ARC D’X

by Steve Erickson

  He was not right. I’m not right today. Georgie said to himself, why not? Was he beginning to blur around the edges like everything else? Was he several seconds ahead of his moment like everything else? He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He waited impatiently for the dark as though down the hall from his flat, outside in the street somewhere, a phone would ring with the arrival of night and she would have for him another hotel and another room number. He kept his eyes peeled for witnesses; he lay in bed with his hands on his chest and became transfixed, for the first time, not with the head of the birdwoman who walked from the flames, not with what dripped from her mouth, but her breasts. Their violation in his mind reduced them to the ornaments of pathetic degradation they were, and he sprang from his bed and prowled the flat as the animals used to do in the Tiergarten’s cages, waiting for their release. The pupil of the night’s eye dilated around him. He stood and gazed at his tarot and at the picture of the buried city that replaced the card he’d always missed; he went to his slab of Wall in the center of the flat and now it too took on the appearance of a tomb, much as had the Neuwall in the woods. Georgie seized the spray can that sat on the floor and wrote THE RETURN OF THE QUEEN OF WANDS. Then he sat on the floor in front of his new graffiti and waited.

  He’d never watched the graffiti actually disappear before. He had no idea whether it vanished in the blink of an eye or faded away slowly, over the course of hours or only minutes: “This is a good time to figure this out,” Georgie advised himself. He sat waiting, staring out of the dim floodlights of the flat at his new black message until he’d fixed his attention on it so long and so fiercely he finally drifted. He slumped on the floor and slipped into a dark room where he saw the bare outline of a woman. He recognized the slope of her back and the fullness of her breasts, he recognized the caress of being inside her even as he couldn’t make out her face. When he woke he’d spilled his semen for the second time of his life, within twenty-four hours of the first. On his Wall the graffiti was gone.

  Georgie stood gazing down at himself. He would have exchanged in a moment the shame of his semen for the honor of his own blood gurgling from a wound. Once again he glanced around as though someone might have seen him; he was also extremely annoyed that he’d fallen asleep on his graffiti watch. Once again the graffiti had slipped away into the Wall somewhere, through the slit of historical memory to which this piece of the Wall was the livid vulva, like all the graffiti since the first day the Wall came here and SONIC MEN, ANONYMOUS GOD had disappeared. Georgie cleaned himself of his semen, scrubbing himself until he was raw, and then stumbled back to the bed; once again, even in exhaustion—he hadn’t slept since before he’d murdered the American—he thrashed his way through the night. Once again he got up and put on another cassette. Once again he returned to his blank Wall to take the spray can and telegraph another message into the void: THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS he wrote.

  And now in the ultimate subversion of himself it was his graffiti that revolted him. Because suddenly the words lost all banality and history; they throbbed before his eyes and hinted at something he could neither resist nor understand, the Wall seething and the words shuddering with danger as he recoiled from them. He wanted them to disappear immediately. If at this moment Georgie had had the means he would have emasculated himself with the swipe of a blade and sprayed the pursuit of happiness with the blood of his amputated sex, until the whole Wall was the red of death’s honor rather than the white of pleasure’s shame.

  The Queen of Wands is the card of passion. Her throne rises from the rubble of the fallen wall, and the sands of the American plain blow over her from the east. In this way her passion rises from the American earth; she’s a thing of the earth and the passion’s a thing of her. At her feet is a large black cat. A round white sphere rises behind her against a dark blue sky. The rod in her hand intimates magic but the magic’s really in the hand and not the rod. Her brooding beauty cages the very breath of every man who lays eyes on her and blasts loose the underpinnings on which he’s confidently and foolishly built a feeble life. She is without true malice. At her moments of greatest fury the rod may take on the appearance of a knife; that she always fails to use it isn’t a sign of weakness but of a goodness she can’t overcome. Rather her powers of destruction lie not in hate but chaos, just as the antithesis to God is chaos; and her chaos blows across those in her realm like the sands that bury her throne. She’s fickle and will betray, without reason or warning, the one who loves her most. She’s hungry for whatever love any man can give her and because she doesn’t trust either love or herself she’ll abuse both, and rush to the next man who might give her a love the previous man could not, in her search for the love that somehow raises her above her own throne, for which she has contempt. She doesn’t believe in what she deserves and she deserves more than she’ll ever know. Though Georgie imagines her as fair and golden the Queen of Wands is dark, her beauty understands that white is not the color of illumination but emptiness and that black is not the color of the void but eternity. Though the rings of her regeneration grow paler in time the core of her memory becomes the glowing ebony of a collapsed star: in the American Tarot she’s not the Queen of Wands at all but the Queen of Slaves.

