Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

UNTIL THAT MOMENT IN the tower it never occurred to me he might still be alive. I left that possibility behind in Vienna when they moved me; I have no certainty when that was, I have no recollection when or how it happened. The Germans continue to broadcast his speeches but I thought he’d only become a myth the world couldn’t allow to die. Sometimes I see the broadcasts on the small TV smuggled in by the fishermen who live out on the islands. There’s always a picture of him from when he was much younger, with his voice speaking over it. I’m not sure how they’ve worked the voice. I suppose they’ve taken the old speeches and spliced them together into new speeches and cleaned up the sound. In my room I continue to write of her but I never thought I was still writing for him. I assumed someone else had fallen in love with her; she’s seduced so many. I write each day, and each night someone comes to take what I’ve done, not unlike the way Holtz did long ago. Our passion has become mechanical in the way of most passion, I build it like a house. No one’s ever been so good at it. I build my own house that defies architecture, I’ve compelled the landscape of history to readjust to my visions. I’ve done it from a blind spot where no one sees me yet my presence cannot go unacknowledged. The guard comes and whether there are ten pages or one, a sentence or a word, he takes the work; no one comments or changes or complains. I assume this is meant to go on until I die, since there seems no chance the seduced will ever be sated.

DOWN HERE IN MY room I don’t get much on the TV, and the fishermen claim there’s nothing on it to believe anyway. To hear the German commentators tell it, Germany’s on the verge of winning the war. Germany’s been on the verge of winning the war about twenty years now. Sometimes I get a signal from an American pirate station in Africa, broadcast into Germany until the Germans find a way to jam it; the Americans insist the tide is turning. The war is as endless as the century. Not long ago I received a transmission that seemed to come from nowhere at all. A man in a sea diver suit was floating in a black sea, a lifeline attached to him from some point unseen. Spheres floated around him and the sea diver just continued to hover there for some time. In the visor of his helmet was the reflection of an immense light that came from something unimaginable; beyond that his face was dark and blank. I imagined the man was myself. The beauty of his image was that anyone could imagine the sea diver was himself, in this transmission that came from nowhere at all. The later broadcasts out of Africa and Germany said nothing of this transmission, and none of the fishermen know anything about it either. When I think about the sea diver, I remember a river of gone time that once forked in two.

GIORGIO IS THE FISHERMAN who brought me the television. He’s fair like many northern Italians, and his very round face beams red like the twilight sun. He literally came up through my floor, in a tunnel the Germans don’t know about. The tunnel leads out to the edge of the city emerging on a deserted piazza that faces the lagoon. Apparently there are hundreds of these tunnels the Germans don’t know. The fishermen laugh at the Germans. The idea of the Germans ruling the world is preposterous to them, since the fishermen come and go in the lagoon as they choose, to the Germans’ general befuddlement. Giorgio and the others warmed up to me when they learned I’m an American. I can’t tell them what I’m doing here, and I won’t allow them to believe I’m a political prisoner; it would be more hypocritical than I could stand. Through this tunnel Giorgio and his friends have brought me food and televisions and company. They could easily take me out with them to the islands, there’d be nothing to it. I protest that the Germans would be sure to find me, and that Giorgio and his friends would suffer the consequences. I argue that the Germans would only move me somewhere else in the city where there’d be no tunnel coming up through the floor and I’d never see Giorgio and the fishermen again. Giorgio disagrees heatedly but also accepts my argument as some kind of inarguable sign of my nobility. It’s almost unbearable to let him attribute such a fine quality to me. I’m a man the Twentieth Century can’t redeem, I try to explain to him. The truth is that if I were to escape I wouldn’t know how to live free of her. Later, it’s the revenge that keeps me here. Still, I can’t resist the opportunity to go out with Giorgio and the fishermen on their boat, and at night sometimes I lower my old arthritic hugeness into the floor and follow them out to the deserted piazza where we sail the lagoon for thirty minutes, round and round in the black water under the stupid wandering searchlights of the Germans who never see anything. I sit on the front of the boat. There the amber lights of a hundred piers circling the lagoon surround me; I listen to the mosquitoes and the wind, and for a moment again own no memory. After a while we return to the room and that night in my sleep I’m laid out on the wet bow of the lagoon itself, in a place where memory owns me. I wake in the dark, a sailor marooned on his own life.

I DON’T INTEND TO try and redeem my infidelity. I haven’t come to redeem anything. Rather I ride history like a wild horse that’s pursued redemption into a century where redemption is replaced by revenge. I knew two women, I’m sorry I was so weak as to need them both. I understand that if I hadn’t betrayed her for my wife, then my wife may not have had to pay betrayal’s price, clutching in her arms against the Vienna night the child of redemption’s and infidelity’s liaison. I would only add one thing now. I say it not for the sake of what one thinks of me, I say it for them, I say it because it’s so. I’d only add that while perhaps, in the eyes of infidelity, what I had with one was supposed to render counterfeit what I had with the other, in fact what I had with each was true unto itself. I don’t expect anyone to despise me less for this. I don’t expect anyone to regard my fingers as less marked by blood. Though the century disgraces the words innocence and honor, I won’t do so by supposing those words could ever apply to me. My daughter, alive today, would be thirty years old, with a hundred undiminished sins of her own.

THIS IS WHERE I’VE lived years and years, then, in this little room with no windows and the hum of the sea in its walls. I think after a while everyone’s come to forget what it is I’m here for. The guards aren’t particularly friendly or attentive, but neither are they unreasonably harsh. They don’t pay much attention to me one way or the other, and in the last year they’ve begun wandering off at times without locking my door behind them. At first I took it as a sign of their contempt for me, that I was so harmless as to warrant such casual surveillance. They didn’t imagine I’d have the nerve to open the door and just walk out. But now I’m fairly certain that, well, they did imagine it, they in fact presumed it. Now I’m fairly certain in retrospect that everything which has happened they’ve meant to happen. The first couple of times, the guards caught up with me right way, since I don’t move so quickly these days; I hadn’t even gotten down the hall and around the corner. But eight months ago, by accident or intention, they didn’t. I pushed open my door one afternoon and stepped into the hall and shuffled down the other direction from where I’d gone before. I expected to shuffle right into one guard or another. Now I realize that the guards caught up with me those first couple of times because I was just going in the wrong direction. I moved down the hall now, it became darker. After five minutes I found a hallway where lanterns burned in the hollows of the walls. I felt overwhelmed not so much by the exertion of the walk as the thick air of the corridors. I came out into another hallway of blue light; I looked up to the city’s tarpaulin above me. Any minute I figured one of the guards would be retrieving me; I even stopped awhile to wait for him. I never figured on getting this far. I had no interest in getting this far, I’d been out of my room ten minutes now. Then I heard a voice in German, and only after I’d stood there leaning against the hallway wall awhile, listening to the foreign words, did they not seem so foreign; my own German was proficient enough to finally recognize that I was listening to a translation of the very words I’d written this morning. I followed the voice. Up half a flight of stairs, after the blue corridor led back into a black one like my own, I came to the room where the old man and the younger one were living.