Tours of the Black Clock

151

I JUST REALIZE IT. I wouldn’t make more of it than that. It’s not as though the part of his soul attached to mine has given it a significant little tug. I just think that when you’re in a room with a dead person you instinctively know it, although just as instinctively I know that isn’t necessarily so. I turn and there he is, nothing about him looks different from the way he looked in the bottom of Giorgio’s boat or the way he looked sitting on the cliffs of the Caribbean watching the war. I just know he’s dead, and I walk over and feel his pulse only because I don’t trust my own instincts anymore. Soon his eyes will roll up into his head; I’ll be damned if I’m going to close them. I’ll be damned if he deserves that kind of dignity. Still, I think I’m supposed to say something. I think I’m supposed to let someone know, before he breaks open and bits of him fly out over the world. I’m supposed to call someone on the phone and tell them the man they’re looking for is here in the West Seventies of Manhattan. By my calculation, which is certainly suspect, he’s eighty-one. I leave him as he is, there in the chair, the gold slits of twilight striping him through the blind. I tear from the blueprint the emergent room in the basement corner and pin it to his shirt. In the middle I write not an explanation or an epitaph or an excuse, just a mystery for someone better at mysteries, any random investigator who passes this way. It reads: “Aber ich liebte sie. (But I loved her.) A.H.”