Tours of the Black Clock

107

DOWN HERE IN MY room I don’t get much on the TV, and the fishermen claim there’s nothing on it to believe anyway. To hear the German commentators tell it, Germany’s on the verge of winning the war. Germany’s been on the verge of winning the war about twenty years now. Sometimes I get a signal from an American pirate station in Africa, broadcast into Germany until the Germans find a way to jam it; the Americans insist the tide is turning. The war is as endless as the century. Not long ago I received a transmission that seemed to come from nowhere at all. A man in a sea diver suit was floating in a black sea, a lifeline attached to him from some point unseen. Spheres floated around him and the sea diver just continued to hover there for some time. In the visor of his helmet was the reflection of an immense light that came from something unimaginable; beyond that his face was dark and blank. I imagined the man was myself. The beauty of his image was that anyone could imagine the sea diver was himself, in this transmission that came from nowhere at all. The later broadcasts out of Africa and Germany said nothing of this transmission, and none of the fishermen know anything about it either. When I think about the sea diver, I remember a river of gone time that once forked in two.