ARC D’X

by Steve Erickson

  In the dark Sally pulled on her dress. It was intact, untattered. Etcher found his glasses; they were intact, unbroken. But everything else was in pieces. “Sally,” he whispered. “Yes,” she whispered back. Beyond the door a child and the child’s father waited. At that moment Etcher couldn’t be sure he would ever have her again; he grabbed her to him, by her hair. He would have crushed her into him.

  She opened the door and the little girl stood looking up at her.

  It was night, but the curtains had been drawn again, as when Etcher first arrived. Some of the beads and trinkets of the jewelry on the table had been strewn on the floor, where the child had played with them. Gann Hurley was sitting on the couch reading a handbill. He didn’t even look up; to have looked up at his wife and the other man would have been a concession that whatever passed between them mattered to him in the least, that he could be affected by anything that was beyond his control. At the front door Sally stood holding her daughter; for a moment the little girl looked at Etcher and then turned away. Etcher gazed back at Sally in confusion. “Will you be all right?” he finally said.

  “Yes.”

  Will I see you again? he wanted to ask. But he was afraid of ruining everything.

  He left the circle, and after waiting a long time caught a bus on the road back into the city proper. Whatever I do now, he said to himself on the bus, staring out the window at the volcano in the distance, I cannot do for her. I cannot assume she’ll be mine. I must act on the assumption she’ll never be mine, that it will never be less impossible than it all seems at this moment. I must act on the assumption that I’ll never see her again, except for a passing moment in the street or the Market, and that love has been left hanging in the black space of a small room, and that in the light, with a husband and a child, she’ll feel very different tomorrow, if she doesn’t already. Therefore, whatever I do now ultimately has nothing to do with her. It has to do with the life I’ve been living. It has to do with the man I’ve been and who I am now, without her, and what my life is now, without her.

  He went home and left his wife.

  It had never been in his temperament to understand power. In all of his passivity he had never felt the oppression of other people’s power over him, which was why he resigned himself so easily to it; his resignation was born not from his fear of others, after all, but himself. Nor was it in his temperament to revel in power, which was why he had never understood why women like Synthia needed him to exert power over them. He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn’t have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn’t last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn’t free.

  Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love.

  Etcher didn’t tell Tedi about Sally, because when he left Tedi it wasn’t about Sally. When he left Tedi he didn’t believe anything would ever happen between him and Sally. What happened between Etcher and Tedi was about Etcher and Tedi, and in his new power he tried to leave Tedi without abandoning her, if such a thing was possible. But he came to recognize the limits of leaving without abandoning. For months afterward, he would go by Tedi’s classroom—with the children and the blackboard and the shelves of books and bibles and texts—to marvel at the limits and power of her rage. He understood that this may have helped nothing. He understood that something about his enlistment of Tedi as a co-conspirator in his own leaving might be dishonest and cruel, and that he couldn’t deny her the right to her rage. Sometimes, outside the school, in the windowless downtown street, he took the full force of her fury as her efforts to contain that fury broke down and she broke down with them, the spectacle interrupted only by an occasional passerby. The best Etcher could do was promise not to lie to himself. He wouldn’t pretend it was all her fault, or pretend her pain was less than it was, or tell himself she was better off. He didn’t believe she was better off. He believed that in meeting her and being with her he had accepted responsibility for her heart and its dreams, whether or not that was something any person could rightly do for another, and had now broken those things; when she ran from the street crying he was left with the sound of the shattering, her dreams in pieces on the ground, the sound of them crunching beneath his feet like glass as he walked away.

  Two months after his marriage ended. Etcher left Church Central one night to the smell of wine in the air. All the way down the rock he smelled it. The wind brought it from the sea to the west through the windows of the lift, as though it were a red-wine sea beyond the shore rolling in and out to the pull of a red drunk moon beyond the Vog. Etcher might have thought he wanted a drink. He couldn’t remember the last drink. Yes he did. Sure he remembered the last drink. He remembered the bottle of wine in the corner of the little altar room, the sound of it in the dark. It was better to believe that the smell of wine in the night air only meant that he needed a drink; he preferred to believe that. He needed to believe it had nothing at all to do with that last time. At this moment Etcher might have craved a drink even though he hadn’t drunk anything in a long time, because it was easier to deal with his thirst than his hunger. If he had believed in omens he might have known, coming down the rock on the lift, what was there at the bottom. And if the smell of wine from the sea wasn’t omen enough, there was, when he stepped from the lift, the empty robe lying in the path. It was a priest’s white robe. Etcher had never seen one just lying on the ground like this, as though the person inside it had suddenly vanished. The wind carried it a couple of feet. Etcher picked it up. Once he would have cast it away immediately, as though it would implicate him in some crime. But now he casually threw the robe over his shoulders and walked on, and not much further from where he’d picked up the robe, at the bottom of the rock, he found Sally waiting for him, her hair blowing like a wild ash weed in the wine wind.

