Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

  69

  REDEMPTION COMES TO ME in my daughter.

  Courtney’s born in the summer of 1938. She’s no sooner out of the womb than her head looks to be on fire, all blood and red hair. Megan insists she gets the hair from both of us, but I know it’s from her. She’s one big brilliant freckle, her skin hums of innocence. Her big eyes grip wisdom from some primal gene that has leapfrogged her father; I can hold her in a single hand. I can run up and down the stairs with her poised in this hand over my head, I can dangle her from the rooftop of our apartment building and she only laughs at my joke. I’m the funniest man in the world to her, I was born to be her clown. My heart’s soaked with her until it tears like tissue just to look at her.

  What does it say about this universe that such a thing comes to someone who deserves it so little.

  I’m leaving you.

  It isn’t your fault that Megan gave me such a thing as Courtney. I don’t deny that even in the throes of this redemption, the dark doesn’t kiss me. There’s enough love somewhere to love both you and my kid, the love dangles like a single rope from the mouth of a well, open beneath the sun and sky, to the well’s pit, wet and black and hot; it’s the same rope. But I have to try and be good. I struggle to warrant this moment that I shot into the middle of my child’s mother, and from which the child of that moment is now given back to me. The light of a star that exploded months ago, and has now arrived to stay.

  Don’t come here anymore.

  I’ve sent word to the landlady on Dog Storm Street that we won’t be needing the flat.

  70

  THE SUMMER PASSES. WE have no money, Megan’s parents having cut off her stipend in retaliation. The arrival of the granddaughter may yet alter this course, but for the moment we live off what Megan’s saved, and what little I’ve saved from the work that I no longer do. I stay home with the child while Megan looks for work; it’s unconventional but I can’t be walking around the streets of the city in broad daylight, Holtz and the boys are out looking for me. I wish we could get out of Vienna but if we tried I’d be arrested. Megan asks no questions. She’s happy to have all of me even on mysterious terms. She’s taken to theft; she shoplifts food, silverware, furniture, books. She comes home with dressers, beds, sofas. I hear the sound of the day’s crime in the stairwell, and go down the stairs to find a table or trunk perched on the back of her four-foot-eleven frame. Our apartment is lavishly furnished by the finest shops in Vienna. She made the decision to resort to a life of crime easily enough, but the Anschluss didn’t hurt. She’s not stealing from Austrians after all, but Germans now. Think of it as a political act, she explains; but I won’t demean it that way. I seem to spend most of my days washing clothes, dragging them up to the top of the roof where I’ve strung a line. From up there I can see the Westbahnhof less than a mile away; I scheme all the time, to no avail.

  Go away.

  Sometimes I’ll see someone watching me from a window across the street, and I think it’s a spy. A spy for them, a spy for you.

  The Czechoslovakians will be Germans soon, too, all of us touched to Germanlife by the god who loves you.

  Courtney lives on my shoulders. It’s the only place high and right enough for her, every other place too close to the ground. On the rooftops now, to the witness of spies, I toss her into the sky, she laughs and laughs. She folds her little hands, each the size of my eyes, across my face and challenges me to live in the black world of her creation. I cry out in mock alarm and she laughs some more. When I hear her I clutch her to my chest and keep her tight to me; I see something. I clutch her so as to make her part of my bigness, which will protect her. I see something horrible. It glints sharply across my vision and then vanishes. She protests the chest and demands the bird’s-eye view from my back. For just a moment I refuse her and hold her anyway; something in me, at the sight of something I cannot or will not keep in my mind’s eye, drops away, as though what’s below my waist is only a dream, and I’m really a tree rooted to a void.

