Tours of the Black Clock (30 page)

I
WON’T CHANCE SUBVERSION
on Petyr’s part. I’m present when he translates the single sentence to the client. Immediately Petyr knows something is up. He translates the sentence precisely. It’s impossible at first to know if the old man understands. “Do you understand?” I ask him, in German. Petyr protests. “You can’t speak to him this way,” he says in English, “I’m the only one who speaks to him. You speak to him through me.” I ask Z again if he understands. “It’s a child,” I tell him, “wonderful news.” Petyr protests again, loudly, in German. The old man looks back and forth from Petyr to me in confusion; I keep trying to talk and Petyr gets louder and louder. Now I turn from the client and answer Petyr in English. “Please,” I say to him, “he’s confused. The guards will hear you, and it’ll be worse for all of us.” Petyr answers, “Worse for you, you mean,” and I say, “Certainly not. Certainly it’s clear how superfluous you are in this matter. I’ll have them take you away if you don’t be quiet.” He glares at me hot and silent. We just sit there watching each other for a minute before I turn back to Z. Z is still rattled, frightened by the way this afternoon is unlike other afternoons. “It’s your child,” I tell him now. Petyr still glares at me, bursting with outrage, but saying nothing. “Do you understand?” I ask the old man. “Your child and Geli’s. The child you were always meant to have. She’s quite beside herself with joy. She’s honored to carry your glorious germ in her. Someday you’ll take this son—and I can tell you with complete confidence that it’ll surely be a son—and groom him to rule the world after you. In such a way, the idea of a world after you becomes bearable, doesn’t it?” When he hears this, the old man’s face begins to shine with a small radiant smile. The ancient eyes light up exactly as I supposed they might, and I can already well imagine the dark shattered desolation they’ll show when I finish my revenge nine months from now. He begins to consider, even in his dim fog, how beautiful the child will be, beautiful like his mother; and life that seemed rather purposeless now finds a final way to matter. He’s linked to immortality forever, linked in flesh and not just the world’s memory. It’s at the same time evidence of both his godness and humanness. Dim and fogged as he is, he begins to cry a little; I could beat him if I wanted and he’d still be happy for what I’ve given him this afternoon. After a while he moves from his chair for the first time I’ve ever seen him do it, and lowers himself on his cot in emotional exhaustion. In his old strangled language he cries out to her with thanks. In his sleep he’s calm and ecstatic at the same time, and I can only hope that, in all his peace and excitement, he doesn’t die on me before I’m done with him.

I
ALLOW SEVERAL DAYS
to pass in which I don’t leave my room. The guards are perplexed and even distressed by this. At night I can hear him, from far away, howling like a lonely dog. When I finally go to see him, his eyes beseech me. In the days that have passed since I first saw him, doubts as to the joyous news have begun to grow in his head. I put them to rest. Day after day Petyr reads to him while I sit listening to make sure nothing’s amiss in the translations. Petyr fumes, caught as he is. Z has actually begun to open up and talk a little, in his crazy fashion, small words here and there, a phrase or two of the future. Plans to take his boy up to his retreat in the Bavarian Alps, where everything as far as anyone can see is under his rule. That sort of thing. I feel immense satisfaction to see the past and its memories flood back into his face, to have him remember bit by bit who he is and what he’s done. It’s as though the past and its memory grow in his head in symbiosis with his future and child growing in her, until the two grow to the present that emerges from between her legs. He flourishes as time passes, he occasionally even does respectable imitations of what he used to be, giving forth with this ridiculous statement or that about things of which he never knew anything. We joke together sometimes in the way a grownup jokes with a child or plays with a pet, dangling a string before its claws. In such a way I dangle before him the heartbeats and kicks of the life inside her, and like a small animal he frantically reaches for what I dangle until I snatch it away, laughing. Petyr has sunk so far into the force of his hate for me that his eyes have almost become dull with it, the power frustrated into seething languish. The weeks pass and then the months. The days I spend with the client and our translator, the nights I sail with Giorgio in the lagoon; soon, I tell Giorgio, I’ll go with you to the islands. You come, Giorgio says, they’ll never find you.

