Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

GIORGIO WAITS IN MY room while I make my way down the hall. The guards are sleeping. One peers up at me half-consciously, grumbling. I’m going to see the old man, I tell him. Disgruntled, the guard says, All right. He’s talking in his sleep. Perhaps I’ll stay with him tonight, I tell him, or bring him back here. The guard nods and readjusts himself, and the other guard sleeping close by protests the volume of our discussion. I move down the hall and across the larger open hallway that divides my part of the city from the client’s. Some of the lanterns in the hollows of the walls are burned out. At his room I find him sitting in the dark in his same chair, neither asleep nor awake. When I speak to him he responds with an incoherent mumble; he holds the pages I’ve written for him in his arms, presses them to himself. He begins to talk with some excitement; he originally thought he’d name the child August, after his only childhood friend. But recently he’s begun to lean toward Petyr. I lift him by his arms; he’s confused, but then everything confuses him. This isn’t going to work, I’m thinking, they’re watching me. But I bring him with me out into the hallway and we slowly head back to my room, the white pages curled in his fists.

ONE BY ONE I blow out the lanterns that still burn, casting his hallway into pitch black. The blue hall that divides his from mine is now the dark deep blue of night; when we reach its mouth there’s a sudden pandemonium of wings, the old feeble birds of the city panicked and thunderous. The old man’s eyes fly around maniacally at this. We get to my hallway, a dim gold from the last lanterns burning; I blow them out too. The guards stir and groan in disorientation, and then settle back to sleep. I push open the door of my room. Giorgio’s there waiting. For a moment I fear Giorgio will recognize him. He’ll recognize him and hate me, and they’ll all hate me, all the Giorgios and Brunos and Marias who treated me as though I belonged among them. They’ll hate me as they have a right to hate me: this is what I’m thinking there in the doorway of my room. What will the discovery of my deceit do to their village and life, I’m thinking, how will anything ever be the same for them again. In this moment, standing in the doorway of my room, I believe I’ve made a terrible mistake, I believe that once again I’ve corrupted something, when I should simply have said to Giorgio’s offer of escape, Leave me. But Giorgio looks at Z and sees only what in fact Z is, only an old man; and the fisherman helps me set him on the bed where he can rest. Giorgio has brought a brown cloak for me but we wrap it around Z. He’s very old, Giorgio says, it could be a difficult trip for him. But I understand, he adds, that you cannot possibly leave him. We’ll do our best. I nod humbly. We’ll get you another cloak out on the boat, Giorgio says. After the old man has rested a few minutes Giorgio says, with great apology in his voice, It’s important we leave right now. I nod again, silently and we lift the old man up, and Giorgio lowers himself into the tunnel. The old man goes next, and then I follow.

T.O.T.B.C. — 15

BY NOW THEY KNOW we’ve gone. By this morning, when they came to my room and then his, they knew we’d disappeared. Perhaps they’ve scoured the city for us, perhaps they’ve searched the room to find the tunnel. At any rate we’ve left the city, on the afternoon the fishermen’s regatta takes place. With the spray of the lagoon now in my face, I gaze around from my place in the boat, and there are around me several boats, and then I see tens of them, and then hundreds. The city with the blue roof floats in the lagoon behind us. The Adriatic glistens to the east of us. Overhead swirl the German helicopters, I keep glancing up at them. Don’t look at them, Giorgio calls to me through his fixed smile from the other end of the boat. Any moment he’s going to understand about the old man. Sooner or later the word will be out, a manhunt will be underway, underway at this very moment by the helicopters above us. The fishermen were right. There are too many boats for the Germans; the lagoon’s filled with them. I’m overwhelmed by the sight of them. I hunch down in the boat, and at my feet, lying in the boat’s bottom, wrapped in the brown cloak, Z shivers from the cold of the sea, befuddled by the very blueness of a sky that’s bluer than any blue ceiling. I look up from the old man to Giorgio, who smiles. I look around at all the other Giorgios sailing on all sides of me. The boats dazzle the lagoon with colored flags that fly from their masts; the white of the swept water erupts in the air. I can’t bring myself to look back at the blue city again, I expect it to have sunk altogether now that we’ve gone, that if I look back once more there’ll be only a huge silver bubble rising from beneath the sea. I’m a little queasy from the boat and the panic. The end of the regatta and the Italian mainland are in sight. On the mainland they’ll certainly capture us; I’m thinking how I’ve used all the Giorgios and Brunos to smuggle out of exile the most evil man in the world. With the mainland just moments away, and with the sight of German soldiers lining the shore, Giorgio now says to me, When we reach the shore we won’t have time to say goodbye. So goodbye now. Goodbye, I say to him. I look around at the fishermen on the other boats, and the colors of the regatta flags; they’re all looking back at me, even fishermen I’ve never seen, fishermen who seem to have come out of nowhere, out of unseen islands. They’re all smiling goodbye.

