(1993) Arc d'X
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Sally didn’t forget. It wasn’t that she was afraid of the volcano, it was that she was liberated by it, as the entire city had been, though perhaps only Sally saw it this way. She saw it as a sign, the voice of the earth, because something had once happened to her in its mouth, once she had seen herself there, though she didn’t actually remember this. She didn’t actually remember the vision of herself and Etcher in the little house on the volcano’s inner ridge. She just knew that the volcano was speaking to her and that her dream of fleeing to the forests of the Ice in the north, far from the barren lava fields of Aeonopolis, was more within her grasp than it might ever be again. It was within her grasp not because she had the means to grasp it but because, momentarily, she had the will, and because it seemed to her the only way she’d ever be free of her life.
“Take me away from here,” she begged Etcher.
It was one thing to enter the city. It was another to leave. There were two ways to go. They could go by sea on a boat, or on land by train. If they went by boat they went illegally. If they went by train they would have to get visas from Central. Occasionally Etcher heard about those who slipped into Desire, crossed the zone and made their way past the peripheral highway to where, if they were STEVE E R 1 C K S O N • 163
fast enough, they might jump the train. But there were almost always police on the train until it was far from the city, and with Polly such an option wasn’t viable anyway.
Once—it now seemed long ago to him—Etcher had known power. Once, before Thomas, there had been a change, a shake-up. Now in the clarity of his new glasses he saw his power as a stalemate. Police followed him everywhere. They waited for him to lead them to the red books. In fact he did lead them to the books, once or twice a week in the beginning, but they didn’t know this; and then his visits became less frequent to Tedi’s school, where amidst the graffiti that ran off the blackboards the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History sat in plain sight, unnoticed and ignored, on the bookshelves with the bibles and references and texts, available to any child who might pull one down and read it like a collection of forbidden fairy tales, with those pages torn from them that Etcher returned to Primacy each day. The books that had once empowered Etcher now imprisoned him. They made it impossible for him to leave. The power Etcher derived from the books ended at the point that Primacy retrieved them or believed it would never retrieve them: Etcher could threaten to toss them into the sea or the volcano, and it made no difference.
Thus Sally would have been trapped as well, except that Etcher set her free. He had watched her writhe too long under the spell of her ghosts and dreams, wriggling for a freedom she could never believe in. He would have to believe in it for her. And so his stalemate with the Church left him only the power to strike the best bargain possible, which was two visas out of the city: one for Sally, and the other for her child.
Standing on the platform at Vagary Junction, eyed suspiciously by the everpresent police, watching the two women of his life wave goodbye to him from their compartment window—the older one in exhilaration and the little one in small confusion—as the train lurched into its own smoke and the Vog in the distance, Etcher actually told himself he’d soon join them, as they planned. He told himself that with them safely out of the city he was free to maneuver more cleverly, more clandestinely, to slip from beneath Primacy’s gaze and eventually follow Sally and Polly to the northern Ice. It was, at first, almost a relief to be alone. He hadn’t been alone in a long time, since before his marriage to Tedi. It was a A R C D’X • 164
relief to bear only the burden of his own oppression. He told himself that in the three or four or six months before he made his own escape, Sally would free herself for good, with no one to save her, and then what she and Etcher had together would redeem itself.
In the back of his mind, since perhaps the first day he’d seen her, he had been telling himself that there would at last be someone to save him, and that it was she.
He received letters from her and replied, unobstructed by the authorities. He had explained to her that while Primacy would allow a correspondence it would have to be a discreet one; their emotional revelations had official limits. She could, for instance, say that she missed him. It was all right, he assured her, to say she missed him. And her first letters were filled with it, along with the news of the house she’d found high on a glistening fjord in the sunlight beyond the treetops, for which Etcher sent the bulk of his pay each month. She sent back news of the house and her heart’s longing for him, and he saw it all in the lines of her letters, the magnificent solitude on the high fjord and Polly’s Sally-in-minia-ture with her hair of mysterious fire and her eyes of mysterious blue running across the white expanse beneath the consuming sky.
In response, something in him cracked.
Beneath the weight of his own palatable relief, he was cracking to a relief he couldn’t bear. It disoriented him in relation to everything he believed about himself and Sally and what they had; it disoriented him in relation to his love. He found his conscience betraying his heart, which is the worst of treacheries, and it only drove him crazier that he couldn’t be with her. He was cracking beneath the approaching destitution that would signify a failure bigger than money, that would signify the final psychic failure of Sally’s struggle to be delivered, and of his struggle to deliver her.
He was cracking beneath the surveillance of the Church which now, rather than letting up, intensified, because in having freed Sally from the city he had freed her, officially, from the matter of a murder in a shabby room in a downtown hotel. In a way that would never have occurred to Sally, in a way even the priests didn’t understand, Etcher had accepted the weight of the crime or, more precisely, the weight of its irresolution.
