believe in his own faith. It was a measure of the power of that faith that it believed in him.
Operating through the Church bureaucracy, Etcher got himself another unit, and a unit for Sally in another circle in another zone.
He gave Tedi most of his money. By the time he had paid for the licenses of the units, nothing was left; he didn’t care about this. In his seizure of power he believed anything was now possible in his life, with or without money. In that collision called love, nothing was property, which was only the most banal currency of power.
Etcher was his own force of nature, not accountable to property or money or bureaucracy or the emotional blackmail of his marriage that had held his life hostage. It had nothing to do with these things but rather with power and the smashing of his own resignation when he began, with blithe temerity, to smuggle from the archives the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History one by one until, some six months later, the vault that had held them was empty.
The first night he went to see Sally, after she’d moved into the new unit, the door was answered by her tiny incarnation. She was three feet high, the replication of her mother but for the fire of her hair and her eyes, which were as blue as Etcher’s own. For a minute Polly stood looking up at him, considering his presence. Then she slammed the door. It took him another minute to work up the courage to knock again.
He hadn’t known many children in his life. He had never been much of a child himself, cocooned in the otherworldly blur of entirely too much reason and silence that missed the point of tantrums and manipulation. The child who greeted Etcher at his lover’s door was just beginning to learn the power of tantrums and manipulation, in a never-ending fight to win the fleeting attention of a self-involved father and haunted mother. She was ready to draw the line at Etcher. She recognized immediately that he was out of his element, and at her mercy. She was charming, hilarious, beautiful, brilliant, strange and shrewd, but she was not merciful STEVE E R I C K S O N • 139
and, worse for Etcher, she was two. Like any true barbarian, she’d ruthlessly exploit Etcher’s essentially civilized nature by which civilized people ultimately perish. Across this breach there was nothing left for Etcher and Polly but to bark at each other.
Struck by the vision of a dog in a forbidden children’s book that her father brought home from the Arboretum one night, Polly had the new interloper read her the story from front to back and back to front, over and over, while she barked each time a new dog made an appearance. She commanded Etcher to draw pictures of more dogs, rarely to her approval, until the circle’s obelisk was plastered with them, chartreuse and purple and aqua dogs wet with the spray of the sea and the dew of the Vog. “Dogs, dogs, dogs!” she chanted, marching around the room, until finally he rebelled: “No more dogs!” he snapped and Polly exploded in laughter, the sound of his breaking point music to her ears. Her laugh was so big for such a little person and so untamed that he laughed too, and the more she laughed the more he laughed, and the more she laughed in return. Over time he came to impose order. Over time he came to be for Polly the agent of order. In the presence of her mother she rebelled against it, but when it was just the two of them, Polly and Etcher, she submitted. Then her rebellions took the form of crawling up into his lap, peering into the mammoth blue eyes behind his glasses, and solemnly announcing, “I am not your friend.” He refused to mollify her frustrations.
He refused to attend to her tantrums or humor her manipulations.
He’d leave her in the middle of the unit screaming her head off while he went into the altar room and closed the door behind him, leaving it ajar just enough so that she knew she hadn’t been deserted.
As each crisis passed, a new order took hold. In the doorway of the unit Etcher would watch her fearlessly chase the seagulls across the white circle in the bleary sunlight from behind the clouds. In the blast of the white circle she’d lift her little arm and, with one little finger, point at the vision of the gulls in rapt silence, as though witnessing in them something no one else could see, a secret revelation glimpsed amid the clockwork of the real, between the gears and wheels, to be forgotten when she was older and knew more, and understood less. Between Polly’s order and Etcher’s, no-man’s-land was the time between waking and sleep, A R C D’X • 140
between real and dream, when the two-year-old lay in the dark and, if sleep didn’t come immediately, called out to anyone who was there. Her bed was filled with so many little animals it seemed impossible to Etcher anyone could sleep there. It also seemed to him a sign of the little girl’s possessive aloneness, in a little world that was always filled with people of whom none could be counted on to stay more than a passing moment.
More and more it came to be Etcher who was there when she called. Polly’s father was off with the theater, often unseen for days. Polly’s mother would take her jewelry box over to a neighbor’s and try to work, eking out an existence for her and her daughter. When Etcher took Polly in his arms and carried her out into the circle at night, walking around the obelisk while Polly searched the Vog for the sight of a star, she clung to his neck like someone who had felt the earth shift beneath her too many times and had learned within moments of her own birth how sooner or later everything passes away. She clung hard, silently. Sleep did not loosen her grip on him. And yet in the night when Polly called for her father and he wasn’t there, when she called for her mother and she wasn’t there, the appearance of Etcher at her side was small consolation. Etcher never quite got used to Polly crying at the sight of him because he wasn’t her father. He never got used to the fact, even as he came to understand it, that no matter what he might do for Polly, the sight of him could never delight her, could never make her heart soar, could never bring the spark to her eyes as did the sight of her father. He never quite got used to having the responsibility of being a father without its glory; he never quite got over the small fantastic hope that maybe she’d somehow gotten from him her blue eyes, which she shared with neither her mother nor father. He was never quite sure exactly when it first broke his heart to realize that Polly wasn’t his, and never could be.
