Amanda, the girl he had loved on the foothill trail not far from the wedding party, was the last he loved chastely, and the last who wasn’t beautiful. He would have a lot of time, living out his later years as an old man inside the rim of a volcano, to consider why something as corrupt as beauty so held him in its grip. He’d have enough time to consider that perhaps, in his blindness, neither Synthia nor Kara was ever as beautiful as he thought. His blindness was too profound even to know he couldn’t see, until in the dim light of the lamp by which he read at night he found himself holding the pages only inches from his face. It was just like history to teach him what love couldn’t. He went and got some glasses. He couldn’t stand for Kara to see him wearing them, as he crashed into the chamber of the observatory that last night and found her naked below the sliver of night wedged in the observatory dome, the fine hair of her arms on end and the nipples of her breasts erect in the cold. He crept up behind her and before she could protest enveloped her in the warmth of his arms and lit her womb with the fire of his cock up inside her and it wasn’t until afterward that she sent him away, not because she hadn’t surrendered willingly to the way he fucked her but because, no longer able to resist seeing her, he had pulled from his coat pocket afterward his new glasses and put them on.
She looked at him. She grabbed him with fistfuls of his black hair and, staring at his face on the floor of the observatory, recoiled. With his blue eyes grown huge by the magnification of the glasses, there came back to her the memory of two eyes in a bottle dug up from beneath the sands of a dream, and all the heartbreak of that dream which she’d lived her waking life to avoid. She sent him away that night without explanation or comprehension. She was left more naked to the night than she’d ever intended, whispering “Etcher, Etcher” as she’d heard an old woman whisper a strange name in a dream’s doorway on the other side of a dream’s river.
And a little more of me died. I was twenty-eight. There were moments in the months that followed when I didn’t care if I lived or not, too dead to take an active part in ending my life, too alive not to let the days roar past me until the very sound of them had passed as well, and only in the subsequent quiet could I identify the stirring far inside me as something resembling survival. Some might have said I was weak. I never felt weak. I never felt weak that I could have loved so much. I never felt weak that I could give myself over to love, or throw everything away for it. I never felt small that love could be so much bigger than I. It was later, when others might have said I was strong, that I felt weak, later when no love was as big as I that I felt small. Later when, for the ten years that passed after Kara, there was no possibility of a love like that again in my life, and nothing left to me but to write my books in pursuit of more commonplace glory. To tell the story of everyone else’s dreams but mine: Kara’s dream and Lauren’s dream and Wade’s, glib dreams of buried cities and haunted jungles and flooded streets, the erotic fevers that change everyone strong enough to change but me; until finally I changed too. And only when the ten years had passed after Kara, only when I’d given myself passively to my marriage in the conviction that I had metamorphosed from the dead childhood of love’s idealism to the dead adulthood of loss’ resignation, only when from the dead wisdom of such an adulthood I had come to believe in nothing but the palpable reality that could be drunk from the hinge of a woman’s legs, was I surprised by love again. She was black and white. She was quiet and wild, her voice watery and melancholy, her smile sweet and hushed. She was the most beautiful woman I ever knew and for as long as it would last I was a force of nature. And if I had never really known her in order to write about her here, then I would have dreamed her, on and on into my nights with no sight of her ever to break the spell and cast another in its place. Maybe that would have been better. But she wasn’t a dream. And until there’s another dream, and until there’s another spell, this is my last book.
When his affair with Kara ended. Etcher packed his things, settled his affairs, and went to say goodbye to his parents.
They lived in the center of the village. They had so long assumed Etcher would eventually leave that, when the time finally came, they had gotten used to the idea he’d never leave at all. Etcher’s mother had moved to the village many years before to be with Etcher’s father; she came from a warmer part of the world several thousand miles away, and it took the rest of her life for her blood to thicken with the cold. Etcher’s father had been born in the Ice, brooding and stormy. There were only the three of them, mother and father and son, each always something separate unto him or herself, the family a home base they returned to emotionally from their daily routines. The night before his son’s departure, Etcher’s father got quietly drunk at the dinner table. Having arrived at the point where he believed his dignity was in jeopardy, he excused himself to go to bed. “I hope you’ll remember me,” he said to the stunned Etcher, “at my best, feet of clay and all,” and it was unbearable to the son how in that moment of parting his father considered himself to be a failure in his son’s eyes. Etcher watched speechless and confused as his father disappeared through the bedroom door, with nothing more to be said between them—which is to say with everything to be said between them—until fifteen years later, at his father’s deathbed when it was too late.
If Etcher inherited both his father’s brooding fatalism and kindness of heart, he resisted the lessons of life that teach one to be harder. In some ways Etcher taught himself to be softer. And in defiance of life’s lessons that teach one to dim the light in oneself and fight the dark. Etcher intended to do neither. He hated the resignation that life insisted on. He listened, with one ear pressed to the passage walls, to the secret life being lived by himself just on the other side of the life he lived consciously. There was no telling how much good he might have done or how much evil he might have committed had he not been so burdened with a conscience. In the end what he feared most was not his own pain but the pain of others, for which he might bear some responsibility. What he feared was not what his heart could survive but what his conscience couldn’t, which included the smallest infraction—his graceless negligence as a best man at a wedding, for instance. Time and again he was ready to believe the best of someone else. Time and again he was ready to acknowledge the worst of himself. Hating the resignation that life insisted on, he would come to be led by his conscience to resign himself completely to life, before saving his life at the expense of that conscience.
