At the edge of Downtown he took a road heading north. He walked in the direction of the nearest blue obelisk. If he remembered correctly Circle Twenty-two was about half a mile away, just on the border of Ambivalence. When he reached the circle he waited behind one of the units; an hour passed and the siren for the morning altar search came on. In the units of Circle Twenty-two people scurried into their altar rooms and shut the doors behind them. In one unit after another Wade went through the closets looking for some clothes that might fit him; the best he came up with was an overcoat. It was small but he could wear it for a while. He also collected whatever money he could find, though people usually knew to take their money with them into the altar rooms unless they left it out as an arranged bribe. In the unit where Wade found the overcoat he used the shower. He was a quarter of a mile down the road when the all-clear alert sounded; at the edge of Downtown he flagged down a startled cop, who took him to headquarters.
When he walked in, everyone appeared as surprised to see him this time as they had the last. Mallory was sitting with his back to the room; he could hear the silence behind him. He turned and saw Wade and didn’t look as happy as he’d been a few hours before. The overcoat was tight around Wade’s shoulders and under his arms. “I need a ride,” he said to Mallory.
Mallory looked at the other cops standing around and said, “Get somebody else.”
Wade said, “I need you to give me a ride.”
“Bullshit.”
“Would I be here if this was bullshit?” He lowered his voice. “Would I be here right now if it wasn’t a good idea that you give me a ride?”
Mallory kept looking at the other cops as though one of them could explain why Wade was there in the middle of police headquarters and not chained to a rock somewhere. Slowly he pulled his coat from the back of his chair. “Where we going?”
“I’ll tell you in the car.”
They left through the same back door they had before and got in the car. Mallory wasn’t having as good a time as the last time they got in the car. He kept looking at Wade and Wade kept looking out the window. They had driven deeper into Downtown when Wade told Mallory to turn up Desolate Street; at the corner of Unrequited, he told Mallory to pull over. “Remember that graffiti I told you about a year or so back?”
“No,” Mallory said.
“Sure. That graffiti I told you about. You couldn’t find it and I came out with you and then I couldn’t find it.” Wade laughed. “Remember what an idiot I was, walking up and down the alley trying to find the graffiti?”
“Yeah,” Mallory answered slowly, “I guess I remember that.”
“Sure,” Wade kept laughing, “man, was that crazy. Here, I want you to see this.” Wade got out of the car and waited for Mallory, who took a lot longer getting out of the car. They stood together on the sidewalk looking down the alley. “I walked up and down here, remember?” Wade said, chuckling. He looked at Mallory.
“I remember, I remember,” Mallory said. Wade just went on chuckling, shaking his head. “Yeah,” Mallory went on, “you said it was here and we couldn’t find it.”
“That’s it,” Wade said, “we couldn’t find it. Come here.” He motioned with his hand and Mallory followed him. They walked down the alley. They came to the place where Wade’s graffiti had been for the past year and there was now only a blank spot. Wade stopped and stared at the spot, and Mallory stood beside him. “See that?” Wade said, nodding at the spot on the wall.
After a moment of staring at the blank wall, Mallory said, “What?”
“Right there,” Wade said.
“Where?”
“Right there. In red.”
“Red?” Mallory said.
Wade smashed Mallory into the wall. When he pulled him away, pieces of Mallory’s nose pocked the wet red smear where Wade had heard the messages of anonymous men and the Queen of Wands over the previous year. Wade held Mallory up by the collar and said, “You see it now, don’t you?” and a strange bloody yawn snorted out of the gape that had been Mallory’s face. “Yes, Mallory, in answer to your question, when I come, it’s white. When you bleed, isn’t it red?” Wade examined the disrupted mass of tissue across the front of Mallory’s head. “You’re not presentable,” he said, dropping him in a heap. He walked back to the car and drove away.
