Free Tours of the Black Clock by Steve Erickson Page A

federal projects pass me over as someone who can get a job somewhere else because I’m big, and the foremen in the trucks start looking right through me when they’re picking their crews in the morning. It’s funny. The only thing I can think of is that someone my size just can’t be counted on to submit to everything there is to be submitted to these days, or maybe it’s that these days anything big is immediately on the wrong side of things, at least down here in the street. I guess I understand it. It’s like this city itself that’s hovering over you everywhere you go and anytime you go there, but only the part of it that exists at eyelevel below the watermark is the part of the city that’s on your side. The rest of it’s your enemy, or dead to you. Sometimes I get the urge to stand still and look up at this huge city hovering for what seems miles above me, and wonder who the hell is really up there on all those floors far away behind windows most of us will never see through. I can’t imagine the buildings anything but empty up there, or maybe a stray soul wandering room to room wondering where everyone else went. The whole top of the city isn’t even here. It isn’t even now. It’s another city from years ago, the image of its life only now reaching us, the light of its extinction having taken place sometime since, and which we can only now wait to witness. Maybe that’s the way the guys in trucks see me, as a bigness that they know has died even though the vision of its death is still busy traveling up through time to the moment all of us, including me, can see it. I say bullshit. I say they’ve got a long fucking time to wait.

35
    N OW IT’S THE SPRING of 1934. And one day one of those things happens, one of those small things that when it happens no one could possibly know will be important. I’m standing around a newsstand up at 49th and Broadway, a number of us are there trying to bum cigarettes off the customers who just bought some. The man who runs the stand is Jerry. He isn’t happy about us being around and he’ll come out sometimes and shoo us like cats, and the boys just stand there with their hands in their pockets. I’m less interested in the cigarettes than the newspapers and magazines, but if I so much as touch one, Jerry goes berserk. So I stand reading the front page of the papers in the racks, actually I only get to read the top halves and am left to wonder at the bottom. The magazines I can only stare at, with these black and red and blue covers, amazing women in shredded clothes and gangsters whose faces are always shadowed with someone else’s dying. I sometimes actually consider the luxury of buying one of these magazines for a dime or fifteen cents or whatever it’s going for. But I never do. I just stand around with the others watching life there on the corner of 49th and Broadway, and most of it is life that’s not so unlike me, but sometimes it’s the life of theater people going by in taxis, actresses on their way to rehearsals in the day and patrons on their way to the shows at night, and financiers and office workers and men in suits in black cars.
    The small thing that happens is one day someone comes running up to Jerry with news that his wife has had a stroke and been taken to the hospital. Jerry’s frantic. “I’ll watch things for you if you want, Jerry,” I say, and maybe if he’d been thinking straight he’d have just closed up the stand and I’d have just wandered off to another corner, and the rest of my life would have been different, and the world and the Twentieth Century would have been different. But he isn’t thinking straight and these are times when closing up work just for a day constitutes a sacrifice, and so my proposal that seemed nuts ten seconds ago is quickly evolving into a hopeful longshot. He breathes deeply and runs back into the stand and collects most of the money, leaves me some change and gives me a nod. Then he just runs off