ARC D’X

by Steve Erickson

  He was vaguely aware of someone at the end of the hall. He might have recognized her as the Woman in the Dark if in the light she hadn’t been transparent. If he could have seen anything he might still not have recognized the big black man from the church lobby years before, since the big man was more naked than the woman. Etcher reached to his mouth to touch his blood. It glistened from the blur of his hands. He was still saying her name when the large man placed his glasses in his hands and ran down to the other end of the hall.

  All the way back to his unit he held out his hands before him and said her name, as though the blood were the medium of their communication and he spoke to her now through his wet fingers. All through the night he lay on his bed with his hands open at his sides. He could tell his hands were still wet with blood in the wind that came through the crack beneath his door. Something’s wrong, he told himself over and over; he did not sleep so as not to dream, because he couldn’t bear to dream of Sally dying alone in the Ice. It was as well that he didn’t catch up with Gann, he tried to tell himself: what would he have said to him anyway? “Gann, I’ve been having dreams.” Now as he lay on his bed he shook himself awake each time he thought he might fall to sleep. He didn’t change positions because he didn’t want to wipe the blood from his hands onto the sheets beneath him. He had almost slipped to sleep when there was a knock on the door.

  Gann, he thought. “Sally,” he said.

  “It’s me,” she answered behind the door.

  He sat up. “Sally?” he said, astonished. The blood didn’t matter anymore, it had conjured her, he thought, and it didn’t matter if he got blood on the door when he went to open it.

  “It’s me,” Mona repeated, in his doorway.

  “It’s you,” he agreed, looking at her. She had a coat pulled around her, and appeared cold. He stepped aside and she stepped through the doorway into the dark of his unit. He closed the door and turned on a lamp. He motioned her toward the only chair as he sat on the bed. She sat on the chair for a moment, and when neither of them said anything she got up and came to the bed and sat on the edge of it next to him. In the light of the lamp she touched the battered side of his face, where he’d been thrown against the wall of the Arboretum.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She took one of his hands. “You’re still bleeding?”

  “No,” he shook his head, “I’m all right.”

  “I think I caused trouble for you.”

  “No.”

  “I think so,” she nodded.

  “Do you know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he hurt you?”

  “Yes. No. I can’t go back now, except to leave.” They sat in silence, the light of the lamp growing a little dimmer. Glancing casually around the unit, she turned back to him to say, “Do you want to sleep?”

  “I can’t sleep,” he answered, exhausted.

  “If you try.”

  “I mean I can’t let myself. I have dreams.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you have dreams?”

  “I dream of the room falling.” She stood and took off her coat and he wasn’t surprised that beneath the coat she wore only the black stockings of the Fleurs d’X. She sat casually naked on his bed. He worried that she was cold. “Should I go?” she said.

  “Are you cold?”

  “I’m cold,” she admitted.

  Instinctively he moved to put his arm around her.

  “It’s all right,” she said, raising her hands.

  He pulled back. “OK.”

  She hadn’t meant he couldn’t touch her. She hadn’t really thought through, as she followed him from the Arboretum out of Desire into the city, whether or not she would let him touch her. She had only recoiled from the promised shelter of his arms, not from his bloody hands touching her. Just as instinctively as he’d moved to put his arms around her, she touched herself, since it was her job to touch herself—a vocational habit—since she’d long since come to define all of her relations with men by the way she touched herself in place of their own hands. I’ll do the touching for you, was what she said to every man. And so when Etcher came to her not so much out of desire as to protect her from the cold, and when she rebuffed him, she tried to repair the reproach by touching herself for him. Her little gift to him.

  There was no blood on her fingers. Her fingers were clean and dry of blood. They didn’t mar the butter of her thighs or the precarious labyrinth of her labia to which she attended every moment, pampering its petals and soothing its inflammations after Wade’s violations. Watching, Etcher sank into the swirl of her. On the bed next to her he reached out to touch the place where her body opened, that he might raise his fingers to his mouth and taste something other than blood, since taste was the one sense he never dreamed, since taste was the sense that told him it was not a dream. He was inches from her when she knew she had to decide now to let him touch her or not: she never said no, but her abrupt gasp at the moment of truth made him draw back again. He felt a bit humiliated, in his position. In her position, he knew instantly, a man would feel humiliated as well, except that it was the fundamental difference between a man and woman, the difference in their brands of humiliation. “I was made,” she explained, “to be seen and not touched.”

  He nodded. It was the fundamental difference between a man and woman that she would not, in such a position, feel she’d let him down. But she did offer a consolation.

  “I can take you from the city,” she said.

  She added, as an afterthought, since she didn’t believe it would matter to him, “It’s dangerous,” though she might have meant the two of them sitting there together, in the silence and the dark.

  “How?” he finally asked, startled.

  “Things can happen.”

  “I don’t mean how is it dangerous. I mean how would you get me out of the city.”

  “Through the Arboretum.”

  “There’s a way out of the city through the Arboretum?”

