Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

I write the first thing I’ve ever written tonight. I’m watching the Twentieth Century through my windows, though I have no way of knowing yet if it’s my Twentieth Century or another, if the 1917 I see through one window or the 1928 through this window or the 1989 through that last window are the ones I know or have known or will know. So I open the windows and then I just see the snow, and I write a story about the white horse in the barn. The snow is blue in the moon and the drainage ditches my father built three years ago are gurgling a little in the light, the ice breaking up a little, pretty unusual for a Christmas night. Wonder where such a hot jungle blast might be coming from that it breaks up the ice and makes the ditches flow so that in the moon they’re silver strings unraveling across the valley? I write a story about the white horse as it runs in the snow, which of course it wouldn’t do. The snow comes down but the ditches keep on unraveling with a heat that insists upon itself, like blood that won’t stop coursing through a body after the heart has ended pumping it; and in the white of the night’s snowfall and the silver of the running drainage all that’s to be seen of a white horse is the red of her eyes. It flits across the valley like fireflies. It burns in the snow until the horse sleeps, freezing where it stands.

IT’S THE NEXT YEAR and I wake one morning to the thought of a woman I’ve never seen and cannot even remember five seconds later. The only thing that remembers her is in the middle of me, and it won’t stop remembering until it spills its memory across the bedsheets. From this point onward I am erect like America. At the end of the year my cock is one of the few things in America that doesn’t crash groundward without effort.

IT’S 1931 AND I’M FOURTEEN. My father’s ranch is hurt by the Depression but not wiped out. Around us farms fail left and right, the ones financed by the banks. There’s unrest in the valleys, the farmers and their hands seized by the malice of hopelessness. Every evening there’s smoke in the hills, and sometimes looking from my window I think the hills are shifting across the horizon. And then I realize it’s only that they’re alive with desperate men, thousands of them. In the nights when their hands are filled with torches it’s as though the world’s on fire, but I’ll come to see such fires the rest of my life. They’re there in the streets of Vienna seven years from now, I can already see them. And the smoke I smell, and the blood in my fourteen-year-old nostrils, is from a fire to come two years from now, fire and blood by my own hands. These fires might seem different, hopeless fires and fires of my own liberation and fires of triumph in the streets of Vienna. But the hate of them is the same, and the heat’s cruel and cold.

I lean out my window and breathe myself as full of it as my lungs can take.

My father puts rifles in the arms of the stablehands and the Indians. They’ll fight if the hills come to the edge of the ranch. My father’s happy enough to kill anything that sighs within earshot. It may or may not be he’s killed things before. Given my own talents, I can guess.

The hills are hungry, and I don’t doubt they’d kill every horse in the stable. Until nothing’s left but the red of their eyes in the snow.

When the crisis ends my father goes into town to drink. Oral and Henry go along. I wake at about four in the morning to the sound of our motorcar pulling up the road, and Oral and Henry propping father under his arms and bringing him in the house down below me. He moans in the living room. Oral and Henry laugh about a girl they met in a speakeasy. I don’t get back to sleep until around dawn, when Oral comes into my room and tells me to get started in the stables.

I’M FIFTEEN. IN THE mornings I lurch into the kitchen, with the middle of me that carries its memories of dreamwomen as hard as steel and big as a president’s monument. The family literally turns away from the sight in shock. Alice has some sort of palpitations by the counter with the flour canisters, and my brothers seethe in fury. Only my father stares with perplexity, his mouth dropping slightly and forgetting to chew. This is, for the rest of them, the most terrifying manifestation of my size yet. It’s almost more than they can live with in the same house, I think.

THINGS I WRITE NOW are also more than Alice can abide: she finds them in my bedroom. For someone in a state of nearly paralyzed mortification she manages to read every word. She takes the matter up with my father. They have a family council of sorts, my father and Alice and my two brothers. They analyze the situation. They speculate as to my psychology and morality and stability. The brothers lobby hard for an institutional solution, but my father settles for a whipping out in the barn and leaving me to sleep with the horses. “Try not to have intimate relations with any of them while you’re out here,” he says when he’s done. His anger seems more personal than the others. “You’re one to talk,” I have the nerve to answer back, and he beats me some more.

It’s 1933. A faultline runs through the epoch. Over here we’ve got Roosevelt, over there they’ve got this guy in Berlin. They’ve got this guy in Russia.

I’m sixteen. The things I see from the windows of my bedroom make less and less sense. Soon a new moment will come with a faultline of its own, and I’ll step to the other side. And on that side it’ll be a long time — perhaps not until the moment I die at the feet of an old woman in a little town on an island I cannot name — before I see anything so clearly again.

It’s you I mean, of course, and it began that afternoon in Vienna when you were still a young girl. And no dreamwoman I ever woke to, before or after, touched you. Nor did I, though it changed everything just to see you, no less than did the small German with wild white hair who wiped the clock clean of numbers altogether.

But that’s later. This is tonight, in 1933, on my father’s ranch. Or rather its outskirts, where the Indians live. And tonight is the night.

HENRY COMES INTO MY room and wakes me up. It’s about eleven o’clock. The moon is whole and though I’ve pulled the curtains across all nine of my windows the moon’s bright enough that they’re like nine white patches on the walls. When I awake Henry’s got his face about two inches from mine. “Hey soldier,” he says. It takes me a few seconds to realize it’s the middle of the night. “You awake?” he says. “How’s the machine?” I sit up in the dark rubbing my face, still groggy. “What machine?” I say, and he says, “You know, the old monster.”

“What’s going on?” I say.

“How old are you Banning?” he says. He knows how old I am, or at least he has a general idea. I sit listening a moment, the rest of the house is quiet. Henry’s being very friendly. His voice is big brotherly.

“What’s going on,” I say again.

“A lady, Banning,” Henry answers, “a lady for Banning tonight.” He pulls the blanket off the bed and throws me my pants off the dresser. “Come on.”

I’m suspicious of his big brotherliness, and I’m also seduced by it. I’ve wanted it for a long time, longer than I’ve wanted to know a woman, though I’ve been wanting that pretty strongly for the last year or two. “Where are we going?” I say to him.

“We’re going to see a lady friend, don’t you want to see a lady friend? See if that machine fits in something besides your hand. You’re going to be popular, little brother.”