(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  When the young girl saw the old woman standing in the doorway of her house gazing out at the sand and muttering a strange man’s name, Kara knew this was the moment Lauren began to die. A week of uncollected mail sitting in the box by the road greeted Kara’s next visit; inside the house she found Lauren slumped in her rocking chair. After Lauren had been buried among the white hills of the plains where she lived, Kara examined the mail and discovered a letter sent to the old woman many years before when she lived in California. How the letter finally found its way to Kansas, how it had taken so many years to get there, was nearly as mystifying as the contents of the envelope itself, one letter enclosed inside another which in turn enclosed another, until the answer at the core simply said I’m waiting. But whoever was out there waiting for Lauren would now wait forever, and for Kara it was something like a child’s first understanding that everyone dies, this lesson of how love can wait in the heart unanswered.

  Kara left Kansas and traveled west. Because her gaze had been fixed so long on the stars, she barely noticed the strange shimmer of everything that passed her, how as she headed west everything was blurred around the edges in its rush to an abysmal moment.

  She continued traveling until she came to a river, where she took a boat navigated by a young man with white hair growing on his arms like fur. The man had been sailing the boat for fifteen years, the length of her own life, back and forth between the shore and an island less than a mile away; from the deck of the boat she looked for the stars in the sky. They were gone. For a moment, between the island and the shore, there was nothing except the boat in the fog on the water. “But why have you come?” the boat-man asked when they reached the island and she was about to step A R C D’X • 106

  ashore; unseen in her coat, she cradled the bottle with the eyes.

  “To bury something,” she murmured.

  The answer was still on her lips when she woke. It was still in her ears when she sat up in bed in the dark of the strange motel.

  She stared in alarm at the strange man sleeping next to her with the white hair on his body that grew like fur; she had no idea who he was or what she was doing in this motel room. She only knew that whatever her life had been before now was consumed by this night’s dream, and that the only remaining trace of that dream was some forgotten thing peering out at her from behind glass, twin blue ghosts joined at the soul by the last thread of memory. Immediately she rose from the bed to check her coat, which lay on a chair, as though it protected something. But nothing was there.

  Before dawn she slipped from the room and caught a bus at the side of the road.

  The bus drove through an endless forest. Watching from the window she couldn’t remember having ever seen, on the ground and in the trees and hovering in the sky, so much ice. On a far hillside four days west, Kara lived in an observatory as caretaker and chief stargazer. If it was now beyond her waking consciousness to name any stars, she accepted that beneath that consciousness lurked the names that didn’t need to be remembered in order to be known. In the isolation of the observatory she felt safe enough in her exposure to the heavens to walk the dark nightlit cavern of the concrete bubble naked, the bright pink of her bare body the only violation of the black-blue sky and its gray outpost. In this way she felt the freedom of loving something that couldn’t be expected to love her back, until—after nearly ten years had passed—she met a man who insisted on loving her more than she could stand.

  He lived on the outskirts of the village below the observatory.

  During the week he worked odd jobs in the village, delivering groceries for his mother’s store and building doors with his car-penter father. On the foothill trails that he had walked all his life, his path crossed Kara’s one dusk; the trees were sheathed by the glistening silver webs of the iceflies, which emerged from their cold white cocoons every year when the winter melted. The young man had been thinking about a wedding some years before that had taken place beneath these same trees, not far from this particular trail. It was a harsh, wincing memory. He’d been the wedding’s STEVE E R I C K S O N • 107

  best man, a particularly bad best man, ignorant of the rituals of best men, of obligatory dances with the bride and toasts to the happy couple. No one had told him about being a best man; and in the oblivious anguish of his own love for one of the bridesmaids, a girl he would never see again after that wedding, he’d taken her down this same foothill trail as the wedding party awaited his presence in growing confusion and fury. His dereliction of duties as best man became for him, years later, the evidence in his life of his own destructive innocence. He never cared much for weddings after that. Years later, when he had left the village after his disastrous affair with Kara, in a white seaside city far away on the morning of his own wedding, the only thing about his pending marriage for which he felt some relief was that at least he wouldn’t have to worry about his transgressions as a best man, being merely the groom instead.

  Between Amanda, the bridesmaid with whom he’d walked on the foothill trail, and Kara whom he met on the same trail eight years later, there was Synthia. Beautiful and shattered, cruel and totalitarian, Synthia was the woman that divided his romanticism in two because, of all those he loved, she was least worthy of it.

  Prostrate in her adoration of an iron fist, and for the way it might piece her together according to its own design after smashing her to bits, Synthia despised the young man for the way there was no iron in his fist, no iron in his heart. Rather his heart was soft for her: she couldn’t tolerate it. Rather his hands were gentle on her body: she held them in contempt for how they were respectful of her, for the way they refused to violate the most fragile of orifices, refused to draw with exquisite brutality the starting line of his pleasure at the line where hers never began. That he was the only man who ever gave her an orgasm was something she only hated him for all the more; it was something that only made him all the weaker in her eyes. Synthia was the beginning of the end of his idealism about love, though that idealism would be another fifteen years in dying. She was the end of the division in him between love and sex, and of his naive conviction that the two—the protests of philosophers notwithstanding—didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. It was the end of his idealistic supposition that freedom wasn’t the price of love, and that slavery wasn’t ever the choice of those who had the freedom to choose.

