(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  When they say goodbye she offers him money, which he politely but firmly refuses. Two hours later at Fifty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, a black girl offers to sell herself to him; he accepts and follows her long enough to push her into a trashcan and rob her.

  Is something wrong with America? he wonders. He sees more human flotsam in New York than he ever saw in Berlin, even in the early Nineties, coloreds everywhere and obvious queers, and a fuckload of Jews. He regards them all with more curiosity than hostility, like someone who’s wandered into the freak tent of a circus. When his bed in the flophouse on Eighth Avenue winds up STEVE E R I C K S O N • 251

  in the same room with an Ethiopian, Georgie protests, arguing with the manager in the hallway while the Ethiopian watches; but there aren’t any other available beds and Georgie doesn’t have the money to sleep anywhere else. The Ethiopian understands what’s happening well enough to keep his eye on Georgie with stony wari-ness the rest of the night. Tomorrow, Georgie tells himself, I’ll get out of New York and make my way west to the real America.

  But the next morning he’s violently sick. For several days he can barely move from the bed except to crawl to the toilet, not sure whether to straddle it or wrap his arms around it as his stomach erupts upward and his bowels explode downward. In his fever he feels infested with the American bacteria, struck low among Afri-cans and fags, a prisoner without pity in New York. Almost four days have passed before, in the swelter of the night and the light of the streetlamp that shines through the window, he’s well enough to climb from bed out onto the flophouse fire escape, where he can unfold his picture of the buried city to remind himself where he’s going and why. He counts his money, including what he took off the black girl that first afternoon. The next day he slinks out of the flophouse and catches a cab to Penn Station, where he buys a bus ticket for as far west as he can go.

  X-148. She’s waiting for him and he doesn’t have much time.

  He takes the bus to Philadelphia and then Memphis, and from there to St. Louis. He likes the bus better than the plane. Watching out the window his heart leaps at the sight of the red, white and blue crucifixes that line the highway and the billboards of a ferocious Jesus with piercing blue eyes who holds an American eagle in his arms. On the horizon in the distance he spots the old drive-in movie screens from the Fifties that have been painted black as monolithic signposts of the converted plague camps. He dozes and her outline becomes more distinct before him. A light from an unknown source reveals her inch by inch. Sometimes he thinks about Berlin; he wonders if anyone has found Christina yet, tied to the Wall in his flat. In the dead of night, as the bus rolls on and everyone sleeps, Georgie slips from his seat and lifts a watch off another passenger two rows back. He winds the watch and puts it in his pocket; at the next stop he’ll get the exact time.

  In St. Louis it’s X-134. The blur of edges gleams shinier and faster, the light of the days grows more metallic. Time is a mineral.

  A R C D’X • 252

  X-132 and it’s Kansas City. X-129 and Georgie sets out on foot, few cars stopping to give him a lift. X-124 he sits in the back bedroom of Lauren’s house on the Kansan flatlands and shows the piece of Wall to Kara, who says, “It’s a nice rock. But you have to admit, it’s not as good as a bottle with eyes, or even wings on your back.”

  He walks out of the summer into the west. The spasms of the last solstice barely reach him anymore. His progress is reduced to ground level; he’s tapped out of money and in these final days must rely on people’s good will. He’s struck and confused by the kindness of Indians he meets in New Mexico. Sometimes when people ask him he tells them his real name and sometimes he doesn’t. In the middle of the desert far from civilization he finds written on the concrete bridges of highway overpasses graffiti hailing thrashmetal bands, and stops to listen for nomads in the desert playing boomboxes. By Arizona, people sit rocking on the front porches of their desert houses cradling clocks in their arms. The lines of ink that streak the front pages of newspapers become increasingly indecipherable until finally the news takes the form of a lost hiero-glyphic. Tumbleweeds skitter along the highway before him, the dust of the desert rushes past him, though no wind blows; the weeds and dust blow to a different force. Soon it occurs to him that none of the cars on the highway go his direction anymore. Every car passes him heading east; he hasn’t seen a single car going west for as long as he can remember. By X-52 there aren’t any cars going east either. He constantly checks the time of the watch he stole on the bus. He constantly asks convenience-store clerks if their clocks are right, and calls the time-of-day on the pay phones along the highway that still work, as he slips from time zone to time zone picking up one hour after another. With his sweetness that catches people off guard he gets a bite to eat here and there, but he isn’t hungry much. He’s long since discarded the American’s passport, back around the Texas Panhandle. At night when he closes his eyes there’s only blackness; the west has drained his sleep of dreams.

