Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

DANIA DOESN’T KNOW WHAT grows in her, as she crosses Davenhall’s mainstreet to her hotel room. She only knows it isn’t of her, that something’s being made inside her that’s not of her tissue and soul. Several times, over at the tavern where she’s still trying to work, the nausea and pain inside her is so startling it nearly stops her heart. At first she assumes it’s because she’s almost fifty years old, after all. She’s never had a baby before and therefore has no real reason to suppose her experience is uncommon. But now some months have passed and she understands, instinctively, that something in her means to be formed and born of a will that isn’t her own. In the middle of mainstreet, not far from where she once guarded the body of Consuelo Garcia, she says, No. No, she says; the lover of all these years, who came to me unseen when he chose, will not have this victory. What’s in me is mine, and though I might have chosen never to have it in me at all, I won’t relinquish anything else anymore. All the men, she tells herself, and all their history, may have believed I was theirs to manifest whatever nightmare they needed to hurl free of themselves; perhaps they all believed that this presumption extended even to this thing in my belly. No; again no; no again and again and again. No. She gets to her room and lies down, and feels her belly and the movement in it. Conscious only of the sunlight through the trees beyond her window, she prepares to fight.

THE SNOW COMES. I wake one morning to its muffled din. It falls on the city’s tarpaulin, lightly and soundlessly except that the city’s emptiness transforms even the fall of snow into an echo. I have to argue with the authorities several days in order to get some heat in my room’s radiator. What about the old man? I ask the guards. At first they don’t answer, then one of them tells me, The Leader has heat. When I see the client that afternoon, the room is cold but neither he nor Petyr seem to notice; it’s like the light through their covered window. I’m rubbing my hands together but the two of them sit the way they always do, still and sullen in the room’s center. All the old man cares about is news of the child. Oh don’t you concern yourself with that, I assure him, that’s all taken care of. Things are proceeding just fine on that score. I suppose I don’t need to worry about Z dying from cold; he’s flared with life. He lives for his son. Petyr doesn’t even look at me anymore. Perhaps he’s busy staring into the face of his own end, approaching now from not so far away with its hand outstretched. The echoes continue for a couple of weeks and when the snow stops and the sun shines down on the ice melting into the tarpaulin, the corridors and piazzas of the empty blue city fill with weird rainbows. Out of the misty colors fly flocks of birds that have been trapped under the city’s ceiling for years; they’re old and their wings flutter heavily in the wet air. Now the echoes I hear are the birds trying futilely to batter their way out.

I WORK DAY AND night. The shores of her womb are lit with fiery torches. Sometimes I fall asleep in the middle of what I’m doing, wake to find the sludge cooling in my hands, waiting to be fed to the larva. At times the whole universe of her hurls itself into upheaval, in rebellion. The larva grows. I can already see the thing moving, ready to live. In the day, when I go to see the old man and Petyr, I can’t quite get the black of the work off my hands; yet it seems that only I can smell it. Winter passes into spring, which passes into early summer. Giorgio comes up through my floor with food, I’m ashamed to take it with my black fingers.

THE OLD MAN PULLED quite a good one on Petyr today. I still shake my head thinking about it; Petyr just misjudged the situation, that’s all. He just couldn’t keep his head, his rage got the better of him. We were sitting in their room, Petyr reading to the old man who sat in his chair holding the brass frame with her picture and the dead brown flower in it. Petyr couldn’t go on with the reading. Convulsed and shaking, he looked up and said to the client, “My Leader, this is a lie.” The old man didn’t seem to have heard, and Petyr said it again, “This is a lie, my Leader,” and then he looked at me. He’s going about it all wrong, I thought to myself calmly, taking me on this way. But then he doesn’t have the imagination for going about it any other way. Now we both looked at the old man, who still seemed entranced by the picture he held, until he slowly raised his head to look at the translator. “This is a lie,” Petyr said firmly, having gotten his attention, “this is a sadistic joke. Do you see? This big stupid man is playing a joke on you. He likes jokes,” and that was true, actually, I always had rather liked a good joke. I remember a good one a long time ago; my father told a good one about his son. The old man just blinked at Petyr, still holding her picture in both hands. “There is no child, my Leader,” Petyr shook his head, tears in his eyes, “you’re not going to be a father. I’m sorry.” The old man just kept blinking at him, and Petyr just kept on saying it over and over, There’s no child, you’re not going to be a father, it’s a stupid joke, and the more he spoke the more upset he became as though he was going to cry any moment, while Z just sat there blinking at him, appearing not to register anything he heard. And then, faster than I would have believed possible, the old man brought her picture up over his head and crashed its heavy brass frame down onto Petyr. Petyr dropped to the floor without a groan or shudder; every bit of life just flew out of him with the blow of the picture, and there he lay looking up at me, a slight discoloration on his forehead from the brass of the frame, before the blood streamed out into his hair and face and the shattered glass of the picture frame and the picture itself, which lay in Petyr’s head. There was her face with a hole in it lying in his. Little shavings of brown dead flower drifted in the air. I thought I was going to choke from laughing so hard. The guards came in then and looked at Petyr in amazed horror; the old man just sat in his chair, looking at her torn picture. I didn’t bother trying to explain to them how an eighty-year-old man could kill someone with that kind of force; if they didn’t know that about him by now, they didn’t know anything. “I believe the Leader has no further use for this gentleman’s services,” I said. The guards looked at the old man and looked at me; one of them snapped his fingers at the others and they dragged poor Petyr out. I looked at the old man when they’d gone, trying to keep a straight face. But I laughed some more and slapped him on the back. “Something to tell your children about,” I suggested. After a while he smiled back.

WITH PETYR GONE, I now translate the work to the client myself. The authorities wanted to bring in a new translator but they’ve relented to my insistence otherwise. I’m not willing to chance a third party at this point. My German is crude compared to Petyr’s and lacks Petyr’s exactitude, but it’s sufficient enough. Soon I find myself writing in German, which I’ve never done in the thirty years since I left America. By writing in German I find I now write in something close to his own voice. I write in his words, I write in the grunts of the beast which are there beneath everything he says.

TWO WEEKS AFTER PETYR’S death they’ve tried to move me in with the old man. That they waited this long reflects less the etiquette of a decent interval than the fact they were too stupid to think of it sooner. It doesn’t matter; I refused. The two of us living and sleeping in different places is the only psychological semblance left to me of being separate from him. In a catacombed sinking city empty except for soldiers and the two of us, I won’t have the two of us now living within the same hundred square feet; the city would corrode outward from the disease of it. I’ll sit with the old fucker in the day and build his child by night, but I need some place and time to be alone with the smell of my befouled hands. Besides, Giorgio comes up through the floor of this room, and at the moments I can barely live with myself, I still go out that way too.