  A R C D’X • 108

  Amanda, the girl he had loved on the foothill trail not far from the wedding party, was the last he loved chastely, and the last who wasn’t beautiful. He would have a lot of time, living out his later years as an old man inside the rim of a volcano, to consider why something as corrupt as beauty so held him in its grip. He’d have enough time to consider that perhaps, in his blindness, neither Synthia nor Kara was ever as beautiful as he thought. His blindness was too profound even to know he couldn’t see, until in the dim light of the lamp by which he read at night he found himself holding the pages only inches from his face. It was just like history to teach him what love couldn’t. He went and got some glasses. He couldn’t stand for Kara to see him wearing them, as he crashed into the chamber of the observatory that last night and found her naked below the sliver of night wedged in the observatory dome, the fine hair of her arms on end and the nipples of her breasts erect in the cold. He crept up behind her and before she could protest enveloped her in the warmth of his arms and lit her womb with the fire of his cock up inside her and it wasn’t until afterward that she sent him away, not because she hadn’t surrendered willingly to the way he fucked her but because, no longer able to resist seeing her, he had pulled from his coat pocket afterward his new glasses and put them on.

  She looked at him. She grabbed him with fistfuls of his black hair and, staring at his face on the floor of the observatory, recoiled.

  With his blue eyes grown huge by the magnification of the glasses, there came back to her the memory of two eyes in a bottle dug up from beneath the sands of a dream
, and all the heartbreak of that dream which she’d lived her waking life to avoid. She sent him away that night without explanation or comprehension. She was left more naked to the night than she’d ever intended, whispering

  “Etcher, Etcher” as she’d heard an old woman whisper a strange name in a dream’s doorway on the other side of a dream’s river.

  And a little more of me died. I was twenty-eight. There were moments in the months that followed when I didn’t care if I lived or not, too dead to take an active part in ending my life, too alive not to let the days roar past me until the very sound of them had passed as well, and only in the subsequent quiet could I identify the stirring far inside me as something resembling survival. Some might have said I was weak. I never felt weak. I never felt weak STEVE E R I C K S O N * 109

  that I could have loved so much. I never felt weak that I could give myself over to love, or throw everything away for it. I never felt small that love could be so much bigger than I. It was later, when others might have said I was strong, that I felt weak, later when no love was as big as I that I felt small. Later when, for the ten years that passed after Kara, there was no possibility of a love like that again in my life, and nothing left to me but to write my books in pursuit of more commonplace glory. To tell the story of everyone else’s dreams but mine: Kara’s dream and Lauren’s dream and Wade’s, glib dreams of buried cities and haunted jungles and flooded streets, the erotic fevers that change everyone strong enough to change but me; until finally I changed too. And only when the ten years had passed after Kara, only when I’d given myself passively to my marriage in the conviction that I had metamorphosed from the dead childhood of love’s idealism to the dead adulthood of loss’ resignation, only when from the dead wisdom of such an adulthood I had come to believe in nothing but the palpable reality that could be drunk from the hinge of a woman’s legs, was I surprised by love again. She was black and white. She was quiet and wild, her voice watery and melancholy, her smile sweet and hushed. She was the most beautiful woman I ever knew and for as long as it would last I was a force of nature. And if I had never really known her in order to write about her here, then I would have dreamed her, on and on into my nights with no sight of her ever to break the spell and cast another in its place. Maybe that would have been better. But she wasn’t a dream. And until there’s another dream, and until there’s another spell, this is my last book.

  Wh en his affair with Kara ended, Etcher packed his things, settled his affairs, and went to say goodbye to his parents.

  They lived in the center of the village. They had so long assumed Etcher would eventually leave that, when the time finally came, they had gotten used to the idea he’d never leave at all. Etcher’s A R C D’X • 110

  mother had moved to the village many years before to be with Etcher’s father; she came from a warmer part of the world several thousand miles away, and it took the rest of her life for her blood to thicken with the cold. Etcher’s father had been born in the Ice, brooding and stormy. There were only the three of them, mother and father and son, each always something separate unto him or herself, the family a home base they returned to emotionally from their daily routines. The night before his son’s departure, Etcher’s father got quietly drunk at the dinner table. Having arrived at the point where he believed his dignity was in jeopardy, he excused himself to go to bed. “I hope you’ll remember me,” he said to the stunned Etcher, “at my best, feet of clay and all,” and it was unbearable to the son how in that moment of parting his father considered himself to be a failure in his son’s eyes. Etcher watched speechless and confused as his father disappeared through the bedroom door, with nothing more to be said between them—

  which is to say with everything to be said between them—until fifteen years later, at his father’s deathbed when it was too late.

