Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

I’m tired of being asked how old I am. I dispense with my usual smart answer and just ignore the question. “Look, Herr Kronehelm,” I begin, leaning forward in the little creaking chair. I explain the situation without tipping my hand too much, I’m trying to get a fix on his situation first. He’s surprisingly open about it, allowing that he buys the work from the man at Charles and Bleecker for six dollars a page. When I hint at how little of that has been coming my direction, he isn’t especially indignant about it, but after a while he starts to see what I’m getting at. He starts to see that if I deliver the manuscripts directly to him, he can pay me three and a half dollars a page, which is better for both of us. Kronehelm weighs the pros and cons of this. It’s a good business move on the face of it but he worries that it’ll get him in trouble with the man at Charles and Bleecker as well as, I guess, whatever other characters he’s dealing with in this matter. But then another aspect of the situation occurs to him, one of great appeal.

“This way,” he says, “we can specialize the work, one might say.”

“What?”

“This way,” he says, “we might customize , so to speak.”

So to speak, one might say … he means he wants me to tailor the stories to him and his tastes. And for a moment I almost think I’m not going to laugh about it anymore, for a moment I almost think I’m going to feel the dread again. I almost feel it knowing that somehow I’ve locked into the preferences and passions of this man who, the more and more I watch him, appears as a blotch of human tissue that still hasn’t completely formed, with an unfinished cranium and a cigarette holder in his unfinished mouth. I almost think I’m going to feel it … but there’s not a chance. No chance at all. I’m just going to laugh harder. I’m going to feel better than I’ve ever felt. I’m going to feel better than the night in my mother’s hut, I’m going to feel better than the time I threw the bum out of the door of the railroad car. I’m going to have the time of my fucking life. I may not be able to write a syllable, convulsed as I’ll be with the mirth of it all. I’m going to be in fucking stitches. “Why that’s fine , Herr Kronehelm,” I say, “that’s jake. We’ll specialize it. We’ll customize it.”

Kronehelm’s almost a little taken aback by my zeal. “Not that I would presume, please understand,” he interjects, “not that I would presume how to tell an artist.” He winces again like he did at the chair when I sat in it. “My English.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I assure him, “everything’s understood.” All that’s left are the details. We even arrange an advance of a hundred dollars, just for the sake of inspiration. Herr Kronehelm suggests we share a drink to seal the deal, but I beg off insisting that inspiration is rising to the boiling point at this very moment and I’ve got to be home when it spills over. I’m not halfway down the stairs before I’m splitting a gut over it. Molly and Herr Kronehelm, Amanda and Herr Kronehelm, Molly and Amanda and Herr Kronehelm. We’ll dress him up in a little uniform, with a little sword and some medals; he’ll be ecstatic. He’ll come all over himself just from the feel of the black leather boots on his feet and the little pointed hat on his fetus-dumpling head. There won’t be anything left of him for Molly and Amanda, he’ll be so spent with excitement. They’ll have to work him over just to get a little blurt of him. Don’t worry Molly, don’t worry Amanda; I’ll make it up to you. We’ll leave him passed out on the floor and it’ll be just the three of us.

1935–36. I LAUGH A year and a half. I rise in New York to just below the eyelevel of the city; I believe my past is past. I move amidst the present at large and at liberty. Moans of murder from the Spanish prairies, sobs of love from the King of England: I ford these sounds like a river. I’m building obsessions for my Austrian mentor, word by word, specialized and customized, blond and strawberry-nippled and voluptuous; I laugh so hard people in the streets stop to stare at my window. After a couple of months Herr Kronehelm presses into my hand six hundred dollars and disappears for months. I keep working and laughing. He reappears suddenly one day with no explanation, accepting his specialized obsessions in silence. I walk the streets with my hand over my mouth: everyone who sees me wants to know what’s so damned funny . In his room where the curtains never part Kronehelm withers gratefully before cruel delicious Molly. Two more months pass and he advances me more money and disappears another four months, reappearing to take from me more of my comedies. Leona and I have a final irrevocable fight, she cries outside my door and splatters abuse across the air like vandalism. Molly and Amanda come and go like they’re told. It’s not as though they’re slaves, they just have better things to do. They’re professionals.

On his second return some things about Herr Kronehelm’s secret trips come to reveal themselves. It seems he’s established a market for my work in Austria and Germany. He takes the work with him, has it translated and then copied, so that he may keep one and sell the other. It’s not any sort of mass production, part of the appeal is the work’s rare exclusivity. No doubt I’m portrayed to his European clients as one of America’s most sensational authors. I have long flowing black hair and wear a cape, I am the secret passion of Claudette Colbert. I’m tubercular and perhaps an opium addict. Anyway I’m sure not a six-foot-four farmboy with a big goofy face. Kronehelm now wants me to feed the pages to him five at a time, which has me crossing town to Gramercy Park every other day. My rate, however, rises to four dollars, almost unheard of in this business.

Keep it so wonderfully American, he advises me. Molly in the company of gangsters and cowboys and tycoons.

It’s the end of 1936. It’s the end of many things. I don’t quite know it yet, but my head has just begun to bob above the watermark after all. If only I were a foot shorter. It coincides with recent discussions between me and the Austrian over our general residency. He wearies of shipping little bundles of five or six pages to the translator in Vienna, more than that he just wearies of New York. He proposes we relocate the business to homesoil. I don’t even know where Austria is: in Switzerland or some place. “Austria is in nothing,” Kronehelm explains with frustration, “it is only in Austria.” He’s resolute about returning. I suggest that nothing has to change, I can continue to work here and ship it on to him in Vienna, from where he can wire back our agreed-upon sum. He doesn’t think this is very satisfactory. I shrug and leave him with his dissatisfaction.

Truth be told, it’s the laughing that I weary of. I’m retelling the old stories, I’m retelling other people’s stories with the things they left out. The girls are beginning to bitch at me in my sleep, we’ve lost the yearning for each other. We’re too familiar with forbidden things. But I haven’t any idea what to do instead of laugh. The laughing’s a habit by which I clear my throat. I’m tired as well of the dread of the pulp stories, and I do less and less of them. Months pass since the last one, and finally one day I go into the magazine not to deliver anything but to get some money owed me from a previous piece. The editor has some news for me.

“Couple of guys were here looking for you,” he says. He seems agitated.

“What couple guys?” I say.

He shrugs, disingenuously. After a moment he says, “It was yesterday.” The twenty-four hours since haven’t calmed him down. “They saw your name in one of the old issues. Or someone else saw it, they didn’t look like big readers.” He laughs nervously.