Tours of the Black Clock

103

AT DAWN, SHE COULD see the smoke. She saw it from the end of mainstreet with the other people of the town; by then the fire burning out over the river was dead and done. All night she’d slept through the sounds of people running down the street to the edge of the island to watch the shack burning; she tossed and turned in her hotel bed and her dreams filled with the fraught rumble below her window. When she saw the smoke she ran down to the shore and pushed a vacant boat out toward the black remnants of the shack as the Chinese tried to pull her back. Two police cutters drifted at the scene; there wasn’t much left to inspect. Dania sat in the boat in the fog watching awhile, she waited for the police to pull her aboard one of the cutters and ask her questions. They’d ask her if she knew him, they’d produce witnesses. But that didn’t happen. After a while she lay in the bottom of the boat and fell asleep; when she woke she heard the rain on the tarpaulin pulled over the boat. It wasn’t until later that day or sometime the next when she saw the dark young Greek ferryman and the way his eyes wouldn’t meet hers that she remembered what she told him the first day she came to the island. Take me to a place, she said, he can’t follow me. Zeno, lovestruck, started his boat. “God, what have you done?” she whispered to him now. He looked around him with furtive guilt; he was about to speak when she stopped him. “Please don’t say that you did it for me,” she begged, and turned back to town.

What’s the matter with all of them, she said to herself that night thinking of Reimes and Joaquin and Paul and Zeno and Blaine, do they imagine I’m beautiful, or ever was? Please, she prayed in the dark, don’t let them find a body. Please don’t let them find a trace of him, out there in the river. Let the last sign of him have been the smoke.

She paid up her hotel bill for a month and stayed another. For a while she worked for the man who ran the tavern across the street. When she’d been on the island a year, a child-swollen Mexican girl stumbled into the tavern one evening and in her wan frantic face was left only a single impulse of life by which she might bear a baby girl. No man was with her nor did she have any reason to be on the island except that she’d come to the most secret place she could find to have what was intended to be a secret child. The child was born several hours later. The mother died by morning. By afternoon the Chinese had a spare eucalyptus pruned and prepared for her. Singlehandedly Dania held them off as the woman’s body lay wrapped in a quilt with the dust of mainstreet rising around it into the red light of the sun falling past the river. “Her name was Consuelo Garcia,” Dania told them. You’re making it up, they said. “She told me herself only moments before she passed away,” Dania answered, Consuelo Garcia’s baby in her arms. Years later when the baby, who Dania named Judy after a girl she saw in a movie once, grew to understand the story of her birth, she never knew whether Dania had invented the mother’s name or not. Dania buried the young mother out behind the ice machine and stood guard several days to satisfy herself the body wouldn’t be unearthed. We’re not barbarians, you know, one Chinese woman told her. As a small girl on the island Judy sometimes took trips across the river with Zeno, who called her Little Greek. You’re only confusing her, Dania might have said to him, if she’d ever spoken to him again after the night he set Blaine on fire.

After she’d lived in the hotel for many years, alone and untouched, the lover came back to her one night. They were older now, the two of them, and their love was older. She woke to find him sitting by her bed holding her hand, stroking her wrist; the next time she found she had her head on his chest. She reached up in the dark and lay her fingers against his face. In this way he appeared over time and sometimes she simply talked to him, telling him everything that had happened to her while he sat in the chair next to the bed. Their carnality retreated not by virtue of age or indifference but by the nature of what it had once been, limitless and inexhaustible; they wouldn’t trivialize it now by the shame of their consciences or the rote of their bodies. You don’t have to speak, she told him, it was always beautiful that you didn’t. He answered, I always said the wrong thing anyway. I got the color of your eyes wrong, I said the wrong name. Any name, she said, would have been wrong. She meant the presumption of naming it at all, what they did together. Our love owned only a face, it owned its own strange body that flowered from the middle into male and female; history served at its pleasure. One night, when she slept, the lover brought the friend; by now the friend was very old. While she slept, the lover, understanding it was time to give something back to the history they’d defied, left something of the friend inside her. There was no trace of this transaction in the morning; no semen leaked from her, no tissues ached with remorse. All she felt was a little dizzy.

The dizziness went on for two weeks. She was now nearly fifty years old. Something is wrong with me, she told Judy one afternoon; and Judy, now eighteen, took off the afternoon shift from the mainstreet tavern she would herself inherit seven years hence, to accompany across the river on Zeno’s ferry the woman who’d fought to save her mother from being perched in the trees by the people of the town. To Zeno’s devastated sorrow, Dania still wouldn’t speak to him. At the other side the woman and the girl got the bus to Samson. The woman, just short of half a century, considered that in her life she’d come farther than her father only to choose exile after all, without any map of a geographic or temporal residence; on the bus to Samson she looked at the hands that had shot men and buried women and delivered children, she looked at the feet that had cast spells and shocked conventions, and felt the only scar that would allow her touch, the one at her mouth, given there by the same hand, though she didn’t really know this, that now tickled and left queasy the base of her womb. The bus rolled down the highway, the Twentieth Century slowly passed in those increments it chose to surrender. In Samson the woman and girl sat together in the doctor’s office and waited the duration of another small piece of the century until the moment the doctor examined her and revealed, to the astonishment of all three of them, that she was pregnant.