(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  Rosary was the name they used for the irons and the new cop pulled some out. Wade nodded at Sally and the new cop clamped A R C D’X • 56

  the rosary around Sally’s wrists. Sally looked at the chains on her hands as if she had known all along it would come to this. Wade took her down the stairs. The sound of the chains clanking between her arms and the way she looked at them as she got into the car released in Wade so deep a sense of betrayal he felt sick.

  Headquarters was over on the other side of Sorrow, which was the next zone over from Ambivalence where the hotel was, so they had a good twenty-minute ride, maybe longer depending on the foot traffic. Wade took the long way to avoid the Market and part of Downtown. Sally sat next to him in the front seat. He told himself he put her in the front seat so he could question her, though he wound up not saying anything to her; then he told himself he didn’t say anything because the more he pressed her the less forth-coming she was going to be, and he knew he didn’t believe that either. He just wanted her in the seat next to him and now that he had her there he couldn’t bring himself to talk to her. She was so beautiful he just held his breath and felt mean about it.

  When he placed her in the cell she gazed around her and then at Wade so mournfully that all he could do was hurry away.

  Wade thought about the woman for the rest of the afternoon.

  The file on her was one of the thinnest he’d ever seen. Sally Hurley aka Hemings, twenty-five years old, married to Gann Hurley, twenty-seven, whose occupation was listed as “artist,” whatever the fuck that meant, with one child, two years old. Actual date of birth on Sally Hemings: blank. Place of birth: blank. Parents: blank. Race: blank. How did this ever get past Primacy? The husband’s listing as an artist and the Hurleys’ address on the edge of the outlaw Redemption zone were little red flags waving in Central’s face. Wade wished Sally could have told him more than she did and he wished she hadn’t told him the one thing she had, about the knife’s being hers, because if she hadn’t identified the knife and it somehow came back from the lab clean, there was always the chance she might have slipped through this somehow, though if Primacy wanted to burn her they didn’t need a reason anymore than he needed one to lock her up. He was still thinking about this when the alert siren went on across the city and he remembered he was supposed to take Mallory’s altar shift.

  Wade went through the motions on the shift, his mind still on the Hemings woman. Randomly he narrowed his search choices to STEVE E R I C K S O N • 57

  Circles Seventeen and Thirty, both on the far side of Humiliation.

  Seventeen was on the list of neighborhoods that hadn’t been hit in a while; Mallory had gone through Thirty only yesterday, which meant if Wade went back today he might catch someone off guard.

  Wade wasn’t up for catching anyone off guard, so he decided on Seventeen. Even under the perpetually dark sky the white of the circle shone blindingly in his eyes as he drove into the middle and parked in the shadow of the blue obelisk. As with all the residen-tial circles of the city, nine individual units dotted the circumference of Seventeen and faced the obelisk at the center. The units were identical in size and all built of gray brick. The obelisks were so tall that from Downtown the suburban skyline of the city was a range of blue spires against the black clouds and the ash of the volcano to the east.

  Wade chose three units in Seventeen as randomly as he’d chosen the circle itself. It wasn’t possible for anyone ever to be certain their unit would be inspected during an altar-room search; sometimes, if the cop was surreptitious enough, it wasn’t possible to be sure even after the search was over. He found nothing to confiscate in the first; in the second he took a small wooden carving of a woman’s head. There wasn’t anything particularly subversive about the woman’s head, but something faintly enigmatic about the woman’s expression made him decide he better bring it in, since there was no telling these days what Primacy considered subversive and what it didn’t.

  In the third unit he was dissatisfied with the sealing on the altar-room door. He inspected it for a few minutes to see that there wasn’t some kind of peephole through which those in the small room on the other side of the door could look out. That was a heavy-duty felony and it would be pretty damned stupid of whoever lived here, but some people were just pretty damned stupid. He clicked on the intercom next to the door. “This sealing’s a violation of city ordinance,” he said to those inside the room.

