ARC D’X

by Steve Erickson

  “I don’t want the damn rock,” the man said. “I’ll take yours,” he said to Mona, nodding at her coat, and wrapped the stone back in the scarf. He handed it to Etcher, who put it in the pocket of his own coat, which he now took off and wrapped around Mona. The man led them to a boat. It had oars and in the bottom was water and what looked like the tatters of a sail, though there was no other sign of a sail or mast. Around the hull it appeared as though the wood was rotting. “Bon voyage,” the man said. Etcher got in the boat and helped Mona in, then he took the oars and pushed the boat off from the dock. Even wearing his coat Mona sat shivering at the stern. Struggling with the oars, Etcher began to row. The men on the dock returned to their drinking and cards, never glancing up to watch the boat’s progress.

  It was an hour before the boat even got out of the grotto. Only then did Etcher understand the peril of the situation. A low ceiling of Vog billowing into the grotto continued to hang several feet above their heads, so it wasn’t until the walls suddenly fell away that Etcher realized they were out on the open sea, where the night came rushing in and the force of the swells threatened to smash the boat back against the rocks. Etcher fought futilely against the waves. They lifted the boat in the air and dashed it back down on the water. Several feet from Etcher at the stern of the boat, behind the gusts of the sea that rained between them, Mona’s cries sounded very distant to him, like a shout from the top of the cliffs that towered somewhere above the Vog.

  All night the boat was pulled by the waves and then hurled back toward the cliffs. By the each hours of morning the boat had finally made its way out to sea, beyond Central’s searchlights; but the shadows of the obelisks of Aeonopolis were still in plain sight and Etcher was alarmed that with dawn the boat would be visible to patrols along the coast. Soaked and overwhelmed by exhaustion and cold, Etcher rowed, racing insanely against the sea and the light of day. Their greatest ally now, he told himself, was the volcano, which delayed the full morning light until nearly noon. He hurried, to whatever extent possible, from one patch of Vog to the other, hoping they might find one to ride up the coast like the lost Vog Travelers of the Arboretum. He kept telling himself that if they could get far enough from the city, around some bend of the coastline above them, then they could rest, sleeping at the bottom of the boat in the sun.

  But at the other end of the boat, with his coat wrapped around her in the dark before daylight, the Woman in the Dark said, “I’m cold.”

  “I know,” Etcher said. “In a few hours the sun will be out. When we’re far enough from the city, when we don’t have to worry about drifting back, we’ll sleep in the sun.”

  “I’m very cold,” she said, as though she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.

  “Think about the sun.”

  “Even the Ice wasn’t this cold.”

  “Think about a place to sleep.”

  “Maybe we should go back,” she said.

  “What?” Etcher was incredulous.

  “It’s too far.”

  “We’re not going back. There’s nothing to go back to. You said yourself there’s no going back. You said yourself there’s no changing your mind. Think about the sun. Think about a place to sleep. We’ve come this far, think of how far we’ve come. It’s just a little further.” The sea, which had been sporadically calmer, was now becoming rough again. The boat was rocked by a wave and Etcher hung on, but in the dark on the other end of the boat Mona was not hanging on; she was holding herself in the cold, huddling in his coat.

  “Keep me warm,” she said.

  “I will,” he answered. “I promise.”

  “Keep me warm now.” She stood in the boat to come to him.

  “Sit down,” he said quickly.

  “Please,” she pleaded, still half standing, and she stepped into the middle of the boat. She was in the middle of the boat, coming to Etcher to beg him for the warmth she never asked of anyone, when the next wave slammed the boat and she vanished. In the blinking of an eye Etcher was by himself. There had been no cry, no last glimpse of her going overboard, no hand reaching out for rescue from inside a fatal wave, nothing left but his coat which she’d worn to keep her warm; he’d lurched to grab her when she was standing in the middle of the boat and had only gotten the coat. If she’d been wearing the coat rather than just wrapping it around her, it would have saved her. Now she was gone as though she’d never been there at all, Etcher sitting alone in the night out on the sea with his coat in his hand, looking around frantically for some trace of her in the water. He began to call out to her only to realize he didn’t know her name, that the fiction they had invented in the Fleurs d’X was that she had no name. So he couldn’t even call to her. He couldn’t see or find her. For the rest of the night he didn’t row anymore, even after he knew she wasn’t coming back, because he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her.

