(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  “What is it, doctor?” Luc said very quietly.

  He was humoring the old man at first, but then Seuroq started telling him about the missing day, and the more he talked the more frightened Luc became, because either the old man was insane, which unsettled every flimsy foundation a young researcher like Luc had established for himself, or the old man was quite sane, in which case none of the foundations were going to matter much anyway. There it was, Seuroq insisted, pointing to the timeline at his fingertips, a missing day that lay between the 31st of December 1999, and the first of January 2000—twenty hours and seven minutes and thirty-four seconds to be precise, the accumulation, according to Seuroq’s calculations, of all the moments over the millennium that grief and passion had consumed from memory and then dribbled back into the X of the arcs of history and the heart, past and present and future rushing toward a dense hole of time into which all of history would collapse. An amazing dark temporal star weighing 72,454 seconds that hovered between the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 211

  millennia, on the other side of which everything the past millennium had ever meant might be utterly different, everything history had claimed might utterly shift, the reducibles of freedom succumbing to the reducibles of love, or perhaps vice versa.

  Even now Seuroq believed he could sense the acceleration toward the vortex; and when night finally fell on this missing day between the 31st of December and the first of January, we might all be anywhere, or nowhere, or more precisely anywhen or no-when, since this was not a black hole of space but time. We might come out in a lurch onto the year 2493, Seuroq thought to himself, and then upbraided himself for such a banal conclusion, not having quite yet reached the further one, that beyond such a day time would measure itself not by the numbers of the clock but of the psyche, which was to say that history would measure itself not by years but by memory, where the heart is a country. Perhaps on the other side of the 32nd of December or January 0, however one might mark it, one would see that the millennium had already begun much earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, perhaps, or in 1945

  when we gazed into the nuclear mirror, or more likely sometime in the middle of an anonymous night in an anonymous hotel room when someone exchanged freedom for love or love for freedom, or entered some irrevocably compromised bargain with a certain happiness that memory doomed to misery before it ever had the chance to remember itself, when the promises of history or the heart first showed the signs of their own betrayal. Perhaps now, in 1993, it was already the Third Millennium, or perhaps it was the ur-Millennium, and a thousand years didn’t have anything to do with anything, it was just a presumption, like a republic or a reich.

  “Dr. Seuroq,” said Luc, “can we go home now?”

  “Yes,” Seuroq answered, “I’m finished here,” and when Luc reached out to touch the old man there was an abruptness about it that gave way to hesitance, which triggered in Seuroq the last memory he would have of Helen tonight. “You’re making that up,”

  he had answered her in the hotel room when she said the Queen of Wands was the card of passion, and he had reached to take the card from her and look at it; but between their fingers, his and hers, the card crumbled, disintegrating with age, as though it were as old as the hotel. That night she woke him and said she wanted to go home, so they checked out of the hotel at one in the morning, A R C D’X • 212

  to the extreme displeasure of the concierge. In the back of the taxi Helen explained to Seuroq that she had been dreaming over and over in her sleep of the card crumbling in their fingers, and it somehow seemed important that they go back home before everything else crumbled. “Everything else?” he had asked. “Like the hotel,” she answered, and laughed as she did when she chained herself to the shackles of the courtyard wall. But it wasn’t really the hotel she meant.

  In the fall of 1998 an American writer living in the same hotel room first read the news on page seventeen of the International Herald Tribune, below the reviews of the latest shows in Paris and London. It would have been more appropriate with the obits, the writer thought to himself later, but at the time he didn’t understand the ramifications anymore than anyone else. It wasn’t until three months later when a magazine ran day x across its cover—

  or jour d’x on the European editions, out of deference to the French scientist who discovered it—that the panic set in and Erickson took the Bullet to Berlin, where they called it X-Tag.

