Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

I am … thirty-one? Megan would be thirty-five.

Today I find your street.

After eleven years during which I looked for it often, only for it to have seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, today I chance upon it as though walking up to my front door. The exact same candleshop is across the street, people go in and out even now. The shutters of the window where I saw you are pulled closed, and after I’ve stood there watching a quarter of an hour, I cross the street and knock on the door. When no one answers I open the door and walk up the stairs to the next level. At your room I pause for a moment, and walk in.

The flat is vacant. Requisite furniture; no sign of residence except the sound in the bathroom off to the right. I walk around the bed to the bathroom door; for a moment I almost believe I see someone. I almost believe there’s a reflection of someone in the mirror. But the only thing I find is the water running in the sink.

“Geli?”

In the answering silence I lift the window and push open the shutters. From this place I see the street as you saw it that day except there are no blackboot boys. They’re running banks now, or in jail, most of them.

“Mein Herr?” someone says behind me. I turn and an older woman is in the doorway. “Have you come to look at the apartment?”

“Has it been vacant long?” I ask.

“Only a few days,” she answers. “It’s not difficult these days to find a renter, especially in the Inner City. I already have several people who’ve made inquiries.” She adds, “But I can take your name if the others change their minds.”

I look around. “Who lived here?”

“My husband’s brother actually, he died several weeks ago.”

“Do you have many apartments like this?”

“Yes,” she answers, “but none is vacant presently.”

“Have you owned the building a long time?”

“Twenty years,” she says, “we bought it, my husband and I, the year before the Depression. Lucky on our part.”

“Eleven years ago a girl lived here. Probably with her family. She had hair like spun sunlight.” I stop. “I mean, dark blond. Blue eyes.” I stop again. “I mean brown.”

“I think you must be referring to the Russians,” she answers coolly.

“The Russians?”

“He was a refugee who left Russia and spent some time in Africa. Then he came to Vienna. He had a daughter, there was no wife.”

“Yes, perhaps that’s who I mean.”

She says firmly, “They were finally sent back.”

“Back?”

“About five years ago. When the new treaty was signed. The Russians wanted them back.”

“No,” I answer after a moment, “somehow I don’t think she’s in Russia.”

“I hope you weren’t attached to them.” She explains, “They were enemies of the state after all.”

“Were they?”

“I’m sure they must have been. They wouldn’t have been sent back after all if they weren’t enemies of—”

“I’m sure you’re right.” I take a last look from the window; she watches me suspiciously.

“What is your name, mein Herr,” she says, the good citizen.

“Banning Jainlight.”

“What sort of name is that?” She’s holding her hands together now.

“It’s an English name.”

“The English are Germans now.”

“I understand.”

“It’s a German name now.”

“No. It will never be a German name.” I step past her. I turn to her. “I could have this flat, you know.” I start down the stairs and at the top she gives me the German farewell, hailing his name and saluting. “To hell with the son of a bitch,” I just answer, but I feel no pleasure from her gasp of shock. I feel no pleasure in the way she’ll try to report me only to find the authorities will take no action at all. I close the door quietly behind me.

I forgot to ask if you were beautiful. I forgot to ask if she ever heard you sing.

I walk through the winding streets of the Inner City. The walls bulge with the mortified joints of fallen warriors. The black and red twisted cross of the new empire faces out from the banners that hang on every building and fly from every steeple. Most of the flags are worn, shredding. The empire becomes dilapidated. A new elevated train under construction two years ago has stopped in midair. Guards are everywhere, on every corner, but at night there are the shots of rebel groups hiding in the basements and towers. I cross the canal and walk to the amusements of the Praterstern.

The park is only partly filled today with families and couples and German soldiers on leave. German officers walk with city girls and cut in front of all the lines for the rides. There’s a funhouse with anti-American slogans painted over by anti-Berlin slogans; in some of the booths one throws a ball or shoots a gun at the face of an American president I don’t recognize. A small cinema shows footage from the Mexican Front. I buy a ticket for the ferris wheel, then on second thought go back and buy a whole roll of tickets. I get in one of the cages with several other people and the wheel begins to turn. It takes about ten minutes to go completely around, and at the bottom when the others get off I give the guy another ticket. He demands that I go through the line again. I refuse. He certainly isn’t the one who’s going to move me from where I’m sitting in the cage; he calls an officer to report me. The officer means business when he arrives; I think he’s even going to draw his gun. I quietly tell him my name is Banning Jainlight and he should speak to his superior if there’s a problem. He doesn’t need to speak to his superior. He gazes at me a moment and nods slightly; he castigates the man running the wheel. I hand the man the whole roll of tickets: I’d like the cage to myself if you don’t mind, I say to him. Flushed and angry he closes the gate. I rise into the sky that darkens. I forgot to ask if you were beautiful. I forgot to ask if she ever heard you sing. From the critical point of a fever when it either breaks or consumes you, Vienna is displayed from my feet to the west. It lies blasted by dusk and dwindling with the Danube; the palaces of the Hapsburgs rise from the edges of the Ring in fields of wind and granite. A flight of black-hooded bicyclers crosses a bridge in the south. Every window of the city stares back at me bugeyed and untold. If I turn on this wheel long enough and often enough, fast enough and forever enough, it may yet catapult me beyond my moment and yours, into the century that flows on the other side of the island, a white hot blur shot into the round woman moon.

THREE YEARS LATER, THE rising moon slips out of Banning Jainlight’s Twentieth Century into the other. It flies high above the river where another large man is sleeping in a small wooden shack that stands on four wooden pillars over the water. There isn’t much in the shack but the bed, a table with a chair, an old oil lamp that still burbles fire, a small iron stove with only crumbs of dead coal. It must be past midnight. The river’s silent but for the boat which now approaches the shack, not a ferry but a rowboat; the man in the rowboat has left his ferry docked behind him in the dark. The man invests his oars with righteous stealth. In his lap sits gasoline and rags, flaming love. The large man in the shack sleeps through the sound of his demise sailing to him through the water. If the large man were to wake at this moment and make his way to the door of the riverhouse and out onto the small landing, if he were to lean over the rail of the landing and, in the pearlshattered shine of the white moon, look into the water, it isn’t even certain he would see the boat anyway, more likely he would gaze again on the afternoon that precedes him, when he stood in this place and looked into the water and saw her. Saw first her face as though it was just floating down there under the water; but it wasn’t floating, he could see her coming toward him. And just as she came up to him from out of the river, he leaned over and reached his arms to her; from out of the water she shot up. His hands caught hers and pulled her the rest of the way. He almost stumbled as he pulled her into his arms. Now he sleeps with this memory; it’s only the sound of memory if he hears in his sleep the sound of the boat coming. He won’t wake until the moon has lifted out of the doorway altogether, until he doesn’t even know there is a moon. Then he’ll smell the smoke, and wonder where all the fire came from.