Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

I DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME. Dania. Forgive me.

A MOMENT AGO MY heart woke me. I look around and it’s dark but still early, I hear the tourists in the tavern across the street, which means the last boat hasn’t yet left for the mainland. I can barely move from the way I’m stricken, from beneath the weight. I’m angry with myself for having gone seventeen years without ever finding the courage. I don’t have any time now. Time knew I was here all along. Now I have only moments. I have only one last burst of havoc in me. I stagger from my bed and lurch across my room to the door. In the hall it seems to take forever to get to her door. Maybe it is forever. Maybe it’s the moment into which one’s whole life falls. At her door my hand slides across the surface when I try to manage a knock, I cannot manage it. I can barely manage the knob. When the door opens, she’s standing there in the middle of the room; no son or lover waits with her. She turns to look at me. Her face when she sees me is inscrutable. I look for a signal but she gives none.

Forgive me?

Lying there on the floor at her feet, I’m aware of the boy coming into the doorway. He stares at me in shock. Is it simply the sight of a dead man, or is it any man at all in his mother’s company? Does the part of my soul attached to his give it a small tug? Does he feel the times I nearly killed him? Does he feel the times I finally saved him? Does he recognize in me the darkness from which I tried to create him? He looks at me, at his mother, and bolts. And somewhere, even in the silence of a forgiveness that never was given, the two parallel rivers of the Twentieth Century, which forked the only other time she ever saw me, flow back into one.

FOR AN HOUR OR so there’s some confusion as the room fills with townspeople and tourists from the tavern across the street. A doctor confirms the news they’re all waiting for, which is that I am indeed dead. But who is he? everyone’s asking; no one remembers me from the tavern or coming over on the boat earlier that day. “How could anyone not notice him,” the doctor says, “the man’s a giant.” I’ve never seen him before in my life, she tells them, still inscrutable. You remember me, I’m thinking, looking up at her: Vienna. In the window. The townspeople accept my anonymity with solemn resolve; it takes twelve of them to drag me out, after the tourists have gone their way. They’re none too delicate about it either. My head bounces down the stairs like a bowling ball. For a moment I thought she was going to stop them, but she didn’t; for a moment I think the woman who runs the tavern is going to stop them as well, but she doesn’t either. They drag me down the street and through the thicket outside the cemetery marsh until my backside’s raw; if I were alive I’d crack the little fuckers’ skulls together like eggs. In the cemetery at the edge of the island, before the wild night, they must bend the tree all the way over to the ground in order to fasten me to it, since they can’t lift me; when they release the tree I think I’m going to be catapulted into space. But the tree only groans back to something midway its original height, the last thing on earth that will ever succumb to the size of me.

I’M UP HERE EIGHT days. It’s not at all bad, truth be told. The weather’s fine and I watch out over the wide blue river, fascinated with the red train that crosses high over the water on its endless track. It reminds me of being on the ferris wheel in the Praterstern. I’m warm in the sunlight and birds visit my arms. I have this one melancholy fantasy that she’ll come to me one day and look up and say, I forgive you. This doesn’t happen but on the other hand it could happen at any time. She could be on her way here now, coming to say, I remember you from that day, before the candleshop.

This doesn’t feel like damnation.

I keep waiting for the damnation. As though it’ll arrive in the form of a black bird, and begin with the eating of my eye. But the birds don’t eat me, rather they seem content to watch the river perched from me. So I wait for damnation; it’s confusing that it doesn’t come. I’ve expected it so long, I spent so long earning it. It makes no sense that God gives me this reprieve, I’d have thought he wouldn’t waste a second. I’d have thought he’d snatch me the first moment I slipped over, as though there wasn’t another moment to lose. In my time, I have no reason but to believe that whatever God exists is the God of revenge.

The God of revenge in a century of revenge. It doesn’t seem possible that this might have been the century of redemption after all. Not this century, not for me. After all the things, it doesn’t seem possible that somewhere I committed some slight, insignificant act of kindness that redeems everything. One small act of kindness that wiped the rest of it away. And yet, in a century when time and space have liberated themselves of all reference points, perhaps one small good thing owns a universe unto itself, and a thousand monstrous worlds of evil must submit themselves to its love. I don’t understand anymore. I’m only here at the end of an island where a river becomes one, waiting for God to come damn me, or for her to come forgive me; I wait for her to whisper my name from the window of her room. I almost killed him, really. I came that close. I held his little head in the palm of my hand and nearly popped it open the moment he was born; only a lapse prevented me. It wasn’t that I was good or anything. It was only a lapse. I almost drowned him that day in the flood not twenty yards from here, from where I then carried him to the hotel; I didn’t have the strength to kill him, was all. I meant to do it, hold him beneath the water until the last bubble up from the graves beneath our feet was his. That I carried him back was only weakness. Nothing good about it. Fuck the God who redeems me, I say.

But God doesn’t believe me. I guess I don’t believe me either.

Before his blue redemptive face above me, I’ve already forgotten the things I’ve cried out for, and the cry itself forgets its own name.

EVERY AFTERNOON DANIA LEAVES her hotel and goes down to the shore of the island to see if her son is returning. Sometimes she spots him lying face down, staring into the water from the edge of the boat captained by a man to whom she no longer speaks. Rejected in this way, she returns to town. After a week and a half, she goes to the cemetery.

The huge nameless man still hangs in the tree. Birds sit on his fingers and the top of his head, staring out toward the river. Each day several of the townspeople come by to hear if the man has yet cried out his name; each day the tree sags a little more beneath him. Dania holds her arms together with determination, as though she’s waiting as well. She studies him each day. The Chinese quiz her constantly. She tells them she’s never seen him before; she doesn’t understand why they won’t believe her.

By the tenth day she’s begun to feel harassed. Also, the body’s become an unhappy sight. She stands in the sunlight watching him awhile before she finally says, “His name was Banning Jainlight.”

The Chinese who are present run into town to get the others. The others return and she says, still watching him, “His name was Banning Jainlight.”

You’re lying, someone says. Like you did many years ago about the woman you called Consuelo Garcia, you’re making it up.

She says, turning, “Let him rot up there then.” They call out after her as she walks back toward town. She shrugs, “Do what you want with him.”