Tours of the Black Clock

45

1935–36. I LAUGH A year and a half. I rise in New York to just below the eyelevel of the city; I believe my past is past. I move amidst the present at large and at liberty. Moans of murder from the Spanish prairies, sobs of love from the King of England: I ford these sounds like a river. I’m building obsessions for my Austrian mentor, word by word, specialized and customized, blond and strawberry-nippled and voluptuous; I laugh so hard people in the streets stop to stare at my window. After a couple of months Herr Kronehelm presses into my hand six hundred dollars and disappears for months. I keep working and laughing. He reappears suddenly one day with no explanation, accepting his specialized obsessions in silence. I walk the streets with my hand over my mouth: everyone who sees me wants to know what’s so damned funny. In his room where the curtains never part Kronehelm withers gratefully before cruel delicious Molly. Two more months pass and he advances me more money and disappears another four months, reappearing to take from me more of my comedies. Leona and I have a final irrevocable fight, she cries outside my door and splatters abuse across the air like vandalism. Molly and Amanda come and go like they’re told. It’s not as though they’re slaves, they just have better things to do. They’re professionals.

On his second return some things about Herr Kronehelm’s secret trips come to reveal themselves. It seems he’s established a market for my work in Austria and Germany. He takes the work with him, has it translated and then copied, so that he may keep one and sell the other. It’s not any sort of mass production, part of the appeal is the work’s rare exclusivity. No doubt I’m portrayed to his European clients as one of America’s most sensational authors. I have long flowing black hair and wear a cape, I am the secret passion of Claudette Colbert. I’m tubercular and perhaps an opium addict. Anyway I’m sure not a six-foot-four farmboy with a big goofy face. Kronehelm now wants me to feed the pages to him five at a time, which has me crossing town to Gramercy Park every other day. My rate, however, rises to four dollars, almost unheard of in this business.

Keep it so wonderfully American, he advises me. Molly in the company of gangsters and cowboys and tycoons.

It’s the end of 1936. It’s the end of many things. I don’t quite know it yet, but my head has just begun to bob above the watermark after all. If only I were a foot shorter. It coincides with recent discussions between me and the Austrian over our general residency. He wearies of shipping little bundles of five or six pages to the translator in Vienna, more than that he just wearies of New York. He proposes we relocate the business to homesoil. I don’t even know where Austria is: in Switzerland or some place. “Austria is in nothing,” Kronehelm explains with frustration, “it is only in Austria.” He’s resolute about returning. I suggest that nothing has to change, I can continue to work here and ship it on to him in Vienna, from where he can wire back our agreed-upon sum. He doesn’t think this is very satisfactory. I shrug and leave him with his dissatisfaction.

Truth be told, it’s the laughing that I weary of. I’m retelling the old stories, I’m retelling other people’s stories with the things they left out. The girls are beginning to bitch at me in my sleep, we’ve lost the yearning for each other. We’re too familiar with forbidden things. But I haven’t any idea what to do instead of laugh. The laughing’s a habit by which I clear my throat. I’m tired as well of the dread of the pulp stories, and I do less and less of them. Months pass since the last one, and finally one day I go into the magazine not to deliver anything but to get some money owed me from a previous piece. The editor has some news for me.

“Couple of guys were here looking for you,” he says. He seems agitated.

“What couple guys?” I say.

He shrugs, disingenuously. After a moment he says, “It was yesterday.” The twenty-four hours since haven’t calmed him down. “They saw your name in one of the old issues. Or someone else saw it, they didn’t look like big readers.” He laughs nervously.

“Did they say what they wanted?”

“I don’t think,” he answers slowly, “it was a family visit,” which is a little funny, I guess, because it turns out in a way that’s exactly what it is.

“What did you tell them?”

“I had to tell them something,” he says, “so I did the best—”

“What did you tell them?”

“That you worked at John Hanks’ Top Dog.” He pauses to see how I take it, to see if I’m going to break his neck. When I don’t react he seizes the opportunity to spit out a rationale. “Well I figured you weren’t working there anymore and it was better than giving them your address and if I didn’t tell them something or if I tried to tell them something untrue they would have found out and come back and—”

“And broken your neck,” I nod. But he’s right, after all. It’s my situation and he isn’t responsible for it. “You owe me some money on the last piece,” I say, “we agreed on fifty and your accounting office coughed up forty.” He’s happy to pay me the ten, he’d probably pay me a hundred right now if I asked for it. “If they come back,” I say on my way out, “you don’t know anything else. Remember? And you sure haven’t seen me recently.”

“Goodbye, Banning,” he says, almost inaudibly.