  “I couldn’t get you out of my head,” she said.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  He asked it as though they had made some appointment hours or days or weeks before that she hadn’t kept. He had imagined seeing her so many times that to see her now in the night and the Vog was somehow utterly expected and utterly unreal at the same time. It was so exhilarating it frightened him. He would have settled for just this opportunity to see her and hear her tell him, “I couldn’t get you out of my head,” and then watch her walk away. But she didn’t walk away. There was no way of being sure she was happy to be there; she didn’t appear happy or unhappy. At the bottom of the rock, on the base of the path that led to the lift, she was as dark as the night around her, she was blacker than he’d seen before, even in the black of her altar room. She was beautiful in that chemistry of her soul by which torment lit her beauty, the only light of her being the light in her eyes, and they walked along the cliffs in the night until they passed the point where a small wooden fence ran out and there was no fence at all, just the rocks and the emptiness beyond them, the plummet to oblivion at the border of where they now loved each other and every embrace was a risk.

  When she became cold he wrapped her in the white robe of the priest. He didn’t notice anymore if the sea smelled of wine. “I’m leaving Gann,” she told him. He didn’t say. “Good” or “I’m glad,” he only nodded, and the Vog leaked from the place where they stood as though that place was scorched by their heresy, rolling out across the cliffs and up the coast. It was the first and only moment Etcher ever believed Aeonopolis had succumbed to the rest of time, which in turn had succumbed to a magic rage wild beyond the fingertips of magicians: and Sally and Etcher didn’t presume to hold that moment, they didn’t wish to stop it as lovers do. They knew the moment wouldn’t wait for them. They knew it would go on spinning out from beneath their feet all the way out to sea for as far as they could see. They merely hoped to get as far as the momentum of the moment would take them, to distill the fury of their heresy into a thrust that would propel them over every moment that hadn’t already been r
educed to shambles by her astonishing face. It was a heresy that broke ten spells in exchange for the one it cast. Standing where they stood with the sea and the Vog and the night at their backs, in his arms she gazed up at him and cried out, “But you look so… happy,” though she meant something more, she meant a frightening rapture, and though she understood his love she didn’t understand his faith, and if he couldn’t persuade her to share his faith he shared her incomprehension of it, and wondered at his desire to possess beauty and own it, because he never really believed it was possible. He didn’t believe in his own faith. It was a measure of the power of that faith that it believed in him.

  Operating through the Church bureaucracy, Etcher got himself another unit, and a unit for Sally in another circle in another zone. He gave Tedi most of his money. By the time he had paid for the licenses of the units, nothing was left; he didn’t care about this. In his seizure of power he believed anything was now possible in his life, with or without money. In that collision called love, nothing was property, which was only the most banal currency of power. Etcher was his own force of nature, not accountable to property or money or bureaucracy or the emotional blackmail of his marriage that had held his life hostage. It had nothing to do with these things but rather with power and the smashing of his own resignation when he began, with blithe temerity, to smuggle from the archives the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History one by one until, some six months later, the vault that had held them was empty.

  The first night he went to see Sally, after she’d moved into the new unit, the door was answered by her tiny incarnation. She was three feet high, the replication of her mother but for the fire of her hair and her eyes, which were as blue as Etcher’s own. For a minute Polly stood looking up at him, considering his presence. Then she slammed the door. It took him another minute to work up the courage to knock again.

  He hadn’t known many children in his life. He had never been much of a child himself, cocooned in the otherworldly blur of entirely too much reason and silence that missed the point of tantrums and manipulation. The child who greeted Etcher at his lover’s door was just beginning to learn the power of tantrums and manipulation, in a never-ending fight to win the fleeting attention of a self-involved father and haunted mother. She was ready to draw the line at Etcher. She recognized immediately that he was out of his element, and at her mercy. She was charming, hilarious, beautiful, brilliant, strange and shrewd, but she was not merciful and, worse for Etcher, she was two. Like any true barbarian, she’d ruthlessly exploit Etcher’s essentially civilized nature by which civilized people ultimately perish. Across this breach there was nothing left for Etcher and Polly but to bark at each other.

