Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

He doesn’t understand the true situation. I understand the true situation. “No point you and I discussing this, let’s take matters up with the big boys. Whoever’s in Vienna now that can handle it.” I get up from my seat. “I’ll be at the other flat. You tell them we swap tonight, that I won’t wait.” I walk by him, our shoulders clash. Out in the street the spy’s waiting by the same lamp; he steps back at the sight of me. He looks up at the lighted window. “Back to the other flat,” I advise him. After a moment he nods.

WHEN I RETURN TO Dog Storm Street you’re gone.

It isn’t that you’ve taken all your things and left, because you had no things, really. A stick of lip rouge, you must have thrown that away. Perhaps you took a coat of mine and now you walk in the streets with it wrapped around your shoulders.

He’s still in the corner. If I move toward him he just pulls back. “Haven’t you heard,” I tell him, “your war’s over.” I sit in my chair and wait. “Keep your shirt on.”

After an hour and a half I think I hear the car amidst all the other racket down below. Then I know I hear the door, but doors after all have been opening and closing all night now. There’s no mistaking the steps on the stairs, though; Holtz’s knock is rude and impatient.

He doesn’t wait for me to get the door, which is all right since I have no intention of getting it anyway. But when he turns on the light, he isn’t Holtz.

Soldiers in the doorway raise their guns.

“You don’t want to hurt me,” I explain to them, “your boy here wouldn’t like it.” I gesture at the corner where he’s been so many nights now, and it’s empty.

Sometimes I have this clarity, sometimes I see it all rather lucidly. On the way to the hotel people are pounding on top of the car; the Germans in the car accelerate and people in the street leap out of their way. It remains to be seen to what extent the Austrians will share the fruits of victory. We get to the Hotel Imperial where I’m taken through the side entrance I was taken four years ago. We go up the lift and get off at a floor near the top of the building. The soldiers lead me into a suite.

I have this clarity, this lucidity. Right now the only thing I remember that seems real is a Christmas Day I tended to the horses in my father’s stable. Now I’m at the far end of this suite and a huge window with a small footrest at the other end opens over Old Vienna, St. Stephen’s lodged in the night like a dagger. The window’s open, the August heat’s overwhelming. There’s another door in the other wall, several sofas and chairs, and a desk. Seated in the sofas and chairs are three or four military officers of an unusual rank, given affairs in England tonight, and behind the desk is a small dark man at least seven years older than the pictures of him in the papers. Once he was a client of mine. Once he worked for me. He limps around to my side of the desk.

He stops half the room away from me; he doesn’t want to get so close because standing next to me will only emphasize how little he is. He raises one finger and, his black eyes tiny and still like dead insects, says only, “It’s not jealousy.” He keeps holding up the one finger to make the point. It’s several moments before he lowers his hand and paces staggeringly to and fro, thinking. He stops and says, “Permit me to introduce you,” and then names off the generals, and adds, “Of course you know Colonel Holtz.” He indicates behind me and I turn to see Holtz sitting in a chair. For a moment Holtz looks a bit odd, and then, transfixed, I see his blue fingers, and his eyes that never move or blink, and his mouth that’s open for the flies. Less than an inch over his right eye is a black hole; the ink of his brains cries down his forehead to his nose. There’s a tittering behind me from the other generals, although not from X, who regards Holtz almost squeamishly.

“It’s not jealousy,” X says again, emphatically. “I admit she had great appeal to me. But,” he says, on the other side of the desk, leaning into it, “what I felt for her can never match the way I love him. If she made him happy, no one would have been happier than I. Even having her myself could not have made me happier.” He pauses. “Do you understand?” I don’t answer and he doesn’t care. He goes to the window and stares out over the city. “Look,” he exclaims with some enthusiasm, “isn’t that the big wheel,” pointing toward the Praterstern. He’s talking to the generals now. “I took my children on the wheel … last year, I believe. Last year or the year before. Some were too small but the ones who were a little older found delight in it.” Limping back toward me, he smiles, “Children. My wife and I just had our sixth.” He stops; he’s become braver about being closer, almost as though he now taunts the way I’m so much larger and more helpless. “Daughters,” he smiles.

The city raves up from beneath us; I can’t sit or quite stand. I feel sick.

“I learned long ago,” he’s saying, through the hiss of blood in my head, “that his will is an inviolate thing. One doesn’t toy with it.” The generals are making an effort not to let their attention wander; they move in their chairs. There’s a sound behind me, and the others look; I think Holtz has slipped where he’s propped. I can’t bring myself to check. X doesn’t notice at all. “I’m ashamed to say,” he goes on, “that I learned this the hard way, almost twenty years ago, when as a very intemperate young man I made an effort to oppose him in the party on a particular issue. It says something about the magnitude of the man that he embraced me in his victory and my defeat. Do you know what the issue was, Herr Jainlight?”

“No,” I finally say. I barely have the voice for it, but I’ll answer anything he asks now.

“Russia, Herr Jainlight,” he says. I’m too confused to know exactly what it means, but I nod. He shrugs. “What to do with her,” he’s saying, “which is to say, what to do with you.” He moves around to his seat and sits; his head doesn’t even rise above the back of the chair. He rubs his face with his hands. I’m looking at the window, the generals, the soldiers at the door.

“I’ll go away,” I whisper. Tentatively, afraid to even say their name, I add, “My family and I.”

“No no no no, Herr Jainlight,” he answers, with great annoyance that such a foolish thing could even be proposed. “That’s no solution at all. How would I explain it to him? ‘We let them go’? And where will you go, where is left? Do you really want to go to Russia? He’d have you sent back here. America?” He shakes his head. “Nor, frankly, can I shoot you.” He shakes his finger at me, “You should appreciate that someone else probably would. But you know, Germany rules half the world today for one reason more than any other. And that is that we seized control of people’s myths. The myths they believed meant one thing, we persuaded them they meant something different. And the problem with shooting a myth is that it freezes its meaning in death.”

“I’ll change the myth.”

He’s utterly annoyed with my lack of sophistication; he literally throws up his hands. “Mein Herr, don’t you suppose we’ve thought of that?” He says furiously, “Do you suppose the idea here is to trick him? Do you suppose I’m another one of these traitors who conspire against him? I can show you motion pictures of the traitors we’ve hanged from butcher’s hooks with the wire from pianos, I’d wrap the cord around my own forsaken throat before I betrayed him! Do you suppose,” he demands, struggling for control, “that this is your myth? It’s not your myth, Herr Jainlight, you didn’t create it. It’s his myth. It’s slept somewhere in his dreams every night of the eleven years since she died, it’s slept in the dreams of our history, our time.” He falls back into the chair. “You tripped into it while you were stumbling in the dark like the overgrown American oaf you are, you woke it. You keep waking it. I can’t shoot you, I can’t send you away. I have to break your legs, your arms, your tongue, not literally — my God it’s a new gloryday, when barbarism is of a newer and more glorious sort as well — I mean I have to break the legs and arms, the tongue, that walk and reach and talk in the place where his myth lives. I have to make you the saddest man alive. A dead man caught in the body of a living one.”