Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

DANIA DOESN’T KNOW WHAT grows in her, as she crosses Davenhall’s mainstreet to her hotel room. She only knows it isn’t of her, that something’s being made inside her that’s not of her tissue and soul. Several times, over at the tavern where she’s still trying to work, the nausea and pain inside her is so startling it nearly stops her heart. At first she assumes it’s because she’s almost fifty years old, after all. She’s never had a baby before and therefore has no real reason to suppose her experience is uncommon. But now some months have passed and she understands, instinctively, that something in her means to be formed and born of a will that isn’t her own. In the middle of mainstreet, not far from where she once guarded the body of Consuelo Garcia, she says, No. No, she says; the lover of all these years, who came to me unseen when he chose, will not have this victory. What’s in me is mine, and though I might have chosen never to have it in me at all, I won’t relinquish anything else anymore. All the men, she tells herself, and all their history, may have believed I was theirs to manifest whatever nightmare they needed to hurl free of themselves; perhaps they all believed that this presumption extended even to this thing in my belly. No; again no; no again and again and again. No. She gets to her room and lies down, and feels her belly and the movement in it. Conscious only of the sunlight through the trees beyond her window, she prepares to fight.

  120

  THE SNOW COMES. I wake one morning to its muffled din. It falls on the city’s tarpaulin, lightly and soundlessly except that the city’s emptiness transforms even the fall of snow into an echo. I have to argue with the authorities several days in order to get some heat in my room’s radiator. What about the old man? I ask the guards. At first they don’t answer, then one of them tells me, The Leader has heat. When I see the client that afternoon, the room is cold but neither he nor Petyr seem to notice; it’s like the light through their covered window. I’m rubbing my hands together but the two of them sit the way they always do, still and sullen in the room’s center. All the old man cares about is news of the child. Oh don’t you concern yourself with that, I assure him, that’s all taken care of. Things are proceeding just fine on that score. I suppose I don’t need to worry about Z dying from cold; he’s flared with life. He lives for his son. Petyr doesn’t even look at me anymore. Perhaps he’s busy staring into the face of his own end, approaching now from not so far away with its hand outstretched. The echoes continue for a couple of weeks and when the snow stops and the sun shines down on the ice melting into the tarpaulin, the corridors and piazzas of the empty blue city fill with weird rainbows. Out of the misty colors fly flocks of birds that have been trapped under the city’s ceiling for years; they’re old and their wings flutter heavily in the wet air. Now the echoes I hear are the birds trying futilely to batter their way out.

  121

  I WORK DAY AND night. The shores of her womb are lit with fiery torches. Sometimes I fall asleep in the middle of what I’m doing, wake to find the sludge cooling in my hands, waiting to be fed to the larva. At times the whole universe of her hurls itself into upheaval, in rebellion. The larva grows. I can already see the thing moving, ready to live. In the day, when I go to see the old man and Petyr, I can’t quite get the black of the work off my hands; yet it seems that only I can smell it. Winter passes into spring, which passes into early summer. Giorgio comes up through my floor with food, I’m ashamed to take it with my black fingers.

  122

  THE OLD MAN PULLED quite a good one on Petyr today. I still shake my head thinking about it; Petyr just misjudged the situation, that’s all. He just couldn’t keep his head, his rage got the better of him. We were sitting in their room, Petyr reading to the old man who sat in his chair holding the brass frame with her picture and the dead brown flower in it. Petyr couldn’t go on with the reading. Convulsed and shaking, he looked up and said to the client, “My Leader, this is a lie.” The old man didn’t seem to have heard, and Petyr said it again, “This is a lie, my Leader,” and then he looked at me. He’s going about it all wrong, I thought to myself calmly, taking me on this way. But then he doesn’t have the imagination for going about it any other way. Now we both looked at the old man, who still seemed entranced by the picture he held, until he slowly raised his head to look at the translator. “This is a lie,” Petyr said firmly, having gotten his attention, “this is a sadistic joke. Do you see? This big stupid man is playing a joke on you. He likes jokes,” and that was true, actually, I always had rather liked a good joke. I remember a good one a long time ago; my father told a good one about his son. The old man just blinked at Petyr, still holding her picture in both hands. “There is no child, my Leader,” Petyr shook his head, tears in his eyes, “you’re not going to be a father. I’m sorry.” The old man just kept blinking at him, and Petyr just kept on saying it over and over, There’s no child, you’re not going to be a father, it’s a stupid joke, and the more he spoke the more upset he became as though he was going to cry any moment, while Z just sat there blinking at him, appearing not to register anything he heard. And then, faster than I would have believed possible, the old man brought her picture up over his head and crashed its heavy brass frame down onto Petyr. Petyr dropped to the floor without a groan or shudder; every bit of life just flew out of him with the blow of the picture, and there he lay looking up at me, a slight discoloration on his forehead from the brass of the frame, before the blood streamed out into his hair and face and the shattered glass of the picture frame and the picture itself, which lay in Petyr’s head. There was her face with a hole in it lying in his. Little shavings of brown dead flower drifted in the air. I thought I was going to choke from laughing so hard. The guards came in then and looked at Petyr in amazed horror; the old man just sat in his chair, looking at her torn picture. I didn’t bother trying to explain to them how an eighty-year-old man could kill someone with that kind of force; if they didn’t know that about him by now, they didn’t know anything. “I believe the Leader has no further use for this gentleman’s services,” I said. The guards looked at the old man and looked at me; one of them snapped his fingers at the others and they dragged poor Petyr out. I looked at the old man when they’d gone, trying to keep a straight face. But I laughed some more and slapped him on the back. “Something to tell your children about,” I suggested. After a while he smiled back.

