Tours of the Black Clock

149

WE SPEND SEVERAL DAYS getting up to Galveston. On the streets of Corpus Christi I panhandle bus fare while Z sits on the curb moaning a strange unearthly sound that seems to come from some place other than his mouth. I know he’s barely alive. Sometimes someone will give us a ration coupon for some food, but the shelves in the grocery stores are always empty. One day a woman tells us about a relief center for people who’ve been dispossessed by the shelling, but after I coax the old man three hours over four city blocks, I find a hopelessly huge crowd outside the center and I know we’ll never get through. I must remind myself that the soldiers on the corners aren’t Germans but Americans. I must also remind myself that it may not matter, it may even be worse. On a government bus that runs refugees north, I see the internment camps for enemy aliens. After a week we’re in New Orleans.

According to the newspapers it’s July 1970. Every day is a struggle to get coupons and hope we find a store with whatever items our coupons specify. Our last day in New Orleans we’re lucky; someone’s dropped a whole ration book on the sidewalk. I redeem some of them for canned fruit which I must feed to Z like a baby. Coffee’s impossible because the Germans have cut off the flow from South America. I trade the rest of our coupons to get us back on the road. All along the highway up through wartime Louisiana I can see the barbed wire that runs along the bayous. The heat’s terrible; the Negro bus driver scolds me for taking an old man on such a trip. Another old man on the bus gives Z a green baseball cap to shield his face from the sun that comes through the window. Every once in a while Z eats a can of something, whatever he can chew and digest, tomato broth or tapioca pudding. We get off the bus at each stop and I take him to the toilet, hoping we’ll get back fast enough before the bus driver pulls out. The bus cuts up the south side of the Appalachians, through Montgomery and I think Atlanta, though I sleep through Atlanta, so I’m not sure. Z’s still moaning in that way and the other people on the bus watch him. I’m still compelled by whatever force it was that smuggled us from the Italian lagoon in the first place; I’ve dreaded the truth of the matter so long that I’ve come to dread the dread more, and therefore must now admit the truth, which is that all this has been allowed by someone. It’s too ridiculous to pretend I’ve somehow actually spirited out of Europe on my own the most powerful man in history, all the way from Italy to America without papers in the middle of a global war. Someone or something unseen directed us past the lieutenant on the train from Milan, the owner of the German kitchen in Nice who suddenly changed his mind about evicting us from our room, the captain from Marseilles who suddenly changed his mind about arranging us passage out of Wyndeaux, the cabbie in Quintana Roo who drove us up the coast for no reason at all, the ambush in a Yucatan ditch that brought us onto first a truck, then a boat that deposited us on an American beach without a soul asking questions and with a fire to keep us warm until we were up and on our way. I’ve been allowed by someone or something unseen to smuggle into the very heart of America the enemy, the withered dying husk of an old man who will soon break apart only for bits of him to blow across America and settle in its land and take root. What have I done, I cry out to myself there on the bus in the dark. I marvel at how everything I touch is marked with malevolence. After several days on the bus we’re forced to spend more time begging in Raleigh before we can move on. When we come into Washington it’s so black from martial law that the old man actually stops moaning a moment, his face alight, as though he recognizes in the black the same home seen in the lights of the gulf by the ancient birds he released from his eyes.

T.O.T.B.C. — 16