There was only one other place to look, of course.
He wondered what he’d say. He practiced confessions in his mind. He recalled all the confessions he’d made up as a boy, all the confessions he’d put into the mouths of the girls he met on the river. Those confessions didn’t apply. Those were confessions that begged never to be forgiven. This was not a confession offered to or received from any lover. This would be a confession to a woman with gray hair who had borne him. She wasn’t in the window anymore when he reached mainstreet again, but the light was still on, the only one in the hoteclass="underline" he had an overwhelming premonition that he would mount the stairs of the hotel, reach the room and find the door open, with the two of them, the girl and his mother, talking, waiting for him grimly. He understood that in fact the destiny of this girl in the blue dress had been to bring him back to face something, no doubt his own failure, from which he had formulated contempt not for himself, who deserved it, but his past and his home, which did not. He wasn’t sure what else there might be to face unless it was the night he had left, and the echo, like the light of a nova, of the man he’d found dead at his mother’s feet.
It had been an old man. Even old he’d still been a huge man, with red hair that had turned gold with the years, like the way leaves die.
Now the man who had white hair his whole life came in the hotel and, remembering hard, stumbled to the bottom of the stairs and found his way up to the next floor. He came down the hall to his mother’s door. It wasn’t open as he had foreseen, but it wasn’t closed either, not entirely. He could push it open, and he did.
The girl with the blue dress was not there. His mother stood in the middle of the room, gazing long into her memories. She wasn’t standing in exactly the same place she’d been fifteen years before, but it was close. And in much the same way as years before, there was the passage of probably five seconds before she turned away from her memories to look at him.
18
FOR SEVERAL SECONDS, ACTUALLY it seems to her like almost a minute, she knows he’s there in the door. In a way she’s been expecting him. She saw him in the street an hour ago as he rampaged among the windows. She doesn’t know why he’s here but she knows it’s nothing small that could bring him back onto the island. And once on the island it was probably not possible that he wouldn’t come here and see her now. So she’s not surprised. But she waits a few moments before she turns to look at him. There’s no recrimination in it.
He’s shocked, she can tell, that she’s become so old. What did you think, she says to herself, that time ticks to the clock of your memories? Her hair’s as white now as his ever was. We look more like mother and son now, she says to herself, than we ever did.
It so happens that she’s been thinking and remembering the same as he, remembering and thinking of that night. It so happens she hears the same echoes of the old man who came to die at her feet. Fifteen years later she hears his voice as though he’s still here on the floor; she hears him talking at this very moment and so does her son who stands in the doorway in silence. The mother and son look at each other and together they listen to the voice of a man who hasn’t been alive for fifteen years; neither mother nor son knows where the voice comes from now, and in fact both assume it’s only a voice in their heads. Neither of them believes that the voice, recreated from the memory of what it might be saying to them if it was actually speaking at this moment, is now saying to each of them the same thing. Neither believes they hold the ghost of this long dead stranger in common.
You remember me, the voice can be heard saying. Well maybe you don’t, maybe you forgot me immediately after I left your sight as surely as I continued to remember you for the rest of my life. It changed the world, my seeing you. Literally it changed it but that’s, you know, another story. Maybe it only changed my world. It only changed my Twentieth Century. Your world, your century, that’s another story. It was in Vienna. You were in a window. You were only a girl then, I don’t guess more than fifteen years old. The year was 1938, when we held the body of the long dead Twentieth Century in common.
T.O.T.B.C.—3
19
MY NAME IS BANNING JAINLIGHT, the voice continues. The year is 1917: I am born. I remember it. I remember leaving her, the rush of it, my mother banning me from her, though it wasn’t she who named me. That was my other mother. I had two.
I remember the long fall down such a short red passageway, as I fell I saw troops on the march, fields afire and black cannons in the sun, riots in the alleys of Russia and messiahs in the dunes of eastern deserts, and One fallen angel after another pulling himself up onto the face of a new hour. First one hand is visible then the second, nails grasping desperately for a hold of something, then the top of the head comes into sight, then the glistening brow, the harsh straining eyes, the grimacing mouth as he pulls himself up and finally hoists his body the rest of the way, lying there on the face of a new hour heaving for air. After the first, the rest come one by one, the fallen angels. They’ve come to change everything. Not just the countryside. They haven’t come just to build a city or two. Cities can be built in any hour at all. They aren’t here just to construct a canal or a bridge in the moonlight. They’ve come to change everything. They’ve come to change the very act of selfportraiture, disassembling it and then reconstructing it from some new vantage point of the soul, some corner of the soul’s room that’s been blocked eight thousand years by a chair we always thought we needed, a tablelamp we were always told was some heirloom too valuable to move, let alone give away. Out with the fucking chair. Out with the tablelamp that burned out long ago. Everything: they’ve come to disassemble and then reconstruct, from some blind spot in the middle of the room that’s always obstructed by something no matter where you stand, the clock. A small nearsighted German with wild white hair, who cannot count the very numbers from which he writes his wild new poetry, just makes it over the top now, catching his breath.
That big redheaded American galoot fumbling his way up after him, that’s me. When the German’s finished, I’ll just be getting started.