(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  She held out her hands to catch herself but even the furniture implied treachery, as though she might grab a chair and the weight of it would only hasten the plunge to oblivion. So Mona felt she had no choice but to reach to Wade, who was there to take her; and when he took her the two of them became suspended in space, and the growl that came from Wade sounded as though it leaked through an abrasion in that space, perhaps the very sound of the rip itself. He entered her and she clung to him, and in the oblivion’s STEVE E R I C K S O N • 97

  cold she let go of him, having decided long ago she would never let anyone keep her warm again. He continued with her until she reached down and yanked him out of her at the moment of his explosion. The white of his ejaculation danced in the air.

  In the middle of the night Mona would lurch from unconsciousness, awakened by the sound and speed of her plummet. She would attach herself to the floor like a golden spider, riding it downward until she fell back to sleep.

  Lying on his back with her face in his lap and her yellow hair in his fist, gazing up at his living map of the Arboretum, which is to say the universe of his dream, he could see the Vog. He watched it move through the passages of the Arboretum and billow across the terrain. It was the only thing he couldn’t eliminate from his vision, the only thing that didn’t defer to his elimination of walls and ceilings and floors; it was the uncontrolled thing of his dream and it moved where it wanted. Following it with his gaze, his eyes riding its untamed rampage, Wade became the greatest Vog Traveler of all, until there was nothing left for him but to rise and leap into its dense heart. When he did this, he hurled himself into his own blackness. He hurled himself into the ash of his own flesh, as though it were the black mouth of a volcano. Inside his blackness he heard the sound of years and chains. In his blackness he knew that it wasn’t a miracle Sally had said when she awoke that noon in the hotel room, it wasn’t a miracle she had said when the knife dropped from her hand. He knew it was a name, the name of both the man she had killed and the act of killing him; and it was a name he’d known forever, though he’d never heard it before. At that moment he knew a thousand nights in the Arboretum had stretched into one.

  In the midst of his blackness, he couldn’t be sure when he’d stopped taking her and when she’d begun taking him, but it was sometime after he entered his blackness and found she’d been there all along, just like the other one and the name she’d spoken.

  He found her drinking it, his blackness; as he lay among the pillows and cushions of the flat, feeling himself grow as black as the Vog itself, his little blonde nymph mounted him and drew into her his every drop. On through the night she rode Wade into the distant vapor of his dream laced with her opium and cognac. Her head back and eyes shut, mouth parted with the tip of her tongue be-A R C D’X • 98

  tween her lips, she loosed a weird rattle from her depths that told him the darkness behind her closed eyes wasn’t his and the man she fucked wasn’t him. “Open your eyes!” he heard himself bellow at her, though he couldn’t be certain it came out as anything but a grunt or a squeak. When he climaxed, a luscious smile burst on her lips. It was a different smile than he’d ever seen from her before, a smile for all the orgasms of all the men she’d known because they were small deaths of those men, life pathetically blurting into her. “Open your eyes!” he demanded again, terror-stricken at how, in her submission to his will, her own blackness ravished his. But she didn’t open her eyes, and she rode him down and down into the dark.

  Far away, when the Vog cleared, Wade could see the other man.

  Wade looked past the walls of Mona’s flat into the Arboretum’s empty core, looked past all the empty catacombs and corridors and could see the sole figure of the other man sitting in the dark of Fleurs d’X watching his Mona. And when she returned from dancing he could tell she was no longer the simple vessel of Wade’s dream, she was no longer the transport of what Wade deposited in her, sloshing against the walls of her womb, but the vessel of another dream: it may have been the other man’s dream. It may have even been Mona’s dream, since the baby-teeth smile wasn’t so vacant anymore, its exquisite emptiness now marred by a meaning. When she smiled there was something else in the smile, a longing that was not Wade’s, the wriggling into Wade’s dream of an alien aspiration like a virus. It was more than intolerable, it was incomprehensible. It went on for many hours of the long Arboretum night until finally Wade put on the clothes he hadn’t worn in a long time and went to Fleurs d’X to see for himself.

