Tours of the Black Clock Read Online Free Page A

as everyone gambled everything in every moment; and he was losing. One by one the buttons disappeared. He dropped obscenities into the river one by one that the skeleton bound to the boat’s bottom might hear them. He almost imagined the old man reaching up over the edge of the boat and clasping him by the ankle. He almost imagined he might look down and see the fingers locked to his foot. Once, earlier on, while sailing along the island, he saw his mother. Her hair was completely gray now. She walked along the banks of Davenhall silently looking at him. She looked as though she understood he wanted an explanation but she couldn’t give it. He couldn’t bring himself to call her. He would have asked how she was, and if they’d spoken long enough he would have asked who she was. She walked and he glided along in tandem silence, and in the light the small white scar at the corner of her mouth sparkled like a diamond in her tooth. It made him a little heartbroken. She finally stopped in the sand and, slowly, almost fearfully, raised her hand and gave him a little wave. A little wave goodbye. He waved back. Then she turned with her arms folded in that determined way, and walked away, and he didn’t see her again after that. He sat on the deck of the boat and sobbed. The next time he thought of her was when he heard from Greek Judy that she was sick. “You should come see her,” Judy called from shore. Tormented and racked with guilt, he nonetheless could not bring himself to step on the island; at the edge of his boat he stared at its shore as though it was the chasm beyond the edge of a cliff. Judy left him howling in the fog. In this moment amidst the fog he howled at the world of his mother and dropped into the black river where nothing could be seen, and groped for something or someone to enter where nothing would be entered. The next time he saw Judy, his mother had recovered; but though he was relieved, his guilt wasn’t mitigated until much later, when everything was mitigated, the hymen of feeling worn away like innocence. One night he thought the feeling had returned when he lay on the mattress in the boathouse and something rumbled up from inside him: something’s happening to me now, he said to himself with awesome hope; but the rumbling wasn’t in him at all, rather it was the shorthaired silver buffalo sweeping across the dusty lot in front of his house where the buses parked in the day. He wrested himself from the mattress just in time to see the last of the animals disappear in the night. With this he lost all hope for the feeling. He lost it through the rest of his youth. He lost it into the years that he passed as a young man, on into the years when he neared the point he couldn’t even call himself young, at least not young in any sense he’d ever understood it. He lost it right up until the day he saw her on the boat, in a blue dress; on that day he rediscovered not the hope of feeling life, but life itself. This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.

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    H E HAD NO DESIGNS on her. He might have liked to put his hands on her hair and pull her gently into his chest, but he wasn’t likely to do even this. She was probably not more than fifteen years old; she could have been born the night he assumed this post on the river. At this time he’d taken on an appearance that frightened these girls; she wasn’t frightened. She stood alone watching into the water, the wet deck of the boat a dark mirror in which her blue dress shone. The ends of her hair stuck to the rail as she leaned across it; he touched her shoulder tentatively. I wouldn’t like you to fall in, he suggested to her. She looked at him as though he’d said something strong and startling. I used to lie to people, he went on, that the river was full of alligators. Piranha sometimes. She laughed, And they believed you? On this river, he smiled, they believe everything. He said, Have you come far? and she seemed to think about