Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

T.O.T.B.C.—7

YOU REMEMBER ME. THIS is, after all, the moment that razors the Twentieth Century down its middle, this simple afternoon you’re leaning out your window, all of fifteen years old I’d say, while below you men are scuffling in one of history’s countless shards. Now there come along some comrades of this poor pillaged soul, a platoon of bums, and for the first time I see something like resistance in this city to the blackboot boys, a vagabond war. As though it’s a battle for your benefit, you there in the window, as though history scrambles and brutalizes and bleeds for the face of you. I cannot recollect your beauty. I recollect the memory of your beauty, which we both know is not the same, because my memory made you beautiful. Whether those vagabonds think you’re beautiful too is impossible for me to guess; they never cared so much for Catherine or Lauren, who are more beautiful. Much more beautiful. Come to think of it, you may be plain as sand. Your long hair a tarnished panic of fool’s-gold yellow, your eyes a banal mud brown. There may not be a single curve of your jaw that’s anything more than ordinary. You say nothing to the scene before you, but your face says everything, the contempt for the blackbooters not simply because they’re bullies but because they presume to hold history as their own, they act like it’s tied to the post with a collar around its neck. The vagabonds have no history, they don’t even know history. It doesn’t intimidate them in the least. And when you look up and raise your eyes across the street, and mine meet them, we follow each other’s look as I make my way past the shard of history; and you say you don’t remember. I don’t believe you. Fifty years later I don’t believe you. Seeing you haunts and binds me, and I don’t believe this defiant maybe-not-beautiful moment that razored the century lengthwise was utterly gone from you before your century had passed another five minutes.

They’re banging around in the street, the window of the candleshop explodes and wax tumbles over the sill, when a stone someone’s hurled strikes you. A moment follows in which everything almost seems to stop, and in that moment the beggars pull the old Jew from the tumult and haul him down the street. The blackboot boys are happy to pretend they’ve won the skirmish, throwing more stones in the beggars’ wake, not far or hard enough to bring them back for more; the boys don’t want more. For a minute they stand around and mark their victory with general commentary about Jews and Germany. In the window you turn as soon as the rock hits you, you raise one hand to your face. In the moment you turn I’m almost sure I can see your blood, I can see the corner of your mouth where the stone opened your flesh. We don’t see each other anymore, our mutual stare is lost in the wound, washed away with the blood of it; maybe the moment’s washed away too. You turn and without looking back once — if only you had looked once — you disappear from the window and shut it closed. The boys are singing and carrying on, and I’d stay there on the street until they’ve left, waiting for you to come back from washing your wound to stand in the window again, or to come to the door and open it, and if not I’d go to the door and knock; I’d wait, but I’m the only one left in the street with the blackbooters who are in a frenzy now, walking around swinging their fists and singing, and far up the street, slowing to a standstill, who should I see but Carl. There he is. He stops, I see him, and I wait for him to see me, and then I turn my back and walk away, and I know he’s done the same.

TONIGHT I RETURN TO my room and it’s empty. Lauren and Jeanine, Catherine and Janet and Leigh are gone. They understand I no longer want them here; I can’t stand the light. I can’t stand the dark, something drunker than blood courses through me. I’m caught between the sheets of the bed; the light of bombings and parades blots the night outside my window. When it fades I sleep an hour, when I wake I sit up in bed in the dark of the room, and find that the gray Hungarian moon has dropped from the sky over the river, has moved through the circular streets of the city, up the banks of the Wien-Fluss to Dog Storm Street, and dangles now in my window like burst mutant fruit from the low limb of a tree. From some place I can’t see the moon casts a shadow on the left corner of my room and there in the shadow opens a door, and there in the door you are. We’re children. I’m twenty. Your breasts are fifteen, your legs twenty-five, your eyes and vulva ageless, neither old nor born. You’re already becoming what I remember rather than what you are. You step from the doorway of the shadow of the moon, your face only a quarter in light, and I see grow from your womb curling out the tuft of your hair a long wet vine; it precedes you, an umbilical thistle. It grows before you across the floor between us, it winds up the side of the bed. It wraps itself around my feet and up my leg, it coils around my waist and binds my erection. Dog Storm Street creaks with blue carriages, I hear the hooves of white donkeys; lakeless swans slap dead against the walls of houses. The window runs with the juice of the moon, I smell the musk of the steppes beyond the eastern hills. At the end of the long wet vine that winds from the center of you and seizes me is a black flower that grows new petals as soon as it sheds them. In a matter of moments the bed’s covered with black petals, I peel them off my thighs sticky and damp. I know you’re a virgin. I didn’t expect anything else. I didn’t expect you to come to the bed like this and prostrate your pink body across the wet black of the crumbling flower. I can already hear, fifty years from now on your Chinese island, every word of your lies. Every word. I hear them above the songs in slavic belfries, you can fill your mouth with the black flower but nothing stifles the deceit of your denial of me. The flower never stops growing. When I grab you by your wrists and shake you into looking at me, it’s as though I’ve taken a live wire: I’m stunned with your cold voltage. I want to let go but I can’t, it takes your own fingers to pry mine loose; you smile as you do it. I wake later and the bed’s soaked with the dew of the black flower. The vine’s withdrawn back into you, only its marks are left on my legs. You’ve gone back into the door of the gray Hungarian moon and closed it behind you. I sleep again and when I wake the wet of you has coated me. On the desk in the sunlight are these pages that document you were here.

I SELL YOU TO them. As though I’ve put chains around your feet and led you by a rope down the Kärntnerstrasse, I sell you, for the usual amount. I guess Petyr’s finally convinced Kronehelm not to come along to the rendezvous; the translator waits at the appointed time and place alone. They don’t know what they have in you. You’re worth more than any of them can pay; at the next appointment Petyr even complains. “Herr Kronehelm,” he announces coolly, “says to tell you your last chapter won’t do. It’s much too …” he looking for the word, “… elusive.”

“If it isn’t satisfactory,” I answer, “then you should find yourself another partner.” I take my money and leave.

The other day I went to find your street again. There on the edge of the Ring not far from the street where I lived seven weeks. I walked up one road and down the other, looking for the candleshop. I scoured maps, I questioned residents of the neighborhood. I mean, it’s not such a big neighborhood. It doesn’t have so many streets, and there are only so many candleshops. But I couldn’t find the candleshop, and I didn’t find your street. And I wonder if I’m really leading you by a rope, chained and enslaved, or if I’m the gateway through which you’ve escaped to other places, as though through a shadow’s door.