  Her voice dropped. “I can take you and show you,” she said. “You have to be sure. No one changes his mind at the last minute. They’ll kill you before they let you change your mind.”

  “The police are watching me,” he advised her. “They know you’re here right now.”

  She got up and put on her coat. Looking around, she said, “It has to be tonight. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It has to be tonight, if you want me to take you from the city. It has to be now. You’ll need money and you can’t bring anything with you. Do you have money?”

  “Some,” he answered, wary.

  She knew he didn’t trust her. “Well, it’s up to you,” she said. Her accent was most pronounced when she was speaking colloquially. She leaned over and turned out the lamp, and when she’d turned out the lamp she leaned over and kissed him, in case she never saw him again, or in case he was the sort of fool who trusted a kiss. “I’ll be at the Arboretum in an hour…”

  “Where will I find you—?”

  “I’ll find you, if you decide to come. One hour. I won’t be there after that. He’s looking for me.” She opened the front door soundlessly and sailed out against the rapids of the night. She didn’t close the door the whole way and he sat on the edge of the bed looking out the crack of the door until he got up to push it almost shut. With the flash of her blond hair the police would certainly see her leave. In the dark Etcher changed his clothes as quietly as possible and got together all the money that he still had after what he’d sent north to Sally. Then he sat for ten more minutes and waited. He waited for that moment when the police would begin to relax, having seen the blonde leave and decided Etcher had gone to sleep. There would be no fooling them for long but he needed that extra minute or two; once he got as far as the outlaw zone they would fall back a little. He couldn’t appear to be up to anything but another trip back to Fleurs d’X. It was going to make the police nervo
us no matter how you cut it, two trips to the Arboretum in one night; it was going to look unusual. Etcher hoped it wasn’t that maniac Mallory who was out there.

  It figured that if there was a way out of the city it was the Arboretum, though Etcher couldn’t imagine what it was short of a hot-air balloon from the top-level tenements or an underground tunnel through fifty miles of cold lava. But he couldn’t wait anymore. He couldn’t stand this feeling he had, he couldn’t stand any more dreams. Whether the Woman in the Dark was telling the truth or lying, whether she was correct or mistaken in what she thought she knew, if there was any getting out of Aeonopolis it figured to be through the Arboretum; and he couldn’t wait anymore and that was that, and he got up from the bed and pulled open the door he hadn’t quite shut, and stepped out into the circle. He didn’t run but walked, not across the white of the circle but around the black edge, and then he slipped out of the circle between two darkened units. He didn’t look back to see the police following him. He didn’t think about never coming back again.

  He walked through the streets of his zone, crossed another zone and came to Desire. He didn’t think he was going to make the Arboretum in an hour as she’d said, but then he hoped she’d be late too, miscalculating her own time and distance. When the silhouette of the Arboretum appeared he kept his eyes peeled for her blond hair; he knew she wasn’t going to wait for him and he knew he couldn’t afford to wait for her. He was sure the cops were somewhere behind him thinking it odd that he was returning to the Arboretum tonight. He assumed cops had an instinct for these things. There was nothing to stop them from going into the Arboretum if they thought they had a reason, ambiguous as their jurisdiction might be. As he neared the neighborhood there was no sight of her. He paused for a moment outside but knew it was a mistake to stop; it would only make everything appear all the more suspicious. He went inside.

  He was halfway down the first corridor when he felt someone in front of him. He felt her fingers run up his face and stop at his glasses. “It’s me,” he confirmed.

  She took his hand. “Come on,” he heard her say, and she pulled him down the corridor and around its U-turn, continuing to the interchange chamber where they crossed to the door on the far side and its spiral stairs. Far away below him on the stairs he could hear, as one always heard in the stairwell, the faint sound of waves crashing. Mona went first before him and he followed.

  They descended past the three doors to the fourth that led to Fleurs d’X, and then they passed that one. They climbed further and further down, passing another door and then another and then another, the light in each more ominous. Etcher had never gone this far down in the Arboretum. He could see what appeared to be the final door beneath him, the eighth by his count. She stopped before reaching it. “You brought the money?” he heard her ask.

  “Yes,” he answered tersely.

  “This is your last chance to change your mind,” she said. “It’s dangerous from here on.”

  “Let’s get to the door,” he said.

  “We’re not going to the door,” she said in the dark. There was a pause. He felt her reach up and touch his leg. “On the other side of you,” she said, “there’s an opening.”

  “The other side?” She meant the other side of the stairwell. It was pitch black. “Let’s go a little further down,” he said, “into the light of the door.”

  “That’s not where it is,” she explained in the dark, “it’s where you are, on the other side. Where there is no light. That’s why it’s there, because there’s no light.”

  He listened and realized that the sound of water crashing in waves was indeed coming not from below him but to his side, in the black of the other wall of the stairwell. He reached out but touched nothing; the wall, and the opening she said was there, was beyond his reach. “I can’t reach it,” he said.

  “No,” she said, “you can’t reach it.”

  “How do I reach it?”

  “You jump.”

  “I don’t even know there’s an opening there,” Etcher said, “except that you tell me there is and I think maybe I hear something.”

