Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

When I leave a few minutes later, Kronehelm’s in quite a state. Petyr’s running back and forth with hot tea or something, any moment he’s going to start measuring Kronehelm’s pulse and peering under his eyelids. I’m in too upbeat a mood to let this nonsense undo it, and I just walk out the door leaving the two of them in each other’s care. It’s a fine afternoon and I decide to take a walk over to the Volksgarten and then cut up through the palace over to the Karlsplatz, see who’s being burned in effigy this afternoon or beaten to a mush before the general bloodlust of the Fräuleins in the coffeehouses. Sure enough it turns out the episode with the errand boy from Berlin is only an omen of better luck to come, because I’m walking along the outer wall of the Hofburg when I hear someone shouting from across the street. Galoot! he’s calling, and I look over and there in the doorway of the Cafe Central is Carl. I haven’t seen him since the night I arrived in Vienna. There he is now waving at me and then I hear a pounding on the window of the cafe and look over, and there are two of the Spanish girls waving as well. I cross the street and Carl and I shake hands, we go into the Central and the Spanish girls jump up and embrace me. Actually I don’t remember us ever being that friendly but it turns out they have grateful recollections of huddling against me in the cold of that train. I’m almost speechless with happiness to see the lot of them, to know someone in this city besides the two loonies I’ve been living with. I spend the rest of the afternoon sitting beneath the arched ceiling of the Central with Carl and the Spanish girls and the rest of the clientele, revolutionaries and journalists and Italian tourists, and waiters running up and down the wide marble stairs in their white jackets.

Carl, it turns out, is still not happy about being in Vienna, but I gather that at least one of the girls has taken him under her wing in more ways than one, and so it isn’t the worst situation he’s ever been in. He’s still trying to get his money from American Express so that he can get to Italy. The two of us sit at the table opening all the sugar cubes while the waiter ignores us. With his command of foreign languages Carl negotiates the conversations. Without going into a long story I explain to the three of them my own insane arrangement with Kronehelm and Petyr. “For God’s sake, come live with us,” Carl says, just like that, and then he turns to the girls and lays it out for them in Spanish and German, and they agree that living with them is the sensible solution. I don’t even want to ask if they really have the room for me because I don’t care; I don’t want to know what their place is like or whatever reasons there might be I shouldn’t go. The only question in my mind is how I’m going to break the news to Kronehelm without him putting a gun in his mouth and painting the walls of his flat with the slush of his brains.

I decide I need to spell it out for him this very night. Carl and the girls come with me and wait out in the street while I go upstairs and wake up Kronehelm, who’s retired early. “Say, mein Herr,” I start talking as soon as I see his eyes flicker, “I’ve reached a business decision here, I’m leaving,” and he’s still rubbing his face getting himself oriented, looking at me, saying to himself, What’s happening? “I’m taking a powder residencewise, I think it’s best,” and now he’s shaking his head as though to clear it out, “but I’ll be in touch with you very soon because we’re still partners, partner,” and now he’s finally starting to get it, “I just don’t think this is a good idea my being here, it, uh, well it ebbs the creative flow you know, it uh, well, let’s just say,” and he’s shaking his head but I bull my way through, “let’s just say that if I stayed here another night, another minute, I’d probably, you know, kill you. Probably. Because you drive me fucking crazy. But the business, that’s still on, I mean I’ve got the goods and you’ve got the market, so let’s not worry about it, I’ll probably write even bigger and better, look at it that way,” and now, as I feared, he’s starting to clutch at my clothes. No no no no, he’s starting, first quite low and calm really, just No no no no, and then when I take his hands and try to pry them finger by finger from my coat he just starts screaming. He’s raving about Client X this and Client X that, and I realize that given the little party we had with the German flunky this afternoon and all that saluting we did together, this is probably not timed absolutely the best it could be, but there’s no going back now, if I stay Kronehelm and Petyr will be up all night plotting strategy how to keep me. They’ll bind me to the damn typewriter, glue my fingers to the keys. So I’m going now. Client X, Client X, Kronehelm keeps choking; he’s holding my ankles and letting me drag him across the floor as I walk to the door. It’s appalling. Then he’s slipped out of his bathrobe and I’m dragging him across the floor naked. This old man with half-finished flesh like the tissue of a fetus, sliding across the floor on my ankles. Petyr stands in one of the doorways staring at us. Finally I just kick him loose; he shudders there at my feet and, as though to mercykill something that’s just been delivered up between birth and stillbirth, I raise my foot over his head and am ready to bring it down. And Petyr, without a sound, screams. He screams without a sound, his whole body’s racked with it, though nothing comes out. The white of his pallor has turned blue. I bring the foot down but not on Kronehelm and just lean into the doorway breathing hard; none of us moves until finally I say, “I’ll send word in a couple of days,” to Petyr, and then stumble out into my life.

I MOVE INTO THE Spanish girls’ flat and stay awhile. In almost no time it takes on an utter familiarity — books and empty wine bottles in the corner and wooden chairs that are broken and old family photos on the wall, and pictures of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, revolutionary tracts under the table and antique clocks stuck at five minutes before two, a small fish tank beneath a window. The Spanish girls live the free life. A whole entourage of people constantly pass through, conversationalists and exlovers on leave from psychiatric wards, philosophers on the make and female Dutch photographers who shoot nude selfportraits, bartenders from Brussels and a plumber who brings a bottle of French champagne every time he fixes the hot water because he wants to make a celebration of it and listen to Bessie Smith records. They all jabber away at the same time and eat roast rabbit, doze off for an hour and wake up midsentence finishing the conversation they began before others coopted it, have violent quarrels and rearrange their lives before my eyes. They tend to have a lot of cockeyed ideas if you ask me. Absolutely everyone smokes and the ash of their cigarettes always grows to about three inches long before it falls to the floor at which point they grind it into the carpet. The world is their ashtray, and soon I notice that the city itself has begun to take on a dinge since I got here, until even the sky is the color of cold cinders.

Most of them consider themselves Trotskyite bandits of a sort who get by through various means. Each day the three Spanish girls leave me careful instructions about cops, tax collectors and utility inspectors who come knocking at the door to inquire about forged papers, back taxes and the meters that have been jammed to keep the bills down. The flat is something of a way station for lots of shady characters, in whose ranks I suppose I must be included. The guy who was here before I arrived was a homosexual who placed an advertisement in a Viennese homosexual newspaper a couple of months ago. The advertisement has appeared since his departure and I now get many letters, wires, secret codes and even personal interviews on the other side of the door. Sultry male voices whisper Guten Tag or deliver rasping promises or sobbing accusations. Thierry? they call. Thierry no longer lives here, I answer. There’s silence and then they either disappear or make their pitch anyway. Bitte, bitte, they moan, and scratch at the door. In other words, these people are all slightly cracked. I’m regarded as a naif and puritan because I don’t fuck every casual acquaintance three seconds after they blow through the doorway. I suppose I might be less inhibited if the population of the place wasn’t on the scale of India. They know I’m a writer but not the exact nature of what I write; they’d probably be amused but who can be sure. As proletarian rebels go they’re a highly refined lot. They eat the best, drink the best, buy expensive objets d’art and wouldn’t be caught dead riding the streetcars. There’s nothing quite as screwy as a bunch of revolutionaries zipping around Vienna in taxis, unless of course it’s Kronehelm and Petyr goosestepping around the suite with dirty books in their arms.