Steve Erickson: Tours of the Black Clock

Having exited the century at one end and entered it again at the other, the year was 1901 when he finally came to a village in northern Asia. He lived in the village awhile and when he understood that it was his time as it had been for others, he left to make his way down the mountains to the polar sea. He came to a bay clogged with ice. He plunged his old whitehaired body into the sea and swam to the first iceblock from where he spent the days remaining to him leaping from one block to the next, putting his ear to the surface of each. As with the ice he’d listened to as a boy on the island, the bergs in the sea were clearly ticking. What he now searched for was the one block of ice that melted in time to the beating of his own heart. He didn’t have long to ascertain this about each one, since listening at any great length would freeze his ear to the ice, a prospect he considered no better than hanging from a tree. When he finally found the right one, he was too exhausted at first to feel much relief; only after he lay there some time, during which his fingertips and heels, and then the hair of his body, froze to the ice, did he feel some peace. He dozed. The ice, caught in a southward current, became smaller and smaller as it drifted off on its own course. For a while he allowed himself to remember everything; one thing after another came into his head, all the things he remembered of the years to come, until the ice had turned completely into the sea. Through the warm fog of his last breath, he watched the memories of a hundred ghosts drift skyward to finally and vainly burst.