  Georgie doesn’t know this since he’s never seen her. The card’s great presence for him lies in its absence, because the absence of a single card renders all other cards invalid. Since a year ago when he first stole the deck off an old Parisian Jew in Zoo Station, the meaning of his queen has in her absence grown only more magnificent. Now in the dark in his flat, just below the surface of the floodlights, in every fitful dream he sees just a little more of the woman in the dark yet not enough so that he can tell her hair is black and not gold, her eyes are the green of the sea and not the blue of the sky. She inches just a little further into view. She hovers just a little closer into the present. The shape of her becomes just a little more distinct. But Georgie doesn’t know that the Queen of Wands, or the Queen of Slaves, is not the creature tattooed on his chest for instance. He’s only figured out that his queen is waiting for him in a buried city, like the one in the picture that has replaced her on his wall, and that the buried city is not Berlin but somewhere in America at the future’s farthest point of exhaustion, which means he has a long way to go and not long to get there before the big day arrives, the distance growing farther with every day that time grows shorter.

  Nevertheless the black hollow of the Reichstag yawns before Georgie tonight. At this point the nights are running together: was it last night he killed the American, or the night before? Georgie hasn’t gone to the Reichstag in a long time, frequenting when he does only that part of it controlled by the Pale Flame; he’s never gone into the Reichstag basement. The Reichstag basement is verboten by Pale Flame law. But the nights are running together now and there’s no sleep for Georgie from thinking about what happened to him in the dark of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel. Perhaps Georgie thinks that, by his forbidden presence in the basement of the Reichstag, he’ll testify as to his control. Perhaps he believes that if he leaves the Reichstag basement with his erection still unspent and slick with the evidence of a woman the night will forgive him; in such an event he may even forgive himself. But mostly he can’t get out of his head that she may be in the Reichstag basement and he goes there now not to prove she is but to reassure himself she is not, he goes there to prove to himself that the woman who selects her men by a number on the telephone and takes them in the privacy of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel has no need to wander the Reichstag basement available to whoever gets his hands on her first. The squat Reichstag sits in the center of Berlin just off the Tiergarten, apart from everything around it, as though abandoned by the city in the same way Berlin abandoned everything at its center a half century ago. On the Reichstag’s far northern side is the jagged gape where a bomb ripped a hole in the spring of ‘96.

  Georgie circles the Reichstag basement in apprehension that he’s going to
run into some of the Pale Flame. He’s wearing the American’s shirt. He hasn’t really forgotten why he never comes to the Reichstag, which has nothing to do with Pale Flame law, but for the moment he tries not to think about it; the reason is there in the back of his mind, rejected by him. He finally enters the hollow. Everything’s dark. He brushes past people coming and going; through an entryway he sees in the dark the forms of others moving. At a small table with a light, a young woman with short black hair wants some money to let him go on into the arcade. There’s no indication she’s been authorized by anyone to collect a tariff, since there’s no indication any authority exists here at all, but Georgie gives her some money. She hands him a blindfold and informs him he must put it on before he passes beyond the entryway behind her. Other people’s clothes are strewn against the walls and before he undresses Georgie goes through them looking for money; he keeps glancing over his shoulder at the woman with the short black hair. But she isn’t watching, she doesn’t care what he steals. She’s here to enforce nothing but the darkness of a blindfold.