STEVE ERICKSON • 165
His success at obtaining the visas for Sally and Polly, then, was more impressive than he knew. In the end Primacy had decided Sally was, officially, expendable. The ramifications of the unsolved murder of an unknown man in a hotel bed had reached that point, officially, where it was riskier to pursue the case than to close the book on it. The strange and violent disappearance of the investigating police officer in the case had made this not only politically preferable but bureaucratically easier, though the police force itself hadn’t been the same since. Two years later the case remained rife with undercurrents. The Church didn’t like undercurrents. Undercurrents, this one or that, always rose to the surface sooner or later, as happened when Etcher came to the priests and asked to take a leave to go north.
He had still, four months after Sally’s departure, not devised any plan of escape that seemed feasible. Everyone knew Etcher was a security risk; no skipper would take him by boat. If he went into the Desire zone the cops kept something of a distance, but the highways beyond the zone and outside the city were always blocked. The trains were always under guard. As Etcher became increasingly frustrated by this imposed immobility, he and Sally had a crisis through the mail. She wrote that Polly missed her father terribly and asked if Etcher could obtain a visa for Gann.
Etcher didn’t understand why he was responsible for Gann. He didn’t understand why Gann, who fancied himself an outlaw, should now receive his help. Let Gann apply for his own visa, he answered Sally. But of course it wasn’t just Gann but Polly who would pay the price for Etcher’s bitter refusal, to which Sally responded with bitterness of her own. After further correspondence he relented, and went to Primacy for yet a third visa that would be in a name other than his own. And so it was now Gann who left the city, traveling north to live in the house for which Etcher sent money every month as Etcher remained behind to support the three of them. I’ve become a joke, he thought to himself. I’ve escorted love across that border beyond which it becomes self-contempt.
So the urgency of his leaving grew, and peaked in the two weeks during which there arrived from the north three extraordinary messages. It was difficult to say which was most startling. The first ARC D’X • 166
In the most direct way possible, as direct as Sally’s chaos could be, she was telling Etcher not to come.
The second message was from Kara, the only other woman he had ever loved as he now loved Sally. More than ten years after leaving her naked beneath those stars wedged in the observatory dome, he suddenly and out of nowhere received a letter calling him back.
The third message was from home. He knew, before he read it, what it said. He knew, before he read it, his father was dying.
He had begun to know, as imperceptibly as the priests had begun to know it, that nothing had quite been the same since he took from the Church vault the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History. After his confrontation with the priests during Sally’s illness, something began to fray the psychic fabric of this city that existed outside time. A trolley car disappeared. An obelisk moved several feet. In a back alley off the corner of Desolate and Unrequited, in the very spot where the arcs between the Church and the volcano and the Arboretum intersected, official graffiti gave way to heresy, which rewrote itself not simply in the present but for all time: not only was there a different message today and tomorrow, but yesterday as well, and the day before, stretching back as far as anyone had ever noticed. Memory was, flash by flash, undoing itself. When the pages of the volumes began to trickle back into the vault, one or two or five or six at a time, depending on Etcher’s whims, the process of this fraying was, for the moment, suspended. Possibly when all the books had been returned to the vault, the trolley car might reappear. The obelisk might return to its place. The official propaganda of the graffiti at Desolate and Unrequited might reassert itself over the surreal nonsense that usurped it. But now, when Etcher came to the priests for a leave to travel north and was refused, the pages stopped and the fraying began again. The priests, sitting around their crescent table discussing the situation, suddenly turned to find one of their col-STEVE E R I C K S O JV • 167
leagues had vanished from his chair. Over the course of the day alarm inevitably evolved into panic: another of them might be gone with the next sunrise. “I’ll be damned,” the head priest thundered at the others, “if I’m going to wake up tomorrow to find I’m not here!”
A solution presented itself, in the form of a surfacing undercurrent. His name was Mallory and he was a cop. His face was a swirl of scar tissue, having been smashed against the wall at the corner of Desolate and Unrequited two years before. Coming from Mallory the solution was so literal-minded as to be, in the current situation, imaginative. Etcher would voluntarily give himself over to the authority of the police and travel north in the company of several officers, who would present papers signed by the prisoner to anyone challenging their jurisdiction. Mallory volunteered for the assignment not out of a devotion to duty nor even to slavishly impress the priests (as was Mallory’s wont), but because he was convinced that Etcher would lead him to Sally Hemings, and that in turn would lead to the man who had obliterated his face and then disappeared off the face of the earth like a trolley car or displaced obelisk or a message on the wall.
Sitting in a church hospital for months picking the scabs off what used to be a nose, Mallory had had plenty of time to figure this out.
It was obvious the big black called Wade had gone off the deep end for Sally Hemings the minute he laid eyes on her. He’d made certain she understood she was looking at a murder rap and then cut a deal with her, probably that afternoon in the car driving her out to her circle after springing her loose from jail. He probably pointed out to her how she now owed him everything and how everything was exactly what he wanted; then he spent several days putting together a plan, jumping a train or boat out of the city an hour after he’d left Mallory crumpled in the alley, heading north where he’d been waiting for her all this time. This guy Etcher wasn’t anything to the Hemings woman but a connection on the inside, a glorified file clerk who fell under her spell just like Wade and could get her out of town. Now she was stiffing Etcher: Mallory knew this because the police read the fucking mail. Now she was saying she wanted to be alone.
