Tours of the Black Clock

64

YOU AND I TOGETHER. A day passes, two, a week passes since Holtz came. I leave the flat only to walk three doors down the street for a meal. I keep thinking, Someone’s going to miss me. I keep thinking, There’s a rendezvous I’ve failed to keep. But there’s no one who misses me, there’s no one for me to meet. Every contact with my life up until this week has been broken, all the moments that have sailed behind the present in a single line scatter to new winds. The common compass spins wildly to no north. Somewhere far away is the moment I stand on the corner at Jerry’s newsstand and covet the pulps on his rack. Further is the moment Henry stands at my bedside and wakes me to follow him and Oral out to the Indian shacks. I don’t know if I actually see these moments or if the glare of the sea on which the present moment sails plays tricks on my eyes. Now we wait for the new client, the new friend. I guess I already know he won’t simply buy you like the others. I guess I already know you’re not simply to be sold to him like the others. At the end of the week I’ve decided a client is just a client, or did I decide that before? I decided before but this time I make myself half-believe it. That’s it. I’d breathe a sigh of relief except that to breathe anything at all connotes life, and the life I’ve carried almost twenty-one years in me has now scattered to another wind as well. An entirely different kind of ghost lives in me now, you and it together.