Steve Erickson: Tours of the Black Clock

HE HAD NO DESIGNS on her. He might have liked to put his hands on her hair and pull her gently into his chest, but he wasn’t likely to do even this. She was probably not more than fifteen years old; she could have been born the night he assumed this post on the river. At this time he’d taken on an appearance that frightened these girls; she wasn’t frightened. She stood alone watching into the water, the wet deck of the boat a dark mirror in which her blue dress shone. The ends of her hair stuck to the rail as she leaned across it; he touched her shoulder tentatively. I wouldn’t like you to fall in, he suggested to her. She looked at him as though he’d said something strong and startling. I used to lie to people, he went on, that the river was full of alligators. Piranha sometimes. She laughed, And they believed you? On this river, he smiled, they believe everything. He said, Have you come far? and she seemed to think about it a bit, smiling at whatever she was thinking, and only nodded. She turned back to the water and the conversation seemed over; he settled his gaze back onto the island before him. He felt oddly moved and forsaken until he heard her say, And you? Have you come far? The water was lapping over the edge of the boat; he wasn’t paying attention to his speed, and the other passengers were glaring at him. He said, I’ve sailed fifteen years between two points less than a mile from each other. The fog came in. They were swallowed up to the blithe indifference of tourists studying their itineraries. Only the girl looked around; she said, I always feel a little lost when I can’t see the stars. The hair on her arms stood on end in the chill but she didn’t appear to notice. I don’t think, he said, I’ve ever seen the stars from this boat: maybe a patch of them. Do you know the stars? he asked. Yes, she said, I know them. Are you an astronomer? he said; they both laughed. The boat continued and the fog fell behind them and the island was there then. In the last few minutes he almost could think of nothing else to say until he said, perhaps more seriously than he meant to, But why have you come here? It was something he’d never asked anyone on his boat; but then she was the first person who, in that moment when the rest of the earth disappeared, noticed. And for a second it was almost as though she hadn’t heard him; and he wasn’t about to repeat it. The island approached and he brushed past her to dock the boat, when she answered, To bury something. She stepped ashore and he called out, to her alone among all the others, Boat leaves in two and a half hours.

BUT SHE DIDN’T RETURN in two and a half hours. He waited for her as the others straggled back; he looked for her in the distance. She didn’t come. Occasionally this happened, since there was another boat later that evening. After ten minutes passed he took his other passengers back to the mainland; he realized only later that he’d forgotten to collect the fares.

ON THE LAST RUN of the day, he was searching the edge of the island for her as soon as it came within sight. But she wasn’t there; patiently he sat on deck staring at the island, rather than away from it, the noise of the nightcrowd coming from town. At this point in his life he’d become too locked in with the rhythms of resignation and instinct to think profoundly upon the impact of this girl. He contemplated the frequency of destiny she transmitted and what its exact nature might be; he mused that she might be his daughter, or his future wife. But he didn’t muse on such things for long. He knew by now these frequencies were unnamable, in a century that tried to name everything that was particularly unfathomable. Time passed and the rest of the tourists found their way back; of course they were always drunker on the evening run. He kept looking for her. There wasn’t any doubt she’d appear; there was no other way off the island, after all, and there was nothing to do other than leave it. In fifteen years there hadn’t been a single instance when someone stayed, or had been left behind. So there just wasn’t any doubt she’d appear. But when they were all back, and waiting to leave, and she still wasn’t there, he delayed five, ten, fifteen minutes. “The buses are waiting for us,” someone said, “when are we going back?” We’ll go back when I say we go back, he said. Twenty minutes passed. The passengers became incensed. When he couldn’t delay any longer, he took them back without her. After returning everyone to mainland, he did what he’d never done before — sailed back to the island and spent the night there, on the boat.

HE HAD THIS IDEA she’d be there every time he opened his eyes. He had this idea she’d be there at sunrise, cold and frightened from her night on the island. But she wasn’t there at sunrise and she wasn’t there when he opened his eyes; and by late morning he was the one who was hungry and cold, and there would be people on shore waiting for the first run of the day. He went back. It was a sunny day. He loaded up the boat quickly and disembarked almost immediately; he found himself searching the island for her all the way across the river. He lost track of the speed with which the boat made its way over the water; people on deck were looking around anxiously and hanging onto the rail as the boat bounced along the surface. Two people actually toppled over; husbands looked at him in outrage as they scooped their wives up off the wet wood. “Do you think you could slow down a little?” someone asked him; he ignored it. At the island she wasn’t there. Gratefully the passengers pried themselves loose from the boat and climbed ashore, leaving him with abhorring looks and sarcastic thanks. He didn’t hear them.

He paced his boat, oblivious to everything else as he’d been since her first failure to return the day before. Now it seemed as though this had been going on not a single day but many days, maybe weeks. He hastily sailed the passengers back a couple of hours later, even leaving behind one or two latecomers calling from the beach; people began tying themselves to the boat in the manner of Zeno’s skeleton tied to the boat’s bottom, so they wouldn’t be thrown over from the captain’s assault on the river. “My God, man,” someone said to him, “do we have to go this fast? Everyone’s frightened.” There was a girl, the boatman answered, she wore a blue dress. You see a girl in a blue dress? All of them just shook their heads a little. He turned back to the black water; he seemed to push the boat a little faster. Passengers clung to the vessel whitefaced, teeth clenched.

On this trip back, or perhaps the next, he realized it. After fifteen years it was a little unthinkable he wouldn’t have seen it immediately; but it happened several times before he noticed. Rather, it didn’t happen. The Moment. The Moment didn’t happen. That moment in which time and space belonged utterly to his boat, destination and point of departure disappeared. And now that he thought about it, he realized it hadn’t happened this morning either, when he woke at the island; and now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember it happening the evening before. For that matter he couldn’t remember it happening since she’d left the boat. And it didn’t happen the rest of the day; and for all the fear and desolation of every time it had happened every day over the preceding fifteen years, now the fear and desolation of it not happening were such as to trivialize everything he’d feared before.

And he began to fear that she was not going to come back to his boat. In the way he’d told himself before that there simply couldn’t be any doubt about it, now he told himself there was nothing but doubt; now every time he sailed up to the island, and all through the time he waited there, he knew she wasn’t going to come. It was as though she’d taken with her that moment on the river; she’d taken it and was living in it somewhere there on the place he’d sworn to leave forever. There’s a girl in a blue dress, he’d call to the tourists going into town, keep your eyes open for her. And when they came back he’d ask if they’d seen her. When they came back, he interrogated them one by one. He stood in the middle of the boat barking at them, and they shrank from him, and lied. They lied that they’d seen her in the bar, they lied that they’d seen her at the hotel, where no one but his mother had lived for over forty years. They lied they’d seen her walking along the street. They lied they’d seen her among the ice, or the graves, and those were the lies he believed most, since he’d thought of her long before he knew her, or long before she even was , when he lay amidst the ice as a boy; and since she had, after all, come to bury something.