddled against each other before him. After he heard their lies he didn’t even see them anymore. He kept looking ashore, at the town. He paced and waited, thirty minutes, an hour. Not a single one of the passengers worked up the courage to ask when they were going back. Two hours passed; it was nearly midnight. And then, like the man who must scream to himself, if in no place other than his own heart, as he hurls himself into the chasm beyond the cliffs edge, he leapt, though it was only inches, from the edge of the boat to Davenhall Island, and went to look for her.
17
HE HADN’T BEEN ON the island ten minutes before all the townspeople knew he was there. Even though it was midnight, when most of them were asleep, all it took was one witness, a man or woman reading by the window perhaps, who happened to glance out his window and see the sailor with the white hair striding down the street. At which point the man or woman in the window would have jumped from his or her chair and run into the back bedroom to wake the rest of the family with the news. Ten minutes and it was all over town. The general assumption was that the appearance, after so many years, of the boy with white hair, who grew up to spend his life sailing back and forth to the home he left and had surely grown insane in the process, could only be a harbinger. Something dreadful was inevitable, a storm moving upriver from the east; or the sinking of Davenhall Island altogether, after decades of its inhabitants honeycombing its innards with tombs they didn’t fill; or herds of silver buffalo sweeping everything in their path: animals and birds and boats and tourist groups and lost Asian tribes in a dying ghost town.
There’s a girl in a blue dress, he said to Judy in the door of her tavern.
She was wiping the counter and picking up the furniture. Racking up the glasses, casually drying her hands on an apron. She came from behind the counter and crossed the room to him.
I’m looking for a girl in a blue dress, he said again, have you seen her?
She didn’t say anything for a moment, as though still listening to sentences said between them that neither uttered; and then she turned from him just slightly, and brought her hand flying across his face.
He staggered a little, his eyes flared.
“You son of a bitch,” she whispered, “your
own mother might have died and you wouldn’t budge off that God damned boat. All those years and you had no use for anything in this town, and now the thing that brings you back is a girl in a blue dress.”
He swallowed hard but steeled himself: That’s right, he told her.
She wiped her hands some more on her apron, though the hands were already dry and the apron was already wet. “I haven’t seen any girl,” she just said, “don’t worry about it, there will be other girls.” She added, “You should be careful, these are modern times. You should be careful.” She almost laughed at him.
That isn’t what this is, he just said. I wouldn’t have come for that, if that was what this was. Then he turned and walked out of the bar.
Out in the street a gust almost blew him over. He pulled his faded blue coat around him and the wind ripped the last of the gold buttons off its stitches. Across mainstreet was the hotel where he was born and raised; he was startled to see a light in his mother’s window, and the form of someone watching him. He only turned up his collar and headed toward the other end of the island. He strolled up mainstreet through the dust of the wind that was silver like razors; he went from door to door rattling them on their hinges to find them locked. He put his elbow to the windows and one by one knocked them in: this was the sound of Davenhall, the shriek of the wind and the blistering of windows, all up and down the street. The Chinese hadn’t been wrong then to believe a storm had come to them from the river. Families huddled in their houses waiting for it to pass; finally the storm reached the ice, where it stood before the white and black machine that never stopped churning. In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else’s in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north. He left the ice machine and headed for the cemetery. To bury something, he said to himself. At the cemetery the wind was harder, because it faced the east of the river where the other side could never quite be seen, but from which came the red trains on the tracks high above the water. There the trees were bare of obituaries, the graves silent. He stood in the marsh that lay shadowstunned and bleeding up worms between his feet, and faced the sky. He could not call her name because he didn’t know it. It isn’t the time to look for her, not at night, he said to himself; and yet only in the dark would he have found the courage and desperation. Only in the dark would the frequency have been so far beyond denial. It isn’t the time, he said to himself, to look for her body in the river, if she tried to escape by swimming; or to look for the remains of a stray boat, if she believed there was any other boat to take her back. But there are no other boats, he said to himself. And he wasn’t ready yet to accept that she wasn’t here.
There was only one other place to look, of course.
He wondered what he’d say. He practiced confessions in his mind. He recalled all the confessions he’d made up as a boy, all the confessions he’d put into the mouths of the girls he met on the river. Those confessions didn’t apply. Those were confessions that begged never to be forgiven. This was not a confession offered to or received from any lover. This would be a confession to a woman with gray hair who had borne him. She wasn’t in the window anymore when he reached mainstreet again, but the light was still on, the only one in the hotel: he had an overwhelming premonition that he would mount the stairs of the hotel, reach the room and find the door open, with the two of them, the girl and his mother, talking, waiting for him grimly. He understood that in fact the destiny of this girl in the blue dress had been to bring him back to face something, no doubt his own failure, from which he had formulated contempt not for himself, who deserved it, but his past and his home, which did not. He wasn’t sure what else there might be to face unless it was the night he had left, and the echo, like the light of a nova, of the man he’d found dead at his mother’s feet.
