(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  On the top tier of the Mountain, the squalling deputies of the convention below them debating the law of a new era and whether under that law blood flowed uphill, Maximilien sat on one side of Sally and on the other Georges, whom Sally called Jack. They were hyena and lion respectively. In the mornings she stared at Maximilien across his sitting chamber, waiting for whatever inspiration would unlock him from his impotence; because Maximilien meant to be a god the prospect of an erection only terrified him, every failure only convincing him anew of how godlike he was. Because Jack had no interest in being a god he slipped Sally from Maximilien’s bedroom in the dead of night and fucked her heartily, returning her to his rival’s chaste contemplation by sunup. I’ve exchanged a complete American revolutionary for a couple of half-finished STEVE E R I C K S O N • 283

  French ones, Sally laughed to herself one rainy afternoon, wondering if the two added up to something more or less than the one.

  She was watching, for what must have been the thousandth time, the earthbound glide of the guillotine in the place de la Concorde.

  In the gray wet sky the blade gleamed like a dead star doomed to fall from space again and again. When her ecstasy reached the point of delirium, when in her mind she had brought the knife down into Thomas’ body so many times she just couldn’t do anything more to free herself of him, Sally returned from the guillotine one twilight to stand in Maximilien’s atrium, her dress soaked with more blood than could ever dry to brown in a lifetime. Blood was on her hands, blood was smeared across her face. Maximilien appeared in the archway and looked at her. “What kind of monster have I become?” she asked him.

  “You’ve become,” was his cool answer, “the symbol of the Revolution’s glory, its purity of purpose and pitiless justice.”

  “It’s enough blood, Maxime. It’s been more than enough.”

  “There’s yet another head to drop,” he advised. “So take your animal pleasure from him tonight while he’s still around to give it.”

  It took every argument and entreaty, every tactic and ruse for Sally to persuade Jack to flee France that night and save his own life. Finally it took her promise to go with him, since he insisted he would not go without her. They lived together in London not far from the house of the American couple where Sally had stayed her first night after crossing the Atlantic five years before. What was left of the Eighteenth Century passed in Sally’s whispered counsel and Georges’ underground manifestos smuggled to France, where with his departure the Revolution had been deprived of its last chance to consume itself. With the collapse of the Bonaparte Putsch of ‘98 and the beheading of its leader, and the Revolution’s uninterrupted metamorphosis into totalitarian state, Jack lost heart, trying to pinpoint where everything had gone wrong, when the Revolution had first foreshadowed the terrorist tenet of the modern age, which holds that freedom is not the ideal of the slave but the luxury of the bourgeois, that one is not a victim in spite of his innocence but because of it, because the terrorist holds innocence to be the guiltiest and most contemptible of political infractions.

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  Mostly, in the tradition of all egoists, Jack mourned his own irrelevance. Sally could not mistake his resentment toward her for it, how he held her accountable; in retrospect he would rather have given up his neck than his place in history, though he could bear to give up neither if it meant relinquishing his claims on her body.

  “My God,” he sputtered one night in an exceptionally lucid moment, “does all of history think with its dick?” His happiest moment may well have been his last, on the eve of the Nineteenth Century, when he discovered that history remembered him after all. A stranger entered a tavern where he found Jack having supper. Throwing wide his arms the stranger exclaimed, in French,

  “Can this honor actually be mine? Is it really the great Danton I see before me?” and before Sally could take the ale from her 5

  mouth to warn him, Jack, literally flattered to death, expansively allowed as how he indeed was that person. The stranger smiled, pulled a pistol from under his cloak and blew Jack halfway across the room. Three other diners rose from their tables to reveal themselves as revolutionary grenadiers. “By the judgment of the Com-mittee on Public Safety,” the stranger pronounced to Jack’s dead body, and then turned to the shocked twenty-five-year-old Sally:

  “Citizen Robespierre sends for you, madame.” Six hours later she was crossing the Channel back to France.

  As it happened, her reunion with Maximilien was limited to his image on the edifices and banners and statues of Paris, where he had become deity of the Revolution’s secular religion. Sally and her guards arrived at the Luxembourg Palace just in time to hear the news that, at the moment the assassin’s bullet shattered Jack’s chest, Maximilien had clutched his own heart with a cry and tumbled from his seat at the very summit of the Mountain. Only the rush of several flacks to the podium of the convention hall broke the fall, prolonging life one more day until its final agonizing rup-ture. In her carriage the soldier who had shot Jack took the news with relative calm. “Robespierre is dead. Citizen Saint-Just is Dictator now,” he announced. “May I drop you elsewhere, madame?”

  and Sally allowed as how she’d just as soon be taken across the river to the Hotel Langeac. By the time her carriage reached the rue d’X her legend had transformed yet again, from the woman who had declined a queendom of slaves and a place as mistress of the Revolution to become instead a subversive’s whore. Perpetu-STEVE E R I C K S O N • 285

  ating this legend was not the folly of her choice but the sanguine conviction of it. In the Hotel Langeac she had a room with a fire-place and a four-poster bed, and a window that pointed the other direction from where Thomas’ balcony had looked the night he watched her run from the hotel for the last time as his slave. At night she could see from her window the streetlights of the boulevards in the distance and the carriages that brought the men to her. They left her gifts, small porcelain figures and little snow-storms imprisoned in crystal balls which adorned the shelf of her room.

