He took the axe from behind the stove and went into an empty storeroom on the side of the house, closing the door behind him. He began to chop. Over the next few hours he chopped up the room and when he was finished he began on another, carving away at the house from the most extraneous rooms toward the center. Day after day he proceeded with increasing ferocity to demolish the house. With each breach of the house’s shelter, with each assault through another wall, he felt the sick exhilaration of another hope collapsing before the hopelessness of the night that flooded in through the house’s gashes. With his axe he stalked his own life as Sally did with her knife. He cast on the fire of the stove the splinters of the house until gradually one room after another disappeared; he was sure he heard the scream of smoldering iceflies rise through the chimney above the rooftop. Polly was so cold he would have set the whole house on fire if it was the only way to keep her warm.
But Sally wasn’t cold at all. Sally was hot. At any moment Etcher thought she’d go up in the dark cloud of her own immolation. There was no barring her door this time against cops and priests, God and Death; Etcher was hacking up the doors for the purpose of the fire. Now Sally lay naked in the webs that were being woven around her as fast as Etcher could rip them away. Steam rose from beneath the place where she lay like the Vog that once poured out from the place where she stood with Etcher on the cliffs of Aeonopolis. When her cries from the heat were more than he could bear he tore away the room around her, to let in the cold of the night for which she pleaded from whatever station of the journey she’d come to. Finally, when the outer wall of the bedroom was gone, to her momentary relief, he lifted her naked body and carried her through the rubble of the slashed jagged walls out onto the ice itself, pulling behind him into a pyre bits and pieces of the house and torching it. The silence of the night, the void of life, was ghastly. In the light and heat of the huge fire Polly played with her animals on what was left of the house floor. Sally lay nude on the fjord with her eyes full of the night and the half-moon above her and a white mountain in the distance gliding slowly through the dark like a ship. When Etcher knelt beside her, when he ran his cold fingers over her body to soothe her shuddering, when he held her breasts in his hands to calm the beating of her heart, he still couldn’t be sure she knew he was there.
In his hands like that, you might have been a prayer. In his hands like that, you might have been something he thought he could midwife into a new incarnation, strong enough to withstand his love if not your own, wrenching from you the choice that had been killing you since you chose that afternoon in Paris between love and freedom. After that you always insisted it could never again be one or the other. After that it had to be both or neither; you meant to find on your journey the intersection of the two and convince yourself that they could be the same road with two names. You insisted on seeing the wholeness of everything in life but yourself, which lay in bits and pieces around you like the doors and rafters of a broken house: you thought the men only worshiped the bits and pieces of you. You thought their worship had nothing to do with the whole of you. Looking out at it from the inside, you thought your beauty was a thing apart from you. You never understood how the thing they loved most wasn’t your face but your voice, how the thing they loved most was that fountain that trickled up from your heart to your mouth and showed everyone who you were, your heart’s broken, wounded aspirations to be better than you were or could be or better than anyone could be. That was what he loved about you. But he never believed freedom and love were the same road with two names. He always believed they were two separate roads and that it was always a matter of moving back and forth between them. On his mouth like that your name might have been an incantation; and far away where you are now, beneath the night sky and the halfmoon, you hear him say it one more time.
Beneath the light of the halfmoon, she says to herself. The revolution has come.
She turns to him on her bed. She isn’t going to bury her face in her pillow this time and pretend to be asleep. She isn’t a fourteen-year-old girl anymore who thinks that if she lies still enough he’ll go away. This time he isn’t going to rape her, spraying her blood across the room, and then absolve himself with cool rags between her legs and tears on her thighs. This time she isn’t going to scream out in the hope that the night will somehow rescue her; she isn’t surprised that the night answers with an unnatural silence. She isn’t surprised by betrayal at all, she expects it; she won’t fall this time into the light of the crescent moon above her. She’s already well on the way somewhere else. When he comes to take her, without hesitation she greets him with a fierce merciless urgency. With no delusions that she might resist him, she turns instead to devour him back.
