Tours of the Black Clock (5 page)

As it happens I’ll make use of the bulk later. As it happens I’ll learn to hide in it sometimes, move it others. I’ll use it to beat any fool to a near faretheewell, and for a few minutes I’ll have an especially good time doing it. And if I appear stupid to some then I’ll use that too, to beat them as well, people who presume themselves pretty sharp and presume they speak a language someone like me can’t understand. Except I do understand, and by being the tourist of their lives I become the spy of their secrets; you’ll see what I mean. Of course sometimes it helps to drive the point home a little, drool at social events or occasionally let one arm jerk wildly at my side for no reason at all. People turn from these displays, and when they do I’ve become so big and stupid as to be invisible.

At the age of eight I sit with my family through edgy dinner conversations. Food drops into my father’s gut like paratroopers to French soil almost twenty years later, all of which I can see at any moment I like from one of the nine windows in my bedroom. At eight I’m not yet a lost cause, I’m still trying to make a decent impression on life. Trying and trying, and all they can do at the dinner table is look at me as if to say, But where in God’s name did this lug come from? Alice and Oral and Henry. My father just tramps along in the wake of his appetites, meat and potatoes and beans, oblivious to us. As I’ll come to learn, it’s a way he has with all his appetites, the forbidden ones most particularly.

O
N CHRISTMAS DAY IN
my tenth year the valley’s all snow. I can see it from any one of my bedroom windows. This morning my brothers and I get up and go out to the barn with my father to check out the horses. The horses are the main business of my father’s ranch, and these winters it’s a lot of trouble to make certain we don’t wake up every day to a lot of frozen horses. There doesn’t seem much doubt to anyone at this time that Oral and Henry will grow up and take over the ranch after my father’s gone, flip a coin for the house or give it to whichever of the two’s been lucky enough to find a woman foolish enough to spend her life with him, stick Alice in some little cottage to be built on the other side of the stable, build another house for the brother who’s left. That’s the plan anyway. Don’t know where I fit into it. As it happens one of them won’t grow up at all, and there won’t be any ranch house to take over for the one who does. On the Christmas Day of my tenth year we’re still six Christmases away from all that.

The horses are all right and we come back to the house. I’m the last one in. The fact is I like the horses and like to spend time out there with them. Two or three I’m particularly fond of, a spotted one and a white and a butterscotch. But now I’m in the house which is warm and filled with the smell of the fire and food. In the kitchen is our cook, Minnie, who’s been with the Jainlight household since before I was born. She’s from Virginia. She shows me what kindness she feels she can get away with, but she also regards me with a confusion that’s only another clue, among many I can’t understand, as to the truth of my presence and past. Helping her is the Indian woman Gayla. Minnie tends to send her out of the kitchen when I’m around. These Virginians don’t like the idea of mixing up white and colored before a boy’s old enough to understand there’s a difference. Gayla’s fairly light, actually. She lives on the outskirts of my father’s land with some of the other Indians. It isn’t her real name, her real name is something unpronounceable. She grew up with an Indian mother and sister out in Oklahoma, the white father having disappeared no later than he first showed up, and she came to Pennsylvania around the same time her sister named Rae married a white newspaperman near Chicago. Like a lot of Indians or half-breeds, Gayla could be any age at all.

As always when I go into the living room, the talk between my mother and my brothers seems to stop a little, and then they go on as before, adjusting to the interjection of my bigness into all their little coziness. The tree is bright. It’s green and silver. A fire roars in the hearth. I sort of shove my way into the festivities. Sometimes I say something and usually Alice will ask me what I mean by it. I could say the most routine thing and Alice acts like I’m talking in runes. “Nice fire,” I might say, and Alice’s face goes still and she finally answers, “Well Banning, I’m not really sure what you intended by that remark.” Actually, it’ll turn out to be a pretty funny remark at that. But all I know at this moment is that I’m a kid who wants to be a part of Christmas here and I can’t seem to get in. Whatever little breach of family bonds is left open for me to enter, I don’t fit through, and there I am outside, in the middle of the living room. Henry has a little set he got for Christmas, with a fort and men, and after a while when Oral gets bored with it Henry relents out of need for another player: he’s Santa Ana with ten thousand troops and I’m a hundred and fifty Texans defending the mission. I’m big enough that I just reach across the battlefield and my arm wipes out six or seven of Henry’s battalions. “You jackass,” he shrieks, “
you’re
supposed to die!
All
of you is supposed to die!” Henry packs up the set and goes back to talking with Oral and Alice. I head upstairs to my bedroom; on the way I knock over this or that of Alice’s bric-a-brac, reducing the Old World to rubble. A chair or a tablelamp. “For God’s sake,” Oral says scornfully. Henry shakes his head with contempt. Alice sighs, deep and wounded. Out with the fucking chair anyway, I say back, though not to them, or to anyone who can hear me for years to come.

I
GET TO THE
top of the stairs, the smoke of Christmas fire and smell of food wafting up after me, and lumber down the hall and crash through my bedroom door. I knock a few more things over and sit in the dark of my bedroom awhile. I don’t remember if I cry. Well yes I do remember. But I sit still awhile and soon I forget about it. I sit in the middle of the room in the dark and look out the nine windows of my bedroom. Some I look through more than others. Later I’ll realize just how few windows all the other rooms of the world have. I can’t get over how only my bedroom has just the right number of windows. It’s possible of course that I just can’t take a hint. It’s possible they’ve put me in such a room with all these windows for a reason. The better to hurl myself out one of them. But instead I just take in everything I see from them. In one I see the year of my birth and in one I see the year of my death, though I see neither my birth nor my death precisely. In the seven windows in between I see the seventy or so years that are my time. Not my life but my time.

And I’m sitting there and I hear this sound. It’s the sound of my time. I’d expect it to be a roar, like something up from the middle of the world, or I’d expect it to be the clatter of machinery. Or the cacophony of guys shouting, in southern fields or beerhalls or cadre meetings. Maybe the good taut yank of a rope snapping in Louisiana, or the soft wet smack of a head that falls from a German axe. The whispers of Russians selling each other out, or just that abysmal yawn of physical matter cracking like a nut, and everything around it falling in. That’s what I’d expect this sound to be. And it isn’t anything like that, wouldn’t you know it. Nothing like that at all. It’s this high vicious squeal, like a rodent would make, or a bat. And it comes from no place in the sky or the ground, no place outside; it’s down under me. And I look around my feet but it isn’t there, I pick up the chair and check and it isn’t there. I can stand on the other side of the room and it’s still under me, somewhere under the place in my belly where I was strung up to my mother before she bore me. It’s a whistle in my bowels.

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.

I
T’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.

I
T’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.

T
HINGS 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.

H
ENRY 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.”