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THEIR ROOM ISN’T MUCH larger than my own, and no less spare. But it’s high enough to have a window near the top; water seeps in around the window’s edges and its smell is occasionally obnoxious. While nothing can really be seen from the window, it still lets in light. I envy their light. They don’t seem to notice it. For a long time I began coming to their room regularly; the two of them always sat in the same place, the old man at the table in the middle, slumped in his chair and staring straight ahead as the other read to him. The old man always wears the same black suit. He’s around eighty, his hair’s thin and white. The mustache is so white and scraggly it’s hardly there at all. I don’t think he recognizes me; he’s only actually seen me once before, after all. I didn’t recognize him until after I saw the picture. Like all old people he’s surrounded by his mementos, as with all old Germans I assumed at first they were the mementos of his Germanness. Pictures of him in his uniform, leading armies, posturing with statesmen, shouting at the people who worshipped him. Only after a while did I realize this wasn’t just another old German with pictures of his god, this was the god with pictures of himself. But it was the other picture that told me, the only picture that wasn’t of him. It stood alone on a small table by his cot, a dead brown flower crumbling from the photo’s heavy brass frame. At first I didn’t understand that it was her. At first it was just a picture of a girl I’d never seen before. But then I saw the inscription, and her name, and I remembered perfectly: I remembered perfectly that this was her: Yes, I told myself, this is exactly what she looks like. I remember exactly the eyes of blue and the hair of spun sunlight. When I picked up the photo that first time in their room, to look closely for something in the corner of her mouth, he became alarmed. As with all helpless old men he no longer could find the words for alarm, the alarm was all in his eyes. And then I realized. I put the picture down. It’s you, I said to him.
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IT’S YOU, THE YOUNGER one repeated to me. He wore a dark gray coat, like me he was in his middle years. He was thin and soft, except his eyes, which watched me with hate. Like the old man he seemed attached to where he sat, as though nothing of him was alive beneath his neck; he was made forceful, for the first time in his life, by his hatred. He had a presence the old man seemed to have transferred to him long ago. In Petyr’s eyes at this moment was exactly the power I’d always heard was the client’s, in Petyr’s eyes at this moment was the power to rule Germany. At this moment he was struggling to some point rational enough for killing me, some point not so distant from his hate that he would lose its strength but distant enough for calculating the schematic of murder. In the same way the client had mourned Geli and his kingdom all these years, in the same way I’d mourned Megan and Courtney and my conscience, Petyr had mourned Kronehelm, I suppose. He’d been translating a long time. He’d translated always with the same precision; if he’d ever subverted or deformed the translations there wouldn’t now be in his eyes the force of this livid hatred, rather I’d see his guilt and deceit. All this was happening the first time I stumbled on them in their little room; we all watched each other with hate and fear and amazement. Though my feet were growing gradually but surely lame, my hands were still capable of the good old things; I could break Petyr in his wormful wrath, and then throttle the old man. I could speak Megan’s name as I did so, I could speak Courtney’s. I could speak all their names, from Warsaw to London, from Treblinka to Mauthausen. And yet I knew that even if I could kill the old man for that long, before the soldiers burst in and shot me down, that even if I could kill him long enough to speak the names of the six million, or ten or twelve, or however many flesh markers he lay down in the pages of time to gauge his evil, in the end there’d only be one little old throttled life to pay for it. That wasn’t revenge enough. If I could find my way into this room every night for another thirty years and kill him little by little each night, it was still just the small miserable life of an old senile memoryless man to whom his own evil no longer meant anything even if I snarled the name of every victim into his wrinkled little face. What’s the revenge of killing a man who’s forgotten his own evil? I left the two of them that first time, I turned my back on Petyr’s eyes in the same way the soldiers show contempt for my own harmlessness. I came back several nights later, and then every night after that. It’s crossed my mind that someone meant this to happen; it’s crossed my mind that if I were to kill Z, soldiers might not burst in at all. Rather they might be watching it all from somewhere secret. Rather they might let me kill him as they may have allowed me to kill X that night in the Hotel Imperial. Still, each night I considered it. Each night my hands felt fit for it. Petyr’s hate, seething and never acted upon, came to bore me. Before my hate came to bore Z, in the depths of whatever fog he now lived, I’d find a revenge to catch his attention.
