Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

He trampled his own clothes underfoot as he ran after her. He was naked when he burst into the Fleurs d’X to find her. The women stopped dancing to look at him; Dee behind the bar stopped pouring drinks. He ran down the corridors of the Arboretum toward her flat; turning every corner he expected to run her down. People cowered before the sight of him; he took no notice of them. He couldn’t understand why, with every corner he turned, he hadn’t caught up with her; it wasn’t until he reached the flat that he knew she was gone for good. The door was open. The lock dangled from the outside. Inside nothing was amiss, but her departure hovered in the room, over the floor that was painted to look as though there were no floor, beneath the ceiling painted to look as though there were no ceiling, between the walls rendered to appear as though there were no walls. Her goodbye hovered like the explosion of his desire when she’d ripped him from inside her that first time she’d returned to find he had taken such possession of her world.

Wade sat in the flat by himself for a while. For some reason it occurred to him to look in the corner where he had kept his clothes that were now scattered throughout the Arboretum passageways. The stone with the graffiti, which he’d hidden there, was gone. Wade roared at the betrayal.

They heard it all over the neighborhood. They heard it in the distance, as the roar grew louder and closer. Soon it rushed through the corridors, preceding him as he ran up and down passageways, up and down stairs, through doors and chambers, as he swept the Arboretum from end to end, top to bottom, looking for her. The roar crashed through the Arboretum until the neighborhood was submerged in it, the torrent eventually trickling down the long black entryway and out the single door into the world outside. As the years passed, the roar slowly wound its way into the city. The months stretched into years, to whatever extent in the Arboretum years could be measured, and finally, after he’d prowled the corridors a long time, he came to accept that he’d never find her.

When he’d drunk the last of her cognac and smoked the last of her opium, his charge became a wayward stagger, stunned and endless. When he ceased to be the marauder of the Arboretum’s food and drink and flesh, he was left to scavenge its dread and rumor and panic, stalking the maze that grew wider and higher as its core grew deeper and darker. He wandered the Arboretum for sixteen years when a vision came to him, and it lasted only a moment.

He turned a corner of the long Arboretum night and saw Sally Hemings.

He stopped where he stood, slumped against whatever wall was behind him. She came from an unlit auditorium, looking around carelessly with two large gray dogs following at her heels; then she saw the apparition at the end of the hall. She’d heard about the naked giant who lurked in the Arboretum passages; there wasn’t much doubt this was he. And he was looking back at her, and she was younger and more fair than he’d remembered. Her dark hair had a touch of fire in it. “Sally?” he said.

Her mouth fell slightly. She watched him in wonder.

“Sally?” He started toward her. For a moment she was frozen, and then she shook herself free of the sight and sound of him, turning to vanish into the shadows.

IN HIS LAST HOUR inside the Arboretum, lying in a heap in the transformed flat where he’d lived with Mona, from a stupor he saw three more visions. Even he knew the first wasn’t real.

It was Mona, standing before him, looking as she’d always looked. She was naked as she’d always been naked, and wet, her golden hair in strands on her bare shoulders as though she’d just climbed from the bottom of the sea. She stood in a pool of water. Even in his stupor he remembered it had been many years since she’d gone. Her head tilted to the side and she smiled, of course, and even though he knew she wasn’t really there, when she held out the stone to him, he reached for it. He closed his eyes and then opened them again and she was gone and his hand was empty. Dimly he nodded to himself.

At first, he didn’t think the second vision was real either.

It was Sally Hemings again, as he’d seen her in another part of the Arboretum. He closed his eyes and said her name, expecting she’d disappear as Mona had, and only the echo of her name would be left in the room with him; but when he opened his eyes, she was still there. “I’m not Sally,” she shook her head, “Sally was my mother.”

He narrowed his eyes and tried to think. “Was?”

“I’m looking for a man,” the girl went on, and now Wade could see she was indeed younger and fairer than Sally. “His name is Etcher. He wore thick glasses and had black hair …” and he laughed until the effort of laughing exhausted him, and he passed out.

He immediately knew the third vision was real. Three men stood before him; one had half a face. Where the other half had been, his mouth curled in a massive scar upward, the face having revolted against its own nature that it might grow back together. Through the hole in the middle of the face came a smudge of words. “Well well well,” he said.

It had taken so much effort before that Wade wasn’t sure he had it in him to laugh anymore. But he couldn’t help it. Stupefied, besotted and trapped like a rat, looking up at the man with the hole in his face, he figured he might as well let it rip from down deep. “You don’t look so good, Mallory,” he guffawed from the floor where there was no floor.

Mallory kicked him savagely in the head.

Wade came to in time to see the sky above him, bearing down on him like the wave of the world as the three cops dragged him to the car. “Only the night,” he cried, “damn the light!”

WHEN LAUREN WAS AN old woman, she would stand on the Kansan desert and watch the leaves. They would dance in dark patterns across her feet, and disappear over the small white hills that filled the dead fields. It was several autumns before she actually walked from her porch to one of the small hills and, turning over a few handfuls of dirt, discovered the rail of a small bridge; she recognized it as a moonbridge, like the ones she’d seen in California years before, from which people had watched the trajectory of the moon across the night sky. The nights that the young girl Kara came to visit Lauren for supper, it was Kara’s gaze that found those skies, a mass of starry light for which the adolescent had a thousand names. Lauren fixed a simple meal and they ate on a plain tablecloth in the main room of Lauren’s house. They talked of Kara’s parents, who lived in Chicago and had sent their daughter to the ranch for children possessed by deep disturbances, odd visions, strange talents. Kara’s talent was renaming every star in the sky and following them as they shifted from one quadrant of the night to another; but as she grew older Kara progressed beyond the ravages of her deep disturbances, beyond the grip of her odd visions, beyond the enthrallment of her strange talents, all of which manifested themselves one last time on the night she found the bottle.

She’d been waiting for the headlights of the brown bus that would take her back to the ranch, and had come across a star she couldn’t account for. When she ran from the porch it was not to the bus but the unaccountable light, which she soon realized wasn’t a star after all but the glint of something lodged in the white earth. Kara brushed away the sand and dug the object from the small hill; the bottle had been caught, it turned out, in the railing of one of the old buried bridges. She held up the bottle and, in the light of every star in the skies above, saw two blue eyes blinking at her.