Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

  156

  I DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME. Dania. Forgive me.

  157

  A MOMENT AGO MY heart woke me. I look around and it’s dark but still early, I hear the tourists in the tavern across the street, which means the last boat hasn’t yet left for the mainland. I can barely move from the way I’m stricken, from beneath the weight. I’m angry with myself for having gone seventeen years without ever finding the courage. I don’t have any time now. Time knew I was here all along. Now I have only moments. I have only one last burst of havoc in me. I stagger from my bed and lurch across my room to the door. In the hall it seems to take forever to get to her door. Maybe it is forever. Maybe it’s the moment into which one’s whole life falls. At her door my hand slides across the surface when I try to manage a knock, I cannot manage it. I can barely manage the knob. When the door opens, she’s standing there in the middle of the room; no son or lover waits with her. She turns to look at me. Her face when she sees me is inscrutable. I look for a signal but she gives none.

  Forgive me?

  Lying there on the floor at her feet, I’m aware of the boy coming into the doorway. He stares at me in shock. Is it simply the sight of a dead man, or is it any man at all in his mother’s company? Does the part of my soul attached to his give it a small tug? Does he feel the times I nearly killed him? Does he feel the times I finally saved him? Does he recognize in me the darkness from which I tried to create him? He looks at me, at his mother, and bolts. And somewhere, even in the silence of a forgiveness that never was given, the two parallel rivers of the Twentieth Century, which forked the only other time she ever saw me, flow back into one.

  158

  FOR AN HOUR OR so there’s some confusion as the room fills with townspeople and tourists from the tavern across the street. A doctor confirms the news they’re all waiting for, which is that I am indeed dead. But who is he? everyone’s asking; no one remembers me from the tavern or coming over on the boat earlier that day. “How could anyone not notice him,” the doctor says, “the man’s a giant.” I’ve never seen him before in my life, she tells them, still inscrutable. You remember me, I’m thinking, looking up at her: Vienna. In the window. The townspeople accept my anonymity with solemn resolve; it takes twelve of them to drag me out, after the tourists have gone their way. They’re none too delicate about it either. My head bounces down the stairs like a bowling ball. For a moment I thought she was going to stop them, but she didn’t; for a moment I think the woman who runs the tavern is going to stop them as well, but she doesn’t either. They drag me down the street and through the thicket outside the cemetery marsh until my backside’s raw; if I were alive I’d crack the little fuckers’ skulls together like eggs. In the cemetery at the edge of the island, before the wild night, they must bend the tree all the way over to the ground in order to fasten me to it, since they can’t lift me; when they release the tree I think I’m going to be catapulted into space. But the tree only groans back to something midway its original height, the last thing on earth that will ever succumb to the size of me.

  159

  I’M UP HERE EIGHT days. It’s not at all bad, truth be told. The weather’s fine and I watch out over the wide blue river, fascinated with the red train that crosses high over the water on its endless track. It reminds me of being on the ferris wheel in the Praterstern. I’m warm in the sunlight and birds visit my arms. I have this one melancholy fantasy that she’ll come to me one day and look up and say, I forgive you. This doesn’t happen but on the other hand it could happen at any time. She could be on her way here now, coming to say, I remember you from that day, before the candleshop.

  This doesn’t feel like damnation.

  I keep waiting for the damnation. As though it’ll arrive in the form of a black bird, and begin with the eating of my eye. But the birds don’t eat me, rather they seem content to watch the river perched from me. So I wait for damnation; it’s confusing that it doesn’t come. I’ve expected it so long, I spent so long earning it. It makes no sense that God gives me this reprieve, I’d have thought he wouldn’t waste a second. I’d have thought he’d snatch me the first moment I slipped over, as though there wasn’t another moment to lose. In my time, I have no reason but to believe that whatever God exists is the God of revenge.

  The God of revenge in a century of revenge. It doesn’t seem possible that this might have been the century of redemption after all. Not this century, not for me. After all the things, it doesn’t seem possible that somewhere I committed some slight, insignificant act of kindness that redeems everything. One small act of kindness that wiped the rest of it away. And yet, in a century when time and space have liberated themselves of all reference points, perhaps one small good thing owns a universe unto itself, and a thousand monstrous worlds of evil must submit themselves to its love. I don’t understand anymore. I’m only here at the end of an island where a river becomes one, waiting for God to come damn me, or for her to come forgive me; I wait for her to whisper my name from the window of her room. I almost killed him, really. I came that close. I held his little head in the palm of my hand and nearly popped it open the moment he was born; only a lapse prevented me. It wasn’t that I was good or anything. It was only a lapse. I almost drowned him that day in the flood not twenty yards from here, from where I then carried him to the hotel; I didn’t have the strength to kill him, was all. I meant to do it, hold him beneath the water until the last bubble up from the graves beneath our feet was his. That I carried him back was only weakness. Nothing good about it. Fuck the God who redeems me, I say.

