Downstairs in the bedroom, Sally and Etcher listened to Mallory running throughout the house around them. For a long time they sat together on the bed in silence, following with their eyes the sounds that moved maniacally from place to place. What’s he looking for? she finally asked. I don’t know, Etcher answered. By the time Mallory had gotten to the very top of the house, his cry of alarm seemed very far away, and neither Sally nor Etcher was paying attention anymore. Each was now listening to his and her own thoughts, trying hard to hear the other’s. Etcher could hear Sally’s. He had become so adept at hearing her thoughts he almost heard them, he believed, before she thought them. He knew she was thinking that maybe she didn’t want to be alone after all; he knew that with him sitting right next to her her confusion had taken yet another turn. Perhaps she expected him to answer this confusion. Perhaps she expected him either to beg her to let him stay—she didn’t really understand yet that the police wouldn’t have allowed this in any event—or to confess that it had all become more than he could bear and he was leaving her to her confusion alone, as she professed to want. At any rate she waited for him to share some of the responsibility of this confusion: and she couldn’t hear, among his thoughts, his refusal.
“Maybe,” she said, “you should just come here like we planned. Maybe we should do what we planned all along, and you should come.” He didn’t answer. “You have to tell me what you’re thinking,” she said. “Are you angry, are you sad? Are you relieved? Do you want to yell at me, or hit me?”
“I could never hit you,” he said.
“But I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
She didn’t know, and he could hear her thoughts so clearly. “You’ve needed to be free since the first,” he said.
“I tried to tell you…”
The sound of Mallory’s searching had stopped.
“All of my life,” she said, “he’s been there,” and he almost said Who? because he knew it wasn’t Mallory and he knew it wasn’t Joseph and he didn’t believe it was Gann. “All my life I could feel him back there, where I remember things that never happened, in this dream that seems to have replaced everything. He’s been there all along. I don’t know who he is. I can barely see him in my mind. I can barely hear his voice. Until now he was there to blame. He was there as the one who wouldn’t let me go. But that’s not it anymore. It isn’t him that won’t let me go, it’s me. Once, when I had the chance, I chose something else—love or safety or the home that made me its slave, I don’t know, but I chose to go back with him and be his slave and because I made that choice, because I loved him or because I was afraid to be without him, because I was afraid to be free, everything changed. Everything about my life changed. Everything about his life changed. Time and the country changed. Did I return with him just so I’d have one more chance to kill him? Did I return with him just so I’d have one more chance to be raped by him, or to be made love to by him, or to wonder which was which? Why am I like this, Etcher? Why isn’t it enough to love you and be loved by you? I know I’m a fool to let you go. No one ever loved me like you. You saved my life. You pulled me from the fever. You adored me more than I deserved. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me this is a mistake.”
He said nothing. He had decided, he had had lots of time on the train to decide, that unless she knew for certain she wanted him with her, he had no arguments left for her. He wasn’t going to talk her into anything. He tried to raise his hands to his eyes; he needed to take off his new glasses. They had filled with so many tears he couldn’t see through them anymore.
But the chains that bound him to her bed caught his hands and pulled them back. He was left at the mercy of her hands. It was worse, somehow, to be at the mercy of her free hands. They now took the glasses from him, from the eyes of her own bound slave, and wiped the tears from his face for him, again and again.
Two weeks after he died, I had a dream.
I’d been expecting it. I hadn’t really mourned my father; I’m not sure I have even now, years later. It may be that I mourned some passing of him before he died, or it may be that the loss still hasn’t sunk in, or it may be that on some deeper level I already understood that everything is loss, that our lives are a race against the clock of loss, a race to lose the vessel of our lives before we lose everything that vessel contains. Surely when my mother goes, should she go before me, the aloneness that’s almost become a psychological vanity for me, the aloneness I like to think I understand so damned well, will take on dimensions I never imagined; because then the loss of the only two things that all the moments of my life have had in common will leave me utterly alone either to know who I am—as I’ve always flattered myself I do—or to the desolation of a deluded life. In that case I’ll be at the mercy of either God or his antithesis, not the Devil, since I don’t believe in the Devil, but Chaos, against which the only weapon God has ever given us is memory.
In this dream about my father I was walking through the corridors of a rest home. It was a very pleasant rest home. The windows were open and the wind that came through was balmy and a pale lovely blue and beyond the windows I could see the trees swaying. As I walked the corridors I saw to the sides large rooms with rows of clean crisp beds, all of which were empty, until I came to the room where my father was. He was sitting up in one of the beds. He looked fine. There was color in his face and he appeared tranquil and happy, perhaps more than I’d ever seen him before. He greeted me. But I distinctly remembered, I completely understood that he was dead; in this dream my sense of time was grounded and I understood he’d died just two weeks before. “Oh,” I said to him, “this is a dream.”
This is not a dream, he answered.