In the light of the fire he sees behind her eyes something moving, something that isn’t Sally at all, the sudden swish of its tail, the slithering flick of evidence inside her of the thing to which she’s abandoned everything of herself but desire. Desire bleeds at her mouth. It ripples to her fingers. She parts her lips to inhale him and take him in her hand. Though he tries to pull away it’s a lie when he tells himself he wants to resist her: he doesn’t want to resist her. Though he tries to pull away it’s a lie whim he tells himself she can survive his fucking her: she cannot survive it. She sweeps away resistance as he swept away the web of the iceflies around her bed. She takes him in her hand and drives him up inside her and he hears the response inside, the scamper of something into the swampland; his cock feels the ripple of the marshes. He fucks the thing in her so as to find what’s left of Sally at the end of the thing: it’s a lie when he tells himself he wants to free her. It’s such a huge lie that in his mind it never finishes his own sentence. He’s oblivious of the night and he’s oblivious of the fjord and he’s oblivious of the fire in the distance and, somewhere on the other side of the fire, of the child. And it’s only when he thinks of the child that, in horror, he tells himself he has to stop. He can’t lie to himself about the child. And when he tells himself he has to stop, it’s only then he realizes he’s been oblivious of how cold Sally has suddenly become in his arms, beneath his body, holding him in the grip of memory. Desire isn’t the only thing left of her after all. The memory is left, a small trace of it in the embers of her slavery that his seed hunts down, the memory of how he loves her and how she loves him and how it’s bigger than anything they have ever known or perhaps anyone has ever known, and how it isn’t big enough. She whispers in his ear.
“Take care of Polly,” she said. And I knew she was gone.
In the light of the fire a shadow scampered across her face, like a serpent taking flight. But it wasn’t a serpent. Etcher turned to see Polly by the edge of the fire. As she’d done on the edge of the city’s white circle, announcing with a tiny finger something no one could see in a crowd of birds, she raised her arm and pointed now at the fatal flame of her departed mother.
The wind blew the chains that hung from the northern wall of the Paris courtyard. The wall was over three hundred years old, as were the chains, because they had been laid into the stone when the wall was built, eight sets of shackles that once held the prisoners of dukes and kings and then, after the Revolution, the enemies of the Republic condemned from the highest summit of Robespierre’s Mountain. The shackles dangled listlessly, the rain of centuries having long since washed them of their blood. Now sometimes teenage lovers broke into the courtyard in the middle of the night to play with the shackles and Seuroq would hurry out of the house to chase them away. More exasperating than the mirth of the kids running off was that of Seuroq’s wife, who found amusing the doctor’s indignation at the harmless bondage games—since the shackles could not be locked—being played in his courtyard. Teasing, she would slip into the chains herself, give them a good rattle. “My God, Helen,” Seuroq said with shock, and Helen laughed.
“You always were so proper,” she said.
“Not that proper, was I?” He softened, momentarily worried that, knowing he was not a demonstrably
passionate man, he had in the course of the many years they’d been married denied his wife something. “I wasn’t so proper,” he asked quietly, “when it mattered not to be proper, was I?” and she took her wrists from the shackles of the courtyard wall and slipped them around his neck, with that smile that was always young.
No one had broken into the courtyard since Helen’s death.
Now, with the courtyard’s silence interrupted only by the city’s distant festivities and its shadows broken only by the twilight through the sieve of the trees, the assistant stood watching the old man through the library window. He’s mourning again, Luc thought to himself, though that didn’t seem precisely right, since it implied there had been a time in the past eight months when the old man had not mourned. It wasn’t that the expression on Seuroq’s face was mournful but rather the opposite: his had always been a mournful face, even when he was lighthearted; no one was funnier than Seuroq when he laughed, because his face was perpetually cast in mourning and the contradiction of laughter was comic. Then Helen died and the mourning went right out of his face, the face went blank of its natural pathos; in the light of the lamp on the desk in the library, that was the look on Seuroq’s face now, lost somewhere in the thirty-one years of marriage and searching for a ghost. “Dr. Seuroq?” Luc finally called through the window, but as he both expected and feared, the old man didn’t answer, staring right through the window and right through his assistant, which left Luc with the choice of either an even more unseemly intrusion, rapping on the window, or leaving without a goodbye. He had more heart for the goodbyeless departure than the intrusion.