It had been an old man. Even old he’d still been a huge man, with red hair that had turned gold with the years, like the way leaves die.
Now the man who had white hair his whole life came in the hotel and, remembering hard, stumbled to the bottom of the stairs and found his way up to the next floor. He came down the hall to his mother’s door. It wasn’t open as he had foreseen, but it wasn’t closed either, not entirely. He could push it open, and he did.
The girl with the blue dress was not there. His mother stood in the middle of the room, gazing long into her memories. She wasn’t standing in exactly the same place she’d been fifteen years before, but it was close. And in much the same way as years before, there was the passage of probably five seconds before she turned away from her memories to look at him.
18
FOR SEVERAL SECONDS, ACTUALLY it seems to her like almost a minute, she knows he’s there in the door. In a way she’s been expecting him. She saw him in the street an hour ago as he rampaged among the windows. She doesn’t know why he’s here but she knows it’s nothing small that could bring him back onto the island. And once on the island it was probably not possible that he wouldn’t come here and see her now. So she’s not surprised. But she waits a few moments before she turns to look at him. There’s no recrimination in it.
He’s shocked, she can tell, that she’s become so old. What did you think, she says to herself, that time ticks to the clock of your memories? Her hair’s as white now as his ever was. We look more like mother and son now, she says to herself, than we ever did.
It so happens that she’s been thinking and remembering the same as he, remembering and thinking of that night. It so happens she hears the same echoes of the old man who came to die at her feet. Fifteen years later she hears his voice as though he’s still here on the floor; she hears him talking at this very moment and so does her son who stands in the doorway in silence. The mother and son look at each other and together they listen to the voice of a man who hasn’t been alive for fifteen years; neither mother nor son knows where the voice comes from now, and in fact both assume it’s only a voice in their heads. Neither of them believes that the voice, recreated from the memory of what it might be saying to them if it was actually speaking at this moment, is now saying to each of them the same thing. Neither believes they hold the ghost of this long dead stranger in common.
You remember me, the voice can be heard saying. Well maybe you don’t, maybe you forgot me immediately after I left your sight as surely as I continued to remember you for the rest of my life. It changed the world, my seeing you. Literally it changed it but that’s, you know, another story. Maybe it only changed my world. It only changed my Twentieth Century. Your world, your century, that’s another story. It was in Vienna. You were in a window. You were only a girl then, I don’t guess more than fifteen years old. The year was 1938, when we held the body of the long dead Twentieth Century in common.
T.O.T.B.C.—3
19
MY NAME IS BANNING JAINLIGHT, the voice continues. The year is 1917: I am born. I remember it. I remember leaving her, the rush of it, my mother banning me from her, though it wasn’t she who named me. That was my other mother. I had two.
I remember the long fall down such a short red passageway, as I fell I saw troops on the march, fields afire and black cannons in the sun, riots in the alleys of Russia and messiahs in the dunes of eastern deserts, and One fallen angel after another pulling himself up onto the face of a new hour. First one hand is visible then the second, nails grasping desperately for a hold of something, then the top of the head comes into sight, then the glistening brow, the harsh straining eyes, the grimacing mouth as he pulls himself up and finally hoists his body the rest of the way, lying there on the face of a new hour heaving for air. After the first, the rest com
e one by one, the fallen angels. They’ve come to change everything. Not just the countryside. They haven’t come just to build a city or two. Cities can be built in any hour at all. They aren’t here just to construct a canal or a bridge in the moonlight. They’ve come to change everything. They’ve come to change the very act of selfportraiture, disassembling it and then reconstructing it from some new vantage point of the soul, some corner of the soul’s room that’s been blocked eight thousand years by a chair we always thought we needed, a tablelamp we were always told was some heirloom too valuable to move, let alone give away. Out with the fucking chair. Out with the tablelamp that burned out long ago. Everything: they’ve come to disassemble and then reconstruct, from some blind spot in the middle of the room that’s always obstructed by something no matter where you stand, the clock. A small nearsighted German with wild white hair, who cannot count the very numbers from which he writes his wild new poetry, just makes it over the top now, catching his breath.
Tours of the Black Clock Page 3