  During the day she made jewelry, necklaces and earrings, and recalled her greatest creation. I invented a country, she had heard Thomas say, with the arrogance of a man who thinks it’s the business of men to make countries and the business of women to make jewelry. But it had taken her all her life to realize it was she who made the country and that the country had always been hers to make, that it waited for either her yes or no that afternoon in the place de la Bastille so as to be born one thing or the other, as an embryo waits for one chromosome or another to be born man or woman. It had taken all her life to hope that in saying no, thus denying herself the chance ever to see her country again, she had made it a purer thing. But she wasn’t so sure about purity anymore, having survived a revolution so obsessed with purity of conscience that its heart had gone first to stone, then to dust, before scattering to nothing.

  She couldn’t be so sure about America either. A visiting mystic brought her news in the first year of the Nineteenth Century about the slave wars and the mad philosopher general who led them after he’d sold himself to his own slaves in bondage. “No more,”

  Sally said, “I don’t want to hear any more.” But when her visitor was leaving and she extracted from him the obligatory gift, she begged that it be something of America; and though there was no real way for her to be certain that the deck of cards he produced was an American Tarot, as he insisted, she took his word for it, convinced of the momentousness of the sacrifice when the owner gave up a single card, without which none of the deck’s other seventy-seven had meaning. Tacking the Queen of Wands to her bedchamber wall, she looked at it the last thing on going to sleep at night and the first thing on waking in the morning and, lost in its A R C D’X • 286

  message in between, every night and every morning for the next thirty-four years until the day she died in the Hotel Langeac on the rue d’X at the age of sixty-two. The year was 1835, or year XLIII of what was once called the Revolut
ion but which Maximilien had renamed before his death, with the obvious self-referential implications, the Deliverance.

  In 1790 her legend swept Thomas home. Halfway across the sea the ship’s crew became alarmed to find Thomas missing from his cabin and nowhere on deck. He was finally located in the ship’s hull, looking for the deepest and coolest place to soothe the blinding pain in his head. When he wouldn’t leave the hull, living there like a rat all the way back to America, James Hemings took over Thomas’ cabin, sleeping in Thomas’ bed and eating Thomas’

  meals, reading Thomas’ books and drinking Thomas’ wine, making the arrangements for the rest of the voyage. At the harbor in Norfolk the ship was met by a carriage with black window shades, behind which a semiconscious Thomas hid from sunlight and America in equal measure.

  When he reached home and his slaves turned out to welcome the carriage’s return, their enthusiasm dissolved into confusion as minutes passed into hours with no one emerging while the carriage sat in front of the house. Again and again James would open the carriage door and peer in, the slaves watching as whispers passed back and forth between driver and unseen passenger, each exchange concluding with James shutting the door and the master declining to appear. Occasionally the slaves would lend the situation an increasingly tepid cheer as though to encourage Thomas out of the carriage; but finally the crowd simply dispersed, returning to their labors, the carriage left alone in the yard. Darkness fell. James unhitched the horses. He spent the rest of the evening with his mother, to whom he broke the news that she would never see her daughter again. Whether it was her wails of despair or simply the cold dead of night that inspired Thomas to make an escape, in the morning the slaves found the carriage open and empty, and word spread over the plantation that the master was finally in the house.

  The country was riveted by the news of Thomas’ return. Its elite flocked to his porch only to find themselves rudely rebuffed by James, who announced to all that the master would be receiving STEVE E R I C K S O N • 287

  no one. The plea of the country’s government that Thomas accept a seat of power went unanswered except for the laughter heard coming from the house’s darkest quarters. James ran the affairs of the plantation as he had managed the business of the oversea voyage. Several years passed. One summer day an erstwhile visitor to the plantation, undeterred by the rumors of the Monticello Mad-ness, rode up within sight of the house on a far hill and found his way blocked by a particularly grisly wall of wood and wire and thistle. It was the sort of fence constructed not as demarcation but barricade. Much more astonishing, the wall was guarded by armed slaves. “See here, boy,” the visitor ordered one, “let me pass that I may have an audience with Mr. Jefferson.” The slave cocked his musket with an aim as true as the light in his eyes. “Beyond this point is Free Virginia, your fucking majesty,” the black guard answered. “Go let your horse shit somewhere else.”

  Free Virginia? the man thought in horror riding away. By nightfall Richmond had heard and by dawn the rest of the nation. By week’s close the realization that Thomas’ plantation had been transformed into an armed compound was supplemented by bulletins of arriving black guerrillas from Haiti and Santo Domingo slipping through the South Carolina coast. By the end of the month the world knew that a slave army of hundreds, perhaps thousands, led by their silent pale general, was camped in the heart of America. By the last days of summer the terrified white citizenry was mobilizing in haste as the country’s new president went to Virginia to talk to an old friend.

  The president arrived at dusk in a carriage of his own, protected by superfluous guards who could be made short work of by the black troops that spread over the hills beyond the barricades.