  But God doesn’t believe me. I guess I don’t believe me either.

  Before his blue redemptive face above me, I’ve already forgotten the things I’ve cried out for, and the cry itself forgets its own name.

  160

  EVERY AFTERNOON DANIA LEAVES her hotel and goes down to the shore of the island to see if her son is returning. Sometimes she spots him lying face down, staring into the water from the edge of the boat captained by a man to whom she no longer speaks. Rejected in this way, she returns to town. After a week and a half, she goes to the cemetery.

  The huge nameless man still hangs in the tree. Birds sit on his fingers and the top of his head, staring out toward the river. Each day several of the townspeople come by to hear if the man has yet cried out his name; each day the tree sags a little more beneath him. Dania holds her arms together with determination, as though she’s waiting as well. She studies him each day. The Chinese quiz her constantly. She tells them she’s never seen him before; she doesn’t understand why they won’t believe her.

  By the tenth day she’s begun to feel harassed. Also, the body’s become an unhappy sight. She stands in the sunlight watching him awhile before she finally says, “His name was Banning Jainlight.”

  The Chinese who are present run into town to get the others. The others return and she says, still watching him, “His name was Banning Jainlight.”

  You’re lying, someone says. Like you did many years ago about the woman you called Consuelo Garcia, you’re making it up.

  She says, turning, “Let him rot up there then.” They call out after her as she walks back toward town. She shrugs, “Do what you want with him.”

  They cut down Banning Jainlight and bury him in the marsh.

  161

  MY NAME IS BANNING Jainlight, a voice says to her fifteen years later; but it’s only a voice in her head, after all, and she herself gave him that name. No dead man lies at her feet now. When she turns to the doorway and sees her son there, as she did fifteen years before, she has no reason to believe the voice she hears in her head speaks in his head as well. When the whitehaired rivermonk sees that the girl in the blue dress is not in his mother’s room as he’d expected to find her, he bolts from the doorway just as he did the time before, his second such lapse, though this one cannot be said to interrupt a life of innocence. He runs back out into the street, stepping on the glass from the windows he broke in his evening’
s rampage. Greek Judy stands watching him from the doorway of her tavern. When Marc arrives at the boat, the passengers are still huddled in terror, waiting to be delivered back to shore; the journey is furious. At her tavern, Judy can hear the tourists’ screams from out of the river’s fog. Business is going to be off awhile, she thinks, or perhaps even says out loud, though no one else is there to say for sure.

  162

  AFTER THAT, HIS FURY subsided into a gentler sorrow. He never saw again the moment of profound isolation on the river. He went into the river, not long after his night on the island, to release from the boat’s bottom whatever of the previous captain was still there; but there was nothing there. He always thought of going back to see his mother. Greek Judy brought him food and beer; she became tender toward his torment. One night about three years later she came to him with no food or beer but news, and he went onto the island for the last time. The street outside the hotel was filled with Chinese trying to get up to the hall outside her door, like scavengers waiting to pick over not his mother’s possessions but the mystery of who she was: Over my own dead body perhaps, he told them, but not hers. At the top of the stairs her door stood open; for a moment he was about to call out, Mother, that she might hear him from her bed as he turned the door’s corner. Instead he called her by her name. Turning the door’s corner, there was a split second when he saw her white hair on the pillow and believed it to be his own.

  Dania, he said. He saw her move slightly; he came to her side; his white hair tangled with hers. She looked up, very old and wrinkled, the scar that had always been at the corner of her mouth now just another of many lines. She put her hand on his face. In her eyes were theoretical tears. For a moment she was living very distinctly in the pain of bearing him. For a moment she was under the leaves of the Pnduul forest, the roof of the Vienna apartment, the tarpaulin of the boat on the river. What fell on her, however, what she heard about her, was not rain. It was a tapping; she knew what was tapping. She knew what now raised its fist to her door. Her son, clutching her, began to say something but she moved her fingers to his mouth to hold back his words. “I’ve already forgiven everyone,” she said, her long exile finally finished. “Now it’s their turn to forgive me.”

  She danced home.

  163

  NO ONE WAS GOING to hang her in any tree; he knew that for certain. Yet over the years the cemetery marsh had become so occupied it seemed there was no place left for her, and so Marc buried his mother, wrapped in a white sheet, in the arms of the man who had come to her that night fifteen years before, though in fact nothing was left of him except bones and mud. He covered her and then he and the woman that his mother had named Judy Garcia walked arm and arm back up mainstreet where they drank alone in her tavern, not a tourist to be seen. Sorry I hit you that time, she mumbled near the end. Sorry I deserved it, he answered. When he smiled sadly she said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile, even a sad smile is nice. He leaned over the bar and when he kissed her forehead her face became buried in his beard. She laughed because it tickled her; he thought it was something else. He pulled on his old buttonless coat and started toward the beach at dusk, and when he came to his boat the girl in the blue dress, blond and unchanged and unaged since the last time he saw her years before, was waiting for him.

