Tours of the Black Clock

3

THEN SHE’D FALL ASLEEP too, sometimes right there on his bed. There were times he thought she’d perhaps been drinking a little. On these occasions he’d lie awake thinking, just a kid staring at the black ceiling, and it was always then he heard the footsteps out in the hall. He’d sit up and look at the light through the crack beneath the door, and listen to the footsteps and how they paused outside the door. As far as he knew, nobody else lived in the hotel but the hotel’s manager, a small Chinese lady who never spoke and was never seen; anyway the steps in the hall were those of someone big. Someone very big. For years, in the middle of the night, he heard right outside his door the tread of this unseen giant. There’s someone else living in the hotel with us, he said to his mother. “Who?” she asked. If she’d simply said No, he would have known she was lying.

The sounds of his life on Davenhall Island were those footsteps in the hall at night, the trees in winter and the throttled din of the ice machine out behind the rice shop, a white and black unit that ran entirely on its own, blocks of ice spitting out onto the ground to the absolute indifference of everyone but Greek Judy who carved them up and put them in the bourbon she served in her bar. Judy was a young woman who had taken over the business some years before; her actual name was Garcia, nothing greek about her. Otherwise the ice sat like glittering glass fusing with the dirt of the town. Greek Judy’s tavern served bourbon and beer, steak and onions to the tourists that came in on old Zeno’s ferry. From four in the afternoon the concentrated red roar of life billowed from the bar in the middle of translucent oriental silence, and after the last ferry went back Marc, who sometimes saw other children in the bar with their parents, went around collecting their artifacts, which he hid under his bed upstairs in the hotel across the street. For years he assumed these things of an outside world were contraband before the will of his mother, who in fact knew all about them but recognized how necessary to a child was the glamour of his secrecy.