Tours of the Black Clock

34

I’M LIVING LIKE THIS a week and a half or so, it’s hard to tell, when I start getting work. Let’s say that in a crowd I stand out. The trucks pull in and the foremen are looking for big guys who can do some serious labor, and I’m made to order. For another three weeks I’m loading freezers in the packing companies downtown, where every thirty minutes they have to let you break because the cold robs your arms and fingers of feeling. This work goes from seven in the morning until nine at night. I can afford to buy food in a store and I could afford to buy a bed in a flophouse except all the beds are taken by the time I get off. I have the bright idea of just reserving a bed for a week with the money I’m saving but somehow it doesn’t seem right, having a job and a meal and a bed all at once. Then the packing company lays a bunch of us off. I get another job delivering packages in the garment district, this lasts about eight days when the customers start complaining that I always look like someone who’s come to put the rub on them.

So I’m back hanging around the streets, this time for something like a month. The federal projects pass me over as someone who can get a job somewhere else because I’m big, and the foremen in the trucks start looking right through me when they’re picking their crews in the morning. It’s funny. The only thing I can think of is that someone my size just can’t be counted on to submit to everything there is to be submitted to these days, or maybe it’s that these days anything big is immediately on the wrong side of things, at least down here in the street. I guess I understand it. It’s like this city itself that’s hovering over you everywhere you go and anytime you go there, but only the part of it that exists at eyelevel below the watermark is the part of the city that’s on your side. The rest of it’s your enemy, or dead to you. Sometimes I get the urge to stand still and look up at this huge city hovering for what seems miles above me, and wonder who the hell is really up there on all those floors far away behind windows most of us will never see through. I can’t imagine the buildings anything but empty up there, or maybe a stray soul wandering room to room wondering where everyone else went. The whole top of the city isn’t even here. It isn’t even now. It’s another city from years ago, the image of its life only now reaching us, the light of its extinction having taken place sometime since, and which we can only now wait to witness. Maybe that’s the way the guys in trucks see me, as a bigness that they know has died even though the vision of its death is still busy traveling up through time to the moment all of us, including me, can see it. I say bullshit. I say they’ve got a long fucking time to wait.