At the nearest station, eighty-five miles away, he boarded a train heading south. He was on the train for six days. He was on the train such a long time that at the end, when he stepped from his car onto the station platform, he continued to feel it traveling beneath him; and later from his hotel window, while the floor of his room continued to move beneath him as well, the blue obelisks of the city vibrated like the forests that accompanied him so endlessly they had seemed to him always the same forest, moving with the train. After so many trees the obelisks were a relief, spires of sea and rock, and he was exhilarated by the sight of them before he came—like everyone in his new city—to dread them.
Soon after he arrived he went to work for the authorities. For a while he was a clerk in the immigration bureau, where he did nothing but file forms nine hours a day. Eventually he was moved to a position in the archives at Church Central. This was but his first crime of resignation. Over the next ten years, as a dead man traveling surreptitiously in the body of a living one, like a convict on the run with a forged passport, he committed so many more such infractions that he lost count. Sometimes in the course of a day or night they numbered in the hundreds, small deferences and numb capitulations including the most sensual, the drink that took him indifferently past drunkenness, the woman he fucked beyond his attraction to her. His aggression itself was passive, the inexorable rush of a gale into a vacuum. He was in the perfect city for deadness and resignation. As he was exhilarated the day he arrived by the blue obelisks of Aeonopolis, so as well he was placated by the repe
tition of the sea, so as well he was reconciled immediately to how the city’s clerical powers had coopted the tedious questions of spirituality and meaning. So as well he came to anticipate the sirens of the morning and twilight and the time spent in the dark of the small altar room of his unit, where he sat praying to no one and feeling nothing and being no place.
For all of this deadness his memory could never abide the melancholy of another’s misery. It was in the early months of his arrival that he walked out of a bakery one morning to be met by an old beggar so hideous and pitiful that when he shoved his open palm in front of Etcher and pleaded for a piece of bread or a coin, the other man was frozen where he stood, even as his mouth was full of bread and his hand full of coins. Etcher fled without giving the man anything. All day he tried to work in the rubble of his moral paralysis, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and, claiming sickness, left work to return to where he’d last seen the beggar. The beggar was no longer there. All night Etcher looked for him. Exhausted, he finally found the beggar at dawn; into the stunned beggar’s hand Etcher stuffed a wad of money, and fled again. After this episode he never again left empty any human heart that gaped like an open wound. He gave money to whoever asked, as though to ward off the thrusts to his own heart by the things that made him ashamed of life. In the same way he taught himself to become softer, so the immune system of his conscience withered away, unprotected by the antibodies of experience. Among a crowd of hundreds at the teeming Market, a nation of beggars immediately identified him and closed in, no matter how he might hide his face or avoid eye contact, until it seemed they were at his doorstep at dawn, until they had mobilized as a guerrilla army monitoring his various routes, hobbling in pursuit on crutches or little wheels.
It was both the ultimate act of resignation and the ultimate answer to his conscience, his marriage to a schoolteacher for whom Etcher fulfilled an increasingly desperate agenda. Her name was Tedi. She was small and pretty like a doll if not like a beautiful woman, her face framed by gold ringlets. She had a mind for the numbers of things and their mechanics; beneath her sweetness she was obsessed with doom. Her past was strewn with men whom she regarded as having betrayed her and against whom she plotted her vengeance, in exact calculations and with a precision like the plumbing of a building. It didn’t hurt that the small school in town where she taught her little pupils was situated amid the most wrathful and indignant of Primacy’s graffiti. Gazing at the messages around her she took inspiration. But because even Tedi understood that vengeance was a short-term satisfaction, and because her temperament for it didn’t quite match her instincts, she was only left with doom in the end and the realization that its mathematics was more inevitable than any she might concoct to thwart it. Thus she hid in her unit from passing meteorites that might fall from space, searching her out as though with radar; and hidden from the danger of the outside world she was left with the doom that lurked in her like an infection.
Etcher felt as though he’d been jostled among an aimless throng of people and then had bumped into Tedi, at which point he looked down at his cupped hands to see they now held her beating heart. She wouldn’t take it back. He couldn’t give it to someone else. He couldn’t drop it on the ground where it might be trampled underfoot by the throng. He somehow accepted responsibility for this heart by the fact of his having it, and by his inability—even in the depths of his deadness—to be so cruel as to simply refuse or desert it. She closed in on him and he allowed himself to be closed in on, because he’d come to believe, now six years after Kara, that he’d never love like that again and that at the age of thirty-five the dead calm of adulthood called for this final moment of peace. Thus he had never stopped disbelieving in his own blame. That he didn’t have the courage to hurt Tedi sooner only doomed him to devastate her later. This culpability became all the more profound when, having given in to her plans for marriage, he gave in to her plans for a child. They both expected she would become pregnant immediately.