For some time we discussed this, my father gently pressing the point that this was real. And nothing had ever seemed more real. I could feel the wind through the windows and see the trees swaying outside, and my father was as vivid as he’d ever been. On his lap he held a small plate. On the plate was a small pastry. He gave me the pastry and said. Here, taste this; and I did. He said. You can taste it, can’t you? and I could. He said. You can taste it because it isn’t a dream; and it was true that it didn’t taste like any dream, it was true that I couldn’t remember ever having been able to taste something in a dream before, taste being the one sense that’s beyond my imagination. But I still wouldn’t believe him. What my mind had come to believe in as the reality of his death was too strong for my heart, which was confronted with the reality of his talking to me now, and offering me a pastry.
And then I woke, at the beckoning of my mind, which feared that it would lose this argument with my heart. Except I didn’t wake to reality but rather into another dream, which I later forgot as immediately as I forget all my dreams, moments beyond the thin silver horizon of waking, beyond the edge of the blade of consciousness. Another dream that wasn’t in the least important except for the fact that it was there waiting beyond the archway of my last meeting with my father, a place for a coward to hurry when he wasn’t brave enough for his visions.
Everyone I’ve ever told about this has said the same thing. Every one of them has said my father was right.
After Etcher returned to Aeonopolis, a calm settled over his daily life. But his nights were filled with dreams of his father and dreams of Kara and mostly dreams of Sally, and worse were the waking moments when he lay staring in the dark unable to believe he wasn’t with her anymore. “I can’t believe what happened to us,” he said out loud in the dark. When his nights became nothing but the same dreams again and again, he went looking for another kind of night.
He found himself at the feet of a naked blonde.
In the rosy stupefaction of the wine he wasn’t always aware she was there. Sometimes he looked right through her. Her yellow hair was tied back and she had long legs and wore only long black stockings and high heels, and she danced for him though he knew she danced for everyone. Somewhere in the onslaught of his dreams and the stupefaction of the wine he understood the true nat
ure of his exchange with the naked blonde, and realized that in such an exchange it was not the woman who gave herself to the dance but the man, that it was only the man’s folly and conceit that allowed him to believe it was a naked blonde giving herself to him, and everything about the exchange was contingent on that conceit. The dance wasn’t about her obliteration but his. It was he who lost his persona in the dark of the club, it was she whose persona became all-pervasive in her body’s celebration. And so there were moments he took comfort in this, losing himself in the same way a man loses himself in the climax of sex, and there were also moments he wasn’t aware she was there at all, when he looked right through her, those moments when there was too much of him to lose no matter how much he might have wished to.
Those were the moments she noticed him. The moments when her spell over him was broken, and her power over him was gone; and she danced to those moments in the expectation of seizing them back from him, and in the hope she never would.
He dropped his glasses one night. The two of them crawled together on the floor of the Fleurs d’X, and when she found them and he put them on he couldn’t help but see her then, her breasts close enough to touch and her mouth close enough to kiss. She laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“You’re very beautiful,” he explained in the dark. “I’m just like all the others.”
“Yes,” she answered, relieved. He could tell she was from the Ice. Not long after, it might have been the next night or the next—in the onslaught of dreams and the stupefaction of wine and the time of the Arboretum it was difficult to know or wonder why it was important—when she came to talk to him at the edge of the Fleurs d’X he said, I’m from the Ice too. “You don’t have an accent,” she said.
“I lost it after I came to the city.”
“I never leave the neighborhood,” she said, by which she meant the Arboretum, “so I never lose anything.” She added, “You don’t look like you’re from the Ice.”
He could tell, even in the dark, that with each passing moment she doubted more and more he was really from the Ice. She believed it was just another fiction of the Fleurs d’X, where everyone had their fictions, the girls most of all. That was one of the attractions of Fleurs d’X, the invention and acceptance of fictions. So he just answered, “I know.” After a moment he said, “My father is dead,” and was appalled that he’d reduced his father’s death to a seduction, only because he couldn’t bring himself to so reduce what had happened with Sally.
“My father’s dead too,” said the woman in the dark, and more than just the cold of the Ice was in her voice.
“Who are you?”
“Call me the Woman in the Dark.” Mona was the fiction she offered all the other men, the one that had been claimed by the black giant who lived in her flat on the other side of the neighborhood; and she looked around her as she said it because though the giant wasn’t here she knew he was watching from her flat, peering at the living map he’d painted across the walls where she lived. If she’d thought there was any corner of the Arboretum that was hidden from sight in the walls of her flat, she might have taken Etcher by the hand and led him there. Or she might not. It might have been that any violation of her relationship with the men she danced for was too monumental, though of course it had already been violated by the man who lived in her flat. It never crossed her mind to fuck Etcher. She wasn’t sure it crossed his either. But she supposed that finally she’d found a man to whom, in some dark cold corner of her life, she might say. “Keep me warm,” and it would mean something entirely different from what it had always meant before. “Keep me warm,” she might say to him, and not feel colder for it. The dead part of her heart in which her father lived might, should she say it to Etcher, surge with the blood of her life, and in the flush she would dance for only one man and obliterate herself at his hands.
