Hours later she met Etcher on the way back, huffing and puffing up the side of the crater. Within twenty feet of her he stopped, his furious magnified eyes regarding the bag of food in her arms. “I took the papers to the mailbox for you,” she said. He answered this news with more of his black silence, approaching to take the bag from her. “I can carry it,” she assured him, and for a moment they tussled over the bag until he grabbed it away. He turned back toward the house and she followed in a hush. She had resolved over the course of the days and nights that she wouldn’t go until he told her to. She would outrage him from his wordlessness, if she had to. At the house, in the doorway, he suddenly turned to her.
“Where’s your father?” he said.
“Behind me,” she said, and he looked over her shoulder at the volcano’s horizon, but then realized that wasn’t what she meant. He went on inside the hut. She believed the opportunity was at hand: “I can barely remember you,” she said, directing her words straight at the past. “That’s good,” he answered, and ripped the bag ferociously to liberate some bread at the bottom, taking a bottle of wine from the cupboard above the sink and storming into the back room. For several minutes she stood staring at the closed door, trying to talk her anger into bursting through it and confronting him.
She had a dream that night in which a dead woman who looked much like her lay on the mattress in the corner of the hut where Polly herself was now sleeping. How the woman had died wasn’t clear, and for a moment, when she seemed to turn her head, Polly thought perhaps the woman was alive after all; then the woman disappeared, and Polly’s relief gave way to the certainty that the disappearance and not the death was the delusion. At the end of the dream Polly had the strangest impression she was dead herself, even though her life didn’t yet understand this: the circumstances of her life had gone so awry that ending it seemed the only viable option. Everything in the dream simply seemed so hopeless and involved such futility that suicide wasn’t an emotional decision but a practical one; she didn’t want to do it but was overwhelmed by the feeling that it was the only out.
When she woke, it was as though a noise had awakened her. But the hut was still and she felt entirely alienated from her dream, until she realized it wasn’t hers: rather this dream had smuggled itself from the other room, slipping through the doorway and across the floor to the mattress, where it invaded her ear and ate its way voraciously into her mind. She could see its form in the dark of the hut, like a crustacean from the lava sea outside skittering across the room. The dogs on the porch whimpered and sniffed at the door. Then there was the abrupt crash of glass in the back room, which gave way to a strange commotion, and she jumped from the mattress and pushed opened the back door, where she half expected to find a battle taking place between Etcher and some beast lurking in the shadows.
Wine ran down the large map on the opposite wall where he’d thrown first the glass, then the bottle. The glass had broken and the bottle lay at the base of the wall gurgling out the remains of its contents. He sat hunched over the desk with his face in his hands and, as though gripped by a seizure, suddenly flailed at the desk so recklessly that the candle was about to tip over and set everything on fire. Polly grabbed the candle. Light darted over the room. In the darting light Etcher didn’t look up, he didn’t move his hands; his glasses lay on the papers in front of him. In the privacy of his hands he said, “Do you know what it does to me to see you?” She had to clutch the candle hard to keep from dropping it; he still wouldn’t show himself, he still wouldn’t look at her. “To see her face looking at me over your shoulder…”
“I’m sorry,” Polly said.
“You’re sorry?” and that released him. His hands fell to the desk and his cheeks were streaked and flushed. “You’re sorry for your face?” The force of his fury seemed to raise him up from where he sat, though in fact he didn’t move at all; in his blind eyes, their glasses still lying on the desk, flashed the last freak moment left of a vision’s halflife from years before, when he loved Polly’s mother and saw everything. “She must have been sorry every day of her life,” he said in a furious whisper. “I must have heard her say she was sorry more times than I could count. She was sorry for her face and she was sorry for her heart, she was sorry for the way everyone told her she had something to be sorry for. She was sorry for the right choices and sorry for the wrong ones and sorry for not knowing which was which, which was almost all of the time. She was sorry for me and she was sorry for the others, but she was never sorry enough for herself except when it was time not to be sorry anymore. Are you here for revenge?”
“Wh-what?”
“It’s a waste of time, if you’ve come for revenge. It’s a waste of time, if you’ve come to hate me. Because there’s no hate you can muster half as good as mine. No revenge you can take half as final as me getting up from this chair and walking out that door and off the edge of the precipice into the fire, a course of action I consider daily, or perhaps it’s hourly. Do you want to be the one who pushes me?”
“I…”
“Come on then,” he said, rising from the chair. He leapt around the desk and grabbed her by the wrist; she screamed, nearly dropping the candle. He pulled her through the front room and out of the house across the porch, past the dogs out onto the ledge, the red mist hanging in the night around them.
“Please,” she begged.
“Do you remember the train ride back, after she died?” A thousand times over the years he must have told himself he was over her. A thousand times in response he must have called himself a liar. Like a wild animal that returns to a habitat it’s never known, but which is its natural one nonetheless, Etcher had come to the mouth of the volcano, and now overlooking the lava he staggered as though to slip over. She screamed again, pulling him back. “It went on forever, all the way back to the city, and you wouldn’t talk to me except to say, like you had a hundred times before, ‘I’m not your friend.’ And then on the station platform you ran to your father and he picked you up in his arms and took you away, and I waited for you to look back at me just once, and you never did. And I knew I’d lost both of you.”
