Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

DANIA HAS ARRANGED A signal with Judy, who’s working at the tavern across mainstreet, that when the time arrives the pregnant woman will wave her lantern before the window and Judy will come immediately. Now pain slashes though her spasmodic and incandescent, and Dania reels across the room. It’s all she can do to get herself on the bed and not pitch herself through the window to the ground below. She cannot believe that it can actually start in this pain; if this pain is only the beginning, what will the birth be like? Her fear is boundless. She fears of course not only the pain but the vision of what will come out of her. She heaves on the bed and the lantern she tried to swing from her window rolls on the floor; she hopes its glass doesn’t break and set the place on fire. Already something in her is strangely wrong: the contractions are already only moments apart. She screams once, then again; Judy, who’s already in the street because she saw the weird weaving light on the walls of Dania’s room, now bolts into the hotel and up the stairs. She’s up the stairs and into the room as Dania feels herself rip from the middle, opening up to unloose what’s inside her; she opens like the night before me. On the bow of the boat I’m sobered by the sound and pain of her. The night’s gleaming and luminous next to the fuliginous larva gushing out from her. The Twentieth Century is being born from her in a wash of steaming evil. Z’s spawn will eat its way out of her, dragging from its hind legs the afterbirth of twelve million faces that felt its father’s misery. It will make its way out of her and up through the cracks of a blue city, scampering down the hallways to Z’s room, dreading the light. It will find its way up Z’s arm, onto his chest, and wake him from his sleep, its thousand black eyes staring into his. The afterbirth trails behind. We dock at the pier and I run through the tunnel of the piazza as quickly as my crippled old feet will take me. It’s inconceivable to me I might miss it, it’s inconceivable that Megan and Courtney and I might not be there to see it. I want to witness the first tip of the first black antenna that emerges from her, feeling its way out. In a moment I’m up from beneath the floor of my room. There’s a roar in my ears, the roar of myself bellowing madly, or perhaps it’s her. It’s inconceivable I might not be there to look into the thing’s features and see him , incontrovertibly him, the outline of the father in the face of the fathered thing. She screams, and in the pit of this scream, as what’s being born travels into the light of the world, because she’s stripped of any other weapon, finding neither the rage that killed Dr. Reimes in retribution for her father nor the resolution that swept her through the river of Davenhall Island to be sufficient for the fight, she’s left with only a single choice; and that is to love it. Whatever comes from her, in all its monstrousness, she can only love it. It’s such a pitiful weapon. Later, she’ll wonder if there really was such a weapon. Later, she’ll wonder if it really lay there inconspicuous and unthreatening on the barren floor of a small secret room. Later she’ll think it’s only a theoretical love, and she’ll wonder if loving it so deeply was ever really possible. But for the moment it’s not only possible but inescapable, one measly love. It doesn’t seem nearly pure enough, or perfect or holy enough, it isn’t love untainted. It’s love marked, wounded, suffered and doubted and denied by the humanity that attends it. It’s nothing before such a huge evil. But in the pit of this last scream it’s all there is, and she bends down and picks it up, and clutches it, a used broken little weapon, with a lifetime of blanks to one live cartridge, if there’s even one. The noise of the weapon is flat and whispered. Somewhere in the sounds of her own scream and the noise of her own love she’s vaguely aware of Judy by her side. In the noise of her love she begins to expel the thing from her; in the noise of her love the thing seems, for a moment, to stop in confusion in its exodus from her. If she’s to unleash a swarm of them, she vows, if she’s to fill the room with them, then it will be with her love’s noise, flat and whispered and pathetic. The century, in confusion, stops in its own time. Caught inside her, it devours its own time, which is to say it devours itself, and then begins to grow again from its inside out. Evil thunders past it like a river. Dania calls for Judy to take whatever it is being born from her. Give it to me, whatever it is, however monstrous, raise it to my breast. And Judy does this. And Dania feels her womb released of it, and feels that to which she’s given birth lying there on her chest, in her arms, and the sticky slime of the way it feels convinces her it’s a monster indeed, until she clears her vision and looks at him, to see a son quite human, drenched in afterbirth and blood, the only sign of a birth this extraordinary not to manifest itself for some weeks, when the hair on his small head will grow drained of all color.

WHEN I SEE THAT she’s not given birth to what I made inside her, I’m aghast. It’s unthinkable that one small act of will has defied the soul of a century bent on finding its true dark literal form. When I see she’s given birth to a child I think to myself, Then I must kill this child. What she’s defied in the act of birth will not deny me my revenge; in killing the child I’ll kill the father in turn, who will die from the grief of it. I know grief. Uncertain as the mysteries of birth may be to me, there’s nothing mysterious to me about grief. I take my pen in my hand and make myself remember what I need to remember in order to do it. It isn’t hard to remember. I look at the child, look for the ways in which the child is like the father; and though the child in truth is more like his mother, there’s enough of the father. There’s plenty enough, plenty of the father and plenty of what I remember.

I’LL KILL HIM; I mean to kill him; I’ve killed enough things to kill one more. The baby’s head fits right in the palm of my hand. Right in the palm. My fingers curl over his little skull. One small pop of his little skull, I’m black enough for that. It’s not such a difficult thing, given all the revenge that will come of it.

I MEAN TO KILL him; give me a moment. I promise, Megan. I promise, Courtney. Just a moment. The child, he really doesn’t look so much like her. Quite a bit like his father, quite a bit like me. Much easier to do it, then. I mean to.

I MEAN TO: I’M beyond the reach of mercy, assuming there was ever mercy in me. I can do it.

I CAN: I’M SURE OF IT.

I CANNOT.

I DROP THE PEN. My face falls to my empty hands. I’m weak; my heart gasps with light. Give me your kisses of fire. I’m miserable in my failures.

THREE DAYS LATER, GIORGIO comes up through the floor of my room. I’m lying on my bed, my hands at my sides stale with my failure to avenge things irrefutably heinous. I lie on my bed considering all our fatherhoods. Giorgio calls me from across the room, his head poking up out of the ground. Listen my friend, he says, the regatta’s tomorrow. If you want to go, you must come with me now. I move myself with great effort to sit up, and place my feet heavily on the floor. There’s only one thing, I tell him. Of course, says Giorgio. Someone, I tell him, is coming with us.