  The rivermonk and the young girl sailed across the river where they caught the last bus into Samson. Halfway there Kara fell asleep on his shoulder. In Samson they ate in a diner and got a room at a motel five minutes down the highway; there were two beds and Marc said, Take your pick. She picked one and he took the other. The radio didn’t work, the filament of the table lamp between them muttered on and off. Outside their door was a Coke machine that someone seemed to use every ten minutes. Marc didn’t ask Kara where she’d been all that time or what she’d done. He didn’t tell her of his mother because he figured she knew about that. They didn’t make plans. He lay on his bed in the dark, listening to the sounds of the highway which didn’t seem so unlike the sounds of the ice machine when he was a boy. He listened to her fall asleep, and sometime in the middle of the night, when he’d fallen asleep as well, he had a nightmare: it was about his father. He woke to find her stroking his forehead and soothing him. She went on soothing him beneath the breeze that came through the window from the highway, and when he fell asleep again this time he dreamed of her growing up in the midwest. From the porch of her teacher’s house Kara named all the stars in the sky, and watched the leaves blow across the buried bridges of the plains. He heard the girl’s voice in his dream, and felt the blue fabric of her dress against his face. He woke calling her in the morning, when the motel room was filled with sun; and in the middle of that sun her bed was empty. When he went to the motel office to pay for the room, a woman told him that Kara had left on another bus three hours before.

  164

  LIVING AND MIGRATING WITH the silver buffalo, he followed her trail seven years. The white hair on his arms grew longer and more savage, the hair on his face covered it so that no one would ever detect a sad smile again. On a mountain near the top of the world, he found her; she was living and working in an observatory, alone and happy. It was a place nearer the fiery field above her. He and the buffalo lived in the woods nearby. He didn’t go to her, accepting that she had chosen to live by herself; he watched her stars with her, outside her walls, and though he’d discarded his coat long before, and though the coat had lost its gold buttons long before that, he now wagered them on which star she was studying tonight. The odds favored him. He fought off the beasts that came threatening her. Sometimes in her doorway, she called out, Who’s there. He lay low until she convinced herself it was no one. After many more years had passed, he realized one day he hadn’t heard or seen her recently, and with trepidation he invaded the observatory to determine she was in no danger. Almost as though she was asleep, she lay in the center of the arena under the observatory’s open dome; the telescope was pointed at her as though the stars were studying her back. Because there was no way of giving her up to the field in which she belonged, he left her there. He’d seen enough burials anyway.

  He migrated even further north with the silver buffalo; they seemed to know where they meant to go. Across the snowy flats, man and herd traveled in a steady vapor. The mining towns became more and more scarce, the signs of life fewer and fewer. They were running somewhere, and when they arrived at the place, the snow was falling. He knew he couldn’t go further with them, that it wasn’t his place. So he had to watch them leave him behind; he noted how they hurled themselves onward, and he pitied anything that fell before their path. Through the blinding falling snow he could barely see them disappear, but he followed their tracks nonetheless, and the sound of them, right up to the mouth of an arctic cave. As he stood there listening to them disappear into the dark of the cave, there roared into his face, from out of the darkness, an inexplicable blast of jungle heat.

  Having exited the century at one end and entered it again at the other, the year was 1901 when he finally came to a village in northern Asia. He lived in the village awhile and when he understood that it was his time as it had been for others, he left to make his way down the mountains to the polar sea. He came to a bay clogged with ice. He plunged his old whitehaired body into the sea and swam to the first iceblock from where he spent the days remaining to him leaping from one block to the next, putting his ear to the surface of each. As with the ice he’d listened to as a boy on the island, the bergs in the sea were clearly ticking. What he now searched for was the one block of ice that melted in time to the beating of his own heart. He didn’t have long to ascertain this about each one, since listening at any great length would freeze his ear to the ice, a prospect he considered no better than hanging from a tree. When he finally found the right one, he was too exhausted at first to feel much relief; only after he lay there some time, during which his fingertips and heels, and then the hair of his body, froze to the ice, did he feel some peace. He dozed. The ice,
caught in a southward current, became smaller and smaller as it drifted off on its own course. For a while he allowed himself to remember everything; one thing after another came into his head, all the things he remembered of the years to come, until the ice had turned completely into the sea. Through the warm fog of his last breath, he watched the memories of a hundred ghosts drift skyward to finally and vainly burst.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1989 by Steve Erickson

  cover design by Jason Gabbert

  978-1-4804-0994-1