Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

It stopped him the moment he said it. It turned him befuddled, and she felt it. He looked down at her beneath him and, there through the part of her lips, were her baby teeth and the smile of victory.

He let her go, she fell limply beneath him. He staggered to his feet, the name he’d spoken ringing in his ears, except that as the moments passed he wasn’t at all sure he’d actually said it. He looked at her as she dozed on the pillows, and almost asked if he’d said it, except that he didn’t trust her answer. Suddenly he had to go to the toilet; now looking around he realized, for the first time in three nights, that the toilet was a converted altar room. It surprised him, actually, that anybody had ever bothered building an altar room in the Arboretum.

He was trying to think what he’d done with the key as he stumbled around the unit, which was in some disarray from when Mona had torn the place apart (hours ago? days ago?) looking for the key herself. That was when he saw the stone. It was in a small cabinet that sat next to the porthole that stared out at the volcano, smoldering in the night and smoking in the day, except now Wade couldn’t remember ever seeing anything in the porthole but night, he couldn’t remember ever seeing daylight at all. He touched the glass of the porthole as though it might be a painting hanging on the wall, rendered by the short, squat artist who was slowly transforming all the hallways of the Arboretum into other hallways. Wade put his face to the porthole and peered in. The closer he looked, the drunker he felt. He gazed back at Mona on the pillows, then turned to the cabinet.

On the top shelf was the key to the lock. He had no recollection whatsoever of putting it there. But now more interesting to him were the cabinet’s other contents, a small collection of forbidden artifacts from the black market: a child’s doll and a pair of dice, mildly pornographic pictures and a comic book, small wooden carvings like the woman’s head he had found a few days ago and still had in his coat pocket, and next to the key a stone. It seemed out of place. Wade examined it. It was flat and smooth on one side, rough and broken on the other, and fit his large hand; but what caught Wade’s eye, what sobered Wade for the first time since he’d lost himself to Mona’s sanctum, was the writing. It was a fragment of graffiti. But the graffiti wasn’t written on the smooth side of the stone, rather it was scrawled across the rough part where it seemed impossible that anything could be written; and though the beginning and end were lost, the core of the message was unmistakable: pursuit of happiness

The actual calligraphy was nothing like the graffiti in the alley at Desolate and Unrequited, which made the coincidence all the more astounding to Wade; and suddenly it became very important to him that he keep this stone. For the first time in a while he found himself chewing the inside of his cheek, where the wound of his confusion had healed amid the cognac and opium and flesh. When he’d gotten his clothes and dressed, he took from his coat pocket the carving of the woman’s head and placed it in the cabinet in exchange for the stone, which he put in his pocket. It was heavy and weighed the side of his coat down. He thought it might fall through the bottom of the pocket. He also took the key. He opened the door to the black hallway and stood for some time staring down the corridor to a dark end he couldn’t see, wondering if he had the bearings to find his way out.

IT WAS DARK OUTSIDE, as the porthole had told him it would be, as though the porthole were not a window but a crystal ball suspended on the wall, predicting his future.

His car was still where he’d left it, in the part of Desire where there stretched in the daylight hours the endless shadow of the volcano meeting the endless shadow of the Arboretum. The window was broken on the passenger’s side. Wade found the night air not invigorating or cleansing but oppressive like a perfume; he felt the weight of the Vog on his heart, and the sound of the waves against the cliffs were louder than he’d ever heard them. In the car he took the stone from his coat pocket and set it on the seat next to him. Trying to start the car he didn’t feel so good.

He drove back into town. He went to the corner of Desolate and Unrequited and pulled the car over to the curb, and opened the door and threw up. He got out of the car and walked down the alley. Even in the middle of the night he knew where to find the graffiti. Even in the dark he knew it wasn’t there anymore, that the place where Wade’s graffiti had addressed him day after day for the past year would be conspicuously blank. The furor of the spot’s emptiness drove his hands to his head, covering his ears.

