Tours of the Black Clock

16

HE HAD THIS IDEA she’d be there every time he opened his eyes. He had this idea she’d be there at sunrise, cold and frightened from her night on the island. But she wasn’t there at sunrise and she wasn’t there when he opened his eyes; and by late morning he was the one who was hungry and cold, and there would be people on shore waiting for the first run of the day. He went back. It was a sunny day. He loaded up the boat quickly and disembarked almost immediately; he found himself searching the island for her all the way across the river. He lost track of the speed with which the boat made its way over the water; people on deck were looking around anxiously and hanging onto the rail as the boat bounced along the surface. Two people actually toppled over; husbands looked at him in outrage as they scooped their wives up off the wet wood. “Do you think you could slow down a little?” someone asked him; he ignored it. At the island she wasn’t there. Gratefully the passengers pried themselves loose from the boat and climbed ashore, leaving him with abhorring looks and sarcastic thanks. He didn’t hear them.

He paced his boat, oblivious to everything else as he’d been since her first failure to return the day before. Now it seemed as though this had been going on not a single day but many days, maybe weeks. He hastily sailed the passengers back a couple of hours later, even leaving behind one or two latecomers calling from the beach; people began tying themselves to the boat in the manner of Zeno’s skeleton tied to the boat’s bottom, so they wouldn’t be thrown over from the captain’s assault on the river. “My God, man,” someone said to him, “do we have to go this fast? Everyone’s frightened.” There was a girl, the boatman answered, she wore a blue dress. You see a girl in a blue dress? All of them just shook their heads a little. He turned back to the black water; he seemed to push the boat a little faster. Passengers clung to the vessel whitefaced, teeth clenched.

On this trip back, or perhaps the next, he realized it. After fifteen years it was a little unthinkable he wouldn’t have seen it immediately; but it happened several times before he noticed. Rather, it didn’t happen. The Moment. The Moment didn’t happen. That moment in which time and space belonged utterly to his boat, destination and point of departure disappeared. And now that he thought about it, he realized it hadn’t happened this morning either, when he woke at the island; and now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember it happening the evening before. For that matter he couldn’t remember it happening since she’d left the boat. And it didn’t happen the rest of the day; and for all the fear and desolation of every time it had happened every day over the preceding fifteen years, now the fear and desolation of it not happening were such as to trivialize everything he’d feared before.

And he began to fear that she was not going to come back to his boat. In the way he’d told himself before that there simply couldn’t be any doubt about it, now he told himself there was nothing but doubt; now every time he sailed up to the island, and all through the time he waited there, he knew she wasn’t going to come. It was as though she’d taken with her that moment on the river; she’d taken it and was living in it somewhere there on the place he’d sworn to leave forever. There’s a girl in a blue dress, he’d call to the tourists going into town, keep your eyes open for her. And when they came back he’d ask if they’d seen her. When they came back, he interrogated them one by one. He stood in the middle of the boat barking at them, and they shrank from him, and lied. They lied that they’d seen her in the bar, they lied that they’d seen her at the hotel, where no one but his mother had lived for over forty years. They lied they’d seen her walking along the street. They lied they’d seen her among the ice, or the graves, and those were the lies he believed most, since he’d thought of her long before he knew her, or long before she even was, when he lay amidst the ice as a boy; and since she had, after all, come to bury something.

The group of them sort of huddled against each other before him. After he heard their lies he didn’t even see them anymore. He kept looking ashore, at the town. He paced and waited, thirty minutes, an hour. Not a single one of the passengers worked up the courage to ask when they were going back. Two hours passed; it was nearly midnight. And then, like the man who must scream to himself, if in no place other than his own heart, as he hurls himself into the chasm beyond the cliffs edge, he leapt, though it was only inches, from the edge of the boat to Davenhall Island, and went to look for her.