In the eight months since her death the world had learned not to intrude, leaving him in his chair in the library and waiting for him to wake from grief, reconciled to the possibility he would never wake. The university had tried gently to nudge the disconsolate widower back into the realm of the living and the learned, coddling him with propositions of study or teaching that he’d find intriguing but not demanding, understanding that the heart’s grief makes a person into a child who must grow old again, or takes him to the edge of file’s end from which he must again grow young. No one had a formula for grief. For a marriage of thirty-one years, was eight months too much, too little, or about right? That was one month for every four years, more or less. It wasn’t the first night Luc had found Seuroq sitting in the library chair staring into the courtyard, with neither a rap on his window nor the call of his name to arrest him from what Luc was voting enough to suppose was a particular recollection rather than simply the gruel of light that wore her face.
On this particular night, however, when Luc was watching Seuroq through the library window, something more extraordinary was happening than just remembering. Seuroq had indeed been thinking of Helen: but at the very moment Luc was in the courtyard trying to get the doctor’s attention, a number of split sensations were tumbling one on top of the other in a single second, initiated by the wind’s rustling the chains on the old courtyard wall and then the instant memory of a night in a very old hotel on the right bank of the city years before, when Helen found the card. Once, when Helen was still married to her first husband, she and Seuroq had a rendezvous in this old hotel; six years later, Helen having long since left her first husband and married Seuroq, the two of them went back as an anniversary of sorts. It was May of 1968. The next morning the tanks rolled down the rue d’X beneath their balcony on the way to the turmoil of the left bank, and the momentum of colossal historic events would steamroll whatever small personal memories of hotel rooms preceded them. Nonetheless, now eight months after Helen’s death, the wind rattled the chains and Seuroq thought of that night in the hotel room, when Helen lost an earring and they pulled the bed away from the corner and found the card in a crack where the walls of the room separated. On it was the picture of a dark woman, sitting on a throne holding a rod. A cat lay at her feet and the landscape around her was strewn with rubble; a white moon rose in a blue sky. “The Queen of Wands,” Helen announced, “is the card of passion.”
“You’re making that up,” Seuroq had retorted.
What provoked him to think of this? he wondered now in the library. If he had ever had the temperament for rage he might have now raged that everything, even the most absurd thing like the sound of chains in the wind, reminded him of Helen. I am haunted by associations that aren’t even my own, Seuroq thought with desolate bitterness.
The extraordinary thing was not that this entire recollection, in which the chains clanked in the wind and Seuroq and Helen made love in the old hotel on the rue d’X and the earring fell behind the bed and the bed was pulled away from the corner and she found the card tucked between where the walls separated, had taken a single second but rather that, shooting through his heart like a pang, it had taken a second. Because at the moment of the sound of the chains against the wall. Seuroq had looked up at the only particularly modern piece of technology in his library, a digital clock, which had said 5:55:55; and now, a second later, his reverie disrupted by the departure of his assistant Luc through the courtyard gate, it said 5:55:54. When he was a child he remembered waking sometimes in the middle of the night, on the eve of a holiday perhaps, to look at a clock and find the night had acquired time rather than spent it; even as a child he reasonably attributed this to his own greedy anticipation of the day. And in his grief over Helen he might have thought it was another trick on his perceptions, except it was hard to mistake an alignment like 5:55:55, and he was quite sure that a second later it said 5:55:54. Now the clock was ticking normally but there was no doubt in his mind that a second had been lost or, looked at another way, gained.
