Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

FOR MONTHS, REVENGE COMMENSURATE and fitting eluded me. I lay thwarted in the dark. Then last night it came to me, on my bed. I woke to it with clarity; for a moment I couldn’t believe it. I mustered my strength to raise myself and get to the desk. It took thirty seconds to do it; I didn’t precede it with an act of pleasure. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of pleasure even if his eighty-year-old body was capable of knowing it. I’d never given him the pleasure of her before, after all, other than his witness from the corner of our room on Dog Storm Street. Because I’m the god’s god, no act of pleasure is necessary: I can touch the egg of her without a penis or its pollen. I can touch the egg of her with my pen, with a sentence: Life is committed at the core of her, I write, nine months short of creation.

WHEN THEY COME THE next day for the work, I inform them I intend to deliver it personally. The guards make a token display of disbelief, claiming such a thing’s impossible, though my door’s been unlocked eight months now. Then I have nothing to give you today, I answer. There’s a conference and one of the guards leaves to discuss the matter with an unknown authority; he returns after several moments. He explains I’ll be escorted under guard to Z’s room.

I WON’T CHANCE SUBVERSION on Petyr’s part. I’m present when he translates the single sentence to the client. Immediately Petyr knows something is up. He translates the sentence precisely. It’s impossible at first to know if the old man understands. “Do you understand?” I ask him, in German. Petyr protests. “You can’t speak to him this way,” he says in English, “I’m the only one who speaks to him. You speak to him through me.” I ask Z again if he understands. “It’s a child,” I tell him, “wonderful news.” Petyr protests again, loudly, in German. The old man looks back and forth from Petyr to me in confusion; I keep trying to talk and Petyr gets louder and louder. Now I turn from the client and answer Petyr in English. “Please,” I say to him, “he’s confused. The guards will hear you, and it’ll be worse for all of us.” Petyr answers, “Worse for you, you mean,” and I say, “Certainly not. Certainly it’s clear how superfluous you are in this matter. I’ll have them take you away if you don’t be quiet.” He glares at me hot and silent. We just sit there watching each other for a minute before I turn back to Z. Z is still rattled, frightened by the way this afternoon is unlike other afternoons. “It’s your child,” I tell him now. Petyr still glares at me, bursting with outrage, but saying nothing. “Do you understand?” I ask the old man. “Your child and Geli’s. The child you were always meant to have. She’s quite beside herself with joy. She’s honored to carry your glorious germ in her. Someday you’ll take this son — and I can tell you with complete confidence that it’ll surely be a son — and groom him to rule the world after you. In such a way, the idea of a world after you becomes bearable, doesn’t it?” When he hears this, the old man’s face begins to shine with a small radiant smile. The ancient eyes light up exactly as I supposed they might, and I can already well imagine the dark shattered desolation they’ll show when I finish my revenge nine months from now. He begins to consider, even in his dim fog, how beautiful the child will be, beautiful like his mother; and life that seemed rather purposeless now finds a final way to matter. He’s linked to immortality forever, linked in flesh and not just the world’s memory. It’s at the same time evidence of both his godness and humanness. Dim and fogged as he is, he begins to cry a little; I could beat him if I wanted and he’d still be happy for what I’ve given him this afternoon. After a while he moves from his chair for the first time I’ve ever seen him do it, and lowers himself on his cot in emotional exhaustion. In his old strangled language he cries out to her with thanks. In his sleep he’s calm and ecstatic at the same time, and I can only hope that, in all his peace and excitement, he doesn’t die on me before I’m done with him.

I ALLOW SEVERAL DAYS to pass in which I don’t leave my room. The guards are perplexed and even distressed by this. At night I can hear him, from far away, howling like a lonely dog. When I finally go to see him, his eyes beseech me. In the days that have passed since I first saw him, doubts as to the joyous news have begun to grow in his head. I put them to rest. Day after day Petyr reads to him while I sit listening to make sure nothing’s amiss in the translations. Petyr fumes, caught as he is. Z has actually begun to open up and talk a little, in his crazy fashion, small words here and there, a phrase or two of the future. Plans to take his boy up to his retreat in the Bavarian Alps, where everything as far as anyone can see is under his rule. That sort of thing. I feel immense satisfaction to see the past and its memories flood back into his face, to have him remember bit by bit who he is and what he’s done. It’s as though the past and its memory grow in his head in symbiosis with his future and child growing in her, until the two grow to the present that emerges from between her legs. He flourishes as time passes, he occasionally even does respectable imitations of what he used to be, giving forth with this ridiculous statement or that about things of which he never knew anything. We joke together sometimes in the way a grownup jokes with a child or plays with a pet, dangling a string before its claws. In such a way I dangle before him the heartbeats and kicks of the life inside her, and like a small animal he frantically reaches for what I dangle until I snatch it away, laughing. Petyr has sunk so far into the force of his hate for me that his eyes have almost become dull with it, the power frustrated into seething languish. The weeks pass and then the months. The days I spend with the client and our translator, the nights I sail with Giorgio in the lagoon; soon, I tell Giorgio, I’ll go with you to the islands. You come, Giorgio says, they’ll never find you.

T.O.T.B.C. — 14

AT NIGHT I GO on a secret mission inside her. I voyage up her canals, wander her passages searching for a place to build what she’ll give birth to months from now. I find a fertile plain on the banks of her womb and begin to work. I don’t have much time for what has to be accomplished. I’ve brought my materials with me. I cast the mold, I make the mortar. I dig a pit there on the beach inside her, transform the whole belly of her into a cauldron. There I make the very ooze of the thing that’s to be born. I concoct it from a hundred things. I concoct it from the hush of those who vanished into the fog on his orders, without a cry or remnant left behind for those who would wonder where they went. I concoct it from the mealy red ice left beneath those shot face down in the snow. I concoct it from the terrified squeal of children transformed abruptly into gunfire, which transforms in turn to the bright afternoon stillness. I concoct it from the gypsies in the ghettos and the Jews naked in the pits. I’ve given to the mortar those he starved, that from the pulp of their bones this thing I make can stand. I’ve given to the mortar those he gassed, that from the small pockets of gas left in their flesh this thing I make might quiver and lurch. I’ve given to the mortar those he burned, that from the unbearable odor of their ash this thing I make might be smelled from any place in paradise. I grind into it the teeth he pulled from their heads, the genitals he ripped from their loins, the eyes he left open when he killed them so that he could always assure himself he had indeed killed them. I concoct the garbage of evil, of which he is father, and which he’s fathered without the passion and sex of a man. Often I break down. Often the fumes of it stop me in my place. And when I’ve given to the mortar all of these, and have watched them disappear into the swirl of the cauldron’s awful whirlpool, I finally give to it Megan, I give to it little Courtney falling through Vienna space. After a while I think, I can no longer do this. But I can do this. I can do this for that day not long from now when he comes to see his son and I present him with this thing I’ve built inside her, and he reaches his fingers tremulously to feel the child’s silky skin and instead touches hard scales, and moves to stare into his son’s blue eyes and instead sees a thousand black eyes the size of pins, and presses to his old chest the soft innocent hair and instead is stung by the twitching antennae. I can do this, Megan; I can do this, Courtney; for that moment when the old face of the god gazes on what his god-seed has spawned, not something grown from an embryo or fetus or even, godlike, from a star, but rather from larva. At that moment he’ll either kill it or it will kill him, or he’ll drop it to the floor in horror where it will come crawling to him on a hundred legs, twitching at him for love. Let him love it if he can. Let him hold it in his arms like the mothers and fathers who clutched for the last time the children he tore away from them. Let him name it with a Christian sound, and parade it in his cathedral of a thousand years.