Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

It’s not long after this, as her family spends its last days in the Pnduul back on the southern rim by the trees, that Dania wakes one night hearing and feeling the buffalo. They’re nearly here, she says to herself in horror. She jumps from her bed and stands in the opening of the tent; in the camp, everyone sleeps. If I wake them for no reason I’ll appear ridiculous, she considers to herself, and looks back into the tent at her sleeping little brother. She wants him to wake now and hear and feel the buffalo too. She keeps peering out into the flat night and walks past the dead campfires to the tent of her mother and father where she stops because she can hear them inside. What a time for love, she thinks to herself. She’s only turned back to her own tent for a moment when there’s a sound like the earth splitting. She spins to the abyss of the crater only to see the night suddenly bled of color. The buffalo come so quickly there isn’t time for anyone to scream; they flash silver in the night. Dania’s paralyzed with the choice of running to her parents or her brother or the trees for safety. The animals rip through the camp pitilessly, tearing through the tents and emerging with the gray canvases sheathing them like ghosts. The sound and smell of them overwhelm her; on all sides of her are the gutted flapping tents hurled into the air. When the buffalo have disappeared as quickly as they came, the tents float down from the sky like parachutes. She’s appalled by the way everything, the running buffalo and the descending gray tents, seems to have happened around her as though to deny she’s a part of it. There isn’t any sound at all now. In shock she stumbles over to where her own tent had been. Several feet from it she finds either her brother’s bedding or her own, she can’t be sure which. The bodies of other people lay in the dirt as though they never woke, only the contortions of their sleep and the way their mouths are open tell her it’s not sleep at all. She finds the body of the French ballet teacher. Twenty feet from him she finds her little brother. She kneels over him and begs him to be alive, she beats him furiously for his deadness. Only when she begins to cry does a sound rise collectively from the trampled village like the sound of birds when they fall to earth, manic and mournful, not a sound of the throat but beneath the heart, life not immolated but made a vicious sizzle. She’s still beating her little brother for his deadness when her father’s hands pull her from the small body. The two of them stagger through the camp together. Vienna, Vienna, her mother cried when she was on top of her father, as though to love the Vienna right up out of him; seconds later the buffalo came through the tent and dragged her into the campfire embers. The stunned fading life of her trickles out in whispers of Vienna as Dr. Reimes tries frantically to keep the life in her, to no avail. Dania’s mother and brother are buried with the other members of the devastated colony the next day below an African rain, a score of natives witnessing the funeral somberly from atop the crater’s rim. Afterwards Dania runs into the trees hurling herself from trunk to trunk to knock the last of the white leaves to the ground. She buries herself in the leaves and lies silently as though to affect death itself, while, her father wanders the groves calling her name.

LYING HERE IN THIS particular burial, she is at once in three separate moments. She’s lying beneath the leaves of the Sudanese forest, she’s lying in her bed in Vienna, she’s lying in the bottom of a rowboat on the shores of Davenhall Island. She’s not asleep or dreaming, she’s perfectly wakefully aware and conscious. She remembers. She remembers last night the shorthaired silver buffalo, she remembers this afternoon the riot in the street outside her window, she remembers running to the beach in the early hours of morning to see the small wooden shack burning on its pillars over the river. In each of these moments she’s waiting for a lover. She’s waiting for the man she loved in the jungle, Dr. Reimes. She’s waiting for the man she loved in the city, a dancer by the name of Joaquin Young. She’s waiting on the island for the man who’s always loved her across time and space. The rain beats down on the African leaves, on the Austrian rooftop, on the tarpaulin that shields the boat. It’s the same rain in three different moments, all of which she lives in at once. Her head pounds. It aches with the thunder of buffalo from the night before. It aches from the stone that struck her in the window this afternoon. It aches from the guilt and confusion of a woman old before she’s thirty, in the chinatown on the other side of the river Rubicon that has no other side. She can’t stand it anymore and sits up in her bed. Outside her window she watches the lights of Vienna. Her father snores like an old man in the other room. She feels the side of her face, thinking the swollen pain is what’s awakened her. Had she not turned from the stone when she did, it would have struck her in the mouth and broken the flesh; she might have lost a tooth or even scarred her lip. She would have at least bled. She’s thinking these things, believing they’re what have awakened her, when she realizes these are not the things that have awakened her, she realizes it’s something else. She realizes someone is here in the room. She looks for him in the dark, she’d call to him if she knew what to call. She doesn’t believe she’s imagining it, she can practically see him. He’s big. He’s very big. He makes her shiver with the way he looms. He’s not any lover she would have expected. She cannot decide whether to rebel against the anonymity of this first lover or revel in it. She isn’t sure she’s ready for him. He tears into her. She hasn’t even had time to grab tight the knobs of the bedposts, she’s gasping from the presence of him up inside her before she completely understands what’s happening. He fucks her till she’s ripe with him; holding onto the bedposts she never gets the chance to touch his face, so that she might know what he looks like. In the morning when she wakes she would almost believe she’s dreamed it except for the way she’s torn and the way her thighs are crusted with her blood and the glue of him. She’ll wash herself before her father awakes. In her Viennese bed among the dishevelment she’s amazed to find the white leaves of the Pnduul Crater, as though she grew them herself in uterine savagery.

THEY’D LIVED IN VIENNA a month, in an apartment building on the edge of the Inner City across from a candleshop, when Dania found a job. Her father, devastated in spirit by the loss of his family, and without resources, attempted only feebly and uselessly to stop her. Dania was now fifteen. She knew four languages fluently and her command of two others was fair; in the jungle over the years all the languages of the colony had woven into something like one. While her first job at the dance school on the other side of the Karlsplatz was menial, her linguistic skills soon landed her an office position. After six or seven months she summoned the nerve to audition before the school’s entrance committee. The committee was embarrassed by her. It was also a source of some exhilarated satisfaction that the Russians, who’d once produced the greatest dancers in the world, were now spitting out grubby little refugees like this one. One of the young dancers of the school was a man in his early twenties by the name of Joaquin Young. Young was a star pupil who taught one or two classes during the school year; the Italian son of an English father and given a Spanish name, the boy had come to the school from Rome eight years before as a prodigy. The school doted on him. They beseeched him to accept Austrian citizenship; he declined though for reasons that had nothing to do with anything as politically prophetic as the fact that only a year hence Austria would no longer exist. It was rather because of the obstinacy and disgust Young felt for the way the school supposed it might use him, when it was clear to Young that it was he who would use the school. In the same way he became legendary for having declined just eight months before a position with the Vienna Ballet, Young made it clear that while he may have passed the ballet’s audition, it failed his. He didn’t want to dance as he would have if he had been born a hundred years before.