Every night he went to see the Woman in the Dark. She did not tell him her name. He drank again now.
Three months after he’d returned to the city the messages came from the north.
The first came from Kara. It was filled with expectation and insinuating pathos. His responses conveyed as much compassion as their obligatory nature could allow. If he no longer loved Kara as he once had, he nonetheless felt bound to love her for what had happened between them; for the source of his defining anguish to dry completely now would be another betrayal by love too profound for him to live with. But even as his answers to Kara became more perfunctory and less urgent, he wasn’t prepared for the simple one-line letter that arrived one afternoon: I don’t ever want to hear from you again. For the first split second he thought it was a joke; but he knew it wasn’t a joke. He thought, for another split second, of answering; but he didn’t answer. And so silence followed until, some time later, another message arrived: Your love was a lie. Then another: You led me on. These memos continued until their terse brutality changed to palpable rage. Now he tried to soothe himself with indignation, that this woman who had rejected him so bluntly and then, after the passage of so many years, beckoned him so summarily could accuse him of leading her on. But it was a cheap indignation, won by logic but without force of argument on the terrain of aging and abandonment and self-remorse: it was easier for her now to believe their love was a lie than to accept the consequences of having once made the wrong choice.
In the midst of these messages came Sally’s.
Now at the age of forty, his father and youth and love all passing at the same moment, he might have seemed comic in his new incarnation. This new role was to embody the recent bitter revelations of beautiful women who had come to assume by the nature of their beauty—even when, as in the case of Sally, they never quite believed in that beauty—that their lives were always to be filled with a hundred romantic choices, any of which could at some point be discarded or undone. Then the moment arrived for one woman after another, Kara and then Sally, when a choice could not be discarded or undone: and Etcher had been that choice for each of them. Because his love had seemed so enormous and his faith so pure they found his betrayal all the more incomprehensible. Now Sally was in trouble. Her life had become destitute and terrifying. She didn’t call Etcher to help her but to love her again. She called on him to promise her hope. And now Etcher could neither promise nor hope. She wrote scornfully in her letters of how he didn’t trust her anymore; he didn’t deny it. She wrote scornfully of how she didn’t trust love anymore; he couldn’t refute it. It infuriated him that she somehow felt love had let her down, when he believed she had let love down. He turned his back on her. His father and youth and love all having simultaneously passed from him, he no longer believed happiness was something pursued timelessly but rather that it was stumbled upon in a moment, seized ruthlessly and sensually with the understanding that it too would pass as quickly as a father or youth or love. But as much as he tried, the one thing Etcher couldn’t pretend was that he didn’t love her anymore. He couldn’t stop the dreams of her. He couldn’t stop the voice in his head that spoke to her, or her voice in his head that spoke back.
Then the correspondence stopped and the dreams changed. In the new dreams Sally was sick again, something in her again fluttering for release. As two years before she was in bed dying, the black bloom of her turned livid by fever. At first he thought these dreams were just old memories until in one of them he stopped to look around and saw he wasn’t in her old unit in her old circle but in the house far to the north in the Ice where he’d been chained to her bed while police rampaged across the rooftop. He told himself the dreams didn’t mean anything. He told himself they were a conspiracy of heart and conscience to provoke him into some kind of flight to her, into rushing back to save her again when he couldn’t save anyone anymore. Gann, after all, was there. It wasn’t as though she were really alone.
But one night not long after this dream. Etcher saw Gann in a corridor of the Arboretum.
He glanced up from Mona’s feet to
catch sight of him just beyond the Fleurs d’X door, making his way to the stairwell that held the sound of the tide and led up to the surface; and at that moment he knew something was wrong. Sally was up there alone in the Ice after all, with no one but Polly. A cold dread passed through him. Suddenly oblivious of the Woman in the Dark, he rose to hurry after Gann, dropping his money on the stage and leaving the club behind. He had gotten down the corridor and was beginning to climb the stairs when he felt someone behind him.
The large hands on his back tore him from the stairs and hurled him against the wall. Etcher fumbled to try to catch his glasses as they flew off his face. In the force of his collision with the wall of the corridor, as he slipped bloodily to the floor, he was aware of nothing but that his glasses were somewhere in the hall where he couldn’t see them; in the vertigo of his blind haze and the smell of blood around him he was reminded not of when he’d smashed his glasses before the priests but of how far from the grace of love’s power he’d fallen. He called out to Gann in his mind, thinking, Something is wrong and I have to find Gann. But what he said out loud, what everything came down to, as it had all come down to since the first moment he saw her, was her name.
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