Tours of the Black Clock

113

SO THERE WERE THE three of us, the hellgod of history, his dreamwriter and his translator, aging crippled and insane and unseen in a damp Italian basement. What came to repulse me most was how time made the client’s evil so feeble and therefore shredded the illusion that his evil was inhuman. It was utterly human. I saw the humanity the day the doctor came and changed Z’s clothes and cleaned him from his fouling himself. His fouling himself was specific to his oldness, but not to his evil. His shit stank, but it stank human, not evil. In the way time and age broke him down, it broke down his vicious godliness, his distinct monstrousness. He lived in abject fear of both of us, Petyr and me. He lived with the pain of his slipping life and approaching confusion. He was afraid and sore enough of life that it was all the more reason not to kill him. I’d hit him sometimes, though. I couldn’t stop myself. I hit him to test the situation, to see if whoever watched us in secret sent in the troops to stop me. His blood stank too, enervated and toxic. When I hit him, Petyr forgot himself for a moment and smiled. Go on, I said to Petyr, nodding at the old man, take a shot. Petyr did, in his impotent fashion. When the old man’s face burst with blood and his confused pitiful cry at the blows, Petyr shrank back, but not I think from having struck the ruler of the world. Rather I think from having allied himself with me; he hated me all the more then for having seduced him. As time passed Z became more rank to see and smell. I tried hard to believe it was the smell of his soul rising up through the body, but his fragility denied this pretense. I didn’t understand how history would bear this evidence of humanity, or how anyone could ever believe in redemption again, since the protest of history had so long been that all men were redeemable. This was a man who could not be redeemed. In my memory of what had been, I was now more him than he was. So here were two men, incontrovertibly human in their foulness, who in all their humanity could not be redeemed. History, clutching to redemption, might insist we were monsters, but the god has human shit in his shorts when the doctor comes to change him. The doctor says nothing, however, of Z’s swollen face, where I hit him. He says nothing of the blood. This is how I’ve come to realize Z is mine to do with as I choose. The followers cannot bring themselves to kill their god, they’ll let his own god do it for them.