(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  On maps of outer space, after all, there are the vague shadows that hint at black holes for years before scientists confirm the discovery. In such a way they must have seen in the present the vague shadows of the future.

  On the other hand the American writer never believed, as others argued, that the scientists knew something they weren’t telling everyone. People said that more in hope than cynicism. Erickson didn’t believe the scientists knew much of anything at all. He suspected they knew less than everyone, having finally bumped up squarely against the limits of their vision. Whatever would emerge on the other side of the temporal wormhole fell as much in the imaginational sovereignty of philosophers and fantasists, theolo-gians and crackpots, witches and pornographers and tunnelers: it would be the most purely democratic and totalitarian event ever, having rendered everyone equally subject to its mysteries and revelations. That, of course, was why Erickson had come to Berlin.

  STEVE E R I C K S O N • 227

  Because Berlin was the psychitecture of the Twentieth Century, and if he or anyone should emerge on the other side of Day X in the new millennium as anything more than a grease skid on the driveway of oblivion, they were bound to all come out on the Unter den Linden, the only boulevard haunted enough to hold all of it: dictators and democrats, authoritarians and anarchists, accoun-tants and artists, businessmen and bohemians, decadents and the devout each contradicting their lives with their hearts, SS troops with blood running from their fingers wearing the wreaths an American president laid around their necks and GDR soldiers, wrenched from the vantage point of their towers pulling huge blocks of the Wall behind them, led past the Unter den Linden’s grand edifices of delirium and death through the Brandenburg into the Tiergarten by an Aframerican runner with a gold medal around his neck who sprinted all the way from Berlin 1936 into the Berlin games of the year 2000, followed at the rear by a mute army of six million men and women and children utterly white of life but for the black-blue of the numbers their bodies wore, and at the rear the Great Relativist himself doing his clown act, juggling a clock, a globe and a light bulb, tangled in a mobius strip and with a smile on his face that said he for sure knew about Day X anyway, a conspiracy of one.

  Erickson received her last phone call the night of the summer solstice. It was around the same time she always called, except as the days had gotten later the night had not yet fallen outside his window, where instead there was the haze of twilight on a street that ran perpendicular to the sun, and therefore never saw either its rise or fall. “Hello,” she greeted him.

  “Hello,” he answered.

  “Do you want me?” she asked, and it seemed appropriate that she would betray her accent most on the word want.

  “Not on the phone anymore.”

  There was silence. “It’s so much safer,” she said.

  “No more on the phone.”

  He knew from what she said now that she’d been thinking about it too. “It was so random like this,” she explained. “I called several numbers that first time. Sometimes I got a woman, sometimes I got a man who sounded … wrong, and I hung up. Then I called your number, and when they answered they said it was a hotel and they A R C D’X • 228

  asked what room, and I just said a room number, and they put the call through and it was, by chance, you. I could have dialed any other number instead. A digit higher or lower, or when I got your hotel I could have hung up, as I almost did, or I could have given a different room number, or the number for a room that didn’t exist, or they might have asked for the guest’s name, and I wouldn’t have been able to give them a name. And it seems quite perfect like this, so perfectly random, so perfectly by chance.”

  “I see.”

  “But you don’t want to do it on the phone anymore.”

  “No.”

  “Tomorrow night I’ll go to a hotel not far from yours and take a room. I’ll take a room hidden away from the street that’s very private. I’ll call you from there and tell you the number. I’ll let the hotel manager know I’m expecting a guest and for you to come straight up. I’ll leave the door of the room unlocked. The room will be completely dark. The blinds will be completely closed, and the lights will all be off. I’ll be there. Once inside the door you’ll wait in the dark for me to come to you. I’ll be naked. You can undress, or I’ll help you. We won’t speak at all or turn on the light. We won’t say anything.” She paused. “Do you have a tag?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll wear mine too.” She said, “You’ll fuck me then. We won’t say anything. It will be like the phone, where we see nothing and have only our words, except we will say nothing and have only our bodies. When we’re finished I’ll find my clothes and dress and leave you in the dark. We’ll never turn on the light.”

  “OK.”

  “It will be dark the whole time.”

  “The sun sets later now.”

  “I’ll call later, after the sun sets.” She hung up. Erickson put the phone back in the cradle. He was up for several hours, with that humming insistence his body couldn’t contain, and when he woke the next morning after a bad night’s sleep, on X-191, the day was slightly more than itself, a fraction of X-190 floating freely and haphazardly across the calendar. Erickson opened the window of his hotel room as he usually did and stood back from the light and peered around him. The room was blurred around the edges, and the light outside had an unfamiliar shimmer and he thought some STEVE E R I C K S O N • 229

  half life of the night’s dream was lingering in his eyes. But he kept looking around and the blur was still there, around the furniture and the doorway, and the shimmer was still there in the light and he knew time had escalated almost indiscernibly, that everything was now caught in the pull of X and just beginning the inexorable rush to the event horizon at millennium’s end. At the bottom of the stairs, what was left of the hotel’s pet cat lay at his feet, torn to shreds during the night. Erickson looked around for some other sign of the Berlin veldt that had invaded the lobby, a rhinoceros perhaps, a python, the beasts of the zoo having begun the final displacement of furry domestic companions. The manager was nowhere to be seen.