  By X-37 it’s begun to get cold. In Flagstaff Georgie tries to steal a coat from the front seat of a four-wheel drive and almost gets caught. He’s pushing himself beyond hunger and cold and exhaustion, exhorted onward by the signs of his progress. He keeps checking the watch. He keeps checking calendars. He keeps track of the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 253

  days and hours. By the time he reaches what was once the Mojave Desert he’s passed the highway checkpoint beyond which no one’s allowed without authorization. Except now it’s X-18 and the checkpoint’s deserted of soldiers or guards; no one’s around to stop Georgie and turn him away. The desolation of the Cataclysm’s landscape is bitter and overwhelming, rolling dead-white hills. He has some water and not much else; every time he feels hungry, every time he can’t bear the cold, every time he wants to sleep, he looks at his picture of the buried city and thinks of room twenty-eight in the Crystal Hotel. He reads his picture of the buried city like a map, he examines the contours of the Cataclysm dunes and compares the moon in the picture with where the moon now hangs in the night sky. On the night of X-6 a small light glimmers in the distance, and when it shortly becomes two lights, he grows excited by how close they are. Then he realizes the lights are coming toward him, and it isn’t long before a pickup truck pulls to a stop.

  In the back of the truck Georgie can see shovels and pickaxes and rags. The driver’s a big man with a beard and a cap pulled over his head and ears; a windbreaker is zipped to his neck. He looks at Georgie in disbelief. “Who the hell are you?” he says.

  “Erickson,” says Georgie.

  “Well, good lord, Erickson, what the hell do you think you’re doing out here?”

  “I’m going to the buried city,” Georgie explains.

  The driver’s stunned. “I don’t know where you heard about that,” he shakes his head, “that’s totally hush-hush.”

  “Is it much farther?”

  “I’ll bet you ran into Fred in Flagstaff, that fuckhead. Get a little tequila and beer in him and Fred’ll tell everyone the secret of the atomic fucking bomb if he knows it, which fortunately he doesn’t.

  Two weeks ago you couldn’t have gotten within fifty miles of here.

  But I guess the party’s over now and everyone’s gone home, which is where I’m going, or at least someplace that makes for a passable facsimile.”

  “It was in the cards,” Georgie explains about the buried city.

  “Hop in, pal. I’ll take you back to Kingman. There’s nothing back there,” he nods in the direction he’s just come from. “Like I said, everyone’s gone home while there’s still time. There’s a waitress I know in Kingman. She works in one of the worst restaurants in the A R C D’X • 254

  civilized world and we’re going to get a room together, at a motel on the main drag of town.”

  “It’s a very old city.”

  “Yeah, I know it’s an old city, pal. You ever find out how old, drop us a postcard, will you? We just spent the last year and a half
trying to figure out exactly how old.”

  “You’ll have to give me your address so I know where to send it.”

  The driver considers Georgie solemnly. “I was making a joke,”

  he finally says, slowly. “I don’t really want you to send me a postcard.” He leans over across the seat and opens the passenger door.

  “Hop in.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Man, I’m telling you there’s nothing back there. A few buildings that were probably houses once, and the rest of it so far buried beneath the rubble no one would have ever known it was there if that big dust-up a few years back hadn’t opened up everything.

  Take my word for it. I can’t believe that asshole Fred. What a mouth.”

  “I have a friend there.”

  “Man, you do not have a friend there. There’s no one there, I’m telling you.” He motions to the open passenger door.

  “No thank you.”

