Soon they were in some other part of the neighborhood altogether, an older section where the smells and colors were deeper than he’d smelled before, the Vog hanging in clouds where the corners turned. She never looked behind her. He made no concerted effort to hide himself; she might have looked over her shoulder at any moment and seen him. It didn’t seem possible she could miss the sound of his heavy steps. It didn’t seem possible she could miss the roar of his blackness against the blank silence of her back.
Off the stage, dressed, she looked smaller. He trained himself in those minutes to know her step so that even in the blackest passages, so black that even the white of her body, even the gold of her hair was denied light, he could hear her. In the blackest passages, she surely must have heard him.
By the time she got to her place, he guessed they’d crossed the Arboretum to the other side. Later, when he was inside her flat and saw the window, a porthole that stared out at the volcano, he knew he’d been right. She had a padlock on the door and went through her pockets to find the key. It was dark but she knew the key and she knew the lock. As she opened the door he was standing only ten feet away, gnawing on his cheek until he could taste blood; at that moment the only thing in his head was the only thing he didn’t want to think about, and that was her, not Mona but the other one, who was free of his dream and the world it claimed as its own. Mona was closing the door behind her when he caught it with his hand. She wasn’t alarmed to see him, but when she tilted her head to the side in that way of hers, she didn’t smile, and he missed her little baby teeth. “Your lucky night,” he said.
STEVE E R I C K S O N • 81
When h e fi r s t saw the stone, Wade had no way of knowing he’d been in the Arboretum three nights.
They had simply stretched into the one long endless night that always possessed the Arboretum, though at some point it occurred to him that outside the clocks must have noted his absence. It occurred to him in the amber haze of her cognac, the aquadream of her opium, the porcelain delirium of her body, as he lay naked among the dusty cushions of her flat, his body glistening with the tide that washed out between her legs with its smell of sea and flowers. The clocks outside know I’m not there, it occurred to him; and he was just lucid enough to translate this into its more banal consequences. But he’d think about this only long enough to tell himself not to think about it, instead to gaze at her sprawled unconscious at his feet, disheveled and tangled. She gurgled with the sound of him inside her.
From his stupor he gazed dimly at the door, which he’d secured on the inside with the lock that had been on the outside when he first arrived. He was trying to remember what he’d done with the key. He reached blindly for the cognac and knocked something over, and heard the splash and saw the rising amber cloud around him. To the catastrophe of the spilled cognac he said something even he didn’t understand.
He sat up from the cushions and pillows that were propped beneath him. He took her long yellow hair in his hand and studied it stupidly; he ran his hand down her back to her thigh. He pulled her beneath him and heard her unconscious moan of dread, the response of her recesses to the realization that her vacancy wasn’t big enough for him, that her vacancy wasn’t one moment larger or smaller than her own body and she couldn’t hold all of him. When he exploded in her he spilled out of every crevice, he ran down her chin and hung from the lobes of her ears like pearls. She didn’t laugh anymore like when she picked up his money after dancing for him, she didn’t laugh like when he picked up the sailor from his chair and dropped him on the ground; her laughter had turned A R C D’X • 82
to the resistant whimper that made him soar, until exhilaration got the better of him and, in the throes of the way he fucked her and the long endless night of the Arboretum, he said, “Sally.”
It stopped him the moment he said it. It turned him befuddled, and she felt it. He looked down at her beneath him and, there through the part of her lips, were her baby teeth and the smile of victory.
He let her go, she fell limply beneath him. He staggered to his feet, the name he’d spoken ringing in his ears, except that as the moments passed he wasn’t at all sure he’d actually said it. He looked at her as she dozed on the pillows, and almost asked if he’d said it, except that he didn’t trust her answer. Suddenly he had to go to the toilet; now looking around he realized, for the first time in three nights, that the toilet was a converted altar room. It surprised him, actually, that anybody had ever bothered building an altar room in the Arboretum.