  As she sank beneath the waves, with far less panic than she would have supposed. Mona thought of Wade running through the Arboretum at this very moment looking for her. Little did he know, little could he imagine as he rushed from chamber to chamber and corridor to corridor searching for her, that she was no longer in the Arboretum at all, no longer in the city, but far away in the ocean’s undertow; she wondered how long it would be before he got that feeling one inevitably gets that someone is gone from his life forever. Perhaps, was her last thought, if he’d painted the walls of the flat not with the secrets of the Arboretum but rather in the color and currents of the sea, she would not have left him after all, the aquadoom of her destiny having come to her instead. With the burst of her lungs she announced this doom to the water’s surface, a black bubble her only memorial in a night too dark and a sea too deranged for anyone to honor it.

  Not long ago I said to a friend, “But of course, nothing’s irrevocable.” And she was surprised. “Then you’ve changed your mind,” she said, “because up until now everything you’ve written has been that some things are irrevocable.” For a moment I felt dishonest or exposed. I was certainly confused, because I hadn’t been aware that my view of things had changed so profoundly. I had to give some thought to the possibility that, if I had in fact made this profound change, it was to survive, a necessity I nonetheless couldn’t respect because I don’t believe the truth of the world changes in order to accommodate anyone’s survival. If it’s the nature of some things to be irrevocable they remain so however urgently I may need to feel differently. At any rate, I knew it was a process of age. I knew I was now nearer the end of my life than the beginning, and the facts and incidents of that life take on more significance simply because there will be fewer of them, and so I had to believe that they were in fact less fraught with consequence so that I could go on. So that, in the darkness left by passion’s supernova, I wouldn’t hurtle back into the dead calm that had preceded it. I would defy my own passivity by making the world around me a more passive place, where everything’s ultimately inconsequential and nothing’s irrevocable, where everything can be returned to the way it was before and every choice includes the option of reversing it when it turns out to be a mistake. Where risk isn’t always a matter of life and death. Where at the end of the two years during which you turned your life upside down, rearranging it from top to bottom, you can wind up back where you started, only a bit older and a bit more broken, closer to the end of everything than to the beginning.

  And the truth is that I was right all along. Even as the fact of it becomes more overwhelming, more unbearable, some things are irrevocable, if not circumstantially then in the heart and memory, the heart and memory being the only two things that can puncture the flow of time through which hisses the history of the future. Two years ago when I stood with her on the cliffs overlooking the sea beyond that point where the fence ended, we said nothing, we touched nothing, we saw nothing, we were nothing but the two of us together; and afterward nothing, including all the things that had not been said and not been touched and not been seen, would ever be the same for either of us
even now when I’m alone once more, as before, and she’s gone. In the bid and hunger for freedom in which she’d lived her whole life, she couldn’t help but be cavalier about love; love would not undo that bid or satisfy that hunger. Everything that’s truly irrevocable finally has to do with love or freedom, but whether you act in the name of the first or the second, one of them ultimately bows to the other and that’s the most irrevocable thing of all.

  Standing with her two years ago on those cliffs overlooking the sea, even I knew that.

