Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

IN NICE, I USE the rest of Giorgio’s money to get us a small room in the back of a kitchen run by Original Germans. The room’s on the upper floor; it’s bare and shabby but we have our own stairway leading down to an alley. In the mornings for breakfast there’s bread and coffee; I have to feed him. I constantly ask him if he needs to go to the toilet since I don’t want to change him or clean him. Sometimes we walk along a street that leads to the beach, where the cafes are filled with Original Germans attended to by New Germans who used to be French. The vineyards in the hills sixty kilometers from here were scorched years ago in order to build the camps, and the French say that there’s been this smell in the air ever since. One tastes it in the food and wine. I don’t know what we’re doing here except that I’m compelled by something, I guess I’ve been compelled since I stopped writing in the blue sinking city. We’ve been released, the two of us, by the birth: there’s nothing more for me to write, there’s nothing more for him to read. We’re left to flee what I wrote and he read. Quickly I’ve run out of money and have asked the German who runs the kitchen if I can work off the fare of our room. I’m sure in other circumstances, when rooms in Nice have been at a premium, he’d have thrown us out, but the fact is no one likes the way the wine tastes anymore, the taste of the camps, the taste of vineyards scorched twenty years ago. The German is a short man with curly gray hair and a bushy mustache. He figures he might as well get something out of the room, so he hires me but only on the condition the old man works too. The old man can’t go to the bathroom by himself, I tell the German, what do you expect him to do around here? He can wipe off tables, the German answers, it’s the easiest thing in the world, to run a wet rag over a table. He asks us if we’re original or new. I’m new, I tell him. He considers this and asks, The old man? He’s original? Yes, I almost answer, the original Original, but I remember this isn’t really so. Austrian, I tell the German. The German puts me to work washing dishes and Z stands in a soiled apron staring at tabletops with the brown water of a dirty rag running down his fingers. The German screams at him and the tourists eating their lunch laugh until the old man loses control of himself, which makes the German rail all the more. Fucking Austrian, he shouts. I take the old man upstairs and change him and lay him on the bed. You’re going to get us thrown out, I tell him. He clutches my arm from the side of his bed asking, And my son is well? He says it as though he means me.

We live in the room above the German kitchen through the following winter. The city doesn’t go untouched by war; there are American submarines off the coast, and sometimes everyone’s put on alert. The Germans, not so entirely in control of matters, have problems with looters, and there’s a mass escape from one of the camps north of here. A number of the prisoners are picked up outside of town. On my days off from washing dishes I take the old man with me down to the beach where he sits on a low wall that runs around the bay. The palms and the Mediterranean sky are gray with silt like an African crater. I walk along the water, every once in a while gazing over my shoulder to make sure the old man’s still there on the wall. This one particular time I see him stumbling across the rocks toward the water in his usual trance; I have to catch him so he doesn’t walk right into the ocean. “Come on,” I tell him, taking him by the arm and leading him back across the rocks. Who knows what it is he thinks he sees out there in the ocean? “Just sit here,” I say, putting him down on the wall again, “what did you think was out there, Russia? Do you think we’re in Berlin, with the crowds ecstatically crying your name? No one’s ecstatically crying your name anymore, so just sit down here.” He sits; his feet don’t even touch the ground. His eyes and nose run with the cold of the air. “Did you think,” I say to him, “you’d take a little swim perhaps? A little swim in the sea to make you young again? Did you think you could wash something off?” I stand there in front of him with my hands in my pockets while his face runs. German soldiers walk along the promenade of the city; no one pays any attention to us. “You can’t wash anything off, you old idiot,” I say to him, “there’s nothing you can wash off. You old shit. Do you think you’re deserving of kindness now, because you’re old and pitiful? You’re an old pitiful shit.” He doesn’t register anything I say. Sometimes he’s about to answer, but it’s hardly ever comprehensible, and I have no reason to suppose it has anything to do with what I say to him. “Did you rack your brains,” I ask him after a bit, “did you and the boys rack your brains at night there in the Chancellery, trying to figure out just how evil you could be? You must have racked your brains. You couldn’t have just been born with such abysmal visions, is that possible? Racked your brains and when you came up with something terrible, you must have all said, But no, that just isn’t quite terrible enough. Certainly we can think of something even more terrible than that. All the generals and bureaucrats and scientists racking their brains to think of things even evil incarnate would find freakish, even the Beast would cower before. Something with a modern touch.” I shake my head. “Well somewhere out there,” I say to him, nodding at the gray sea and the gray sky beyond it, “somewhere out there is a Twentieth Century that crushed you. Somewhere out there is a Twentieth Century that wouldn’t abide you. That reached out of the hole, the collapsed center of its clock, and struck at you and pulled you down. So humiliated you that you felt no choice but to leap into the hole and fall forever. Somewhere that didn’t care that it had devoured past and future, that didn’t believe time and history and destiny could hold goodness hostage. You and me, old buddy,” I say, “we’re going to find that place. The Twentieth Century that doesn’t exist, except in the sense that one needs to believe in it, as one once used to believe in God, that’s where we’re going. Pack your bag. We’re going there, old man. You piece of old shit. You slime, piece of excremental slime. Bloody fucking piss-blasted fart from the intestines of history, you—” I stop, sputtering, breathing heavily, and look at him. I lean over and spit right in his face. He doesn’t even blink. A big gob right in his eye; he doesn’t even meet my gaze. He doesn’t even feel my spit running down his cheek, it doesn’t matter, his whole face is wet with cold, the tears and snot of him. “Shit,” I can only say, and take his handkerchief from his pocket and wipe him. I lift him by the arm and we go back to our room; it takes us a long while to make our way up the street. In the dark of the room I carry him to his bed.

Before I get a chance to turn on the light, I know there’s someone else in the room. Who is it? I say in the dark. I turn on the light and there are three of them, hunkered down in the corner. They don’t have to say anything, I know they’re Jews who broke out of the camp where the escape was yesterday. A boy and girl in their late teens who might be either siblings or lovers; there’s an older man with them, about my age, perhaps a little younger though he looks older. We’ll only stay tonight, the boy finally says, without explanation because he knows I don’t need one. His mind’s racing, trying to think what he’ll do if I say no or try and turn them in; he knows they’ve put me in a bind, that I could get myself shot for keeping them. He knows that while he’s much younger than I, he’s nowhere as big, if it should come to that. I look at them and then over at Z on the bed; they look at the bed too. We all watch Z on the bed for a minute before I say, All right. I get this crazy idea in my head for a moment about the third, older man: I had a friend once, I say, who went to Paris. But the older man isn’t Carl. That night I smuggle in some food for them. You’ve very brave and kind to do this, the girl tells me. Please don’t say that, I ask her. After we eat, the girl goes over to Z and lifts him and begins to help him eat. I can’t stand to see it. Please, I say, don’t do that, don’t help him like that. But he’s an old man, the girl says. He’s a piece of shit, I tell her. All of them now look at me in silent, hurt shock. Reproachfully, the girl continues to feed Z in defiance. No one speaks anymore of my kindness or courage, and in the pit of early morning, before dawn, the three are gone.