It might have been easier if Etcher could have hated Sally. But he knew she acted not out of malice but confusion; Etcher’s faith in this love was such that it was incapable of comprehending how confusion could be as destructive as malice. “You want to know if he and I have made love, don’t you?” she asked witheringly in one of their arguments about the man who didn’t even have the same name for both of them, Joseph to her and Thomas to him. But even when Sally scorned Etcher’s pain with a contempt he’d never heard from her before, even when Sally scorned his unasked questions, he knew it was really her own heart she scorned. At such moments he wanted to protect her again, as he’d come to protect her since the moment she walked into the archives searching for Madison Hemings. Etcher wanted to protect her from the way the chaos of her heart spilled into the shambles of her soul; it might have been easier, since he couldn’t bring himself to hate Sally, if he could have therefore hated the man whose name she knew as Joseph but whom Etcher knew as Thomas. But he couldn’t hate Thomas either. It was impossible for Etcher to hate any man for loving Sally; it would be tantamount to hating himself. And so that’s what he came to do. Once again he extended the benefit of the doubt to everyone but himself. Once again he was the most convenient target of his own agony and rage, as though he didn’t believe anyone else could really sustain the impact of either his agony or rage.
He didn’t follow her. He didn’t track her through the city, or conspire to confront her infidelity. He didn’t spy on her affair around corners. He did, however, wait outside her door. He did sleep at night against the obelisk in the Vog, pulling his coat around him and waiting for her return. He did linger beyond the circumference of her old circle, out in Redemption known as Desire, where Gann now lived alone except when Polly was with him. One night he finally approached, knocking on Gann’s door. “Is Sally here?” he asked when Gann answered.
“No,” said Gann. After a moment he said, “She got you running in circles, huh?” and it was to Gann’s credit that there was no meanness in the question. He seemed to take no satisfaction in Etcher’s plight; the odd thing was that Gann had come rather to like Etcher. This, then, was what Etcher had come to: an alliance with Gann.
On a black night that he knew she was with Thomas, at two in the morning when he knew she was going to be with him the rest of the night, he wanted to die. He had neither the passion nor conviction for suicide but he had none for life either, and all the pity he had before for those who never knew the feeling of a love that was bigger than their own lives now became an indifference for life itself. He told himself that if he could, he would have emptied his eyes of her face and his arms of their memories and his heart of its dreams, but his greatest anguish was that as soon as he said it, he knew even on this night he never would have done any of that. He never knew whose slave she had been. He only knew that he was hers.
It may have been at this moment that Etcher was left with no choice but to let go of Sally, since the only other alternative was to let go of his love, which he couldn’t do. Because while losing Sally would only break his heart, losing his ability to love like this—and he would never again love like this—meant the shattering of something so profound as to defy its naming with names like love or Sally or Thomas. The faith in love that led him to take his life in his own hands, as the priests had put it more accurately than they knew, was the creation of something more and bigger than love, in the process of which love was nothing more or less than the essential element. Something in him, from that moment on, became just a little cruel. The light in him, from that moment on, became marked with the ashes of a black cremation. And finally, when he came to detest himself for his continuing subjugation to the way Sally hurt him, when he knew he could no longer blame anyone but himself for his feeling of humiliation and betrayal, he stepped back across the chasm, from the side of his heart’s blind faith to the side of his heart’s naked nihilism: he got another pair of glasses.
When Sally saw Etcher wearing the new glasses, she finally understood what was at stake. Until now she understood only in her head but not her heart that she was at the edge of losing him. She decided the only thing to do was see neither Etcher nor Joseph, perhaps for a long time. She decided that if she was never again going to be owned, if she was never again going to be a slave, she’d brutally have to drag her own life out into its own outlaw zone and abandon it there. Alone she walked Desire’s wild shoreline, the city to the south of her and the volcano far to the east, and between the two the rising black hulk of the Arboretum. Beneath her she could feel the waves of the sea slash the rocks and rush into the grottoes under her feet, where fissures ran to the surface; with each incoming wave the water sprayed through cracks in the ground in a hundred geysers as though the earth were crying for her to free herself. Confronted with her new decision. Joseph asked that he might be allowed to see her once a month. Etcher, however, insisted he would not hear from her at all. Sally was furious with his adamant terms. But he was now locked in an effort as desperate as hers to free himself, and when she begged him to stay until morning on what they believed was their last night together, when once again he felt himself nearly seduced by her pain, he refused.
The priests at Central noticed that Etcher wore his glasses again. They didn’t have the imagination to understand that at this moment he was vulnerable to everything and everyone, including them; they didn’t have enough empathy for the mess and blood and semen and tears of human life to understand that in his desolation he might have given whatever they asked. Instead, mistaking the new glasses for renewed control, they kept their distance even more; and their moment of potential victory slipped past them.
