Tours of the Black Clock (35 page)

I
WALKED INTO TOWN
with the rest of the tourists and took a room at the hotel on the main street. The Chinese woman who ran the hotel sat in a back room; when she failed to acknowledge me, I slowly went up the stairs and found the first door that opened for me. The room was like many rooms I’ve lived in. I lay down on the bed and waited for someone to discover I was here. A bowl of rice and pork was sitting on the table by the window when I woke. Since then, every twilight when I’ve awakened, rice and pork wait for me on the table.

She and her son live several doors down the hall from mine. After I’d been in my hotel room for a month, during which time no one spoke to me or asked who I was or what I was doing, I got up one night and walked up the hallway and stood before their door. This was the place and moment to which I’d been compelled by his defiant birth. Now, years later, I’m still compelled there because I haven’t yet found the courage to do what I came to do. Now, years later, I still stand before their door having come to the door that first night and then the next, and then the next, and every night after that for a week and then a month and then a year, and then two years, then five, then ten. Always I believe the courage will come to me at her door. I will not die as he did, never begging someone’s forgiveness. That she would not or could not give forgiveness isn’t what matters; what matters is the act of my begging. Every night I raise my fist to the door, about to knock; sometimes I hear her or the boy turn in their sleep on the other side. Many times I stand there the whole night for hours on feet that are racked with pain. When the dawn light drifts up from downstairs, when I see the top of the stairs fade to a softer blue, when I hear someone stir on the other side of their door, my nerve collapses altogether; I return to my little room and close the door and wait for the next night, when I try again.

I
T’S NOW BEEN SEVENTEEN
years since I came to this hotel. Seventeen years of nights I’ve stood at her door with my hand raised. I see her sometimes from my window, when I have the courage to look out. Occasionally I believe she looks just as she did when she watched me from her own window that day in 1937, ’38, I don’t remember anymore. She spends much time in her own room caring for the boy; sometimes, when the boy’s out playing somewhere, I smell the liquor in the hallway. I would have a drink with her, if it was possible; fortified by it, I would say all the things. All the things to say. We would, after all of it, become drinking pals in our old times. From my window I watch the boy too, whitehaired embodiment of the willful love of hers that defied all our terrible power. When the rains come one autumn she runs from the hotel looking for him as the island floods; the waters rush down the mainstreet with a terrible power of their own. After neither of them has come back, I pull on my coat and climb with difficulty down the stairs and out the hotel’s backway. In the rain and wind I slowly trudge up toward the northern end of the island where the cemetery lies; there, huddled beneath a wooden shack, I can see the boy trapped by the storm as the graves bubble up around him. I wade out to him. By the time I reach him the downpour is such that almost nothing’s visible but rain; I spot him by his hair. He’s nearly unconscious. I pull him up from the water and for a moment, as he’s caught in my hands, I have that old urge to avenge my wife and child who I can barely remember anymore; all I remember is vengeance. I have that old urge. But I pick him up out of the water and hold him to my chest and wade back to town. I come back to the hotel and up the stairs. I’m wondering what I’ll say to her when I carry the boy through the door. But she hasn’t returned yet and so I lay the boy on his bed and pull the blanket up around him when I hear the door downstairs, and I’ve only returned and closed the door of my own room when I hear her footsteps in the hall. She’s lived a whole lifetime not to hear my footsteps behind her anymore. I hear her call his name at the sight of him, the noise of love’s weapon fired years ago from the moment she bore him.

S
EVENTEEN YEARS I SLIP
in and out of the hotel back door in the dead of night and storm. Except for the unknown stranger who brings me my food, I am unknown and strange to the rest of the town. I’ve fallen out of time, it searches for me and I hide like a rebel in the ruins of Mexico. If it’s found me out, it’s left me to my delusions. From the window I watch the tavern, the woman who runs it, the Chinese carrying their dead north; I hear ice and its machine, crackling in the distance. Sometimes I like to pretend she’s the one who brings the rice and pork. Sometimes I believe I wake to the smell of liquor in my room; I leave such a conviction to my delusions as well. I don’t have much time.

I
DON’T HAVE MUCH
TIME
. Dania. Forgive me.

A
MOMENT AGO MY
heart woke me. I look around and it’s dark but still early, I hear the tourists in the tavern across the street, which means the last boat hasn’t yet left for the mainland. I can barely move from the way I’m stricken, from beneath the weight. I’m angry with myself for having gone seventeen years without ever finding the courage. I don’t have any time now. Time knew I was here all along. Now I have only moments. I have only one last burst of havoc in me. I stagger from my bed and lurch across my room to the door. In the hall it seems to take forever to get to her door. Maybe it is forever. Maybe it’s the moment into which one’s whole life falls. At her door my hand slides across the surface when I try to manage a knock, I cannot manage it. I can barely manage the knob. When the door opens, she’s standing there in the middle of the room; no son or lover waits with her. She turns to look at me. Her face when she sees me is inscrutable. I look for a signal but she gives none.

Forgive me?

