Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

Holtz finally comes out, once again opening and closing the door as though not to wake someone. He does it so tentatively the door doesn’t really catch behind him. He comes over and I stand up; he looks relieved. “I’m sorry,” he says crisply, quietly, “it can’t be tonight. The … the client is leaving Vienna.” But he just got here, I think to myself. “He’ll be back in a week or so, there’s going to be a new election. Perhaps then.” Perhaps not, he adds without saying it. His face sags from the tension. I just nod all right. Behind us the door that didn’t quite catch closed drifts partly open.

For just a moment I look and, in the faint light of the suite beyond the door, the client looks back.

He’s standing over a desk, both hands flat on the desk as he leans over the papers scattered before him. To one side is a half-finished plate of food; it looks like it may have been sitting there all night, eaten from erratically. On a couch behind him I can barely see a blond woman, pretty in a very ordinary way; she’s curled up asleep, or partly asleep. Maybe she’s waited for him to come to bed, maybe she’s been waiting for a sign it matters to him whether she goes ahead to bed or not. When I look through the door he looks up from his papers, his hair falling in his face; he looks first at the affront of the open door, and then at Holtz, and then at me. At each stage of this small act his face slowly changes; at the sight of me he goes white. His mouth falls slightly open. In his eyes is no power at all. When we look into each other’s eyes, his beg to be conquered in the way he’s conquered this very city on this very day; there’s the fear and hope that I’m as merciless as he. I can imagine that he’s sat behind this door all evening picking at his food and glancing distractedly at his papers, wondering what he would say to me; when the nerve finally failed him, he couldn’t go through with it. My anonymity to him is no less compelling than his to me: this has all been a mistake.

Holtz follows my line of vision, turns to peer over his shoulder at the open door. He blanches. He races to the door and, muttering profusely through it, closes it. Z never turns away from me, nor I from him, until the door shuts us off from each other for thirty years to come. In thirty years, when I’m an old man and he’s an ancient living in a basement in Italy, I’ll wonder if he remembers this moment, or if he remembers ever seeing me at all.

Holtz walks me to the lift and sees me off without a word. He’s still standing at the door when it slides closed; he has a funny look on his face. The car’s waiting for me, and I let it take me back to Dog Storm Street. I have a pact with Megan to be there in the morning, but I don’t want the Germans to know where she lives, and I’m not finished at the other flat besides. You didn’t finish me earlier this evening and now I’m ready for you. I have to unbutton my fly on the way up the stairs, I’m that urgent; I can only hope the landlady isn’t watching.

You’re putting on lipstick when I come in. You stand naked at the sink, studying your mouth in the mirror. What did he say? you ask, and I answer, He begged us. You touch yourself reflexively, unaware you’ve even done it.

At the window something’s coming out of me, it doesn’t sound so much like laughter except that you begin to giggle, so it must be laughter. I seem to be shaking with this sound, there in the window; it fills the room and runs out the window. Down on the street by the corner is a man smoking a cigarette; I notice he’s looking up at my room. I think he may have been there when I drove up in the car; I believe he’s a German tail. Not one of the New Germans born today but an Original German. Even now he pretends to be casual but the sound that comes from me moves up the street toward him, and he lights another cigarette nervously and discards it quickly, pulling his coat up around his neck. A woman in the belfry across the way opens her window in alarm. Other windows open up and down the street; it’s still an hour before daybreak. The sound keeps coming and if it’s laughter it’s of a different virus, not like when I used to laugh in the windows of New York with the other girls. The landlady downstairs in her room is making noise. You sit on the bed giggling your lipstick into a smear, and then laughing louder the more I laugh.

The level of it rises in the city. Doormen posted outside the pensiones leave their places, chairs tip over in the gutters. Midway through it people are erecting barricades outside their doors and boarding up their windows, I can hear the fall of hammers and the searing of steel down the block. The landlady’s hurling herself furiously from wall to wall in the room below, lights come on in one window after another all over the neighborhood until the laughter obliterates them one by one in turn. A woman with an open shirt moves into the streetlamp below, her mouth streaked with butter; the doormen are replaced with other doormen, keys jangle from their belts large and white like bones on a ring. In the window I take off my clothes. I don’t even need to call you to me, you know to come. You stand against me embracing me from the back, we can barely hold each other in the mutual convulsion. The sound of me dies and only the convulsion’s left, but the sound of you never stops. Reaching around in front you seize me with your hand; the sound in me’s dead: Don’t laugh, I say. You take me in your hand and still laugh; with your other hand you reach around and hold all of me; you laugh into my back. You can barely get your thin pink arms around me. Don’t laugh, I say. The more I say it, the more you laugh; the more you laugh, the wilder you caress and thrash me. My love explodes in the snow on the sill. Just don’t laugh anymore, I groan in the window, sinking to the floor beneath it. With your hair you tie yourself to the bed and begin to sing.

REDEMPTION COMES TO ME in my daughter.

Courtney’s born in the summer of 1938. She’s no sooner out of the womb than her head looks to be on fire, all blood and red hair. Megan insists she gets the hair from both of us, but I know it’s from her. She’s one big brilliant freckle, her skin hums of innocence. Her big eyes grip wisdom from some primal gene that has leapfrogged her father; I can hold her in a single hand. I can run up and down the stairs with her poised in this hand over my head, I can dangle her from the rooftop of our apartment building and she only laughs at my joke. I’m the funniest man in the world to her, I was born to be her clown. My heart’s soaked with her until it tears like tissue just to look at her.

What does it say about this universe that such a thing comes to someone who deserves it so little.

I’m leaving you.

It isn’t your fault that Megan gave me such a thing as Courtney. I don’t deny that even in the throes of this redemption, the dark doesn’t kiss me. There’s enough love somewhere to love both you and my kid, the love dangles like a single rope from the mouth of a well, open beneath the sun and sky, to the well’s pit, wet and black and hot; it’s the same rope. But I have to try and be good. I struggle to warrant this moment that I shot into the middle of my child’s mother, and from which the child of that moment is now given back to me. The light of a star that exploded months ago, and has now arrived to stay.

Don’t come here anymore.

I’ve sent word to the landlady on Dog Storm Street that we won’t be needing the flat.

THE SUMMER PASSES. WE have no money, Megan’s parents having cut off her stipend in retaliation. The arrival of the granddaughter may yet alter this course, but for the moment we live off what Megan’s saved, and what little I’ve saved from the work that I no longer do. I stay home with the child while Megan looks for work; it’s unconventional but I can’t be walking around the streets of the city in broad daylight, Holtz and the boys are out looking for me. I wish we could get out of Vienna but if we tried I’d be arrested. Megan asks no questions. She’s happy to have all of me even on mysterious terms. She’s taken to theft; she shoplifts food, silverware, furniture, books. She comes home with dressers, beds, sofas. I hear the sound of the day’s crime in the stairwell, and go down the stairs to find a table or trunk perched on the back of her four-foot-eleven frame. Our apartment is lavishly furnished by the finest shops in Vienna. She made the decision to resort to a life of crime easily enough, but the Anschluss didn’t hurt. She’s not stealing from Austrians after all, but Germans now. Think of it as a political act, she explains; but I won’t demean it that way. I seem to spend most of my days washing clothes, dragging them up to the top of the roof where I’ve strung a line. From up there I can see the Westbahnhof less than a mile away; I scheme all the time, to no avail.