Two weeks after they had parted, Etcher received a message from Sally. He couldn’t decide whether to go back. It wasn’t because he didn’t still love her utterly but because he’d be returning with such crippled faith on his part, to such crippled determination on hers; he had come to see, in the manner of Polly who silently raised her finger to witness in the flight of gulls something beyond what anyone else could see, that Sally’s inner turmoil would eventually have to be played out. He did return, of course, convincing himself it could be played out with him as well as, maybe better than, without. And though he’d never understand everything, he would come to understand the hard way that, though Joseph was gone from her life, the ghost called Thomas was not.
Sometimes in the middle of the night as everyone was sleeping, right after the episode in the hotel, when she was still with Gann, Sally would go out into the circle. She would carry with her the black wooden box with the rose carved on the top. After she left Gann, when she was with Etcher, she would continue to rise and cross the circle in a night so dead even the white of the circle was lightless. In the dark she was searching for what belonged in the box. Night after night she waited in the circle for the Vog to break just enough that the moon might peer through, illuminating her search; she assumed she would know what she was looking for when she found it.
It was the rumble of the volcano that launched her final flight to freedom.
The city woke to it one morning as though to a bomb. The ground shook. People ran from their units into the circles and watched the volcano’s fireball rise into the sky, spat forth from an earth clearing its throat. The city became paralyzed, silent in its panic, passively waiting for the mountain to roll soundlessly across the lava fields and down the streets in a molten wave. In the distance, to the southwest, the tiny white figures of the priests could be seen on the Central rooftop surveying the coming cataclysm. But after several days passed, when the earth began to calm itself and it was clear the cataclysm would not come this time, the city returned to its deadness, the crack of doom that brought it momentarily to life changing from echo to memory to the finally forgotten.
Sally didn’t forget. It wasn’t that she was afraid of the volcano, it was that she was liberated by it, as the entire city had been, though perhaps only Sally saw it this way. She saw it as a sign, the v
oice of the earth, because something had once happened to her in its mouth, once she had seen herself there, though she didn’t actually remember this. She didn’t actually remember the vision of herself and Etcher in the little house on the volcano’s inner ridge. She just knew that the volcano was speaking to her and that her dream of fleeing to the forests of the Ice in the north, far from the barren lava fields of Aeonopolis, was more within her grasp than it might ever be again. It was within her grasp not because she had the means to grasp it but because, momentarily, she had the will, and because it seemed to her the only way she’d ever be free of her life.
“Take me away from here,” she begged Etcher.
It was one thing to enter the city. It was another to leave. There were two ways to go. They could go by sea on a boat, or on land by train. If they went by boat they went illegally. If they went by train they would have to get visas from Central. Occasionally Etcher heard about those who slipped into Desire, crossed the zone and made their way past the peripheral highway to where, if they were fast enough, they might jump the train. But there were almost always police on the train until it was far from the city, and with Polly such an option wasn’t viable anyway.
Once—it now seemed long ago to him—Etcher had known power. Once, before Thomas, there had been a change, a shake-up. Now in the clarity of his new glasses he saw his power as a stalemate. Police followed him everywhere. They waited for him to lead them to the red books. In fact he did lead them to the books, once or twice a week in the beginning, but they didn’t know this; and then his visits became less frequent to Tedi’s school, where amidst the graffiti that ran off the blackboards the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History sat in plain sight, unnoticed and ignored, on the bookshelves with the bibles and references and texts, available to any child who might pull one down and read it like a collection of forbidden fairy tales, with those pages torn from them that Etcher returned to Primacy each day. The books that had once empowered Etcher now imprisoned him. They made it impossible for him to leave. The power Etcher derived from the books ended at the point that Primacy retrieved them or believed it would never retrieve them: Etcher could threaten to toss them into the sea or the volcano, and it made no difference.
Thus Sally would have been trapped as well, except that Etcher set her free. He had watched her writhe too long under the spell of her ghosts and dreams, wriggling for a freedom she could never believe in. He would have to believe in it for her. And so his stalemate with the Church left him only the power to strike the best bargain possible, which was two visas out of the city: one for Sally, and the other for her child.
Standing on the platform at Vagary Junction, eyed suspiciously by the everpresent police, watching the two women of his life wave goodbye to him from their compartment window—the older one in exhilaration and the little one in small confusion—as the train lurched into its own smoke and the Vog in the distance, Etcher actually told himself he’d soon join them, as they planned. He told himself that with them safely out of the city he was free to maneuver more cleverly, more clandestinely, to slip from beneath Primacy’s gaze and eventually follow Sally and Polly to the northern Ice. It was, at first, almost a relief to be alone. He hadn’t been alone in a long time, since before his marriage to Tedi. It was a relief to bear only the burden of his own oppression. He told himself that in the three or four or six months before he made his own escape. Sally would free herself for good, with no one to save her, and then what she and Etcher had together would redeem itself. In the back of his mind, since perhaps the first day he’d seen her, he had been telling himself that there would at last be someone to save him, and that it was she.