  It seemed to the writer that every crucial moment of the Twentieth Century had sooner or later expressed itself in Berlin and therefore it was natural he should go there. But past Han-nover the train just got emptier, and by the time it reached Zoo Station at dawn the writer rose from his sleeper to find himself disembarking alone. He took a room on the third floor of an empty hotel in Savignyplatz. The neighbors led lives even more transitory than his: streetwalkers and barflies and whatever tourists were weird enough to stray into Berlin, the kind of adventurous eccentrics who used to pass up Paris or Maui for Amazon villages or Alaskan outposts. A block from the hotel, passing beneath the tracks of the S-Bahn, he looked up one night to the scream of a runaway train hurtling west. The sound and speed were terrifying, the white boxes of the train’s windows empty of life, and in the cold blue shine of the moon the tracks of the S-Bahn glistened across the sky like time’s vapor trail. The writer braced himself for STEVE E R I C K S O N • 213

  the crash in the distance, the cry of the train flying off the track into space, plunging into a building or park or the waters of Lake Wannsee. That was the night of the first phone call.

  As time passed, his memory of this became less exact. As the present slipped into the final year of the millennium, memory became more and more disengaged from the past, like a door that floated from room to room in a house, taking up residence one day in the kitchen and the next day in the basement. The phone in his room had never rung before. The American couldn’t have said for sure the phone even worked. Since there was hardly anyone left in Berlin and he didn’t know anyone anyway, he assumed it was the hotel manager; maybe there was a problem with the bill. Erickson answered and there was silence for a moment and then a young woman’s voice spoke to him in German. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,” the writer said, and there was another pause and the woman said, in English, “I want to take you in my mouth.”

  For a split, ludicrous second, he thought it was his ex-wife. He hadn’t talked to her in several years—only once since the Cataclysm, and then just long enough to assure himself she was all right, blessed as she always was by dumb luck. His ex-wife lived her life in fear of one disaster or another, ranging from the apocalyptic to the mundane, when more than anyone he knew she was always unscathed by events; in a meteor shower she’d be the one who just happened to be off the planet at the time. Now, for a split ludicrous second, he thought she’d tracked him down, though in the next moment he knew that was impossible. With the phone in his hand he instinctively turned to the window, as though someone were watching. He tried to remember what was across the street—another hotel, where someone might be staring at him from a darkened room. “What?” he finally answered foolishly, and she said it again.

  “Are you alone?” she asked, after a pause. Hesitantly he answered that he was. “Take off your clothes,” she said; and at that moment he was either going to hang up or do what she said. He told her he had to close the blinds on the window. “Did you take off your clothes?” she said when he came back. They talked some more; she described herself. She had blond hair and nice breasts.

  She didn’t say how old she was, but when he thought about it, which was for only a second, he imagined she was much younger A R C D’X • 214

  than he. She didn’t say she was beautiful. It became implicitly understood, particularly within the boundaries of the fantasy they were sharing, that outright lying wasn’t permitted. The thing he would remember later with dead certainty was that, immediately after it was over and he lay spent on the hotel bed, she asked if he was all ri
ght. Not whether the sex had been all right but whether he was all right, his intensity having betrayed itself to her. Yes, he answered, and there was a click.

  After that he was shaken. He wanted a real woman, not a fantastic one. He even thought of going to the Reichstag, which he’d never done before, but that scene was too strange for him. He pulled on his clothes and opened the window, expecting somehow to see her revealed; below, a camel loped silently down the empty dark street toward the square. It was more than a month before she called back. She left a message with the hotel manager: Are you really never there, it said, where do you go when there’s nothing to do at home? In his mind he imagined her with only a dollop of romanticism—more attractive than plain but not especially pretty, perhaps a bit plump. He wouldn’t allow himself to sit in the hotel room waiting for her calls; and yet in Berlin all there was left to do was wait. From his window he watched the dark street for another camel, as though it had been a sign. But when her third call came, the block was empty of beasts, not even the growl of the lion he believed slept in one of the nearby cellars, though he’d never seen it. She fucked him on the phone again and told him when she’d call back, and so already their rendezvous transgressed the spontaneous.