  As he sat at one of the tables to the side of the club, it took Wade a long time to remember where he’d seen the other man. In his mind Wade traveled down every corridor he’d ever walked in the Arboretum, peered into every chamber where he might have seen the man before. The short, squat painter had blotted out everything that ever happened to Wade outside and before the Arboretum, and if Wade hadn’t seen the other man just hours before smashing Mallory’s face in the alley and shoving the car over the cliffs into the sea, he never would have remembered. When it STEVE E R I C K S O N • 99

  came to him, when he recognized the man with the black hair and the glasses as the archives clerk who had walked past Wade and Mallory in the lobby of Church Central, it was the biggest intrusion of all, the most unseemly of violations; at that moment Wade almost got up from his table and left the club. If he had, he thought later, Mona might still be with him. But he stayed and, as the minutes went by, his calm gradually became more and more frayed. His serenity was undone by the way the man watched Mona dance, by the way he smiled at Mona and the way she smiled back.

  When she smiled there was something in her little baby teeth that Wade had never seen all the times she smiled at him; there was a response in her smile to the way the man with the black hair and the thick glasses appeared so sad, the way he smiled at her so halfheartedly, the way he seemed lost and not there at all, his attention arrested time and again only by Mona’s fleeting lovely secrets. Then the man began to follow Mona from stage to stage as Wade had done the first night he watched her. Mona’s smile became more transformed, from dance to dance, by the sad man’s relentless audience. Only when Mona saw Wade sitting in the dark did her smile vanish, and it was then Wade knew he didn’t own her anymore.

  Hour after hour, watching Mona dance for the sad blackhaired man with the glasses, Wade began drinking little whiskeys just as in the old days, signaling to Dee behind the bar as the sad man dropped his glasses in the dark and, on her hands and knees, Mona helped to find them. When the blackhaired man surrendered the rest of his money at Mona’s feet and walked from the club, Wade got up from his table to follow; and as he passed her stage he looked once at her, trapped in her dance, and felt her watch him all the way out of the Fleurs d’X.

  The other man was at the end of the corridor. Shred by shred Wade tore the clothes from his own body for the last time and left them in his trail; by the time he reached the stairs, he was naked again. He pulled the other man from the stairs, hurling him against the corridor wall, the glasses skidding the length of the hallway.

  Dazed, the man groped blindly around him, tumbling into some more profound, unspoken incapacitation. Wade beat him furiously. Blood splattered the corridor walls. The man took the AR C D’X • 100

  beating without resistance, crumpling to the floor beneath the assault until in his incapacitation he finally groaned a single word. It was the only sound the man made.

  “Sally.” ‘

  Wade tottered at the sound of it. If the man with the black hair had risen up and surprised Wade with a blow of retaliation, it couldn’t have struck with more force or shock. Wade lowered his hands and stood panting over the man, wondering if he believed his ears just as he’d wondered before when, with Mona, he’d said the same name. And then the man said it again, through the blood in his mouth, utterly unaware of Wade as though there was nothing and no one there in the corridor but blood and broken heart; and the reality from which Wade had fled into the Arboretum three years before
floated in the hallway between the two men, in a word.

  He turned to see Mona at the end of the hall. She had followed the trail of his clothes from the doorway of the Fleurs d’X. In this last moment he would ever actually lay eyes on her, she looked almost as she had the first time, naked but for her black stockings and high-heeled shoes; now in the dank light of the Arboretum corridor rather than the dark of her flat or the blush of the club, she seemed more frail, even as Wade was the more naked of the two. Mona didn’t look at Wade at all. She put her hands to her mouth, gazing at the beaten man beneath him. When Wade reached out to her, she turned and ran. He called out and started after her, then was jerked back to his victim as though the name the man had spoken was a web that bound them. It was the best Wade could do to reach down and pick up the man’s glasses and hand them back to him.

