Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

When Joaquin Young watched Dania dance he understood, though he might not have identified it in this way, how she danced against history. She danced against it in the way her father crossed its irrevocable hour on horseback twenty years before in pursuit of the train that would take him out of Russia, in possession of the blueprint that the forces of history wanted so badly. She danced her moments so as to own them for herself. He understood that if she was as bad as the instructors and professors on the committee claimed, then there were a hundred misturns, missteps and misgestures she would have made that she did not. By intuition she didn’t strive to control her body but to risk losing control every place she took that body, every place in her own psyche that thundered with gleaming buffalo. “But there’s no structure to her form,” one of them argued, or perhaps he said there was no form to her structure. Young laughed, “She’s inventing her own structures, can’t you see?” He detested the way they supposed that the structures they didn’t recognize weren’t structures at all. This argument raged as the blond girl stood there in the middle of the floor with her head bowed, arms folded in determination, seething; raged as though she wasn’t there at all. Young was overruled, but the committee was unnerved. Days afterward people were still talking in the halls about Dania dancing. What now? he said, the first thing he spoke to her, since he hadn’t actually spoken to her in the audition. I go back to translating letters in the main office, I imagine, she answered, to which he replied, Then your imagination’s limited. Yours, she said back, has danced away with you. That night she returned to the floor where she’d danced for them and pondered the meaning of her own steps.

They didn’t speak again until some months later, when Young caught up with her in the street to tell her he was leaving Vienna. It seemed to her she’d spent enough time pining for young Dr. Reimes back in the jungle and that there was no call now to pine for Joaquin Young. Three weeks after he’d gone she got a letter from Amsterdam. He asked her to come to him. This was the plan all along, she considered, to make me come to him; he didn’t, after all, take me with him. He didn’t say three weeks ago in the street, Come with me. He said goodbye so that he could write three weeks later, Come to me. She put the letter under her pillow and went to the window where she was still thinking about it as the scuffle broke out in the street below her. I’ll go to him, she decided almost defiantly only a moment before she turned away and the stone grazed her face. The next day she still had a large bruise there beneath her eye; she was barely aware of it, conscious only of the way she was enflamed between her legs from the lover who had come that night. “My God,” croaked her father at the sight of her face. She told him about the fight in the street the day before.

Her father didn’t seem so much now like the dashing rider who outraced history outside St. Petersburg back before she was born. He lowered his eyes and when he began to cry, she began to cry. “Oh father,” she ran to him, holding his hand. I’ve cost my family everything, he said. I had it in my head that coming to Vienna was shrewd and look what it’s cost. It’s my mother he means, she thought. He means that if he hadn’t said Vienna she wouldn’t have been on top of him that night, going Vienna Vienna over and over as though to draw the doom of it right up out of him into her. She would have been below him as usual and he’d have sheltered her from the silver buffalo. “I thought,” he said bitterly now, “we’d live under the very nose of history. Rather we’ve jumped into its mouth. And for what?” It was then he drew closed the shutters as though all Vienna was looking in on them, and pulled up one of the floorboards and lifted out in a cloud of African dust the old saddlebag and took from the bag the old blueprint and unrolled it across the table. For a moment he only stood there above the open blue map and shuddered, hacking African dust in his lungs. She held him by the shoulders until the attack ended. In the following silence he ran his hand across the print, lost in thought until she finally asked, “What is it, father?” At first he didn’t seem to hear.

