Tours of the Black Clock

137

GIORGIO WAITS IN MY room while I make my way down the hall. The guards are sleeping. One peers up at me half-consciously, grumbling. I’m going to see the old man, I tell him. Disgruntled, the guard says, All right. He’s talking in his sleep. Perhaps I’ll stay with him tonight, I tell him, or bring him back here. The guard nods and readjusts himself, and the other guard sleeping close by protests the volume of our discussion. I move down the hall and across the larger open hallway that divides my part of the city from the client’s. Some of the lanterns in the hollows of the walls are burned out. At his room I find him sitting in the dark in his same chair, neither asleep nor awake. When I speak to him he responds with an incoherent mumble; he holds the pages I’ve written for him in his arms, presses them to himself. He begins to talk with some excitement; he originally thought he’d name the child August, after his only childhood friend. But recently he’s begun to lean toward Petyr. I lift him by his arms; he’s confused, but then everything confuses him. This isn’t going to work, I’m thinking, they’re watching me. But I bring him with me out into the hallway and we slowly head back to my room, the white pages curled in his fists.