(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  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 colloqui-ally. 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 STEVE E R I C K S O N • 187

  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 nervous 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 AR C D’X • 188

  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 STEVE E R I C K S O N • 189

  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 AR C D’X • 190

  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 opera-tion weren’t about to let you turn around and go upstairs, where you could tell the cops about it. Now they gathered around Etcher STEVE E R I C K S O N • 191

  and Mona and one of them took his cigarette from his mouth and dropped it on the dock 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.

  A R C D’X • 192

  “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 early 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 STEVE E R I C K S O JV • 193

  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 A R C D’X • 194

  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.