(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  On his way back to the S-Bahn suddenly there was the Crystal Hotel right in front of him. It hadn’t even crossed his mind after the phone call to go to the hotel and it couldn’t be said now that he made a reasoned decision about it; reason wasn’t part of the process. Reason would have said to keep on going to the S-Bahn:

  “Even I know that,” Georgie said to himself, laughing out loud. But he had the writer’s passport and money and music and piece of the Wall and picture of the buried city, and now the hotel of the writer’s phone call had presented itself to him. He was sorry to find that, unlike the last hotel, the lobby wasn’t empty but that instead there was a night manager, an extremely old man who worked behind the front desk. The old man appeared even sorrier to see in the doorway of his hotel a bald boy with red wings on his back and fire and lightning and a naked woman with an eagle’s head and something dripping from its mouth on his chest. “Excuse me,” Georgie said to the old man, “I have a friend in room twenty-eight.”

  “Yes,” it took the manager some time to say it, “she said you would be along. Well,” he added with great reluctance, “she said to send you right up.”

  “Thank you,” Georgie said. Beyond the lobby was a bar that hadn’t been occupied in years; the stairs were to the left. Georgie went up the stairs floor by floor. He went down each shadowy unlit corridor looking for room twenty-eight until he found it near the back of the hotel, where it occurred to him for the first time that he had no idea what he was doing. He knocked so halfheartedly he could barely hear the knock himself. He slowly turned the door knob and found it unlocked.

  For several moments he stood in the open doorway staring into a pitchblack room. He searched the wall next to him for a light but the switch wasn’t there. At first he thought the room was empty but then he knew it wasn’t empty; he knew someone was close by and he felt the dark of the room challenging him, he felt the night STEVE E R I C K S O N • 235

  challenging him as though there was one more thing for him to prove. He was inside the room with the door partly but not altogether closed behind him and was surprised how quickly she was suddenly there next to him; all he saw of her was, very dimly, the arm that shot out of the dark to push the door closed. Then he heard her breathing and smelled her hair. He waited for her to say something and wondered what he would answer. He waited for her to turn on the light. He felt her surprise when the tips of her fingers brushed his bare chest; they flinched as though singed by the flames of his tattooed belly. But then her fingers returned to him. He felt them fumble toward his neck to confirm the chain with its tag. She grabbed the chain and pulled him forward into the room until he stumbled against the bed. Though he now understood there wasn’t going to be any light, he still waited for her to say something, and then he understood there wasn’t going to be anything said. For a moment he was confused, wondering where she was in the dark, until he realized she was on the bed that he stood alongside. Lying at its edge, she unbuttoned his pants and freed him and put him in her mouth. He touched her long hair and her breasts in consternation.

  Her breasts felt big to him but he couldn’t be sure, since he’d never felt a woman’s breasts. Even if he might have been able to construct a mental picture of the woman who lay before him, even if—like a blind man listening to descriptions of colors he’s never seen—he wasn’t utterly without reference points in the touch of a woman’s breast, he would have rejected such a vision anyway.

  Since he’d never had a woman before, the sanctuary of the dark was immense; he would have killed anyone who violated it. Later, upon leaving the hotel, when she nearly gave in to curiosity and turned on the light after all, she never knew that she had survived only by virtue of having left the light off. In the total darkness he quickly became hard; his erection was a response to the invisibility of the moment, the blur of the frantically waning millennium nowhere to be seen. Within seconds he was already shuddering toward an orgasm. Sensing this she released him from her mouth, and took him in her hand as she knelt on the bed away from him; with trepidation he ran his hands forward along the downward slope of her back to her hair. She put him inside her. Blood roared AR C D’X • 236

  to his head like a drug. Savagely he pulled her to him. When he heard her gasp and whimper into the pillow where her face was buried, he was at first confounded and then appalled by the lurking presence of love.

