Tours of the Black Clock

110

THIS IS WHERE I’VE lived years and years, then, in this little room with no windows and the hum of the sea in its walls. I think after a while everyone’s come to forget what it is I’m here for. The guards aren’t particularly friendly or attentive, but neither are they unreasonably harsh. They don’t pay much attention to me one way or the other, and in the last year they’ve begun wandering off at times without locking my door behind them. At first I took it as a sign of their contempt for me, that I was so harmless as to warrant such casual surveillance. They didn’t imagine I’d have the nerve to open the door and just walk out. But now I’m fairly certain that, well, they did imagine it, they in fact presumed it. Now I’m fairly certain in retrospect that everything which has happened they’ve meant to happen. The first couple of times, the guards caught up with me right way, since I don’t move so quickly these days; I hadn’t even gotten down the hall and around the corner. But eight months ago, by accident or intention, they didn’t. I pushed open my door one afternoon and stepped into the hall and shuffled down the other direction from where I’d gone before. I expected to shuffle right into one guard or another. Now I realize that the guards caught up with me those first couple of times because I was just going in the wrong direction. I moved down the hall now, it became darker. After five minutes I found a hallway where lanterns burned in the hollows of the walls. I felt overwhelmed not so much by the exertion of the walk as the thick air of the corridors. I came out into another hallway of blue light; I looked up to the city’s tarpaulin above me. Any minute I figured one of the guards would be retrieving me; I even stopped awhile to wait for him. I never figured on getting this far. I had no interest in getting this far, I’d been out of my room ten minutes now. Then I heard a voice in German, and only after I’d stood there leaning against the hallway wall awhile, listening to the foreign words, did they not seem so foreign; my own German was proficient enough to finally recognize that I was listening to a translation of the very words I’d written this morning. I followed the voice. Up half a flight of stairs, after the blue corridor led back into a black one like my own, I came to the room where the old man and the younger one were living.