He was trying to think what he’d done with the key as he stumbled around the unit, which was in some disarray from when Mona had torn the place apart (hours ago? days ago?) looking for the key herself. That was when he saw the stone. It was in a small cabinet that sat next to the porthole that stared out at the volcano, smoldering in the night and smoking in the day, except now Wade couldn’t remember ever seeing anything in the porthole but night, he couldn’t remember ever seeing daylight at all. He touched the glass of the porthole as though it might be a painting hanging on the wall, rendered by the short, squat artist who was slowly transforming all the hallways of the Arboretum into other hallways.
Wade put his face to the porthole and peered in. The closer he looked, the drunker he felt. He gazed back at Mona on the pillows, then turned to the cabinet.
On the top shelf was the key to the lock. He had no recollection whatsoever of putting it there. But now more interesting to him were the cabinet’s other contents, a small collection of forbidden artifacts from the black market: a child’s doll and a pair of dice, mildly pornographic pictures and a comic book, small wooden carvings like the woman’s head he had found a few days ago and still had in his coat pocket, and next to the key a stone. It seemed out of place. Wade examined it. It was flat and smooth on one side, rough and broken on the other, and fit his large hand; but what STEVE E R I C K S O N • 83
caught Wade’s eye, what sobered Wade for the first time since he’d lost himself to Mona’s sanctum, was the writing. It was a fragment of graffiti. But the graffiti wasn’t written on the smooth side of the stone, rather it was scrawled across the rough part where it seemed impossible that anything could be written; and though the beginning and end were lost, the core of the message was unmistakable: pursuit of happiness
The actual calligraphy was nothing like the graffiti in the alley at Desolate and Unrequited, which made the coincidence all the more astounding to Wade; and suddenly it became very important to him that he keep this stone. For the first time in a while he found himself chewing the inside of his cheek, where the wound of his confusion had healed amid the cognac and opium and flesh. When he’d gotten his clothes and dressed, he took from his coat pocket the carving of the woman’s head and placed it in the cabinet in exchange for the stone, which he put in his pocket. It was heavy and weighed the side of his coat down. He thought it might fall through the bottom of the pocket. He also took the key. He opened the door to the black hallway and stood for some time staring down the corridor to a dark end he couldn’t see, wondering if he had the bearings to find his way out.
It was dark outside, as the porthole had told him it would be, as though the porthole were not a window but a crystal ball suspended on the wall, predicting his future.
His car was still where he’d left it, in the part of Desire where there stretched in the daylight hours the endless shadow of the volcano meeting the endless shadow of the Arboretum. The window was broken on the passenger’s side. Wade found the night air not invigorating or cleansing but oppressive like a perfume; he felt the weight of the Vog on his heart, and the sound of the waves against the cliffs were louder than he’d ever heard them. In the car he took the stone from his coat pocket and set it on the seat next to him. Trying to start the car he didn’t feel so good.
He drove back into town. He went to the corner of Desolate and A R C D’X • 84
Unrequited and pulled the car over to the curb, and opened the door and threw up. He got out
of the car and walked down the alley. Even in the middle of the night he knew where to find the graffiti. Even in the dark he knew it wasn’t there anymore, that the place where Wade’s graffiti had addressed him day after day for the past year would be conspicuously blank. The furor of the spot’s emptiness drove his hands to his head, covering his ears.
At home he confronted the evidence of outside clocks that had noted his absence. He parked beneath the obelisk at Circle Four and opened the door of his unit; more disturbing than any havoc was the way the unit had been ransacked so carefully. It revealed the precision of authority, the invasion of those who didn’t have the time or enthusiasm for superfluous destruction. Wade recognized the work because he’d often done it himself in the past.
Standing in the doorway of his unit, his arms hanging limply at his side, he heard someone behind him; he turned and saw, stepping from the dark Vog into the light of his doorway, the rookie who had rosaried Sally Hemings and told him about Mallory and the satellite dish at the hotel. For a moment the rookie didn’t say anything. “What?” Wade finally asked.