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SO THERE WERE THE three of us, the hellgod of history, his dreamwriter and his translator, aging crippled and insane and unseen in a damp Italian basement. What came to repulse me most was how time made the client’s evil so feeble and therefore shredded the illusion that his evil was inhuman. It was utterly human. I saw the humanity the day the doctor came and changed Z’s clothes and cleaned him from his fouling himself. His fouling himself was specific to his oldness, but not to his evil. His shit stank, but it stank human, not evil. In the way time and age broke him down, it broke down his vicious godliness, his distinct monstrousness. He lived in abject fear of both of us, Petyr and me. He lived with the pain of his slipping life and approaching confusion. He was afraid and sore enough of life that it was all the more reason not to kill him. I’d hit him sometimes, though. I couldn’t stop myself. I hit him to test the situation, to see if whoever watched us in secret sent in the troops to stop me. His blood stank too, enervated and toxic. When I hit him, Petyr forgot himself for a moment and smiled. Go on, I said to Petyr, nodding at the old man, take a shot. Petyr did, in his impotent fashion. When the old man’s face burst with blood and his confused pitiful cry at the blows, Petyr shrank back, but not I think from having struck the ruler of the world. Rather I think from having allied himself with me; he hated me all the more then for having seduced him. As time passed Z became more rank to see and smell. I tried hard to believe it was the smell of his soul rising up through the body, but his fragility denied this pretense. I didn’t understand how history would bear this evidence of humanity, or how anyone could ever believe in redemption again, since the protest of history had so long been that all men were redeemable. This was a man who could not be redeemed. In my memory of what had been, I was now more him than he was. So here were two men, incontrovertibly human in their foulness, who in all their humanity could not be redeemed. History, clutching to redemption, might insist we were monsters, but the god has human shit in his shorts when the doctor comes to change him. The doctor says nothing, however, of Z’s swollen face, where I hit him. He says nothing of the blood. This is how I’ve come to realize Z is mine to do with as I choose. The followers cannot bring themselves to kill their god, they’ll let his own god do it for them.
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FOR MONTHS, REVENGE COMMENSURATE and fitting eluded me. I lay thwarted in the dark. Then last night it came to me, on my bed. I woke to it with clarity; for a moment I couldn’t believe it. I mustered my strength to raise myself and get to the desk. It took thirty seconds to do it; I didn’t precede it with an act of pleasure. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of pleasure even if his eighty-year-old body was capable of knowing it. I’d never given him the pleasure of her before, after all, other than his witness from the corner of our room on Dog Storm Street. Because I’m the god’s god, no act of pleasure is necessary: I can touch the egg of her without a penis or its pollen. I can touch the egg of her with my pen, with a sentence: Life is committed at the core of her, I write, nine months short of creation.
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WHEN THEY COME THE next day for the work, I inform them I intend to deliver it personally. The g
uards make a token display of disbelief, claiming such a thing’s impossible, though my door’s been unlocked eight months now. Then I have nothing to give you today, I answer. There’s a conference and one of the guards leaves to discuss the matter with an unknown authority; he returns after several moments. He explains I’ll be escorted under guard to Z’s room.
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I WON’T CHANCE SUBVERSION on Petyr’s part. I’m present when he translates the single sentence to the client. Immediately Petyr knows something is up. He translates the sentence precisely. It’s impossible at first to know if the old man understands. “Do you understand?” I ask him, in German. Petyr protests. “You can’t speak to him this way,” he says in English, “I’m the only one who speaks to him. You speak to him through me.” I ask Z again if he understands. “It’s a child,” I tell him, “wonderful news.” Petyr protests again, loudly, in German. The old man looks back and forth from Petyr to me in confusion; I keep trying to talk and Petyr gets louder and louder. Now I turn from the client and answer Petyr in English. “Please,” I say to him, “he’s confused. The guards will hear you, and it’ll be worse for all of us.” Petyr answers, “Worse for you, you mean,” and I say, “Certainly not. Certainly it’s clear how superfluous you are in this matter. I’ll have them take you away if you don’t be quiet.” He glares at me hot and silent. We just sit there watching each other for a minute before I turn back to Z. Z is still rattled, frightened by the way this afternoon is unlike other afternoons. “It’s your child,” I tell him now. Petyr still glares at me, bursting with outrage, but saying nothing. “Do you understand?” I ask the old man. “Your child and Geli’s. The child you were always meant to have. She’s quite beside herself with joy. She’s honored to carry your glorious germ in her. Someday you’ll take this son—and I can tell you with complete confidence that it’ll surely be a son—and groom him to rule the world after you. In such a way, the idea of a world after you becomes bearable, doesn’t it?” When he hears this, the old man’s face begins to shine with a small radiant smile. The ancient eyes light up exactly as I supposed they might, and I can already well imagine the dark shattered desolation they’ll show when I finish my revenge nine months from now. He begins to consider, even in his dim fog, how beautiful the child will be, beautiful like his mother; and life that seemed rather purposeless now finds a final way to matter. He’s linked to immortality forever, linked in flesh and not just the world’s memory. It’s at the same time evidence of both his godness and humanness. Dim and fogged as he is, he begins to cry a little; I could beat him if I wanted and he’d still be happy for what I’ve given him this afternoon. After a while he moves from his chair for the first time I’ve ever seen him do it, and lowers himself on his cot in emotional exhaustion. In his old strangled language he cries out to her with thanks. In his sleep he’s calm and ecstatic at the same time, and I can only hope that, in all his peace and excitement, he doesn’t die on me before I’m done with him.