  Etcher’s treacherous boat found its forsaken shore thirty miles up the coast, on the second day after he’d left the city; and though he’d had his hours in the sun, nothing could warm him. The cold of the sea had sunk so deep into his bones that by the time he made his way to the first little village inland, taking a job stocking the meat locker for a local storekeeper, he was like an animal hurrying to the chill of its natural habitat. In the locker his heavy glasses fogged over and froze to his face. Sometimes he thought about Mona and sometimes he thought about Sally; sometimes in his thoughts the two of them blurred together into a flaxen black succubus so sexually lush it repelled him to think of her. So he didn’t think. He worked in the meat locker for four days, drawing wages and hitching a ride out of town up the main highway, bypassing the first station and the second until he reached the third, where he gambled that it would be safe to take a train.

  He was always on the lookout for cops. From station to station over the next six days he would constantly change trains, change cars, change seats to the dismay of the conductors. He reached his home village and stayed with his mother one night and then moved on the next day; but he wasn’t racing against time. He was traveling on time’s train and time’s car in time’s seat, shifting from one to the other when seat after seat and car after car and train after train eventually fell behind. He had finally given his compulsions over to his fatalism in the same way the sea left him no choice about Mona. On the trains he huddled in the cold that hadn’t left him since the grotto.

  He finally came to the last little town. He paid a guy in a truck the last of his meat-locker wages to give him a lift the twenty miles to Sally’s house. They got there after sundown. The house was dark on the fjord in the distance. The driver said, “You sure someone lives there, pal?” and Etcher lied. He barely heard the truck driving off as he walked up the path, and by the time he got to the house there wasn’t any sound at all.

  Until, somewhere, he heard Polly crying.

  The ice had frozen the front door around the edges and he had to force it open. The house was dark inside except for the faint glimmer of coals in the cast-iron stove, where a feeble fire had been built hours or perhaps even days before. Its warmth had long since fled the house. The frigid blast in Etcher’s face was the first cold to impress him since his thirty-six hours in the boat; he shuddered not at the cold itself but at recognition that he hadn’t yet met the limits of cold, that something in the world was colder than he was, and that it was this house where he’d once dreamed of living with the woman whom he would have once died loving. Stumbling over a squat wooden stool and kicking a toy duck at his feet, Etcher stood in the dark and listened. For several moments it was quiet and then once more he heard the crying.

  He made his way through the front room. He stopped at the foot of the stairs before crossing the kitchen toward the back hallway and listened, peering up the stairs into the blackness to see if anyone was there. He passed one room after another. All of them were so dark that Etcher couldn’t see the small white clouds of his breath he knew were right in front of his eyes. In the back hallway he saw a faint glow shining from Sally’s bedroom. Then he could clearly hear Polly, and a woman’s whispers.

  A small lamp burned on a table. Next to the table the mother and her child were in bed. Clothes long since worn and toys long since forsaken were strewn throughout the room, where the walls and ceiling were bare of pictures and a curtain was pulled across the window in a last-ditch effort to keep out the cold. Draped over Sally’s bedroom was a massive silver web. From one corner to the other a swarm of iceflies had spun a cocoon that glittered like a giant jewel. The lamp inside gave the jewel its light, fire flashing off the dense crisscross of ice; and behind the gauzy pale-blue membrane of the cell the ephemeral forms of Sally and Polly, moving with a languid vagueness, resembled the metamorphosis of a black larva. For a moment Etcher couldn’t say or do anything. With the sweep of one arm and what he thought was a cry, he tore the web away; but afterward he wasn’t sure he’d cried at all. He heard no echo, and at first neither Sally nor Polly even looked up at him, barely aware in the stupor of their cold and hunger that anyone was there.

  He called her name. She barely turned her head. She looked so ravaged and wasted, her face and hair so white like the sheets of her bed and the crystalline bedlam of ice surrounding her, it was as if most of her had vanished altogether, nothing but a pair of deathly distant eyes lying on the pillow and the broken black slash of her mouth. Huddled against her was the small helpless body of her daughter, desperately trying to warm herself against her mother’s fever. Speechless and petrified, Etcher stirred himself from the grip of his shock to rush to them and throw his arms around them; but he’d forgotten how cold he was, and Polly screamed at the touch of him, and her scream in turn jolted Sally to a grunt so meaningless and unearthly that Polly cried more. Sally instinctively clutched at Etcher not because she was aware he’d come back to her but for his coldness, since she was on fire, and the same cold that the daughter recoiled from the mother pulled closer to her so that she might press her whole raging body against his. Thus Etcher was as consumed by Sally as he was rejected by Polly, who tried to beat him away from her even as Sally wouldn’t let him go, the three of them locked in an absurd embrace of ice and fire.

