Tours of the Black Clock

12

FIFTEEN YEARS PASSED. DARKNESS was all over his life now. It flooded in through a secret tunnel that began in Vienna and ended in one of the aortae of his heart. Every day through the years he sailed the boat back and forth to his home. He never stepped ashore or went into town. That he had directed his innocence toward the leaving of his home, and that his fate had become to spend his life on this river between home and irrevocable escape, transporting tourists, now stranded him in the country of self-betrayal. He became the muttering depraved rivermonk of Davenhall, his white mane and beard and the crazy blast of his green eyes adding age to his appearance by the epoch; the white hair on his arms grew like fur. After a while he didn’t have the girls anymore. If one came to him as he lay on the deck of his boat waiting for the tourists’ return, he sent her away. He’d simply raise anchor and drift off to that moment in the fog that had first terrified him when he was innocent but which he now called home or, if he couldn’t recall the word, hell. Sometimes to pass the time, he sailed the river along the island’s shore over to the western tip where he could see the old black and white machine still unmanned and burping out ice into the steaming dirt. He never ventured farther out into the open expanse of the river itself; somewhat like the ancients he was afraid of what was at the end. In truth he came to recognize he was afraid of venturing beyond the edge of his life altogether. He asked himself why he’d never been a tourist, then asked himself why he’d never been anything but a tourist. His blue coat lost its buttons one by one, not at cards but invisibly, when he wasn’t looking. It was as though something was telling him that though he might suppose he was gambling nothing, in fact he was gambling all the time and poorly, just as everyone gambled everything in every moment; and he was losing. One by one the buttons disappeared. He dropped obscenities into the river one by one that the skeleton bound to the boat’s bottom might hear them. He almost imagined the old man reaching up over the edge of the boat and clasping him by the ankle. He almost imagined he might look down and see the fingers locked to his foot. Once, earlier on, while sailing along the island, he saw his mother. Her hair was completely gray now. She walked along the banks of Davenhall silently looking at him. She looked as though she understood he wanted an explanation but she couldn’t give it. He couldn’t bring himself to call her. He would have asked how she was, and if they’d spoken long enough he would have asked who she was. She walked and he glided along in tandem silence, and in the light the small white scar at the corner of her mouth sparkled like a diamond in her tooth. It made him a little heartbroken. She finally stopped in the sand and, slowly, almost fearfully, raised her hand and gave him a little wave. A little wave goodbye. He waved back. Then she turned with her arms folded in that determined way, and walked away, and he didn’t see her again after that. He sat on the deck of the boat and sobbed. The next time he thought of her was when he heard from Greek Judy that she was sick. “You should come see her,” Judy called from shore. Tormented and racked with guilt, he nonetheless could not bring himself to step on the island; at the edge of his boat he stared at its shore as though it was the chasm beyond the edge of a cliff. Judy left him howling in the fog. In this moment amidst the fog he howled at the world of his mother and dropped into the black river where nothing could be seen, and groped for something or someone to enter where nothing would be entered. The next time he saw Judy, his mother had recovered; but though he was relieved, his guilt wasn’t mitigated until much later, when everything was mitigated, the hymen of feeling worn away like innocence. One night he thought the feeling had returned when he lay on the mattress in the boathouse and something rumbled up from inside him: something’s happening to me now, he said to himself with awesome hope; but the rumbling wasn’t in him at all, rather it was the shorthaired silver buffalo sweeping across the dusty lot in front of his house where the buses parked in the day. He wrested himself from the mattress just in time to see the last of the animals disappear in the night. With this he lost all hope for the feeling. He lost it through the rest of his youth. He lost it into the years that he passed as a young man, on into the years when he neared the point he couldn’t even call himself young, at least not young in any sense he’d ever understood it. He lost it right up until the day he saw her on the boat, in a blue dress; on that day he rediscovered not the hope of feeling life, but life itself. This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.