There was no doubt that Gann Hurley adored Polly more than he adored anyone else in his life or world. He adored Polly for the way she was an extension of him; he adored her for what of himself was in her. Perhaps, Etcher thought, it was this way with all fathers. Hurley had married Sally, after all, for the child she would give him. He had insisted on the child and, because Sally couldn’t stand to be dispossessed, she gave him his child. Gann’s passivity was of a different strain than that of Etcher, who hoped to move STEVE E R I C K S O N • 141
through his own life upsetting it, or anyone else’s, as little as possible. Gann consumed lives. His passivity was the vacuum into which lives were sucked. If someone had pointed out to Gann that in choosing to have this child he’d made a fundamental choice about the rest of his life, a choice that entailed a fundamental sacrifice of himself, he would have been confounded if not con-temptuous; he would have considered the suggestion that something of himself had to be given up to fatherhood a blow to his integrity. Because his world spun so utterly to his own gravity, reasoning with him as to the wisdom of its various revolutions was like arguing with the sun, with which Gann felt a certain kinship.
Much later, when everything came apart, Gann would look at Etcher in disbelief and say to him, “You went through all of this for a woman?” Maybe this was his retaliation for Etcher’s having taken his wife, though Gann would never have seen the situation as Etcher’s taking his wife, even if that had been the situation, which it was not: it was that his wife had left him, a version of events Gann also rejected. But that Etcher had come slowly but surely to absorb Gann’s responsibilities, that Gann came to live off the fitful sense of honor that Etcher’s love created, was the price of Etcher’s folly. If lives were to be used, Gann was certain that Etcher’s particularly cried out for it. Gann obliged him. That it often came to be Etcher who put the food
in Polly’s mouth and the clothes on her back and a roof over her head was only the result of the role Etcher had chosen for himself; no one had chosen it for him. And if Etcher could never quite understand how Gann could live with that, he nonetheless couldn’t completely disagree with it either, the role being the appropriate price for what Etcher saw at the end of his particular night, the glimmer of light that might be happiness. He had felt himself turned alive by not one woman, but two.
Now, with all his power, he ran for that light. Every moment was shot through with its possibility. In so running he would hurl himself into a new life and a new Etcher, because he never before had really believed in happiness; his rush toward the light was the leap of faith of one who had never before had faith. In the pandemonium of his love he arrived at the archives late and left early, carelessly filing the forms and papers however it amused him. He never craved a drink. In her bed at night, in the contraband love A R C D’X • 142
stolen within inches of her sleeping child, he smelled the wine of her and the ash, he smeared himself with her until his body was black with the cinders of her soul. He got on his knees before her and hissed her name in the archway of her womb, and took in his teeth the bud of her blistered dreams. He never relented. He ignored her pleas to stop. He parted the fur between her thighs and slipped his mouth over her red silk bell that rang at the tip of his tongue. “No, please,” she moaned centuries away on some unfath-omable street of no numbers; and it was his new power that he loved her so much that her no meant nothing to him. On into the night nothing of him moved but his tongue in her, nothing shook his grip of her body or the seizure of her breasts when there trickled down the uterine avenue the gorgeous bitter oil of her black egg. The taste of it flooded his brain like the drug of a star.
He said her name. He said it into her, it wound its way up inside her. It hung in the center of her and encircled her heart, sealing off all means of escape, it caught in her throat and filled the back of her mouth. It bled into her eyes and she saw her own name before her written in his terrible alphabet. It crashed the barricades of what they believed and invaded the realm of what they dreaded until for him there was nothing anymore to dread except the limits of his voice to speak her name, the limits of his mouth to swallow what her body flushed onto his lips, the limits of his fingers to hold her fast until he’d pleased her beyond what she could bear.
And in those moments on his knees before her he understood how love made a person whole by obliterating him, how it made a person bigger than he’d ever been by taking from him everything he thought he valued, how it could touch a person with the biggest and most obliterating determination of all, the conviction that he could die for someone, that he would die for her.
For Sally those moments were excruciating. She couldn’t remember Gann having ever given her an orgasm or having ever given any indication he cared to; now she clung to some uncomprehending unworthiness, never believing herself deserving of the climax to which her new lover dedicated himself. When the no slipped from her lips at the surge of her body onto his own lips she had no idea what it meant, though she had the sense of having been pleased like this before, and of how the orgasm was at once a transcendence she never believed in and a capitulation she could STEVE E R I C K S O N • 143
never forgive herself for making. In the dark she tried to make out the place and time into which these climaxes hurled her. In the dark she tried to make out the name and face of the man who knelt before her. She was overwhelmed by his insistence on beginning his life anew. She could barely stand the burden of his happiness.
She could barely live up to the possibilities of her own happiness.