  Get it taken care of by tomorrow morning’s alert.” He made a note of the unit. He kept looking at the carving of the woman’s head from the second apartment, thinking maybe it was harmless enough and he’d put it back. But it was the only artifact he’d con-hscated and he ought to have something to show for the search; the matter was decided when the siren came on announcing the A R C D’X • 58

  shift was over. He put the carving in his coat pocket. Sitting in his car in the shadow of the blue obelisk he could see families emerging from the altar rooms of their units, peering out the windows.

  As he started the car and slowly drove out of the blinding white circle, the crash of the ocean against the city’s cliffs in the distance reminded him of something, but it wasn’t until he felt the nausea that he realized it sounded like the irons around Sally’s hands as she’d gotten in his car at the hotel.

  Crossing Humiliation back toward Sorrow, Wade filed a report over the car radio about the faulty altar-room-door sealing in Circle Seventeen’s third unit. To his surprise a response came back from Mallory, who was already finished with the business at the hotel and back at headquarters. “Shit,” Wade said, “you could have done your own damned altar search.” Mallory laughed with dull malice. Wade thought Mallory was going to tell him something about Mrs. Hurley or the hotel but instead Mallory was calling back about a disturbance “over in Desire,” he said, and then abruptly stopped, and now it was Wade’s turn to laugh because he knew Mallory had just fucked up. Redemption was Primacy’s name for that zone but, because it was an outlaw zone, everyone called it Desire; Church Central’s jurisdiction over it was shadowy at best.

  It wasn’t a good idea, however, to call it Desire over the police radio because some ass-licking priest up at Central was probably monitoring it and now Mallory had fucked up and this made Wade happy. “Say,” Wade answered back, “where did you say that was again, Mallory?” and he emphasized Mallory’s name just so the ass-licking priest would be sure to catch it.

  As twilight fell Wade headed toward Desire and the scene of the disturbance, a twenty-four-hour strip joint called Fleurs d’X.

  Sometimes everything happens at the same

  time, Wade told himself later looking back on this particular day.

  As he finished the altar shift and was heading back to headquarters, he’d already thought about swinging by to check out the day’s STEVE E R I C K S O N • 59

  graffiti. But if by any chance he’d forgotten about the graffiti, what he saw at the Fleurs d’X would have reminded him.

  Wade knew he was going to have to take a better look at the day’s second dead body than he had the first. For the cops to get called in about a “disturbance” in Desire, it had to be pretty disturbing; what probably happened this time was that someone panicked before cooler heads could prevail. Desire got away with more than the usual shit because it operated out at the edge of the lava fields just barely within—or without—Primacy’s threshold of righteous indignation; the zone’s anarchy particularly manifested itself in a huge neighborhood called the Arboretum, a single unit of chambers, lofts, urban caves and underground grottoes linked by hundreds of corridors and passages that shot off in every direction. The Arboretum’s nefarious activities included a theater, TV

  arcade, book outlets and, Wade had heard, a floating emporium of forbidden artifacts, most of which had been seized by police during altar-search shifts before making their way back onto the black market. You needed either a map or a very weird brain to find your way through the Arboretum, and since no
map existed because no one person knew everything that was in it, that narrowed the neighborhood’s demographics to the very weird. Sailors docked up the coast and drove down across the tip of the lava fields in old bombed-out buses in the dead of night, just to get lost in the Arboretum for weeks.

  Wade spent an hour bullying his way through the labyrinth to the Fleurs d’X, where twelve stages and a bar operated twenty-four hours a night, since daylight never invaded the Arboretum.