T.O.T.B.C.—14

A
T NIGHT I GO
on a secret mission inside her. I voyage up her canals, wander her passages searching for a place to build what she’ll give birth to months from now. I find a fertile plain on the banks of her womb and begin to work. I don’t have much time for what has to be accomplished. I’ve brought my materials with me. I cast the mold, I make the mortar. I dig a pit there on the beach inside her, transform the whole belly of her into a cauldron. There I make the very ooze of the thing that’s to be born. I concoct it from a hundred things. I concoct it from the hush of those who vanished into the fog on his orders, without a cry or remnant left behind for those who would wonder where they went. I concoct it from the mealy red ice left beneath those shot face down in the snow. I concoct it from the terrified squeal of children transformed abruptly into gunfire, which transforms in turn to the bright afternoon stillness. I concoct it from the gypsies in the ghettos and the Jews naked in the pits. I’ve given to the mortar those he starved, that from the pulp of their bones this thing I make can stand. I’ve given to the mortar those he gassed, that from the small pockets of gas left in their flesh this thing I make might quiver and lurch. I’ve given to the mortar those he burned, that from the unbearable odor of their ash this thing I make might be smelled from any place in paradise. I grind into it the teeth he pulled from their heads, the genitals he ripped from their loins, the eyes he left open when he killed them so that he could always assure himself he had indeed killed them. I concoct the garbage of evil, of which he is father, and which he’s fathered without the passion and sex of a man. Often I break down. Often the fumes of it stop me in my place. And when I’ve given to the mortar all of these, and have watched them disappear into the swirl of the cauldron’s awful whirlpool, I finally give to it Megan, I give to it little Courtney falling through Vienna space. After a while I think, I can no longer do this. But I can do this. I can do this for that day not long from now when he comes to see his son and I present him with this thing I’ve built inside her, and he reaches his fingers tremulously to feel the child’s silky skin and instead touches hard scales, and moves to stare into his son’s blue eyes and instead sees a thousand black eyes the size of pins, and presses to his old chest the soft innocent hair and instead is stung by the twitching antennae. I can do this, Megan; I can do this, Courtney; for that moment when the old face of the god gazes on what his god-seed has spawned, not something grown from an embryo or fetus or even, godlike, from a star, but rather from larva. At that moment he’ll either kill it or it will kill him, or he’ll drop it to the floor in horror where it will come crawling to him on a hundred legs, twitching at him for love. Let him love it if he can. Let him hold it in his arms like the mothers and fathers who clutched for the last time the children he tore away from them. Let him name it with a Christian sound, and parade it in his cathedral of a thousand years.

D
ANIA DOESN’T KNOW WHAT
grows in her, as she crosses Davenhall’s mainstreet to her hotel room. She only knows it isn’t of her, that something’s being made inside her that’s not of her tissue and soul. Several times, over at the tavern where she’s still trying to work, the nausea and pain inside her is so startling it nearly stops her heart. At first she assumes it’s because she’s almost fifty years old, after all. She’s never had a baby before and therefore has no real reason to suppose her experience is uncommon. But now some months have passed and she understands, instinctively, that something in her means to be formed and born of a will that isn’t her own. In the middle of mainstreet, not far from where she once guarded the body of Consuelo Garcia, she says, No. No, she says; the lover of all these years, who came to me unseen when he chose, will not have this victory. What’s in me is mine, and though I might have chosen never to have it in me at all, I won’t relinquish anything else anymore. All the men, she tells herself, and all their history, may have believed I was theirs to manifest whatever nightmare they needed to hurl free of themselves; perhaps they all believed that this presumption extended even to this thing in my belly. No; again no; no again and again and again. No. She gets to her room and lies down, and feels her belly and the movement in it. Conscious only of the sunlight through the trees beyond her window, she prepares to fight.