“It’s the map of the Twentieth Century,” he finally answered. He began poring over the blueprint. “There’s a secret room I can’t find.” He shook his head in consternation. “I’ve looked a long time,” he said, “it’s here somewhere.” He flipped through the overlays, he ran his finger along all the lines. “It’s not in the passages or the halls, the likeliest places,” he said, raising the tracing finger emphatically, “not in the bedrooms. I would have thought maybe the bedrooms. I would have thought maybe the attic. The basement,” he rubbed his chin with his hand, “well, the basement doesn’t make sense. Where can a secret room lead from the basement? A secret room from the attic might at least go outside.” Outside the Twentieth Century? she thought, terrified for him. “But what’s in the secret room,” she said gently, and after a moment he only answered, “The conscience.” She slowly ran her own hand over the forehead of her old father, wiped from him the dust from the crater which he wore in the same way she secretly wore the leaves of its forest. Tenderly she gazed upon her father’s madness. For twenty years, she told herself, he’s believed this is the floorplan of the Twentieth Century, with a hidden room that is its conscience. She wondered if those who had pursued him were as mad, or whether anyone had ever really pursued him at all.

Take it with you when you go to Amsterdam, he said, and she gave a start; she hadn’t said anything to him of Amsterdam. I didn’t mean to read the letter, girl, he said quietly, I was making up the room while you were at the school today. If he’d seen the blood and white leaves of the sheets as well, he said nothing; he would not be the sort of father, now that he’d lost everyone else, to so abhor his daughter’s womanhood simply because he always wanted her for himself. I won’t take it, she answered, because I’ll be back. He didn’t believe her. I’ll be back, she said, and we’ll find the secret room together. We’ll find it and I’ll dance there, if there’s space for a dance.

T.O.T.B.C. — 11

ON THE NIGHT BEFORE she arrived in Amsterdam the lover came again. It was her second night on the train, past one in the morning; they’d just pulled out of Paris. Her father begged her not to go by way of Munich and so the trip had taken nearly a day longer than it might have otherwise. She’d just returned from the dining car where she had a sandwich and some wine, sitting alone at a table as the bottle bounced nervously on the cloth to the clatter of the tracks. The wine left little red droplets on the cloth before her. The old bartender sat beneath one thin light reading a newspaper; he offered it to her when he finished and she took it. The train passed several villages where men swung lanterns from the station platforms. She finally rose from the table and returned to her car; a mother and daughter who’d been in her compartment were no longer there and she had the cabin to herself. She stood in the aisle of the empty train snaking through Europe at two-thirty in the morning and the cold air through the open window blew against the part of her face that was slightly yellow from the fading bruise. A lantern clamped to the wall of the train jiggled wildly. When her face was cold she returned to her seat and lay there some time underneath the newspaper before she slept.

Because she slept, she’d say to herself, while it was happening, It’s a dream. But she never really believed that, not from the first moment when she found herself startled to attention by the realization that, as in her room in Vienna, someone was there in the compartment. It was dark but not that dark; she saw the looming form of him above her. “What are you doing here?” she actually said; he stopped for a moment, as though he might try and explain. Then she heard a sound like something ripped, and understood the fabric of the dress had torn around her thighs; she heard another rip and flinched. She sat upright as though to hold him off. The buttons of her dress scattered across the floor; she scrambled to her feet only to realize in the cold air that came through the windows of the aisle outside her cabin door that he’d pulled everything off her. Her bare body fell against the window. The heat of it sent the cold of the glass running down the wall. She had one foot on the floor and the other knee on the seat, and held her arms to her breasts; perhaps she believed something might yet be protected. Take your arms away from your breasts, he said to her. She rose to him in the frosted glow of the compartment. The definition of his eyes bled into two sightless blazes of glass through which she could see the night beyond him. Through his glass eyes she could see the passing small fences and blue silos and little houses in the distance with lights; when the lids of his eyes fell shut she felt the top of her legs glisten. He put his mouth there and held her ankles to the red velvet seat; she flailed at the seat in the cold of the moonlight. He pulled her down and she clutched the armrest as she’d clutched the bedposts; amidst the thump of the train she felt him enter her. She kept expecting him to dim and die with some rush of light. It was like waking in the night to find some part of her numb, feeling as though she didn’t have an arm or leg, and waiting for the feeling to come back slowly in a warm throb. She let go of the armrest. The newspaper rustled beneath her chest. When she pounded at the glass he took her hands in his. He flooded the center of her and she screamed into the seat, opening up to him again.