Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

  Blaine was confused. He watched her walk back out toward the landing ready to plunge into the cold river again and swim back toward the island. “My dream?” he said in some consternation.

  She said to him from the landing, “I’ll tell Zeno to come pick you up. It may not be till morning, though.” She nodded toward the fog. “Unless you want to swim to town.”

  Blaine was still trying to understand. “But—”

  “Don’t you see,” she said with some exasperation, “it could just as easily have had nothing to do with me. It could just as easily have had everything to do with you.” She looked toward the water once and then back at him. “You thought someone was dying every time I danced. But maybe that wasn’t it at all,” she said. “Maybe,” she said, before disappearing, “someone was dying every time you watched me dance.”

  He lunged toward the landing not with any thought of pulling her back from the river, but rather to convince himself, to provide himself with the evidence of his own eyes, that she’d been there at all; a ripple on the surface of the water would do. He still wasn’t sure when he turned back into the house, even though he could clearly see the ripples and even, he believed, her form disappearing into the black depths of the river. Even though the air of the shack was still heavy with her presence and the sound of what she said. That he wasn’t sure, however, perhaps said more about him than her, as she’d implied: if men insisted on seeing her flesh and blood as the apparition of the promises they once made to each other and then betrayed, that final betrayal was theirs, not hers. He slept that night in the house on the river, slept rather well, actually. Somewhere in the final moments of this life, even as a dim slow man whose good heart was never sophisticated enough to understand the Twentieth Century sins that God never thought of, he understood something; and what she’d said to him remained the last words on his mind. “I know,” he said to himself simply, opening his eyes; and he might have grasped what he knew and held it and looked at it had he not been distracted by the fire. He sat up in bed and gazed at the house on fire around and above him. And then he didn’t know anymore. He would have liked to know it again but there wasn’t the time. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said at last, before the secret room in which he’d always lived burned to a size much smaller than a man.

  T.O.T.B.C.—13

  103

  AT DAWN, SHE COULD see the smoke. She saw it from the end of mainstreet with the other people of the town; by then the fire burning out over the river was dead and done. All night she’d slept through the sounds of people running down the street to the edge of the island to watch the shack burning; she tossed and turned in her hotel bed and her dreams filled with the fraught rumble below her window. When she saw the smoke she ran down to the shore and pushed a vacant boat out toward the black remnants of the shack as the Chinese tried to pull her back. Two police cutters drifted at the scene; there wasn’t much left to inspect. Dania sat in the boat in the fog watching awhile, she waited for the police to pull her aboard one of the cutters and ask her questions. They’d ask her if she knew him, they’d produce witnesses. But that didn’t happen. After a while she lay in the bottom of the boat and fell asleep; when she woke she heard the rain on the tarpaulin pulled over the boat. It wasn’t until later that day or sometime the next when she saw the dark young Greek ferryman and the way his eyes wouldn’t meet hers that she remembered what she told him the first day she came to the island. Take me to a place, she said, he can’t follow me. Zeno, lovestruck, started his boat. “God, what have you done?” she whispered to him now. He looked around him with furtive guilt; he was about to speak when she stopped him. “Please don’t say that you did it for me,” she begged, and turned back to town.

  What’s the matter with all of them, she said to herself that night thinking of Reimes and Joaquin and Paul and Zeno and Blaine, do they imagine I’m beautiful, or ever was? Please, she prayed in the dark, don’t let them find a body. Please don’t let them find a trace of him, out there in the river. Let the last sign of him have been the smoke.

  She paid up her hotel bill for a month and stayed another. For a while she worked for the man who ran the tavern across the street. When she’d been on the island a year, a child-swollen Mexican girl stumbled into the tavern one evening and in her wan frantic face was left only a single impulse of life by which she might bear a baby girl. No man was with her nor did she have any reason to be on the island except that she’d come to the most secret place she could find to have what was intended to be a secret child. The child was born several hours later. The mother died by morning. By afternoon the Chinese had a spare eucalyptus pruned and prepared for her. Singlehandedly Dania held them off as the woman’s body lay wrapped in a quilt with the dust of mainstreet rising around it into the red light of the sun falling past the river. “Her name was Consuelo Garcia,” Dania told them. You’re making it up, they said. “She told me herself only moments before she passed away,” Dania answered, Consuelo Garcia’s baby in her arms. Years later when the baby, who Dania named Judy after a girl she saw in a movie once, grew to understand the story of her birth, she never knew whether Dania had invented the mother’s name or not. Dania buried the young mother out behind the ice machine and stood guard several days to satisfy herself the body wouldn’t be unearthed. We’re not barbarians, you know, one Chinese woman told her. As a small girl on the island Judy sometimes took trips across the river with Zeno, who called her Little Greek. You’re only confusing her, Dania might have said to him, if she’d ever spoken to him again after the night he set Blaine on fire.