  123

  WITH PETYR GONE, I now translate the work to the client myself. The authorities wanted to bring in a new translator but they’ve relented to my insistence otherwise. I’m not willing to chance a third party at this point. My German is crude compared to Petyr’s and lacks Petyr’s exactitude, but it’s sufficient enough. Soon I find myself writing in German, which I’ve never done in the thirty years since I left America. By writing in German I find I now write in something close to his own voice. I write in his words, I write in the grunts of the beast which are there beneath everything he says.

  124

  TWO WEEKS AFTER PETYR’S death they’ve tried to move me in with the old man. That they waited this long reflects less the etiquette of a decent interval than the fact they were too stupid to think of it sooner. It doesn’t matter; I refused. The two of us living and sleeping in different places is the only psychological semblance left to me of being separate from him. In a catacombed sinking city empty except for soldiers and the two of us, I won’t have the two of us now living within the same hundred square feet; the city would corrode outward from the disease of it. I’ll sit with the old fucker in the day and build his child by night, but I need some place and time to be alone with the smell of my befouled hands. Besides, Giorgio comes up through the floor of this room, and at the moments I can barely live with myself, I still go out that way too.

  125

  ON MY APPROACH, I’M surprised at how dark it’s become. I stream farther into her, looking for the light of her beach; I can only discern the outline of the thing that fills her. Even I didn’t expect it would become this consuming. The larva’s now so large as to block out everything,
and my way to the cove of her womb is obstructed by it. For a moment I regret everything. For a moment I forget the smell from which I’ve made this thing inside her is the smell of his evil, rather I confuse it with my own infidelity. Until I make myself remember Megan and Courtney, there’s a moment when I forget my resolve to sacrifice whatever redemption might be left in the world for their revenge; and my memory is owned by the nights in Vienna I loved you. I turn back and desperately retreat. Someone calls out: is it he or I? “Geli.”

  Dania screams. She sits upright in her bed which is soaked with sweat. Across the street she can hear the voices of the tourists in the tavern; she looks at the clock. It’s past midnight. She can’t be sure at this moment what it is that’s made her cry out, it could have been any one of a number of things. It could have been the convulsion, only one of many, of whatever’s inside her; she presses her hands to her stomach. It could have been the dream, only one of many, of giving birth to a monster; she shakes her head clear of its image. She suspects, however, it’s neither of these that’s made her scream: she believes it was the voice calling her by the name she will not accept. She stumbles from the bed to throw up yet again, long past the time for throwing up; this is now her eighth month. I’m not fighting hard enough, she fears; she would reach down into herself if she could, and struggle with it hand to hand, and make it her own. Her will wanders desperately looking for a weapon.