  And then he saw that what possessed Sally now wouldn’t be delivered so easily as a white baby gull. The thing inside her, part aerial and part amphibian, was in no hurry to hatch from her and expose itself to the cold outside. So it devoured Sally organ by organ and bone by bone, drinking her fecund blackness and then slumbering in the waste of it, fouling its own nest with relish. It had found an ideal host in Sally’s purity, which was as marked by chaos and desire as it was devoid of guile or malice, the pure folly of a will for transcendence that at the same moment never understood the nature of what was to be transcended: once she might have cut the thing out of her. Once she might have taken her knife and lopped it off at the root, when it attached itself to her thighs and shot its seed into her womb. But cutting it off would have taken the sort of malice and ruthlessness that Sally’s sort of purity didn’t allow for; the purity which attracted her destruction was also the purity that left her no defense. From the beginning Sally Hemings had been laced with her own doom. In the web of the iceflies her transcendence had begun. In the dark delirium of her black fire she’d already started the journey. What Etcher saw as degeneration was the first leap upward; as she seemed to him to be plummeting downward, she in turn watched him fade and disappear from whatever her existence was in the process of becoming, as that existence finally surrendered her beauty. For all of her life her beauty had taken away with one hand the freedom it offered with another; for all her life it had unlocked with one hand the chains the other had bound to her; and she didn’t want to be beautiful anymore. She had never believed in it anyway. She believed every man who had called her beautiful was a liar or a fool, either not to be taken seriously or to be taken seriously only for how he meant to possess her. She didn’t want her body anymore, she didn’t want her face; she would happily leave her witchy incandescent eyes on the pillow, her watery dreamwracked mouth in his hand, where he could hold it like a coin or a plum or a small animal and believe its kiss was a gift of the soul rather than a twitch of the nervous system. She would leave behind the bits of her beauty like souvenirs, and she’d leave the shell of herself to the thing inside her that could devour what she was but not who she was, whil
e she went to a place where the static of love meeting freedom was not to be confused with history.

  He couldn’t move her. There was no way he could get her and Polly through the ice the twenty miles to town, and he had no idea whether having made the effort he would find anyone in town who could help them anyway. Nor would he leave her in order to go find someone who might help: it had taken so much and so long to get here that he had no money left and couldn’t be sure there would be a way back. As he walked from room to room with the small table lamp in his hand, he saw that the blast of cold that met him when he came into the house was more than just the air. The iceflies were everywhere. The house was a catacomb of webs spun from doorway to rafter, from crossbeam to window frame, the corners filled with thousands of cocoons hatching thousands of flies until they dangled from his elbow and buzzed around his glasses and his black hair was alive with them. He foraged the house for kindling to stuff in the iron stove, but after he had chopped up the furniture with an axe there was nothing left to burn except food and toys and the house itself. Etcher and Sally and Polly ate the remaining bread, cans of fish and fruit. When he gathered into his arms Polly’s wooden animals and flutes and trains and the pictures she’d drawn of birds and kitties and butterflies, to feed to the stove in a cremation of innocence, he turned to see the little girl in the doorway of the room as though some child’s instinct had alerted her, bringing her from her mother’s bed: “Do you want to play with my toys?” she asked in a tiny pitiful voice. He was awash with shame. He looked at the toys in his arms and dropped them to the floor, and she ran quickly to retrieve her favorite horse, as though she understood he hadn’t really meant to play with them at all and now she’d rescue at least one when she had the chance.