Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

  149

  WE SPEND SEVERAL DAYS getting up to Galveston. On the streets of Corpus Christi I panhandle bus fare while Z sits on the curb moaning a strange unearthly sound that seems to come from some place other than his mouth. I know he’s barely alive. Sometimes someone will give us a ration coupon for some food, but the shelves in the grocery stores are always empty. One day a woman tells us about a relief center for people who’ve been dispossessed by the shelling, but after I coax the old man three hours over four city blocks, I find a hopelessly huge crowd outside the center and I know we’ll never get through. I must remind myself that the soldiers on the corners aren’t Germans but Americans. I must also remind myself that it may not matter, it may even be worse. On a government bus that runs refugees north, I see the internment camps for enemy aliens. After a week we’re in New Orleans.

  According to the newspapers it’s July 1970. Every day is a struggle to get coupons and hope we find a store with whatever items our coupons specify. Our last day in New Orleans we’re lucky; someone’s dropped a whole ration book on the sidewalk. I redeem some of them for canned fruit which I must feed to Z like a baby. Coffee’s impossible because the Germans have cut off the flow from South America. I trade the rest of our coupons to get us back on the road. All along the highway up through wartime Louisiana I can see the barbed wire that runs along the bayous. The heat’s terrible; the Negro bus driver scolds me for taking an old man on such a trip. Another old man on the bus gives Z a green baseball cap to shield his face from the sun that comes through the window. Every once in a while Z eats a can of something, whatever he can chew and digest, tomato broth or tapioca pudding. We get off the bus at each stop and I take him to the toilet, hoping we’ll get back fast enough before the bus driver pulls out. The bus cuts up the south side of the Appalachians, through Montgomery and I think Atlanta, though I sleep through Atlanta, so I’m not sure. Z’s still moaning in that way and the other people on the bus watch him. I’m still compelled by whatever force it was that smuggled us from the Italian lagoon in the first place; I’ve dreaded the truth of the matter so long that I’ve come to dread the dread more, and therefore must now admit the truth, which is that all this has been allowed by someone. It’s too ridiculous to pretend I’ve somehow actually spirited out of Europe on my own the most powerful man in history, all the way from Italy to America without papers in the middle of a global war. Someone or something unseen directed us past the lieutenant on the train from Milan, the owner of the German kitchen in Nice who suddenly changed his mind about evicting us from our room, the captain from Marseilles who suddenly changed his mind about arranging us passage out of Wyndeaux, the cabbie in Quintana Roo who drove us up the coast for no reason at all, the ambush in a Yucatan ditch that brought us onto first a truck, then a boat that deposited us on an American beach without a soul asking questions and with a fire to keep us warm until we were up and on our way. I’ve been allowed by someone or something unseen to smuggle into the very heart of America the enemy, the withered dying husk of an old man who will soon break apart only for bits of him to blow across America and settle in its land and take root. What have I done, I cry out to myself there on the bus in the dark. I marvel at how everything I touch is marked with malevolence. After several days on the bus we’re forced to spend more time begging in Raleigh before we can move on. When we come into Washington it’s so black from martial law that the old man actually stops moaning a moment, his face alight, as though he recognizes in the black the same home seen in the lights of the gulf by the ancient birds he released from his eyes.

  T.O.T.B.C.—16

  150

  NEAR THE END, IN his last days, the moan that comes from him is unbearable. It’s as if the soul of him, slipping into its final damnation, is already howling back through an open door. As it becomes a greater and greater moan, a greater howl, I begin not only to hear but to feel it; it ripples through me from the part of his soul that’s attached to mine. Walking in the streets of Washington the people who pass look at us in the way one looks for the direction of a siren; they know it’s somehow coming from us but they don’t know how. I can so barely stand it that sometimes I just walk on ahead, leaving him behind. The howl then soars to stop me in my tracks; I turn back to him, expecting to see him staring after me and screaming at his abandonment. In fact he’s not staring after me at all. I stride back to him and see how his body shrinks behind its features, disappearing until the only things left of him are his various grotesque appendages, the nose, the ears, the fingers. On a wall beside him is a poster which is old and shredded around the edges, curling at the corners: it’s a poster of him. As on the German television broadcasts, the image is of the man nearly forty years ago, and printed across the image is a large black X. Beneath the image and its X is the single word, in large black letters, NEVER. The old man, now virtually dying before my eyes, stands peering out from beneath the rim of his green baseball cap at this picture of himself. I don’t know if his howl is for the X across the image, or for the image itself. I pull him away and the humid swampland of the city breaks open in a summer storm. As the streets become small rivers he whimpers at my side. It’s an improvement over the moan.

