ARC D’X

by Steve Erickson

  In the heat of their shock, which he felt on his brow, he heard the gasp of history. He heard history open its mouth and silently gape, no sound coming from it, only the silence that consumed everything around it. If there had been a sound it could have been a cry, it might have been a laugh, most likely it would have been the utterance in which a cry is indistinguishable from a laugh. In a city that lay outside of history, in a church that presumed itself unthreatened by the collision of time and memory that named its own truth, it was the joke of their arrogance that they presumed history might be locked away in a room without a single guard. They presumed their power was such that no one would ever turn a key and walk in and carry history out under his arm. What they now wouldn’t have given to have placed a guard by the door. What they now wouldn’t have given to have put on an extra padlock. What they now wouldn’t have given for a bell that rang in alarm, or a whistle that blew; and what they wouldn’t have given to have entertained a single thought that once told them. Perhaps our hold on history is not so secure or inviolable. Perhaps our confidence in God isn’t so justified. None of them said anything at this particular moment. Maybe they tried to say something and Etcher simply couldn’t, in the blur of his new freedom, see the contortions of their shock or insult.

  “I have to go,” he explained, turning to leave. It was almost an afterthought when, pausing in the doorway, he said, “I’ll be back when Sally’s better. When I think it’s the right time, I’ll return the books.” He walked down the hall, took the lift to the lobby, and left the Church and the rock behind him.

  He found her alone when he got home. The doctor was gone. As far as he could tell, no police had searched the premises. She was alone in her bed, just barely revived by her terror. The curtain of the window was cracked, the sun had shone in her eyes all afternoon; she hadn’t the strength to move where she lay, let alone get up and close the curtains. Now Sally, sensing a presence, barely raised her head from the pillow to see who else was in the room. Etcher knelt at her side. Her yellow eyes, circled in black, welled with tears. He had to lean very close to hear her, putting his ear to her lips, when she whispered her first words in days. She said, “I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” he answered.

  She said something else. He leaned so close he was afraid she’d smother beneath him.

  “What?” he said.

  He could hardly hear her when she asked, “Am I going to die?”

  “No,” he told her.

  “Do you promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I going to get better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to get better.”

  “I promise.”

  “Are you sure?” she cried, the smallest of cries.

  “Yes.”

  He went to the window. Outside he could see the blur of Cecilia and Polly playing in the circle. Polly looked up just as Etcher was peering out the window. She ran to the door; Etcher opened it. The little girl stood in the doorway awhile and looked at the woman on the bed who was her mother. She was afraid to approach, and then Sally turned slightly, slightly raised her hand to her little girl, slightly called her little girl’s name. Polly ran to her side. Fears ran down Sally’s face. She thought she remembered something somewhere far in the past when she was a little girl herself, a dying mother in a house far away, beckoning her children to her. But she didn’t see how she could have a memory of anything like that, other than in a dream.

  When Polly had gone with Cecilia. Etcher drew the curtain closed. He went to the door and bolted it. He piled all the furniture in front of it—the dresser and table, the chairs, Polly’s toy chest. The night came. Etcher took off his clothes and got in bed next to Sally and put his arms around her.

  Come on then, he said to the door in the dark. Come on, he said in the dark, where he was freest of all, his phony vision left behind him in shards of glass, caught in the robes of phony priests. He no longer needed to see her to know who she was, the woman in his arms. He no longer needed to see her to know she was beautiful or afraid. Come on, he said to whoever would come through this door, to priests and police, to her child or the father of her child. He said it to the city and to history, to memory and the future. He said it to God, he said it to Death. Come on, and try to take her.

  This continued the next night, and the next and the next. It continued through the fever, through the horrible chills and the flashing heat. It continued through the wet sheets that Etcher washed and hung to the obelisk in the center of the circle, along with Polly’s chartreuse and purple dogs. It continued through the sirens, morning and twilight. It continued for five nights, until finally someone knocked on the door. For some time the knocking continued and Etcher didn’t answer. He didn’t rise from the bed until, from the depths of her delirium, Sally cried out, “He’s here.”

  “Sally?” the voice outside the door said. It was Gann. Etcher rose from the bed. He looked outside into the dark through the curtains of the window. “Sally?” Gann said again.

  “She’s sick,” Etcher finally said in the window.

  After a moment Etcher heard Gann say, “What’s wrong with her?” Etcher couldn’t see anything in the dark. But Gann was closer, next to the window.

  “She’s been sick for a week.”

  “Where’s Polly?”

  “At the neighbor’s.”

  “What’s wrong with Sally?”

  “I told you. She’s been sick. She has a fever.”

  “Will she be all right?”

  “Go take care of your daughter,” Etcher said. He dropped the curtains into place and backed away from the window. He stood for a while listening to Gann’s footsteps walking away.

  On the sixth night, Etcher woke with a start.

