“I thought so. Perhaps it fell out of your pocket.”
The priest kept wiping his mouth. He looked at the door and then at the floor around his feet as though the key might materialize. His eyes were twitching when he said, “You remember me taking the key. And putting it in my pocket.”
“I think so.”
“No,” the priest said emphatically, “you do remember it. If anyone asks, you remember I took the key and put it in my pocket. I didn’t leave it in the door. I put it in my pocket and it fell out somewhere along the way. Where nobody would find it. Where nobody would know what it was if they happened to pick it up. We’ll get another key made. We don’t have to bother anyone else about it. I took the key from the lock and put it in my pocket and you gave me the file, you remember that. If anyone should ask.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t just walk away and leave it in the door. I didn’t do that.”
“Yes. I mean no.”
An hour later a locksmith appeared to make another key for the door.
For several months Etcher kept the key hidden away, occasionally considering whether to dispose of it, not simply because it was incriminating but because he’d never really thought about opening the door to see what was behind it. Etcher wasn’t concerned with what was behind the door. It was never his reason for taking the key. He took the key simply for the taking, and he was struck afterward by how easily he’d done it, how easily he’d lied about it when the priest had returned looking for the key in panic. It was only later that he was tempted to press his luck and actually open the door; and then he was unnerved by how tempting it was, though curiosity as to what was behind the door was never a part of it. It was the act of opening he couldn’t resist, as it had been the act of taking. And as every month passed in which he expected Tedi to tell him she was pregnant and that his fate and responsibility were decided, as every month went by that he was once again reprieved by some conspiracy of biology and destiny, his own recklessness grew more irresistible until the moment came when, in the latest hours of the night, he gave in to it.
He would try to open the door, he decided. He assumed the locksmith had changed the lock anyway when he made the other key. He would try to open the door, and when it wouldn’t unlock, he could then dispose of the key, the temptation having been succumbed to and thwarted.
The locksmith, however, had not changed the lock. In the dark of the archives, the door opened.
Etcher had been right about its being a very small room, the size of a walk-in vault. There was nothing inside but the books—nearly a hundred of them, all like the one the priest had removed and the other priest had returned. The books were old and dusty, in grimy red covers that had no titles or authors’ names but were simply identified, on labels that ran along the edges of the shelves, as the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History: and at that moment Etcher almost turned from the vault and slammed the door behind him. At that moment, though he had no idea what the volumes meant, suspicion crowded subversion in his brain; instantly Etcher somehow knew that if he were to be discovered here, he’d disappear forever, that no one would ever see him again. That the breach of entering this room with these books was more than simply treason, it was heresy. He lingered long enough to pull one and then another volume down and open them. In them were listed events Etcher had never heard of. The volumes told of people no one had ever known and countries no one had ever seen. He read of lives no one had ever lived and pored over maps of places no one had ever been. Every sound of Church Central, every creak in the walls and every footstep in its distant quarters, resonated in the vault until, with dawn just over the horizon, his nerves could no longer stand it.
He was terror-stricken, some minutes later, to hurry from the archives into the lobby of Church Central only to see, there in the middle of the night, two cops.
He could tell they were cops. One was a large black man and the other a short man with red hair; they appeared tense. He was certain they had been waiting for him, tipped off by a witness in the shadows or an alarm miles away. But in fact the cops paid Etcher little attention. They just stood in the middle of the lobby as Etcher walked furtively past them. He got all the way to the door expecting them to call out after him, and it was only when they did not, it was only when he left the lobby and building and, outside, felt the cold sweat on his face and the night air in his constricted lungs, and only when he got home to find Tedi sleeping, with no fateful news on her lips, that he truly believed he’d gotten away with it. Then he couldn’t sleep. Then he wanted a drink, but after he dug his forbidden bottle out of the cupboard where he kept it, he changed his mind and put it back. He was seized by the impulse to rid himself of the key for good; outside in the middle of the night he walked around the circle’s obelisk, muttering to himself. For a long time he tried to think of where to dispose of the key, and the more he thought, the more the impulse for getting rid of it subsided, until he decided—much to his own dismay—that perhaps getting rid of it wasn’t so necessary after all.
He allowed himself then what he believed would be his last subversion: keeping the key. The fires of subversion in him were banked; he felt spent, calm.
After several days passed, however, and then a week and then two. Etcher realized nothing had changed. If the target of his subversion was his own life, nothing about the few clandestine moments he’d spent in the archives’ vault had delivered him. The moments in the vault were like a drug that had been taken and experienced and then had worn off, leaving him jangly and unsettled and blinking around him at how his circumstances had remained untransformed. And though there wasn’t any way in which stealing into the vault could transform the circumstances, an unconscious impulse insisted such an act would slowly change Etcher himself until he’d crossed the rubicon of his subversion and there was no way back. He had no idea what such a point of no return would look like. He had no idea what he would look like once he’d passed it. He clung to the notion that he would easily see this point approaching in the distance before he got there, allowing him enough time to change his mind.