  He trampled his own clothes underfoot as he ran after her. He was naked when he burst into the Fleurs d’X to find her. The women stopped dancing to look at him; Dee behind the bar stopped pouring drinks. He ran down the corridors of the Arboretum toward her flat; turning every corner he expected to run her down. People cowered before the sight of him; he took no notice of them. He couldn’t understand why, with every corner he turned, he hadn’t caught up with her; it wasn’t until he reached the flat that he knew she was gone for good. The door was open. The lock dangled from the outside. Inside nothing was amiss, but her depar-STEVE E R I C K S O N • 101

  ture hovered in the room, over the floor that was painted to look as though there were no floor, beneath the ceiling painted to look as though there were no ceiling, between the walls rendered to appear as though there were no walls. Her goodbye hovered like the explosion of his desire when she’d ripped him from inside her that first time she’d returned to find he had taken such possession of her world.

  Wade sat in the flat by himself for a while. For some reason it occurred to him to look in the corner where he had kept his clothes that were now scattered throughout the Arboretum passageways.

  The stone with the graffiti, which he’d hidden there, was gone.

  Wade roared at the betrayal.

  They heard it all over the neighborhood. They heard it in the distance, as the roar grew louder and closer. Soon it rushed through the corridors, preceding him as he ran up and down passageways, up and down stairs, through doors and chambers, as he swept the Arboretum from end to end, top to bottom, looking for her. The roar crashed through the Arboretum until the neighborhood was submerged in it, the torrent eventually trickling down the long black entryway and out the single door into the world outside. As the years passed, the roar slowly wound its way into the city. The months stretched into years, to whatever extent in the Arboretum years could be measured, and finally, after he’d prowled the corridors a long time, he came to accept that he’d never find her.

  When he’d drunk the last of her cognac and smoked the last of her opium, his charge became a wayward stagger, stunned and endless. When he ceased to be the marauder of the Arboretum’s food and drink and flesh, he was left to scavenge its dread and rumor and panic, stalking the maze that grew wider and higher as its core grew deeper and darker. He wandered the Arboretum for sixteen years when a vision came to him, and it lasted only a moment.

  He turned a corner of the long Arboretum night and saw Sally Hemings.

  He stopped where he stood, slumped against whatever wall was behind him. She came from an unlit auditorium, looking around carelessly with two large gray dogs following at her heels; then she saw the apparition at the end of the hall. She’d heard about the A R C D’X • 102

  naked giant who lurked in the Arboretum passages; there wasn’t much doubt this was he. And he was looking back at her, and she was younger and more fair than he’d remembered. Her dark hair had a touch of fire in it. “Sally?” he said.

  Her mouth fell slightly. She watched him in wonder.

  “Sally?” He started toward her. For a moment she was frozen, and then she shook herself free of the sight and sound of him, turning to vanish into the shadows.

  In his last hour inside the Arboretum, lying in a heap in the transformed flat where he’d lived with Mona, from a stupor he saw three more visions. Even he knew the first wasn’t real.

  It was Mona, standing before him, looking as she’d always looked. She was naked as she’d always been naked, and wet, her golden hair in strands on her bare shoulders as though she’d just climbed from the bottom of the sea. She stood in a pool of water.

  Even in his stupor he remembered it had been many years since she’d gone. Her head tilted to the side and she smiled, of course, and even though he knew she wasn’t really there, when she held out the stone to him, he reached for it. He closed his eyes and then opened them again and she was gone and his hand was empty.

  Dimly he nodded to himself.

  At first, he didn’t think the second vision was real either.

  It was Sally Hemings again, as he’d seen her in another part of the Arboretum. He closed his eyes and said her name, expecting she’d disappear as Mona had, and only the echo of her name would be left in the room with him; but when he opened his eyes, she was still there. “I’m not Sally,” she shook her head, “Sally was my mother.”

  He narrowed his eyes and tried to think. “Was?”

  “I’m looking for a man,” the girl went on, and now Wade could see she was indeed younger and fairer than Sally. “His name is Etcher. He wore thick glasses and had black hair …” and he laughed until the effort of laughing exhausted him, and he passed out.

  STEVE E R I C K S O N • 103

  He immediately knew the third vision was real. Three men stood before him; one had half a face. Where the other half had been, his mouth curled in a massive scar upward, the face having revolted against its own nature that it might grow back together.