At home he confronted the evidence of outside clocks that had noted his absence. He parked beneath the obelisk at Circle Four and opened the door of his unit; more disturbing than any havoc was the way the unit had been ransacked so carefully. It revealed the precision of authority, the invasion of those who didn’t have the time or enthusiasm for superfluous destruction. Wade recognized the work because he’d often done it himself in the past. Standing in the doorway of his unit, his arms hanging limply at his side, he heard someone behind him; he turned and saw, stepping from the dark Vog into the light of his doorway, the rookie who had rosaried Sally Hemings and told him about Mallory and the satellite dish at the hotel. For a moment the rookie didn’t say anything. “What?” Wade finally asked.

“Yes sir,” the rookie said. “They posted me here in case you came back.” He pointed behind him and Wade could now see, on the other side of the circle, another car beside his own. “Everyone’s been wondering what happened to you, sir,” the rookie said. After a moment he added, “It’s four o’clock in the morn—”

“I didn’t ask what time it was,” Wade said.

“No,” the rookie replied coolly, and now Wade realized something was wrong. Now there was no telling whose side anyone was on. “No, you didn’t ask what time it was, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. I have to ask you to come with me down to headquarters.” He stepped aside as though to give Wade room to pass, even though he was standing outside, in the clear, where even Wade had room to pass. Wade hated being in the clear. He hated having room to pass. He wanted to make the rookie back up in a corridor; he missed the psychic geometries of passages and doorways and chambers.

There were more cops at headquarters than he’d expected to see at this hour. Most of them were sleeping slumped in their chairs, but they woke quickly when Wade walked in. Wade went to his desk and aimlessly moved some things around on it; looking down at the desk he caught sight of himself. He looked himself up and down. His coat hung on him like a rag, and his tie and belt were missing; he became vaguely aware that he smelled of sweat. Was there the smell of sex and liquor too? Was there the smell of blood, or was that in his mind? Was that the smell of still being in a dream, or the smell a dream leaves on you when you wake from it? In the middle of headquarters he felt everyone examining him. The only one in the room who didn’t get up from his chair was Mallory.

“Look at you,” Mallory finally said. He leaned the chair back; his hands were folded in his lap. He appeared very relaxed. “You’re not presentable. They want to talk to you but you’re not presentable. Well,” he said, bringing the chair forward and now rising from it, “no time now for making ourselves presentable. They want to talk to you.” Mallory headed down a back hallway and stopped midway to turn, a withering look on his face that asked what Wade was waiting for. They left through the back door and got in a car. Mallory was behind the wheel. “Whoa,” Mallory said, recoiling from Wade with relish. “You smell unpleasant, Wade. Like you just crawled out of the deep shit you’re in, except you couldn’t have done that, because it’s much too deep for that. Deep deep deep. Way deeper than you’re going to be crawling out of any time too soon.” He laughed and shook his head. “We went around the bend on this one, didn’t we? Mrs. Hurley, I mean. Black Sally. I mean, I think she’s a shade, what do you say? Next time we bring her in, those of us who are still on this case I mean, which we can presume will not include yourself, those of us who are still on the case will get a better look at her. A good look. All the nooks and crannies. I’ll give you a report when I come see you on visiting day, let you know what you missed. I’m sure they’ll let you have visitors every now and then. It’d be inhuman otherwise. You have to seriously fuck up not to ever get any visitors. Well, shit, now that I think about it. You may not be seeing anybody for a while, now that I think about it. Well, I’ll find some way to let you know. Don’t think your old buddy Mallory would leave you wondering about something like that. I’ll find some way to let you know just how black it all gets down deep inside. I say she’s a horse of a different color, once you get a better look. The good part, especially. I say the good part’s not even built the same way. I say you touch it, you bite it, and the juice that comes out is more like blackberry than cherry.” Mallory thought a moment, driving down the highway. “When you come, Wade, is it white?”