“Yes sir,” the rookie said. “They posted me here in case you came back.” He pointed behind him and Wade could now see, on the other side of the circle, another car beside his own. “Everyone’s been wondering what happened to you, sir,” the rookie said.
After a moment he added, “It’s four o’clock in the morn—”
“I didn’t ask what time it was,” Wade said.
“No,” the rookie replied coolly, and now Wade realized something was wrong. Now there was no telling whose side anyone was on. “No, you didn’t ask what time it was, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. I have to ask you to come with me down to headquarters.” He stepped aside as though to give Wade room to pass, even though he was standing outside, in the clear, where even Wade had room to pass. Wade hated being in the clear. He hated having room to pass. He wanted to make the rookie back up in a corridor; he missed the psychic geometries of passages and doorways and chambers.
There were more cops at headquarters than he’d expected to see at this hour. Most of them were sleeping slumped in their chairs, but they woke quickly when Wade walked in. Wade went STEVE E R I C K S O N • 85
to his desk and aimlessly moved some things around on it; lookin down at the desk he caught sight of himself. He looked himself up and down. His coat hung on him like a rag, and his tie and belt were missing; he became vaguely aware that he smelled of sweat.
Was there the smell of sex and liquor too? Was there the smell of blood, or was that in his mind? Was that the smell of still being in a dream, or the smell a dream leaves on you when you wake from it? In the middle of headquarters he felt everyone examining him.
The only one in the room who didn’t get up from his chair was Mallory.
“Look at you,” Mallory finally said. He leaned the chair back; his hands were folded in his lap. He appeared very relaxed. “You’re not presentable. They want to talk to you but you’re not presentable. Well,” he said, bringing the chair forward and now rising from it, “no time now for making ourselves presentable. They want to talk to you.” Mallory headed down a back hallway and stopped midway to turn, a withering look on his face that asked what Wade was waiting for. They left through the back door and got in a car.
Mallory was behind the wheel. “Whoa,” Mallory said, recoiling from Wade with relish. “You smell unpleasant, Wade. Like you just crawled out of the deep shit you’re in, except you couldn’t have done that, because it’s much too deep for that. Deep deep deep. Way deeper than you’re going to be crawling out of any time too soon.” He laughed and shook his head. “We went around the bend on this one, didn’t we? Mrs. Hurley, I mean. Black Sally. I mean, I think she’s a shade, what do you say? Next time we bring her in, those of us who are still on this case I mean, which we can presume will not include yourself, those of us who are still on the case will get a better look at her. A good look. All the nooks and crannies. I’ll give you a report when I come see you on visiting day, let you know what you missed. I’m sure they’ll let you have visitors every now and then. It’d be inhuman otherwise. You have to seriously fuck up not to ever get any visitors. Well, shit, now that I think about it. You may not be seeing anybody for a while, now that I think about it. Well, I’ll find some way to let you know. Don’t think your old buddy Mallory would leave you wondering about something like that. I’ll find some way to let you know just how black it all gets down deep inside. I say she’s a horse of a different color, once you get a better look. The good part, especially. I say A R C D’X • 86
the good part’s not even built the same way. I say you touch it, you bite it, and the juice that comes out is more like blackberry than cherry.” Mallory thought a moment, driving down the highway.
“When you come, Wade, is it white?”
Wade looked at Mallory and then stared in front of him as Mallory drove west in the dark, toward the rock. There was only one road up to Central. It was lined with small lanterns that hung from posts all the way up the side of the rock, but they didn’t light the road particularly well, their glow rendered increasingly vague smudges as they ascended into the night Vog. At the rock Mallory and Wade parked the car and took the lift up. From the lift they walked to the main doors. The sound and spray of the sea was all around them, mixed with the ash of the volcano. It was impossible to see, in the mist, anything of the sea or the volcano or the white round building itself. Inside the building the huge plain lobby was dark and empty.
