Tours of the Black Clock

2

THIS MOMENT WAS THE first lapse in a life of innocence. Marc grew up on Davenhall Island in Davenhall chinatown, the only white kid of the town’s only white woman and, it had to be presumed, one of the town’s fleeting transitory white men. One perhaps who’d come in as a tourist one night some twenty years before the night Marc left the island forever, or what he thought at the time would be forever. Marc’s eyes were green. His hair was white as noon, not yellow, white; it never darkened. When he was small he sat in front of the mirror in his mother’s room on the second floor of the hotel across from Greek Judy’s in the middle of mainstreet, and pulled his eyes at their corners to narrow them like the rest of the eyes in town. As though there was nothing amiss in the genes other than his having been born into a darkness before which he never had to squint, a dark that sucked into itself all the color of his hair. A dark like his mother must have been born into too, though not so fuliginous and depthless since her hair wasn’t the stark white of his, nothing of her was that white except the small scar at the upper corner of her mouth. Nothing about her came to characterize her for him so much as this small scar. He came to measure what she felt by it, or what he supposed the scar told him that she felt. When she caught him trying to look like a Chinese in the mirror of her room, the scar lifted to some expression between humor and alarm; he saw it and didn’t do it anymore.

At night she warmed some milk and read to him in her strange accent, the accent of many languages woven into a jungle of one. She read from books in which neither of them had any interest except for the sound of her reading them. It was a rare gesture of motherhood though this isn’t to say she didn’t feel like a mother to him even when she made no gestures. The fact was she couldn’t have been less prepared for him; when she had him she was at the age she could have been a grandmother. She had borne him after reaching a point where she supposed it was possible only in theory. Thus she regarded him as a bit of a theoretical child. She observed and considered him in the way she might observe and consider an extraordinary figment of her imagination. When she was most brutally honest with herself, she’d ask if, given this, it was possible she really loved him deeply; she was never so brutally honest she could bring herself to answer, though had she been that courageous it’s entirely conceivable the answer would have been yes. At any rate the milk and reading were acts by which she stepped into her own imagination and took part in it, with conviction.