They didn’t understand at all. Wade knew they didn’t understand, because nothing he was saying made any particular sense.
Finally the priest nodded, “Yes, I see.” After a moment the other two priests nodded as well. “Wade,” said the head priest, narrow-ing his eyes with concern, “there was a woman. She was at the scene. When you found her she was holding the murder weapon.
You held her twenty-four hours and then let her go.”
“There was no murder weapon at the scene.”
“A knife,” the priest corrected, reading his papers.
“The deceased wasn’t stabbed.”
“But there was a knife.”
“But he wasn’t stabbed.”
“But there was a knife.”
Finally Wade had to swallow. He’d been talking some time and felt as though he’d choke, perhaps puking cognac all over the priests’ crescent table. “The man was beaten to death,” he said.
“Then where is the club?”
“Exactly.”
“There is no club,” the priest said gently, the words cold in the air and the is hissing like a snake. “There is a knife.”
“I think the husband did it,” Wade announced.
The priest seemed astounded. “Really?”
“He’s an actor. The Hurleys live over in—” he caught himself, STEVE E R I C K S O N • 89
almost having said Desire—“Redemption. I had to go undercover to find what I could. I don’t like loose ends anymore than anyone else. I like them less than anyone else. I hate them.” He paused.
“It’s . • • difficult in that part of town. We don’t really have jurisdiction there.”
“That’s a matter of dispute,” the priest rebuked him. Wade allowed himself to be properly chastened. “Why didn’t you tell anyone you were going undercover?”
“Well,” Wade said, allowing a cast of disappointment to cross his face, “it’s very hard for me to say this. But I have reason to believe, I’ve believed for some time, that one of my officers has been selling confiscated forbidden artifacts to the black market. I believe that just recently, within the last several days, he sold a TV
monitor that was confiscated at the very hotel where this murder took place. In order to keep me from investigating Hurley’s outlaw activities and in the process perhaps uncovering this black-market scheme, this officer I’ve referred to might have blown my cover and jeopardized the investigation. He’s also found it necessary to try and implicate Hurley’s wife even as the facts of the matter indicate she’s not the murderer. In other words, I believe Mrs.
Hurley has been an unwitting smoke screen for police corruption on possibly a wide scale.”
The priests were stunned. The two flunkies kept looking at the priest in the middle.
“In retrospect,” Wade said, “I understand I made a mistake by not coming to you personally and explaining my course of action.
I’d like to add that I also feel badly about my appearance at this meeting. It was my hope to make this report in a more … presentable manner. I hope you’ll forgive the disrespect of the officer who brought me here so unceremoniously. Next time I’ll insist on de-corum.”
The priest locked in on Wade’s gaze. “Yes, Wade,” he finally smiled faintly, “next time you do that.” The two just looked at each other for a long time. Then the priest announced, with some resignation, “Very well. Let’s not belabor the matter.”
“What?”
“I mean,” the priest waved his hand nonchalantly, “do what you nave to do. No use spending a lot of time in territory where we don’t have jurisdiction anyway.”
A R C D’X • 90
Wade thought about this a moment. “Does this mean you don’t want me to continue the investigation?”
“Of course you should continue the investigation. After all, someone was murdered. Let’s not, however, overcomplicate things.”
Wade said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Yes you are, Wade,” the priest said, “you know exactly what I mean. You’re a rather clever man. You’ve just made it rather clear that you’re a rather clever man.”
Wade chose his words as carefully as possible. “Is there anything about this matter to which you’d like me to give particular attention?”
“I was just getting to that.”
“Yes.”
“You know,” the priest said, “maybe the woman killed him, maybe the husband. Maybe someone in the hotel, the concierge for all we know. But we’d certainly like to know, as much as anything else we’d like to know, who he was.”
“Who … ?”
“The man who was killed,” the priest said, with some impatience.
“There are no records or information on that.”
“In your own word: exactly.”
Wade nodded. “I see.”
“Find out who the dead man is, Wade, and we might be inclined to close the whole matter. The hell with who actually killed him,”
laughed the priest.
“Yes, sir,” Wade laughed back, “the hell with it.”
“I was making a joke, of course.”
“The hell with who killed him,” Wade went on laughing.
The priest narrowed his eyes and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Is there anything else?” he said. He was now anxious to get Wade out of his sight as quickly as possible. The center of the room throbbed with the cop’s blackness.
“Anything else?”
“That we need to discuss.”
Wade thought for a moment. He looked around the white room-
“God?”
STEVE E R I C K S O N • 91
“You take care of things on your end, Wade. We’ll take care of God.”
Wade got up from the chair. He was careful not to walk too quickly from the white room. He was careful not to walk too quickly down the hall. At the lift he waited; there was no button.
Finally the door opened and the lift took him down to the main floor, where he found his way out into the lobby.
No one was waiting for him, of course, since no one had expected he’d be coming back. Wade had rolled everything up into one big messy ball that Central was going to have to sort out before they knew what to do with it. Once they got it sorted, they’d take care of Wade; he knew that. So he only had a little time. He took the lift down the side of the mountain and walked down the road into Downtown. The lanterns posted along the roadside down the side of the rock had long since gone out and it was still dark, but the sky in the east above the volcano was a lighter shade of blue than it had been before, a lighter shade than he’d seen it in some time.
He didn’t care for it.
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 A R C D’X • 92
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 sai
d 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 STEVE E R I C K S O N
93
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 cliffs 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. Refore 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.
A R C D’X • 94
M o n a says, O o o h 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 STEVE E R I C K S O N • 95
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 A R C D’X • 96
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.
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