  “Do you hear the sea?”

  “Yes?”

  “Next to you, where you are now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s there,” she said. “Jump.”

  He looked at the door down below him. “Is that the bottom of the stairs?”

  “No,” she said.

  “It looks like the last door.”

  “It may be the last door or… it may not. I’m not sure. But it’s not the bottom.”

  “How far is the bottom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He breathed deeply. He kept studying the darkness to the side of him where the sound of the waves was coming, as though he might distinguish some profound pitch of black that constituted an opening. “How big is the opening?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was annoyed. He was supposed to jump over a chasm of undetermined depth to an opening of unknown size, which he could neither reach nor see. He kept staring into the side of the stairwell and he knew no matter how long he looked or waited it all came down to jumping. He took off his glasses, folding them and putting them in his pocket. He raised his leg over the rail of the stairs and climbed out onto the outer edge of the steps, suspended over the dark of the stairwell below him. When he started thinking too much about everything, he jumped.

  It was at least half a minute before she said, “Did you make it?”

  One foot had slipped, and he’d wildly grasped the first thing he could put his arms around. He found himself sitting for that half a minute listening to his heart pound while she in turn had listened for his fading scream downward or a distant telltale splat or whatever sound the plunge to oblivion makes, finally deciding that either he had made it or been very polite about the plummet.

  “Can you reach me?” he heard her ask from the stairs. She didn’t sound far away.

  “What do you mean, reach you?” he said.

  “Can you take my hand and pull me?”

  He laughed.

  “What’s funny?” she asked in the dark.

  “Nothing.”

  “I told you,” she said, “I can’t stay here anymore. He’s looking for me.” He was laughing because one thing was for sure and it was that this woman looked out for herself. Maybe she liked him or maybe she didn’t but in either case she hadn’t allowed sentiment to get in the way of his making that jump first, and now that he’d risked his neck once by getting himself across the dark pit of the stairwell, it was his function in the scheme of things to risk it again getting her across. He still couldn’t see anything. On his knees he felt the rock’s edge at his feet. He leaned out into the dark until he felt her hand, and then pulled her. “You’ve got the money?” was the first thing she said to him on the other side.

  “You’re welcome,” he answered. Unfazed she led him out through the back of the opening to a tunnel that continued further down into the earth. They went for some way. The sound of the waves grew louder and the air in the tunnel colder. The two of them had gone ten minutes when the path turned to reveal a dark grotto, lit by torches jammed into the rocks. The ocean rushed in and out of the grotto through an opening in the distance that was located at the base of the cliffs far below the city. Inside the grotto was a small dock with several very small boats that wouldn’t hold more than two or three people, and standing around the boats were five men talking and smoking and drinking. A couple of them were playing cards. They looked up to see Mona and Etcher climb down the last stretch of the trail.

  No one sailed in, everyone sailed out. This wasn’t a harbor for sailors on leave but a one-way station for fugitives unlikely ever to come back, and once you got this far the men running the operation weren’t about to let you turn around and go upstairs, where you could tell the cops about it. Now they gathered around Etcher and Mona and one of them took his cigarette from his mouth and dropped it on the doc
k and held out his open hand without saying a word. Etcher gave him the money. The man looked at it and shook his head. He waited.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” Etcher said.

  “It’s only enough for one,” the man said. Etcher looked at the man and Mona looked at Etcher. Frightened, she struggled with frustration to free her earrings from her lobes, turning them over to the man, who said, “These aren’t worth much.” Mona took from her coat pocket something wrapped in a scarf and handed that over as well. The man unwrapped it and held it up. “It’s a fucking rock,” he said.

  “It’s a forbidden artifact,” she said. “Look, there’s writing on it.” She pointed to the rough side of the rock. “On the other side.”

  “Give me your coat,” he said. “Yours too,” he said to Etcher.

  “We’ll freeze out there without our coats,” Etcher said.

  “Well, you’re not going out there with them,” the man answered. One of the other men laughed.

  “We’ll give you one of the coats,” said Etcher.

  “You’ll give us what we fucking ask for.”

  “No.”

  The man sighed. “Didn’t anyone explain this to you? Now that you’re here you’re going out on that tide one way or the other. Either you go out in a boat or you go out without one. You’re not going with your coat the first way and you won’t need your coat the second way. Doesn’t the logic of that impress you?”

  “The politics of stalemate impress me,” said Etcher. “I’m completely versed in them. You can’t let us turn around and go back and if you don’t sell us the boat you have to kill us and it’s bad business because if I wash up on the shore somewhere it’s just going to be a lot of trouble. Really a lot of trouble. I work for the Church and have something they want and they’re breathing down my neck and the cops watch every move I make, even now they know I’m somewhere in the Arboretum. Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think I need to get out of this damned city so badly? Why do you think this is my last resort? I’m giving you everything I’ve got and she’s giving you everything she’s got and we’ll give you one of the coats but not both.” He added, “You can have the rock too,” nodding at the stone Mona had given the man.