Steve Erickson: Tours of the Black Clock

He’s shocked, she can tell, that she’s become so old. What did you think, she says to herself, that time ticks to the clock of your memories? Her hair’s as white now as his ever was. We look more like mother and son now, she says to herself, than we ever did.

It so happens that she’s been thinking and remembering the same as he, remembering and thinking of that night. It so happens she hears the same echoes of the old man who came to die at her feet. Fifteen years later she hears his voice as though he’s still here on the floor; she hears him talking at this very moment and so does her son who stands in the doorway in silence. The mother and son look at each other and together they listen to the voice of a man who hasn’t been alive for fifteen years; neither mother nor son knows where the voice comes from now, and in fact both assume it’s only a voice in their heads. Neither of them believes that the voice, recreated from the memory of what it might be saying to them if it was actually speaking at this moment, is now saying to each of them the same thing. Neither believes they hold the ghost of this long dead stranger in common.

You remember me, the voice can be heard saying. Well maybe you don’t, maybe you forgot me immediately after I left your sight as surely as I continued to remember you for the rest of my life. It changed the world, my seeing you. Literally it changed it but that’s, you know, another story. Maybe it only changed my world. It only changed my Twentieth Century. Your world, your century, that’s another story. It was in Vienna. You were in a window. You were only a girl then, I don’t guess more than fifteen years old. The year was 1938, when we held the body of the long dead Twentieth Century in common.

T.O.T.B.C.—3

MY NAME IS BANNING JAINLIGHT, the voice continues. The year is 1917: I am born. I remember it. I remember leaving her, the rush of it, my mother banning me from her, though it wasn’t she who named me. That was my other mother. I had two.

I remember the long fall down such a short red passageway, as I fell I saw troops on the march, fields afire and black cannons in the sun, riots in the alleys of Russia and messiahs in the dunes of eastern deserts, and One fallen angel after another pulling himself up onto the face of a new hour. First one hand is visible then the second, nails grasping desperately for a hold of something, then the top of the head comes into sight, then the glistening brow, the harsh straining eyes, the grimacing mouth as he pulls himself up and finally hoists his body the rest of the way, lying there on the face of a new hour heaving for air. After the first, the rest come one by one, the fallen angels. They’ve come to change everything. Not just the countryside. They haven’t come just to build a city or two. Cities can be built in any hour at all. They aren’t here just to construct a canal or a bridge in the moonlight. They’ve come to change everything . They’ve come to change the very act of selfportraiture, disassembling it and then reconstructing it from some new vantage point of the soul, some corner of the soul’s room that’s been blocked eight thousand years by a chair we always thought we needed, a tablelamp we were always told was some heirloom too valuable to move, let alone give away. Out with the fucking chair. Out with the tablelamp that burned out long ago. Everything : they’ve come to disassemble and then reconstruct, from some blind spot in the middle of the room that’s always obstructed by something no matter where you stand, the clock. A small nearsighted German with wild white hair, who cannot count the very numbers from which he writes his wild new poetry, just makes it over the top now, catching his breath.

That big redheaded American galoot fumbling his way up after him, that’s me. When the German’s finished, I’ll just be getting started.

I see all this at the moment I’m coming out of my mother. I’m no sooner born than at the end of my rope. I pass out awhile and when I come to, a few things have been switched around on me and it’s a while before I catch on.

It’s 1917, and the clock is ticking.

IT’S 1925 AND I’M eight. I live on my father’s ranch in west Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border, in the nicest house I’ll ever know, white and blue, sound and certain. But … doesn’t this sound like I’m visiting ? “I live on my father’s ranch. …” The house faces south. My father’s name is Philip; Jainlight’s an English name. He’s a burly little tyrant, a tyrant to the stable hands, the Indians worst of all. I never see kindness from him to anyone except once or twice when we go into town and he’ll buy a little present for one of the women strolling up and down the walk, assuming Alice isn’t there of course.

Alice is the woman he’s married to. She’s the woman I know as my mother, and if that really sounds like I’m visiting, you’re starting to get the picture. I also have two older brothers, Oral and Henry. Oral’s six years older and Henry’s four. They act like my father and look like their mother. Oral treats the old men who tend to the horses worse than my father does, he probably believes they’re our slaves. Henry might grow up to do something really evil like run for political office, if he were destined to grow up at all, which is something I’ll take care of later on. He sweet-talks Alice and steals money from her. The fact is that even at eight I realize not only that he’s stealing her money but that she knows it and likes it. Alice grew up in Pittsburgh and came to my father’s house so she could fill it up with bric-a-brac from the Old World. She wears her hair in tight little vaguely purplish curls. Her once-darkness has been passed on to her two oldest sons, and Oral has on his mouth the small birthmark that Alice has a little higher on her cheek. The only thing I share with any of this family is my father’s red hair.

I’m visiting, like I say. I’m a tourist. I don’t know when I begin to realize this, I think at this point I still haven’t realized it in full. I know of course that my brothers hate me, and my father’s indifferent though no more or less so than to my brothers or my mother or anyone else except the women he sees in the city. Alice doesn’t neglect me in terms of her obligations. When I’m sick she’s there to take care of me, and she attends to my needs no less than to Oral’s or Henry’s. But she’s cordial, you know? She’s hospitable . A hospitable mother, like a concierge in a foreign country. I think she must have had some doubts of her own right from the beginning. But when does a kid figure his family isn’t quite right? How old does he have to become, and how smart? I don’t know yet that it’s just me that’s a tourist. I figure it’s everybody.

I JUST KNOW I’M doing something wrong, and it’s about this time I’m beginning to have an idea what it is. I’m big. At eight I’m two years bigger than normal and getting bigger yet. In a couple of years I’ll be bigger than my father, and in a couple of years after that I’ll be bigger than either of my brothers. It’s a bigness that’s gross in this family, it calls to their attention how much at odds I am with them. My hands are big and my feet are big, I have long arms. I have this big face, this large open face, that leads people to the conclusion I’m a bit of an idiot. It’s a bigness that conveys brutishness without any compensating intelligence. I mean, I come to understand all this later. Now I’m only eight. But I already sense that I’m not only at odds with the family but sometimes my own nature, and later I’ll understand the ways in which my own nature’s at odds with itself. When I lie in bed at night reading all the books from Alice’s library downstairs, I like to think it’s the act of a small boy, I trick myself into thinking this right up to the moment I rip the book down the binding. It just happens, I’m lying there reading and the bigness just comes out, the bigness that the act of reading means to deny, it comes out in my hands and there I am on my bed with half a book in each hand, and pages flying around my head. Then Henry runs downstairs to tell Alice I’m tearing up her books. Later I’ll come to read with the books propped against the bedpost, untouched by me, at arm’s length from an uncontrollable bigness.