  Watching from his carriage window the president saw bonfires on the knolls, cotton fields completely uprooted and cleared away for training grounds, free blacks and former slaves with guns and what had once been the plantation slave quarters converted to barracks, food bins and munitions sheds. A white flag flew from the president’s carriage top. Another white flag was draped across his chest, though whether it provided a better target than sanctuary became a joke that traveled so quickly among the slavesoldiers that James Hemings had already heard it by the time the president reached the door of the house.

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  The house was utterly dilapidated. Doors hung on their hinges and shutters from the windows. Vines from the growth outside slid through the guest chambers like snakes. The ballroom had been gutted to become a strategy room, with a huge topography of the countryside laid out on a table and a flurry of markers depicting lines of attack so ominous the president averted his eyes, afraid he’d see something that jeopardized his life. “Doesn’t matter, Mr.

  President,” James assured him, “nothing there your white ass would understand anyway.” James led the president deeper into the house until they came to a back room where two armed sen-tries stepped aside to let them pass.

  The dead smell of the room was overpowering. The president stood in the dark long enough to believe his eyes would never adjust to it. A dim form finally began to appear on the other side of the room. “Could you please light a candle?” came a familiar whisper to the form of a second guard, who lit a candle to reveal the form of yet a third guard. The white flag on the president’s chest soaked up the candlelight like a sponge, glowing back.

  “Hello, John,” the man seated on the other side of the room whispered.

  The president stepped forward. “My God, Thomas,” he answered.

  “How’s the country these days?” Thomas didn’t look directly at the president but shielded his eyes from the dull throb of the pinpoint of candlelight.

  “The headaches,” John surmised, remembering.

  “It’s not even a headache anymore, John. There are rare moments when the pain actually goes away, I mean moments, ten or fifteen seconds, and you know what I think when that happens?

  For those ten or fifteen seconds I’m afraid I’ve died, because it’s the only thing I can imagine taking away the pain. It’s become the kind of pain that reminds me I’m alive.”

  “The country is damned terrified, to answer your question. Are you planning to take over with your slaves? You never fooled me about your appetite for power, Thomas. The others, Abigail, well, she’s always been irrationally fond of you, with a preternatural faith in that part of you that was always so good at being all things to all men. But you resent it that I’m president, I know that. It’s been like this between us ever since we’ve been friends. You re-STEVE E R 1 C K S O N • 289

  sent it deeply.” He whined, “I deserve to be president.” He stepped closer. “What the hell has happened to you?”

  The tawny circle of the candlelight widened now to reach Thomas’ brow, and it was with a shock that John then saw the other man was naked.

  “Thomas,” he croaked, his throat becoming thick, to which Thomas raised his hand to his eyes once more and John heard the clanking of the chains and saw the shackles on his wrists. “Oh no,”

  he said. He looked at the two armed guards standing to each side of the naked white man. “Oh no, Thomas.” He looked around him for James Hemings, unsure whether he was still in the dark of the room by the door. Vehemently he cried at the two guards, “This is an abomination. This is an outrage.” He lunged at Thomas as though to rip him free of the chains, but Thomas raised his hand just a half a second behind the guards raising their guns; whether Thomas was signaling John to stop in his tracks or the guards to refrain from shooting John wasn’t clear, perhaps even to Thomas.

  “Please, John. My head hurts badly enough. No one has taken me prisoner. I sold myself.”

  “What?” said the president.

  “It was all above board. As legal as a transaction can be.” He turned to one of the guards. “Is there any wine?” he said. “Would you like some wine, John?” The guards didn’t move or answer. “I can’t take this light anymore, please snuff the candle.” The guard on Thomas’ le
ft leaned forward and, with a quick puff, blew the room back into darkness. Instinctively the other white man recoiled. “It’s the final resolution of the dilemma of power,” he heard Thomas say in the dark, “to be at once both king and slave. To at once lead an army and be its waterboy. To command every man and woman within miles, and be subject to the whim of any little colored child who wanders in and orders me to dance like a pup-pet, or make a funny face, or wear something silly on my head such as the peel of an orange or an animal turd. Sometimes I just wish for a woman, is all. Sometimes I wish for just one, who in turn may ride me chained through the hallways of the house like a beast of burden. I wish there was just one woman who could come into the dark and arouse me, and drain the pain from my head to my loins through her lips. But there’s no woman who A R C D’X • 290

  can do that anymore, try though I might, beautiful though one might be.”

  “You’re mad,” John’s voice cracked.

  “You haven’t even asked what my price was,” Thomas sulked.

  “Ask me what my price was.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “The first price was too high, of course. The first price was too impossible. It was her, naturally: she was the price. When they refused that, I would have settled for a single night with her, and when they refused that I would have settled for an hour. But she simply wasn’t part of the bargain, was she? They couldn’t have sold her to me even if they wanted because, you know, it’s a funny thing, but she had entirely other ideas about it. So finally I settled on a bottle of wine. It was a good bottle of wine. You should make that clear to others when you go back, it was a good bottle of wine.

  You should make sure they understand it was a bottle of French vintage that James brought back from Paris. I drank it in an hour.