  After she’d lived in the hotel for many years, alone and untouched, the lover came back to her one night. They were older now, the two of them, and their love was older. She woke to find him sitting by her bed holding her hand, stroking her wrist; the next time she found she had her head on his chest. She reached up in the dark and lay her fingers against his face. In this way he appeared over time and sometimes she simply talked to him, telling him everything that had happened to her while he sat in the chair next to the bed. Their carnality retreated not by virtue of age or indifference but by the nature of what it had once been, limitless and inexhaustible; they wouldn’t trivialize it now by the shame of their consciences or the rote of their bodies. You don’t have to speak, she told him, it was always beautiful that you didn’t. He answered, I always said the wrong thing anyway. I got the color of your eyes wrong, I said the wrong name. Any name, she said, would have been wrong. She meant the presumption of naming it at all, what they did together. Our love owned only a face, it owned its own strange body that flowered from the middle into male and female; history served at its pleasure. One night, when she slept, the lover brought the friend; by now the friend was very old. While she slept, the lover, understanding it was time to give something back to the history they’d defied, left something of the friend inside her. There was no trace of this transaction in the morning; no semen leaked from her, no tissues ached with remorse. All she felt was a little dizzy.

  The dizziness went on for two weeks. She was now nearly fifty years old. Something is wrong with me, she told Judy one afternoon; and Judy, now eighteen, took off the afternoon shift from the mainstreet tavern she would herself inherit seven years hence, to accompany across the river on Zeno’s ferry the woman who’d fought to save her mother from being perched in the trees by the people of the town. To Zeno’s devastated sorrow, Dania still wouldn’t speak to him. At the other side the woman and the girl got the bus to Samson. The woman, just short of half a century, considered that in her life she’d come farther than her father only to choose exile after all, without any map of a geographic or temporal residence; on the bus to Samson she looked at the hands that had shot men and buried women and delivered children, she looked at the feet that had cast spells and shocked conventions, and felt the only scar that would allow her touch, the one at her mouth, given there by the same hand, though she didn’t really know this, that now tickled and left queasy the
base of her womb. The bus rolled down the highway, the Twentieth Century slowly passed in those increments it chose to surrender. In Samson the woman and girl sat together in the doctor’s office and waited the duration of another small piece of the century until the moment the doctor examined her and revealed, to the astonishment of all three of them, that she was pregnant.

  104

  I HAVE GIVEN HER a child.

  This is the beginning of my revenge. For many years I had no reason to believe revenge was possible. I didn’t imagine I’d have the opportunity for it, or if I did that there was a revenge commensurate and fitting. For many years I had no reason to believe I was worthy of exacting revenge from anyone but myself. I only know revenge insists upon itself and that now the opportunity for it is in my hands. My wife and daughter who died twenty-five years ago cannot be denied, my own unworthiness and guilt notwithstanding. This revenge will light up his ancient eyes with loss and grief. I can’t sleep at night, the prospect so thrills me. I’m sure he’s not yet so old his eyes can’t cry anymore, or that he’s so beyond the beat of life his heart can’t break. There’s just enough life left in him as to still hold the most terrible sorrow of a lifetime. Alone in my small room beneath the sea, seized by my revenge, I shake my fists with a mean fevered joy.