  Between the lights and liquor and women the club usually got pretty steamy and crazy, but now it was empty. Bodies on the decidedly rigorous side of mortis probably didn’t do much for business. No suspects were waiting in bed with the dead man this time, just the faces of the girls watching from behind the curtains as Wade walked into the club’s dressing room. The dead man slouched on the bench was more a kid, really—about twenty, Wade supposed—good-looking and muscular, bare-chested and his head completely shaven. Covering his chest was the tattoo of a voluptuously naked woman with the head of a bird, standing in a sea of fire. Something dripped from the birdwoman’s mouth, and 1

  A R C D’X • 60

  behind her was a strange insignia of crossed blue lightning bolts; on the back of the boy’s shoulders were tattooed red wings. His eyes stared openly before him, their terror frozen and eternal; his chest was ripped and his fingernails bloody with his own flesh, as though he had attacked his own body. From the look on his face Wade figured heart failure as the cause of death, but that was another thing for the coroner to work out. As with the body in the hotel bed earlier this morning, Wade had never seen this guy before. The nice thing about a bald kid with wings tattooed on his back was that if you’d ever seen him before, you sort of remembered later.

  Behind the bar a tall darkhaired woman named Dee, whom Wade had known as a stripper herself in younger days, poured him a drink. He waved it away. “Somebody panicked,” he said,

  “that’s how I figure it.”

  “You going to get it out of here?” said Dee.

  “How long’s he been dead?”

  “All night.”

  “Outside in the real world,” Wade explained, “the night’s just starting. In this place ‘all night’ means anything.”

  “I would have dumped him myself except I heard someone called the cops,” Dee said with some disgust. “I decided it would be better if there was a body when you got here rather than me trying to convince you there wasn’t.”

  “Ever seen him before?”

  “No.”

  “The girls?”

  “Nobody knows him at all. Things broke up fast when it went down. Jenny, one of the dancers, became hysterical. It made for a shitty evening.”

  “So who called it in?”

  “You’re the cop, you tell rrie. Could have been anybody.”

  “Your girl?”

  Dee shook her head.

  “So exactly what happened?”

  “You’re the cop, you tell—”

  “Is this Jenny here tonight?”

  “I didn’t want This Jenny around. I told you, she was hysterical.”

  STEVE E R I C K S O N • 61

  “It would have been a lot easier for both of us if I could have asked This Jenny a few questions.”

  “She doesn’t know anything anyway,” Dee said, “she never even talked to the guy. You going to drink this or not?” She answered her own question and drank it for him, and then poured another.

  “Actually, Mona’s the one who talked to him.”

  “Who’s Mona?”

  “Right there.”

  She pointed to the nearest stage and there was Mona.

  Wade had never seen her at the Fleurs d’X before. Nineteen years old, her long blond hair tied back, she stood on stage in nothing but black stockings and black high heels and the pink light.

  Dee waved her over and Mona came down off the stage, fanning her face futilely with her hand; unlike the other girls, she didn’t appear remotely alarmed by Wade. When she smiled, with her head tilted to one side like a child, she had little baby teeth, perfectly lined up and white. She smiled at Wade now, who gnawed on his cheek. “The guy in the back room,” he said, “with the tattoos.”

  Mona leaned against the bar, one arm folded beneath the other fanning her face with her hand. “Tattoos?” she said.

  “The pictures,” Dee explained to Mona, pointing to her chest.

  “Yes,” Mona nodded, understanding now, “it was the pictures,’

  and Wade could tell from the accent she was from the Ice to the north.

  “What do you mean it was the pictures?” he asked.

  “He said they were changing.”

  “The man said the tattoos were changing?”

  “He was sitting watching,” and she pointed over at the stage,

  “and then we talked after. He came back to where we dress,” and now she pointed in the direction of the body, “and I said he couldn’t be back there, it wasn’t allowed. One of the other girls was with me.”

  “Jenny,” said Wade.

  “Suddenly he was very excited. Very upset. He said the tat…”

  “Tattoos.”

  “He said they were changing on his body.” She looked down at herself and absently straightened the top of one stocking that came A R C D’X • 62

  up to her thigh. He was thrilled by her fearless vacancy. “He took his hands,” and she raised her own hands and curled her fingers to show him, “and clawed at his chest,” and she ran her fingers over her breasts, “and tore at the tattoos. I think he wanted to remove them.” She wasn’t unintelligent, she wasn’t without expression. She smiled easily. It was the way she smiled, Wade thought to himself later: with her little baby teeth, vacant of concern and introspection and moral contemplation. As though she could search her soul in seconds flat and find not only everything she was looking for but everything she needed, because all she would ever need was the means that would further whatever needs were immediate, to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty, to cover herself when cold and fan her face when hot, to sleep when tired and fuck when excited, to use the world to survive, vacant of artificial meanings and tomorrows that existed nowhere but in people’s heads.