  By the human logic of time one should always walk, Erickson told himself, from east to west in Berlin. From east to west one walked from Old Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate into glassy synth-Berlin, which had been built expressly for the purpose of rejecting the claims and biases, the suppositions and ghosts of history, the Berlin that in the glare of the nuclear mirror had created itself anew from the ground up and freed itself from history once and for all. But the last time anyone walked from east to west was ten years ago, when everyone on the one side fled to the other, when everyone abandoned the history of Berlin which, in the fashion of the Twentieth Century, had become one more commodity of ideology. In the 1990s the seduction of Berlin was that one always walked from west to east, against the sun and in the face of memory, and then took the U-Bahn back. Now in the new blur of the day the American took the same walk, west to east, maybe on the theory that the city would lose its blur in the process. In Berlin all the small necessary things had broken down while the larger, more ludicrous enterprises carried on: the trains had stopped running at Zoo Station since the last arrival of refugees from the Russian-Slav civil wars, but in the windows of the top floor of the KaDeWe the lights of the government still burned at night, and in the distance to the south of the city construction continued for the 2000 Olym-pics, an obsession since the beginning of the Nineties that Berlin refused to relinquish regardless of whatever New Year’s party eternity had planned.

  So on this day Erickson walked from west to east, and with the fall of dusk went to take the U-Bahn back. He ducked into the A R C D’X • 230

  Kochstrasse station and descended underground; he was waiting on the platform for the train when he noticed a familiar figure at the other end.

  Georgie was slumped on the bench staring straight ahead. Ten-year-old newspapers blew past his feet, and he was so sti
ll he might have been dead. Across the tunnel from where Georgie stared, Erickson saw the small hole in the U-Bahn wall that the Frankfurt banker had pointed out; it was as though Georgie were waiting for a father’s face to appear in the hole at any moment. A little voice in Erickson’s head said to leave him there, but he walked over. He didn’t speak to Georgie but waited for him to look up. Georgie didn’t turn to look until the American sat down next to him.

  He turned to look at Erickson and there was no sweetness in Georgie’s face at all. There was nothing in his face of childlike serenity; it was like the night after the two of them had left Georgie’s flat when the sight of the Neuwall in the street had transformed the young Berliner’s perverse earnest innocence to the malevolent fury that tried to kick the wall down. Except that at this moment, as he sat waiting for a face to appear in the hole of the U-Bahn tunnel, Georgie’s transformation had already gone several degrees further. His face was dark like a swarm rising from the other side of a hill, the shadow of having stared too many nights into that hole in the side of the U-Bahn tunnel and having waited too long for a dreamed-of reconciliation that was only met minute after minute and hour after hour and night after night by nothing but the hole’s void. Now the sockets of Georgie’s eyes were so hollow that all Erickson could see in them was something so black it would frighten even the night, a feeling so lightless it would startle even hate. If Georgie recognized the American at all, he showed no sign. In his face there wasn’t the slightest chance a father’s face would appear, there wasn’t the slightest sign of a Tunneler in the catacombs of memory, not a human sight or sound flickered even in the scurrying of someone’s retreat into his own recesses.

  Erickson got up. He got up right away. He turned and started walking the other direction, toward the exit of the U-Bahn, where he ascended back to the street and walked, for a change, east to west, which was what he should have done in the first place. For STEVE ERICKSON • 231

  some reason he felt in his coat pocket for the small piece of the Wall he’d bought at the Brandenburg, uncertain whether it reassured or frightened him to realize he’d left it back at the hotel. For a while he thought it was his imagination, for a while he dismissed it as paranoia, but in the last dark block before Checkpoint Charlie he knew the footsteps he heard right behind him were real, and that they were Georgie Valis’. By the time he reached the end of the block the footsteps were all around him, and then he was surrounded in the street by six, then eight, then ten of them, members of the Pale Flame with their heads shaved and their shirts off and their chests bare and each of them with the same tattooed design, a creature with the body of a naked woman and the head of what appeared to Erickson to be a strange bird, rising from a sea of fire against a backdrop of lightning. On all their shoulders they wore tattooed wings. It was as though all of them had been summoned with the snap of fingers, a muttered command, and Erickson turned to Georgie in time to take the first blow, and the last that he would ever count or understand.

  And memory broke free once and for all, floating above him like the balloon a child lets go. In that moment the writer was neither quick enough for escape nor afraid enough for panic. He shouted out only once and then succumbed to the only hope left him, that the storm of the assault would blow over him and move on.

  Five minutes later Georgie said to the others, “All right.”

