Steve Erickson: Tours of the Black Clock

The sounds of his life on Davenhall Island were those footsteps in the hall at night, the trees in winter and the throttled din of the ice machine out behind the rice shop, a white and black unit that ran entirely on its own, blocks of ice spitting out onto the ground to the absolute indifference of everyone but Greek Judy who carved them up and put them in the bourbon she served in her bar. Judy was a young woman who had taken over the business some years before; her actual name was Garcia, nothing greek about her. Otherwise the ice sat like glittering glass fusing with the dirt of the town. Greek Judy’s tavern served bourbon and beer, steak and onions to the tourists that came in on old Zeno’s ferry. From four in the afternoon the concentrated red roar of life billowed from the bar in the middle of translucent oriental silence, and after the last ferry went back Marc, who sometimes saw other children in the bar with their parents, went around collecting their artifacts, which he hid under his bed upstairs in the hotel across the street. For years he assumed these things of an outside world were contraband before the will of his mother, who in fact knew all about them but recognized how necessary to a child was the glamour of his secrecy.

SHE KNEW HE’D LEAVE someday. When he was eleven he got it into his head he wanted to be a monk. Every day he built a small cathedral out of the iceblocks in the dirt; after a while all that was left of his monkdom were the ice cathedrals on which he would lie and listen to the crackling of the melting blocks. It seemed like the sound of ticking. It would be many years later, when he was sailing the boat back and forth to the island, that he’d forgive the men who found release in the legs of his mother. It would be many years before he forgave her, too.

THE ONLY NEGOTIATION GREEK Judy ever had with the Chinese of Davenhall concerned the bodies in the trees out in the northern graveyard. The town could be crossed on foot in six or seven minutes walking up mainstreet, and the island in something between twelve and fifteen depending on the season. In the hard rains of autumn the graveyard flooded and the island diminished, shrunk at its northern border where Marc remembered seeing one afternoon, in a storm that came faster than any consideration of shelter, blue bubbles floating up around the tombstones; something unimaginable was gasping up from underground. The Chinese peasants of Davenhall routinely hung on the graveyard trees the bodies of the Davenhall dead, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, before interment. It was the peasants’ conviction that if one died without speaking his or her name in the final breath, then to seal away the corpse that had been wrenched loose of its identity by death would exile the spirit to some netherbetween place. At each funeral witnesses would be called forth to verify that, before dying, the dead one had established without doubt his memory of himself. If no witness could attest to such a thing, the body would hang in the graveyard trees until the universe chose to write his or her name in the sky, so that he or she could read it and call the name out. Sometimes a body hung in the trees for quite a while. Sooner or later one of the peasants would wander into town and report to the others, “I heard him today, today he said his name,” and with satisfaction the body was then buried. In the summer, especially when it was very hot, the bodies tended to remember their names much more quickly. It came to pass that the inhabitants of Davenhall kept on the tables by their beds small index cards with their names written in large letters so that should the moment of death come suddenly, and with it perhaps a paralysis of instant recall, they could read their names from the cards and cry them out in the night in order that someone walking by in the street might hear it. But when Marc saw the blue bubbles floating up around the tombstones, he realized that the interred had come to find they preferred crucifixion in the trees to slumber in the cold wet ground of the Davenhall marsh, and that they were casting out from under the rising river their very memories so that they might hang amnesiac and free before the sky and the pale rosy smear of sunset, and the writing of the universe. When Marc, huddled that day beneath a wood shack in the rain, saw the blue memories of a hundred ghosts drift off riverward to finally and vainly burst, he gathered up his innocence in all its fierceness and directed it toward the leaving of this town forever.

THE NIGHT THAT MARC saw the stranger lying dead at his mother’s feet, he was nineteen. He turned and walked down the hotel stairs, out into mainstreet, down to the dock in time to catch the last boat to the mainland. He’d thought about doing this many times but this was the first that his nerve caught up with his imagination. Over the years he’d watched old man Zeno with his red riverbitten face and his long blue coat with the dingy gold buttons sail his small human ferry back and forth each day, bringing over the years thousands of strangers to the black and amber lights of Greek Judy’s tavern. Now in the dark Zeno didn’t give a second look to the boy as he stepped onto the boat, crowding in with the others, huddling against them in the fog and reek of Judy’s bourbon. But at some point during the twenty-minute journey, the old man looked Marc’s way and said something to the effect of, “Boy, that hair’s some kind of white.”

They got to shore and the tourists piled out of the boat and onto the buses that were waiting to take them twenty miles northwest to the city of Samson. It’s possible Marc wouldn’t have gotten on the bus even if he’d had a ticket, nerve having lost ground to imagination once again. Nothing irrevocable had yet been crossed. But there was no boat back to Davenhall until the morning, and so he stood there in the dirt watching the lights of the last bus vanish down the highway and then looking over his shoulder at the river behind him, and Zeno’s boathouse in the remaining desolation. Zeno sized things up. He stood in the doorway of the boathouse where he lit the gaslamp next to the window, and after blowing out the match and tossing it on the step he called out to the boy’s white hair, “Just what is it you imagine you’re doing?” I imagine, the boy answered, that I’ve lived on that island long enough, and am now about to put some real distance between us. “Not tonight, I’d say,” the old man answered. After a moment he added, “Come on in and drink something stiff, and I’ll take you back first boat of the morning.”

I’ll come in and have the drink, Marc answered. But I’m not going back.

They played cards in the boathouse, in the light of the lamp. The old man bet the gold buttons of his blue coat, since he plainly cheated and there was never the slightest danger of his losing them. He fell asleep against the wall while the boy made various accusations.

Marc did not go on to Samson the next day. Rather he did return to the island with the old man, much as the old man had figured, though he refused to step foot on it. Back and forth three times he sailed with the old man and more busloads of tourists, refusing to enter the town and waiting on deck as Zeno went to get some of Judy’s beer. Once Marc glimpsed in the distance his mother walking up main-street in a tattered salmon-colored dress he recognized, her arms folded in that way of hers and her face set with a familiar and incomprehensible determination. He glimpsed her long hair in the rising dust of the town, the gray hair that once had been a tarnished panic of fool’s-gold yellow. Marc lay low on the deck of the boat facing out toward the river, away from town and the island, leaning over the side and dragging his hand in the water, lunging for fish that he had no intention of catching.