“I was just a little girl.”
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” he cried. In the sheen of the fire his eyes grew wide with the sound of it, as though he could see the admission floating in front of him over the crater, and he wanted to reach out from the void of his life and pull it back.
“You didn’t kill anyone,” she pleaded. “Please come away from the edge.”
“I meant to save her, like I did before.”
“You couldn’t save her either. You didn’t kill her and you couldn’t save her.”
“I was supposed to take care of you. She said, Take care of Polly, and I let him take you.”
“He was my father, Etcher. And I was just a little girl. And I don’t remember much of what happened except that you loved my mother, even then I knew that, and that’s why I’ve come back. And if you hate yourself now then you let me down when I need you most, when I need you to tell me all the things about her that my father won’t or can’t because he never really knew her, when I need to know there was someone in our lives who loved us more than his own life, and that was you. So you have to come away from the fire now, and tell me. Please.”
In the glow of the crater, his face in his hands, he wept. The tears ran through his fingers and down to the ragged sleeves of his shirt. When he finished and came away from the fire he seemed very old to the girl, as though his legs would buckle beneath him, and there was enough of the father in her to find selflessness a revelation, to find the human burden of carrying an old man away from the fire a frightening thing to accept. She sat against the wall as he slept, not at his desk but on the mattress at her feet, spent of his nightmares that plopped one after another from his brain to the floor, scattering helplessly for shelter.
When he left the city, the beggars followed.
He had returned in broad daylight years before,
met by neither cops nor priests, who were only beginning to adjust to the trauma of his escape and therefore hardly expected his reappearance. In the voggy glare of midafternoon, under the eyes of the city, he moved himself and the red books to the volcano, and only the beggars took note, the beggars who had zeroed in on his unguarded conscience from every alley and corner, in the midst of every crowd. Now they poured into the streets from the curbs and doorways, following along behind not to beg anything more of him but simply to say goodbye, the broken army of the city’s forsaken standing at the edge of town alongside the peripheral highway silently watching him disappear into the lava fields. It was only this demonstration that alerted the authorities of Aeonopolis, half a day late, that Etcher had again slipped in and out of their grasp. As the Arboretum had long since proved, authority was never particularly equipped for dealing with audacity.
Larger audacities were to confront them.
Page by page, Etcher was rewriting the books.
Page by page he left the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History in the red mailbox at the volcano’s base, as had been arranged with the Church; what had not been arranged was that, leaf by leaf, each was transformed by him. As the years passed, the precarious placement of the volumes on the shores of the crater’s fire, where Etcher might drop them one by one into the lava, unraveled the nerves of the priests while discouraging the plans of police to swoop down on the tiny house and seize what was in it. Etcher had taken the lessons of stalemate to the ultimate edge of stalemate, and then began to write. He wrote every day that he didn’t throw himself into the crater with as many of the books as his arms could carry.
He did it because, having not had a single night since her death when he didn’t dream of her, having plummeted into the dark hole of his heart, all he could find in his control was history. As his heart had been undone, as he would undo his own memory in some pointless effort to forget her, he would now undo history minute by minute, detail by detail. He gave history its false cues, he misspoke its passwords. In his rewritten history bombs failed to detonate, assassins’ guns misfired in the theater. Secret tunnels were dug from the killing grounds of the Commune by which escaped whole revolutions; invasions were distracted by the pornographic obsessions of dictators. Motorcades were delayed by a flat tire. The earth of Etcher’s new history shimmered with the fission of reactor meltdowns, and wars that had once ended in four years went on for forty. Hard moral lessons were corrupted. The conscience of history became as relative as its science, and memory became a factor of expedience in the equation of power.
Complicit in Etcher’s assault were the priests themselves, who gave no indication they understood the revisions. Perhaps they actually believed it didn’t matter, as long as the books were returned to their vault where they might again become sacred. Likelier they suppressed their worst suspicions, flinging the returned pages back into the dark and lunging the door closed behind them to secure the books not from thieves but themselves, who might come to know what they couldn’t stand to know. Likeliest was that the priests had rarely read the history in the first place and wouldn’t have known it was not the same even if they bothered to read it now. Rummaging in the heart’s basement, stepping into history through the doorway of the heart as the second hand hurtled toward midnight, perhaps not unlike the priests Etcher believed he would find a resurrection. Not his own, since he didn’t believe in that anymore, but hers, since hers was his anyway. Failing such a discovery he thrived on the energy of destruction and anarchy until the night of his confession to Polly, at which point he thrived on her. At least for a while the mad storm of his work calmed. The molten flow of the mountain receded into the earth and the fire of the volcano cooled to embers, around which the old man and the girl circled to stories of her mother, which often broke down early in the telling.