  71

  ONE NIGHT AT THE end of summer I wake in the early hours of the morning. I have the sense that something’s on the rooftop waiting; lying there next to Megan I try to dismiss the feeling. I turn to Megan and, in her sleep, I take her. But while my back’s to the ceiling, and while I’m inside her, I can’t get over the feeling of something trapped on the roof above me. I finally withdraw from her still hard. I get out of bed; sleepily she calls for me. It’s nothing, I say to her; I turn in the moonlight so she can’t see I’m still hard. I walk out of the bedroom, I walk past Courtney’s cradle. I open the door and step out onto the stairs naked; I open the door leading up to the rooftop. My erection hasn’t passed and I climb the stairs until, at the top step, I stop and listen; I can hear something on the roof. I step out onto the roof now. Vienna’s glazed with light; the roof is white and angular; a wave of familiarity rushes over me. I feel that soon I’ll drown in this wave, sinking to some bottom, drifting in the wake of some tide; and I can barely wait for it, it can’t happen soon enough. I climb over the peaks of the rooftop; it seems to me, drowned and frozen, I might splinter against an empty pier. In the corner of an alcove on the roof is a bird, the sound I’ve heard. I reach for it and then there’s another sound, and I turn. You step from behind the building’s steeple, coy and distant. I deserve it, I guess. I deserve it for sending you away. I guess you’ve been sleeping here on the roof above the bed in the room below where I’ve been with my wife: I have a wife, I say, I have a daughter. “I never wanted to be your wife,” you answer, “I never wanted to be your daughter.” You come toward me and stop at the chimney that rises between us; you writhe before me bent over the chimney. The dark center of you opens to me. “Call me wife if you want,” you whisper, “call me daughter.” I can barely breathe until I’m inside you; somewhere before us Vienna winks and groans in a haze. “Call me anything you like.” Oh Geli, I say into your hair spun like sunlight. I take you by the hips and pull you closer; your gasp slithers to the ground below. Oh Geli, I say it again, to your eyes of blue. I clasp your breasts, my hands run to your neck and shoulders. My fingers touch your face; at the corner of your mouth is a scar. Semen swims out of me in confusion. But where, I can only moan, touching the scar, did you get this?

  T.O.T.B.C.—9

  72

  THIS MORNING I RETURN to Dog Storm Street. Megan watches with anguish; she’s still in the window when I look up from the street. I won’t try to explain it. At my old flat there are Germans waiting; a soldier sees me and fumbles quickly with his telephone. Another emerges from the doorway with a gun, looking for the first. I suppose they have orders to arrest me on sight. I suppose they have orders not, under any circumstances, to cause me harm. They approach and I knock one of them down. Shoot me, I laugh at them. They can only wait until Holtz shows up. I go on upstairs; there’s someone else living in my flat, a fat New German. I open the door and he jumps up off the bed, I take his things and throw them out the window onto the street. I salute him, Heil, I salute the soldiers below. The landlady runs upstairs and when she sees me her eyes grow wide and she begins to shriek; I salute her too. Holtz arrives in almost no time, he gets to the top of the stairs as I’m throwing the fat New German down them. He reassures the landlady and coaxes her down the stairs; he turns to me and says, Banning, such a spectacle. He’s furious with me but he doesn’t want me to leave again. We have an agreement, he says, smooth and disappointed. Tell him, I say, that I’m fucking her. Tell him I fuck her all the time, and she sings for me from the bed, tied by her hair. I fuck her many ways, tell him that. Tell him, I’m saying to Holtz, my face inches from his, tell him I ravish her over and over. For a moment Holtz says nothing, only smiles slightly. But Banning, finally comes the response, he’s counting on it.