T
HE SNOW COMES. I
wake one morning to its muffled din. It falls on the city’s tarpaulin, lightly and soundlessly except that the city’s emptiness transforms even the fall of snow into an echo. I have to argue with the authorities several days in order to get some heat in my room’s radiator. What about the old man? I ask the guards. At first they don’t answer, then one of them tells me, The Leader has heat. When I see the client that afternoon, the room is cold but neither he nor Petyr seem to notice; it’s like the light through their covered window. I’m rubbing my hands together but the two of them sit the way they always do, still and sullen in the room’s center. All the old man cares about is news of the child. Oh don’t you concern yourself with that, I assure him, that’s all taken care of. Things are proceeding just fine on that score. I suppose I don’t need to worry about Z dying from cold; he’s flared with life. He lives for his son. Petyr doesn’t even look at me anymore. Perhaps he’s busy staring into the face of his own end, approaching now from not so far away with its hand outstretched. The echoes continue for a couple of weeks and when the snow stops and the sun shines down on the ice melting into the tarpaulin, the corridors and piazzas of the empty blue city fill with weird rainbows. Out of the misty colors fly flocks of birds that have been trapped under the city’s ceiling for years; they’re old and their wings flutter heavily in the wet air. Now the echoes I hear are the birds trying futilely to batter their way out.

I
WORK DAY AND
night. The shores of her womb are lit with fiery torches. Sometimes I fall asleep in the middle of what I’m doing, wake to find the sludge cooling in my hands, waiting to be fed to the larva. At times the whole universe of her hurls itself into upheaval, in rebellion. The larva grows. I can already see the thing moving, ready to live. In the day, when I go to see the old man and Petyr, I can’t quite get the black of the work off my hands; yet it seems that only I can smell it. Winter passes into spring, which passes into early summer. Giorgio comes up through my floor with food, I’m ashamed to take it with my black fingers.

T
HE OLD MAN PULLED
quite a good one on Petyr today. I still shake my head thinking about it; Petyr just misjudged the situation, that’s all. He just couldn’t keep his head, his rage got the better of him. We were sitting in their room, Petyr reading to the old man who sat in his chair holding the brass frame with her picture and the dead brown flower in it. Petyr couldn’t go on with the reading. Convulsed and shaking, he looked up and said to the client, “My Leader, this is a lie.” The old man didn’t seem to have heard, and Petyr said it again, “This is a lie, my Leader,” and then he looked at me. He’s going about it all wrong, I thought to myself calmly, taking me on this way. But then he doesn’t have the imagination for going about it any other way. Now we both looked at the old man, who still seemed entranced by the picture he held, until he slowly raised his head to look at the translator. “This is a lie,” Petyr said firmly, having gotten his attention, “this is a sadistic joke. Do you see? This big stupid man is playing a joke on you. He likes jokes,” and that was true, actually, I always had rather liked a good joke. I remember a good one a long time ago; my father told a good one about
his
son. The old man just blinked at Petyr, still holding her picture in both hands. “There is no child, my Leader,” Petyr shook his head, tears in his eyes, “you’re not going to be a father. I’m sorry.” The old man just kept blinking at him, and Petyr just kept on saying it over and over, There’s no child, you’re not going to be a father, it’s a stupid joke, and the more he spoke the more upset he became as though he was going to cry any moment, while Z just sat there blinking at him, appearing not to register anything he heard. And then, faster than I would have believed possible, the old man brought her picture up over his head and crashed its heavy brass frame down onto Petyr. Petyr dropped to the floor without a groan or shudder; every bit of life just flew out of him with the blow of the picture, and there he lay looking up at me, a slight discoloration on his forehead from the brass of the frame, before the blood streamed out into his hair and face and the shattered glass of the picture frame and the picture itself, which lay in Petyr’s head. There was her face with a hole in it lying in his. Little shavings of brown dead flower drifted in the air. I thought I was going to choke from laughing so hard. The guards came in then and looked at Petyr in amazed horror; the old man just sat in his chair, looking at her torn picture. I didn’t bother trying to explain to them how an eighty-year-old man could kill someone with that kind of force; if they didn’t know that about him by now, they didn’t know anything. “I believe the Leader has no further use for this gentleman’s services,” I said. The guards looked at the old man and looked at me; one of them snapped his fingers at the others and they dragged poor Petyr out. I looked at the old man when they’d gone, trying to keep a straight face. But I laughed some more and slapped him on the back. “Something to tell your children about,” I suggested. After a while he smiled back.