Tours of the Black Clock

69

REDEMPTION COMES TO ME in my daughter.

Courtney’s born in the summer of 1938. She’s no sooner out of the womb than her head looks to be on fire, all blood and red hair. Megan insists she gets the hair from both of us, but I know it’s from her. She’s one big brilliant freckle, her skin hums of innocence. Her big eyes grip wisdom from some primal gene that has leapfrogged her father; I can hold her in a single hand. I can run up and down the stairs with her poised in this hand over my head, I can dangle her from the rooftop of our apartment building and she only laughs at my joke. I’m the funniest man in the world to her, I was born to be her clown. My heart’s soaked with her until it tears like tissue just to look at her.

What does it say about this universe that such a thing comes to someone who deserves it so little.

I’m leaving you.

It isn’t your fault that Megan gave me such a thing as Courtney. I don’t deny that even in the throes of this redemption, the dark doesn’t kiss me. There’s enough love somewhere to love both you and my kid, the love dangles like a single rope from the mouth of a well, open beneath the sun and sky, to the well’s pit, wet and black and hot; it’s the same rope. But I have to try and be good. I struggle to warrant this moment that I shot into the middle of my child’s mother, and from which the child of that moment is now given back to me. The light of a star that exploded months ago, and has now arrived to stay.

Don’t come here anymore.

I’ve sent word to the landlady on Dog Storm Street that we won’t be needing the flat.