Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

ON MY APPROACH, I’M surprised at how dark it’s become. I stream farther into her, looking for the light of her beach; I can only discern the outline of the thing that fills her. Even I didn’t expect it would become this consuming. The larva’s now so large as to block out everything, and my way to the cove of her womb is obstructed by it. For a moment I regret everything. For a moment I forget the smell from which I’ve made this thing inside her is the smell of his evil, rather I confuse it with my own infidelity. Until I make myself remember Megan and Courtney, there’s a moment when I forget my resolve to sacrifice whatever redemption might be left in the world for their revenge; and my memory is owned by the nights in Vienna I loved you. I turn back and desperately retreat. Someone calls out: is it he or I? “Geli.”

Dania screams. She sits upright in her bed which is soaked with sweat. Across the street she can hear the voices of the tourists in the tavern; she looks at the clock. It’s past midnight. She can’t be sure at this moment what it is that’s made her cry out, it could have been any one of a number of things. It could have been the convulsion, only one of many, of whatever’s inside her; she presses her hands to her stomach. It could have been the dream, only one of many, of giving birth to a monster; she shakes her head clear of its image. She suspects, however, it’s neither of these that’s made her scream: she believes it was the voice calling her by the name she will not accept. She stumbles from the bed to throw up yet again, long past the time for throwing up; this is now her eighth month. I’m not fighting hard enough, she fears; she would reach down into herself if she could, and struggle with it hand to hand, and make it her own. Her will wanders desperately looking for a weapon.

THIS EVENING THE OLD man comes to my room on the way back from the tower. We went to the tower this afternoon together. The guards escorted us through the winding streets and over the bridges; it was a long walk that tired Z profoundly. At the top of the tower he wheezed the whole time. I convinced the authorities it was a good idea; as the momentous occasion nears, I want him worn down. After a five minute dose of the sea and sky, we started back and had to stop in an empty cafe so he could rest. He speaks sometimes but I don’t understand what he says. When he talks to the soldiers they don’t seem to understand either. Yes my Leader this, yes my Leader that, that’s all the soldiers say to him in return. He holds no majesty for them at all; the kind of hysteria he inspired thirty years ago, there’s none of that. On the way back, when we come to my room, I surprise myself and suggest to the guards that he rest there for an hour or two. I heard there’s going to be a broadcast tonight, it seems a good idea to have him see it. For the momentous occasion I want him to be good and full of himself. So we go into my room and I sit on the bed and set him on the chair where I write, because I don’t want him falling asleep on me. I close the door and wait for the guards to drift away, or maybe doze themselves; then I pull out the TV. I turn it on and wait for the broadcast; any minute I expect we’ll see his face and hear some reassembled speech he gave a long time ago. I hope to fill him with his own glory in the way the photos in his room fill him with glory, but he only sits staring at the TV mute and uncognizant. The broadcast comes on, the picture of him from very young days, when everyone thought he was quite impressive, quite the thing; and he begins to speak; and then it goes blank again. And then, out of nowhere as has happened before, there’s that man in the sea diver suit, except this time he isn’t just floating under the sea. This time he seems to be walking across the bottom of the sea; a strange vessel sits in the background. There, on the bottom of the sea, he plants an American flag. This is what your war’s come to, I say to the old man, armies claiming victory on the bottom of the sea. They’re out there right now, at this moment, on the bottom of the Adriatic, planting flags and little plaques. Z stares at the scene in stupefaction. I turn off the TV and hide it away, and the guards take him back to his room.

I GO WITH GIORGIO and his friends out to their island tonight. It takes about an hour to cross the lagoon. I’m in a state like that of the air before rain. The people of the island welcome me like a member of their family who’s returned home after half a lifetime. No ceiling covers the island, we walk along the streets under the stars and the lights of windows. The little houses are composed and tidy and painted with exuberant colors. Giorgio explains that the Germans have tried to cover the island, as well as the other surrounding islands, to no avail. The islanders sabotage their efforts, and when the Germans come to arrest them they only find a village as empty as the city I live in. It occurs to me when I hear this that perhaps my city isn’t empty at all, it’s only that its people, like the people of this island, will not be vanquished by those arrogant enough to presume history has dictated their triumph. To live with the people of this island is to be in a place and time where there’s no war at all; it isn’t as though the people pretend there isn’t a war, but rather it is that the war is truly insignificant to them. The Germans who rule them are objects of ridicule and mirth. The fishermen take me to a restaurant where the food and wine are already waiting. There’s another fisherman, a small man about half my size, with a golden tenor, whose name is also Giorgio, and after I’ve gone around to all of them and they’ve thrown their arms around me in welcome, it seems half of them are named Giorgio. There are also ten or twelve Brunos. The women are all named Maria. Maybe they were named something else before I began with the wine but after an hour they become Maria, warm and voluptuous and without a trace of mystery. After a while when we begin to eat the fish, the fishermen begin to sing gondolier songs celebrating the day’s catch. They sing about the lonely life on the water and the age of the city. They sing, Give me your kisses of fire. I can’t stand the beauty of it. I hold close into my lap my black hands that smell of the night’s work, but the Maria next to me wrests my hands away from me and brings them to her mouth. I’m appalled that her lips should kiss them, but she won’t let me draw my hands back. When I begin to cry none of them asks me what it is I cry for; my rain has begun. I’ve lived so far from life this true I’d forgotten its power. One song after another the fishermen sing, there in the small restaurant swept by the open wind of the Adriatic. The fishermen invite me to live with them on the island and never go back to the hidden sinking city. If I want to leave the lagoon forever, they tell me, I can do that too. They’ve been free so long I don’t think they understand how impossible it would be, that even if I wanted to go there’d be no way. The Germans, I try to tell them, they’d catch you too, and arrest you for helping me. How could you expect to elude them? The fishermen laugh and pour me some more wine and pour themselves some more wine and that’s when they explain about the regatta. They explain about the regatta and how there will be a thousand boats on the lagoon at once: How, says one Giorgio or another, are the Germans supposed to check a thousand boats? One or two, or ten or twelve perhaps, but not a thousand. After the wine is gone all of us stagger down to the dock and head back for the city; I lay on the bow of Giorgio’s boat flushed with the wine and the songs I’ve heard that seem to come out of the sea as though it’s filled with singing sea divers. Give me your kisses of fire. And it’s then, as though in response to their songs, I hear her first cry, the first strangled sound of her labor.