  “From this point on you’re on your own. I’m the last soul you’re going to see.”

  “OK.”

  The driver shakes his head again wearily. “Here.” He reaches behind the passenger seat and pulls out a blanket and a plastic bottle of water. “The blanket’s dirty, but…” He hands them to Georgie through the window.

  “Thank you. Do you have the time?”

  The driver looks at his watch. “About a quarter to seven.”

  Georgie is setting his own watch. “Do you have the exact time?”

  The driver looks again. “I’ve got six-forty-eight.” He reaches back across the seat and pulls the passenger door closed. “Take it easy,” he says. He starts the truck and drives off, and Georgie doesn’t wait to watch the tail lights disappear down the highway; he’s continuing on, exhilarated. He puts the water in his pack and wraps the blanket around him.

  STEVE E R I C K S O N • 255

  He reaches the excavation site on the afternoon of X-4. The Cataclysm has cut a savage swathe through the earth, and on the edge of the divide Georgie can make out in the distance the gray befuddled sea. Georgie stares down into the rocky gash where the earth has wrenched loose of itself and, from one end of the Cataclysm’s gorge to the other, he sees staring out of the black rock the dim ravaged faces of ancient white houses, ladders, and scaffolding drooling down the cliffs. Georgie begins his descent. The world is soundless. The crash of the sea is too far away and no wind blows through the canyon, and Georgie hasn’t heard or seen a single stirring of life for days. After months of the flash and clatter of birds in the skies of Berlin this sky is empty and he becomes all the more aware of the crunch of rocks beneath his feet as he makes his way down into the site. By dusk he’s at the bottom. For the first time in days he collapses into the blanket the truck driver gave him and sleeps the whole night, without a single dream’s glint or whisper.

  In the morning he wakes in panic. He looks at his watch and then looks again; for a moment the watch has stopped. He taps the face of the watch and the second hand starts back up: was the watch running just a moment ago when he first looked at it, having lost only a split second, or has it been stopped all this time, maybe all night? Perhaps he hit his wrist against one of the rocks on the cliffs. The watch says 8:21. Georgie tries to tell himself calmly that he wasn’t climbing the rocks at 8:21 last night, he’d already reached the bottom by then and fallen asleep; in all likelihood it’s now 8:21 in the morning. But in his disorientation Georgie has a lapse on the day: X-. .. 3? 2? What, Georgie thinks to himself, does X-3 mean anyway? Does it mean X is three days away, or two? Or four? Stooped deep in the earth’s crevice, rocking on his feet, he miserably holds his head in his hands trying to straighten out everything in his mind. Finally he begins to walk down the gorge in the direction of the excavation. The scaffolding constructed alongside the cliffs has the abandoned air of something deserted quickly.

  Above one makeshift rampart is a pair of ancient windows and in another clearing he finds the unearthed remains of something resembling a plaza or town square. In the black volcanic earth beneath the gray light of the sun is the outline of a white circle. At its center is the dark stump of some kind of pillar or obelisk.

  A R C D’X • 256

  Georgie spends the rest of the day searching through the unearthed city. By the next day his panic is of a different sort. It’s a panic about food, to begin with; he cannot will away his hunger any longer, and despite all his attempts at conservation his water will last only another day at best. He’s also having more difficulty keeping track of the time. He keeps looking at his watch. When he stares up through the mouth of the gorge, which gets smaller and smaller the further he goes, he sees passing overhead in the sky high above him tumbleweeds and wheels and machine gear and office equipment and supermarket sundries and newspapers and pages from diaries, a panoply of general uselessness spinning wildly westward on a current no wind has ever blown: time is almost up. Most profoundly, Georgie’s beginning to have grave doubts that the Queen of Wands is here. Georgie’s beginning to suspect that the driver of the pickup truck on the highway was right, that no one is here. Growing weaker and more delirious he rushes through the buried city from one room to another looking for her. Trying to sleep on the hillside in one of the ancient houses, when the unleashed night of the desert couples with the unearthed night of the timeless city, he bolts upright again and again to his expectation of ghosts, any of whom might be the one he’s come so far to find. He shivers in the dark. He awaits her touch, for her deliverance into his hands. He would be erect with desire, he assures himself, if he had the strength for it, if delirium were enough to fuel desire, as it nearly is.

