Tours of the Black Clock

159

I’M UP HERE EIGHT days. It’s not at all bad, truth be told. The weather’s fine and I watch out over the wide blue river, fascinated with the red train that crosses high over the water on its endless track. It reminds me of being on the ferris wheel in the Praterstern. I’m warm in the sunlight and birds visit my arms. I have this one melancholy fantasy that she’ll come to me one day and look up and say, I forgive you. This doesn’t happen but on the other hand it could happen at any time. She could be on her way here now, coming to say, I remember you from that day, before the candleshop.

This doesn’t feel like damnation.

I keep waiting for the damnation. As though it’ll arrive in the form of a black bird, and begin with the eating of my eye. But the birds don’t eat me, rather they seem content to watch the river perched from me. So I wait for damnation; it’s confusing that it doesn’t come. I’ve expected it so long, I spent so long earning it. It makes no sense that God gives me this reprieve, I’d have thought he wouldn’t waste a second. I’d have thought he’d snatch me the first moment I slipped over, as though there wasn’t another moment to lose. In my time, I have no reason but to believe that whatever God exists is the God of revenge.

The God of revenge in a century of revenge. It doesn’t seem possible that this might have been the century of redemption after all. Not this century, not for me. After all the things, it doesn’t seem possible that somewhere I committed some slight, insignificant act of kindness that redeems everything. One small act of kindness that wiped the rest of it away. And yet, in a century when time and space have liberated themselves of all reference points, perhaps one small good thing owns a universe unto itself, and a thousand monstrous worlds of evil must submit themselves to its love. I don’t understand anymore. I’m only here at the end of an island where a river becomes one, waiting for God to come damn me, or for her to come forgive me; I wait for her to whisper my name from the window of her room. I almost killed him, really. I came that close. I held his little head in the palm of my hand and nearly popped it open the moment he was born; only a lapse prevented me. It wasn’t that I was good or anything. It was only a lapse. I almost drowned him that day in the flood not twenty yards from here, from where I then carried him to the hotel; I didn’t have the strength to kill him, was all. I meant to do it, hold him beneath the water until the last bubble up from the graves beneath our feet was his. That I carried him back was only weakness. Nothing good about it. Fuck the God who redeems me, I say.

But God doesn’t believe me. I guess I don’t believe me either.

Before his blue redemptive face above me, I’ve already forgotten the things I’ve cried out for, and the cry itself forgets its own name.