  Through the hole in the middle of the face came a smudge of words. “Well well well,” he said.

  It had taken so much effort before that Wade wasn’t sure he had it in him to laugh anymore. But he couldn’t help it. Stupefied, besotted and trapped like a rat, looking up at the man with the hole in his face, he figured he might as well let it rip from down deep. “You don’t look so good, Mallory,” he guffawed from the floor where there was no floor.

  Mallory kicked him savagely in the head.

  Wade came to in time to see the sky above him, bearing down on him like the wave of the world as the three cops dragged him to the car. “Only the night,” he cried, “damn the light!”

  When Lauren was an old woman, she would stand on the Kansan desert and watch the leaves. They would dance in dark patterns across her feet, and disappear over the small white hills that filled the dead fields. It was several autumns before she actually walked from her porch to one of the small hills and, turning over a few handfuls of dirt, discovered the rail of a small bridge; she recognized it as a moonbridge, like the ones she’d seen in California years before, from which people had watched the trajectory of the moon across the night sky. The nights that the young girl Kara came to visit Lauren for supper, it was Kara’s gaze that found those skies, a mass of starry light for which the adoles-cent had a thousand names. Lauren fixed a simple meal and they ate on a plain tablecloth in the main room of Lauren’s house. They talked of Kara’s parents, who lived in Chicago and had sent their daughter to the ranch for children possessed by deep disturbances, odd visions, strange talents. Kara’s talent was renaming every star in the sky and following them as they shifted from one quadrant of the night to another; but as she grew older Kara progressed be-A R C D’X • 104

  yond the ravages of her deep disturbances, beyond the grip of her odd visions, beyond the enthrallment of her strange talents, all of which manifested themselves one last time on the night she found the bottle.

  She’d been waiting for the headlights of the brown bus that would take her back to the ranch, and had come across a star she couldn’t account for. When she ran from the porch it was not to the bus b
ut the unaccountable light, which she soon realized wasn’t a star after all but the glint of something lodged in the white earth.

  Kara brushed away the sand and dug the object from the small hill; the bottle had been caught, it turned out, in the railing of one of the old buried bridges. She held up the bottle and, in the light of every star in the skies above, saw two blue eyes blinking at her.

  The eyes in the bottle were old and sad and nearly blind. At first Kara thought she could speak to them and that somehow they understood her; in the same way that she could compute the language of stars, she might compute the language of eyes as they communicated in return. But she concluded they were useless, like blue fish in water, and she was only to be their keeper, and so over the years she kept the bottle wrapped in cloth that the blind eyes might be protected from the light. The bottle became a secret that Kara and Lauren withheld from each other, a pact of mutual betrayal maintained not by choice but because the secret was somehow too laden with meaning for either woman to divulge to the other. The only person Kara ever told about the bottle was the stranger who came down the road one afternoon as she was near-ing her fifteenth birthday; Lauren invited him to share a meal and spend the night in the back room. Georgie was around twenty years old, good-looking, even pretty, it seemed to Kara. His head was completely shaved and there crept up around his neck, above the collar of his shirt, a dark growth. At first Kara thought he was horribly scarred, until later that night in his room when she saw the tattoo.

  In the light of the small gas lamp by his bed Kara made her bargain, that if she could examine the nude woman with the bird’s head standing in a sea of fire on Georgie’s chest, if she could run her hands along the brilliant wings he wore on his shoulders, she would reveal something in return. In the light of the small gas lamp, she unwrapped from the cloth the bottle with the eyes, and STEVE E R I C K S O N • 105

  the man and girl sat looking at them together. Georgie understood this secret was very important to Kara, and in the bottom of his backpack he searched for another forbidden thing of his own to show her: it was a stone, flat on one side and rough on the other, a little larger than Georgie’s hand. “But look,” Georgie said, when he could see the girl was disappointed, and turned the stone over; on the rough side was written pursuit of happiness. Kara nodded, trying to appear impressed. “It’s a nice rock,” she offered, without conviction, “but you have to admit it’s not as good as a bottle with eyes, or even wings on your back.”