  105

  MY MEMORIES ARE WILLFULLY winged, capricious in flight. I lived in this room a long time before I knew where I was. For a large part of the last twenty years I own no memory. Sometimes I’m afraid to speak my own name, I’m afraid I’ll hear nothing. I don’t remember when I began to write for them again or why. For years I refused and then one day I was here at my small table writing. By then she was far away and it took a long time to call her back. I don’t know where she went all that time, or what she did. I hadn’t seen her since that night she called to me from the top of the stairs in our room on Dog Storm Street. When she returned she hadn’t changed at all, I’m sure. I don’t see her so clearly anymore but I’m sure she hasn’t aged a day. Though we’ve forgotten many things we used to do, we remember we were in love, the three of us. Assuming as I do when I feel the hair on my face, assuming as I do when I wake in the morning and find my feet grown arthritic and stiff, that I’m now more than fifty years old, then the year is at least 1967. The waves of the sea rock the room, they hum in the walls. I hear fishermen far away. I insist sometimes that I be allowed to see daylight. I only want to see and breathe it. It’s been just in the last several years I’ve come to understand I’m imprisoned in a sinking city in Italy. Except for my guards, I seem to be the only person living here; the city’s empty. The Germans have camouflaged it from the air, covering all the city’s passages and canals so that now it’s just one great maze with a blue roof. So as to fool the enemy. One big mazed boat that never disembarks. I tell my guards I insist on seeing the daylight, and they take me past empty bridges and houses and empty piazzas to a tower where I have five minutes to look out at the city’s massive blue tarpaulin which has been made to appear as if it’s the sea. It’s at this moment that it occurs to me I’m not the only person living in this city after all, it’s at this moment it occurs to me he’s here too. After five minutes in the tower they say, That’s enough.

  106

  UNTIL THAT MOMENT IN the tower it never occurred to me he might still be alive. I left that possibility behind in Vienna when they moved me; I have no certainty when that was, I have no recollection when or how it happened. The Germans continue to broadcast his speeches but I thought he’d only become a myth the world couldn’t allow to die. Sometimes I see the broadcasts on the small TV smuggled in by the fishermen who live out on the islands. There’s always a picture of him from when he was much younger, with his voice speaking over it. I’m not sure how they’ve worked the voice. I suppose they’ve taken the old speeches and spliced them together into new speeches and cleaned up the sound. In my room I continue to write of her but I never thought I was still writing for him. I assumed someone else had fallen in love with her; she’s seduced so many. I write each day, and each night someone comes to take what I’ve done, not unlike the way Holtz did long ago. Our passion has become mechanical in the way of most passion, I build it like a house. No one’s ever been so good at it. I build my own house that defies architecture, I’ve compelled the landscape of history to readjust to my visions. I’ve done it from a blind spot where no one sees me yet my presence cannot go unacknowledged. The guard comes and whether there are ten pages or one, a sentence or a word, he takes the work; no one comments or changes or complains. I assume this is meant to go on until I die, since there seems no chance the seduced will ever be sated.

  107

  DOWN HERE IN MY room I don’t get much on the TV, and the fishermen claim there’s nothing on it to believe anyway. To hear the German commentators tell it, Germany’s on the verge of winning the war. Germany’s been on the verge of winning the war about twenty years now. Sometimes I get a signal from an American pirate station in Africa, broadcast into Germany until the Germans find a way to jam it; the Americans insist the tide is turning. The war is as endless as the century. Not long ago I received a transmission that seemed to come from nowhere at all. A man in a sea diver suit was floating in a black sea, a lifeline attached to him from some point unseen. Spheres floated around him and the sea diver just continued to hover there for some time. In the visor of his helmet was the reflection of an immense light that came from something unimaginable; beyond that his face was dark and blank. I imagined the man was myself. The beauty of his image was that anyone could imagine the sea diver was himself, in this transmission that came from nowhere at all. The later broadcasts out of Africa and Germany said nothing of this transmission, and none of the fishermen know anything about it either. When I think about the sea diver, I remember a river of gone time that once forked in two.