  Animals prowled the city. The previous summer, under the cover of darkness, members of the Pale Flame opened the cages in the garden across from Zoo Station; now people were mauled by tigers. In the mouth of the Charlottenburg U-Bahn station the American found what was left of a kangaroo ripped apart by a panther.

  For months after the cages were opened, the city was the most alive it had been since the fall of the Wall nine years earlier, the orange and yellow and green noise of exotic birds flashing across a sky still smoky from the Night of the Immolation, when the Pale Flame had captured and set on fire seventeen Asian women in the pattern of a swastika. Sometimes the American could still see or hear the few birds left in the gables of the buildings. Beneath the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 215

  Brandenburg Gate he was once so startled by a clap of thunder above him he might have thought it was another runaway S-Bahn, if there was an S-Bahn that ran anywhere nearby; but the sound wasn’t a train, it was the pandemonium of escaped birds amid the stone rafters, crashing wildly from one archway to the other. The color and music of birds survived neither Berlin nor winter. Slowly but surely one species of escaped animals wiped out the next, with no cops around to pick up the gutted carcasses.

  Berliners said you knew which of the ‘93-‘94 exodus were the cops because they were the ones at the head of the throng. Five years later the few police still left were guarding the German government holed up in the old KaDeWe department store, after the ministers of state had returned to the new capital only to find the Beichstag occupied by warring factions of the Neuwall Brigade on the one hand and the Pale Flame on the other. For weeks bureaucrats wandered homelessly the deserted boulevards off the Wittenbergplatz before winding up on the ransacked KaDeWe’s sixth floor. Once the most astonishing gourmet food emporium in the Western World, the sixth floor had been picked over thoroughly in the riots of ‘95, leaving the government not even a roll to nibble or a bottle of wine to suck on while conducting the affairs of the newest reich, which held the dubious distinction of being an even bigger botch than the third one.

  Now in Berlin, in the last spring of the second millennium, on X-257 as it was marked on the punk calendar the American writer had bought in Kreuzberg, every nineteen-year-old with a computer was a reich unto himself. He created his own German state and programmed it to last not a thousand years but ten thousand. He invaded weak peoples, wiped out impure races, torched effete cul-tures, claimed natural living space, and added seventeen new definitions to the term Final Solution. All he needed was the right software and a sector of the city where the juice hadn’t been shut off. If the horrific dimensions of his imagination didn’t quite have the baroque flamboyance of sixty years before, he made up for it with rudimentary technological acumen, blunt brutishness and a certain obliviousness of irony, since the thrashmetal that served up his anthems would be as unsavory to the Fiihrer as it was passe to whatever decadents were alienated enough still to be here, most of them drifting naked in the sex arcade of the Beichstag basement A R C D’X • 216

  in search of anyone with a vaccine tag around his or her neck.

  Berlin, once again and for the last time in this century, lay at the crosscoordinates of history’s indecision, the final decade of the final century characterized by dissolution in the East and a contriv-ance of unity in the West which barely lasted five minutes beyond the contriving, the gravity of authority versus the entropy of freedom, the human race’s opposing impulses devouring each other, order consumed by anarchy and then reordering itself. In the anarchy of each individual’s building his own reich, each reich imposed its own order, much like the last reich which supposed humanity could be recreated in its image. Humanity knew the attraction of it. It lied if it said it didn’t. It recognized the attraction not in its sense of self-perfection but rather in its imperfections which it so despised and so yearned to transcend, that longing for the fire that burned it clean of its humiliations. In the nihilism that was left, in the void of the obliterated conscience, where every rampart had been reduced to rubble, it longed to take care of God once and for all, the smug motherfucker.

  Erickson had been in Berlin two months and was eating dinner one night in a restaurant off the Ku’damm, when a couple of Berliners sitting at his table told him about the Tunneler.

