Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

Like a coat too large to be grown into, the savagery she’d once aspired to in the Sudan jungle seemed too large as well, and she could never make it fit. This was difficult for her to understand since after all she had shot a man down in the streets of Vienna. For a while she spent time uptown with some of the gangs that appeared on the last dark streets untouched by the afterglow of a war that had vanquished in a very complete and absolute way complete and absolute evil. She’d ride up and down the urban island on the back of a motorcycle with a kid who gave her a mangy tabby cat she called Dog for the way it fetched things and followed constantly at her heels. But this wasn’t savagery enough. She drank too much. The vodka bottles piled up in the corner of her apartment where she sat beneath her skylight trying to remember the Russian folksongs her father sang in the jungle. But this wasn’t anything near truly savage, and moreover she despised the phony romanticism of it in the way she despised the phony romanticism of artists. “Oh Dania, what is this?” she whispered to herself with irritation, when she found herself crying alone one night for no reason she could identify, “this isn’t about not being beautiful. This isn’t about not being loved.” Another vodka bottle for the corner. She and Dog slept curled together in the vodka stupor, as she was coming to do more and more nights. In the skylight above her, the city became a psychetecture complete with men who followed her, whom she only occasionally sensed, and men who died when she danced, whom she would have repudiated had she sensed them at all. The horizon filled with the vision of a Japanese sunflower that blossomed five years before and only now came into view. Before the flash of this flower, in the moment it lit up her corridors, she considered that the savage century was unleashed not by the act of standing in a Vienna window, but by the act of being seen there. Soon after, she left the dance company. Matters with the two men in her life had become impossible. Joaquin calculated constantly, though he had many other women at the same time; she thought to herself, He’s more tormented by his past sexual defeat than any genuine passion, a hundred other successes with all the others will never compensate for his failure with me. Paul was tormented by genuine passion and almost more unbearable for it; his adoration became oppressive. When he worshipped even the most flawed inch of her, that small flawed territory at the corner of her mouth where the scar grew whiter with the years, her affection for him surrendered to claustrophobia. “And what about this finger,” she asked him, “this one that pulled the trigger one night in Vienna, do you adore it as well?” For this adoration Joaquin threw Paul out of the company, which was petty even for Joaquin. She wearied of the havoc she wreaked. Employing the confidence of a girlfriend in the company named Ingrid, Dania gave up her apartment and moved herself and Dog into Ingrid’s place; she went to work for a bookstore in the Village. In this way she dropped out of the lives of both Joaquin and Paul as though through a trapdoor. After some time she would telephone Paul, conscientious about his fragility. He begged to see her. She refused, relented, it was a mistake, refused, refused, relented, it was another mistake, refused. She had no idea what her life was supposed to be and feared that it wasn’t necessarily supposed to be anything. There were times she’d watch the theater until everyone had left, then go through the back since she still had the key and up to the studio on the twelfth floor where the dancers would rehearse in the mornings and afternoons. One entire wall was a window that looked out on Manhattan, the opposite wall was lined with mirrors. Alone, before a hundred scarred dancers, she’d dance the dance written only for her.

She left the bookstore one twilight and by the time she reached the corner a block away, she was looking over her shoulder again. It quickly became dark. Occasionally she’d slow her pace, then stop and look back; stepping into the street she waved down a cab. From the backseat she watched out the window for him, but there was nobody. She had the cabbie drive around a few minutes before taking her back to Ingrid’s street. “Pull over here,” she said at the end of the block; she paid him and got out. If there was someone behind her she didn’t want him to know exactly where she was living. She got halfway to Ingrid’s building when she stopped: for the first time she heard his steps. Not in all the years had she actually heard the steps. She’d felt his love, sometimes in Vienna she’d worn his love and felt it run from her; but she hadn’t heard his steps like this. She headed not for her building but a hotel across the street; on the first floor was a coffee shop. She went inside. She stopped long enough to look behind her. She gazed around; the coffee shop was empty. Beyond the coffee shop was a bar; the bar was empty. She made her way through the room. On the other side of the room she heard the sound of the outer door opening; turning, she waited for someone to appear in the dim light of the bar or the coffee shop. “Joaquin?” she called. There was no answer. The lobby of the hotel was small and empty; no one was behind the front desk and the mail boxes behind the desk were all small and empty too. Crossing the lobby she moved several steps up the stairs.

This is the wrong way, she thought to herself. This is the wrong thing to do. This is like the night I went into the old vacant building on Seventh Avenue and there was someone there and I fainted. She took herself to task, once again, for fainting. But now she was on a set of stairs again, at an irrevocable step, stopping to watch and listen in the direction from which she’d come. There was the pause of dead silence before she heard his footsteps again. She hurried further up the dark stairs. She reached the first floor and moved down the pitch black hall, groping desperately along the wall for a light switch. By the end of the hall, where there was nowhere else to go, she still hadn’t found it; she turned. In the dim light from downstairs he was only a silhouette at the end of the hall. “Joaquin,” she said. “Paul,” she said. She didn’t really suppose it was Joaquin or Paul, the silhouette was too big to be Joaquin or Paul. “It’s over between us,” she said in the dark, “the war’s over, Vienna’s over. What are you doing here?” She grabbed the knob of the door nearest to her and rattled it; locked and merciless, it wouldn’t open. She turned back to him and waited; for a moment there in the dark nothing happened; then he turned on the light she’d tried so hard to find.

T.O.T.B.C. — 12

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” he said.

He was older than she’d expected; she wasn’t sure he was what she’d expected at all. He didn’t come any closer to her, waiting instead. “Were you following me?” she finally said. Her voice broke.

He turned and looked behind him, stepped back and gazed down the stairs. His arms hung at his sides. “There’s no one,” he said, as though it took him several moments to assess the emptiness of the stairs. Everything about him was a bit slow, she decided. He turned back to her in the hall and she took a step away.

“Please don’t come closer,” she said.

“There’s no one,” he said again. He reached into his pocket and pulled from it a key. “It’s my room,” he said, pointing to the door she’d tried to open. He could see she didn’t believe him. “Here, try it.” He tossed her the key. She hesitantly took the key and, watching him the whole time, put it in the lock of the door and turned it. The door swung open. He stepped toward the door and again she took a step behind her; she was caught at the end of the hall. He raised his hand: “Watch.” Astonished, she watched the big man lower himself onto the floor of the hall face down with his hands stretched above his head. He was now speaking in a muffled voice into the carpet of the hall. “See,” he explained, “I’m on the floor. See? You can walk past. You can see my hands. If I try anything you can run back and lock yourself in my room and call the police maybe.” While this preposterous scene was taking place she was indeed making her way past him. “See, I’m on the floor here,” he was saying as she got to the other end of the hall where the stairs were. She looked down the stairs into the darkness, trying to listen for the footsteps. “Are you by the stairs now?” he called out from the floor, his mouth in the carpet. After a moment he said, “You can wait in my room a bit if you’re afraid to go. You can lock the room and I’ll go down the stairs and look to see if there’s anyone there. See, I’m right here on the floor of the hallway.”