  The Woman in the Dark says, Everything is humming. The night hums, the city. Everything is seconds ahead of itself, I can feel the whirring of the room. Walking to the hotel tonight I heard the growl of animals in the cellars all along the street, they’re disturbed by the hum. They perk up to the sound of time. The dark glows with their eyes. The solstice rushes to catch up with the light of the west. Rudi must be home by now. He’s wondering where I am and looking over the loft. Maybe he’s found the package from Prague, what will I tell him when he asks about it? What will I tell him when he asks where I was tonight? I don’t care any longer. Maybe I won’t go back. If I stay tonight in this room, will the American lover stay with me, and what then? It wasn’t supposed to be a whole night together. I knew sooner or later he’d say, Not on the phone anymore. I knew sooner or later he’d insist on this. I admit I wanted to as well but I might have waited if I hadn’t heard the power in his voice. I might have waited until the end of summer or the beginning of autumn. I might have waited until the eve of the New Year to go into the black hole of X-Tag on my hands and knees being fucked from behind rather than with Rudi, I’d rather feel my tits in the hands of a stranger I cannot see than be with Rudi’s dead heart. It doesn’t matter. Ry the New Year Rudi and I won’t be together anyway. Rudi and I won’t be together by the end of the week. The American lover hums with the night. I could taste on the end of his cock the drop that anticipated his satisfaction. On the New Year I’ll pop him at midnight like a champagne bottle, his splash will precede us into the future.

  Perhaps he won’t be here on the New Year. Perhaps he won’t be in Rerlin anymore. Perhaps the power in his voice on the phone was because he’s leaving. But I don’t believe he’s leaving. I don’t believe he has anywhere to go. I believe he’s come to Berlin for the STEVE E R 1 C K S O N • 237

  New Year, it’s the only reason to come to Berlin, for what’s to come. Otherwise you get out of Berlin. Otherwise you’re me and still in Berlin calling one number after another listening for the voice of what you need. He was shy for a moment when he first arrived, I saw his form hesitate in the doorway. I was surprised that he’d already taken off his shirt, he must have started undressing in the hallway. He must have begun undressing on the stairs, loosening the first buttons in the street. When I cry out, I feel his excitement. He’s a beast, of course. I might have known. From the wound in his voice on the phone. From the sound of his orgasm the first time I called, the groan at the end. I’ve come to learn that nothing can be defiled anymore. I part my legs and open myself at the junction of my soul. It’s the ping of freedom in my mind, like the tap of a wine glass that rings through the house, when the first tiny white drop of him falls into the pool of me and ripples out-ward. When the heart is broken and the dream is gone, annihilation is delicious. I find in it my last place of peace on the journey into the whirl. The only bastion left me before the siege of what I remember, a flash of red across the black in the distance, a kind of deliverance or, even, a miracle.

  “America,” he heard her say, and exploded in confusion. As he slumped to the floor at the side of the bed, his mortification was grateful for the dark. He covered his face with his hands as though even in the dark a bystander might have seen the shame of his satisfaction. Five minutes went by and then ten.

  Suddenly he heard her rise from the bed. There were only a few more moments in which he heard her rustling in the room, and then the door of the room opened and she paused to think about turning on the light to see him; and then he heard her footsteps hurry down the stairs. Where had she gone? How long would it be before she came back? He pic
ked himself up from the floor and lay on the bed. His enervation, the way he felt as though he’d receded up into himself, was appalling. Everything had been fine until she said it. Even when he was in her mouth it had been fine.

  A R C D’X • 238

  He was convinced he could have stopped himself before he lost control. But he’d had his first orgasm and now the only thing he kept telling himself was that it was dark and there were no witnesses, that even she wasn’t a witness. Was the old man downstairs behind the front desk a witness? Would she tell the old man that Georgie had lost control? She wouldn’t tell the old man, Georgie reassured himself. But none of this calmed him much because unfortunately there had been a witness and the witness was Georgie. There was no lying to Georgie about it. There had been a witness and the witness was Georgie and he saw himself now in the dark standing over him: the eyes of the birdwoman burned with accusation. It was not the fucking, it was the collapse of control and the indulgent expense of his essence. The solitude of the orgasm, the loneliness of it, was disgusting. Everything had been fine until she said it.

  What had it meant, that at the height of his power over her and in the depths of his humiliation of her, she had said it and he’d lost everything? She’d said it like a magic word and immediately it had broken his power over her. The more he thought about this the more he knew he had to wait for her to come back so he could strip her and take her by the neck and hold her in the deathgrip of love and fuck her again in triumph without capitulation. She’d be disabused of any meaning she thought his orgasm might have had.