  73

  1939. LOVE RAGES. IT cries out from you, seething and red; I come back for more and more. These German nights we sit at the bottom of the well joined and impulsed, in the mornings I climb up the r
ope of my love to the light, where my child waits. Megan grows sadder. Her parents resume the stipend, inspired by the grandchild, and she gives up her life of crime; but the days are still, disquieting. Austrian papers scream of “the Polish provocation,” Swiss papers tell it differently. In September the British declare war and Megan’s sorrow spreads like her hair on the pillow behind her head. All touch is lost with her nation and people: We’re at war, I say to you. The happy delirium on your face at this news is unmistakable, you coo for defilement. “Is he watching?” you mutter beneath me; I look for his form in the shadows of the room. The heat inside you detonates me. By the end of the year, people in the street are certain the war will be a short one. When Holtz visits I can tell he isn’t so sure; he’s dazed that events have gone this far. Many more Germans soon, Danes, Belgians, Dutch. One afternoon in the autumn of 1939 I’m standing in the Volksgarten with my little girl, now almost one and a half years old; she teeters precariously on her little legs; and as we’re watching the Viennese strolling in the unnerved hours I gaze around and I’m in a boat. The boat is on water with a thousand other small boats around us, a city floats in a lagoon behind us, the Adriatic Sea glistens to the east of us. A fisherman at the other end of the boat watches me knowingly. Everything in me aches; I’m old. I have a beard. It’s thirty years from now, and lying in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in a brown cloak, is a very old man, white thin hair and dead eyes, gazing up at me. It’s not a vision I’m having, or a dream. I feel the boat rocking as surely as anything I’ve ever felt. I look at the old man trying to remember who he is, because I know I’ve seen him; and then I have this distant memory of thirty years before, when I caught his eye for several seconds through the hotel doorway.

  74

  1940. COME HERE. THERE are still a hundred things for me to do to you. Paris has fallen, I was there once. I met a friend from there, or was it there he was going when we said goodbye? What was his name? We shook hands on the platform at a station: No way they’re going to take over Paris, I said; and then he was gone. In the window above Dog Storm Street a procession of planes sails black like the years before my birth. I hear you panting beneath me. Your hair’s tousled in the wind through the window. This is Paris, Geli. There’s smoke from Montmartre and bright wet lipstick on the Vendome column.

  Holtz is troubled. I’m watched by Germans all the time, I try to shake them when I leave the flat to return to my family. Perhaps he worries I’ll vanish again, perhaps it’s something else. Lately he comes to my room and sits in the dark for hours rambling about something he calls Barbarossa; it takes you and me away from each other. I see you tapping your foot impatiently waiting for him to leave, I watch you touching yourself and tasting it. Holtz won’t tell me about it at first. “One of the client’s lifelong dreams,” he only hints grandly. Some piece of distinctly audacious treachery, I guess.

  “But. …” Holtz says.

  But?

  Lighting cigarettes all night, putting them out. Rising from his chair, pacing the room, sitting again. “The client’s distracted,” Holtz says. Distracted? I laugh. Holtz hates it when I laugh. You’re distracting him, Geli. From one of his lifelong dreams. “Banning,” he says, and in this moment I know something’s wrong, “Banning.” I stop laughing and listen to him. “You have to understand what I’m trying to tell you,” he continues, “it’s deadly. The affair’s become political. He doesn’t concentrate the way he used to. Barbarossa’s critical to the war, its timing is absolutely pinpoint.” He’s pacing again. “If it doesn’t take place in the spring, if it’s delayed too long, then we must wait another spring. Worse if he decides not to wait at all, and presses forward too late. …” He stops, turning to me. “They removed her nine years ago when she became a problem for him. They’ll remove her again.”

  Remove her? I blink at him in the dark. “What does it mean,” I say, “they’ll remove her?”

  “It means,” he says, leaning across our bed, “they’ll remove me. It means they’ll remove you.”

  “Then fire me,” I laugh. “Or rather, I’ll fire you.”

  Holtz gestures in the night. “But you see,” he starts again, “you see, there are those,” and immediately I know he’s included with them, “there are those who think Barbarossa’s a potential disaster. A potential catastrophe. Who would like to see him forget about it altogether, before he pushes history farther than it can be pushed.” And now he’s rambling again, talking to himself or someone else. “Napoleon tried to push history that far, and history pushed back.” Holtz is a nervous wreck. “For some of us,” he says, “she’s the woman who will save the country. She’s the woman who will save him from himself.”

  “I’ll think of something especially good for tomorrow night,” I offer.

  He narrows his eyes. He’d advise or threaten me at this moment if he could think of anything that would do either one. I thought he’d never leave, you say when he’s gone.

