Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

She didn’t want to go back down into the dark yet. She walked back toward his room; in the door she turned to watch him lying there. She decided he was a bit dim. She turned on the light; the room was undistinguished, a quaint blue paper on the wall, a small desk by the window that looked directly across to Ingrid’s flat except that her flat was several floors higher. “You don’t have to lie on the floor,” she said finally.

After ten or twelve seconds he slowly and clumsily got up off the floor. He walked into his room and for a moment seemed unsure what to do next; he sat down at the desk. He got back up and turned another chair for the woman to sit, then returned to the desk. He didn’t take off his coat or do anything that had the appearance of making himself at home; if his speech and manner had been any more of a monotone she might have regarded him as frightening. She sat in the chair he’d turned, looking past him out the window to the building across the street. Neither of them said anything at all for a moment. The big man pointed to the phone on the desk. “You can make a call.”

“No, I’ll just stay a bit. Actually,” she thought for a moment, and then finished, “I live just across the street with Ingrid.” He turned and looked through the window at the building across the street. “I don’t want him to know where I live.” She paused. “Maybe he already knows.”

“Does he always follow you?” the big man said.

“Yes. It seems to have happened every day for a long time now, on my way to and from work.”

“Maybe you should call the police.”

She looked around the room for a clock but couldn’t find one. In the light from the street she saw the red blotches of broken blood in his face, she could smell the liquor. “I’m going to go.”

“Would you like me to walk with you across the street?” he said.

“No.” For a moment she stayed where she was; then she slowly stood, always with her eye on him. At the open door she said, “It isn’t necessary. Thank you, though.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind …”

“OK.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind,” she finished; “watching from the window, as I cross the street. You can watch to see that I get across the street all right.”

“OK.”

“Can you do that? Can you just watch me?”

He hadn’t moved from his place in the dark; his hands were flat on his legs before him. “Yes, I can do that,” he said. Downstairs, in front of the hotel, she stepped from the door and looked up and down the street; then she walked, arms folded with determination, to the other side. At the door of Ingrid’s building she turned and looked up to Blaine’s lighted window. Then she turned back to the door and disappeared into the building, and in the window across the street the curtain fell back before his silhouette.

BLAINE DIDN’T ACTUALLY LIVE in this particular hotel room; he’d taken it only some time after the client first hired him to follow and watch Dania, and when Dania then moved in with Ingrid from her place uptown near where Blaine left her on Riverside Drive wrapped in his coat one night. That was the night he no longer worked for the client, that was the night the client’s case became a different sort of case. The client had said that night that none of what happened made sense since Dania wasn’t beautiful, but it was pretty obvious to Blaine that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He’d seen her dance many times. He discovered that every time she danced something terrible happened, something terrible to slow aging men like himself. He didn’t understand what the dance meant, the only dancing he’d ever seen before was the kind in clubs and movies. No more than Joaquin Young, who was smarter and more sophisticated than Blaine, was Blaine able to consciously understand how she danced to the resurrection of his memories and certain possibilities precluded forever; he hadn’t begun to be even more than dimly aware that there were possibilities until long after he’d allowed them to slip away. Blaine was caught to the moment of Dania like the strand of her hair to the wet red of her mouth when the dance finished. He’d been devastated by that first inkling which everyone eventually knows, that there are things which are irrevocable. This moment is the one when one either saves his spirit or watches it die in tandem with his body.

The morning after he’d followed her to the door of his own room, he followed her to work. She was about to turn when he raised his hand and waved; she was relieved to see him. She no longer had the sense of someone following her. When she told him she was a dancer he said the only dancers he knew were in clubs and movies. I don’t dance anymore, she told him. Why, he still wondered, there on the sidewalk outside her bookstore eight hours later, his hands in his coat pockets that were secretly stuffed with newspaper clippings. I used to dance this one dance, she tried to explain in Washington Square, as she moved from the shadow of one tree to the shadow of the next, circling Blaine as he remained in place, his hands in his pockets now black with ink; sometimes he could see her speaking and sometimes he could only hear her. She tried to explain in a way that she understood herself, let alone him. This dance was written especially for me. She paused and went on. There was something dangerous about it; it was written for something dangerous in me. She paused; he couldn’t see her now; and went on. And, uh, I knew it was dangerous, and I loved it. She stepped from the shadow of the tree into one of the lights of the square. She turned to Blaine and he could see her beautiful face more clearly than he’d ever seen it. But then I stopped loving it, she said returning to something of a circle again: it hurt too many people. And when I finished with the dance, I finished with all dances.

I finished with all the dances, she says to herself in the dark, behind the door of Ingrid’s building as she listens to Blaine walk away. She’s been saying it to herself since Washington Square, in the silence of their return home; and now she knows she doesn’t believe it. Now she knows the danger of it still lures her, the depraved druglike thrill of it beckons her on the other side of resolve, and she hasn’t gotten three steps up the stairs toward Ingrid’s flat before she’s turned and, peering surreptitiously out the door, loosed herself back into the night and the street. She looks toward Blaine’s window to make certain he doesn’t see her; it’s still dark, he hasn’t gotten up to the room yet. She walks down the street and turns toward the direction of the theater. Halfway there she hears all their footsteps, not one lover or two but a legion of them. When she comes to the theater she goes around the back and walks up the twelve flights; by the eighth she’s pulling the dress off over her head. By the time she’s in the dark studio before the long window that looks out over Manhattan she’s nude, absolutely alone in the single light that shines from the ceiling. As she begins to dance she’s unaware of Joaquin and Paul; Joaquin and Paul are unaware of each other there, and barely aware of her. They’re mostly aware of their own danger, which they allow themselves to believe, as most men do, has something to do with her. In their approach to her they’re frozen in a way that suggests they’re moving in relation to each other; only when they recognize that relationship, however, does it lapse into something hostile. If she’s aware of the presence of either of them, she’s displayed no recognition; perhaps she loves not being aware of them in the way she loved being loved by a lover she never saw. It’s as though no one could conceivably be worthy of this moment or this danger; circling her own reflection in the mirror she can barely see the forms of Joaquin and Paul in confrontation with each other against the night and the city beyond the window, until they simply take off from her dance, grappling. The shatter of the window cuts off midchord. She stops and for a stunned moment considers that men who were there a moment ago are gone now: there’s nothing in the window but the still Manhattan night rushing in at her.