Steve Erickson: Tours of the Black Clock

The group of them sort of huddled against each other before him. After he heard their lies he didn’t even see them anymore. He kept looking ashore, at the town. He paced and waited, thirty minutes, an hour. Not a single one of the passengers worked up the courage to ask when they were going back. Two hours passed; it was nearly midnight. And then, like the man who must scream to himself, if in no place other than his own heart, as he hurls himself into the chasm beyond the cliffs edge, he leapt, though it was only inches, from the edge of the boat to Davenhall Island, and went to look for her.

HE HADN’T BEEN ON the island ten minutes before all the townspeople knew he was there. Even though it was midnight, when most of them were asleep, all it took was one witness, a man or woman reading by the window perhaps, who happened to glance out his window and see the sailor with the white hair striding down the street. At which point the man or woman in the window would have jumped from his or her chair and run into the back bedroom to wake the rest of the family with the news. Ten minutes and it was all over town. The general assumption was that the appearance, after so many years, of the boy with white hair, who grew up to spend his life sailing back and forth to the home he left and had surely grown insane in the process, could only be a harbinger. Something dreadful was inevitable, a storm moving upriver from the east; or the sinking of Davenhall Island altogether, after decades of its inhabitants honeycombing its innards with tombs they didn’t fill; or herds of silver buffalo sweeping everything in their path: animals and birds and boats and tourist groups and lost Asian tribes in a dying ghost town.

There’s a girl in a blue dress, he said to Judy in the door of her tavern.

She was wiping the counter and picking up the furniture. Racking up the glasses, casually drying her hands on an apron. She came from behind the counter and crossed the room to him.

I’m looking for a girl in a blue dress, he said again, have you seen her?

She didn’t say anything for a moment, as though still listening to sentences said between them that neither uttered; and then she turned from him just slightly, and brought her hand flying across his face.

He staggered a little, his eyes flared.

“You son of a bitch,” she whispered, “your own mother might have died and you wouldn’t budge off that God damned boat. All those years and you had no use for anything in this town, and now the thing that brings you back is a girl in a blue dress.”

He swallowed hard but steeled himself: That’s right, he told her.

She wiped her hands some more on her apron, though the hands were already dry and the apron was already wet. “I haven’t seen any girl,” she just said, “don’t worry about it, there will be other girls.” She added, “You should be careful, these are modern times. You should be careful.” She almost laughed at him.

That isn’t what this is, he just said. I wouldn’t have come for that, if that was what this was. Then he turned and walked out of the bar.

Out in the street a gust almost blew him over. He pulled his faded blue coat around him and the wind ripped the last of the gold buttons off its stitches. Across mainstreet was the hotel where he was born and raised; he was startled to see a light in his mother’s window, and the form of someone watching him. He only turned up his collar and headed toward the other end of the island. He strolled up mainstreet through the dust of the wind that was silver like razors; he went from door to door rattling them on their hinges to find them locked. He put his elbow to the windows and one by one knocked them in: this was the sound of Davenhall, the shriek of the wind and the blistering of windows, all up and down the street. The Chinese hadn’t been wrong then to believe a storm had come to them from the river. Families huddled in their houses waiting for it to pass; finally the storm reached the ice, where it stood before the white and black machine that never stopped churning. In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else’s in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north. He left the ice machine and headed for the cemetery. To bury something, he said to himself. At the cemetery the wind was harder, because it faced the east of the river where the other side could never quite be seen, but from which came the red trains on the tracks high above the water. There the trees were bare of obituaries, the graves silent. He stood in the marsh that lay shadowstunned and bleeding up worms between his feet, and faced the sky. He could not call her name because he didn’t know it. It isn’t the time to look for her, not at night, he said to himself; and yet only in the dark would he have found the courage and desperation. Only in the dark would the frequency have been so far beyond denial. It isn’t the time, he said to himself, to look for her body in the river, if she tried to escape by swimming; or to look for the remains of a stray boat, if she believed there was any other boat to take her back. But there are no other boats, he said to himself. And he wasn’t ready yet to accept that she wasn’t here.

There was only one other place to look, of course.

He wondered what he’d say. He practiced confessions in his mind. He recalled all the confessions he’d made up as a boy, all the confessions he’d put into the mouths of the girls he met on the river. Those confessions didn’t apply. Those were confessions that begged never to be forgiven. This was not a confession offered to or received from any lover. This would be a confession to a woman with gray hair who had borne him. She wasn’t in the window anymore when he reached mainstreet again, but the light was still on, the only one in the hotel: he had an overwhelming premonition that he would mount the stairs of the hotel, reach the room and find the door open, with the two of them, the girl and his mother, talking, waiting for him grimly. He understood that in fact the destiny of this girl in the blue dress had been to bring him back to face something, no doubt his own failure, from which he had formulated contempt not for himself, who deserved it, but his past and his home, which did not. He wasn’t sure what else there might be to face unless it was the night he had left, and the echo, like the light of a nova, of the man he’d found dead at his mother’s feet.

It had been an old man. Even old he’d still been a huge man, with red hair that had turned gold with the years, like the way leaves die.

Now the man who had white hair his whole life came in the hotel and, remembering hard, stumbled to the bottom of the stairs and found his way up to the next floor. He came down the hall to his mother’s door. It wasn’t open as he had foreseen, but it wasn’t closed either, not entirely. He could push it open, and he did.

The girl with the blue dress was not there. His mother stood in the middle of the room, gazing long into her memories. She wasn’t standing in exactly the same place she’d been fifteen years before, but it was close. And in much the same way as years before, there was the passage of probably five seconds before she turned away from her memories to look at him.

FOR SEVERAL SECONDS, ACTUALLY it seems to her like almost a minute, she knows he’s there in the door. In a way she’s been expecting him. She saw him in the street an hour ago as he rampaged among the windows. She doesn’t know why he’s here but she knows it’s nothing small that could bring him back onto the island. And once on the island it was probably not possible that he wouldn’t come here and see her now. So she’s not surprised. But she waits a few moments before she turns to look at him. There’s no recrimination in it.