(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  In the white room, around the crescent table, they were seated in their half-circle. “We were just wondering,” said the head priest, “if you’re ready to return the books now.”

  “I was giving that matter some serious thought this very morning,” Etcher answered.

  The priests looked at each other with anticipation. “Really?”

  asked the head priest.

  “I’m ready to begin right now, as a matter of fact.”

  “This is very good news,” the head priest said after a moment.

  Etcher reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to the priest, who unfolded and studied it for several minutes.

  “What’s this?” the priest said.

  “Page one.”

  The priest continued studying the paper in his hands. “Page one,” he repeated, almost absently.

  “Tomorrow I’ll give you page two.”

  “Do you mean to tell us,” and it was difficult to be sure without his glasses, but Etcher supposed he heard in the priest’s voice a rising hysteria that struggled for control, “that you’re going to return the books page by page?”

  “I’d like a window,” Etcher answered.

  “What?”

  “A window. In the archives. The view is limited, staring out at the lobby. There’s no light in the lobby. I’d like a window. Can you do that please? If you put in a window, I’ll bring you pages six through nine perhaps, or eight through eleven. A window on the light. A window on the sea.”

  A month later, after they had put in the window, he decided he wanted to move the archives altogether. He had them relocated STEVE E R I C K S O N • 155

  upstairs in the northernmost part of Central, where he could see in one direction the sea and in the other direction the volcano.

  Here he could always smell the wine in the air, which rolled in with the ocean and bubbled hot in the volcano’s crater.

  So Etcher had found his light, having been fired by love to defy God and seize history. And the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History trickled back to Primacy page by page, in no great rush, since Etcher well understood that when the day came years later that the last page had been returned, his life would be over, there would be no more history left to protect him from Primacy, in the same way that if the return of the pages was to stop there would also be nothing to protect him, since there would be nothing for Primacy to lose by ridding itself of him. Everything came down to a trickle of pages. The trickle couldn’t be either too fast or too slow. Sometimes, for a window, sometimes for a new view of things, the pages returned in threes or fours, occasionally half a dozen at a time. There were, after all, close to fifty thousand; Etcher could occasionally afford to be generous. It was important to instill hope in the priests. It would be dangerous if they should feel overwhelmed by the futility.

  Etcher lived with the woman he loved, in the way he had once come to believe he’d never love again, and with her child whose love he coveted beyond what was possible, beyond what was possible for a man who would be her father if he could, and could never be her father no matter how much he would.

  In the haze of his life without glasses, everything was wine and light and pages. But when the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come to Etcher. And when he woke from them, the light wasn’t the same.

  In the first dream, nearly a year after Etcher had left his marriage, Sally was sitting on the floor, her knees pulled up under her chin, and she was talking. She told him, in this dream, that she was in love with another man.

  He woke from this dream and discounted it. He discounted it even though, somewhere in the back corner of what he’d come to know, he understood that this dream was the expression of an A R C D’X • 156

  inkling. But he discounted it and didn’t think about it again, until the very next night when he made love to Sally and there slipped from her lips a name that was not his, slipped so clandestinely she wasn’t even aware she’d said it. But Etcher heard it, unmistakably.

  “Thomas,” she whispered.

  But she didn’t believe she knew anyone by that name. Had she been aware of having said it, she would have been as surprised as Etcher, not because she wasn’t seeing another man but because his name was not Thomas but Joseph.

  He was a large bear of a man who spoke in a hush, and he had a stall in the Market. She’d gone there several months after having recovered from her nearly fatal illness, browsing among the Market’s paltry offerings. He made jewelry of a less exotic sort than Sally’s—strings of benign white wafers that hung as plain func-tional necklaces—and had been watching Sally from the other side of the Market; when she wandered over to him he could barely believe his good luck. Then, as she studied his jewelry carefully, he took notice of the necklace she wore.

  “Where did you get this?” he said in his hushed voice.

  The way he spoke, the way she could hardly hear him at all, felt familiar to her, as well as the way he looked down on her from a height. She was immediately sorry that Etcher didn’t look down on her from a height. She was immediately sorry that Etcher, a soft-spoken man himself, now seemed so loud. “I made it,” she said of the necklace.

  Joseph looked around him, over both shoulders. “They allowed this?”

  “I’ve never … subjected it to their approval.” She asked, “Do you think I’d have trouble selling a necklace like this?”

  “It’s a very unusual necklace,” he advised her.

  She got the idea, then, of selling some of her necklaces through Joseph’s stall. She came back the next day to talk to him about it and, though he was dubious and afraid, since he couldn’t afford to have the police shut him down, he wanted to see Sally again, so he STEVE E R I C K S O N • 157

  offered to keep her necklaces and earrings under the counter and show them to anyone who appeared adventurous. Unknown to Sally, he bought some of the jewelry himself, so that she’d return.

  Slowly he began to steal her heart.

  One night she went home with him, and didn’t return to her own circle until late the next morning.