  126

  THIS EVENING THE OLD man comes to my room on the way back from the tower. We went to the tower this afternoon together. The guards escorted us through the winding streets and over the bridges; it was a long walk that tired Z profoundly. At the top of the tower he wheezed the whole time. I convinced the authorities it was a good idea; as the momentous occasion nears, I want him worn down. After a five minute dose of the sea and sky, we started back and had to stop in an empty cafe so he could rest. He speaks sometimes but I don’t understand what he says. When he talks to the soldiers they don’t seem to understand either. Yes my Leader this, yes my Leader that, that’s all the soldiers say to him in return. He holds no majesty for them at all; the kind of hysteria he inspired thirty years ago, there’s none of that. On the way back, when we come to my room, I surprise myself and suggest to the guards that he rest there for an hour or two. I heard there’s going to be a broadcast tonight, it seems a good idea to have him see it. For the momentous occasion I want him to be good and full of himself. So we go into my room and I sit on the bed and set him on the chair where I write, because I don’t want him falling asleep on me. I close the door and wait for the guards to drift away, or maybe doze themselves; then I pull out the TV. I turn it on and wait for the broadcast; any minute I expect we’ll see his face and hear some reassembled speech he gave a long time ago. I hope to fill him with his own glory in the way the photos in his room fill him with glory, but he only sits staring at the TV mute and uncognizant. The broadcast comes on, the picture of him from very young days, when everyone thought he was quite impressive, quite the thing; and he begins to speak; and then it goes blank again. And then, out of nowhere as has happened before, there’s that man in the sea diver suit, except this time he isn’t just floating under the sea. This time he seems to be walking across the bottom of the sea; a strange vessel sits in the background. There, on the bottom of the sea, he plants an American flag. This is what your war’s come to, I say to the old man, armies claiming victory on the bottom of the sea. They’re out there right now, at this moment, on the bottom of the Adriatic, planting flags and little plaques. Z stares at the scene in stupefaction. I turn off the TV and hide it away, and the guards take him back to his room.

  127

  I GO WITH GIORGIO and his friends out to their island tonight. It takes about an hour to cross the lagoon. I’m in a state like that of the air before rain. The people of the island welcome me like a member of their family who’s returned home after half a lifetime. No ceiling covers the island, we walk along the streets under the stars and the lights of windows. The little houses are composed and tidy and painted with exuberant colors. Giorgio explains that the Germans have tried to cover the island, as well as the other surrounding islands, to no avail. The islanders sabotage their efforts, and when the Germans come to arrest them they only find a village as empty as the city I live in. It occurs to me when I hear this that perhaps my city isn’t empty at all, it’s only that its people, like the people of this island, will not be vanquished by those arrogant enough to presume history has dictated their triumph. To live with the people of this island is to be in a place and time where there’s no war at all; it isn’t as though the people pretend there isn’t a war, but rather it is that the war is truly insignificant to them. The Germans who rule them are objects of ridicule and mirth. The fishermen take me to a restaurant where the food and wine are already waiting. There’s another fisherman, a small man about half my size, with a golden tenor, whose name is also Giorgio, and after I’ve gone around to all of them and they’ve thrown their arms around me in welcome, it seems half of them are named Giorgio. There are also ten or twelve Brunos. The women are all named Maria. Maybe they were named something else before I began with the wine but after an hour they become Maria, warm and voluptuous and without a trace of mystery. After a while when we begin to eat the fish, the fishermen begin to sing gondolier songs celebrating the day’s catch. They sing about the lonely life on the water and the age of the city. They sing, Give me your kisses of fire. I can’t stand the beauty of it. I hold close into my lap my black hands that smell of the night’s work, but the Maria next to me wrests my hands away from me and brings them to her mouth. I’m appalled that her lips should kiss them, but she won’t let me draw my hands back. When I begin to cry none of them asks me what it is I cry for; my rain has begun. I’ve lived so far from life this true I’d forgotten its power. One song after another the fishermen sing, there in the small restaurant swept by the open wind of the Adriatic. The fishermen invite me to live with them on the island and never go back to the hidden sinking city. If I want to leave the lagoon forever, they tell me, I can do that too. They’ve been free so long I don’t think they understand how impossible it would be, that even if I wanted to go there’d be no way. The Germans, I try to tell them, they’d catch you too, and arrest you for helping me. How could you expect to elude them? The fishermen laugh and pour me some more wine and pour themselves some more wine and that’s when they explain about the regatta. They explain about the regatta and how there will be a thousand boats on the lagoon at once: How, says one Giorgio or another, are the Germans supposed to check a thousand boats? One or two, or ten or twelve perhaps, but not a thousand. After the wine is gone all of us stagger down to the dock and head back for the city; I lay on the bow of Giorgio’s boat flushed with the wine and the songs I’ve heard that seem to come out of the sea as though it’s filled with singing sea divers. Give me your kisses of fire. And it’s then, as though in response to their songs, I hear her first cry, the first strangled sound of her labor.

