Tours of the Black Clock

39

BUT THEN IN 1942 I’ll come to find myself oblivious to self-mortification. I’ll come to acknowledge it in principle even as I never quite feel it. I don’t guess in 1942 I’m aware of anything except the room in Vienna where I ravish you over and over while the most evil man who ever lived watches us. I don’t suppose anything ever really shakes me until the night I watch my wife and child hurl themselves to oblivion as some kind of price for saving you and me, a woman they never knew and a man the depths of whose soul they never felt the way they deserved. Both of us from a pact which perhaps I chose, perhaps I didn’t.

Damn the consequences of my acts, it’s the consequences of my words I love and loathe. I wrap them like a rope around a man’s neck, or thread them like a string of pearls up through the middle of a woman’s womb.

I don’t know whether I’m supposed to feel bad for Pennsylvania, I only know I don’t. I cleared the decks of that almost instantly, making room for the evil to come. I admit it’s a little appalling that it doesn’t cross my mind hardly ever. Maybe Henry deserved dying, maybe my father and Alice and Oral deserved what they got too, but there’s an odd silence where my conscience should be wrestling with it. It’s like a man atomizing into nothingness hundreds of thousands of men and women and children, maybe in a little city somewhere, maybe Japan, maybe two little cities in Japan, maybe in the name of something righteous, maybe in the name of ending some larger barbarism, but then claiming that he never has a moment’s doubt about it, he never loses a moment’s sleep. Never in the dark does he see a face or hear a voice calling him. But then, that happens in your Twentieth Century. Not mine.

I’ve come now to see and hear things only when I fuck a woman in the dark or write words on a white page. It doesn’t mean I stop feeling the havoc of my fingers. I write to the music of Henry’s head sloshing when I broke it. My first story, there in the cloakroom at Doggie Hanks’ Top Dog, is about a man who kills his woman on a New York City backway. He kills her at the story’s beginning, but the story isn’t about him, it’s about her. She’s telling the story and goes right on telling it after he’s killed her, and goes on telling us how she longs for him still. When he sleeps at night she strips him on the bed, ties him to the bedrail with his shirt and makes love to him with her mouth. He wakes up and all he can see is that he’s tied naked to his bed and bleeding. His thighs and belly are covered with blood and he cries out in terror at his dying. In fact he isn’t dying at all. In fact the blood isn’t his but hers, she’s still bleeding from the top of her head where he bashed it in. But he can’t see her at all, he only sees the blood that he assumes is his own; and the sight of it, the image of what he believes is his own death, as well as the mysterious inexplicable climax he comes to from a sucking he cannot fathom, literally stops his heart. I also manage to work in some social observations of life in the streets of Manhattan.

I work in dread of every word I write. It leaves me abysmal and burdened rather than released. When I lie down to sleep I have to put the papers away, where I can’t reach or see them. When I finish I don’t wait a minute with it, but take it right down to the offices of the magazine, so as to have it out of my life.