Now, with all his power, he ran for that light. Every moment was shot through with its possibility. In so running he would hurl himself into a new life and a new Etcher, because he never before had really believed in happiness; his rush toward the light was the leap of faith of one who had never before had faith. In the pandemonium of his love he arrived at the archives late and left early, carelessly filing the forms and papers however it amused him. He never craved a drink. In her bed at night, in the contraband love stolen within inches of her sleeping child, he smelled the wine of her and the ash, he smeared himself with her until his body was black with the cinders of her soul. He got on his knees before her and hissed her name in the archway of her womb, and took in his teeth the bud of her blistered dreams. He never relented. He ignored her pleas to stop. He parted the fur between her thighs and slipped his mouth over her red silk bell that rang at the tip of his tongue. “No, please,” she moaned centuries away on some unfathomable street of no numbers; and it was his new power that he loved her so much that her no meant nothing to him. On into the night nothing of him moved but his tongue in her, nothing shook his grip of her body or the seizure of her breasts when there trickled down the uterine avenue the gorgeous bitter oil of her black egg. The taste of it flooded his brain like the drug of a star. He said her name. He said it into her, it wound its way up inside her. It hung in the center of her and encircled her heart, sealing off all means of escape, it caught in her throat and filled the back of her mouth. It bled into her eyes and she saw her own name before her written in his terrible alphabet. It crashed the barricades of what they believed and invaded the realm of what they dreaded until for him there was nothing anymore to dread except the limits of his voice to speak her name, the limits of his mouth to swallow what her body flushed onto his lips, the limits of his fingers to hold her fast until he’d pleased her beyond what she could bear. And in those moments on his knees before her he understood how love made a person whole by obliterating him, how it made a person bigger than he’d ever been by taking from him everything he thought he valued, how it could touch a person with the biggest and most obliterating determination of all, the conviction that he could die for someone, that he would die for her.
For Sally those moments were excruciating. She couldn’t remember Gann having ever given her an orgasm or having ever given any indication he cared to; now she clung to some uncomprehending unworthiness, never believing herself deserving of the climax to which her new lover dedicated himself. When the no slipped from her lips at the surge of her body onto his own lips she had no idea what it meant, though she had the sense of having been pleased like this before, and of how the orgasm was at once a transcendence she never believed in and a capitulation she could never forgive herself for making. In the dark she tried to make out the place and time into which these climaxes hurled her. In the dark she tried to make out the name and face of the man who knelt before her. She was overwhelmed by his insistence on beginning his life anew. She could barely stand the burden of his happiness. She could barely live up to the possibilities of her own happiness. He gave everything and took everything, and since she couldn’t get over the feeling that, where he believed there was everything, there was in fact only nothing, the fraud of it filled her with remorse. She knew, in the dark delirium of his pleasing her, that she’d been borne out of being owned into this blackness where she owned him; and in that blackness the one clue to who she really was was there right in front of her, and farther from her reach than ever. And thus what she released onto his lips from the center of her was the echo of a distant memory that would determinedly abort the birth of the person in her who had sworn never to be owned again. She wouldn’t settle for happiness without meaning. She clutched his black hair that fell across her thighs. When his tongue found in her the clearing where the small child waited, in the embrace of the small child’s arms was a small white baby seagull not yet strong or knowing enough to fly from the blinding white circle that engulfed it. Like the tragic alchemy of her face, by which her beauty was released by sorrow. Sally could only fly alone. She could not fly with the only lover she’d ever known who believed in her wings.
Three months after her affair with Etcher began, Sally became mysteriously ill.
It began in the middle of her, in the small of her back, as if the small white seagull was growing inside and beating its wings for release. For some time it was merely pain, and then one morning it overcame her and she collapsed. For an hour Polly wandered the unit, absently playing with this toy or that and crying to her unconscious mother; finally she opened the door and wandered out into the circle, where Cecilia the neighbor saw her. Cecilia went out to talk to the child. “Mama’s sad,” Polly told the woman. “Well, let’s go see what she’s sad about,” Cecilia answered, taking the little girl’s hand. Cecilia found Sally shuddering on the floor. When Etcher returned that night Sally was in bed, the pillow beneath her wet hair a ring of sweat. What dismayed him most washer whiteness. She was as white as anyone he’d ever seen in the Ice. He held her all night to conjure the blackness back into her; in her ear he coaxed her with advice, he beseeched her to breathe the night deep into her lungs, that it would flush her body with the tinge of twilight. The next morning she seemed to have rebounded.