  His last thirty-six hours are spent in New York City. I can barely remember why I left it, though I know the reasons were quite momentous at the time. I also know it’s not the same New York City. We spend some time in Washington Square and walk, two ragged bums, up the great boulevards. There was a time once when he dreamed of marching up the great boulevards of New York with a conqueror’s contempt, as when he marched up the boulevards of Vienna and Paris and London. Whose bodies would he have sealed up in the walls of Park Avenue? After a while it’s not possible to move him anywhere on his own power. We catch the subway; he sits beneath a maelstrom of graffiti. Some teenagers torment him, knocking his cap this way and that, pulling it down over his face; when the doors slide open at Lincoln Center they grab the cap and take off through the turnstiles. At 72nd Street we get off. Every step up the stairs is an effort for both of us. His moaning ends, exhausted. I’m at the point where I must will myself beyond my lameness, the lameness barely accommodated by what’s compelled and brought us this far. Not much further, I tell him now: I know exactly where we’re heading.

  We’re heading for the small room where I first began to chronicle the adventures of old loves. Amanda and Molly. I’ll bet they thought I’d forgotten them. It takes me only most of the morning to find the block, only most of the afternoon to get us to the building. The building hasn’t changed, not outside anyway. When we enter the lower lobby I’m practically carrying the old man, I might as well sweep him up in my arms like a bride. I carry him into the lift, and at first I get the floor wrong. We go up and down a couple of times, and then I decide maybe I had the floor right after all. It had to be this particular floor. Right before the lift door slides open, I believe I’m going to look down the same hallway I looked down years ago, and see the door of my room. But the lift door slides open and where my room used to be is an office. I open the door of the office and no one’s there. There’s dust everywhere and mail on the floor that hasn’t been collected. The blinds have been drawn many years. The papers on the desk are old and brittle. It’s disappointing, I thought I’d see the old place. The old scene of the crime. The table where I wrote and the shelves that held old coffee grounds. I take him into the room and set him in the chair behind the desk; the air he exhales is startling, it seems like more air than his withered body could hold. His hands flop onto the flat top of the desk before him; at his fingertips is an old blueprint someone left behind. I walk over to the window and turn the blinds, walk back over to the door to pick up the mail, twenty blank white postcards that, from the postmarks, were all sent nearly two decades before. Nothing’s written on the cards, but the addresses on the front are all in the same hand. I look around the office for a moment; it’s utterly ordinary. I’m thinking maybe it’s not the right floor after all, maybe
it’s not the right building. Maybe it’s the wrong street. Studying the old blueprint in the light through the window, I find nothing extraordinary about it either; it’s a house. It has a main floor and a floor upstairs and a basement, and all the usual rooms of any house. It could be the sound and certain house I grew up in, the one I burned to the ground. The only thing slightly curious about it is a room in the corner of the basement; its lines have emerged literally out of brown age, as though it was always there but only the actual passage of time would reveal it. It could have appeared any time in the last twenty years. I’m standing there in the light of the window looking at the blueprint when I realize he’s dead.

  151

  I JUST REALIZE IT. I wouldn’t make more of it than that. It’s not as though the part of his soul attached to mine has given it a significant little tug. I just think that when you’re in a room with a dead person you instinctively know it, although just as instinctively I know that isn’t necessarily so. I turn and there he is, nothing about him looks different from the way he looked in the bottom of Giorgio’s boat or the way he looked sitting on the cliffs of the Caribbean watching the war. I just know he’s dead, and I walk over and feel his pulse only because I don’t trust my own instincts anymore. Soon his eyes will roll up into his head; I’ll be damned if I’m going to close them. I’ll be damned if he deserves that kind of dignity. Still, I think I’m supposed to say something. I think I’m supposed to let someone know, before he breaks open and bits of him fly out over the world. I’m supposed to call someone on the phone and tell them the man they’re looking for is here in the West Seventies of Manhattan. By my calculation, which is certainly suspect, he’s eighty-one. I leave him as he is, there in the chair, the gold slits of twilight striping him through the blind. I tear from the blueprint the emergent room in the basement corner and pin it to his shirt. In the middle I write not an explanation or an epitaph or an excuse, just a mystery for someone better at mysteries, any random investigator who passes this way. It reads: “Aber ich liebte sie. (But I loved her.) A.H.”

