Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“Yes.”

Will I see you again? he wanted to ask. But he was afraid of ruining everything.

He left the circle, and after waiting a long time caught a bus on the road back into the city proper. Whatever I do now, he said to himself on the bus, staring out the window at the volcano in the distance, I cannot do for her. I cannot assume she’ll be mine. I must act on the assumption she’ll never be mine, that it will never be less impossible than it all seems at this moment. I must act on the assumption that I’ll never see her again, except for a passing moment in the street or the Market, and that love has been left hanging in the black space of a small room, and that in the light, with a husband and a child, she’ll feel very different tomorrow, if she doesn’t already. Therefore, whatever I do now ultimately has nothing to do with her. It has to do with the life I’ve been living. It has to do with the man I’ve been and who I am now, without her, and what my life is now without her.

He went home and left his wife.

IT HAD NEVER BEEN in his temperament to understand power. In all of his passivity he had never felt the oppression of other people’s power over him, which was why he resigned himself so easily to it; his resignation was born not from his fear of others, after all, but himself. Nor was it in his temperament to revel in power, which was why he had never understood why women like Synthia needed him to exert power over them. He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn’t have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn’t last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn’t free.

Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love.

Etcher didn’t tell Tedi about Sally, because when he left Tedi it wasn’t about Sally. When he left Tedi he didn’t believe anything would ever happen between him and Sally. What happened between Etcher and Tedi was about Etcher and Tedi, and in his new power he tried to leave Tedi without abandoning her, if such a thing was possible. But he came to recognize the limits of leaving without abandoning. For months afterward, he would go by Tedi’s classroom — with the children and the blackboard and the shelves of books and bibles and texts — to marvel at the limits and power of her rage. He understood that this may have helped nothing. He understood that something about his enlistment of Tedi as a coconspirator in his own leaving might be dishonest and cruel, and that he couldn’t deny her the right to her rage. Sometimes, outside the school, in the windowless downtown street, he took the full force of her fury as her efforts to contain that fury broke down and she broke down with them, the spectacle interrupted only by an occasional passerby. The best Etcher could do was promise not to lie to himself. He wouldn’t pretend it was all her fault, or pretend her pain was less than it was, or tell himself she was better off. He didn’t believe she was better off. He believed that in meeting her and being with her he had accepted responsibility for her heart and its dreams, whether or not that was something any person could rightly do for another, and had now broken those things; when she ran from the street crying he was left with the sound of the shattering, her dreams in pieces on the ground, the sound of them crunching beneath his feet like glass as he walked away.

Two months after his marriage ended, Etcher left Church Central one night to the smell of wine in the air. All the way down the rock he smelled it. The wind brought it from the sea to the west through the windows of the lift, as though it were a red-wine sea beyond the shore rolling in and out to the pull of a red drunk moon beyond the Vog. Etcher might have thought he wanted a drink. He couldn’t remember the last drink. Yes he did. Sure he remembered the last drink. He remembered the bottle of wine in the corner of the little altar room, the sound of it in the dark. It was better to believe that the smell of wine in the night air only meant that he needed a drink; he preferred to believe that. He needed to believe it had nothing at all to do with that last time. At this moment Etcher might have craved a drink even though he hadn’t drunk anything in a long time, because it was easier to deal with his thirst than his hunger. If he had believed in omens he might have known, coming down the rock on the lift, what was there at the bottom. And if the smell of wine from the sea wasn’t omen enough, there was, when he stepped from the lift, the empty robe lying in the path. It was a priest’s white robe. Etcher had never seen one just lying on the ground like this, as though the person inside it had suddenly vanished. The wind carried it a couple of feet. Etcher picked it up. Once he would have cast it away immediately, as though it would implicate him in some crime. But now he casually threw the robe over his shoulders and walked on, and not much further from where he’d picked up the robe, at the bottom of the rock, he found Sally waiting for him, her hair blowing like a wild ash weed in the wine wind.

“I couldn’t get you out of my head,” she said.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

He asked it as though they had made some appointment hours or days or weeks before that she hadn’t kept. He had imagined seeing her so many times that to see her now in the night and the Vog was somehow utterly expected and utterly unreal at the same time. It was so exhilarating it frightened him. He would have settled for just this opportunity to see her and hear her tell him, “I couldn’t get you out of my head,” and then watch her walk away. But she didn’t walk away. There was no way of being sure she was happy to be there; she didn’t appear happy or unhappy. At the bottom of the rock, on the base of the path that led to the lift, she was as dark as the night around her, she was blacker than he’d seen before, even in the black of her altar room. She was beautiful in that chemistry of her soul by which torment lit her beauty, the only light of her being the light in her eyes, and they walked along the cliffs in the night until they passed the point where a small wooden fence ran out and there was no fence at all, just the rocks and the emptiness beyond them, the plummet to oblivion at the border of where they now loved each other and every embrace was a risk.

When she became cold he wrapped her in the white robe of the priest. He didn’t notice anymore if the sea smelled of wine. “I’m leaving Gann,” she told him. He didn’t say, “Good” or “I’m glad,” he only nodded, and the Vog leaked from the place where they stood as though that place was scorched by their heresy, rolling out across the cliffs and up the coast. It was the first and only moment Etcher ever believed Aeonopolis had succumbed to the rest of time, which in turn had succumbed to a magic rage wild beyond the fingertips of magicians: and Sally and Etcher didn’t presume to hold that moment, they didn’t wish to stop it as lovers do. They knew the moment wouldn’t wait for them. They knew it would go on spinning out from beneath their feet all the way out to sea for as far as they could see. They merely hoped to get as far as the momentum of the moment would take them, to distill the fury of their heresy into a thrust that would propel them over every moment that hadn’t already been reduced to shambles by her astonishing face. It was a heresy that broke ten spells in exchange for the one it cast. Standing where they stood with the sea and the Vog and the night at their backs, in his arms she gazed up at him and cried out, “But you look so … happy,” though she meant something more, she meant a frightening rapture, and though she understood his love she didn’t understand his faith, and if he couldn’t persuade her to share his faith he shared her incomprehension of it, and wondered at his desire to possess beauty and own it, because he never really believed it was possible. He didn’t believe in his own faith. It was a measure of the power of that faith that it believed in him.