  Perhaps it was the jewelry. Perhaps it was that she wanted to be admired for something she created rather than someone she was, since she had no idea who she was and therefore could never really trust anyone who loved her for that. Of course it wasn’t her jewelry that Joseph loved, it was the same intangible thing about her that all the men had loved; from the other side of the Market she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen as she had been the most beautiful woman a thousand other men had ever seen. But she chose to believe it was the beauty of the necklace she wore that attracted him. And then, if she was touched by the familiarity of him, there was also the way that he was utterly different, because though he wanted to ravish her like the others, he was incapable of it.

  They lay together in bed and he tried to will forth the manifestation of his desire. His mind roamed around itself to find the magic click of the cells in his brain that would spark an erection.

  When he could not, when he suffered in her arms, that need for her comfort and assurance and pity felt more like real need to her than the need others had for her body or soul, particularly her soul, since its contents were so mysterious and unnamable to her. Comfort and assurance and pity were qualities she recognized readily enough in herself that she could offer; they possessed a value she understood. If there was ever a woman who needed to pity a man, who needed to be needed for the heedless assurances of her heart when her body could not be taken, it was Sally; and so she gathered him up. She held him just as the big bearness of him gathered her in his arms and held her. Once she had needed the ravishment. Once, amid Gann’s indifference and in the aftermath of a dream from which she woke in a strange hotel next to a strange man in a pool of blood, she needed the carnality of love.

  Bu
t Etcher had satisfied that need, and once he had, Sally in her fashion couldn’t quite believe in it anymore, since the slave in her couldn’t understand anyone loving her as anything but property; A R C D’X • 158

  and when Etcher ravished her not as property but as a person, she could no longer understand ravishment at all, nor his in particular.

  She believed ravishment was bigger than she was worthy of, which made it unreal. Joseph’s love, crippled and pitiful, was real. It didn’t overwhelm her in the way of Etcher’s. It didn’t impart meaning to her life in terms of what it gave to her but in terms of what it asked of her. She had found someone as wounded as she. And so for several months she loved Joseph, the fact of their love sex-less if not the intention.

  “There’s someone else,” she told Etcher, not long after it began.

  “Then you have to find out what it means,” Etcher choked. It was the sort of thing someone believes when he says it but hopes that, the moment he says it, the new infatuation’s meaning will become instantly and clearly trivial, and no further investigation will be necessary. It was a fair answer, but not an honest one. She begged him to help her. It was an honest plea, but not a fair one.

  He’d helped her with everything else, after all; Etcher had been from the beginning the one who helped her more than either of them had a right to. It was unfair of her to ask for his help now because what she really asked was that he accept part of the responsibility for a decision that could only be hers. The night she told him there was another man they made fitful angry love in the middle of which she moaned desperately, “Marry me.” Etcher knew at that moment that Sally did not know the meaning of her heart. In a single hour she’d gone from telling him there was another man to a frantic plea for marriage, and everything he’d allowed himself to trust could never again be trusted the same way.

  At the end of their sex, when she cried, as she had many times before, “No!” to her own orgasm, the no had a new conviction, the no had a new persuasion about it, the no believed anew its unworthiness to be yes, the no believed anew its unwillingness to be possessed.

  It might have been easier if Etcher could have hated Sally. But he knew she acted not out of malice but confusion; Etcher’s faith in this love was such that it was incapable of comprehending how confusion could be as destructive as malice. “You want to know if he and I have made love, don’t you?” she asked witheringly in one of their arguments about the man who didn’t even have the same name for both of them, Joseph to her and Thomas to him. But even STEVE E R I C K S O JV • 159

  when Sally scorned Etcher’s pain with a contempt he’d never heard from her before, even when Sally scorned his unasked questions, he knew it was really her own heart she scorned. At such moments he wanted to protect her again, as he’d come to protect her since the moment she walked into the archives searching for Madison Hemings. Etcher wanted to protect her from the way the chaos of her heart spilled into the shambles of her soul; it might have been easier, since he couldn’t bring himself to hate Sally, if he could have therefore hated the man whose name she knew as Joseph but whom Etcher knew as Thomas. But he couldn’t hate Thomas either. It was impossible for Etcher to hate any man for loving Sally; it would be tantamount to hating himself. And so that’s what he came to do. Once again he extended the benefit of the doubt to everyone but himself. Once again he was the most convenient target of his own agony and rage, as though he didn’t believe anyone else could really sustain the impact of either his agony or rage.

  He didn’t follow her. He didn’t track her through the city, or conspire to confront her infidelity. He didn’t spy on her affair around corners. He did, however, wait outside her door. He did sleep at night against the obelisk in the Vog, pulling his coat around him and waiting for her return. He did linger beyond the circumference of her old circle, out in Redemption known as Desire, where Gann now lived alone except when Polly was with him. One night he finally approached, knocking on Gann’s door. “Is Sally here?” he asked when Gann answered.

