Etcher was filled with regret not that there was something he hadn’t had the chance to say to his father, but that his father might have needed to say something to him. When, at the sight of his father’s body, Etcher brought his hand to his mouth with a gasp, he pulled Mallory into the gesture like a marionette.
What Etcher most dreaded now wasn’t the smoke of his father’s cremation. What he dreaded was that the billow of the cremato-rium would be something entirely different from the smoke he had known for the past six days, something purer and conveying a color of the earth, and then there would be forced upon Etcher the realization that the dark smoke that had pursued him from the city was something else. There was no ceremony. Later Etcher was vaguely troubled by this lack of ritual, though he wasn’t sure why, since all three of them in his family had always hated ritual, and the manner of his father’s death was therefore in keeping with the spirit of his life. Over the days that followed, Etcher became enraged by the chains. He threatened to intentionally hurt himself.
“I’ll rip my hands off,” he told Mallory. “You can explain to them STEVE E R I C K S O N • 171
in Central how I’m supposed to return their precious books with my hands ripped off.”
The whole time Etcher was with his mother, however, Mallory didn’t take off the chains. He didn’t take off the chains until several days later, when Etcher went to see Kara.
The observatory was as good as a prison, Mallory figured. It was made of stone, with no windows, and only a single set of double doors on the northwest side. The only other way to leave the dome, as far as Mallory could see, was to jump from the top; he didn’t really think Etcher was going to risk that. He knew Etcher wasn’t going to risk anything before getting to Sally Hemings. So at the observatory he took the rosary off, more because he was getting sick of it himself than out of consideration for Etcher, for whom he had no consideration one way or the other. The other cops waited outside the door and Mallory patrolled the dome’s stone circumference, just for good measure.
As they had approached the dome, Etcher didn’t smell the smoke at all, only the surrounding trees and the bite of the air. He had nearly gotten to the doors of the observatory when they opened suddenly and she presented herself, as though to take the offensive against time and confront both of them with the ways in which time had deformed them. Her hair was shorter. She was a little heavier, and older of course. He wore the glasses—if not the same pair—that had so appalled her that last night. He hadn’t come to answer anything between them, and he’d brought no questions. Perhaps he wouldn’t have come at all if he hadn’t believed the smoke was the pyre of everything else ending.
He knew Kara smelled her own smoke. He felt, in the grip.of her hand as they sat beneath the opening of the dome looking up at the sky, the desperation he recognized as someone smelling smoke. As calmly as Kara pretended to receive him back into her life, he recognized the way everything was tinged with this desperation: it was all around him in the trappings of a rendezvous, in how she would have taken off her clothes and lain naked beneath the night as she had once before if she hadn’t believed it would send him running from her. They talked. He told her, in terms he hoped were explicit enough to warn her but implicit enough to protect what was private, about Sally. She told him, in terms she hoped would obviously belie her assurance that she expected noth-
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ing of him, about what had happened to the sky. It had changed.
She had looked up one night a couple of months before and had noticed it immediately. It was just after that dusk which everyone crosses sooner or later, when their remaining days recede before them and solitude suddenly reveals itself to be ghastly and endless.
She looked up and it was a different sky. It had different quadrants and different stars. There were different worlds and new mortifying suns. Tonight she clung to Etcher, and to what he couldn’t give beyond some requisite tenderness that he would have owed to anyone, but especially her.
When she slept, he lay in the dark of the observatory staring up at its concrete shell, and on the inside of the dome watched all his memories. They were big and in color, and roared out of so many years before in details he would have thought forgotten beyond the possibility of remembrance. He reveled in the luxury of being able to raise his hands to his eyes without the shackles of the rosary, and take off his glasses and cover his eyes, hiding his face away from the light of the memories on the observatory dome. To his astonishment and horror he found himself silently calling his wardens outside to come drag him away. It seemed that, for once, Mallory took forever. In the dark Etcher whispered to Kara, “It’s time to go,” and had to pry her hands loose from his neck.
‘ ‘M y f a t h e r is dead” was the first thing he said to Sally when he saw her. Etcher and the cops had continued north across the expanse of the Ice, the trees disappearing and the terrain becoming bleaker and whiter until there was nothing but endless winter, somewhere near the top of the world. The fjord where she lived was jagged and stark. Over its cliffs, which encircled her house, rolled the clouds, each releasing another. At the edge of the fjord gorges cut their way through the earth; the bottoms were filled with water and in the distance there trickled across the ice veins of blue light. A vague gray solstice tumbled across the sky.
Polly was the first to see Etcher when he arrived; she ran toward him yelling his name until she got close enough to notice the chains STEVE E R I C K S O N • 173
around his wrists. She looked at him confused, not sure whether something was wrong with him or whether she had done something wrong and the chains were somehow for her. When she saw next to him the man with no face, she cried. She turned and ran back toward the house.
“My father is dead,” he said, not yet sure whether he had left the death of his father behind him or brought it with him, or whether he had stashed it in the snow somewhere along the way, to be preserved and recovered later. The abrupt gasp Sally gave might as easily have been to the news as to the sight of him. She was flooded with emotion to see him. She had missed him utterly.