He would compose himself and begin again. Sometimes they talked so long into the night that history, for a night, passed unviolated, returned to the red mailbox intact and without changes, though in new contexts from changes that had come before. Etcher drank less. And then, from the choke in her voice at the mention of her father, he knew that sooner or later Polly would leave, that her fury at her father was the defiance of a heartbreak that sooner or later must reconcile itself to the source. And that was when he knew she’d go back to her father because she couldn’t leave as far behind as she might have hoped or believed the little girl who had run to her father on the station platform, who adored him more than anyone else in the world and always would. So once more Etcher began to drink. Once more he began to write. He was back in the heart’s doorway, passing through to seek its most malevolent possibility. If he could not, once more, find a resurrection, he would locate a trapdoor instead, a lever to pull through which Gann Hurley would plummet to oblivion. But though he might actually find such a trapdoor, though he might actually find such a lever, the fact was that this was his heart, not Polly’s, where her father was safe and untouchable, arrogantly secure, forever protected from even his daughter’s own rage.
In the back room he wrote faster and more furiously. At first he thought, on the night the knock came on the door, that it was the pounding in his own head; and when he realized it was not in his own head, when he realized it wasn’t Polly banging around in the other room or the dogs sniffing at the residue of wine in the empty bottles, he assumed any other possibility but the fantastic truth. He assumed it was the clerk from Central on his bicycle, though the clerk had never before passed the red mailbox. He assumed it was the cops. He assumed it was Hurley, who had come for his daughter. When Etcher called out the girl’s name and then called again, and went into the front room where Polly was frozen in the open doorway, he never assumed it would be Sally Hemings standing there on the porch outside, on the eve of a choice that would change everything, staring aghast into Polly’s face, which stared back. The mother, at fourteen, was several years younger than the daughter.
He nearly fainted.
Polly rushed as though to catch him but he caught himself, gazing from one girl to the other. Since the thing that terrified him most wasn’t simply her ghost but how in the doorway Sally looked at him as though she’d never seen him before, he said her name almost as a question. It didn’t entirely get past his lips, part of it caught in that doorway of the heart where it had lingered so long.
Sally turned from the door. She ran past the gray dogs curled on the porch, up the side of the crater toward the ridge of the mountaintop. She ran down the other side of the mountain toward the lava fields. She hadn’t a thought in her head of water or prison or slavery; later she would have liked to believe it was a dream, she’d have given anything to believe it was a dream. But at this moment she knew it wasn’t a dream and so she ran parched and exhausted and half out of her mind. She never looked back at the crater or the house or Polly standing in the doorway watching her go; when she finally reached the bottom of the volcano she went on running and stumbling across the black plain. Sometime in the night a wagon picked her up. Sometime in the night she felt and heard beneath her the turning of wheels; she felt and tasted on her lips the trickle of water. Into the night she didn’t dream or think at all. The wagon took her back to Paris.
In the early hours of morning she pulled herself off the back of the wagon. She wandered aimlessly as she’d done the night she buried the carving knife in what she believed was Thomas’ sleeping body back on the rue d’X. Pulled by the tides of the city, Sally returned to the center of the Parisian moment: the black prison with eight towers, which the revolution had stormed forty hours before. Smoke still hung on the square. Blood had long since overcome the scent of lilac from the broken window of the perfume shop. People streamed freely across the prison drawbridge in and out of the prison gate; high on the dark red pikes that surrounded the square were the heads of garrison soldiers. Women wept over the cobblestones where their men had died. Moving from widow to widow, talking to them, holding them in comfort, was Thomas.
/> Sally watched for some time. To each of the women Thomas gave some money. It reminded her of when she was a little girl and one day had seen him seize the whip from a man beating a slave. She sat dazed in the street amid the glass of the perfume-shop window; pieces of glass glittered in the dawn sun. Finally he saw her. In the smoke he stood staring at her. When he came toward her she couldn’t help but find his judgment terrifying. He looked at the glass all around her and said, “You’re going to cut yourself,” and picked her up and caught himself on a shard in the folds of the tattered dress he’d bought her; together they watched his hand bleed. As he carried her in his arms she tore from her dress a long strip and wrapped it around his hand. She wanted to sleep in his arms but said, “Put me down.”
He put her down. Her knees buckled beneath her and he had to catch her from falling in the street. She pulled herself from his arms and began walking away. “You’re too weak to walk,” he said.
“No.”
“You have nowhere to go.”
“Your hand’s bleeding,” she said; “you should go home.”
“If you leave now you’ll never see your family again. You’ll never see America again. You’ll be in a strange country forever, with strange people and a strange language you don’t know—”
“I’ll learn.”
“In Virginia you will be the mistress of my house. The queen of my bed.” He ran after her.
She turned to confront him. “I would just try to kill you again,” she said. “I’d keep trying until I did.”
“Where do you suppose you’ll go? How will you live?”
She resumed walking from the square down the winding street. This is the way to the river, she thought to herself. She heard him behind her.
ARC D’X Page 33