At his unit in Circle Four he showered again to wash off Mallory’s blood, and then changed clothes. He drove his own car, with the stone from Mona’s cabinet still in the passenger seat next to him, out to the cliffs not far from Desire’s frontier. Parking the car in neutral with its front tires at the cliff’s edge, he got out with the stone and pushed the car over. As though the force of the car’s plunge might pull him along after it, he found himself sitting on the ground staring at blue nothingness, the blue of the sky and the blue of the distant sea where only a moment before the car had been. The crash of the car below was really no louder than the crash of the waves.
He walked to Redemption. An hour after he’d left Mallory’s face on the wall at Desolate and Unrequited, he was at the doorway of the Arboretum. It was almost light. Before Wade stepped in the doorway to walk down the long corridor, he looked up at the sky and treasured how he wouldn’t have to be offended by its lie anymore.
Mona says, Oooh he shoots me up inside. Ohhhhh. It’s not so bad when it’s only a feeling like opium, something I can think about when I have nothing to think about. In the dark he isn’t there at all, and one night when he says the name of the other woman it means I’m not there either. He slips out and sleeps, I push him away. I get up and go to eat at the place in the south Arbo, I hear him splash inside. When I come back from work I think maybe he’ll be gone. One morning when I wake he’s gone but I go to work and come back and he’s back. I’m back, he says. I’m back for good. He tears my clothes. He wants to tear everything, he does it to me fast. After that he looks at the window and smiles. “Only the night now,” he says to the window, smiling, “nothing but night,” and I’m looking up at the window and see the morning light come in, shine on his smile. But he just says over and over, “Only the night. Damn the light.”
I almost never go outside but sometimes when I do the blue points of the city make me think of when I was a little girl growing up in the Ice, the chimneys of my village the way they line the road coming into town. The smoke of the chimneys the way it rises in the sky like the Vog of the mountain like the smoke of the sea and I’d ride with my father in the wagon down the road of our village and the chimneys line the road like tombs, like the empty trees. And the smoke of the chimneys rises and hangs over the road like an archway. And my father sits nearer to me on the wagon seat to keep me warm, he says, he moves his body next to mine to keep me warm. He comes at night to keep me warm. I hear him in the night in the next room keeping my little brother warm. I hear my little brother’s cries and I think. Please don’t stop, keep my little brother warm all night. Because when he’s finished with my little brother he’ll come for me: so don’t stop. The louder little brother cries the happier I am. My brother is eight. Mother sleeps in the other room across the hall from mine but I know she doesn’t really sleep, I know she lies in bed saying, Please don’t stop keeping my children warm. Please don’t stop because when he’s finished he’ll come for me, my mother thinks, lying in the bed across the hall. One night I take what I can carry and walk down the road beneath the long arch of smoke until I’m far enough away that I won’t have to pray anymore that the cries of my brother never stop.
I know about the stone. I know how Wade stole it from the cabinet, in its place is a small wooden woman’s head. Someone once told me these things are, what, forbidden…? None of this matters to me. Someone once told me that I’m, what, attracted? to these things because they’re forbidden, but forbidden means nothing to me, so what’s to attract. The stone was more real than memory or love. I could put it between my legs and feel it there. I could push it into me a little bit and it hurt and it was a hurt I believed, not
the hurt of the heart or head which aren’t real. But after the morning when I found the stone gone he came back and fucked me and afterward when he slept I found the stone hidden in the corner of the flat behind his clothes. I left it there until later when the thing happened with the other man, later when I wasn’t so sure about the hurt of the heart. Later when, after Wade had been here a long time, I saw the other man who came to Fleurs d’X with the glasses that made his eyes big, who smiled sadly and was lost in the hurt of his heart. One night he dropped his glasses and I was on the floor in the dark helping him to look, and the way he looked at me when he put them on I knew at that moment he was ridiculous like all the others. I laughed. I laughed at how ridiculous and sad he was. They’re so easy to forget, the men. It’s the best thing about them, the way they’re so easy to forget, the way they’re never really there at all. But his sadness is in my head now and I can’t forget it, his sad smile makes me feel what I don’t believe. And now I wait for him night after night to come. I wait for him to give up what all the men give up. They think it’s about them, the way I dance, but it isn’t about them, it’s about the way they’re nothing, and the man with the glasses is only another fool, but his foolishness is in my head and heart and I don’t know why, and then one night Wade comes to the club when the one with the glasses is there too. After a while I know Wade’s watching him. After a while I know he’s watching me watch him, and he doesn’t like it.