In the midst of the precious aloneness she had hoped to find, even with her child and the father of her child in the same house, she had still missed him. She had written him not to come in part because she knew that if she saw him again she might not be strong enough to be alone without him.
He knew this too, though it didn’t much mitigate his rage. He was alive with indignation over her betrayal. He was still sorting out the matter of responsibility for the fact of his life having become a shambles. The shambles was all the more devastating for the promise of two years before, when his affair with her had begun; he remembered the moment of resolution when he’d left Tedi, ruthless in insisting on his right to be happy. He’d been so certain everything was within his control. Now nothing was in his control. He stood in the middle of Sally’s bedroom that was to have been his own as well, facing her and chained to a cop who made little children cry at the sight of him, the father of her child in the room upstairs lying in front of the window that Etcher had dreamed of lying in front of, watching the sky and glaciers gliding past that Etcher had dreamed of watching; and everything couldn’t help but seem ridiculous, everything couldn’t help but appear as though it had come flying back in his face, in return for his having tempted the absurdity of life by thinking he had any power over it.
It was just like Etcher to wonder if this humiliating result hadn’t been in the cards all along. He believed just enough in the retribu-tion of destiny to wonder if this place to which he’d now come wasn’t the natural price to be paid for every mistake and every resignation, for every brutal truth, every broken heart.
It was a wonderful house. It made everything worse, that it was A R C D’X ‘ 174
a wonderful house, because on first sight of it his deepest dream took on dimensions, took on the form of stone and wood, walls and doors, crossbeams and rafters. His deepest dream rose
with the staircase that ascended the middle of the house to the upper room and panorama that swept before its western wall. In the southern wall was a door that led out onto the roof of the lower floor. Outside, next to the door, was a ladder. The ladder led up onto the roof of the upper floor, and on the upper floor the world spilled out at the roofs edges, north and east and south and west, in a rush so huge and elemental that even when the winds were still one was afraid of being swept off by the sight of it. Goodbye, one automatically whispered to everything on top of that house, where everything was too big for one to really know whether it was a farewell to the world or to what one believed or to the sheer delusion that, standing on top of the world, one was important at all. It seemed an act of preposterous arrogance to stand on top of such a house with the world thundering down in its blue yowl; and that was the greatest lost dream of all, the loss of that preposterous arrogance, because it was the arrogance of someone in the grip of love’s power, and Etcher knew he wasn’t that powerful anymore.
He begged Mallory to chain him to Sally’s bed.
Mallory complied, not as a favor to Etcher but because he had to find Wade. He knew Wade was there. He knew Wade was hiding beneath the stairs or in some back room. He had begun looking for him as soon as they stepped off the train in the little station twenty-five miles away; he’d asked around in the tiny village. All the way by bus across the desolation of the Ice up to the house, he’d had his eyes peeled for the logical hiding places. But there were no hiding places. There was only ice. When the little girl cried at the sight of him out in the snow and ran back to the house, Mallory hurried behind her pulling Etcher and the other cops along, convinced the kid would tip Wade off and give everything away. Mallory rosaried Etcher to Sally Hemings’ bed and ran halfcrazed throughout the house, flinging open closet doors and shoving aside furniture under the rather bemused gaze of Gann Hurley, who was waiting for Sally to bring him his lunch and clean the bathroom and wash the dishes and make his bed. The cop with no face turned the house upside down until he finally reached the top room and the ladder outside. Staring up the ladder, he knew there was STEVE E R I C K S O N • 175
no other place for Wade to go. He knew he had him trapped. This frightened Mallory because, confronted with this moment, he was alone; and he didn’t want to meet Wade alone. He called down to the other cops, who couldn’t hear him. He screamed until he was hoarse and finally one by one they came outside the house to look up at Mallory on the roof of the first floor. “I’ve got him!” Mallory cried, pointing up the ladder to the very top of the house. The cops, looking at the top of the house from the ground, couldn’t see anyone: “There’s no one there,” one of them yelled up to Mallory, who ignored him, squawking from every open blister of his head until the other cops came back into the house and up the stairs and out onto the roof of the first floor. “One of you stays here,” Mallory said, “and the other two follow me,” and he started slowly up the ladder step by step until he reached the very top. When the other cops heard his scream they panicked, believing Mallory had found Wade after all. They didn’t know that Mallory was crying at the sight of the world, at the sight of the streaming red sky, at the sight of time cascading toward him in rapids.
Downstairs in the bedroom, Sally and Etcher listened to Mallory running throughout the house around them. For a long time they sat together on the bed in silence, following with their eyes the sounds that moved maniacally from place to place. What’s he looking for? she finally asked. I don’t know, Etcher answered. By the time Mallory had gotten to the very top of the house, his cry of alarm seemed very far away, and neither Sally nor Etcher was paying attention anymore. Each was now listening to his and her own thoughts, trying hard to hear the other’s. Etcher could hear Sally’s. He had become so adept at hearing her thoughts he almost heard them, he believed, before she thought them. He knew she was thinking that maybe she didn’t want to be alone after all; he knew that with him sitting right next to her her confusion had taken yet another turn. Perhaps she expected him to answer this confusion. Perhaps she expected him either to beg her to let him stay—she didn’t really understand yet that the police wouldn’t have allowed this in any event—or to confess that it had all become more than he could bear and he was leaving her to her confusion alone, as she professed to want. At any rate she waited for him to share some of the responsibility of this confusion: and she couldn’t hear, among his thoughts, his refusal.
