Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

She was still there, all right; the thin air hadn’t claimed her. She was still there, mute, unaware, and it made him furious. He wanted to stop the car and reach over and shake her, but he was afraid of himself, of what he’d do if he actually touched her and held her in his hands. He wanted just to wrest her from her transfixed attention, until he realized she was transfixed not with her memories or her dreams but something very real beyond the windshield of the car.

She was looking at the volcano. She looked at its flat peak and the smoke that rose into the sky. She watched it a long time, it seemed to Wade, and then for a moment she turned to him, something expectant in her eyes and on her lips. She craned her neck to keep the mountain in view long after they passed it and after Wade had turned the car toward the sea. In the white light of the circle, when he parked the car and she got out, she continued watching the volcano until her attention was interrupted by the redhaired two-year-old child who ran from the third unit into her baffled mother’s arms.

IT MAY NOT HAVE BEEN until that moment that Wade knew for certain he was going back to the Fleurs d’X. Even driving Sally back from police headquarters he believed he could resist returning to the Arboretum. But when the small child ran to Sally’s arms, and the mother grabbed her daughter to her breast, Wade reeled where he stood, a huge wavering black blot on the blinding circle beneath his feet. He staggered back to his car. Gann Hurley, tall and thin with long brown hair, stood in the doorway of the third unit watching his wife and daughter.

In the afternoon light the Arboretum was an aberration, something that should have been invisible until darkness fell.

The entrance was obscure, indifferent. At the end of one of the neighborhood’s jutting extensions, cut in a grungy wooden wall about a foot off the ground so Wade had to step up, it was by chance or intention the neighborhood’s single doorway, wide enough for only one person to go through at a time. There was no actual door that opened or closed. Wade walked down a long narrow corridor as the light from outside grew dimmer. Soon there was nothing but blackness.

For a man as large as Wade the claustrophobia was uncompromising. The corridor wound slowly downward and then back up as the distant sounds of the inner Arboretum became more distinct. Through the walls Wade could feel vibrations from far away, the churning of machinery and the hum of unknown music punctuated by garbled profanities, violent outbursts, high female moans. Then the corridor made a U-turn, opening onto a small chamber where a dirty bulb burned high on one wall, revealing two doorways to the left and one to the right, and another directly on the other side of the chamber. The doors on the left and right opened to other corridors to other intersections, eventually leading to the theater, TV arcade, artists’ grottoes and bars, and units where people lived.

The doorway directly in front of him revealed a spiral stairway. Descending the stairs Wade passed any number of other doors; he’d never gone far enough to be sure how many. It had been two or three trips before he realized the sound he heard from the bottom of the stairwell was water, not like a river but a tide that rolled in and out, lapping at the subterranean walls. Deep in the heart of the Arboretum its sensual history was told in the smells of the people who had been there, floors and walls soaked with wine and the juice of lovers’ couplings. There was also the Vog that had drifted in when the Arboretum was layers younger, before its labyrinth had crept inexorably across Desire’s terrain, the belch of the volcano’s most ancient ambitions caught in the Arboretum’s inner sancta and frantically drifting from hall to hall in search of the way out. The same panicked search was shared by the lost ones Wade met as he made his way through the neighborhood, their confusion compounded by the narrowness of corridors that wouldn’t let more than two people pass: anyone crossing Wade’s path, for instance, found he wasn’t inclined to back up. Thus the Vog Travelers, as they were called, spent as much time going backward in the passageways as forward. Sometimes one would mutter to Wade, asking where “the door” was. But usually they said nothing, concealing their plight because thieves in the Arboretum preyed on the Vog Travelers who wandered perpetually until they found exhaustion or delirium.

In all the times Wade had been in the Arboretum he’d never seen a single sign. One learned to count and remember. Deep in the heart of the Arboretum were the drawings of artists who scurried from corridor to corridor looking for bare walls, since honor dictated that no one vandalized the work of others. No one wrote graffiti because graffiti was the propaganda of authority. In the final corridor that ran to the Fleurs d’X, a short squat painter without a shirt, grim colors splattered across his chest, rendered with dimensional exactitude the image of another corridor, which had the effect of providing Fleurs d’X its ultimate camouflage, particularly since elsewhere in the Arboretum was a corridor where the artist had rendered the image of this one, complete with two naked girls leaning in one of the doorways. So Wade, who had been to the club just twenty hours before, couldn’t be sure it was real until he actually stepped into it.

Once again it was almost empty. Three stages were open; no bodies waited in the dressing room. Wade sat down and Dee, who was watching him, motioned one of her girls over to his table. She was small and dark, with breasts too large for her body. “Where’s Mona?” he said. Mona, she answered, didn’t come on for another three hours. Wade considered the political ramifications of whiskey and ordered one anyway, and then another; after an hour a fourth stage opened and after another hour a fifth and sixth. The Fleurs d’X began to fill. Wade was aware he should have been back at headquarters some time ago. But each time he thought of Sally Hemings standing in the white circle with the small child whose hair was the color of fire, he’d call over the small dark girl and order another whiskey as he contemplated her disproportionate breasts, shrinking them in his mind. He waited.

When Mona finally appeared from the back of the club, she didn’t acknowledge Wade at all; she didn’t acknowledge anyone. For a while she served drinks and stood in the doorway where it was cooler, waiting to give her first performance: all the stages were now operating. Wade got up from his table, staggering a bit because he’d had many whiskeys. He went over to Mona’s stage where the seats were full of other men; randomly he tapped one on the shoulder. “You’re in my seat,” he said.

The sailor looked up at Wade. “Fuck off,” he answered.

Wade picked the man up and dropped him on the floor. He sat in the chair while the man thrashed painfully on the ground. Mona smiled at Wade with her little baby teeth; on the floor the sailor continued seething, mumbling obscene comments. Mona laughed. Wade laughed too. He ordered another drink.

The dancers rotated among the stages so that a man sitting at one stage long enough would eventually see all the girls. Wade, however, followed Mona from stage to stage; soon men gave up their seats without having to be removed from them. For each dance Wade put more money on the side of the stage, and after each dance Mona picked up the money. She laughed at the money in the same way she laughed at the sailors being dropped on the floor, and Wade laughed back. There wasn’t any doubt in his mind she danced for him. He could tell by the way her head tilted to the side and she smiled with her little baby teeth when she knelt on the stage and opened herself; he didn’t care so much about her opening herself. He didn’t care so much about the secrets of her body. He did feel affection for the roundness of her breasts, which were not too large; he admired that her nipples were always erect. He understood that she might act as though she danced for the other men, he understood she might smile at them in the same way and show them the same things; she had to deceive them, he understood, in order that they would give her their money. But he knew, with more and more clarity as he drank more whiskey, that her dance for him was special, and a promise, and they could laugh together at how round her breasts were, at how erect her nipples were, at how it sent his blood rushing through him, how it sent his very blackness rushing through him.