(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  As the day dragged on and the heat became worse, the demonstration by the prison grew angrier. More people were pouring into the square and a huge cheer greeted an arriving wagon of guns, followed by a cannon that had been liberated at Invalides. As negotiations went on inside the prison between its commander and a representative of the crowd, the mood of the throng fluctuated between wild celebration and mounting frustration. People passed out in the street from heat and drunkenness. Others shouted insults at the soldiers high above them on the prison ramparts, while the eyes of horses hitched to carts of straw became lit by a dark malevolence, as though the animals were possessed. Sally was gripped by the exhilaration and fear that winding its way through ARC D’X • 40

  the streets of Paris at this very moment was word that Thomas was dead, murdered by his lover. Suddenly, perhaps irrationally, she was certain the news would sweep the crowd and she’d be recognized by someone. Any minute someone would say, Yes I know this girl, the black one; and point to her, and hold up the glove that had been taken from her that day the mob almost pushed Thomas’

  carriage into the Seine. She wore this glove, the witness would say, I took it from her myself. Sally was watching the prison, wondering how it would be to spend the rest of her life in one of its towers, when the shooting began.

  Where the fire came from first wasn’t clear. It might have been from the prison itself or a hotel across the street. But then there was a tremendous volley, muskets exploding and the crash of cannons from the high walls of the prison, answered by the crowd’s own cannon. The wagon horses reared as the straw was torched to fill the square with billows of smoke, obscuring the vision of the soldiers above. The window of the perfume shop erupted in a rain of glass, and a maelstrom of fragrances overwhelmed the square, mixing with the smell of smoke and wine and blood; a warning from someone in the crowd was followed by the loudest explosion of all, and Sally looked up just as the drawbridge of the prison came thundering down, cut loose by someone who had scaled the walls. People began rushing through the prison gates. The water in the moat beneath the bridge sizzled with the debris of smoldering iron from guns and cannons. Through the gates a howl rose from the people as though it were coming from the black towers themselves, and as the stampede threatened to carry Sally along with it, all she could think of was getting away. She was trying to turn against the momentum of the crowd when the pregnant woman grabbed her by the arm: “But where are you going, mademoi-selle?” she said, before sliding lifelessly to Sally’s feet, the back of her head smoking. Sally felt herself lifted off the ground by the surge.

  A horse with its fiery wagon bolted wildly in the riot, people trying to make way for it. Beaching into the flames of the passing wagon, Sally hoisted herself onto it.

  Across the square and past the drawbridge, through the revolution and into the dusk, she rode down the Paris streets with a ball of fire at her back. She could feel its heat. When the heat felt like STEVE E R I C K S O N • 41

  his body, when it felt as if it were going to take hold of her hair and make her submit to it on her knees, she leapt from the wagon and rolled into a gutter, where she lay watching the flaming wagon disappear down the road before she lost consciousness.

  Sometime in the night she picked herself up from the gutter. She walked until she came to the city gates. She left the city behind and continued in the dark toward what she believed were the woods in the distance, where she finally fell asleep again in the grass.

  She slept a long time.

  She was vaguely aware of morning and the sun in her eyes. Far away in her mind she thought she should wake up and go, before someone came along and arrested her and took her back to prison, or abducted her to sell her. In her sleep she laid end to end all the dead masters with knives protruding from their gullets. But worse was that in her sleep, the sun sliding across the sky, she missed Thomas, and all she could hear was the rip of his body when she’d killed him, and all she could see was the black moths flying up out of him, and she wanted to gather them all up and put them back inside him and take back the knife and close him up, and feel him drink her as a father drinks a daughter.

  When she woke it was late afternoon, and she was on a terrain unlike any she’d seen.

  She stood up slowly and looked around her. Her head pounded and she was very thirsty, her life drunk dry. There were no woods.

  Beneath her feet where she’d slept so many hours wasn’t grass but cold cinder. She was on the ridge of a large mountain; to one side of her, far down below her, stretched a plain of the black cinder, and to the other side was the mountain’s crater. The horizon of the mountaintop was flat, as though its peak had been lopped off by God, and from the pit of the crater beneath her feet rose a steady stream of smoke and the light of a fire.