But that night she was worse. Etcher returned from work to find Polly alternately poking at her mother’s somber daze and playing with her mother’s jewelry, having strewn them from one end of the unit to the other. Now Sally was white like ice itself. Her lips were cracked and her hair was matted; the black lines of her eyes and mouth were the very scrawl of death. One moment he’d touch her and she was clammy and cold, the next she was on fire, and she was only fleetingly aware anyone else was there. Polly began to cry. Etcher was astounded. He scooped up the child and wrapped her in the tiny pink blanket of her bedding and paced the floor with her as Sally moaned to the sound of her daughter. “Why is Mama crying?” the little girl bawled. After almost an hour she finally foil asleep. Sally croaked with thirst. In the fit of her fever she hurled her blankets off her. The sheets of the bed were soaked beneath her. Etcher lifted her from the bed and set her on the couch as he plundered the various drawers and shelves for more bedding. He changed the sheets and put Sally back to bed; now she was freezing. He buried her with blankets and laid himself across her. She shook violently beneath him.
It continued all night. All through the night Sally thrashed in a rage of heat and cold, as Etcher would lift her from the bed and remake it, changing the sheets that were wet with her sweat. His hope was that she would expel the disease in the torrent of her fever; he held her so close and she was so hot that their embrace seared him, and when he wasn’t holding Sally he attended to Polly, who woke hourly through the night and called to her mother. When her mother didn’t come she cried. When she cried Sally stirred from the sleep that Etcher spent the night fighting for. At dawn, when the little girl tumbled from bed and came over to pull her mother’s hair, Etcher bathed and dressed Polly, fed her some breakfast, and took her to the neighbor. “Help me,” he begged.
“Where’s her father?” Cecilia answered, taking the child.
For the first time Sally seemed to sleep peacefully in the morning light. Etcher, allowing himself to hope the crisis had passed, crossed downtown on the way to Central; he didn’t make his usual morning stop to see Tedi. At the archives in the early afternoon he was gripped by a sense of something ominous. He took the lift up to one of the offices on the next level, where he found one of the priests. “I have to go now,” he told the priest.
“What are you talking about?” the priest said, taken aback.
“I’ll return when I can.” He had found a new capacity for ruthlessness in his life. It was part of a new power that didn’t allow for second-guessing in the matters about which he’d found a new determination. When he returned home, a moment beyond the door’s threshold he discovered a metamorphosis taking place. Laid out on the bed she was drained of color or
cognizance. The blood in her was as still as stone. She was lividly caught in some abyss that denied Sally Hemings had ever existed. He put on his coat and went to the next circle and found a doctor.
The doctor came back with Etcher. He took one look at the woman on the bed and said, “She’s dead.”
Etcher gazed calmly at the doctor. “Let me explain something,” he answered, “she’s not dead.”
“It’s in the hands of God,” the shaken doctor protested.
“Let me explain something.” Etcher looked down at Sally and back at the doctor. “Things have changed around here, so you can’t be expected to have known. I’ve been running for the light, is the thing. I’ve been running and I’m almost there, and the light isn’t going to flicker out just at the moment I reach it. It’s not going to happen that way. You have to take into account the new power. You have to take into account the new capacity for ruthlessness.” He said, “There’s been a shake-up, so to speak.” He pulled the doctor down to his knees. “God works for me now.” He thrust the doctor’s face into Sally’s, whose eyes were open and still. “Listen: she breathes.” The doctor listened, terror-stricken. “You can’t be expected to have known,” Etcher assured him. The doctor and Etcher watched Sally for a long time.
She breathed.
The rest of the night Etcher kept the doctor there by the scruff of his neck. He pressed him into mixing concoctions and formulae; but the doctor, at a loss as to what was wrong with Sally, couldn’t treat her. Finally, when Etcher lifted Sally from the bed in order to change the sheets for what seemed the hundredth time, he turned around to find the door wide open; the doctor had made his escape.
Not long after, the doctor returned with the police. The cop in charge was a small wiry man with red hair and a mass of bandages where his nose used to be. The sound of his words seemed to leak out of everywhere but his mouth, which now jagged sharply skyward; there was no way for Etcher to know he’d seen this cop before, in the lobby of the Church in the middle of the night. The police left the doctor with Sally and took Etcher crosstown, up to the rock.
At the rock, Etcher was met by the priest who had left his key in the vault door months before. He didn’t say anything but took Etcher by a lift to a top floor of the Church, where Etcher had never been in the nine years he worked as a file clerk. The door of the lift opened on a long hallway, at the end of which were two open doors and, beyond them, a white room. The priest led Etcher to a small office off to the side of the hall, where another priest in a white robe was sitting at his desk waiting for him.
Etcher had seen this priest before, at one time or another. He’d never spoken to him. The priest in the white robe looked up at Etcher from his desk and motioned for him to take a seat. The priest who brought him disappeared.
The priest in the office was curt and officious. “You’re Etcher?” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’ve been working here for a while, haven’t you, Etcher?”
“Yes.”
The priest wasn’t looking at Etcher. He was making notes on something that had nothing at all to do with Etcher. “You’re very lucky to be able to work for the Church,” the priest said. Etcher, thinking this over, didn’t say anything. The priest looked up. “Do you want to keep your position as an employee of the Church?”
“I’m not really sure,” Etcher said. “Actually, I’ve been giving this matter some thought.”
This wasn’t the response the priest had expected. “You’re not sure?”
