Tours of the Black Clock

19

MY NAME IS BANNING JAINLIGHT, the voice continues. The year is 1917: I am born. I remember it. I remember leaving her, the rush of it, my mother banning me from her, though it wasn’t she who named me. That was my other mother. I had two.

I remember the long fall down such a short red passageway, as I fell I saw troops on the march, fields afire and black cannons in the sun, riots in the alleys of Russia and messiahs in the dunes of eastern deserts, and One fallen angel after another pulling himself up onto the face of a new hour. First one hand is visible then the second, nails grasping desperately for a hold of something, then the top of the head comes into sight, then the glistening brow, the harsh straining eyes, the grimacing mouth as he pulls himself up and finally hoists his body the rest of the way, lying there on the face of a new hour heaving for air. After the first, the rest come one by one, the fallen angels. They’ve come to change everything. Not just the countryside. They haven’t come just to build a city or two. Cities can be built in any hour at all. They aren’t here just to construct a canal or a bridge in the moonlight. They’ve come to change everything. They’ve come to change the very act of selfportraiture, disassembling it and then reconstructing it from some new vantage point of the soul, some corner of the soul’s room that’s been blocked eight thousand years by a chair we always thought we needed, a tablelamp we were always told was some heirloom too valuable to move, let alone give away. Out with the fucking chair. Out with the tablelamp that burned out long ago. Everything: they’ve come to disassemble and then reconstruct, from some blind spot in the middle of the room that’s always obstructed by something no matter where you stand, the clock. A small nearsighted German with wild white hair, who cannot count the very numbers from which he writes his wild new poetry, just makes it over the top now, catching his breath.

That big redheaded American galoot fumbling his way up after him, that’s me. When the German’s finished, I’ll just be getting started.

I see all this at the moment I’m coming out of my mother. I’m no sooner born than at the end of my rope. I pass out awhile and when I come to, a few things have been switched around on me and it’s a while before I catch on.

It’s 1917, and the clock is ticking.