Tours of the Black Clock

27

THINGS I WRITE NOW are also more than Alice can abide: she finds them in my bedroom. For someone in a state of nearly paralyzed mortification she manages to read every word. She takes the matter up with my father. They have a family council of sorts, my father and Alice and my two brothers. They analyze the situation. They speculate as to my psychology and morality and stability. The brothers lobby hard for an institutional solution, but my father settles for a whipping out in the barn and leaving me to sleep with the horses. “Try not to have intimate relations with any of them while you’re out here,” he says when he’s done. His anger seems more personal than the others. “You’re one to talk,” I have the nerve to answer back, and he beats me some more.

It’s 1933. A faultline runs through the epoch. Over here we’ve got Roosevelt, over there they’ve got this guy in Berlin. They’ve got this guy in Russia.

I’m sixteen. The things I see from the windows of my bedroom make less and less sense. Soon a new moment will come with a faultline of its own, and I’ll step to the other side. And on that side it’ll be a long time — perhaps not until the moment I die at the feet of an old woman in a little town on an island I cannot name — before I see anything so clearly again.

It’s you I mean, of course, and it began that afternoon in Vienna when you were still a young girl. And no dreamwoman I ever woke to, before or after, touched you. Nor did I, though it changed everything just to see you, no less than did the small German with wild white hair who wiped the clock clean of numbers altogether.

But that’s later. This is tonight, in 1933, on my father’s ranch. Or rather its outskirts, where the Indians live. And tonight is the night.