  He heard the flapping of the wings before he heard her scream. He heard it inside her, trying to smash its way out, that wild ferocity of even the frailest creature when it’s trapped; and she screamed again. He held her. Her body didn’t merely convulse, it thrashed in upheaval, and when he put his face right up next to hers, right close to hers, he could see in the dark and in his blindness the horror in her eyes, the startled realization of something about to be delivered. And he held her thighs and pulled her to him even as she fought him off with a new maniacal power; and in the rush of the black spill of her womb he almost believed, though he couldn’t be sure, since the room was so black and the vision of his eyes was so black and the spill of her was so black, that there flew from out of her a white baby gull. He could hear it rise in the room. He could hear it flying around him shaking the afterbirth from its wings, insistent on its freedom until the room filled with the rip of the curtain and the crash of the window, and the funnel of the night air poured through. And Etcher leapt from the bed and began, bit by bit, pulling the furniture away from the door, the dresser, the table and chairs, Polly’s toy chest, until the way was clear and he flung the door open. He stepped out into the circle and dropped to his knees.

  He began searching the ground with his hands. He knew that if he should find there in the glass of the broken window a dead bloody bird, then he had lost Sally. He would have lost Sally and he would have lost the light and he would have lost everything. Only if the bird had made it, only if the bird had broken the bonds of its own wounds and taken flight by a sheer will for freedom, would Sally make it as well; and so he searched on his hands and knees for the rest of the night. On and on through the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, on his hands and knees he searched the entire white circle.

  He never found the bird.

  He walked back into the unit at dawn. Stepping through the doorway rubble of his barricade, in the light of the broken window and the afterbirth of her fever, in the trail of her own thwarted death, he heard her say, “I love you, Etcher.” And then she went to sle
ep.

  She was sitting up in bed the next day. Three days later she rose from the bed for the first time since she’d fallen ill. Gann returned with Polly. Etcher returned to Church Central.

  It was only for a brief moment that it struck Etcher as odd, to be history’s file clerk. He barely took notice of the priests. Over the days and then the weeks, they circled him with the solicitous respect that’s always accorded a wild sick animal right up to the opportune moment when it can be destroyed. Only after some time had passed did Etcher notice they brought him no forms or papers to file. Quickly his job turned into being some sort of custodian, a watchman on the lookout for anyone who trespassed into his light; for days and then weeks he sat among the archives doing nothing but staring out to the Central lobby. He was thinking about the limitations of his view when his presence was requested upstairs.

  In the white room, around the crescent table, they were seated in their half-circle. “We were just wondering,” said the head priest, “if you’re ready to return the books now.”

  “I was giving that matter some serious thought this very morning,” Etcher answered.

  The priests looked at each other with anticipation. “Really?” asked the head priest.

  “I’m ready to begin right now, as a matter of fact.”

  “This is very good news,” the head priest said after a moment.

  Etcher reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to the priest, who unfolded and studied it for several minutes.

  “What’s this?” the priest said.

  “Page one.”

  The priest continued studying the paper in his hands. “Page one,” he repeated, almost absently.

  “Tomorrow I’ll give you page two.”

  “Do you mean to tell us,” and it was difficult to be sure without his glasses, but Etcher supposed he heard in the priest’s voice a rising hysteria that struggled for control, “that you’re going to return the books page by page?”

  “I’d like a window,” Etcher answered.

  “What?”

  “A window. In the archives. The view is limited, staring out at the lobby. There’s no light in the lobby. I’d like a window. Can you do that please? If you put in a window, I’ll bring you pages six through nine perhaps, or eight through eleven. A window on the light. A window on the sea.”

  A month later, after they had put in the window, he decided he wanted to move the archives altogether. He had them relocated upstairs in the northernmost part of Central, where he could see in one direction the sea and in the other direction the volcano. Here he could always smell the wine in the air, which rolled in with the ocean and bubbled hot in the volcano’s crater.

  So Etcher had found his light, having been fired by love to defy God and seize history. And the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History trickled back to Primacy page by page, in no great rush, since Etcher well understood that when the day came years later that the last page had been returned, his life would be over, there would be no more history left to protect him from Primacy, in the same way that if the return of the pages was to stop there would also be nothing to protect him, since there would be nothing for Primacy to lose by ridding itself of him. Everything came down to a trickle of pages. The trickle couldn’t be either too fast or too slow. Sometimes, for a window, sometimes for a new view of things, the pages returned in threes or fours, occasionally half a dozen at a time. There were, after all, close to fifty thousand; Etcher could occasionally afford to be generous. It was important to instill hope in the priests. It would be dangerous if they should feel overwhelmed by the futility.

  Etcher lived with the woman he loved, in the way he had once come to believe he’d never love again, and with her child whose love he coveted beyond what was possible, beyond what was possible for a man who would be her father if he could, and could never be her father no matter how much he would.

  In the haze of his life without glasses, everything was wine and light and pages. But when the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come to Etcher. And when he woke from them, the light wasn’t the same.

  In the first dream, nearly a year after Etcher had left his marriage, Sally was sitting on the floor, her knees pulled up under her chin, and she was talking. She told him, in this dream, that she was in love with another man.

