Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

Fifty-six years later, after the century has long since run out of numbers but only begins to understand it’s doomed never to die, the man whose hair has been white since the day he was born comes home for the last time. As he did many years before, on the night he exiled himself to sail between home and escape every day again and again, and as he did three years before, on the night he came to find the girl named Kara in the blue dress, he climbs the stairs of the hotel where he lived as a child. He’s lost track of how long he’s looked for the girl in the blue dress. He accepts that he’s lost track of more than just this. Climbing the stairs, the man is neither old nor young now. He doesn’t hear the voices of other men and their stories anymore. He would settle to hear his mother’s voice as it was when he was small and she read the stories that held no interest for either of them but for the sound of her reading them. Here at the top of the stairs he expects now to find the dark he was born from, which drained his hair of color. He knows the Chinese of the town are waiting to hear her call out her own name before she goes; they have a tree all ready for her. The street outside the hotel fills with Chinese and they begin to shuffle into the building downstairs, where the doors barely hang from their hinges and the windows are empty of glass, and no one else, including a manager, lives anymore. Fifty-six years the white woman has lived in the hotel, most of those years its only tenant. Like scavengers the Chinese wait to pick over not the woman’s possessions, which are worthless, but the eyes, ears, fingers attached to the mystery of who she was. He has other plans. Over my own dead body perhaps, he tells himself: but not hers. At the top of the stairs in the hallway her door stands open; for a moment he’s about to call out Mother, that she might hear him from her bed as he turns the door’s corner. Instead he calls her by her name; turning the door’s corner there’s a split second when he sees her white hair on the pillow and believes it’s his own. “Dania?” he asks.

In the final months of the year 1917, a man on a horse chases a train thirty kilometers outside St. Petersburg. The steam of the engine is silver in the night, black against the moon, and the train reliably eludes him like the hour that’s always an hour away. Behind him revolutionaries spur their own horses in pursuit. His ears are filled with their inevitability; it sounds with every passing moment as though they’ve nearly overcome him. Yet he’s already chosen to defy that inevitability they claim for themselves; he means to ride into history as the agent of chaos, believing that if history has a will at all, it’s owned by no man for more than the moment it takes to change it forever. Remembering this, he rides harder. Remembering this, he frees himself from the inevitability of their pursuit and from the way the train eludes him. He lashes his horse and screams into its mane, he reaches down to the saddlebag to confirm that what it holds is securely fastened, and he rides out of his hour and crosses it to the one that’s always an hour away. The horse rears at the track. The Russian leaps to the second from the last car of the train and mutters a prayer to the abandoned animal already disappearing behind him. The man scrambles into the car’s doorway clutching the saddlebag around him as the wind batters him at his back. For a while he just sits in the door watching the mounted revolutionary guards that have chased him from just outside the city: If they are the forces of history, he thinks to himself, gasping for air, they’ll catch the fucking train too. He’s trying to figure out where to stash the contents of the saddlebag should this occur. But soon it’s clear this will not occur, soon he sees them disappearing in the night as his horse did. Over the roar of the train he might almost hear their gunshots; he’s almost arrogant enough to laugh, but not quite. After a while he picks himself up and makes his way down the aisle of the dark thundering train. He finds an empty cabin and holding the saddlebag to his chest lays himself out on the seat to sleep. He keeps one hand in the bag where he holds a gun. He dozes awhile, the blond Russian, and wonders if he’ll shoot anyone this evening. It’s in the early hours of the morning that the door of the cabin slides open abruptly, and he lurches upright and nearly showers the doorway with lead; only a moment saves the woman who stands there. She’s dark in the dark, perhaps slavic or mediterranean. She’s moved from another cabin of another car. She looks at the expression on his face, the expression that immediately precedes the decision to hold his fire, though that expression gives no indication of reprieve. She looks at the saddlebag where his hand disappears; she intuitively knows her death waits there for that once in a lifetime command. When the command doesn’t come she accepts this as gracefully as if it had. She breathes deeply and takes a place on the seat across from him. He’s watched her only half a minute before somewhere in his loins rises the first smoke that, six years later, is to become his daughter.

BY THE TIME DANIA had lived with her family fourteen years in the middle of the Pnduul Crater, she could no longer discount the possibility that the rim of the crater was moving. Its livid ridge turned slowly but distinctly around her, traveling to the right as the black clouds above raced to the left like Dobermans. During the year, she and her father, mother and young brother would migrate with the other European exiles of the colony, following the rim of the crater to higher and lower ground depending on the rain and heat; the southern curve, where the trees stood and several wells had been dug, was best. The dusk lay low in the branches of the trees like the foliage of a thousand black trunks. In the middle of autumn she walked through the avenues of the forest while the white leaves fell from above her as though the dusk itself was dying. She lay on the ground and covered herself with the leaves and when her little brother came looking for her she leapt out in an explosion of brittle white, laughing at his little terror all the way back to the gray tents that stood invisible against the ash of the Pnduul. For days afterward her body wore against her will small bits of the white leaves as evidence of the young secret savagery inside her into which she had every intention to grow. She marked the seasons by this savagery.

It wasn’t until a number of years later, running alone through the nightstreets of New York, the frantic large lumbering sound of her lover behind her, that in the middle of her fear she questioned the exile of her childhood. From Paris and Madrid and Brussels, writers and geologists and dull bureaucrats had left their homes and come to the colony when one intrigue or another was about to catch up with them. There was a young doctor from Berlin who arrived in her thirteenth year. It took her about a day and a half to fall in love with him. He was in his late twenties with black hair like her mother’s and blue eyes; what crime brought him to the East Sudan was unclear. It was possible he was a missionary who’d come to live with the savages: I’m a savage too, she insisted to him. The doctor watched her with genuine longing but kept his distance. He wants to be respectable to me, she thought disgustedly, like an uncle or older brother. His name was Reimes. Good day Dr. Reimes, she said when they passed, the word doctor spat out in acidic irony. She despised the fact he was such a gentleman. On a train in Russia years before, her mother had decided in the course of an evening to go with her father to Africa; it was the thing about her mother the girl came to remember most vividly, as though she’d been there herself, and admire most fervently, as though her mother had never done anything else so remarkable.