I liked it better the way things were before. I liked it better when the feeling of a stone between my legs was more real than memory or love. One night I come home from work and open the door and step in and find the floor beneath my feet gone. I look up and the ceiling is gone. I look around and the walls are gone, far away I can see into the other rooms and halls and doors. Wade is there naked waiting for me like always, like always he has that look on his face. His thing is hard. We’re there hanging in the middle of nothing, everything’s vanished. I scream and he nods. I scream again and he keeps nodding.
When Mona opened the door of her flat and stepped in, she found herself falling.
Wade employed the short, squat artist who transformed the halls of the Arboretum to paint Mona’s flat as what one would see if there were no walls, nor any walls beyond them, to the ends of the Arboretum. To paint the ceiling as what one would see if there was no ceiling, to the heights of the Arboretum. To paint the floor as what one would see if there was no floor, to the Arboretum’s depths. Now in Mona’s flat Wade could look in any direction and see to the far reaches of the Arboretum all the catacombs and corridors, the empty TV arcades and casinos and galleries and stages and bars and clubs, abandoned of borders and supports and people. Everything around and beneath Mona was gone, including the very door she’d just come through; all that was left, besides the furniture of Mona’s flat—a couple of chairs and a table, a broken-down vanity dresser—floating amid the beams of the neighborhood high above its cellars, was herself and Wade, naked and erect and strangely serene.
She held out her hands to catch herself but even the furniture implied treachery, as though she might grab a chair and the weight of it would only hasten the plunge to oblivion. So Mona felt she had no choice but to reach to Wade, who was there to take her; and when he took her the two of them became suspended in space, and the growl that came from Wade sounded as though it leaked through an abrasion in that space, perhaps the very sound of the rip itself. He entered her and she clung to him, and in the oblivion’s cold she let go of him, having decided long ago she would never let anyone keep her warm again. He continued with her until she reached down and yanked him out of her at the moment of his explosion. The white of his ejaculation danced in the air.
In the middle of the night Mona would lurch from unconsciousness, awakened by the sound and speed of her plummet. She would attach herself to the floor like a golden spider, riding it downward until she fell back to sleep.
Lying on his back with her face in his lap and her yellow hair in his fist, gazing up at his living map of the Arboretum, which is to say the universe of his dream, he could see the Vog. He watched it move through the passages of the Arboretum and billow across the terrain. It was the only thing he couldn’t eliminate from his vision, the only thing that didn’t defer to his elimination of walls and ceilings and floors; it was the uncontrolled thing of his dream and it moved where it wanted. Following it with his gaze, his eyes riding its untamed rampage, Wade became the greatest Vog Traveler of all, until there was nothing left for him but to rise and leap into its dense heart. When he did this, he hurled himself into his own blackness. He hurled himself into the ash of his own flesh, as though it were the black mouth of a volcano. Inside his blackness he heard the sound of years and chains. In his blackness he knew that it wasn’t a miracle Sally had said when she awoke that noon in the hotel room, it wasn’t a miracle she had said when the knife dropped from her hand. He knew it was a name, the name of both the man she had killed and the act of killing him; and it was a name he’d known forever, though he’d never heard it before. At that moment he knew a thousand nights in the Arboretum had stretched into one.