  She was very thirsty. She wondered if someone had picked her up after all and deposited her far from Paris. But she didn’t remember anything like that.

  A R C D’X • 42

  She walked down into the crater toward the light. The fire grew brighter, and soon she came to a house.

  It was twilight when she reached the house. It sat on a small plateau overlooking the crater’s mouth, and it wasn’t like any other house she’d known. It looked like no French house, no English house. It didn’t look like any house she’d seen in Virginia. It wasn’t like the house a white man would live in, but closer to the ram-shackle slave quarters on Thomas’ plantation, except that it seemed to be made of the very rock of the mountain. On the porch of the house slept two large gray dogs, who raised their heads to greet her. She passed the dogs and paused at the door, afraid to knock; but she was very thirsty, and perhaps someone would give her some water. The crater loomed to her side, its smoke rising and dying in the darkening of the sky.

  She stood at the door of the house, her ear pressed close to it.

  But she didn’t hear anything and finally she rapped her hand on the wood. The door opened, and she saw herself.

  She saw herself standing in the doorway, looking back at her.

  The two of them stared at each other agape; the only thing momentarily reassuring to Sally, the only reason she didn’t scream and run immediately, was that the other one looked as amazed as she.

  If Sally had had the presence of mind she would have raised her hand to feel if it was a mirror; but she wouldn’t have felt a mirror in any event. Sally instead put her hand to her mouth, too late to stifle her cry; the other one cried out too.

  “Polly?” She heard a voice from a back room of the house. At the sound of Polly’s name her first reaction was that it was Thomas’

  voice, but it wasn’t Thomas; and then the voice said again, “Polly, what is it?” And then the speaker stepped out from the back room.

  Sally had never seen him before. In his midfifties, he was of normal build, not as tall as Thomas but older; he had a wild mass of black hair speckled with white and gray. Thick spectacles made his eyes loom like blue crystal balls. As he tottered in the doorway his dissolution was profound, beyond simple drunkenness, and though Sally was at first relieved and disappointed to see that it wasn’t Thomas, the sight of the older man with the black hair roared out of unfamiliarity into the psychic zone of distant but unshakable recognition, remembered more than prophesied. He looked at her and screamed, in a gasp whose sound died midair.

  STEVE ERICKSON • 43

  The color of his drinking vanished from his face and for a moment he was on the verge of fainting; the other Sally inside the house stepped toward him as though to catch him. But he caught himself, gazing from one woman to the other, and Sally felt her fear transformed by his own into something they shared that neither of them understood. Now he said not Polly’s name but her own: “Sally,”

  and he choked on it. Like the earlier cry it didn’t all come out, part of it caught in the ventricles of his heart where it had been a long time.

  Sally turned from the door. She ran past the gray dogs and the porch, back up the side of the cra
ter toward the ridge of the mountaintop. She ran down the other side of the mountain toward the black plains. She hadn’t a thought in her head now of water or prison or slavery. Later she would have liked to believe it was a dream; she’d have given anything to believe it was a dream. But at this moment she knew it wasn’t a dream and so she ran parched and exhausted and half out of her mind. She never looked back at the crater or the house or herself standing in the doorway watching her go; when she finally reached the bottom of the mountain she went on running and stumbling across the black plain. Sometime in the night a wagon picked her up. Sometime in the night she felt and heard beneath her the turning of wheels; she felt and tasted on her lips the trickle of water. Into the night she didn’t dream or think at all. The wagon took her back to Paris.

  In the early hours of morning she pulled herself off the back of the wagon and again wandered aimlessly as she’d done after bury-ing the carving knife in Thomas’ sleeping body. It wasn’t until she saw Thomas that she stopped.

  It was dawn and, pulled by the tides of the city, Sally found herself returned to what was the center of the Parisian moment, the black prison with eight towers. Smoke still hung on the square.

  Blood had long since overcome the scent of lilac from the perfume shop. People streamed freely across the prison drawbridge in and out of the prison gate; high on the dark red pikes that surrounded the square were the heads of garrison soldiers. Women wept over the cobblestones where their men had died.