  They stopped with the kicking and beating. They shone in the twilight, six eight ten fiery birdwomen glistening in righteous satisfaction. One of them pushed the body over and they stood examining it. Georgie tapped the writer’s face with his shoe to see if there was a reaction, and when there was nothing he started going through the dead man’s pockets. He found a wallet and a hotel key, but not what he was looking for. “Shit!” he yelled in frustration, slapping the body alongside its head. For a while he sat slumped in the street pouting at the dead American while his troops stood by waiting. Georgie looked at the address on the hotel key. “Know where this is?” he said to one of the others.

  “Savignyplatz.”

  “I’m going,” Georgie said.

  “Not real smart, man,” one of them advised timidly, after a pause. “Someone will see you.” He pointed at the body. “If the A R C D’X • 232

  cops ask questions they’ll wind up at that hotel sooner or later and someone will be able to tell them he saw you.”

  “If the cops ask questions,” repeated Georgie. “What fucking cops? I don’t see any cops. Cops don’t even pick up all the fucking dead animals,” waving his hand at the landscape around him, though at that particular moment there weren’t any dead animals to be seen.

  “This isn’t a dead animal.”

  “Tell that to him,” Georgie said. “Tell that to the cops.” He looked at the hotel key and got up off the ground.

  “Want us to go with you?”

  “No. I’ll see you later.” He headed back toward the U-Bahn in time to find that his shirt had already been lifted from the bench where he’d left it, and to take the same train the American had planned to catch. He rode the U-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse and changed to the S-Bahn heading in the direction of Wannsee; after several more stops he got off and changed cars because people on the train were looking at the halfbird halfwoman figure of the Pale Flame on his bare chest, before glancing away when he returned their gaze. He disembarked for good at the Savignyplatz station and wandered around the neighborhood looking for the American’s hotel. It was dark when he found it.

  He was trying to think what he was going to do about the hotel manager. But there was no hotel manager that he could see, only the remains of a dead cat on the stairs, and so Georgie went up the stairs to the room number that was on the key. He opened the door and went inside. While there was something thrilling about the invasion, like a child finding a secret world just beyond the back-yard fence, he wasn’t much interested in exploring: he quickly perused the room, ignoring its other contents until he found what he was looking for, after not so much effort, in the second drawer of the table next to the bed.

  It hadn’t been disguised or hidden, it was just there in the drawer, the little shard of Wall with the impossible inscription on the wrong side. Georgie sat on the American’s bed contemplating the stone for a while, and then finally returned his attention to the things he’d overlooked. In the same drawer where the stone had been was the American’s passport and traveler’s checks, cash including German marks and Dutch guilders and French francs, a STEVE ERICKSON ‘ 233

  vaccine tag on its chain with a key in the lock. Georgie unlocked the chain and put the tag around his neck. He stood in front of the hotel-room mirror looking at himself with the tag on. He took it off after a few minutes because the tag kept dangling across the face of the birdwoman and a tag wasn’t all that cool anyway, an insinuation of stigma that was intolerable for a Pale Flame leader.

  He went over the rest of the room. He took several of the American’s cassettes, Frank Sinatra and a Billie Holiday album, after he threw away the picture of the singer. There was a reggae album Georgie discarded with disgust, and a tape of soul music that the American had apparently compiled personally, the names of the artists written on the label in what must have been the American’s hand; the American had titled the cassette / Dreamed That Love Was a Crime, a line he took from a 1960s song in which a jury of eight men and four women find the singer guilty of love. He went through the books that were stacked on the hotel dresser, though Georgie never read books, Faulkner, James M. Cain, a 1909 hard-cover edition of Ozma of Oz, and several that Georgie didn’t recognize until he realized from a picture inside that the author of the books was in fact the man he’d just left dead in the street an hour before. On the cover of one of the American writer’s books was a picture of a city buried in sand, a black cat in the foreground beside a bridge, a huge white moon rising in the blue night sky. Georgie tore off the cover and threw the rest of the book away. He went back and forth between his new treasures, particularly the stone and
the picture of the buried city, and had put the vaccine tag back around his neck and was studying it in the mirror again when the phone rang.

  He answered it without hesitation. He said nothing, just listening to whatever was on the other end with the same curiosity he had had while looking through the writer’s possessions. He listened as though the sound at the other end of the phone was another thing that had once belonged to the writer but was now his. At first there was silence, in the duration of which the voice on the other end of the line decided to take Georgie’s own silence as a confirmation of something: “The Crystal Hotel,” she finally said in English with a German accent, “room twenty-eight,” and hung up.

  Georgie nodded to the dead line as though this made perfect sense. He put back the phone and took from the closet one of the A R C D’X • 234

  American’s shirts, which he didn’t wear but rather used to wrap the cassettes and the piece of the Wall, and then tied it to his belt.

  He folded the picture of the buried city and put it in his pockets with the passport and traveler’s checks and cash and the wallet he had taken off the writer’s body. He left the tag around his neck.