He gave everything and took everything, and since she couldn’t get over the feeling that, where he believed there was everything, there was in fact only nothing, the fraud of it filled her with remorse. She knew, in the dark delirium of his pleasing her, that she’d been borne out of being owned into this blackness where she owned him; and in that blackness the one clue to who she really was was there right in front of her, and farther from her reach than ever. And thus what she released onto his lips from the center of her was the echo of a distant memory that would determinedly abort the birth of the person in her who had sworn never to be owned again. She wouldn’t settle for happiness without meaning.
She clutched his black hair that fell across her thighs. When his tongue found in her the clearing where the small child waited, in the embrace of the small child’s arms was a small white baby seagull not yet strong or knowing enough to fly from the blinding white circle that engulfed it. Like the tragic alchemy of her face, by which her beauty was released by sorrow, Sally could only fly alone. She could not fly with the only lover she’d ever known who believed in her wings.
Three months after her affair with Etcher began, Sally became mysteriously ill.
It began in the middle of her, in the small of her back, as if the small white seagull was growing inside and beating its wings for release. For some time it was merely pain, and then one morning it overcame her and she collapsed. For an hour Polly wandered the unit, absently playing with this toy or that and crying to her unconscious mother; finally she opened the door and wandered out into the circle, where Cecilia the neighbor saw her. Cecilia went out to talk to the child. “Mama’s sad,” Polly told the woman.
“Well, let’s go see what she’s sad about,” Cecilia answered, taking the little girl’s hand. Cecilia found Sally shuddering on the floor.
When Etcher returned that night Sally was in bed, the pillow beneath her wet hair a ring of sweat. What dismayed him most was A R C D’X • 144
her whiteness. She was as white as anyone he’d ever seen in the Ice. He held her all night to conjure the blackness back into her; in her ear he coaxed her with advice, he beseeched her to breathe the night deep into her lungs, that it would flush her body with the tinge of twilight. The next morning she seemed to have rebounded.
But that night she was worse. Etcher returned from work to find Polly alternately poking at her mother’s somber daze and playing with her mother’s jewelry, having strewn them from one end of the unit to the other. Now Sally was white like ice itself. Her lips were cracked and her hair was matted; the black lines of her eyes and mouth were the very scrawl of death. One moment he’d touch her and she was clammy and cold, the next she was on fire, and she was only fleetingly aware anyone else was there. Polly began to cry. Etcher was astounded. He scooped up the child and wrapped her in the tiny pink blanket of her bedding and paced the floor with her as Sally moaned to the sound of her daughter. “Why is Mama crying?” the little girl bawled. After almost an hour she finally fell asleep. Sally croaked with thirst. In the fit of her fever she hurled her blankets off her. The sheets of the bed were soaked beneath her. Etcher lifted her from the bed and set her on the couch as he plundered the various drawers and shelves for more bedding. He changed the sheets and put Sally back to bed; now she was freezing. He buried her with blankets and laid himself across her. She shook violently beneath him.
It continued all night. All through the night Sally thrashed in a rage of heat and cold, as Etcher would lift her from the bed and remake it, changing the sheets that were wet with her sweat. His hope was that she would expel the disease in the torrent of her fever; he held her so close and she was so hot that their embrace seared him, and when he wasn’t holding Sally he attended to Polly, who woke hourly through the night and called to her mother.
When her mother didn’t come she cried. When she cried Sally stirred from the sleep that Etcher spent the night fighting for.
At dawn, when the little girl tumbled from bed and came over to pull her mother’s hair, Etcher bathed and dressed Polly, fed her some breakfast, and took her to the neighbor. “Help me,” he begged.
“Where’s her father?” Cecilia answered, taking the child.
For the first time Sally seemed to sleep peacefully in the morning STEVE E R I C K S O IS • 145
light. E
tcher, allowing himself to hope the crisis had passed, crossed downtown on the way to Central; he didn’t make his usual morning stop to see Tedi. At the archives in the early afternoon he was gripped by a sense of something ominous. He took the lift up to one of the offices on the next level, where he found one of the priests. “I have to go now,” he told the priest.
“What are you talking about?” the priest said, taken aback.
“I’ll return when I can.” He had found a new capacity for ruthlessness in his life. It was part of a new power that didn’t allow for second-guessing in the matters about which he’d found a new determination. When he returned home, a moment beyond the door’s threshold he discovered a metamorphosis taking place. Laid out on the bed she was drained of color or cognizance. The blood in her was as still as stone. She was lividly caught in some abyss that denied Sally Hemings had ever existed. He put on his coat and went to the next circle and found a doctor.
The doctor came back with Etcher. He took one look at the woman on the bed and said, “She’s dead.”
Etcher gazed calmly at the doctor. “Let me explain something,”
he answered, “she’s not dead.”
“It’s in the hands of God,” the shaken doctor protested.
“Let me explain something.” Etcher looked down at Sally and back at the doctor. “Things have changed around here, so you can’t be expected to have known. I’ve been running for the light, is the thing. I’ve been running and I’m almost there, and the light isn’t going to flicker out just at the moment I reach it. It’s not going to happen that way. You have to take into account the new power.
You have to take into account the new capacity for ruthlessness.”
(1993) Arc d'X Page 17
