Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

Holtz has a plan tonight. In the four and a half years since he first came to this flat he’s aged twenty, continental cordiality falling away from his face in chunks. His eyes are debauched by terror, his flesh yellow. His hair drops out in tufts, cigarettes are killing him. There are rumors in the street. “Kill her,” he says. What? “Kill her.” I won’t, I answer. If you want, I’ll stop. Get me and my family passage out of the country, and I’ll just quit. “And where will you take passage to?” he asks in a deathly croak. “Where are you beyond his reach except perhaps America? You can’t go back to America.” He looks at me. “We know about you and America.” He’s sitting on the edge of the bed; his eyes don’t quite focus. “The translator’s under house arrest,” he finally says, “every new chapter is now delivered under armed guard. This is what it’s come to. Z waits pacing in his suite.” I saw a blond woman there that night in the hotel four years ago, I say. “She’s nothing to him,” Holtz answers, “she’s not the one he cares about. It’s the one you’ve brought to him he cares about. Kill her.” Neither of us speaks for several minutes and finally I just say to him, Let the translator do it, but I won’t. He nods as though he knew all along, that even if I had agreed, nothing can now be turned back. For the first time I feel a little badly for him, he’s in way over his head. Me too probably. Look out that window, I say to him; and we both sit in the dark looking out the window onto the empty street. I want to show him the other century, when none of this happens, and when all he has to think about is his place in the kingdom or the death of his country. I don’t think he can see it, though.

YOU AND I DISTANT. Lately we argue; I suppose we’re arguing about him. He just sits in the corner. It isn’t that we’re bored, the three of us. Rather the math of our evil is constrained by the math of our bodies. I find myself missing my little daughter, and America. I return to Megan sooner and sooner each night; she sinks drowsily deeper and deeper into her sadness. She no longer looks at me when I get home. I pull her to me and lie that there will always be an England.

AUGUST 1942. ENGLAND FALLS. The invasion has been a savage four months and has cost the Germans, but this is the end. London, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh are all gone, only the seaport of Glasgow holds out besieged. The news comes over the radio this evening as I hold you by your ankles and feed on you, you bursting at my lips rapid-fire. The Germans, knowing what it will be, have not jammed the broadcast but rather pick it up from London and send it out to all Europe; it’s the prime minister. “We survive bombs,” he says, “we may survive tanks. We survive the blade, and bullets. We survive history of a thousand years, the caprices of political tempests. But defeat, that we choose not to survive. It finishes, countrymen. I’m sorry. If the damnation of an eternity for whatever follies I’ve committed would spare my nation this, I would with gratitude be so damned. As it is, damnation is insistent with no exchange for it. God save the King. God save the Empire.” There’s a moment of black quiet and then a muffled pop; the weight of him can be heard thudding against the microphone. The ooze of him can be heard this thousand miles. In that black quiet perhaps he snickered to know that where he once thought lay the century’s conscience there’s only a oneliner, a vaudeville smirk. I leave you to your spasms. When you ask, “Why are you going?” I answer, To Megan; I have to. “Don’t leave,” you say. Don’t leave, he calls from the corner. You bastard, I answer him. Halfway down the stairs you ask me one last time.

IN THE MERE MOMENTS since the broadcast the streets have filled with people, shouting and cheering and embracing that the war in Europe is over. Some wonder out loud whether the Germans will now declare war on America. I run the whole way to Megan and Courtney, dodging revelers and honking cars, civil guards posted on the corners who are hailed as though they just got back from England in the last five minutes. On the quays of the Wien-Fluss small victory parades are taking place spontaneously. From Megan’s street I can see the light in our flat, it seems a silent light in the middle of the din.

I run up the stairs, every flight. At the top the door stands ajar and I know something’s wrong.

All the lights are on, everything’s in its place. I go from room to room; I don’t call her name but say it normally, just to confirm to myself it won’t be answered: Megan. It isn’t answered. There’s no sign of Courtney.

I’m thinking, It’s such a hot night, and there’s much ruckus in the street; they went out. I think it but I know it isn’t so. I sit in the flat ten, fifteen, twenty minutes that ache in their passage. I look up finally to see one of the neighbors in the doorway, an old man from the flat below. He darts away. By the time I’ve chased him downstairs he’s got his room closed and locked; I bang on the door for him to open. I’m shaking it by the knob and about to rip it off the wall when the neighbor across the hall protests.

“What’s happened to my family,” I say.

“Soldiers,” she says.

I go back down into the street. People are running up and down the sidewalks swilling beer and shouting. On the other side is a man I know is a spy. I’ve never seen him before but I know because he looks like every other spy who’s tailed me over the last five years. I walk across the street to him. Like all these other very subtle spies he looks away from me as though he doesn’t notice me at all; when I get right up to him he’s still pretending he doesn’t see me. I hold him by the waist and lift him over my head and hang him on one of the streetlamps. I slap him and tell him, “Get Holtz.” Some other people gather around in the throes of their jubilation; they’ve decided this must be political in the way everything is now. “Get Holtz,” I say again, and no one likes my accent much. Maybe one of them wants to hit me in the head with a shovel, maybe another would as soon shoot me. “Leave him be!” the spy is screaming at them; I guess I must be the most invulnerable man in the world at this moment.

I take him off the streetlamp and put him on the ground. “I’ll be across the street,” I say. I return to the flat.

Holtz is there in about forty minutes. He looks terrible. Things don’t improve when he sees me. He comes into the flat, I’m sitting in the same place I’ve been since I got here; he looks around the flat and knows what’s happened. Something in me sinks to see him as surprised as I am. I understand now that he’s not in control of the situation. “They’re gone,” I say from where I sit.

He doesn’t say anything at first; for a man whose country has just taken over the English empire, he doesn’t appear enthusiastic. “Banning,” is all he can muster. It was a poor precedent, ever allowing him to call me that. I’ve set another precedent tonight: the lights are on. “Banning.” He shrugs pathetically.

“Tell them,” I say, “tell them I want to make the swap tonight.”

He looks utterly befuddled. “The swap?”

“That, or I’ll kill him. Tell them. I won’t wait.”

He’s still doing his befuddled act. “What are you talking about?”

I shake my head. “I won’t wait. Z for my family, in an hour.”

“Z?” It’s a good act, I give him credit. “Banning, you’ve …You’re disturbed at this moment, I think.” He says it slowly, as though gingerly handling a grenade where the pin is loose. “Z’s in Berlin, Banning. Berlin. We’ve conquered England this evening.”