He began working late in the archives every night. He drifted further and further from home, spending first five minutes, then ten, then half an hour in the archives vault studying the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History and their blasphemous reality. The more alien this reality was to him, the more he intuitively believed it. Thus he surely and deliberately found for himself a corner with no exits, where he had no choice but to plot his own revolution against a reality that had no history, and in which he no longer had faith. His breakthrough act came on the night that he not only opened the vault to invade its contents but took one of the volumes from the vault, carried it through the lobby and out of Central, into the dark of the city. It was the volume that included all the entries between Heathen and Holy. Etcher not only chose this volume because of what happened that afternoon but soon realized that but for what happened he might not ever have taken any of the books. He might well have just lurked forever in his corner of no exits, never finding the courage to fulfill his plots.
The woman who walked into the archives that afternoon seemed lost, gazing at the walls around her. With her she had her two-year-old child, who bore a striking resemblance to the mother except for the fire in the little girl’s hair.
Somewhere between twenty and thirty, between white and black, her eyes somewhere between brown and green as her wild dark hair fell across her face, the woman impressed Etcher less with her beauty than the audacity of her presence, since he’d never seen anyone walk into the archives but a priest. Indeed, a priest in the lobby also stopped to look at her, as struck by her as Etcher. The woman was very shy as she approached, pulling the small girl behind her. “I was wondering—” she began in the quietest voice like water, when she stopped, staring at the looming blue eyes behind Etcher’s thick glasses almost as Kara had looked at them almost ten years before, as something sprung loose from the oceanbed of a dream. F
or a moment Etcher found himself once again on the brink of a terrible rejection, though nothing had ever passed between him and this woman to be rejected.
It was a long minute before she shook herself from the sight of him. The little girl, in the meantime, was running up and down the aisles of the archives. The priest in the lobby appeared mortified. “Polly,” the woman said to the little girl, “come here.” The child didn’t pay much attention. The mother shut her eyes in weary futility. She looked at Etcher again, struggling for composure. “I was wondering if you could help me,” she said. “I’m trying to get some information on a relative. I’ve been—Polly!”
The child returned to her mother’s side.
“What are you doing here?” Etcher said in panic. He kept looking over at the priest in the lobby.
“His name was Madison Hemings,” the woman tried to explain quickly. “He was a distant relative, I think, perhaps an uncle or cousin—”
“This office isn’t open to the public,” Etcher cut in. “We don’t have that kind of information.”
“Oh,” she answered, “I’m sorry.”
“You should go to the police for that sort of thing.”
“No,” she shook her head, “no, I can’t go to the police,” and before the little girl could take off again the mother scooped her up into her arms. “Well, thank you anyway,” she said very quietly, and walked from the archives across the lobby as the priest and Etcher watched her go.
Etcher was miserable for the rest of the day. He wanted a drink, after not having had one since before the first night he’d entered the vault. It was instead of drinking that he took home with him that night the volume that covered material from Heathen to Holy; when he was sure Tedi was asleep, when he’d finally fended off her constant pleas that he come to bed, he went into the privacy of the altar room, shut the door behind him and, in the faint glow of the light above, opened the book. He didn’t really expect to find an entry for Madison Hemings. The only Hemings listed was a woman named Sally, briefly identified as the slave and mistress of the leader of a country Etcher had never heard of.
As though searching out a forsaken beggar, he spent the weeks afterward looking for her. He left his unit early in the mornings so that he might spot her on the way to Church Central, and he no longer worked late in the archives in the evening, so that he could search for her on the way home. He thought he might see her in the city’s voggy unlit streets, where the only sounds were the engines of cop cars and passing buses and the clanking of deserted trolleys. He thought he might hear her whisper in the Market where the vendors waited motionless and mute behind food stands and clothes racks that buyers selected from in silence. He thought the ragged peddlers who slept with their wagons in the back alleys and hobbled to him out of the sooty magenta dusk might sell him an answer from their pile of lamps and rags and dishes and candles, or trade one for something of value. Several hours a day for several weeks he wandered the city with the graffiti of the church peering at him from the city walls through the Vog and shouting in his head amidst his own voices of subversion and disarray. When he returned to the unit at night he told Tedi he’d been working late, in the manner of adulterers who lie about affairs. They fought about sex. He slept in the outer room and held in his dreams the woman who had come looking for Madison Hemings. He didn’t drink.
He used the channels available to him, sending to police headquarters an official Primacy request for a file on Hemings. When it came back he was only mildly surprised to see that her name was Sally. The cop who brought the file said, “A lot of activity on this one lately.”
Two days later in the white afternoon glare of her circle on the edge of the outlaw zone Redemption, Etcher stood in the shadow of the obelisk. He waited a long time before walking up to knock on the door. It opened before he reached it. The man in the doorway was several inches taller than Etcher, several years younger. He had long dark hair and wore a T-shirt. Clutching one of his hands was the little girl Etcher had seen in the archives several weeks before.
