Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

If you take the hands, it’s simply a serious mistake not to take the stumps. And when does it end then? “Just do it to me ,” I whisper. “Whatever it is, please do it to me .”

He’s silent long enough I believe he hasn’t heard me. “Russia, that was the issue,” he finally says. “Almost twenty years ago he argued that we would have to take Russia. I thought it was … a mistake. He was right, I was wrong. But now we don’t have Russia, his inviolate will violated. Now instead we have this uneasy alliance on our eastern border, which it may be too late to do anything about. We would rule not only Europe but Asia at this moment, perhaps with Japan … perhaps without. The American solution would be self-evident.” He says, “Of course I won’t do it to you mein Herr, you just haven’t been listening .” Drumming his fingers on the desktop for a moment, he turns to the guard by the door and gives a signal. The door opens and after a moment the soldier brings into the room my wife and child.

I can’t say anything. Megan looks at me stunned, the color has run even from the freckles. Courtney has the insolent courage of four-year-old girls; she keeps looking up at the soldier waiting for him to explain himself. Megan pulls her into her skirt. I would abandon all of my moments before or after this if I could only remove the two of them from this one. But it’s too late for that now. One’s no longer young when he understands some things are irrevocable. The little crippled man hobbles over to Megan and Courtney; he doesn’t look at Megan but only Courtney; he rubs his hand in her hair. He turns his back on them and the soldier rips Courtney from her mother. He pushes her onto the footrest before the window and then up onto the windowsill. Megan wails with horror. “Daughters,” X mumbles to himself, shaking his head. Courtney on the windowsill turns and looks at me, and we hold between us the moments I dangled her from rooftops, all the high places she lived and owned. The soldier pushes, and she steps out.

All my moments, if only to cut this one out of time. It seems to hold in place. In it, Megan, four-foot-eleven, takes, in the last moment I’ll ever know her, command in a room full of Germans not entirely unlike the way she commanded the first night I knew her. She tears herself from any attempt to stop her and leaps through the window before the moment is out; and with what’s left of this part of time, she spins Courtney in midair and pulls her to her chest. There’s no question, you know, of retrieving her. There’s no question of rescue. Megan knows this, everyone knows it. It’s only so the freckletot will not take the long ride down all by herself. It’s only so that however extended this moment will be after only a brief four years of them, it won’t be so utterly lonely, out there in the black Vienna night, with all that night beneath her little feet. In the last bit of this moment Megan turns and looks at us with defiance. The moment joins itself to every other one I will know, all the ones I cry out in my head to exchange. I carry it everywhere, Megan clutching our daughter to her and the two of them seeming to hang there in the window.

Then they’re gone. Then the next moment there’s nothing in the window but the still Vienna night.

You should have taken the stumps.

He buckles somewhere between my hands. …Someone’s hitting me with something, the soldiers with their guns I guess; I’m sure it’s rather amusing, X croaking out from between my fingers, Don’t shoot him, don’t shoot; and then, when the life starts to dribble out of his eyes, he says, Well, yes, shoot him. The soldiers are a little confused. After they’ve hit me in the head with the butts of their guns enough times, the blood runs into X’s hair, eyes. After a while I don’t see anything anymore.

Actually, they did take the stumps. Actually, they took everything. Or did I just hand it all over, long ago?

1943.

1944.

1945. I CAN SEE THE SMOKE.

1946.

1947. I COME TO the place one afternoon while walking, I lose track much better when I walk, I’ve walked every day now for a long time, the place is there on the sidewalk before me, and though there isn’t a single sign that it happened here I know immediately even though I haven’t been conscious of where I’m going, and I step back looking around me and realize I’m in front of the hotel and that high above me one of those windows is the window. I look at the place on the sidewalk and begin to smash myself against the stone of the hotel and strike at the sharp edges of the edifice with my wrists that I might open up some vein and pour the blood of my impure mongrel mother over the city that it will be fouled in some way that fouls him in turn, that fouls the humiliation he inflicted on this city by which he meant to glorify his squalid vagabond womanless youth and to make meaningless the way the city beckoned her away from him sixteen years ago. Soon there’s blood all over. They come and stop me soon. Five or six of them pull me down, before they do I’ll ring the Ring with the black blood of the Indian who bore me, twisting bloody wet in the grasp of them, my guardians who appear from nowhere to protect me from myself, and who will always be with me for as long as he lives, his moment joined to mine.

T.O.T.B.C. — 10

I LOSE TRACK MUCH better when I walk.

It’s 1948. Springtime, I guess.

The war goes on. Dead soldiers come back from Mexico and are sealed up in the walls of the Hofburg. Z’s final revenge against the city he loves and loathes; he’d rather fill up Vienna with them than the deserts of Occupied Yucatan. The rigor mortis has set in on all of them, their bodies frozen in strange shapes. The walls of Old Vienna protrude with dead elbows, dead knees that jut out from the new cement.

Z speaks to the continent over radio on a weekly basis. Most of the time it’s obvious the tape is an old speech from ten years ago, his voice stronger and clearer. When the news is a bit more momentous they try to get by with a new speech. His words slur and his voice breaks, sentences wander off to no resolution. The rumors from Berlin never stop. The military seems to have taken control of things, many of the top party people have vanished. Though there has never been an official announcement, X is apparently dead. I like to think I killed him. I don’t remember that night well enough to be sure, and if I analyze it I admit it seems unlikely they would have let me do it, but who knows. All those generals standing around there looking at each other saying, Why not? Sure. Maybe it makes sense after all.

I don’t write anymore, which is exactly what X had in mind, of course. But others have something different in mind, and they still keep me on Dog Storm Street where this toady or that regularly visits. Sometimes they cajole me, sometimes they rant. They know I would not mind their torture. They know I would not mind dying. I’m sure they’d consider just doing away with me if it didn’t threaten the decrepit passion by which Z still mesmerizes Greater Germany. With the guerrillas in the hills and insurrection in the cities they can’t afford it. It doesn’t matter to me in the least what they do. Every two weeks an envelope is brought to my door; I’m paid in Deutschemarks.

The alliance is no better than ever. Rumor even has it that it was the Russians who smuggled the Bomb to America as Z was preparing to use it. Courtney would be ten now.