Wade had been in the lobby before. He noted that Mallory didn’t seem such a stranger to it either, more impatient than intimidated.
Over to the left were administrative offices and down a hallway was the Church’s confidential archives. At this moment the only other person Wade could see in the building besides himself and Mallory was a clerk leaving the archives, a man in his midthirties with a wild mass of black hair and thick spectacles that, in the glint of the hall light, made his eyes appear like blue crystal balls. He didn’t look like a priest. The archives clerk glanced furtively at the two cops as he passed; behind him Wade heard the main doors open and close with the clerk’s exit.
Wade and Mallory waited. There was no place in the huge lobby to sit. Finally through a single door to the right came a man in the white robes of a priest. He signaled to Wade to follow him and with the flick of his fingers dismissed Mallory. “See you, Wade,”
Mallory said as the priest led Wade back through the door he’d just come from. Wade didn’t look back.
The priest and Wade took another lift. The priest neither said anything nor looked at Wade. When the door of the lift opened on a long hallway as austere as the lobby downstairs, the priest indicated a room at the hallway’s far end. Wade stepped out and the door of the lift closed behind him.
The doors of the room at the end of the hallway were open.
STEVE E R I C K S O N • 87
Wade was now forcing himself to focus better; he was manifestly aware of the way he smelled. He was still trying to understand if the smell of sex and liquor was real or wafted in the corners of a dream-memory. He got to the end of the hallway and inside were three priests seated around the outside of a crescent table. In the hollow of the crescent was an empty chair. The room was white and the priests were in white; one of the priests looked up suddenly at Wade in the doorway as though Wade’s blackness had rudely announced him. He studied the policeman with unmistakable disapproval and pointed at the empty chair.
Wade sat in the chair for almost as long, it seemed, as he’d waited in the lobby below. The priest who had looked up at Wade wasn’t paying him attention anymore; he was reading some papers while the other two priests were busy making notes. Behind the priests were windows that looked out onto the night. Beyond the glass of the windows Wade could see bright searchlights illuminating the waves of the sea below. The room was insulated so Wade couldn’t actually hear the sea, but sometimes it seemed everything vibrated slightly a
s though from the force of the waves against the rock. The head priest was still reading his papers. He didn’t look at Wade but rather at the papers when he said, “Wade,” and since it wasn’t a question as far as Wade could tell, Wade didn’t answer.
At the policeman’s silence the priest finally raised his head.
“You’ve been with us for some time.” Wade still didn’t say anything. The priest studied his papers and said, “Your work in the past has always been satisfactory, Wade. Occasionally a bit cavalier, perhaps even eccentric, but we allow for a man’s personality in his work.” He smiled tolerantly.
Wade began to say that no one had ever mentioned before that he was either cavalier or eccentric. Wade couldn’t remember ever having been—up until the last few days—cavalier or eccentric. He started to chew the inside of his cheek but stopped himself and instead took a deep breath.
“Where have you been?” the priest said.
Wade was focusing. He needed to swallow because his throat was tight, but he knew if he swallowed hard the priest would see
!t and he felt as though only a hard swallow was separating him from incarceration, not in a police cell but in one of the cells in the rock below his feet or the penal colony to the south, reserved for A R C D’X • 88
political heresies. He’d heard many times over many years about the justice of the priests, which was far less benevolent than that of any cop. So he didn’t swallow too hard when he said, “Undercover.”
For some reason the priest actually appeared surprised by this answer. “Undercover?” he said.
“On a murder case.”
The other two priests stopped writing and looked at him now.
The head priest leaned forward across the crescent table. “The murder in the hotel downtown?”
“Yes.”
“Have you found anything?”
Wade was trying to think quickly. “I’m following a lead. I’ve reached an interesting point in the investigation. But I’ve surfaced now in order to get some hard answers. I’m sure you understand what I mean.”
(1993) Arc d'X Page 10
