Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

At his unit in Circle Four he showered again to wash off Mallory’s blood, and then changed clothes. He drove his own car, with the stone from Mona’s cabinet still in the passenger seat next to him, out to the cliffs not far from Desire’s frontier. Parking the car in neutral with its front tires at the cliff’s edge, he got out with the stone and pushed the car over. As though the force of the car’s plunge might pull him along after it, he found himself sitting on the ground staring at blue nothingness, the blue of the sky and the blue of the distant sea where only a moment before the car had been. The crash of the car below was really no louder than the crash of the waves.

He walked to Redemption. An hour after he’d left Mallory’s face on the wall at Desolate and Unrequited, he was at the doorway of the Arboretum. It was almost light. Before Wade stepped in the doorway to walk down the long corridor, he looked up at the sky and treasured how he wouldn’t have to be offended by its lie anymore.

MONA SAYS, OOOH HE shoots me up inside. Ohhhhh. It’s not so bad when it’s only a feeling like opium, something I can think about when I have nothing to think about. In the dark he isn’t there at all, and one night when he says the name of the other woman it means I’m not there either. He slips out and sleeps, I push him away. I get up and go to eat at the place in the south Arbo, I hear him splash inside. When I come back from work I think maybe he’ll be gone. One morning when I wake he’s gone but I go to work and come back and he’s back. I’m back, he says. I’m back for good. He tears my clothes. He wants to tear everything, he does it to me fast. After that he looks at the window and smiles. “Only the night now,” he says to the window, smiling, “nothing but night,” and I’m looking up at the window and see the morning light come in, shine on his smile. But he just says over and over, “Only the night. Damn the light.”

I almost never go outside but sometimes when I do the blue points of the city make me think of when I was a little girl growing up in the Ice, the chimneys of my village the way they line the road coming into town. The smoke of the chimneys the way it rises in the sky like the Vog of the mountain like the smoke of the sea and I’d ride with my father in the wagon down the road of our village and the chimneys line the road like tombs, like the empty trees. And the smoke of the chimneys rises and hangs over the road like an archway. And my father sits nearer to me on the wagon seat to keep me warm, he says, he moves his body next to mine to keep me warm. He comes at night to keep me warm. I hear him in the night in the next room keeping my little brother warm. I hear my little brother’s cries and I think, Please don’t stop, keep my little brother warm all night. Because when he’s finished with my little brother he’ll come for me: so don’t stop. The louder little brother cries the happier I am. My brother is eight. Mother sleeps in the other room across the hall from mine but I know she doesn’t really sleep, I know she lies in bed saying, Please don’t stop keeping my children warm. Please don’t stop because when he’s finished he’ll come for me, my mother thinks, lying in the bed across the hall. One night I take what I can carry and walk down the road beneath the long arch of smoke until I’m far enough away that I won’t have to pray anymore that the cries of my brother never stop.

I know about the stone. I know how Wade stole it from the cabinet, in its place is a small wooden woman’s head. Someone once told me these things are, what, forbidden …? None of this matters to me. Someone once told me that I’m, what, attracted? to these things because they’re forbidden, but forbidden means nothing to me, so what’s to attract. The stone was more real than memory or love. I could put it between my legs and feel it there. I could push it into me a little bit and it hurt and it was a hurt I believed, not the hurt of the heart or head which aren’t real. But after the morning when I found the stone gone he came back and fucked me and afterward when he slept I found the stone hidden in the corner of the flat behind his clothes. I left it there until later when the thing happened with the other man, later when I wasn’t so sure about the hurt of the heart. Later when, after Wade had been here a long time, I saw the other man who came to Fleurs d’X with the glasses that made his eyes big, who smiled sadly and was lost in the hurt of his heart. One night he dropped his glasses and I was on the floor in the dark helping him to look, and the way he looked at me when he put them on I knew at that moment he was ridiculous like all the others. I laughed. I laughed at how ridiculous and sad he was. They’re so easy to forget, the men. It’s the best thing about them, the way they’re so easy to forget, the way they’re never really there at all. But his sadness is in my head now and I can’t forget it, his sad smile makes me feel what I don’t believe. And now I wait for him night after night to come. I wait for him to give up what all the men give up. They think it’s about them, the way I dance, but it isn’t about them, it’s about the way they’re nothing, and the man with the glasses is only another fool, but his foolishness is in my head and heart and I don’t know why, and then one night Wade comes to the club when the one with the glasses is there too. After a while I know Wade’s watching him. After a while I know he’s watching me watch him, and he doesn’t like it.

I liked it better the way things were before. I liked it better when the feeling of a stone between my legs was more real than memory or love. One night I come home from work and open the door and step in and find the floor beneath my feet gone. I look up and the ceiling is gone. I look around and the walls are gone, far away I can see into the other rooms and halls and doors. Wade is there naked waiting for me like always, like always he has that look on his face. His thing is hard. We’re there hanging in the middle of nothing, everything’s vanished. I scream and he nods. I scream again and he keeps nodding.

WHEN MONA OPENED the door of her flat and stepped in, she found herself falling.

Wade employed the short, squat artist who transformed the halls of the Arboretum to paint Mona’s flat as what one would see if there were no walls, nor any walls beyond them, to the ends of the Arboretum. To paint the ceiling as what one would see if there was no ceiling, to the heights of the Arboretum. To paint the floor as what one would see if there was no floor, to the Arboretum’s depths. Now in Mona’s flat Wade could look in any direction and see to the far reaches of the Arboretum all the catacombs and corridors, the empty TV arcades and casinos and galleries and stages and bars and clubs, abandoned of borders and supports and people. Everything around and beneath Mona was gone, including the very door she’d just come through; all that was left, besides the furniture of Mona’s flat — a couple of chairs and a table, a broken-down vanity dresser — floating amid the beams of the neighborhood high above its cellars, was herself and Wade, naked and erect and strangely serene.

She held out her hands to catch herself but even the furniture implied treachery, as though she might grab a chair and the weight of it would only hasten the plunge to oblivion. So Mona felt she had no choice but to reach to Wade, who was there to take her; and when he took her the two of them became suspended in space, and the growl that came from Wade sounded as though it leaked through an abrasion in that space, perhaps the very sound of the rip itself. He entered her and she clung to him, and in the oblivion’s cold she let go of him, having decided long ago she would never let anyone keep her warm again. He continued with her until she reached down and yanked him out of her at the moment of his explosion. The white of his ejaculation danced in the air.