  If Etcher inherited both his father’s brooding fatalism and kindness of heart, he resisted the lessons of life that teach one to be harder. In some ways Etcher taught himself to be softer. And in defiance of life’s lessons that teach one to dim the light in oneself and fight the dark, Etcher intended to do neither. He hated the resignation that life insisted on. He listened, with one ear pressed to the passage walls, to the secret life being lived by himself just on the other side of the life he lived consciously. There was no telling how much good he might have done or how much evil he might have committed had he not been so burdened with a conscience. In the end what he feared most was not his own pain but the pain of others, for which he might bear some responsibility.

  What he feared was not what his heart could survive but what his conscience couldn’t, which included the smallest infraction—his graceless negligence as a best man at a wedding, for instance. Time and again he was ready to believe the best of someone else. Time and again he was ready to acknowledge the worst of himself. Hating the resignation that life insisted on, he would come to be led by his conscience to resign himself completely to life, before saving his life at the expense of that conscience.

  At the nearest station, eighty-five miles away, he boarded a train STEVE ERICKSON • 111

  heading south. He was on the train for six days. He was on the train such a long time that at the end, when he stepped from his car onto the station platform, he continued to feel it traveling beneath him; and later from his hotel window, while the floor of his room continued to move beneath him as well, the blue obelisks of the city vibrated like the forests that accompanied him so endlessly they had seemed to him always the same forest, moving with the train. After so many trees the obelisks were a relief, spires of sea and rock, and he was exhilarated by the sight of them before he came—like everyone in his new city—to dread them.

  Soon after he arrived he went to work for the authorities. For a while he was a clerk in the immigration bureau, where he did nothing but file forms nine hours a day. Eventually he was moved to a position in the archives at Church Central. This was but his first crime of resignation. Over the next ten years, as a dead man traveling surreptitiously in the body of a living one, like a convict on the run with a forged passport, he committed so many more such infractions that he lost count. Sometimes in the course of a day or night they numbered in the hundreds, small deferences and numb capitulations including the most sensual, the drink that took him indifferently past drunkenness, the woman he fucked beyond his attraction to her. His aggression itself was passive, the inexorable rush of a gale into a vacuum. He was in the perfect city for deadness and resignation. As he was exhilarated the day he arrived by the blue obelisks of Aeonopolis, so as well he was placated by the repetition of the sea, so as well he was reconciled immediately to how the city’s clerical powers had coopted the tedious questions of spirituality and meaning. So as well he came to anticipate the sirens of the morning and twilight and the time spent in the dark of the small altar room of his unit, where he sat praying to no one and feeling nothing and being no place.

  For all of this deadness his memory could never abide the melancholy of another’s misery. It was in the early months of his arrival that he walked out of a bakery one morning to be met by an old beggar so hideous and pitiful that when he shoved his open palm in front of Etcher and pleaded for a piece of bread or a coin, the other man was frozen where he stood, even as his mouth was full of bread and his hand full of coins. Etcher fled without giving the man anything. All day he tried to work in the rubble of his A R C D’X • 112

  moral paralysis, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and, claiming sickness, left work to return to where he’d last seen the beggar.

  The beggar was no longer there. All night Etcher looked for him.

  Exhausted, he finally found the beggar at dawn; into the stunned beggar’s hand Etcher stuffed a wad of money, and fled again. After this episode he never again left empty any human heart that gaped like an open wound. He gave money to whoever asked, as though to ward off the thrusts to his own heart by the things that made him ashamed of life. In the same way he taught hims
elf to become softer, so the immune system of his conscience withered away, unprotected by the antibodies of experience. Among a crowd of hundreds at the teeming Market, a nation of beggars immediately identified him and closed in, no matter how he might hide his face or avoid eye contact, until it seemed they were at his doorstep at dawn, until they had mobilized as a guerrilla army monitoring his various routes, hobbling in pursuit on crutches or little wheels.

  It was both the ultimate act of resignation and the ultimate answer to his conscience, his marriage to a schoolteacher for whom Etcher fulfilled an increasingly desperate agenda. Her name was Tedi. She was small and pretty like a doll if not like a beautiful woman, her face framed by gold ringlets. She had a mind for the numbers of things and their mechanics; beneath her sweetness she was obsessed with doom. Her past was strewn with men whom she regarded as having betrayed her and against whom she plotted her vengeance, in exact calculations and with a precision like the plumbing of a building. It didn’t hurt that the small school in town where she taught her little pupils was situated amid the most wrathful and indignant of Primacy’s graffiti. Gazing at the messages around her she took inspiration. But because even Tedi understood that vengeance was a short-term satisfaction, and because her temperament for it didn’t quite match her instincts, she was only left with doom in the end and the realization that its mathematics was more inevitable than any she might concoct to thwart it. Thus she hid in her unit from passing meteorites that might fall from space, searching her out as though with radar; and hidden from the danger of the outside world she was left with the doom that lurked in her like an infection.