  Thomas moved from widow to widow, talking to them, holding them in comfort. To each of the widows he gave some money. It reminded Sally of when she was a little girl and one day had seen A R C D’X • 44

  him seize the whip from a man beating a slave. She sat dazed in the street, amid the glass of the perfume-shop window, watching.

  Pieces of glass glittered in the dawn sun.

  He finally saw her. He stood in the smoke staring at her. When he came toward her she couldn’t help but find his judgment terrifying. He looked at the glass all around her: “You’re going to cut yourself,” he finally said. Picking her up he caught himself on a shard in the folds of her tattered dress he’d bought her; together they watched his hand bleed. As he carried her in his arms she tore from her dress, as she’d once torn from the discarded bed curtains in Virginia, a long strip and wrapped it around his hand.

  She wanted to fall asleep in his arms but said, “Put me down.”

  He put her down. Her knees buckled beneath her and he had to catch her to keep her from falling in the street.

  “Three conditions,” she said. “First, I will be the mistress of your house. Second, you will never sell me to another. Third, you will free all our children when they come of age.”

  “I trust,” Thomas answered, “you agree in turn not to murder me in my sleep.”

  “You’re in no position to negotiate,” she murmured sleepily.

  “If I accept your conditions, do you promise to go back to America with me?”

  “I promise,” she answered, and only in the last moment, before completely submitting to exhaustion, did she open her eyes to look up from his shoulder at the shadow that crossed his face. Nothing much astonished her now. It was the cloud of black moths descending on them.

  Except that it was much greater than a cloud, much more than a plague of moths: they filled the sky from one end of the square to the other and then, as they lit on his coat and his brow and his bleeding hand, the man and girl realized they weren’t moths at all and never had been. He touched them and they crumbled in his fingers. They left a black smudge. After waiting for their dreadful rain since he was a boy of five, he realized with a gasp that they had finally fallen, the ashes of the slave named Evelyn who poisoned her master Jacob Pollroot forty years before.

  STEVE E R I C K S O N

  45

  Thomas says, I never saw Paris again. In the beginning my dreams were of the Paris I’d come to after my wife died: languid gardens and rambunctious streets, the sensual exuber-ance, the ferocious quest. As the news from France traveled to Virginia over the years following my return, my dreams changed and in the last one I was walking the rue d’X and felt a tide about my feet, some thick hot river; and then I saw bubbling up from the gutters the blood, and I looked up to a wave of it rushing toward me. Often I’ve defended it. Often I’ve said to those who here de-cried it that the nutrients of the blood of tyrants are drunk by the soil of freedom’s storms. But in my dreams the blood keeps rising, flooding the terrain until no soil remains. And if I could never openly condemn it, now I would secretly hate Paris for how it betrayed what it fought for if only there were not more intimate, firsthand treachery to despise.

  On the other hand, some small more intimate treachery on the part of the King of France might well have saved his head. … He needed a slave of his own. He needed some black vessel to receive the blackness in his heart and soul and leave him strong enough for the right and good. He needed to commit some trivial duplicity, betraying his vain, viperous little Austrian queen; in so identifying the part of him that cried for redemption he might have redeemed his country if not his throne. Now his blood bubbles up with all the rest, and so does his queen’s.

  One should not make the rash promises of one’s ideals before so many witnesses. I told her I would never marry another. Perhaps I wouldn’t have anyway. Perhaps I said that not so as to ease her passage into death but to deliver myself to the forbidden that I had denied myself so long even as I hungered for it. In a year I’ll be fifty. I passed some time ago that point where I was closer to the end than to the beginning. I spent all the years up to that point as the slave of my head’s convictions rather than my heart’s passions, and never felt as alive as the first night I took her. Never felt as alive as those moments when I knew I’d done something that could A R C D’X ‘ 46

  never be forgiven. In the nights that have passed since, I accepted such moments not as the crimes that contradicted what I believed in but as the passionate chaos that justified and liberated the god of reason living within me. I’ve asked myself whether I love Sally.

