Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

They cut down Banning Jainlight and bury him in the marsh.

MY NAME IS BANNING Jainlight, a voice says to her fifteen years later; but it’s only a voice in her head, after all, and she herself gave him that name. No dead man lies at her feet now. When she turns to the doorway and sees her son there, as she did fifteen years before, she has no reason to believe the voice she hears in her head speaks in his head as well. When the whitehaired rivermonk sees that the girl in the blue dress is not in his mother’s room as he’d expected to find her, he bolts from the doorway just as he did the time before, his second such lapse, though this one cannot be said to interrupt a life of innocence. He runs back out into the street, stepping on the glass from the windows he broke in his evening’s rampage. Greek Judy stands watching him from the doorway of her tavern. When Marc arrives at the boat, the passengers are still huddled in terror, waiting to be delivered back to shore; the journey is furious. At her tavern, Judy can hear the tourists’ screams from out of the river’s fog. Business is going to be off awhile, she thinks, or perhaps even says out loud, though no one else is there to say for sure.

AFTER THAT, HIS FURY subsided into a gentler sorrow. He never saw again the moment of profound isolation on the river. He went into the river, not long after his night on the island, to release from the boat’s bottom whatever of the previous captain was still there; but there was nothing there. He always thought of going back to see his mother. Greek Judy brought him food and beer; she became tender toward his torment. One night about three years later she came to him with no food or beer but news, and he went onto the island for the last time. The street outside the hotel was filled with Chinese trying to get up to the hall outside her door, like scavengers waiting to pick over not his mother’s possessions but the mystery of who she was: Over my own dead body perhaps, he told them, but not hers. At the top of the stairs her door stood open; for a moment he was about to call out, Mother, that she might hear him from her bed as he turned the door’s corner. Instead he called her by her name. Turning the door’s corner, there was a split second when he saw her white hair on the pillow and believed it to be his own.

Dania, he said. He saw her move slightly; he came to her side; his white hair tangled with hers. She looked up, very old and wrinkled, the scar that had always been at the corner of her mouth now just another of many lines. She put her hand on his face. In her eyes were theoretical tears. For a moment she was living very distinctly in the pain of bearing him. For a moment she was under the leaves of the Pnduul forest, the roof of the Vienna apartment, the tarpaulin of the boat on the river. What fell on her, however, what she heard about her, was not rain. It was a tapping; she knew what was tapping. She knew what now raised its fist to her door. Her son, clutching her, began to say something but she moved her fingers to his mouth to hold back his words. “I’ve already forgiven everyone,” she said, her long exile finally finished. “Now it’s their turn to forgive me.”

She danced home.

NO ONE WAS GOING to hang her in any tree; he knew that for certain. Yet over the years the cemetery marsh had become so occupied it seemed there was no place left for her, and so Marc buried his mother, wrapped in a white sheet, in the arms of the man who had come to her that night fifteen years before, though in fact nothing was left of him except bones and mud. He covered her and then he and the woman that his mother had named Judy Garcia walked arm and arm back up mainstreet where they drank alone in her tavern, not a tourist to be seen. Sorry I hit you that time, she mumbled near the end. Sorry I deserved it, he answered. When he smiled sadly she said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile, even a sad smile is nice. He leaned over the bar and when he kissed her forehead her face became buried in his beard. She laughed because it tickled her; he thought it was something else. He pulled on his old buttonless coat and started toward the beach at dusk, and when he came to his boat the girl in the blue dress, blond and unchanged and unaged since the last time he saw her years before, was waiting for him.

The rivermonk and the young girl sailed across the river where they caught the last bus into Samson. Halfway there Kara fell asleep on his shoulder. In Samson they ate in a diner and got a room at a motel five minutes down the highway; there were two beds and Marc said, Take your pick. She picked one and he took the other. The radio didn’t work, the filament of the table lamp between them muttered on and off. Outside their door was a Coke machine that someone seemed to use every ten minutes. Marc didn’t ask Kara where she’d been all that time or what she’d done. He didn’t tell her of his mother because he figured she knew about that. They didn’t make plans. He lay on his bed in the dark, listening to the sounds of the highway which didn’t seem so unlike the sounds of the ice machine when he was a boy. He listened to her fall asleep, and sometime in the middle of the night, when he’d fallen asleep as well, he had a nightmare: it was about his father. He woke to find her stroking his forehead and soothing him. She went on soothing him beneath the breeze that came through the window from the highway, and when he fell asleep again this time he dreamed of her growing up in the midwest. From the porch of her teacher’s house Kara named all the stars in the sky, and watched the leaves blow across the buried bridges of the plains. He heard the girl’s voice in his dream, and felt the blue fabric of her dress against his face. He woke calling her in the morning, when the motel room was filled with sun; and in the middle of that sun her bed was empty. When he went to the motel office to pay for the room, a woman told him that Kara had left on another bus three hours before.

LIVING AND MIGRATING WITH the silver buffalo, he followed her trail seven years. The white hair on his arms grew longer and more savage, the hair on his face covered it so that no one would ever detect a sad smile again. On a mountain near the top of the world, he found her; she was living and working in an observatory, alone and happy. It was a place nearer the fiery field above her. He and the buffalo lived in the woods nearby. He didn’t go to her, accepting that she had chosen to live by herself; he watched her stars with her, outside her walls, and though he’d discarded his coat long before, and though the coat had lost its gold buttons long before that, he now wagered them on which star she was studying tonight. The odds favored him. He fought off the beasts that came threatening her. Sometimes in her doorway, she called out, Who’s there. He lay low until she convinced herself it was no one. After many more years had passed, he realized one day he hadn’t heard or seen her recently, and with trepidation he invaded the observatory to determine she was in no danger. Almost as though she was asleep, she lay in the center of the arena under the observatory’s open dome; the telescope was pointed at her as though the stars were studying her back. Because there was no way of giving her up to the field in which she belonged, he left her there. He’d seen enough burials anyway.

He migrated even further north with the silver buffalo; they seemed to know where they meant to go. Across the snowy flats, man and herd traveled in a steady vapor. The mining towns became more and more scarce, the signs of life fewer and fewer. They were running somewhere, and when they arrived at the place, the snow was falling. He knew he couldn’t go further with them, that it wasn’t his place. So he had to watch them leave him behind; he noted how they hurled themselves onward, and he pitied anything that fell before their path. Through the blinding falling snow he could barely see them disappear, but he followed their tracks nonetheless, and the sound of them, right up to the mouth of an arctic cave. As he stood there listening to them disappear into the dark of the cave, there roared into his face, from out of the darkness, an inexplicable blast of jungle heat.