In the midst of his blackness, he couldn’t be sure when he’d stopped taking her and when she’d begun taking him, but it was sometime after he entered his blackness and found she’d been there all along, just like the other one and the name she’d spoken. He found her drinking it, his blackness; as he lay among the pillows and cushions of the flat, feeling himself grow as black as the Vog itself, his little blonde nymph mounted him and drew into her his every drop. On through the night she rode Wade into the distant vapor of his dream laced with her opium and cognac. Her head back and eyes shut, mouth parted with the tip of her tongue between her lips, she loosed a weird rattle from her depths that told him the darkness behind her closed eyes wasn’t his and the man she fucked wasn’t him. “Open your eyes!” he heard himself bellow at her, though he couldn’t be certain it came out as anything but a grunt or a squeak. When he climaxed, a luscious smile burst on her lips. It was a different smile than he’d ever seen from her before, a smile for all the orgasms of all the men she’d known because they were small deaths of those men, life pathetically blurting into her. “Open your eyes!” he demanded again, terror-stricken at how, in her submission to his will, her own blackness ravished his. But she didn’t open her eyes, and she rode him down and down into the dark.
Far away, when the Vog cleared, Wade could see the other man.
Wade looked past the walls of Mona’s flat into the Arboretum’s empty core, looked past all the empty catacombs and corridors and could see the sole figure of the other man sitting in the dark of Fleurs d’X watching his Mona. And when she returned from dancing he could tell she was no longer the simple vessel of Wade’s dream, she was no longer the transport of what Wade deposited in her, sloshing against the walls of her womb, but the vessel of another dream: it may have been the other man’s dream. It may have even been Mona’s dream, since the baby-teeth smile wasn’t so vacant anymore, its exquisite emptiness now marred by a meaning. When she smiled there was something else in the smile, a longing that was not Wade’s, the wriggling into Wade’s dream of an alien aspiration like a virus. It was more than intolerable, it was incomprehensible. It went on for many hours of the long Arboretum night until finally Wade put on the clothes he hadn’t worn in a long time and went to Fleurs d’X to see for himself.
As he sat at one of the tables to the side of the club, it took Wade a long time to remember where he’d seen the other man. In his mind Wade traveled down every corridor he’d ever walked in the Arboretum, peered into every chamber where he might have seen the man before. The short, squat painter had blotted out everything that ever happened to Wade outside and before the Arboretum, and if Wade hadn’t seen the other man just hours before smashing Mallory’s face in the alley and shoving the car over the cliffs into the sea, he never would have remembered. When it came to him, when he recognized the man with the black hair and the glasses a
s the archives clerk who had walked past Wade and Mallory in the lobby of Church Central, it was the biggest intrusion of all, the most unseemly of violations; at that moment Wade almost got up from his table and left the club. If he had, he thought later, Mona might still be with him. But he stayed and, as the minutes went by, his calm gradually became more and more frayed. His serenity was undone by the way the man watched Mona dance, by the way he smiled at Mona and the way she smiled back. When she smiled there was something in her little baby teeth that Wade had never seen all the times she smiled at him; there was a response in her smile to the way the man with the black hair and the thick glasses appeared so sad, the way he smiled at her so halfheartedly, the way he seemed lost and not there at all, his attention arrested time and again only by Mona’s fleeting lovely secrets. Then the man began to follow Mona from stage to stage as Wade had done the first night he watched her. Mona’s smile became more transformed, from dance to dance, by the sad man’s relentless audience. Only when Mona saw Wade sitting in the dark did her smile vanish, and it was then Wade knew he didn’t own her anymore.
Hour after hour, watching Mona dance for the sad blackhaired man with the glasses, Wade began drinking little whiskeys just as in the old days, signaling to Dee behind the bar as the sad man dropped his glasses in the dark and, on her hands and knees, Mona helped to find them. When the blackhaired man surrendered the rest of his money at Mona’s feet and walked from the club, Wade got up from his table to follow; and as he passed her stage he looked once at her, trapped in her dance, and felt her watch him all the way out of the Fleurs d’X.
ARC D’X Page 11