  He woke from this dream and discounted it. He discounted it even though, somewhere in the back corner of what he’d come to know, he understood that this dream was the expression of an inkling. But he discounted it and didn’t think about it again, until the very next night when he made love to Sally and there slipped from her lips a name that was not his, slipped so clandestinely she wasn’t even aware she’d said it. But Etcher heard it, unmistakably.

  “Thomas,” she whispered.

  But she didn’t believe she knew anyone by that name. Had she been aware of having said it, she would have been as surprised as Etcher, not because she wasn’t seeing another man but because his name was not Thomas but Joseph.

  He was a large bear of a man who spoke in a hush, and he had a stall in the Market. She’d gone there several months after having recovered from her nearly fatal illness, browsing among the Market’s paltry offerings. He made jewelry of a less exotic sort than Sally’s—strings of benign white wafers that hung as plain functional necklaces—and had been watching Sally from the other side of the Market; when she wandered over to him he could barely believe his good luck. Then, as she studied his jewelry carefully, he took notice of the necklace she wore.

  “Where did you get this?” he said in his hushed voice.

  The way he spoke, the way she could hardly hear him at all, felt familiar to her, as well as the way he looked down on her from a height. She was immediately sorry that Etcher didn’t look down on her from a height. She was immediately sorry that Etcher, a soft-spoken man himself, now seemed so loud. “I made it,” she said of the necklace.

  Joseph looked around him, over both shoulders. “They allowed this?”

  “I’ve never… subjected it to their approval.” She asked, “Do you think I’d have trouble selling a necklace like this?”

  “It’s a very unusual necklace,” he advised her.

  She got the idea, then, of selling some of her necklaces through Joseph’s stall. She came back the next day to talk to him about it and, though he was dubious and afraid, since he couldn’t afford to have the police shut him down, he wanted to see Sally again, so he offered to keep her necklaces and earrings under the counter and show them to anyone who appeared adventurous. Unknown to Sally, he bought some of the jewelry himself, so that she’d return.

  Slowly he began to steal her heart.

  One night she went home with him, and didn’t return to her own circle until late the next morning.

  Perhaps it was the jewelry. Perhaps it was that she wanted to be admired for something she created rather than someone she was, since she had no idea who she was and therefore could never really trust anyone who loved her for that. Of course it wasn’t her jewelry that Joseph loved, it was the same intangible thing about her that all the men had loved; from the other side of the Market she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen as she had been the most beautiful woman a thousand other men had ever seen. But she chose to believe it was the beauty of the necklace she wore that attracted him. And then, if she was touched by the familiarity of him, there was also the way that he was utterly different, because though he wanted to ravish her like the others, he was incapable of it.

  They lay together in bed and he tried to will forth the manifestation of his desire. His mind roamed around itself to find the magic click of the cells in his brain that would spark an erection. When he could not, when he suffered in her arms, that need for her comfort and assurance and pity felt more like real need to her than the need others had for her bod
y or soul, particularly her soul, since its contents were so mysterious and unnamable to her. Comfort and assurance and pity were qualities she recognized readily enough in herself that she could offer; they possessed a value she understood. If there was ever a woman who needed to pity a man, who needed to be needed for the heedless assurances of her heart when her body could not be taken, it was Sally; and so she gathered him up. She held him just as the big heartless of him gathered her in his arms and held her. Once she had needed the ravishment. Once, amid Gann’s indifference and in the aftermath of a dream from which she woke in a strange hotel next to a strange man in a pool of blood, she needed the carnality of love. But Etcher had satisfied that need, and once he had. Sally in her fashion couldn’t quite believe in it anymore, since the slave in her couldn’t understand anyone loving her as anything but property; and when Etcher ravished her not as property but as a person, she could no longer understand ravishment at all, nor his in particular. She believed ravishment was bigger than she was worthy of, which made it unreal. Joseph’s love, crippled and pitiful, was real. It didn’t overwhelm her in the way of Etcher’s. It didn’t impart meaning to her life in terms of what it gave to her but in terms of what it asked of her. She had found someone as wounded as she. And so for several months she loved Joseph, the fact of their love sexless if not the intention.

  “There’s someone else,” she told Etcher, not long after it began.

  “Then you have to find out what it means,” Etcher choked. It was the sort of thing someone believes when he says it but hopes that, the moment he says it, the new infatuation’s meaning will become instantly and clearly trivial, and no further investigation will be necessary. It was a fair answer, but not an honest one. She begged him to help her. It was an honest plea, but not a fair one. He’d helped her with everything else, after all; Etcher had been from the beginning the one who helped her more than either of them had a right to. It was unfair of her to ask for his help now because what she really asked was that he accept part of the responsibility for a decision that could only be hers. The night she told him there was another man they made fitful angry love in the middle of which she moaned desperately, “Marry me.” Etcher knew at that moment that Sally did not know the meaning of her heart. In a single hour she’d gone from telling him there was another man to a frantic plea for marriage, and everything he’d allowed himself to trust could never again be trusted the same way. At the end of their sex, when she cried, as she had many times before, “No!” to her own orgasm, the no had a new conviction, the no had a new persuasion about it, the no believed anew its unworthiness to be yes, the no believed anew its unwillingness to be possessed.