Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

Blaine did not need to turn on the light in his room to see the clippings. Sitting at the desk, he pulled them from his pockets with his dark grubby fingers and laid them out before him; he’d studied them so many times that now he knew which was which by their shapes. If he turned on the switch and was faced with them in the bald light, he would once again begin to feel the guilt, and then he’d certainly want a drink, and he’d tried hard for some time now not to have a drink. And at this moment he might well have succumbed to his desire for a drink, even in the dark, had he not looked out the window just as Dania was walking up the street. By the time Blaine got down to the street she was already gone. He walked around the neighborhood a quarter of an hour and when he didn’t see her the only place he could think of was where he’d seen her so many times before. In front of the theater he watched the studio window high above him, waiting as discreetly as he knew how until she came back down. He had certainly never seen anything in his life before like the two men who launched themselves out into the night in a spray of glass. Oddly, in their fall, they regained the balletic composure they’d abandoned when interlocked with each other; but Blaine didn’t know much about that. There was no sound as they fell, they didn’t even cry out. In Blaine’s mind perhaps, but only in his mind, was the echo of the glass breaking. He followed them down with his gaze, he watched the way the two men danced down. There was silence for several moments and after they hit there was only the small sound from twelve floors above him, and it took some time for him to recognize it.

She doesn’t look at the window. She kneels on the floor wondering, in the middle of the strange sound that comes from her, what in the turning of the black clock has made her play this role. She finally rises. Walking away from the window, she still doesn’t look, in the same way she didn’t look at either her father in the street or Reimes in the glass of his own window nearly ten years before; she doesn’t look at herself in the mirror, she doesn’t need to look to see the woman who couldn’t resist dancing one last time. She doesn’t take the elevator down. She walks the twelve flights figuring that around the sixth she’ll pull her dress back over her head and around the third she’ll begin to hear the sirens. She hasn’t a clue how to explain it. As it happens she’s all the way to the bottom before the sirens come, and they’re so far away there’s no telling which atrocity in the city they’re answering. She opens the back door of the theater and steps across its threshold to find the tide that’s come in, that rolls into Manhattan in our sleep, leaving the edifices dark and wet and its watermark high above our heads. She dives into the street and the roots of civilization drift past her black cold glide.

THE CLIENT HAD SAT in Blaine’s office striped by the gold slits of twilight that came through the blinds. He was nearing sixty with the kind of paunchiness that had only now begun to show in his face; at first appearance he seemed groomed and well dressed. After a while, though, Blaine noticed the dapper clothes had frayed at the corners of the collar on his coat; it wasn’t a new suit. Blaine didn’t have much imagination and was just smart enough to know he wasn’t very smart, but he was observant after years of training himself to be, so he saw that about the client, the way he was frayed. Had Blaine more imagination he might have seen the way the man’s story was frayed too. The client explained that someone had been following his girlfriend eighteen months and now he wanted Blaine to keep an eye on her and if necessary protect her. For a man in a frayed suit he set a fair amount of money on Blaine’s desk. He didn’t give his name but Blaine didn’t question that, nor did he question whether eighteen months wasn’t rather a long time for someone to be followed by someone else without anything coming of it. Blaine didn’t involve himself with the subtle complications of a case, he didn’t feel possessed by an investigator’s compulsion to know the truth of something. He took the money and did the job, as long as he believed he could live with it. This was the nature of being in business for himself. He’d been in business for himself since he and his partner split up over a case Blaine couldn’t remember anymore; sometimes he’d run into someone who’d mention it and Blaine just got uncomfortable. He always wanted to say, Well then, tell me all about it, will you, because it’s just entirely slipped my mind. But that didn’t seem like it would sound so intelligent. All he remembered was spending the rest of the 1930s and the war in the corner of a bar down on West 59th called the Unforeseen where the name curled out of the wall above the door. Once Blaine was walking at four in the morning through Times Square, it was deserted, all that was left was the long peach-colored veil of a bridal gown floating down the middle of the intersection until a stray car roared through catching it on its fender, and the smell of someone’s sour liquor overwhelmed him, he became sick there on the curb, made himself walk several more blocks to get away from this smell of drunks but couldn’t, went back to where he lived, the smell was still there, got his big lug body in the hot shower and the smell rose in the steam of the water and he realized he was oozing it. He was oozing the smell of the Unforeseen. So he opened up an office for business. It was piddling business, without bravado or anger, anger having become buried so long in him that the very name anger eluded the confounded emotion it finally became; he never bothered trying to explain to himself why he was and always would be small time. He stopped drinking awhile. Ninety-nine nights of a hundred were alone, the hundredth spent with some woman or another who wanted to know if he wore a badge or trenchcoat, if he picked locks. After the war the nitty-gritty cases got nittier and grittier in weirder ways for some reason; there were nitty-gritty ones back when he first began but they still resembled something like normal sins then, normal people breaking normal commandments, not ones God never thought of. For instance, in this particular case involving this particular client, the dancer wasn’t really the client’s girlfriend at all; she hadn’t even laid eyes on him. The client was the one who’d been following her for eighteen months, the client who hired Blaine to follow the dancer because she was being followed. This doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me, Blaine thought to himself standing there in the old dark vacant building that final night while the client held the unconscious body of a fainted dancer in one arm and the gun in the other hand. The client kept looking at the woman’s face in the dark and then far up into the ceiling, anguished by the way a man who’s had a great deal of what he wanted in life can arrive at a point when the only thing he wants lies right there in his arms and yet remains somehow untouchable: God, she’s not even beautiful, Blaine heard him say there in the dark. What happened to me, the client said, how did everything change? You see the way she dances? he said to Blaine. Blaine answered, Yeah, I’ve seen. The client said, I was one of those guys who only a few years back ran the world, wasn’t it only a few years back? The next day the papers said he once ran a club on the Upper West Side; Blaine might have even been there once. Say, do I know you from way back, did we once meet long ago? Blaine asked only seconds before the shot, before the smell in the dark, the only smell stronger than that of the booze Blaine drank a world ago, the smell of brains and gunfire. He pried the unconscious girl from the dead man’s arms, carried her out onto Seventh Avenue and Houston, hailed the cab and directed it up the shores of the Hudson.