  152

  I FOLLOWED THE POSTMARKS of the blank white cards west. In Pennsylvania I saw a burning house. In Ohio, in the flatlands, at the Mississippi, I looked for every sign of him, every sign of any bit of him that had blown and settled and taken root. When I found him, I pulled the root up. Fingers of him, the hairs of his mustache curling up out of the soil, the veins of him scaling walls like vines, I cut them all down. I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thousand righteous champions calcified into something venal and mean by their presumptions of something sacred and pure and undirtied by the blood and spit and semen of being human: I recognized all of them by the bit of him they carried, sometimes in one eye, sometimes under their nails. I did not turn my violence on them. I didn’t scorn them or call myself finer. I named them by what they were, sometimes in a place no one heard me, in a language no one knew; I named the evil that calls itself righteously destined. On the other side of a river that seemed to have no other side, I took a ride with a boatman who looked as though he’d seen one big man in his life too many.

  153

  I WALKED INTO TOWN with the rest of the tourists and took a room at the hotel on the main street. The Chinese woman who ran the hotel sat in a back room; when she failed to acknowledge me, I slowly went up the stairs and found the first door that opened for me. The room was like many rooms I’ve lived in. I lay down on the bed and waited for someone to discover I was here. A bowl of rice and pork was sitting on the table by the window when I woke. Since then, every twilight when I’ve awakened, rice and pork wait for me on the table.

  She and her son live several doors down the hall from mine. After I’d been in my hotel room for a month, during which time no one spoke to me or asked who I was or what I was doing, I got up one night and walked up the hallway and stood before their door. This was the place and moment to which I’d been compelled by his defiant birth. Now, years later, I’m still compelled there because I haven’t yet found the courage to do what I came to do. Now, years later, I still stand before their door having come to the door that first night and then the next, and then the next, and every night after that for a week and then a month and then a year, and then two years, then five, then ten. Always I believe the courage will come to me at her door. I will not die as he did, never begging someone’s forgiveness. That she would not or could not give forgiveness isn’t what matters; what matters is the act of my begging. Every night I raise my fist to the door, about to knock; sometimes I hear her or the boy turn in their sleep on the other side. Many times I stand there the whole night for hours on feet that are racked with pain. When the dawn light drifts up from downstairs, when I see the top of the stairs fade to a softer blue, when I hear someone stir on the other side of their door, my nerve collapses altogether; I return to my little room and close the door and wait for the next night, when I try again.

  154

  IT’S NOW BEEN SEVENTEEN years since I came to this hotel. Seventeen years of nights I’ve stood at her door with my hand raised. I see her sometimes from my window, when I have the courage to look out. Occasionally I believe she looks just as she did when she watched me from her own window that day in 1937, ’38, I don’t remember anymore. She spends much time in her own room caring for the boy; sometimes, when the boy’s out playing somewhere, I smell the liquor in the hallway. I would have a drink with her, if it was possible; fortified by it, I would say all the things. All the things to say. We would, after all of it, become drinking pals in our old times. From my window I watch the boy too, whitehaired embodiment of the willful love of hers that defied all our terrible power. When the rains come one autumn she runs from the hotel looking for him as the island floods; the waters rush down the mainstreet with a terrible power of their own. After neither of them has come back, I pull on my coat and climb with difficulty down the stairs and out the hotel’s backway. In the rain and wind I slowly trudge up toward the northern end of the island where the cemetery lies; there, huddled beneath a wooden shack, I can see the boy trapped by the storm as the graves bubble up around him. I wade out to him. By the time I reach him the downpour is such that almost nothing’s visible but rain; I spot him by his hair. He’s nearly unconscious. I pull him up from the water and for a moment, as he’s caught in my hands, I have that old urge to avenge my wife and child who I can barely remember anymore; all I remember is vengeance. I have that old urge. But I pick him up out of the water and hold him to my chest and wade back to town. I come back to the hotel and up the stairs. I’m wondering what I’ll say to her when I carry the boy through the door. But she hasn’t returned yet and so I lay the boy on his bed and pull the blanket up around him when I hear the door downstairs, and I’ve only returned and closed the door of my own room when I hear her footsteps in the hall. She’s lived a whole lifetime not to hear my footsteps behind her anymore. I hear her call his name at the sight of him, the noise of love’s weapon fired years ago from the moment she bore him.

  155

  SEVENTEEN YEARS I SLIP in and out of the hotel back door in the dead of night and storm. Except for the unknown stranger who brings me my food, I am unknown and strange to the rest of the town. I’ve fallen out of time, it searches for me and I hide like a rebel in the ruins of Mexico. If it’s found me out, it’s left me to my delusions. From the window I watch the tavern, the woman who runs it, the Chinese carrying their dead north; I hear ice and its machine, crackling in the distance. Sometimes I like to pretend she’s the one who brings the rice and pork. Sometimes I believe I wake to the smell of liquor in my room; I leave such a conviction to my delusions as
well. I don’t have much time.