  128

  DANIA HAS ARRANGED A signal with Judy, who’s working at the tavern across mainstreet, that when the time arrives the pregnant woman will wave her lantern before the window and Judy will come immediately. Now pain slashes though her spasmodic and incandescent, and Dania reels across the room. It’s all she can do to get herself on the bed and not pitch herself through the window to the ground below. She cannot believe that it can actually start in this pain; if this pain is only the beginning, what will the birth be like? Her fear is boundless. She fears of course not only the pain but the vision of what will come out of her. She heaves on the bed and the lantern she tried to swing from her window rolls on the floor; she hopes its glass doesn’t break and set the place on fire. Already something in her is strangely wrong: the contractions are already only moments apart. She screams once, then again; Judy, who’s already in the street because she saw the weird weaving light on the walls of Dania’s room, now bolts into the hotel and up the stai
rs. She’s up the stairs and into the room as Dania feels herself rip from the middle, opening up to unloose what’s inside her; she opens like the night before me. On the bow of the boat I’m sobered by the sound and pain of her. The night’s gleaming and luminous next to the fuliginous larva gushing out from her. The Twentieth Century is being born from her in a wash of steaming evil. Z’s spawn will eat its way out of her, dragging from its hind legs the afterbirth of twelve million faces that felt its father’s misery. It will make its way out of her and up through the cracks of a blue city, scampering down the hallways to Z’s room, dreading the light. It will find its way up Z’s arm, onto his chest, and wake him from his sleep, its thousand black eyes staring into his. The afterbirth trails behind. We dock at the pier and I run through the tunnel of the piazza as quickly as my crippled old feet will take me. It’s inconceivable to me I might miss it, it’s inconceivable that Megan and Courtney and I might not be there to see it. I want to witness the first tip of the first black antenna that emerges from her, feeling its way out. In a moment I’m up from beneath the floor of my room. There’s a roar in my ears, the roar of myself bellowing madly, or perhaps it’s her. It’s inconceivable I might not be there to look into the thing’s features and see him, incontrovertibly him, the outline of the father in the face of the fathered thing. She screams, and in the pit of this scream, as what’s being born travels into the light of the world, because she’s stripped of any other weapon, finding neither the rage that killed Dr. Reimes in retribution for her father nor the resolution that swept her through the river of Davenhall Island to be sufficient for the fight, she’s left with only a single choice; and that is to love it. Whatever comes from her, in all its monstrousness, she can only love it. It’s such a pitiful weapon. Later, she’ll wonder if there really was such a weapon. Later, she’ll wonder if it really lay there inconspicuous and unthreatening on the barren floor of a small secret room. Later she’ll think it’s only a theoretical love, and she’ll wonder if loving it so deeply was ever really possible. But for the moment it’s not only possible but inescapable, one measly love. It doesn’t seem nearly pure enough, or perfect or holy enough, it isn’t love untainted. It’s love marked, wounded, suffered and doubted and denied by the humanity that attends it. It’s nothing before such a huge evil. But in the pit of this last scream it’s all there is, and she bends down and picks it up, and clutches it, a used broken little weapon, with a lifetime of blanks to one live cartridge, if there’s even one. The noise of the weapon is flat and whispered. Somewhere in the sounds of her own scream and the noise of her own love she’s vaguely aware of Judy by her side. In the noise of her love she begins to expel the thing from her; in the noise of her love the thing seems, for a moment, to stop in confusion in its exodus from her. If she’s to unleash a swarm of them, she vows, if she’s to fill the room with them, then it will be with her love’s noise, flat and whispered and pathetic. The century, in confusion, stops in its own time. Caught inside her, it devours its own time, which is to say it devours itself, and then begins to grow again from its inside out. Evil thunders past it like a river. Dania calls for Judy to take whatever it is being born from her. Give it to me, whatever it is, however monstrous, raise it to my breast. And Judy does this. And Dania feels her womb released of it, and feels that to which she’s given birth lying there on her chest, in her arms, and the sticky slime of the way it feels convinces her it’s a monster indeed, until she clears her vision and looks at him, to see a son quite human, drenched in afterbirth and blood, the only sign of a birth this extraordinary not to manifest itself for some weeks, when the hair on his small head will grow drained of all color.