Lying there on the floor at her feet, I’m aware of the boy coming into the doorway. He stares at me in shock. Is it simply the sight of a dead man, or is it any man at all in his mother’s company? Does the part of my soul attached to his give it a small tug? Does he feel the times I nearly killed him? Does he feel the times I finally saved him? Does he recognize in me the darkness from which I tried to create him? He looks at me, at his mother, and bolts. And somewhere, even in the silence of a forgiveness that never was given, the two parallel rivers of the Twentieth Century, which forked the only other time she ever saw me, flow back into one.

F
OR AN HOUR OR
so there’s some confusion as the room fills with townspeople and tourists from the tavern across the street. A doctor confirms the news they’re all waiting for, which is that I am indeed dead. But who is he? everyone’s asking; no one remembers me from the tavern or coming over on the boat earlier that day. “How could anyone not notice him,” the doctor says, “the man’s a giant.” I’ve never seen him before in my life, she tells them, still inscrutable. You remember me, I’m thinking, looking up at her: Vienna. In the window. The townspeople accept my anonymity with solemn resolve; it takes twelve of them to drag me out, after the tourists have gone their way. They’re none too delicate about it either. My head bounces down the stairs like a bowling ball. For a moment I thought she was going to stop them, but she didn’t; for a moment I think the woman who runs the tavern is going to stop them as well, but she doesn’t either. They drag me down the street and through the thicket outside the cemetery marsh until my backside’s raw; if I were alive I’d crack the little fuckers’ skulls together like eggs. In the cemetery at the edge of the island, before the wild night, they must bend the tree all the way over to the ground in order to fasten me to it, since they can’t lift me; when they release the tree I think I’m going to be catapulted into space. But the tree only groans back to something midway its original height, the last thing on earth that will ever succumb to the size of me.

I
’M UP HERE EIGHT
days. It’s not at all bad, truth be told. The weather’s fine and I watch out over the wide blue river, fascinated with the red train that crosses high over the water on its endless track. It reminds me of being on the ferris wheel in the Praterstern. I’m warm in the sunlight and birds visit my arms. I have this one melancholy fantasy that she’ll come to me one day and look up and say, I forgive you. This doesn’t happen but on the other hand it could happen at any time. She could be on her way here now, coming to say, I remember you from that day, before the candleshop.

This doesn’t feel like damnation.

I keep waiting for the damnation. As though it’ll arrive in the form of a black bird, and begin with the eating of my eye. But the birds don’t eat me, rather they seem content to watch the river perched from me. So I wait for damnation; it’s confusing that it doesn’t come. I’ve expected it so long, I spent so long earning it. It makes no sense that God gives me this reprieve, I’d have thought he wouldn’t waste a second. I’d have thought he’d snatch me the first moment I slipped over, as though there wasn’t another moment to lose. In my time, I have no reason but to believe that whatever God exists is the God of revenge.

The God of revenge in a century of revenge. It doesn’t seem possible that this might have been the century of redemption after all. Not this century, not for me. After all the things, it doesn’t seem possible that somewhere I committed some slight, insignificant act of kindness that redeems everything. One small act of kindness that wiped the rest of it away. And yet, in a century when time and space have liberated themselves of all reference points, perhaps one small good thing owns a universe unto itself, and a thousand monstrous worlds of evil must submit themselves to its love. I don’t understand anymore. I’m only here at the end of an island where a river becomes one, waiting for God to come damn me, or for her to come forgive me; I wait for her to whisper my name from the window of her room. I almost killed him, really. I came that close. I held his little head in the palm of my hand and nearly popped it open the moment he was born; only a lapse prevented me. It wasn’t that I was good or anything. It was only a lapse. I almost drowned him that day in the flood not twenty yards from here, from where I then carried him to the hotel; I didn’t have the strength to kill him, was all. I meant to do it, hold him beneath the water until the last bubble up from the graves beneath our feet was his. That I carried him back was only weakness. Nothing good about it. Fuck the God who redeems me, I say.

But God doesn’t believe me. I guess I don’t believe me either.

Before his blue redemptive face above me, I’ve already forgotten the things I’ve cried out for, and the cry itself forgets its own name.

E
VERY AFTERNOON DANIA LEAVES
her hotel and goes down to the shore of the island to see if her son is returning. Sometimes she spots him lying face down, staring into the water from the edge of the boat captained by a man to whom she no longer speaks. Rejected in this way, she returns to town. After a week and a half, she goes to the cemetery.

The huge nameless man still hangs in the tree. Birds sit on his fingers and the top of his head, staring out toward the river. Each day several of the townspeople come by to hear if the man has yet cried out his name; each day the tree sags a little more beneath him. Dania holds her arms together with determination, as though she’s waiting as well. She studies him each day. The Chinese quiz her constantly. She tells them she’s never seen him before; she doesn’t understand why they won’t believe her.

By the tenth day she’s begun to feel harassed. Also, the body’s become an unhappy sight. She stands in the sunlight watching him awhile before she finally says, “His name was Banning Jainlight.”

The Chinese who are present run into town to get the others. The others return and she says, still watching him, “His name was Banning Jainlight.”

You’re lying, someone says. Like you did many years ago about the woman you called Consuelo Garcia, you’re making it up.

She says, turning, “Let him rot up there then.” They call out after her as she walks back toward town. She shrugs, “Do what you want with him.”

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

M
Y 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.

A
FTER 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.