Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“Sally?” the voice outside the door said. It was Gann. Etcher rose from the bed. He looked outside into the dark through the curtains of the window. “Sally?” Gann said again.

“She’s sick,” Etcher finally said in the window.

After a moment Etcher heard Gann say, “What’s wrong with her?” Etcher couldn’t see anything in the dark. But Gann was closer, next to the window.

“She’s been sick for a week.”

“Where’s Polly?”

“At the neighbor’s.”

“What’s wrong with Sally?”

“I told you. She’s been sick. She has a fever.”

“Will she be all right?”

“Go take care of your daughter,” Etcher said. He dropped the curtains into place and backed away from the window. He stood for a while listening to Gann’s footsteps walking away.

On the sixth night, Etcher woke with a start.

He heard the flapping of the wings before he heard her scream. He heard it inside her, trying to smash its way out, that wild ferocity of even the frailest creature when it’s trapped; and she screamed again. He held her. Her body didn’t merely convulse, it thrashed in upheaval, and when he put his face right up next to hers, right close to hers, he could see in the dark and in his blindness the horror in her eyes, the startled realization of something about to be delivered. And he held her thighs and pulled her to him even as she fought him off with a new maniacal power; and in the rush of the black spill of her womb he almost believed, though he couldn’t be sure, since the room was so black and the vision of his eyes was so black and the spill of her was so black, that there flew from out of her a white baby gull. He could hear it rise in the room. He could hear it flying around him shaking the afterbirth from its wings, insistent on its freedom until the room filled with the rip of the curtain and the crash of the window, and the funnel of the night air poured through. And Etcher leapt from the bed and began, bit by bit, pulling the furniture away from the door, the dresser, the table and chairs, Polly’s toy chest, until the way was clear and he flung the door open. He stepped out into the circle and dropped to his knees.

He began searching the ground with his hands. He knew that if he should find there in the glass of the broken window a dead bloody bird, then he had lost Sally. He would have lost Sally and he would have lost the light and he would have lost everything. Only if the bird had made it, only if the bird had broken the bonds of its own wounds and taken flight by a sheer will for freedom, would Sally make it as well; and so he searched on his hands and knees for the rest of the night. On and on through the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, on his hands and knees he searched the entire white circle.

He never found the bird.

He walked back into the unit at dawn. Stepping through the doorway rubble of his barricade, in the light of the broken window and the afterbirth of her fever, in the trail of her own thwarted death, he heard her say, “I love you, Etcher.” And then she went to sleep.

SHE WAS SITTING UP in bed the next day. Three days later she rose from the bed for the first time since she’d fallen ill. Gann returned with Polly. Etcher returned to Church Central.

It was only for a brief moment that it struck Etcher as odd, to be history’s file clerk. He barely took notice of the priests. Over the days and then the weeks, they circled him with the solicitous respect that’s always accorded a wild sick animal right up to the opportune moment when it can be destroyed. Only after some time had passed did Etcher notice they brought him no forms or papers to file. Quickly his job turned into being some sort of custodian, a watchman on the lookout for anyone who trespassed into his light; for days and then weeks he sat among the archives doing nothing but staring out to the Central lobby. He was thinking about the limitations of his view when his presence was requested upstairs.

In the white room, around the crescent table, they were seated in their half-circle. “We were just wondering,” said the head priest, “if you’re ready to return the books now.”

“I was giving that matter some serious thought this very morning,” Etcher answered.

The priests looked at each other with anticipation. “Really?” asked the head priest.

“I’m ready to begin right now, as a matter of fact.”

“This is very good news,” the head priest said after a moment.

Etcher reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to the priest, who unfolded and studied it for several minutes.

“What’s this?” the priest said.

“Page one.”

The priest continued studying the paper in his hands. “Page one,” he repeated, almost absently.

“Tomorrow I’ll give you page two.”

“Do you mean to tell us,” and it was difficult to be sure without his glasses, but Etcher supposed he heard in the priest’s voice a rising hysteria that struggled for control, “that you’re going to return the books page by page?”

“I’d like a window,” Etcher answered.

“What?”

“A window. In the archives. The view is limited, staring out at the lobby. There’s no light in the lobby. I’d like a window. Can you do that please? If you put in a window, I’ll bring you pages six through nine perhaps, or eight through eleven. A window on the light. A window on the sea.”

A month later, after they had put in the window, he decided he wanted to move the archives altogether. He had them relocated upstairs in the northernmost part of Central, where he could see in one direction the sea and in the other direction the volcano. Here he could always smell the wine in the air, which rolled in with the ocean and bubbled hot in the volcano’s crater.

So Etcher had found his light, having been fired by love to defy God and seize history. And the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History trickled back to Primacy page by page, in no great rush, since Etcher well understood that when the day came years later that the last page had been returned, his life would be over, there would be no more history left to protect him from Primacy, in the same way that if the return of the pages was to stop there would also be nothing to protect him, since there would be nothing for Primacy to lose by ridding itself of him. Everything came down to a trickle of pages. The trickle couldn’t be either too fast or too slow. Sometimes, for a window, sometimes for a new view of things, the pages returned in threes or fours, occasionally half a dozen at a time. There were, after all, close to fifty thousand; Etcher could occasionally afford to be generous. It was important to instill hope in the priests. It would be dangerous if they should feel overwhelmed by the futility.

Etcher lived with the woman he loved, in the way he had once come to believe he’d never love again, and with her child whose love he coveted beyond what was possible, beyond what was possible for a man who would be her father if he could, and could never be her father no matter how much he would.

In the haze of his life without glasses, everything was wine and light and pages. But when the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come to Etcher. And when he woke from them, the light wasn’t the same.

In the first dream, nearly a year after Etcher had left his marriage, Sally was sitting on the floor, her knees pulled up under her chin, and she was talking. She told him, in this dream, that she was in love with another man.

He woke from this dream and discounted it. He discounted it even though, somewhere in the back corner of what he’d come to know, he understood that this dream was the expression of an inkling. But he discounted it and didn’t think about it again, until the very next night when he made love to Sally and there slipped from her lips a name that was not his, slipped so clandestinely she wasn’t even aware she’d said it. But Etcher heard it, unmistakably. “Thomas,” she whispered.