Tours of the Black Clock

10

IT WAS OBVIOUS AND appropriate that the old man should be given to the river; Marc wasn’t about to let him hang in a tree for a week. So in the middle of the night he took Zeno into the river and bound him with rope to the bottom of the boat. He cried as he did this. The next day, wearing the blue coat with the dirty gold buttons, he opened up business; his first decision was to raise the fare to a dollar each way. As weeks and then months passed, he came to forget about Zeno tied to the bottom of the boat, except for those odd moments when his bones rattled in the currents of the river; the passengers would look curiously to their feet at the sound. But the new captain was certainly mindful of the old man that first trip across the river when the fog closed in and there was nothing but a world of water and vapor, leaving him to ask himself, Where in the universe am I? Which he might just as well have asked all those years his boat was only a floating chinatown. And that he asked it now without ever having asked it before was what made this moment the first lapse in a life of innocence.