  He waited in the dark for several hours and only after he decided he could bear to see himself did he get up and find a light and turn it on. He did this because he was seized by curiosity about her and wanted to find out what he could by rifling through her belongings and because he suddenly had this alarming idea that maybe she robbed him of the American’s cassettes and the piece of the Wall.

  But in the light he found on the floor, halfway between the door and the bed, the shirt with the objects wrapped in it.

  He also found, to his great bewilderment, the room empty. There were no belongings. There were no clothes in the closet or drawers, nothing in the bathroom. It didn’t take even Georgie long to understand the woman might not be coming back at all.

  America, she’d said; but she wasn’t American. He could tell on the phone she was German. He pulled out of his pants’ pocket the American’s wallet and began going through it looking for a name, STEVE E R I C K S O N • 239

  perhaps scribbled on a tiny scrap of paper, but there was no name, there was no tiny scrap of paper; Georgie yelped in fury and frustration. For another hour he sat on the bed and then pulled on his pants, tied the American’s shirt to his belt, and went downstairs.

  The old man wasn’t behind the desk now. During the time Georgie had been upstairs the old man had gone off his shift and now no one was behind the desk, and the hotel door was locked with no key to be found. I’m locked in the fucking hotel! Georgie thought to himself in disbelief. He kicked his foot through the door and glass came raining down in such an explosion he even startled himself, covering his face with his arms; with his bare elbow he knocked out the rest of the glass and stepped through. Animals howled in the distance. Now there will be witnesses, was all he could think; even more miserably he supposed that since he’d broken the glass he couldn’t very well return the next night to ask the old man about the woman who had been in number twenty-eight.

  Everything’s fucked up now, Georgie thought disconsolately, looking at his bleeding arms.

  The S-Bahn was closed. Georgie walked from Savignyplatz to the Ku’damm, where he might have been in the mood to vandalize a few of the stores if he hadn’t had other things on his mind, and if he hadn’t already been bleeding from broken glass. It had been some time since he’d been to the Ku’damm and now he noted how many of the stores were no longer there. Two stray taxis rolling up and down the boulevard refused to stop for him; for half a block he ran along the second one pounding on the side, swearing the Pale Flame’s eternal revenge. By morning the taxi driver, having thought over the threat, would be halfway to Munich.

  To avoid the Wittenbergplatz where most of the city’s remaining cops were, Georgie headed to Zoo Station and then northeast through the Tiergarten, constantly on the alert for police and tigers. It was pretty obvious he couldn’t allow himself to get picked up by cops with all the American’s things. He thought of disposing of the wallet but he’d still have the passport, which was too valuable to cast aside, and Georgie wanted to go through the wallet one more time anyway in case he’d missed something. He had to get rid of the wallet carefully because if anyone found anything that they could connect with the body at Checkpoint Charlie, they A R C D’X • 240

  might trace the American back to his hotel in the Savignyplatz; in modern day Berlin the police never went to that sort of trouble but this was an American, and maybe that made it different. Georgie found himself giving the various details of this particular murder more attention than usual, and was still thinking about it when he came upon a segment of the Neuwall standing completely isolated in a clearing of the park, gleaming in the moonlight through the trees. It had the impact of a white tomb. Before tonight Georgie would have attacked it mercilessly; now he shrank from it.

  It was dawn by the time he reached his flat.

  He bandaged his arms and sat up all day looking at the American’s things. He burned the driver’s license and social security card, and was surprised to find no credit cards; didn’t all Americans have credit cards? This afternoon he’d take the passport over to Curt on the other side of Kreuzberg and put him to work on it.

  Erickson wasn’t a bad name; Georgie could make use of it. It could have been worse, Rodriguez or Tyrone Something, but on the other hand Georgie wouldn’t have wasted his time with a fucking Rodriguez or Tyrone. Would a Rodriguez or Tyrone have this piece of the Wall? Georgie couldn’t get enough of looking at the stone. He unfolded the cover of the American’s book, tearing away the title and the author’s name and everything else until all that was left was the picture of the buried city and the black cat in the white sand that glistened in the light of the huge white moon like the lump of Neuwall Georgie had seen in the Tiergarten a few hours before. In his flat he went over to where he’d pinned the seventy-seven cards of his American Tarot and stuck the picture of the buried city in the place of the missing seventy-eighth. For a while he played the American’s cassettes.

  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 STEVE ERICKSON • 241

  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 A R C D’X • 242

  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.