Mallory knew that Wade and the Hemings woman were up there together right now. They had figured the priests would never let A R C D’X • 168
Etcher go, and they were almost right; what they didn’t figure was how smart Mallory was. They just never figured, Mallory said to himself, what a smart guy I am. Now they were in for a big surprise.
Now let’s see Wade try to hide, up there in all that fucking Ice.
A t f i r s t it was a trick of the wind, the smell of the smoke. In all the years Etcher had lived in the city he had never smelled the smoke of the lava fields, the wind from the southwest blowing the wine of the sea through the streets and in turn the smell of the smoke north. Now he was heading north on the train, in the company of a police entourage. They had seized half a car for his transport. In the dank light of the train one cop sat in the seat across from him, another in the seat behind him, another by the door nearest him and the fourth right next to him. The one next to him was the cop who had come to take him off to Central the time Sally was sick. One didn’t forget him. His name was Mallory and his nose was missing and the whole bottom of his face lurched upward into a scar; it was sometimes impossible to be sure what he was saying, words leaking out of various orifices in the front of his head like the sea that sprayed up through fissures of the earth along the coast or the Vog that rose from the lava fields.
The chains that the cops called a rosary bound Etcher to Mallory by one wrist and to his seat by the other. In the pitch of night, whenever one man slumped into sleep, the slip of his hand would yank the other man awake, and this went on until the dawn, each man falling asleep in time to wake the other man. When Etcher needed to use the toilet Mallory accompanied him. When his heavy new glasses fell from his face into his lap, he had to wait until the cop in the seat across from him put them back on.
It was in the middle of the night that Etcher smelled the smoke.
The smell began unpleasantly enough but then, no matter how far behind the train left the black fields, it got worse. It went from a distinct unpleasantness to a horrific stench, and it was then that Etcher knew the smoke wasn’t a trick of the wind anymore, it was a trick of the soul, and there was no tricking the soul back. It was STEVE E R I C K S O N • 169
then he knew this wasn’t just the smell of the volcano but the smell of what waited for him, a moment far north to which his whole life rushed. This was the very smell of his odyssey into the black and it was the smell of the end, of something dead in him that was caught in this particular crevice of time and wasn’t to be dislodged, but would go on decaying just beyond his reach, just beyond his capacity to work it loose from where it was caught and grasp it and hurl it out of his life forever. When the smoke grew unbearable, when he was afraid he was either going to suffocate or vomit where he sat, he lunged for the train window to open it, jerking Mallory so hard from the slumber that hissed from the various punctures of his face that the cop believed Etcher was trying to escape. Mallory yelled a strange strangled yell. “My God, that smoke!” Etcher cried. The other cops jumped to their feet, subduing Etcher and wrestling him back into his seat. “Please, open the window,”
Etcher begged them, and the smoke grew so powerful in his lungs, and his hands were so restrained by the rosaries, that he would have crashed his face through the glass of the window in order to get some air.
Mallory raised his fist to level a blow at Etcher. He stopped only at the last moment, the other cops yelling because the priests had made it clear Etcher was to come back in one piece. “Open the window,” Mallory muttered, lowering his arm. They opened the window. But what came through the
window wasn’t fresh air but a new billow of smoke, like the smell of someone being burned alive.
“No, close it,” Etcher moaned, now trying to find his glasses which had fallen off.
After six days, only twenty minutes from his home town, Etcher suddenly knew, with a calm utterly mysterious to him, that his father was dead.
He knew he would reach his home and his mother would be waiting for him in the doorway, and she would say, “He’s gone.”
And that was exactly how it happened. They came to his old house on a back road of the village, Etcher in chains with his police guard, Mallory opening the front door for him without knocking. Etcher stepped in to see his mother standing there as though she’d been waiting for him. Two other women were in the room crying. For a moment Etcher’s mother was bewildered by the police and the rosary, but then she just said, “He’s gone,” the way he knew it A R C D’X • 170
would happen; he’d died only half an hour before, at the moment Etcher knew it. The son held the mother, Mallory hovering over them obscenely by the dictates of the chains. After another moment the doctor came out of the back room. “He’s still back there in bed if you want to go see him,” his mother said. “He looks like he’s sleeping.”
He did not look like he was sleeping. Etcher and Mallory went into the back bedroom and Etcher’s father was propped up on the pillows in bed, and he looked like he was dead. Every impulse of life had fled his face, which was the color of sand; his mouth was slightly open. Perhaps if he’d looked as though he were sleeping, Etcher might have remained to say something to him. He might have said goodbye, for instance; he had thought, on the train in the smoke, of the things he might say, but there didn’t seem anything that had to be reconciled. Wasn’t there always something that had to be reconciled? Wasn’t there always some final breach to be bridged between parent and child, particularly when they’re so different, when Etcher knew his father had long before stopped trying to identify the ways in which his son refused to live between the incandescence to one side of him and the abyss to the other, attempting instead to straddle both, to place one foot in each?