Being a scientist, Seuroq’s first assumption was not of the extraordinary but the ordinary; it was not that he had made some earthshaking discovery, but that he had a broken clock. He woke the next morning not to any new enthusiasm for scientific adventure but to the same depression he had felt every morning for the last eight months, the kind that didn’t want him to get out of bed, that didn’t even want him to wake up. As had been the case every morning, it took all his will to get dressed, have his coffee and bread and jam, and then unplug the clock from the library wall and take it down to the electronics store off St-Germain-des-Prés. On the boulevard along the way banners flapped halfheartedly in shop windows and from streetlights celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the First Republic in 1793—a muted hoopla, the French having always found the actual Revolution a happier contemplation than all that business with the rolling heads afterward. This was at a time, moreover, when people’s ideas about freedom were confused anyway, Moroccans and Slavs and gypsies overrunning the city, not to mention the beginning of the nervous exodus from Berlin. Even the banners themselves, as had been wryly pointed out in the newspapers and on TV, were in error. Year CC, they read, in reference to the revolutionary calendar adopted by the Republic and later discarded by Bonaparte; except that 1993 being the two-hundredth anniversary was therefore in fact the two-hundred-and-first year of the Republic, had the Republic lasted that long. YEAR CCI was what the banners should have read, before they were amended by either bad mathematics or a misplaced sense of poetry. “The clock’s broken,” Seuroq told the shopkeeper at the electronics store.
“Yes? It loses time? Or it’s fast,” said the shopkeeper.
“It runs backward.”
The shopkeeper, of course, found nothing wrong with the clock. “A power surge,” he suggested to Seuroq. “You live in a very old building, right?” But it didn’t seem to Seuroq that a power surge would have unwound the clock by a second; and though his head told him there simply had to be something wrong with the clock, Seuroq’s heart was beginning to hear the whisper of the last years of the second millennium. Since it was the heart speaking to him, he could not rule out the heart’s agenda—that the psychic debris of Helen’s death was gathering like autumn leaves in a storm, blowing together into a meaning; whether the universe cared, Seuroq needed such a meaning. Whether the u
niverse cared, Seuroq needed to believe some purpose might be derived from Helen’s death; and he knew this, he recognized the heart’s agenda, and in the manner of the scientist tried to factor the heart into the equation. And so, as he returned to his university office for the first time in eight months, to pursue the theory brewing someplace between his heart and mind, he continued to insist on the possibility he was just being sentimental, deriving from Helen’s death nothing more than a needy wild conjecture. “What if,” he said to Luc, dismissing with the wave of a hand the assistant’s apology for having left the night before without a goodbye, “time is relative not simply to the perspective of motion, not simply to what the eye sees from a passing train or a rocket hurtling at the speed of light, but to the heart as well, and the speed at which it travels?”
“What?” said Luc.
What was, Seuroq asked himself, the speed at which the heart travels, in the throes of love or grief or in the fall of its deepest trauma? Across the pages of his logs he calculated until the numbers available wouldn’t calculate anymore, at which point he used new ones, remembering as he did the obscure discovery of a reclusive American mathematician in Cornwall forty years earlier who had found a missing number between nine and ten. Beginning with a given premise, he charted the heart’s arc across the course of lifetime, from the moment it first took flight until the crash into pieces; and like the clanking of prisoners’ chains on a courtyard wall, his head now flooded with a hundred memories of her, ending with her question to him asked in their darkest hour, when they had come close to separating, when they almost lost each other. “But what does life mean, if one isn’t loved?” He had argued it might mean many things. But then he had reduced, in scientific fashion, the meaning of all of those things to a common denominator, and it was always love; and humbled by his wife’s observation, which she had made with no scientific principles whatsoever, which he had to prove to himself with theorems and calculations and equations even as she had known it in a moment’s intuition, he succumbed to the intangible meaning of everything they had been together, and it saved them, until cancer took her and nothing could save them.
ARC D’X Page 24
