Tours of the Black Clock

23

I GET TO THE top of the stairs, the smoke of Christmas fire and smell of food wafting up after me, and lumber down the hall and crash through my bedroom door. I knock a few more things over and sit in the dark of my bedroom awhile. I don’t remember if I cry. Well yes I do remember. But I sit still awhile and soon I forget about it. I sit in the middle of the room in the dark and look out the nine windows of my bedroom. Some I look through more than others. Later I’ll realize just how few windows all the other rooms of the world have. I can’t get over how only my bedroom has just the right number of windows. It’s possible of course that I just can’t take a hint. It’s possible they’ve put me in such a room with all these windows for a reason. The better to hurl myself out one of them. But instead I just take in everything I see from them. In one I see the year of my birth and in one I see the year of my death, though I see neither my birth nor my death precisely. In the seven windows in between I see the seventy or so years that are my time. Not my life but my time.

And I’m sitting there and I hear this sound. It’s the sound of my time. I’d expect it to be a roar, like something up from the middle of the world, or I’d expect it to be the clatter of machinery. Or the cacophony of guys shouting, in southern fields or beerhalls or cadre meetings. Maybe the good taut yank of a rope snapping in Louisiana, or the soft wet smack of a head that falls from a German axe. The whispers of Russians selling each other out, or just that abysmal yawn of physical matter cracking like a nut, and everything around it falling in. That’s what I’d expect this sound to be. And it isn’t anything like that, wouldn’t you know it. Nothing like that at all. It’s this high vicious squeal, like a rodent would make, or a bat. And it comes from no place in the sky or the ground, no place outside; it’s down under me. And I look around my feet but it isn’t there, I pick up the chair and check and it isn’t there. I can stand on the other side of the room and it’s still under me, somewhere under the place in my belly where I was strung up to my mother before she bore me. It’s a whistle in my bowels.

I write the first thing I’ve ever written tonight. I’m watching the Twentieth Century through my windows, though I have no way of knowing yet if it’s my Twentieth Century or another, if the 1917 I see through one window or the 1928 through this window or the 1989 through that last window are the ones I know or have known or will know. So I open the windows and then I just see the snow, and I write a story about the white horse in the barn. The snow is blue in the moon and the drainage ditches my father built three years ago are gurgling a little in the light, the ice breaking up a little, pretty unusual for a Christmas night. Wonder where such a hot jungle blast might be coming from that it breaks up the ice and makes the ditches flow so that in the moon they’re silver strings unraveling across the valley? I write a story about the white horse as it runs in the snow, which of course it wouldn’t do. The snow comes down but the ditches keep on unraveling with a heat that insists upon itself, like blood that won’t stop coursing through a body after the heart has ended pumping it; and in the white of the night’s snowfall and the silver of the running drainage all that’s to be seen of a white horse is the red of her eyes. It flits across the valley like fireflies. It burns in the snow until the horse sleeps, freezing where it stands.