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“Maybe,” she said, “you should just come here like we planned.
Maybe we should do what we planned all along, and you should come.” He didn’t answer. “You have to tell me what you’re thinking,” she said. “Are you angry, are you sad? Are you relieved? Do you want to yell at me, or hit me?”
“I could never hit you,” he said.
“But I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
She didn’t know, and he could hear her thoughts so clearly.
“You’ve needed to be free since the first,” he said.
“I tried to tell you …”
The sound of Mallory’s searching had stopped.
“All of my life,” she said, “he’s been there,” and he almost said Who? because he knew it wasn’t Mallory and he knew it wasn’t Joseph and he didn’t believe it was Gann. “All my life I could feel him back there, where I remember things that never happened, in this dream that seems to have replaced everything. He’s been there all along. I don’t know who he is. I can barely see him in my mind. I can barely hear his voice. Until now he was there to blame.
He was there as the one who wouldn’t let me go. But that’s not it anymore. It isn’t him that won’t let me go, it’s me. Once, when I had the chance, I chose something else—love or safety or the home that made me its slave, I don’t know, but I chose to go back with him and be his slave and because I made that choice, because I loved him or because I was afraid to be without him, because I was afraid to be free, everything changed. Everything about my life changed. Everything about his life changed. Time and the country changed. Did I return with him just so I’d have one more chance to kill him? Did I return with him just so I’d have one more chance to be raped by him, or to be made love to by him, or to wonder which was which? Why am I like this, Etcher? Why isn’t it enough to love you and be loved by you? I know I’m a fool to let you go. No one ever loved me like you. You saved my life. You pulled me from the fever. You adored me more than I deserved. Tell me I’m wrong.
Tell me this is a mistake.”
He said nothing. He had decided, he had had lots of time on the train to decide, that unless she knew for certain she wanted him with her, he had no arguments left for her. He wasn’t going to talk her into anything. He tried to raise his hands to his eyes; he needed STEVE E R 1 C K S O N • 177
to take off his new glasses. They had filled with so many tears he couldn’t see through them anymore.
But the chains that bound him to her bed caught his hands and pulled them back. He was left at the mercy of her hands. It was worse, somehow, to be at the mercy of her free hands. They now took the glasses from him, from the eyes of her own bound slave, and wiped the tears from his face for him, again and again.
Two weeks after he died, I had a dream.
I’d been expecting it. I hadn’t really mourned my father; I’m not sure I have even now, years later. It may be that I mourned some passing of him before he died, or it may be that the loss still hasn’t sunk in, or it may be that on some deeper level I already understood that everything is loss, that our lives are a race against the clock of loss, a race to lose the vessel of our lives before we lose everything that vessel contains. Surely when my mother goes, should she go before me, the aloneness that’s almost become a psychological vanity for me, the aloneness I like to think I understand so damned well, will take on dimensions I never imagined; because then the loss of the only two things that all the moments of my life have had in common will leave me utterly alon
e either to know who I am—as I’ve always flattered myself I do—or to the desolation of a deluded life. In that case I’ll be at the mercy of either God or his antithesis, not the Devil, since I don’t believe in the Devil, but Chaos, against which the only weapon God has ever given us is memory.
In this dream about my father I was walking through the corridors of a rest home. It was a very pleasant rest home. The windows were open and the wind that came through was balmy and a pale lovely blue and beyond the windows I could see the trees swaying.
As I walked the corridors I saw to the sides large rooms with rows of clean crisp beds, all of which were empty, until I came to the room where my father was. He was sitting up in one of the beds.
He looked fine. There was color in his face and he appeared tran-A R C D’X • 178
quil and happy, perhaps more than I’d ever seen him before. He greeted me. But I distinctly remembered, I completely understood that he was dead; in this dream my sense of time was grounded and I understood he’d died just two weeks before. “Oh,” I said to him, “this is a dream.”
This is not a dream, he answered.
For some time we discussed this, my father gently pressing the point that this was real. And nothing had ever seemed more real. I could feel the wind through the windows and see the trees swaying outside, and my father was as vivid as he’d ever been. On his lap he held a small plate. On the plate was a small pastry. He gave me the pastry and said, Here, taste this; and I did. He said, You can taste it, can’t you? and I could. He said, You can taste it because it isn’t a dream; and it was true that it didn’t taste like any dream, it was true that I couldn’t remember ever having been able to taste something in a dream before, taste being the one sense that’s beyond my imagination. But I still wouldn’t believe him. What my mind had come to believe in as the reality of his death was too strong for my heart, which was confronted with the reality of his talking to me now, and offering me a pastry.
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