  In the darkness of his blindfold he reenters room twenty-eight of the Crystal Hotel. Once more he’s standing in the doorway of the American writer’s rendezvous, the American writer’s darkness. He wanders tentatively forward, his hands before him, waiting for her touch to meet his. He’s surprised by the heat of the basement, it’s the heat of something older than the summer solstice; the smell of ashes is thick around him. The lurking form of the reason he never comes to the Reichstag spies on him from around the corner of his mind, the American bitch. He feels someone grasp the tag around his neck and he feels to be sure it’s a woman. Immediately he becomes erect. He pulls her to the ground which is hard and hot, and says in English, “What’s your name.” When she doesn’t respond he repeats the question in German.

  “No names,” she answers. She sounds drunk. She touches the bandages on his arms.

  He takes her by the neck and shakes her. “What’s your name?” he demands.

  She squirms beneath him. “Christina.” He nods, relieved. He opens her and puts himself inside. The reason he never comes to the Reichstag continues to watch from around the corner, treacherous spying American Stasi bitch. Go away, he mutters; the woman beneath him cries out. Go back to your new wall, he seethes, petulant. He now knows the woman beneath him isn’t from the Crystal Hotel even if her name is Christina. Her moans and whimpers don’t sound at all like the female at the Crystal Hotel and her breasts are much smaller. She feels and sounds much smaller and reeks of beer and cognac. He’s sure he sees a flash of light somewhere beyond the darkness of the blindfold, and in the flash he feels the basement freeze around him and it occurs to him he’s been revealed. It occurs to him there are witnesses everywhere. It occurs to him he’s a fool, that it’s all been a trick and he’s the only one wearing a blindfold, and as in a child’s game everyone’s standing around in a circle watching as he stumbles to his next humiliation. Believing this, he doesn’t come but rather wilts to nothing; the woman beneath him sighs with audible relief. Georgie rips the blindfold from his face and jumps to his feet: but no one’s watching. It’s dark, not pitch-black like room twenty-eight but dark nonetheless, a few barely distinguishable forms of people doing indistinguishable things.

  He yanks the female up from the floor by the tag chain and drags her out of the basement. He grabs his clothes from where he left them but doesn’t bother to look for hers, and pulls her naked out into the Berlin summer night.

  They walk south past the Brandenburg Gate through the bankrupt monument of the unfinished Potsdam Plaza. The moon is full. Christina has long red hair and freckles all over that Georgie can see even in the moonlight, and her most exotic attraction besides her small budding breasts is that except for the hair on her head she’s completely shaved, giving her the body of pubescence even as her face makes clear she’s several years older than Georgie. She’s just sober enough to understand she’s completely naked and that the light above her is the full moon and that the trees of the Tiergarten are in the distance. Georgie pulls the female along with the impatience of a child disgusted by the way some long-coveted toy hasn’t measured up to the coveting, until they reach an S-Bahn station where they ascend to the platform and wait for a train. The few other stragglers waiting for the train see Georgie and his naked woman and desert the platform immediately. The night’s final train arrives and Georgie and Christina get on. Most of the seats are empty, and when the few other passengers see the naked woman and the boy with the tattooed wings, they empty their seats as well. Georgie doesn’t want to sit down. Christina’s legs buckle as she crumples to the ground at his feet. He pulls her back up to her feet by the chitin.

  Everyone’s a witness now, he tells himself. He grimly believes he’s passed some point of no return, that the Pale Flame will cast him from their ranks or kill him when the word gets out about tonight in the Reichstag basement. In a small street-corner market that’s open late, Georgie buys a beer while Christina stands stunned in the market’s stark overhead light; she covers her face with her hands. The store owner, a Turk, stares at them, not sure which holds his greatest attention, the completely naked shaved woman or the boy buying the beer with the sign on his body of the Pale Flame, which savagely kill Turks as a matter of course. Tonight, however, Georgie says, “Thank you very much,” when the owner returns his change. Georgie pulls Christina back out into the night and to his flat. Just inside the flat, slipped beneath the front door, is the result of Curt’s efforts with the American’s passport. Georgie examines the passport as Christina collapses to the floor.