  X-l.

  Deeper into the city he wanders. The mouth of the gorge above him has finally disappeared altogether. Like his legendary father tunneling subterranean Berlin Georgie’s becoming lost, beginning to circle back on his own steps through one after another of the Cataclysm’s revealed rooms. He doesn’t have the strength to climb another scaffold. He doesn’t have the strength to call her name.

  Piece by piece he’s stripped himself down, casting aside the shirt and vaccine chain and the contents of his pockets, the water and blanket and even the picture of the buried city, which, in retaliation for its betrayal, he rips to bits and flings above him as though to hurl it out of the canyon altogether. The bits of the picture only rain back down on him. Foolishly he brushes some of the confetti from his wings, comically he wears some on his bare head. He STEVE E R I C K S O N • 257

  tears his watch from his wrist and holds it in front of his eyes desperately trying to focus on the hour. In his other hand he clutches the only thing he can’t bear to discard, the piece of the Berlin Wall. He stumbles further into the gorge in his fevered daze, sometimes dozing against the canyon’s side; in hallucinatory moments he misses Christina with the shaved freckled body writhing in the bondage of his bloody bandages on the floor of his flat. As he lies beneath the gorge’s shelter the hours pass and then the rest of the day, until he hears the gray twilight sun sink far beyond the edge of the earth. Not long before midnight, when it’s too dark for Georgie even to read the time on his watch, he hears the shadow of the millennium advance across the eastern horizon.

  In the dark of the shadow he sees something.

  It’s so faint he looks again and again, by now distrusting his own eyes, but further into the gorge, suspended a few feet above the ground, is the outline of something. In his delirium the first and only thing he can think of is a coffin, set in the side of the canyon like a jewel. He crosses the crevasse. When he sees the climb he must make he nearly turns back, but slowly he begins, with his watch and his piece of Wall. In a rocky hollow of the canyon he sees it isn’t a coffin; within several feet he sees it’s another of the city’s ancient doors. It doesn’t seem possible he could have missed this door. It doesn’t seem possible he could have missed anything.

  He’s been over everything again and again. But there’s a door now and the only reason he could see it
at all from the other side of the gorge was because coming from behind the door is, unmistakably, a light.

  He’s terrified. He backs away from the door: terror wars with desperation. He steps back to the door: as he tries to get a grip on it, desperation refutes terror. He holds the watch up to the sliver of light coming through the crack of the door and, behind and below him, the ghost city splayed across the Cataclysm’s breach slides into oblivion.

  At 11:59, the second hand of the watch hurtling toward twelve, he yanks open the door and steps through.

  AR C D’X • 258

  The old man stirs in his chair at Georgie’s entrance but doesn’t wake at first. The bareness of the room is blinding to Georgie; he holds his hands up to his eyes. In the glare he can barely make out the sink and toilet in the corner and the unmade bed against the wall. On the table in front of the lone old man sits a radio that’s turned off and Georgie’s piece of the Wall, though even as Georgie now looks at the evidence of his empty hands he can’t remember putting it there. Beyond the old man on the other side of the room is another door. It’s slightly open. Beyond the door is a dark hallway.

  The stillness of the room is even more striking to Georgie than the lifelessness of the last several days, though now he isn’t so sure about the last several days, whether they were several days ago or several years, or whether days or years still mean what they did moments before. The stillness means to deny the presence of the old man. A buzz in some other part of the building, beyond the door on the other side of the room and down its dark hallway, takes on the audible outline of a TV. The old man looks at the room around him much as Georgie has been looking at it, and he’s been staring at the bed for some time and is still staring at it when he asks, so quietly Georgie can barely hear him, “Is there any wine?” He finally turns to Georgie only because Georgie hasn’t answered.