Z AND I ARE not arrested at the mainland. I pull the old man up from the boat’s bottom and we climb out, trying to lose ourselves among the hundreds of Italians milling around under the eyes of the Germans on the ridge of the banks. The old man and I are wearing brown cloaks and hoods like two monks, one small and shriveled and the other oversized and lame; we’re surrounded by fishermen, the same ones who smiled at me from their boats, who now take no notice of us at all. Everyone begins to head into the town on the mainland. Z and I travel with them, soldiers watch us as we pass. At the mainland station I pull from my cloak a wad of the Eurodeutsch currency Giorgio’s put there for us; it takes most of it to buy two tickets for the train. The station’s swarming with German soldiers. The whole thing seems ridiculous, it’s obvious we’ll be arrested any moment. We climb onto the train heading for Milan and, beyond Milan, the territories that were formerly France. The train’s packed. Someone gives up a seat for the old man; I set him there with his train ticket sticking out of his coat pocket underneath the cloak. In his hands he still holds pathetically the last pages I wrote before leaving the sinking city, the ink on them having long since run in wet indecipherable streaks. I take my own place out in the car’s aisle. After thirty minutes there’s a shudder beneath our feet and the station, with its platforms full of German soldiers, begins to drift past us. In another thirty minutes the lagoon is far behind us. Halfway to Milan a conductor wanders up the car and punches our tickets without a second look or thought.

In Milan we don’t get off the train. I find a window seat for the old man. He’s dazed, stupid with silence; he stares straight ahead. From the window of the train I buy some bread and wine from one of the passing food vendors. After a little less than an hour we pull out again. At the border they’ll take us, I know that. I have my eye out at all times for the officials. No one carries passports anymore within Greater Germany but at the territories someone will no doubt want to see our identification. Occasionally one soldier or another comes through the car looking us over. Two hours outside Milan, the train’s full again, and the conductor and a train official and two guards come down the aisle. With them is also a German lieutenant; the passengers watch him with fear. Everything’s routine until our cabin, where the conductor asks Z for his identification. Z sits in stunned incomprehension. The lieutenant with the conductor and train official and two guards is considering me rather closely. The conductor and official begin to berate the old man; then the lieutenant says to me, Are you with this old man? There’s no reason for him to assume I am, since Z is sitting in the car and I’m standing in the aisle. No one has told him, as far as I know, that I’m with the old man. After a moment I say, Yes, I’m with the old man. The conductor and the official turn to me and ask me for my papers, and after another moment I tell them I don’t have my papers. He doesn’t have his either, I say, nodding at my client. The conductor and the official take great indignant satisfaction in this news and the guards seem about to arrest me, when the lieutenant raises his hand and says to me, Where did you get on this train? Thinking about it, I’m prepared to say Milan, but instead I decide to astonish him with the truth. He nods at this, looks at the old man, looks back at me. Then he signals the conductor, train official and guards to move on to the next cabin. Dumbfounded, they compose themselves and comply. The five of them pass by me; I’m a bit dumbfounded myself. I’m trying to study the face of the German lieutenant for an answer, but he never looks my way again.