He received letters from her and replied, unobstructed by the authorities. He had explained to her that while Primacy would allow a correspondence it would have to be a discreet one; their emotional revelations had official limits. She could, for instance, say that she missed him, it was all right, he assured her, to say she missed him. And her first letters were filled with it, along with the news of the house she’d found high on a glistening fjord in the sunlight beyond the treetops, for which Etcher sent the bulk of his pay each month. She sent back news of the house and her heart’s longing for him, and he saw it all in the lines of her letters, the magnificent solitude on the high fjord and Polly’s Sally-in-miniature with her hair of mysterious fire and her eyes of mysterious blue running across the white expanse beneath the consuming sky.
In response, something in him cracked.
Beneath the weight of his own palatable relief, he was cracking to a relief he couldn’t bear. It disoriented him in relation to everything he believed about himself and Sally and what they had; it disoriented him in relation to his love. He found his conscience betraying his heart, which is the worst of treacheries, and it only drove him crazier that he couldn’t be with her. He was cracking beneath the approaching destitution that would signify a failure bigger than money, that would signify the final psychic failure of Sally’s struggle to be delivered, and of his struggle to deliver her. He was cracking beneath the surveillance of the Church which now, rather than letting up, intensified, because in having freed Sally from the city he had freed her, officially, from the matter of a murder in a shabby room in a downtown hotel. In a way that would never have occurred to Sally, in a way even the priests didn’t understand. Etcher had accepted the weight of the crime or, more precisely, the weight of its irresolution.
His success at obtaining the visas for Sally and Polly, then, was more impressive than he knew. In the end Primacy had decided Sally was, officially, expendable. The ramifications of the unsolved murder of an unknown man in a hotel bed had reached that point, officially, where it was riskier to pursue the case than to close the book on it. The strange and violent disappearance of the investigating police officer in the case had made this not only politically preferable but bureaucratically easier, though the police force itself hadn’t been the same since. Two years later the case remained rife with undercurrents. The Church didn’t like undercurrents. Undercurrents, this one or that, always rose to the surface sooner or later, as happened when Etcher came to the priests and asked to take a leave to go north.
He had still, four months after Sally’s departure, not devised any plan of escape that seemed feasible. Everyone knew Etcher was a security risk; no skipper would take him by boat. If he went into the Desire zone the cops kept something of a distance, but the highways beyond the zone and outside the city were always blocked. The trains were always under guard. As Etcher became increasingly frustrated by this imposed immobility, he and Sally had a crisis through the mail. She wrote that Polly missed her father terribly and asked if Etcher could obtain a visa for Gann. Etcher didn’t understand why he was responsible for Gann. He didn’t understand why Gann, who fancied himself an outlaw, should now receive his help. Let Gann apply for his own visa, he answered Sally. But of course it wasn’t just Gann but Polly who would pay the price for Etcher’s bitter refusal, to which Sally responded with bitterness of her own. After further correspondence he relented, and went to Primacy for yet a third visa that would be in a name other than his own. And so it was now Gann who left the city, traveling north to live in the house for which Etcher sent money every month as Etcher remained behind to support the three of them. I’ve become a joke, he thought to himself. I’ve escorted love across that border beyond which it becomes self-contempt.
So the urgency of his leaving grew, and peaked in the two weeks during which there arrived from the north three extraordinary messages. It was difficult to say which was most startling. The first was from Sally. From her halting, difficult letter, it became clear to Etcher that she was trying to tell him something momentous and not entirely focused, yet somehow familiar. It was written in the voice of a woman who had once told him she had found someone else, except that now the someone else she had found was herself. In the most direct way possible, as direct as Sally’s chaos could be, she was telling Etcher not to come.
The second message was from Kara, the only other woman he had ever loved as he now loved Sally. More than ten years after leaving her naked beneath those stars wedged in the observatory dome, he suddenly and out of nowhere received a letter calling him back.
The third message was from home. He knew, before he read it, what it said. He knew, before he read it, his father was dying.
He had begun to know, as imperceptibly as the priests had begun to know it, that nothing had quite been the same since he took from the Church vault the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History. After his confrontation with the priests during Sally’s illness, something began to fray the psychic fabric of this city that existed outside time. A trolley car disappeared. An obelisk moved several feet. In a back alley off the corner of Desolate and Unrequited, in the very spot where the arcs between the Church and the volcano and the Arboretum intersected, official graffiti gave way to heresy, which rewrote itself not simply in the present but for all time: not only was there a different message today and tomorrow, but yesterday as well, and the day before, stretching back as far as anyone had ever noticed. Memory was, flash by flash, undoing itself. When the pages of the volumes began to trickle back into the vault, one or two or five or six at a time, depending on Etcher’s whims, the process of this fraying was, for the moment, suspended. Possibly when all the books had been returned to the vault, the trolley car might reappear. The obelisk might return to its place. The official propaganda of the graffiti at Desolate and Unrequited might reassert itself over the surreal nonsense that usurped it. But now, when Etcher came to the priests for a leave to travel north and was refused, the pages stopped and the fraying began again. The priests, sitting around their crescent table discussing the situation, suddenly turned to find one of their colleagues had vanished from his chair. Over the course of the day alarm inevitably evolved into panic: another of them might be gone with the next sunrise. “I’ll be damned,” the head priest thundered at the others, “if I’m going to wake up tomorrow to find I’m not here!”
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