Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

“That’s right,” Holtz answers, in the same calm way he first said it. He reaches over and takes the coffee cup and puts out the second cigarette. He’ll sit and wait all night for me to say something, before he says another word.

“And Client Z,” I finally ask him, “at whose pleasure does he serve?”

Holtz hands me back the coffee cup, full of ashes. “Client Z,” he answers, rising from his chair, “serves at the pleasure of history.”

I DON’T BELIEVE HIM.

AND IN THAT MOMENT I’m blinded by the gray Hungarian moon moving toward me up the Wien-Fluss and I forget everything. I notice I’m sitting there with the lights off, and I think to myself, Why are the lights off? I notice the window that I opened for some air and I think, Who opened the window? I notice the other man in the room who moves from his chair to his coat without saying anything and I think, There’s someone else here?

“I don’t believe you,” I think I finally say to him when he’s in the doorway.

Opening the door he tells me, “But it doesn’t matter, sir. It may be better that you don’t believe me. Let’s say, if you wish, that I haven’t told you anything new at all. Let’s say, if you wish, that nothing I’ve said in these last moments means anything. All that matters is the work, after all. A client is a client.”

He leaves me in the dark, where I thought I was on my own terms.

NOTHING HE’S SAID MEANS anything. At the pleasure of history? We all serve at the pleasure of history. It doesn’t concern me; all that matters is the work. I’m an American; a client is a client.

The window remains open; the car below leaves. I’m left alone. Comes the moon to my street.

T.O.T.B.C.—8

“THERE MAY BE SOMEONE new now,” I finally say it, “a new client.” You hoist yourself up onto me. “A new friend.” You take my face in your hands and move it till it’s caught in the web of what you see and know. I keep trying to look away. Don’t you think I understand this, you laugh, don’t you think I understand everything? “Don’t laugh,” I insist. You lunge at my mouth with yours.

If he serves at the pleasure of history, you answer, then history serves at the pleasure of us.

YOU AND I TOGETHER. A day passes, two, a week passes since Holtz came. I leave the flat only to walk three doors down the street for a meal. I keep thinking, Someone’s going to miss me. I keep thinking, There’s a rendezvous I’ve failed to keep. But there’s no one who misses me, there’s no one for me to meet. Every contact with my life up until this week has been broken, all the moments that have sailed behind the present in a single line scatter to new winds. The common compass spins wildly to no north. Somewhere far away is the moment I stand on the corner at Jerry’s newsstand and covet the pulps on his rack. Further is the moment Henry stands at my bedside and wakes me to follow him and Oral out to the Indian shacks. I don’t know if I actually see these moments or if the glare of the sea on which the present moment sails plays tricks on my eyes. Now we wait for the new client, the new friend. I guess I already know he won’t simply buy you like the others. I guess I already know you’re not simply to be sold to him like the others. At the end of the week I’ve decided a client is just a client, or did I decide that before? I decided before but this time I make myself half-believe it. That’s it. I’d breathe a sigh of relief except that to breathe anything at all connotes life, and the life I’ve carried almost twenty-one years in me has now scattered to another wind as well. An entirely different kind of ghost lives in me now, you and it together.

FIVE WEEKS PASS. IT’S autumn in Vienna, frayed and hushed. I go to see her. I wait for her to come home, plump little anglosaxon dumpling bouncy and wild. It’s dusk, she unlocks the door and I come up behind her. The shadow overwhelms her; she turns where she stands and drops the key. I retrieve it. “Hello,” I tell her. She’s breathing heavily and in the light her face is as red as her hair. It might be she’s going to say to me, How are you? or, You just left me that night, or Go away. Instead she says, “I’m pregnant,” and no sooner has she said it than she bitterly resents the desperation it betrays. I won’t insult either of us by pretending to wonder if it’s mine. “I’ll marry you,” I say, and am horrified by the way it sounds: “Marry me,” is the way I rephrase it. She laughs shortly in the doorway, still bitter, then just smiles to herself, melancholy, and for a moment she’s only going to take the key, put it in the lock, open the door and shut herself away from me. In the next moment she’s sprung at me, to the place where I’ve backed away from her so I don’t loom so large, and she’s pounding me, beating my chest with her fists, wailing furiously. On the other side of the street people stop to look; I’m holding her by the wrists and she begins kicking and I pull her to me to make her stop. She sobs into my shirt. “Megan,” I whisper, “Megan. It’s for me.” I whisper, “It’s for me I’m asking it. I know you don’t need pity from me. It’s for me because … everything’s gone wrong lately. This is my conscience throwing me a line, this is one little bit of decency in the middle of. …There are many things I can’t explain. Just let me have this little normal decent thing that tells me not everything I do is corrupt.” We stand in the street several minutes and finally go up to her apartment. I stay with her on into the night, and leave about eleven. In her sleep I promise I’ll return by dawn. Under the moon of madness I cross a bridge at the Wien-Fluss; thirty-five years from now I step onto the old man’s ferry and he sails me to your island. There’s a moment, between the island and the boathouse on the shore, when neither’s in sight.

WINTER COMES LIKE GRAMERCY Park, irrational and overnight. I strain to remember the winter of Gramercy Park, three or four winters ago I keep thinking, until I remember it was only last year. Megan and I marry nearly as suddenly. There’s a last moment flurry of activity by the shipbuilder and Megan’s mother to thwart things; the mother hurries to Vienna to approve. She’s aghast at the sight of me. I think all the more highly of her for it. “Oh Mama, go bloody home then,” Megan tells her. When they threaten to cut off her money she only says, “You ought to have done it years ago.” The wedding takes place on a Saturday morning before a vaguely denominational minister who’s nearly as little as Megan; I’m Gulliver in matrimony, yet barely large enough for the occasion. Megan wears a peach dress with a small veil. She’s sweet and the awe she shows in her eyes is humbling. When we leave the wind rips the veil from her head and hurries it over the rooftops where it passes out of sight beyond a post office spire. We take a new flat upstairs from where she’s been living, somewhat smaller actually except that it has an extra room. A stairway leads from right outside our door up to the top of the building where another door’s unlocked by the same key that unlocks ours. At night we fall asleep to the roar of rallies in the hills. People talk of nothing but Germany, and by the end of winter the government calls an election in which Austrians will decide whether to be Austrians. Only Austrians would need an election to know such a thing. Only Germans would be enraged by the temerity of it, or would call it temerity. I pull Megan’s voluptuous little body close to my head and place my ear to the core of her, where I hear redemption growing inside her. When her water breaks in seven months I’ll let it splash on my head as baptism. We both know it’s a girl and have named her Courtney. “Oh big boy,” Megan whispers in my hair, “love me just a little.” I hold her hard. I’ve kept the place on Dog Storm Street, I go there each twilight. To work, I tell her. Discreetly, fearfully, she doesn’t ask where or what. My part of the bargain is that when she opens her eyes in the morning, she’ll find me next to her.