Tours of the Black Clock

118

AT 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.