Tours of the Black Clock (4 page)

There’s a girl in a blue dress, he said to Judy in the door of her tavern.

She was wiping the counter and picking up the furniture. Racking up the glasses, casually drying her hands on an apron. She came from behind the counter and crossed the room to him.

I’m looking for a girl in a blue dress, he said again, have you seen her?

She didn’t say anything for a moment, as though still listening to sentences said between them that neither uttered; and then she turned from him just slightly, and brought her hand flying across his face.

He staggered a little, his eyes flared.

“You son of a bitch,” she whispered, “your own mother might have died and you wouldn’t budge off that God damned boat. All those years and you had no use for anything in this town, and now the thing that brings you back is a girl in a blue dress.”

He swallowed hard but steeled himself: That’s right, he told her.

She wiped her hands some more on her apron, though the hands were already dry and the apron was already wet. “I haven’t seen any girl,” she just said, “don’t worry about it, there will be other girls.” She added, “You should be careful, these are modern times. You should be careful.” She almost laughed at him.

That isn’t what this is, he just said. I wouldn’t have come for that, if that was what this was. Then he turned and walked out of the bar.

Out in the street a gust almost blew him over. He pulled his faded blue coat around him and the wind ripped the last of the gold buttons off its stitches. Across mainstreet was the hotel where he was born and raised; he was startled to see a light in his mother’s window, and the form of someone watching him. He only turned up his collar and headed toward the other end of the island. He strolled up mainstreet through the dust of the wind that was silver like razors; he went from door to door rattling them on their hinges to find them locked. He put his elbow to the windows and one by one knocked them in: this was the sound of Davenhall, the shriek of the wind and the blistering of windows, all up and down the street. The Chinese hadn’t been wrong then to believe a storm had come to them from the river. Families huddled in their houses waiting for it to pass; finally the storm reached the ice, where it stood before the white and black machine that never stopped churning. In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else’s in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north. He left the ice machine and headed for the cemetery. To bury something, he said to himself. At the cemetery the wind was harder, because it faced the east of the river where the other side could never quite be seen, but from which came the red trains on the tracks high above the water. There the trees were bare of obituaries, the graves silent. He stood in the marsh that lay shadowstunned and bleeding up worms between his feet, and faced the sky. He could not call her name because he didn’t know it. It isn’t the time to look for her, not at night, he said to himself; and yet only in the dark would he have found the courage and desperation. Only in the dark would the frequency have been so far beyond denial. It isn’t the time, he said to himself, to look for her body in the river, if she tried to escape by swimming; or to look for the remains of a stray boat, if she believed there was any other boat to take her back. But there are no other boats, he said to himself. And he wasn’t ready yet to accept that she wasn’t here.

There was only one other place to look, of course.

He wondered what he’d say. He practiced confessions in his mind. He recalled all the confessions he’d made up as a boy, all the confessions he’d put into the mouths of the girls he met on the river. Those confessions didn’t apply. Those were confessions that begged never to be forgiven. This was not a confession offered to or received from any lover. This would be a confession to a woman with gray hair who had borne him. She wasn’t in the window anymore when he reached mainstreet again, but the light was still on, the only one in the hotel: he had an overwhelming premonition that he would mount the stairs of the hotel, reach the room and find the door open, with the two of them, the girl and his mother, talking, waiting for him grimly. He understood that in fact the destiny of this girl in the blue dress had been to bring him back to face something, no doubt his own failure, from which he had formulated contempt not for himself, who deserved it, but his past and his home, which did not. He wasn’t sure what else there might be to face unless it was the night he had left, and the echo, like the light of a nova, of the man he’d found dead at his mother’s feet.

It had been an old man. Even old he’d still been a huge man, with red hair that had turned gold with the years, like the way leaves die.

Now the man who had white hair his whole life came in the hotel and, remembering hard, stumbled to the bottom of the stairs and found his way up to the next floor. He came down the hall to his mother’s door. It wasn’t open as he had foreseen, but it wasn’t closed either, not entirely. He could push it open, and he did.

The girl with the blue dress was not there. His mother stood in the middle of the room, gazing long into her memories. She wasn’t standing in exactly the same place she’d been fifteen years before, but it was close. And in much the same way as years before, there was the passage of probably five seconds before she turned away from her memories to look at him.

F
OR SEVERAL SECONDS, ACTUALLY
it seems to her like almost a minute, she knows he’s there in the door. In a way she’s been expecting him. She saw him in the street an hour ago as he rampaged among the windows. She doesn’t know why he’s here but she knows it’s nothing small that could bring him back onto the island. And once on the island it was probably not possible that he wouldn’t come here and see her now. So she’s not surprised. But she waits a few moments before she turns to look at him. There’s no recrimination in it.

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

M
Y 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.

I
T’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.