Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

For all of this deadness his memory could never abide the melancholy of another’s misery. It was in the early months of his arrival that he walked out of a bakery one morning to be met by an old beggar so hideous and pitiful that when he shoved his open palm in front of Etcher and pleaded for a piece of bread or a coin, the other man was frozen where he stood, even as his mouth was full of bread and his hand full of coins. Etcher fled without giving the man anything. All day he tried to work in the rubble of his moral paralysis, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and, claiming sickness, left work to return to where he’d last seen the beggar. The beggar was no longer there. All night Etcher looked for him. Exhausted, he finally found the beggar at dawn; into the stunned beggar’s hand Etcher stuffed a wad of money, and fled again. After this episode he never again left empty any human heart that gaped like an open wound. He gave money to whoever asked, as though to ward off the thrusts to his own heart by the things that made him ashamed of life. In the same way he taught himself to become softer, so the immune system of his conscience withered away, unprotected by the antibodies of experience. Among a crowd of hundreds at the teeming Market, a nation of beggars immediately identified him and closed in, no matter how he might hide his face or avoid eye contact, until it seemed they were at his doorstep at dawn, until they had mobilized as a guerrilla army monitoring his various routes, hobbling in pursuit on crutches or little wheels.

It was both the ultimate act of resignation and the ultimate answer to his conscience, his marriage to a schoolteacher for whom Etcher fulfilled an increasingly desperate agenda. Her name was Tedi. She was small and pretty like a doll if not like a beautiful woman, her face framed by gold ringlets. She had a mind for the numbers of things and their mechanics; beneath her sweetness she was obsessed with doom. Her past was strewn with men whom she regarded as having betrayed her and against whom she plotted her vengeance, in exact calculations and with a precision like the plumbing of a building. It didn’t hurt that the small school in town where she taught her little pupils was situated amid the most wrathful and indignant of Primacy’s graffiti. Gazing at the messages around her she took inspiration. But because even Tedi understood that vengeance was a short-term satisfaction, and because her temperament for it didn’t quite match her instincts, she was only left with doom in the end and the realization that its mathematics was more inevitable than any she might concoct to thwart it. Thus she hid in her unit from passing meteorites that might fall from space, searching her out as though with radar; and hidden from the danger of the outside world she was left with the doom that lurked in her like an infection.

Etcher felt as though he’d been jostled among an aimless throng of people and then had bumped into Tedi, at which point he looked down at his cupped hands to see they now held her beating heart. She wouldn’t take it back. He couldn’t give it to someone else. He couldn’t drop it on the ground where it might be trampled underfoot by the throng. He somehow accepted responsibility for this heart by the fact of his having it, and by his inability — even in the depths of his deadness — to be so cruel as to simply refuse or desert it. She closed in on him and he allowed himself to be closed in on, because he’d come to believe, now six years after Kara, that he’d never love like that again and that at the age of thirty-five the dead calm of adulthood called for this final moment of peace. Thus he had never stopped disbelieving in his own blame. That he didn’t have the courage to hurt Tedi sooner only doomed him to devastate her later. This culpability became all the more profound when, having given in to her plans for marriage, he gave in to her plans for a child. They both expected she would become pregnant immediately.

He awaited it hopelessly. He waited for his blank passivity to manifest itself as a small life, an unknowing infant whose existence would foreclose forever the possibilities of Etcher’s own escape. As he waited, he drank more. He scored liquor on the city’s boulevards, sometimes in broad daylight. But he never considered this petty outlawry as an attack on his passivity or even an aberration of it, but rather as more complicity, since the intent and effect of the drinking was to make passivity more tolerable. Like any functioning drunk, Etcher managed his hangovers as well as the hour of the day and the quality of his inebriation would allow; the priests would reprimand him on mornings when he showed up for work obviously toxic from something more than bitterness. In the hollow of his life he fashioned a routine that wouldn’t let him forget how his life was over, spending longer hours in Central’s dark corridors beneath its high empty rafters that were startling for the way they were immaculate of graffiti, reveling dully in his role as power’s flunky and authority’s file clerk. As time went by he found less occasion, as he’d done in the early days of their relationship, to leave work in time to pass the windowless downtown street of Tedi’s school, sometimes waiting for her in back of the classroom staring at the blackboard, where her messages ran off the edge of the slate onto the walls, around the corners and down the hallways — nothing but Tedi and little children and Primacist messages and classroom shelves of bibles and hymn books.

But offhours, in the shifts between his employment and his marriage, his drunkenness allowed him a fantasy. In this fantasy he ran through the streets of the city during one of the daily searches, with everyone huddling in their altar rooms, as he had his way with freedom, flush with the same rage of pleasure he’d poured into the flesh portals of so many faceless women. These fantasies were, in a sense, the same authoritarian fantasies of those who held power, a wild howl of sensuality derived from the submission of others. He’d merely been, he realized now, ten years too soon for Synthia, who had so longed for someone to make her yield to this sort of submission. She’d marvel now, if he were to happen upon her, at the steel of his hands that pinned her beneath him until he finished with her, at his integrity dribbling away inside her. But there was something else about his fantasies that had nothing to do with power. There was something about his fantasies that would have appalled the totalitarian Synthia, that had to do with anarchy and a lurking subversion ticking away inside him along with the weeks and months during which Etcher waited for Tedi to become pregnant and, mysteriously, she did not. In the dark of the archives he came to realize that with every passing month fate kept giving him another opportunity to make a break for it. He also came to realize that, each time he turned down the chance, it might be his last.

He was excited and terrified by the growing sound of the ticking. On the afternoon he discovered the archives’ back room, the ticking was loud enough to be indistinguishable from that of his heart.

His duties in the archives were to keep in order the records of the city’s affairs, and to file and search out records for the priests who used them. The door in back of the archives was so inconspicuous that Etcher always assumed it was a closet or storage space of some sort; it wasn’t only locked but had the dusty, uncracked look of not having been opened in a long time. Etcher worked for Central seven years before he saw a priest wearing the white robes of a church leader unlock the door one afternoon, enter and then close it behind him. This was the first sign to Etcher that whatever was beyond the door was not a closet. The second sign was that the priest didn’t emerge from the room for two hours. When he did, he had a large book under his arm and was looking for a place to put it in order to lock the door. “Want me to take that?” said Etcher.