He awaited it hopelessly. He waited for his blank passivity to manifest itself as a small life, an unknowing infant whose existence would foreclose forever the possibilities of Etcher’s own escape. As he waited, he drank more. He scored liquor on the city’s boulevards, sometimes in broad daylight. But he never considered this petty outlawry as an attack on his passivity or even an aberration of it, but rather as more complicity, since the intent and effect of the drinking was to make passivity more tolerable. Like any functioning drunk, Etcher managed his hangovers as well as the hour of the day and the quality of his inebriation would allow; the priests would reprimand him on mornings when he showed up for work obviously toxic from something more than bitterness. In the hollow of his life he fashioned a routine that wouldn’t let him forget how his life was over, spending longer hours in Central’s dark corridors beneath its high empty rafters that were startling for the way they were immaculate of graffiti, reveling dully in his role as power’s flunky and authority’s file clerk. As time went by he found less occasion, as he’d done in the early days of their relationship, to leave work in time to pass the windowless downtown street of Tedi’s school, sometimes waiting for her in back of the classroom staring at the blackboard, where her messages ran off the edge of the slate onto the walls, around the corners and down the hallways—nothing but Tedi and little children and Primacist messages and classroom shelves of bibles and hymn books.
But offhours, in the shifts between his employment and his marriage, his drunkenness allowed him a fantasy. In this fantasy he ran through the streets of the city during one of the daily searches, with everyone huddling in their altar rooms, as he had his way with freedom, flush with the same rage of pleasure he’d poured into the flesh portals of so many faceless women. These fantasies were, in a sense, the same authoritarian fantasies of those who held power, a wild howl of sensuality derived from the submission of others. He’d merely been, he realized now, ten years too soon for Synthia, who had so longed for someone to make her yield to this sort of submission. She’d marvel now, if he were to happen upon her, at the steel of his hands that pinned her beneath him until he finished with her, at his integrity dribbling away inside her. But there was something else about his fantasies that had nothing to do with power. There was something about his fantasies that would have appalled the totalitarian Synthia, that had to do with anarchy and a lurking subversion ticking away inside him along with the weeks and months during which Etcher waited for Tedi to become pregnant and, mysteriously, she did not. In the dark of the archives he came to realize that with every passing month fate kept giving him another opportunity to make a break for it. He also came to realize that, each time he turned down the chance, it might be his last.
He was excited and terrified by the growing sound of the ticking. On the afternoon he discovered the archives’ back room, the ticking was loud enough to be indistinguishable from that of his heart.
His duties in the archives were to keep in order the records of the city’s affairs, and to file and search out records for the priests who used them. The door in back of the archives was so inconspicuous that Etcher always assumed it was a closet or storage space of some sort; it wasn’t only locked but had the dusty, uncracked look of not having been opened in a long time. Etcher worked for Central seven years before he saw a priest wearing the white robes of a church leader unlock the door one afternoon, enter and then close it behind him. This was the first sign to Etcher that whatever was beyond the door was not a closet. The second sign was that the priest didn’t emerge from the room for two hours. When he did, he had a large book under his arm and was looking for a place to put it in order to lock the door. “Want me to take that?” said Etcher.
The priest jumped at the sound of Etcher’s voice. It was as if he were unaware Etcher had ever been there, though Etcher was in plain sight and had always been there. “No,” the priest blurted, reluctantly putting the book on the ground and fumbling through his robes for the door’s key. He locked the door and lef
t.
The next morning a different priest brought the book back. This priest wore the pale-blue robes of a second-level clergyman; Etcher recognized him as an assistant to the one who had been there the day before. As he unlocked the narrow door, the assistant asked Etcher to locate a file for him. When the priest disappeared inside the room Etcher, rummaging through the archives’ files, saw that the key to the room had been left in the lock.
He had no idea why he did it. He knew that if he’d been too hungover to think of it, or so sober he might have thought about it too long, he never would have done it. But now Etcher walked quickly to the door, took the key from the lock, and put it in his pocket.
When the priest in the light-blue robes came out of the room, closing the door behind him, he would have turned to lock it except that Etcher said, “Here’s your file.” The priest took the file and stood there several moments examining it. “I also pulled these, in case you need them,” Etcher said.
The priest looked up into Etcher’s monstrous blue eyes floating behind his glasses. “No, I don’t need those,” the priest said. Then he walked away, still reading the file.
It was shortly after noon when the priest returned. Frantically rushing to the door in back, he stared at the lock for a minute in disbelief. He turned to Etcher. He was pale as he said, “There was a key.”
“I’m sorry?” said Etcher.
“There was a key,” the priest repeated. He wiped his mouth with his hand. “Did you see it?”
“In the door?”
“Yes in the door,” he nearly shrieked.
“I thought you took it,” Etcher said.
“What?”
“You took it. You came out and took the key. Remember? I gave you the file?”
“I took the key?”
“And then I gave you the file.”
“Are you sure?”
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