Tours of the Black Clock

157

A MOMENT AGO MY heart woke me. I look around and it’s dark but still early, I hear the tourists in the tavern across the street, which means the last boat hasn’t yet left for the mainland. I can barely move from the way I’m stricken, from beneath the weight. I’m angry with myself for having gone seventeen years without ever finding the courage. I don’t have any time now. Time knew I was here all along. Now I have only moments. I have only one last burst of havoc in me. I stagger from my bed and lurch across my room to the door. In the hall it seems to take forever to get to her door. Maybe it is forever. Maybe it’s the moment into which one’s whole life falls. At her door my hand slides across the surface when I try to manage a knock, I cannot manage it. I can barely manage the knob. When the door opens, she’s standing there in the middle of the room; no son or lover waits with her. She turns to look at me. Her face when she sees me is inscrutable. I look for a signal but she gives none.

Forgive me?

Lying there on the floor at her feet, I’m aware of the boy coming into the doorway. He stares at me in shock. Is it simply the sight of a dead man, or is it any man at all in his mother’s company? Does the part of my soul attached to his give it a small tug? Does he feel the times I nearly killed him? Does he feel the times I finally saved him? Does he recognize in me the darkness from which I tried to create him? He looks at me, at his mother, and bolts. And somewhere, even in the silence of a forgiveness that never was given, the two parallel rivers of the Twentieth Century, which forked the only other time she ever saw me, flow back into one.