Tours of the Black Clock

164

LIVING AND MIGRATING WITH the silver buffalo, he followed her trail seven years. The white hair on his arms grew longer and more savage, the hair on his face covered it so that no one would ever detect a sad smile again. On a mountain near the top of the world, he found her; she was living and working in an observatory, alone and happy. It was a place nearer the fiery field above her. He and the buffalo lived in the woods nearby. He didn’t go to her, accepting that she had chosen to live by herself; he watched her stars with her, outside her walls, and though he’d discarded his coat long before, and though the coat had lost its gold buttons long before that, he now wagered them on which star she was studying tonight. The odds favored him. He fought off the beasts that came threatening her. Sometimes in her doorway, she called out, Who’s there. He lay low until she convinced herself it was no one. After many more years had passed, he realized one day he hadn’t heard or seen her recently, and with trepidation he invaded the observatory to determine she was in no danger. Almost as though she was asleep, she lay in the center of the arena under the observatory’s open dome; the telescope was pointed at her as though the stars were studying her back. Because there was no way of giving her up to the field in which she belonged, he left her there. He’d seen enough burials anyway.

He migrated even further north with the silver buffalo; they seemed to know where they meant to go. Across the snowy flats, man and herd traveled in a steady vapor. The mining towns became more and more scarce, the signs of life fewer and fewer. They were running somewhere, and when they arrived at the place, the snow was falling. He knew he couldn’t go further with them, that it wasn’t his place. So he had to watch them leave him behind; he noted how they hurled themselves onward, and he pitied anything that fell before their path. Through the blinding falling snow he could barely see them disappear, but he followed their tracks nonetheless, and the sound of them, right up to the mouth of an arctic cave. As he stood there listening to them disappear into the dark of the cave, there roared into his face, from out of the darkness, an inexplicable blast of jungle heat.

Having exited the century at one end and entered it again at the other, the year was 1901 when he finally came to a village in northern Asia. He lived in the village awhile and when he understood that it was his time as it had been for others, he left to make his way down the mountains to the polar sea. He came to a bay clogged with ice. He plunged his old whitehaired body into the sea and swam to the first iceblock from where he spent the days remaining to him leaping from one block to the next, putting his ear to the surface of each. As with the ice he’d listened to as a boy on the island, the bergs in the sea were clearly ticking. What he now searched for was the one block of ice that melted in time to the beating of his own heart. He didn’t have long to ascertain this about each one, since listening at any great length would freeze his ear to the ice, a prospect he considered no better than hanging from a tree. When he finally found the right one, he was too exhausted at first to feel much relief; only after he lay there some time, during which his fingertips and heels, and then the hair of his body, froze to the ice, did he feel some peace. He dozed. The ice, caught in a southward current, became smaller and smaller as it drifted off on its own course. For a while he allowed himself to remember everything; one thing after another came into his head, all the things he remembered of the years to come, until the ice had turned completely into the sea. Through the warm fog of his last breath, he watched the memories of a hundred ghosts drift skyward to finally and vainly burst.