  “No,” said Gann. After a moment he said, “She got you running in circles, huh?” and it was to Gann’s credit that there was no meanness in the question. He seemed to take no satisfaction in Etcher’s plight; the odd thing was that Gann had come rather to like Etcher. This, then, was what Etcher had come to: an alliance with Gann.

  On a black night that he knew she was with Thomas, at two in the morning when he knew she was going to be with him the rest of the night, he wanted to die. He had neither the passion nor conviction for suicide but he had none for life either, and all the pity he had before for those who never knew the feeling of a love that was bigger than their own lives now became an indifference for life itself. He told himself that if he could, he would have empA R C D’X • 160

  tied his eyes of her face and his arms of their memories and his heart of its dreams, but his greatest anguish was that as soon as he said it, he knew even on this night he never would have done any of that. He never knew whose slave she had been. He only knew that he was hers.

  It may have been at this moment that Etcher was left with no choice but to let go of Sally, since the only other alternative was to let go of his love, which he couldn’t do. Because while losing Sally would only break his heart, losing his ability to love like this—and he would never again love like this—meant the shattering of something so profound as to defy its naming with names like love or Sally or Thomas. The faith in love that led him to take his life in his own hands, as the priests had put it more accurately than they knew, was the creation of something more and bigger than love, in the process of which love was nothing more or less than the essential element. Something in him, from that moment on, became just a little cruel. The light in him, from that moment on, became marked with the ashes of a black cremation. And finally, when he came to detest himself for his continuing subjugation to the way Sally hurt him, when he knew he could no longer blame anyone but himself for his feeling of humiliation and betrayal, he stepped back across the chasm, from the side of his heart’s blind faith to the side of his heart’s naked nihilism: he got another pair of glasses.

  When Sally saw Etcher wearing the new glasses, she finally understood what was at stake. Until now she understood only in her head but not her heart that she was at the edge of losing him.

  She decided the only thing to do was see neither Etcher nor Joseph, perhaps for a long time. She decided that if she was never again going to be owned, if she was never again going to be a slave, she’d brutally have to drag her own life out into its own outlaw zone and abandon it there. Alone she walked Desire’s wild shore-line, the city to the south of her and the volcano far to the east, and between the two the rising black hulk of the Arboretum. Beneath her she could feel the waves of the sea slash the rocks and rush into the grottoes under her feet, where fissures ran to the surface; with each incoming wave the water sprayed through cracks in the ground in a hundred geysers as though the earth were crying for her to free herself. Confronted with her new decision, Joseph STEVE E R I C K S O N • 161

  asked that he might be allowed to see her once a month. Etcher, however, insisted he would not hear from her at all. Sally was furious with his adamant terms. But he was now locked in an effort as desperate as hers to free himself, and when she begged him to stay until morning on what they believed was their last night together, when once again he felt himself nearly seduced by her pain, he refused.

  The priests at Central noticed that Etcher wore his glasses again.

  They didn’t have the imagination to understand that at this moment he was vulnerable to everything and everyone, including them; they didn’t have enough empathy for the mess and blood and semen and tears of human life to understand that in his desolation he might have given whatever they asked. Instead, mistaking the new glasses for renewed control, they kept their distance even more; and their moment of potential victory slipped past them.

  Two weeks after they had parted, Etcher received a message from Sally.
He couldn’t decide whether to go back. It wasn’t because he didn’t still love her utterly but because he’d be returning with such crippled faith on his part, to such crippled determination on hers; he had come to see, in the manner of Polly who silently raised her finger to witness in the flight of gulls something beyond what anyone else could see, that Sally’s inner turmoil would eventually have to be played out. He did return, of course, convincing himself it could be played out with him as well as, maybe better than, without. And though he’d never understand everything, he would come to understand the hard way that, though Joseph was gone from her life, the ghost called Thomas was not.

  Sometimes in the middle of the night as everyone was sleeping, right after the episode in the hotel, when she was still with Gann, Sally would go out into the circle. She would carry with her the black wooden box with the rose carved on the top. After she left Gann, when she was with Etcher, she would continue to rise and cross the circle in a night so dead even the white of the circle was lightless. In the dark she was searching for A R C D’X • 162

  what belonged in the box. Night after night she waited in the circle for the Vog to break just enough that the moon might peer through, illuminating her search; she assumed she would know what she was looking for when she found it.

  It was the rumble of the volcano that launched her final flight to freedom.

  The city woke to it one morning as though to a bomb. The ground shook. People ran from their units into the circles and watched the volcano’s fireball rise into the sky, spat forth from an earth clearing its throat. The city became paralyzed, silent in its panic, passively waiting for the mountain to roll soundlessly across the lava fields and down the streets in a molten wave. In the distance, to the southwest, the tiny white figures of the priests could be seen on the Central rooftop surveying the coming cataclysm. But after several days passed, when the earth began to calm itself and it was clear the cataclysm would not come this time, the city returned to its deadness, the crack of doom that brought it momentarily to life changing from echo to memory to the finally forgotten.