“Well…”
“There are reports, Etcher, that you’ve been acting rather strange lately. There are complaints about your recent work habits and behavior.”
“Complaints?”
The priest stopped taking notes and put down his pen. “Do you find this amusing?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, I haven’t thought about whether it’s amusing. In the larger scheme of things it might appear amusing. At some later point, I mean.”
The priest studied him.
“At some later point, it might—”
“Be quiet.” The priest had thought this was going to be a routine disciplinary session. He resented having to give it extraordinary attention or energy. “I’m putting you on suspension,” he said. “I hadn’t intended to do this. I assumed we would straighten this out in short order. I hadn’t anticipated your attitude, your impertinence. In several weeks we’ll reassess the situation. Maybe then, after several weeks without pay, you’ll appreciate your position. Maybe you’ll take the matter more seriously.”
“The problem is, I need the pay.”
“Yes,” the priest answered coolly, “I understand that. It would have been constructive if you had understood that before we had this discussion. Perhaps next time you’ll be less cavalier. More prudent.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” Etcher explained, “I can’t take a leave at this time. Not until I figure out what I’m going to do. I have a friend who’s very sick.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” the priest retorted, incredulous. “I didn’t say this was a leave, I said it was suspension. It isn’t something that you have any say about whatsoever.”
“Oh no. That’s not true. I have complete say.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known. But things have changed.”
“Changed?”
“I have the books.”
The priest blinked. “The books?”
“The old red ones. From the vault downstairs. The Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History, such as they are.” Etcher said, “I have all of them.”
The priest went as white as his robe. He went whiter than the people of the Ice, he went whiter than Sally Hemings’ disease. His mouth finally curled into a desperate smile. “It’s preposterous.”
“Well, it’s understandable you would think so,” Etcher admitted.
“You’ve taken your life in your hands,” the priest croaked, “if you’ve so much as touched a single one of those books.”
Etcher laughed. “Well, now that you put it that way, that’s it exactly. I’ve taken my life in my hands.” He laughed for several minutes. When he stopped laughing he added, “There’s been a shake-up.”
The priest jumped from his chair and ran from the room.
Etcher sat waiting nearly forty-five minutes. He became tired of sitting and waiting; he was worried about Sally. He had finally given up waiting and was walking out of the office toward the lift when the priest returned. He appeared to Etcher to be in something of a state. “Come with me,” he gasped.
They walked down to the other end of the hall, through the open doors of the white room. Several other priests were sitting behind a crescent table, in front of which was an empty chair. The head of this group, sitting in the middle between the others, said, “Sit down, Etcher.”
Etcher wasn’t sure he’d ever seen this particular priest. “I’ve been sitting for an hour,” he answered irritably. “I have a sick friend.”
“Sit down,” the head priest said again, motioning to the empty chair. Etcher sat. After a moment the priest leaned forward, his hands folded on the table in front of him; the other priests leaned with him. “The books are gone,” he brought himself to say, after a moment.
“That’s what I explained to the other one,” Etcher answered.
“Did you take them?” the priest said. Something was funny in his voice.
“We’ve gone over this,” Etcher told them, shifting in his chair to indicate the priest he had spoken to in the other office, who was now standing behind him in the doorway. “Didn’t we go over this?” he said. The priest in the doorway wrung his hands in response. “We went over this,” Etcher said to the head priest with impatience.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” the head priest said.
“Yes. I’ve taken the books.”
“Where are they?”
“I have them.”
&
nbsp; “The police are on their way to your unit at this very moment, to find the books.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t keep them there, would I?” Etcher said.
“We’ll check the unit where you used to live with your wife,” the priest said. “We’ll check the Hurley woman’s residence as well.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Etcher snapped. “The books aren’t in any of those places—you can turn them upside down for all I care. I would have expected,” Etcher said to the head priest, “that at least you had figured it out. I would have expected that at least you knew there’s been a change.”
“You don’t know what those books are.”
“Of course I don’t know what they are. Who’s more dangerous, a man who knows he’s carrying a bomb or a man who doesn’t? The man who knows, and has to get rid of the bomb as soon as possible, because he realizes that any moment it’s going to go off? Or the man who doesn’t know and is walking around without a concern in the world, while the bomb ticks away in his suitcase? The chaos of the situation lies in his ignorance, because he doesn’t know enough about the situation to get the hell out before it’s too late, to give up his control of the situation before it’s too late. Look.” He took his glasses off and put them on the crescent table. He raised his fists above his head and brought them down, smashing the glasses.
The priests sitting around the outer rim of the crescent table cried out, covering their faces with their arms. Their white robes sparkled with slivers of glass and blood. Etcher raised his hands to his face; in the blur of his vision he could make out only the smear of red on his fingers. He lifted his eyes to the white of the room, to the vibrating hum of the sea: it was the light he’d been running for, here in front of him. He could barely make out the priests; the white blur of them wasn’t nearly as impressive as the smear of red. Reaching across the table he wiped his hands on the head priest’s robes.
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