Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

BUT THEN IN 1942 I’ll come to find myself oblivious to self-mortification. I’ll come to acknowledge it in principle even as I never quite feel it. I don’t guess in 1942 I’m aware of anything except the room in Vienna where I ravish you over and over while the most evil man who ever lived watches us. I don’t suppose anything ever really shakes me until the night I watch my wife and child hurl themselves to oblivion as some kind of price for saving you and me, a woman they never knew and a man the depths of whose soul they never felt the way they deserved. Both of us from a pact which perhaps I chose, perhaps I didn’t.

Damn the consequences of my acts, it’s the consequences of my words I love and loathe. I wrap them like a rope around a man’s neck, or thread them like a string of pearls up through the middle of a woman’s womb.

I don’t know whether I’m supposed to feel bad for Pennsylvania, I only know I don’t. I cleared the decks of that almost instantly, making room for the evil to come. I admit it’s a little appalling that it doesn’t cross my mind hardly ever. Maybe Henry deserved dying, maybe my father and Alice and Oral deserved what they got too, but there’s an odd silence where my conscience should be wrestling with it. It’s like a man atomizing into nothingness hundreds of thousands of men and women and children, maybe in a little city somewhere, maybe Japan, maybe two little cities in Japan, maybe in the name of something righteous, maybe in the name of ending some larger barbarism, but then claiming that he never has a moment’s doubt about it, he never loses a moment’s sleep. Never in the dark does he see a face or hear a voice calling him. But then, that happens in your Twentieth Century. Not mine.

I’ve come now to see and hear things only when I fuck a woman in the dark or write words on a white page. It doesn’t mean I stop feeling the havoc of my fingers. I write to the music of Henry’s head sloshing when I broke it. My first story, there in the cloakroom at Doggie Hanks’ Top Dog, is about a man who kills his woman on a New York City backway. He kills her at the story’s beginning, but the story isn’t about him, it’s about her. She’s telling the story and goes right on telling it after he’s killed her, and goes on telling us how she longs for him still. When he sleeps at night she strips him on the bed, ties him to the bedrail with his shirt and makes love to him with her mouth. He wakes up and all he can see is that he’s tied naked to his bed and bleeding. His thighs and belly are covered with blood and he cries out in terror at his dying. In fact he isn’t dying at all. In fact the blood isn’t his but hers, she’s still bleeding from the top of her head where he bashed it in. But he can’t see her at all, he only sees the blood that he assumes is his own; and the sight of it, the image of what he believes is his own death, as well as the mysterious inexplicable climax he comes to from a sucking he cannot fathom, literally stops his heart. I also manage to work in some social observations of life in the streets of Manhattan.

I work in dread of every word I write. It leaves me abysmal and burdened rather than released. When I lie down to sleep I have to put the papers away, where I can’t reach or see them. When I finish I don’t wait a minute with it, but take it right down to the offices of the magazine, so as to have it out of my life.

THE MAGAZINE BUYS THE story for forty dollars. That’s the long and short of it, actually there’s a great deal of fussing and hesitating and general screwing around that goes on several weeks. First they don’t believe I’m really writing stories, because I don’t look like someone who writes stories, then they don’t believe I wrote this particular story, then they’re trying to figure out what to do with a story like this. This then is the second career which comes of standing around Jerry’s newsstand on the afternoon Jerry’s wife had a stroke; and the first career, as Doggie Hanks’ doorman, provides me the resources with which to pursue the second. The second will lead to the third, which will take me away from my country for more than thirty years. But that’s almost two years away: it’s now early 1935. I’m writing for the pulps. The stories are a cut above average and my rate goes up from forty dollars to fifty, but the secret of success is writing lots of stories; I don’t have the energy. Also, I don’t know anything. What do I know? I know how to destroy the manifestations of my youth in a single night. Out of it I write stories I can barely stand to hold in my hands, after which I travel for days inside my own black hour.

T.O.T.B.C.—5

I MAKE A FATEFUL and entirely conscious decision right at the beginning. This decision is to put across the top of my stories the name Banning Jainlight. I know that this has got to catch up with me, I can read the papers. The Philly papers have run a couple things, and Philadelphia just isn’t that far away. They’ve heard of Banning Jainlight there. Maybe I’m just not willing to be a tourist anymore. Maybe I’m not visiting anymore. The name goes where I go, bad or good. Maybe I keep it in defiance of Oral and Henry in that hut, Alice and my father thrashing on the ground beyond the licks of the flaming house, maybe I keep it to defy my mother who disappeared into the night, when she should have disappeared sixteen years before and taken me with her. Then I wouldn’t have been Banning Jainlight at all.

Sooner or later someone’s going to come. Little man, big man, whoever. I remember them already, actually. They’re still about twenty months into the future but I already remember them coming out of the night, down the street: “You know someone named Jainlight?” they say to me out of the dark. Little man. Big man. I turn and run. I hear their footsteps running after me, rounding the last corner of 1936.

But now in the spring of 1935 after I’ve been working for Doggie almost a year, I’m at the club one night early before the crowd has come in. Not much is going on, Doggie’s just strolling up the aisles and Billy’s with him, and Billy’s thinking very hard, hard enough to practically launch his head from his shoulders. When they’re close to me Billy says out of the blue, but so that Hanks will hear it, “So: Jainlight.” Just like that. First time he’s ever used my name, and I know it’s come to mean something to him.

I’m leaning in the door reading a paper. News all over the front about Germans. I don’t even look at Billy.

Billy’s eating a toothpick and talking around it. “Heard they’re looking for someone named Jainlight in the Pittsburgh area: that’s what I heard. A big redhead kid about six foot somethin’. Went on a rampage one night wiped out his whole friggin’ family.” He gazes off for a moment even though there’s nothing of interest in his line of vision except a bourbon glass on the bar that’s empty anyway. Doggie looks at him in confusion and then at me.

I look up from my paper now. “The news is fascinating these days,” I say, “take these fucking Germans for instance. I was under the impression we taught them what’s what around the time I was being born. Anyway, I can barely tear my attention away from it.”

“A big redhead kid named Banning Jainlight,” says Billy.

“Banning Jainlight is my alias,” I say, “must have been the real Banning Jainlight you heard about.”

Billy turns his gaze in my direction; now he appears a bit befuddled. “The real Banning Jainlight?”

Doggie’s looking at me, then at Billy. “You heard him,” he says to Billy, “the real Banning Jainlight. In parts of Pennsylvania there are probably several.”