Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

Sally turned from the door. She ran past the gray dogs and the porch, back up the side of the crater toward the ridge of the mountaintop. She ran down the other side of the mountain toward the black plains. She hadn’t a thought in her head now of water or prison or slavery. Later she would have liked to believe it was a dream; she’d have given anything to believe it was a dream. But at this moment she knew it wasn’t a dream and so she ran parched and exhausted and half out of her mind. She never looked back at the crater or the house or herself standing in the doorway watching her go; when she finally reached the bottom of the mountain she went on running and stumbling across the black plain. Sometime in the night a wagon picked her up. Sometime in the night she felt and heard beneath her the turning of wheels; she felt and tasted on her lips the trickle of water. Into the night she didn’t dream or think at all. The wagon took her back to Paris.

In the early hours of morning she pulled herself off the back of the wagon and again wandered aimlessly as she’d done after burying the carving knife in Thomas’ sleeping body. It wasn’t until she saw Thomas that she stopped.

It was dawn and, pulled by the tides of the city, Sally found herself returned to what was the center of the Parisian moment, the black prison with eight towers. Smoke still hung on the square. Blood had long since overcome the scent of lilac from the perfume shop. People streamed freely across the prison drawbridge in and out of the prison gate; high on the dark red pikes that surrounded the square were the heads of garrison soldiers. Women wept over the cobblestones where their men had died.

Thomas moved from widow to widow, talking to them, holding them in comfort. To each of the widows he gave some money. It reminded Sally of when she was a little girl and one day had seen him seize the whip from a man beating a slave. She sat dazed in the street, amid the glass of the perfume-shop window, watching. Pieces of glass glittered in the dawn sun.

He finally saw her. He stood in the smoke staring at her. When he came toward her she couldn’t help but find his judgment terrifying. He looked at the glass all around her: “You’re going to cut yourself,” he finally said. Picking her up he caught himself on a shard in the folds of her tattered dress he’d bought her; together they watched his hand bleed. As he carried her in his arms she tore from her dress, as she’d once torn from the discarded bed curtains in Virginia, a long strip and wrapped it around his hand. She wanted to fall asleep in his arms but said, “Put me down.”

He put her down. Her knees buckled beneath her and he had to catch her to keep her from falling in the street.

“Three conditions,” she said. “First, I will be the mistress of your house. Second, you will never sell me to another. Third, you will free all our children when they come of age.”

“I trust,” Thomas answered, “you agree in turn not to murder me in my sleep.”

“You’re in no position to negotiate,” she murmured sleepily.

“If I accept your conditions, do you promise to go back to America with me?”

“I promise,” she answered, and only in the last moment, before completely submitting to exhaustion, did she open her eyes to look up from his shoulder at the shadow that crossed his face. Nothing much astonished her now. It was the cloud of black moths descending on them.

Except that it was much greater than a cloud, much more than a plague of moths: they filled the sky from one end of the square to the other and then, as they lit on his coat and his brow and his bleeding hand, the man and girl realized they weren’t moths at all and never had been. He touched them and they crumbled in his fingers. They left a black smudge. After waiting for their dreadful rain since he was a boy of five, he realized with a gasp that they had finally fallen, the ashes of the slave named Evelyn who poisoned her master Jacob Pollroot forty years before.

THOMAS SAYS, I NEVER saw Paris again. In the beginning my dreams were of the Paris I’d come to after my wife died: languid gardens and rambunctious streets, the sensual exuberance, the ferocious quest. As the news from France traveled to Virginia over the years following my return, my dreams changed and in the last one I was walking the rue d’X and felt a tide about my feet, some thick hot river; and then I saw bubbling up from the gutters the blood, and I looked up to a wave of it rushing toward me. Often I’ve defended it. Often I’ve said to those who here decried it that the nutrients of the blood of tyrants are drunk by the soil of freedom’s storms. But in my dreams the blood keeps rising, flooding the terrain until no soil remains. And if I could never openly condemn it, now I would secretly hate Paris for how it betrayed what it fought for if only there were not more intimate, firsthand treachery to despise.

On the other hand, some small more intimate treachery on the part of the King of France might well have saved his head…. He needed a slave of his own. He needed some black vessel to receive the blackness in his heart and soul and leave him strong enough for the right and good. He needed to commit some trivial duplicity, betraying his vain, viperous little Austrian queen; in so identifying the part of him that cried for redemption he might have redeemed his country if not his throne. Now his blood bubbles up with all the rest, and so does his queen’s.

One should not make the rash promises of one’s ideals before so many witnesses. I told her I would never marry another. Perhaps I wouldn’t have anyway. Perhaps I said that not so as to ease her passage into death but to deliver myself to the forbidden that I had denied myself so long even as I hungered for it. In a year I’ll be fifty. I passed some time ago that point where I was closer to the end than to the beginning. I spent all the years up to that point as the slave of my head’s convictions rather than my heart’s passions, and never felt as alive as the first night I took her. Never felt as alive as those moments when I knew I’d done something that could never be forgiven. In the nights that have passed since, I accepted such moments not as the crimes that contradicted what I believed in but as the passionate chaos that justified and liberated the god of reason living within me. I’ve asked myself whether I love Sally. I believe I have come to love her, even if it’s not the way I loved my wife. Sally was the woman who was there when I was closer to the end than the beginning, when I wasn’t so willing to surrender my moments only to my convictions. Surrendering to passion, I came to believe my convictions not less, but more.

When I was young, the state of Virginia did not allow a man to free his own slaves. Such was the bond between the slave and the man who owned her. Such was the state that would not loosen such a bond. At the age of twenty-five I offered to the state a law that would allow a man to free his slaves, freeing not only the slave but the man who owned her. The state was outraged. Twenty years later I took her in the Paris night and cannot free myself from it: such is the bond between us. And no law will set me free of the thing I own, the thing that possesses me in return.

I believe in time the black one may be whole. The state hates me for saying so.

I’ve invented something. As the germ of conception in my head it was the best and wildest and most elusive of my inventions. It’s a contraption halfcrazed by a love of justice, a machine oiled by fierce hostility to those who would ride the human race as though it were a dumb beast. I’ve set it loose gyrating across the world. It spins through villages, hamlets, towns, grand cities. It’s a thing to be confronted every moment of every day by everyone who hears even its rumor: it will test most those who presume too glibly to believe in it. But I know it’s a flawed thing, and I know the flaw is of me. Just as the white ink of my loins has fired the inspiration that made it, so the same ink is scrawled across the order of its extinction. The signature is my own. I’ve written its name. I’ve called it America.