  108

  GIORGIO IS THE FISHERMAN who brought me the television. He’s fair like many northern Italians, and his very round face beams red like the twilight sun. He literally came up through my floor, in a tunnel the Germans don’t know about. The tunnel leads out to the edge of the city emerging on a deserted piazza that faces the lagoon. Apparently there are hundreds of these tunnels the Germans don’t know. The fishermen laugh at the Germans. The idea of the Germans ruling the world is preposterous to them, since the fishermen come and go in the lagoon as they choose, to the Germans’ general befuddlement. Giorgio and the others warmed up to me when they learned I’m an American. I can’t tell them what I’m doing here, and I won’t allow them to believe I’m a political prisoner; it would be more hypocritical than I could stand. Through this tunnel Giorgio and his friends have brought me food and televisions and company. They could easily take me out with them to the islands, there’d be nothing to it. I protest that the Germans would be sure to find me, and that Giorgio and his friends would suffer the consequences. I argue that the Germans would only move me somewhere else in the city where there’d be no tunnel coming up through the floor and I’d never see Giorgio and the fishermen again. Giorgio disagrees heatedly but also accepts my argument as some kind of inarguable sign of my nobility. It’s almost unbearable to let him attribute such a fine quality to me. I’m a man the Twentieth Century can’t redeem, I try to explain to him. The truth is that if I were to escape I wouldn’t know how to live free of her. Later, it’s the revenge that keeps me here. Still, I can’t resist the opportunity to go out with Giorgio and the fishermen on their boat, and at night sometimes I lower my old arthritic hugeness into the floor and follow them out to the deserted piazza where we sail the lagoon for thirty minutes, round and round in the black water under the stupid wandering searchlights of the Germans who never see anything. I sit on the front of the boat. There the amber lights of a hundred piers circling the lagoon surround me; I listen to the mosquitoes and the wind, and for a moment again own no memory. After a while we return to the room and that night in my sleep I’m laid out on the wet bow of the lagoon itself, in a place wh
ere memory owns me. I wake in the dark, a sailor marooned on his own life.

  109

  I DON’T INTEND TO try and redeem my infidelity. I haven’t come to redeem anything. Rather I ride history like a wild horse that’s pursued redemption into a century where redemption is replaced by revenge. I knew two women, I’m sorry I was so weak as to need them both. I understand that if I hadn’t betrayed her for my wife, then my wife may not have had to pay betrayal’s price, clutching in her arms against the Vienna night the child of redemption’s and infidelity’s liaison. I would only add one thing now. I say it not for the sake of what one thinks of me, I say it for them, I say it because it’s so. I’d only add that while perhaps, in the eyes of infidelity, what I had with one was supposed to render counterfeit what I had with the other, in fact what I had with each was true unto itself. I don’t expect anyone to despise me less for this. I don’t expect anyone to regard my fingers as less marked by blood. Though the century disgraces the words innocence and honor, I won’t do so by supposing those words could ever apply to me. My daughter, alive today, would be thirty years old, with a hundred undiminished sins of her own.

  110

  THIS IS WHERE I’VE lived years and years, then, in this little room with no windows and the hum of the sea in its walls. I think after a while everyone’s come to forget what it is I’m here for. The guards aren’t particularly friendly or attentive, but neither are they unreasonably harsh. They don’t pay much attention to me one way or the other, and in the last year they’ve begun wandering off at times without locking my door behind them. At first I took it as a sign of their contempt for me, that I was so harmless as to warrant such casual surveillance. They didn’t imagine I’d have the nerve to open the door and just walk out. But now I’m fairly certain that, well, they did imagine it, they in fact presumed it. Now I’m fairly certain in retrospect that everything which has happened they’ve meant to happen. The first couple of times, the guards caught up with me right way, since I don’t move so quickly these days; I hadn’t even gotten down the hall and around the corner. But eight months ago, by accident or intention, they didn’t. I pushed open my door one afternoon and stepped into the hall and shuffled down the other direction from where I’d gone before. I expected to shuffle right into one guard or another. Now I realize that the guards caught up with me those first couple of times because I was just going in the wrong direction. I moved down the hall now, it became darker. After five minutes I found a hallway where lanterns burned in the hollows of the walls. I felt overwhelmed not so much by the exertion of the walk as the thick air of the corridors. I came out into another hallway of blue light; I looked up to the city’s tarpaulin above me. Any minute I figured one of the guards would be retrieving me; I even stopped awhile to wait for him. I never figured on getting this far. I had no interest in getting this far, I’d been out of my room ten minutes now. Then I heard a voice in German, and only after I’d stood there leaning against the hallway wall awhile, listening to the foreign words, did they not seem so foreign; my own German was proficient enough to finally recognize that I was listening to a translation of the very words I’d written this morning. I followed the voice. Up half a flight of stairs, after the blue corridor led back into a black one like my own, I came to the room where the old man and the younger one were living.