  Struck by the vision of a dog in a forbidden children’s book that her father brought home from the Arboretum one night, Polly had the new interloper read her the story from front to back and back to front, over and over, while she barked each time a new dog made an appearance. She commanded Etcher to draw pictures of more dogs, rarely to her approval, until the circle’s obelisk was plastered with them, chartreuse and purple and aqua dogs wet with the spray of the sea and the dew of the Vog. “Dogs, dogs, dogs!” she chanted, marching around the room, until finally he rebelled: “No more dogs!” he snapped and Polly exploded in laughter, the sound of his breaking point music to her ears. Her laugh was so big for such a little person and so untamed that he laughed too, and the more she laughed the more he laughed, and the more she laughed in return. Over time he came to impose order. Over time he came to be for Polly the agent of order. In the presence of her mother she rebelled against it, but when it was just the two of them, Polly and Etcher, she submitted. Then her rebellions took the form of crawling up into his lap, peering into the mammoth blue eyes behind his glasses, and solemnly announcing, “I am not your friend.” He refused to mollify her frustrations. He refused to attend to her tantrums or humor her manipulations. He’d leave her in the middle of the unit screaming her head off while he went into the altar room and closed the door behind him, leaving it ajar just enough so that she knew she hadn’t been deserted.

  As each crisis passed, a new order took hold. In the doorway of the unit Etcher would watch her fearlessly chase the seagulls across the white circle in the bleary sunlight from behind the clouds. In the blast of the white circle she’d lift her little arm and, with one little finger, point at the vision of the gulls in rapt silence, as though witnessing in them something no one else could see, a secret revelation glimpsed amid the clockwork of the real, between the gears and wheels, to be forgotten when she was older and knew more, and understood less. Between Polly’s order and Etcher’s, no-man’s-land was the time between waking and sleep, between real and dream, when the two-year-old lay in the dark and, if sleep didn’t come immediately, called out to anyone who was there. Her bed was filled with so many little animals it seemed impossible to Etcher anyone could sleep there. It also seemed to him a sign of the little girl’s possessive aloneness, in a little world that was always filled with people of whom none could be counted on to stay more than a passing moment.

  More and more it came to be Etcher who was there when she called. Polly’s father was off with the theater, often unseen for days. Polly’s mother would take her jewelry box over to a neighbor’s and try to work, eking out an existence for her and her daughter. When Etcher took Polly in his arms and carried her out into the circle at night, walking around the obelisk while Polly searched the Vog for the sight of a star, she clung to his neck like someone who had felt the earth shift beneath her too many times and had learned within moments of her own birth how sooner or later everything passes away. She clung hard, silently. Sleep did not loosen her grip on him. And yet in the night when Polly called for her father and he wasn’t there, when she called for her mother and she wasn’t there, the appearance of Etcher at her side was small consolation. Etcher never quite got used to Polly crying at the sight of him because he wasn’t her father. He never got used to the fact, even as he came to understand it, that no matter what he might do for Polly, the sight of him could never delight her, could never make her heart soar, could never bring the spark to her eyes as did the sight of her father. He never quite got used to having the responsibility of being a father without its glory; he never quite got over the small fantastic hope that maybe she’d somehow gotten from him her blue eyes, which she shared with neither her mother nor father. He was never quite sure exactly when it first broke his heart to realize that Polly wasn’t his, and never could be.

  There was no doubt that Gann Hurley adored Polly more than he adored anyone else in his life or world. He adored Polly for the way she was an extension of him; he adored her for what of himself was in her. Perhaps, Etcher thought, it was this way with all fathers. Hurley had married Sally, after all, for the child she would give him. He had insisted on the child and, because Sally couldn’t stand to be dispossessed, she gave him his child. Gann’s passivity was of a different strain than that of Etcher, who hoped to move through his own life upsetting it, or anyone else’s, as little as possible. Gann consumed lives. His passivity was the vacuum into which lives were sucked. If someone had pointed out to Gann that in choosing to have this child he’d made a fundamental choice about the rest of his life, a choice that entailed a fundamental sacrifice of himself, he would have been confounded if not contemptuous; he would have considered the suggestion that something of himself had to be given up to fatherhood a blow to his integrity. Because his world spun so utterly to his own gravity, reasoning with him as to the wisdom of its various revolutions was like arguing with the sun, with which Gann felt a certain kinship.

  Much later, when everything came apart, Gann would look at Etcher in disbelief and say to him. “You went through all of this for a woman?” Maybe this was his retaliation for Etcher’s having taken his wife, though Gann would never have seen the situation as Etcher’s taking his wife, even if that had been the situation, which it was not: it was that his wife had left him, a version
of events Gann also rejected. But that Etcher had come slowly but surely to absorb Gann’s responsibilities, that Gann came to live off the fitful sense of honor that Etcher’s love created, was the price of Etcher’s folly. If lives were to be used, Gann was certain that Etcher’s particularly cried out for it. Gann obliged him. That it often came to be Etcher who put the food in Polly’s mouth and the clothes on her back and a roof over her head was only the result of the role Etcher had chosen for himself; no one had chosen it for him. And if Etcher could never quite understand how Gann could live with that, he nonetheless couldn’t completely disagree with it either, the role being the appropriate price for what Etcher saw at the end of his particular night, the glimmer of light that might be happiness. He had felt himself turned alive by not one woman, but two.