Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

He began working late in the archives every night. He drifted further and further from home, spending first five minutes, then ten, then half an hour in the archives vault studying the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History and their blasphemous reality. The more alien this reality was to him, the more he intuitively believed it. Thus he surely and deliberately found for himself a corner with no exits, where he had no choice but to plot his own revolution against a reality that had no history, and in which he no longer had faith. His breakthrough act came on the night that he not only opened the vault to invade its contents but took one of the volumes from the vault, carried it through the lobby and out of Central, into the dark of the city. It was the volume that included all the entries between Heathen and Holy. Etcher not only chose this volume because of what happened that afternoon but soon realized that but for what happened he might not ever have taken any of the books. He might well have just lurked forever in his corner of no exits, never finding the courage to fulfill his plots.

The woman who walked into the archives that afternoon seemed lost, gazing at the walls around her. With her she had her two-year-old child, who bore a striking resemblance to the mother except for the fire in the little girl’s hair.

Somewhere between twenty and thirty, between white and black, her eyes somewhere between brown and green as her wild dark hair fell across her face, the woman impressed Etcher less with her beauty than the audacity of her presence, since he’d never seen anyone walk into the archives but a priest. Indeed, a priest in the lobby also stopped to look at her, as struck by her as Etcher. The woman was very shy as she approached, pulling the small girl behind her. “I was wondering—” she began in the quietest voice like water, when she stopped, staring at the looming blue eyes behind Etcher’s thick glasses almost as Kara had looked at them almost ten years before, as something sprung loose from the oceanbed of a dream. For a moment Etcher found himself once again on the brink of a terrible rejection, though nothing had ever passed between him and this woman to be rejected.

It was a long minute before she shook herself from the sight of him. The little girl, in the meantime, was running up and down the aisles of the archives. The priest in the lobby appeared mortified. “Polly,” the woman said to the little girl, “come here.” The child didn’t pay much attention. The mother shut her eyes in weary futility. She looked at Etcher again, struggling for composure. “I was wondering if you could help me,” she said. “I’m trying to get some information on a relative. I’ve been — Polly!”

The child returned to her mother’s side.

“What are you doing here?” Etcher said in panic. He kept looking over at the priest in the lobby.

“His name was Madison Hemings,” the woman tried to explain quickly. “He was a distant relative, I think, perhaps an uncle or cousin—”

“This office isn’t open to the public,” Etcher cut in. “We don’t have that kind of information.”

“Oh,” she answered, “I’m sorry.”

“You should go to the police for that sort of thing.”

“No,” she shook her head, “no, I can’t go to the police,” and before the little girl could take off again the mother scooped her up into her arms. “Well, thank you anyway,” she said very quietly, and walked from the archives across the lobby as the priest and Etcher watched her go.

Etcher was miserable for the rest of the day. He wanted a drink, after not having had one since before the first night he’d entered the vault. It was instead of drinking that he took home with him that night the volume that covered material from Heathen to Holy; when he was sure Tedi was asleep, when he’d finally fended off her constant pleas that he come to bed, he went into the privacy of the altar room, shut the door behind him and, in the faint glow of the light above, opened the book. He didn’t really expect to find an entry for Madison Hemings. The only Hemings listed was a woman named Sally, briefly identified as the slave and mistress of the leader of a country Etcher had never heard of.

AS THOUGH SEARCHING OUT a forsaken beggar, he spent the weeks afterward looking for her. He left his unit early in the mornings so that he might spot her on the way to Church Central, and he no longer worked late in the archives in the evening, so that he could search for her on the way home. He thought he might see her in the city’s voggy unlit streets, where the only sounds were the engines of cop cars and passing buses and the clanking of deserted trolleys. He thought he might hear her whisper in the Market where the vendors waited motionless and mute behind food stands and clothes racks that buyers selected from in silence. He thought the ragged peddlers who slept with their wagons in the back alleys and hobbled to him out of the sooty magenta dusk might sell him an answer from their pile of lamps and rags and dishes and candles, or trade one for something of value. Several hours a day for several weeks he wandered the city with the graffiti of the church peering at him from the city walls through the Vog and shouting in his head amidst his own voices of subversion and disarray. When he returned to the unit at night he told Tedi he’d been working late, in the manner of adulterers who lie about affairs. They fought about sex. He slept in the outer room and held in his dreams the woman who had come looking for Madison Hemings. He didn’t drink.

He used the channels available to him, sending to police headquarters an official Primacy request for a file on Hemings. When it came back he was only mildly surprised to see that her name was Sally. The cop who brought the file said, “A lot of activity on this one lately.”

Two days later in the white afternoon glare of her circle on the edge of the outlaw zone Redemption, Etcher stood in the shadow of the obelisk. He waited a long time before walking up to knock on the door. It opened before he reached it. The man in the doorway was several inches taller than Etcher, several years younger. He had long dark hair and wore a T-shirt. Clutching one of his hands was the little girl Etcher had seen in the archives several weeks before.

“Excuse me,” Etcher said, “I—” and he stopped, not knowing what to say. All the way across town on the bus he’d tried to figure out what he was going to tell her; the sudden appearance of her husband only distracted him more. “I was wondering if I could speak to Mrs. Hurley,” he said.

Hurley raised his thumb and pointed over his shoulder. “Come on, Polly,” he said to the little girl, and they walked across the circle beyond one of the other units. Sally came into the doorway where her husband had been. She wore a plain dress, the earth and ash and blood tones of which, in the sun behind Etcher, weren’t unlike the color of her skin. Her hair was loose. She was even more startled now by the sight of Etcher than she’d been in the archives. Etcher took off his glasses, rendering her a blur.

“Come in,” she said. Etcher stumbled into the unit and immediately ran into a table. “Are you all right?” she asked. He groped for a place to sit and she led him to a couch.

“My name’s Etcher,” he finally said. “I work at Central. A few weeks ago you came to get some information.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “But there was a priest in the lobby, and the archives aren’t open to the public. I didn’t want you to get in trouble.”

She said, “How did you find me?”

“Well, some things aren’t so difficult when you work for the Church.” He didn’t know what to tell her and he wasn’t sure why he was here. He didn’t know whether to tell her about the entry in the volume he’d taken from the archives. Thinking about this on the couch he put his glasses back on instinctively, which he always did when he was confused, when, for instance, he couldn’t hear what someone was saying. The unit around him was dark, the furniture worn. There was a table on which sat a drawer full of beads and trinkets and small silver chains, a pair of pliers and the finished results of some necklaces and earrings. Otherwise the room had been overrun by little stuffed bears and tigers and storybooks and puzzles with missing pieces; there was a small wooden train that went over a small wooden bridge through a small wooden tunnel. The walls of the unit were barren except for pictures drawn with crayons and a crude poster curling at the corners that announced GANN / ARBO.