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I ALLOW SEVERAL DAYS to pass in which I don’t leave my room. The guards are perplexed and even distressed by this. At night I can hear him, from far away, howling like a lonely dog. When I finally go to see him, his eyes beseech me. In the days that have passed since I first saw him, doubts as to the joyous news have begun to grow in his head. I put them to rest. Day after day Petyr reads to him while I sit listening to make sure nothing’s amiss in the translations. Petyr fumes, caught as he is. Z has actually begun to open up and talk a little, in his crazy fashion, small words here and there, a phrase or two of the future. Plans to take his boy up to his retreat in the Bavarian Alps, where everything as far as anyone can see is under his rule. That sort of thing. I feel immense satisfaction to see the past and its memories flood back into his face, to have him remember bit by bit who he is and what he’s done. It’s as though the past and its memory grow in his head in symbiosis with his future and child growing in her, until the two grow to the present that emerges from between her legs. He flourishes as time passes, he occasionally even does respectable imitations of what he used to be, giving forth with this ridiculous statement or that about things of which he never knew anything. We joke together sometimes in the way a grownup jokes with a child or plays with a pet, dangling a string before its claws. In such a way I dangle before him the heartbeats and kicks of the life inside her, and like a small animal he frantically reaches for what I dangle until I snatch it away, laughing. Petyr has sunk so far into the force of his hate for me that his eyes have almost become dull with it, the power frustrated into seething languish. The weeks pass and then the months. The days I spend with the client and our translator, the nights I sail with Giorgio in the lagoon; soon, I tell Giorgio, I’ll go with you to the islands. You come, Giorgio says, they’ll never find you.
T.O.T.B.C.—14
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AT NIGHT I GO on a secret mission inside her. I voyage up her canals, wander her passages searching for a place to build what she’ll give birth to months from now. I find a fertile plain on the banks of her womb and begin to work. I don’t have much time for what has to be accomplished. I’ve brought my materials with me. I cast the mold, I make the mortar. I dig a pit there on the beach inside her, transform the whole belly of her into a cauldron. There I make the very ooze of the thing that’s to be born. I concoct it from a hundred things. I concoct it from the hush of those who vanished into the fog on his orders, without a cry or remnant left behind for those who would wonder where they went. I concoct it from the mealy red ice left beneath those shot face down in the snow. I concoct it from the terrified squeal of children transformed abruptly into gunfire, which transforms in turn to the bright afternoon stillness. I concoct it from the gypsies in the ghettos and the Jews naked in the pits. I’ve given to the mortar those he starved, that from the pulp of their bones this thing I make can stand. I’ve given to the mortar those he gassed, that from the small pockets of gas left in their flesh this thing I make might quiver and lurch. I’ve given to the mortar those he burned, that from the unbearable odor of their ash this thing I make might be smelled from any place in paradise. I grind into it the teeth he pulled from their heads, the genitals he ripped from their loins, the eyes he left open when he killed them so that he could always assure himself he had indeed killed them. I concoct the garbage of evil, of which he is father, and which he’s fathered without the passion and sex of a man. Often I break down. Often the fumes of it stop me in my place. And when I’ve given to the mortar all of these, and have watched them disappear into the swirl of the cauldron’s awful whirlpool, I finally give to it Megan, I give to it little Courtney falling through Vienna space. After a while I think, I can no longer do this. But I can do this. I can do this for that day not long from now when he comes to see his son and I present him with this thing I’ve built inside her, and he reaches his fingers tremulously to feel the child’s silky skin and instead touches hard scales, and moves to stare into his son’s blue eyes and instead sees a thousand black eyes the size of pins, and presses to his old chest the soft innocent hair and instead is stung by the twitching antennae. I can do this, Megan; I can do this, Courtney; for that moment when the old face of the god gazes on what his god-seed has spawned, not something grown from an embryo or fetus or even, godlike, from a star, but rather from larva. At that moment he’ll either kill it or it will kill him, or he’ll drop it to the floor in horror where it will come crawling to him on a hundred legs, twitching at him for love. Let him love it if he can. Let him hold it in his arms like the mothers and fathers who clutched for the last time the children he tore away from them. Let him name it with a Christian sound, and parade it in his cathedral of a thousand years.
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Tours of the Black Clock Page 24