  Courtney, freckletot. Even you could not redeem this.

  75

  1941. BARBAROSSA’S CALLED OFF. When Holtz tells me, I can see he thinks it’s a good thing for Germany but maybe not so good for him. There’s relief and wrath in Berlin, eye to eye across the political barricades; Holtz runs low, crossfire flashing above his head. Fifteen years the client’s dreamed of making Russia German; now cronies despair at his wandering nights. I’ve saved Russia, I laugh to you, I’ve saved the world. You squeeze me in your palm, fondle me. “What a very good boy you are then,” you answer. We celebrate. Your legs shine like your eyes. Guys hack tubercular on the stairs outside, there are sounds in the woodwork and the sink pipes rumble like the streets. Russian whispers rise to a wail from the Danube. “Is he here?” you ask, and when I look, sure enough, he is. I guess I never believed he’d come. I know you said it all along; I guess you were right. Do you want him? You look up at him; he rustles in the corner, shrinking away into the dark: “He’s rather a puny one, isn’t he?” Yes. I’ve seen him before: he isn’t much. “Is he as big as you?” Of course not, I laugh. What a question. I push myself into you; he holds the corner of the wall so hard I can see the blood fall from his fingers. Geli, Geli. “Oh my God, my God, my God, my God,” you’re nearly screaming it. To me, though; not him.

  76

  MARCH 1942. I’VE SAVED Russia but doomed England. The invasion of the island began today, the German frenzy that’s been building Russiaward now unleashed across the Channel. Japan that was once tempted to strike in the Pacific now becomes attentive to the British colonies in Asia. America that was being gradually drawn into the war only months ago is now forced to wait for England’s fate. Megan twists painfully in the silence from home, phone communication impossible. Sometimes I feel I have this clarity, sometimes I think I see it all rather lucidly. I look around my flat on Dog Storm Street and there’s no one there at all, I tell myself. In the streets of the city people anticipate news of surrender any moment; there are also uneasy rumors of conspiracies in the Chancellery. Something’s happening, people tell me. I have to restrain myself from explaining: He’s gone, you see, they can’t find him. I have to hold myself back from telling them, He isn’t in the Chancellery anymore, he’s here in Vienna; he lives in my flat. He stands in the corner and watches me with the woman both of us love.

  Sometimes I’m sure I view it all without obstruction, the Twentieth Century sighted from my window. Today, with news coming in over the radio, I saw it for instance: I looked out my window onto the street, the same street, the same buildings I always see, the windows that stare back at my own; and it was different. The moment was a different moment, of a different now. What I saw from my window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other branch of a river that’s been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike: the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks. This was the river of the Twentieth Century that was forked at that very moment I saw you in the window of your house across from the candleshop, when t
he melee was taking place before you in the street; this Twentieth Century I saw from my own window today was the one in which I never saw you at all. In which I never saw you and never wrote of you, and your invention never came to the attention of special clients. In which no evil mind was ever distracted by the reincarnation of a past obsession, no Barbarossas were suspended and therefore evil came to rule the world; or else such suspended invasions were the catastrophe Holtz predicted, and evil therefore collapsed altogether. I longed for this century, seeing it from my window, because I was absolved in it of some of my monstrousness; but I also knew such a version of the Twentieth Century was utterly counterfeit. That neither the rule of evil nor its collapse could be anything but an aberration in such a century, because this is the century in which another German, small with wild white hair, has written away with his new wild poetry every Absolute; in which the black clock of the century is stripped of hands and numbers. A time in which there’s no measure of time that God understands: in such a time memories mean nothing but the fever that invents them: before such memories and beyond such clocks, good views evil in the same way as the man on a passing train who stands still to himself but soars to the eyes of the passing countryside. It just couldn’t have been, that’s all. It’s nice to think so, to think evil remains collapsible. But I saw you in that window and the true Twentieth Century found itself, and abandoned the lie it might have chosen to live if you hadn’t been there.