  Outside Wade radioed in to headquarters to send another squad car for the body. No one but Wade would have thought much about the dead kid with the tattoos, writing him off as insane or under the influence of some new bootleg drug; but when Wade heard the story about a man who believed tattoos changed on his body, he knew he had to go check the graffiti. He didn’t expect the graffiti to have any answers but he did expect, as had been true every day for the past year, the graffiti to have changed like the tattoos. Wade crossed Desire. In his mind he entered Mrs. Hurley’s cell and took her as Mona watched, smiling vacantly with her little baby teeth and her head tilted to the side. Wade decided to go by Mrs. Hurley’s address; he parked at the center of the circle in the dark, trying to remember which unit was the one. He turned off the lights of his car. For ten minutes he watched the windows for a glimpse of someone who might be Gann Hurley or Sally’s little girl. In several of the units people kept glancing out at him.

  Finally Wade left the circle and then Desire, driving along the highway that surrounded the city of Aeonopolis. He was happy to leave behind him the sound of the sea against the cliffs to the west; it was replaced by the sound of the evening train on its way into Vagary Junction, passing through the control zone that divided the city from the outlands. On one side of the highway to Wade’s right was the silhouette of the Arboretum rising in the night sky, on the STEVE E R I C K S O N

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  other the lava fields to the east and beyond the lava fields the looming shadow of the volcano, its peak flat as though lopped off by God. From the mountain, where a steady stream of smoke could be seen rising by day, came a red glow from the crater’s fires. Soon Wade reentered the city. He passed the barbed-wire entry points of several districts and drove into Downtown, finally pulling up
to the corner of Desolate and Unrequited. He got out of the car and made his way down the cobblestones of a small alley.

  The city was full of graffiti. By ordinance, defacement was designed into the basic urban blueprint; architects built it into their work. In this way Primacy confronted chaos, disorder and revolution by preempting the result of their vandalism, devaluing if not utterly obscuring the occasional scribble of outlaws. Primacy’s graffiti took the form of sloganeering, nursery rhymes or, most often, scriptures; but this one Wade had noticed a year before: SONIC men, ANONYMOUS GOD, it had read, in dark blue block letters.

  Wade never really understood what it meant. He only knew that SONIC men, ANONYMOUS GOD wasn’t the sort of thing the priests over at Central were cooking up. He directed Mallory to direct someone else to remove it. The next day Mallory reported his man couldn’t find it. Since he never passed up an opportunity to make an idiot out of Mallory, Wade personally dragged him out to Desolate and Unrequited and down the cobblestone alley to point out the graffiti and ask how anyone could have missed it. Except that now, in the same dark blue block letters, it said BLUES FALLING DOWN like hail.

  There was no doubt it was by the same hand. Wade walked up and down the alley in search of the previous day’s graffiti, feeling more and more foolish; inspecting the wall, he scraped at it with his fingernail as though the sonic men and anonymous god lurked beneath the granite surface. But there was nothing underneath.

  The message had simply changed.

  It continued to change over the next year. Every day that Wade went by the alley at Desolate and Unrequited, the graffiti was different. Old letters disappeared and new ones appeared, or old ones rearranged themselves to form new words. Wade didn’t mention the graffiti to anyone or try again to have it removed; since it was always changing, no one could exactly accuse him of neglecting his duty. The messages, after all, were removing themselves. He wrote each down, one after another, in a log he kept. Each came A R C D’X • 64

  to seem somehow more seditious than the one before, even as each became more obscure, until finally there was one he didn’t understand at all: ich bin ein berliner.