  A beautiful young American Marxist student went to East Berlin one weekend in 1977 and fell in love with an East German professor. She wound up defecting, marrying the professor, bearing his son, and becoming an East German citizen. Over the years the professor began to suspect, much to his horror, that his wife was informing on him for the Stasi, the East German secret police. He came to believe, moreover, that she’d been informing on him for some time, certainly since she had become a citizen of East Germany and perhaps before that; in fact, as he thought about it more and more, he eventually concluded that she’d been spying on him from the very beginning, that their initial meeting and love affair had been part of a Stasi plan all along. He was convinced that he’d been seduced in the name of the state and that the young American woman had never loved him at all and that even their little boy was part of the political scheme.

  Perhaps this was true and perhaps it wasn’t. But clandestinely, with the knowledge of only his closest and most trusted friends, the professor entered a plot to escape to the West by underground STEVE E R I C K S O IV • 217

  tunnel near the barren Potsdamerplatz. One morning in the early spring of 1989 he rose from bed, washed and dressed himself, prepared his class papers and packed his briefcase, kissed his wife goodbye and held his ten-year-old son especially close to him, and left his house as he’d done hundreds of mornings over the years, never to be seen again.

  A number of high-placed friends who knew of the professor’s suspicions concerning his wife were convinced he’d been arrested, and filed a protest with the government. But the Stasi insisted he hadn’t been arrested, and that insistence took on some credibility when the Stasi began conducting a thorough search of the city.

  After some months passed, a new story began circulating. According to this story the professor himself had believed he was about to be arrested and left his wife and child that fateful morning to head straight for the house with the tunnel, where he conveyed his alarm to his co-conspirators. Convinced that the police were about to descend any moment, the professor’s accomplices buried him with food and water in what had been completed of the tunnel. No one knew that only seven months later the rest of them would be sauntering across the border from east to west, through the Wall, with tens of thousands of other Germans.

  To this day, according to Erickson’s dinner companions, the professor still didn’t know. To this day, the story went, he was still down in the tunnel. Not understanding the first thing about digg
ing a tunnel, with no map and apparently not much sense of direction, the professor continued digging until finally, after weeks or months, he made a breakthrough, hacking his way with a pick into what he hoped was the targeted destination, the cellar of a house off Potsdamerstrasse west of the Wall. What he found instead was that he had returned to an earlier point of the tunnel. Slowly and gradually he had circled back on himself. His despair and panic must have been unutterable. For ten years the Tunneler honey-combed the no-man’s-land of the ghost Wall; amid the new, unfinished Potsdam Plaza one could hear his echoes from underground in the plaza’s empty corridors.

  The strange thing was that afterward Erickson began hearing this absurd story everywhere, from anyone still left in the city.

  Whenever he bumped into someone long enough to have more than a three-minute conversation, the tale of the Tunneler came A R C D’X • 218

  up. He heard it not only in the drunken Teutonic slur of the bars but from other tourists and little old ladies in bookshops and stray bankers from Frankfurt on the U-Bahn, one of whom, standing on the train, pointed at a hole in the underground wall of Kochstrasse station and said to Erickson, out of the blue, “Tunneler.” Excuse me? the American answered, not even sure the German was speaking to him, and the Frankfurt banker told him the story of how the Tunneler had dug his way into the U-Bahn and then, terrified he was still in the East, retreated, scurrying back into the blackness. And as Erickson looked at the hole in the wall of the darkened subway he remembered the last time he had come to Berlin, two years after the fall of the Wall, and how he took the U-Bahn from west to east and could still feel the passage from what had once been one side to what had once been the other; the ghosts of division still lurked in the underground. In the case of the Tunneler, however, he’d simply been underground too long, because the fact was that even if there had still been a Wall, Kochstrasse would have placed him not back in the East but in the West, about half a block beyond what was once Checkpoint Charlie.