  Georgie puts on a cassette. “This is a good one,” he assures the semiconscious woman. He turns the music up, then down, then back up, and undoes the bandages that have been wrapped around his arms. He ties the bandages into several long strips and binds Christina’s wrists and ankles, lashing her to his slab of the Wall in the center of the flat. In her stupor she groans. Around and around his Wall Georgie circles, stepping over or around Christina’s prostrate body and taking swigs of beer and listening to the cassette. Christina writhes in dazed confusion. Georgie takes the paint can and sprays across the Wall I DREAMED THAT LOVE WAS A CRIME and then returns to his orbit, wishing he had another beer when he finishes the one he bought. Then he goes over to the floodlights and turns them off.

  The flat’s dark now, nearly as dark as a room at the Crystal Hotel, darker for sure than the Reichstag. He stumbles to his Wall and touches it; he feels the wet black paint of the new graffiti. He finds her in the dark. He strips off the rest of his clothes and lowers himself to take her, but he’s wrapped her ankles too tight and there’s no separating her. He turns her around but no matter how he tries he can’t get inside her. He thinks perhaps he’ll put himself in her mouth but he can’t even get her mouth open; he keeps turning her this way and that. He keeps telling himself she’s someone else. He tells himself it’s another’s breasts and that the sound that comes from her is another’s sound. But she’s already been too exposed to the light of trains, to the light of late-night markets, to the light of the moon, for him to trick himself into believing he’s never seen her. All his wrath cannot inflate his loins with enough semen and blood to make him erect; his impotence is bigger than the dark. He wails at his situation, rises from the floor and hurls himself in the dark at his Wall so that the wet black paint of his manifesto will leave its imprint on him and tar his wings. But when he hits the Wall there’s no wet black paint anymore: Day X has already sucked his message to the other side through the Wall’s portal, and the Wall is already blank.

  He turns the light back on. For a while he sits against the blank Wall. The Female doesn’t move in her bondage except to shiver; in the still of the flat, in the hushed haze of the floodlights, Georgie looks over in the light and sees her eyes are open. A single tear runs down her face. “Don’t cry,” he says and, aiming carefully, reaches over to crush her tear beneath his thumb as he would an insect, or the flame of
a candle. The black paint of his graffiti is long gone from the Wall but the paint on his thumb leaves a vague print on her cheek. Outside, the solace of Berlin meets the new upward tick of the hour, the hum of everything indiscernibly escalates to a new pitch, and for a few minutes, perhaps even closer to an hour, Georgie actually dozes in the light without dreams. When he gets up Christina still hasn’t moved, hopelessly bound as she remains to the Wall. Georgie shuts the door of the flat carefully behind him so as not to wake her.

  In the Kochstrasse U-Bahn it’s probably half an hour before dawn. The trains will begin running soon. No one closes the stations in the offhours anymore and homeless people sleep on the station platform, those desperate enough not to care who robs or knifes them in their sleep. In this final hour of the night Georgie isn’t here for robbing or knifing. He stands on the platform just feet from where the American writer made the mistake of sitting next to him; but Georgie isn’t thinking of that either. He’s forgotten everything about the American except what he’s taken from him. Georgie lowers himself from the platform and carefully steps over the rails of the track. He crosses to the other side of the tunnel. A gypsy lying on the platform wakes just long enough to look over and mutter a warning before falling back to sleep; on the other side of the tunnel Georgie pulls himself up alongside the wall. Several times he has to jump up to get a grip on the opening of the hole; he tries to hold himself up long enough to peer inside. Beyond the breach of the hole is a relentless darkness, the kind of darkness he’s been looking for since the Crystal Hotel, only to find it now when he doesn’t want it. Now he’d settle for light. Now he’d settle for a window or a bulb or a moon; with a spare hand he’d flick a switch if he could, or light a match. All he can do is look into the dark as hard as he can.