“Excuse me,” Etcher said. “I—” and he stopped, not knowing what to say. All the way across town on the bus he’d tried to figure out what he was going to tell her; the sudden appearance of her husband only distracted him more. “I was wondering if I could speak to Mrs. Hurley,” he said.
Hurley raised his thumb and pointed over his shoulder. “Come on, Polly,” he said to the little girl, and they walked across the circle beyond one of the other units. Sally came into the doorway where her husband had been. She wore a plain dress, the earth and ash and blood tones of which, in the sun behind Etcher, weren’t unlike the color of her skin. Her hair was loose. She was even more startled now by the sight of Etcher than she’d been in the archives. Etcher took off his glasses, rendering her a blur.
“Come in,” she said. Etcher stumbled into the unit and immediately ran into a table. “Are you all right?” she asked. He groped for a place to sit and she led him to a couch.
“My name’s Etcher,” he finally said. “I work at Central. A few weeks ago you came to get some information.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “But there was a priest in the lobby, and the archives aren’t open to the public. I didn’t want you to get in trouble.”
She said, “How did you find me?”
“Well, some things aren’t so difficult when you work for the Church.” He didn’t know what to tell her and he wasn’t sure why he was here. He didn’t know whether to tell her about the entry in the volume he’d taken from the archives. Thinking about this on the couch he put his glasses back on instinctively, which he always did when he was confused, when, for instance, he couldn’t hear what someone was saying. The unit around him was dark, the furniture worn. There was a table on which sat a drawer full of beads and trinkets and small silver chains, a pair of pliers and the finished results of some necklaces and earrings. Otherwise the room had been overrun by little stuffed bears and tigers and storybooks and puzzles with missing pieces; there was a small wooden train that went over a small wooden bridge through a small wooden tunnel. The walls of the unit were barren except for pictures drawn with crayons and a crude poster curling at the corners that announced GANN / ARBO.
Sally got up from the couch. “Gann always keeps it dark in here,” she said. She pulled open the window curtains and the light blasted her in retaliation; she put her hand in front of her eyes and stepped sideways into the obelisk’s shadow. She returned to the couch and sat down, the obelisk still casting its black denial across the top of her face. It nearly obscured how sad she appeared, sitting beside Etcher on the couch. She looked as though she would break if she learned one more secret, which was why he didn’t tell her about the entry in the book from the archives, or if she suffered one more betrayal, which was why the news was on the tip of his tongue. He thought the most tragic thing about her was how her sorrow made her more beautiful. It seemed the worst trick of her beauty, that the chemistry of sorrow would make it so much more luminous. Her touching sweet smile was most lovely as the smile that obviously masked heartbreak; it was when her heartbreak was unmasked, as when the shadow of the obelisk dissipated into a gray twilight pool that poured from her face and flooded the unit, that her beauty somehow defied either the rules or definitions of the earth. Etcher could neither bear to look at her nor bear not to.
“Well,” he said, “that was what I wanted to tell you.” They sat on the couch a moment in silence and he thought he should get up and leave. He pointed at the drawer of jewelry, the necklaces and earrings. “Did you make these?” he asked.
“Yes.” She picked up one of the necklaces and held it against her brown neck.
“It’s nice,” he said. At first he was being polite. But he reached over and touched the necklace; she placed it in his hand. He’d never seen a necklace like this. Strange charms and primitive symbols hung from its links. “Have the police ever searched you during an alert?” he
asked, and realized how abrupt the question sounded.
“I… don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to be sure. When you’re in the altar room you never know if they’re here or not. No one knows if they even come out to this zone.”
“This is the kind of thing they would confiscate. You should hide it,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Are you from here?” he said, and that sounded abrupt too.
“No.” The certainty of her answer wavered in the air. “Are you?”
“I come from a village far away to the north, up in the Ice.”
She said, “I come from somewhere else too.”
“Have you been in the city long?”
“I— Awhile. As long as we’ve been married, anyway. A couple of years, anyway. We married when I became pregnant. Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have children?”
His mouth was dry. “Yes. May I have something to drink?”
“OK.” She stood and got him a glass of water and brought it back. She sat down and said, after a moment, “How many?”
“What?”
“Children.”
“None,” he shook his head.
“Oh,” she said, “I thought you just said you had children.”
“No, not at all.”
“I thought you did.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Two.”
“Did you tell me that before?”
“I said we got married when I became pregnant.”
“What’s her name?” he asked, although he knew what her name was.
“Polly.”
He drank his water. “I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything. I can go.”
“Gann was just taking Polly for a walk.”
“I hope it’s not a problem, my coming here.”
“No. I’m glad you came.” It immediately sounded to both of them like a strange thing to say. They were moved by it, and uncomfortable. “Have we ever met before?” she asked.
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