  I believe I have come to love her, even if it’s not the way I loved my wife. Sally was the woman who was there when I was closer to the end than the beginning, when I wasn’t so willing to surrender my moments only to my convictions. Surrendering to passion, I came to believe my convictions not less, but more.

  When I was young, the state of Virginia did not allow a man to free his own slaves. Such was the bond between the slave and the man who owned her. Such was the state that would not loosen such a bond. At the age of twenty-five I offered to the state a law that would allow a man to free his slaves, freeing not only the slave but the man who owned her. The state was outraged. Twenty years later I took her in the Paris night and cannot free myself from it: such is the bond between us. And no law will set me free of the thing I own, the thing that possesses me in return.

  I believe in time the black one may be whole. The state hates me for saying so.

  I’ve invented something. As the germ of conception in my head it was the best and wildest and most elusive of my inventions. It’s a contraption halfcrazed by a love of justice, a machine oiled by fierce hostility to those who would ride the human race as though it were a dumb beast. I’ve set it loose gyrating across the world. It spins through villages, hamlets, towns, grand cities. It’s a thing to be confronted every moment of every day by everyone who hears even its rumor: it will test most those who presume too glibly to believe in it. But I know it’s a flawed thing, and I know the flaw is of me. Just as the white ink of my loins has fired the inspiration that made it, so the same ink is scrawled across the order of its extinction. The signature is my own. I’ve written its name. I’ve called it America.

  STEVE E R I C K S O N • 47

  In the autumn of 1 7 8 9 Thomas left Paris with his daughters, valet, and mistress and set out for home. On the night they came within sight of the Virginia coast their ship caught fire and the ent
ourage, with as many of their possessions as could be rescued, were loaded into small boats and rowed ashore. The ship burned behind them in the sea. On Christmas Day James drove their coach over the familiar hills of Thomas’ plantation, which Thomas and Patsy and James hadn’t seen in nearly seven years; and suddenly the horizon filled with the black faces of slaves rushing to welcome them. For the last mile the slaves followed the coach to the house, shouting at James and cheering when the carriage door opened and Thomas emerged, followed by the two daughters. But the commotion stopped still at the sight of the beautiful black slavegirl who took her master’s hand to step from the coach, dressed in her fine European clothes. Without a word, staring straight ahead of her, Sally kissed her stunned mother and then vanished with Thomas into the house, as unmistakably pregnant as she was elegant.

  The child died at birth. It was a small girl, who would have had the face of her mother and the firelike hair of her father. Over the next ten years Sally bore Thomas several children; it was the last, a son named Madison, who would later identify Thomas as his father, though Thomas’ “legitimate” family—his daughters and their own children—were bound to deny it, as they would in fact deny that Sally was Thomas’ mistress at all. They would have denied Sally’s very existence if it had been possible to do so persua-sively. Thomas never acknowledged his children by Sally, nor did he treat them in any fashion differently from the way he treated the other slave children of the plantation. But as Madison grew older he would often, from a distance, be taken by visitors for Thomas himself; and later, as each child turned twenty-one, Thomas quietly fulfilled his agreement with Sally and gave them their freedom, at which point, one by one, they disappeared in the night, to reappear in other places and other lives.

  A R C D’X • 48

  Her own identity, which she’d begun to construct so tentatively as a free woman in Paris, was now given back to the role of possession, without whose possessor life meant nothing. She did not completely forget the person she conspired to make in Paris, in the moments when she wouldn’t thank him for a pair of gloves: now, when he returned from his travels, she’d thank him for such gifts by closing the bedroom door and dropping her dress from her shoulders. What life was solely hers she came to pass over the years making jewelry, which she’d store in a black wooden box with a rose carved on the top, or give to the other slaves who came to regard Sally with a nearly mystical awe. It didn’t occur to her that this jewelry might have value. She made it for her own pleasure, often from the beads of Indians whom Thomas would sometimes take her to meet in the hills. Thomas had great respect for the Indians’ resourcefulness and honor. Sometimes it seemed to her that he felt special kinship with the savagery of their existence and envied the harmony in which they lived with that savagery.