Tours of the Black Clock

154

IT’S NOW BEEN SEVENTEEN years since I came to this hotel. Seventeen years of nights I’ve stood at her door with my hand raised. I see her sometimes from my window, when I have the courage to look out. Occasionally I believe she looks just as she did when she watched me from her own window that day in 1937, ’38, I don’t remember anymore. She spends much time in her own room caring for the boy; sometimes, when the boy’s out playing somewhere, I smell the liquor in the hallway. I would have a drink with her, if it was possible; fortified by it, I would say all the things. All the things to say. We would, after all of it, become drinking pals in our old times. From my window I watch the boy too, whitehaired embodiment of the willful love of hers that defied all our terrible power. When the rains come one autumn she runs from the hotel looking for him as the island floods; the waters rush down the mainstreet with a terrible power of their own. After neither of them has come back, I pull on my coat and climb with difficulty down the stairs and out the hotel’s backway. In the rain and wind I slowly trudge up toward the northern end of the island where the cemetery lies; there, huddled beneath a wooden shack, I can see the boy trapped by the storm as the graves bubble up around him. I wade out to him. By the time I reach him the downpour is such that almost nothing’s visible but rain; I spot him by his hair. He’s nearly unconscious. I pull him up from the water and for a moment, as he’s caught in my hands, I have that old urge to avenge my wife and child who I can barely remember anymore; all I remember is vengeance. I have that old urge. But I pick him up out of the water and hold him to my chest and wade back to town. I come back to the hotel and up the stairs. I’m wondering what I’ll say to her when I carry the boy through the door. But she hasn’t returned yet and so I lay the boy on his bed and pull the blanket up around him when I hear the door downstairs, and I’ve only returned and closed the door of my own room when I hear her footsteps in the hall. She’s lived a whole lifetime not to hear my footsteps behind her anymore. I hear her call his name at the sight of him, the noise of love’s weapon fired years ago from the moment she bore him.