Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“No,” said Gann. After a moment he said, “She got you running in circles, huh?” and it was to Gann’s credit that there was no meanness in the question. He seemed to take no satisfaction in Etcher’s plight; the odd thing was that Gann had come rather to like Etcher. This, then, was what Etcher had come to: an alliance with Gann.

On a black night that he knew she was with Thomas, at two in the morning when he knew she was going to be with him the rest of the night, he wanted to die. He had neither the passion nor conviction for suicide but he had none for life either, and all the pity he had before for those who never knew the feeling of a love that was bigger than their own lives now became an indifference for life itself. He told himself that if he could, he would have emptied his eyes of her face and his arms of their memories and his heart of its dreams, but his greatest anguish was that as soon as he said it, he knew even on this night he never would have done any of that. He never knew whose slave she had been. He only knew that he was hers.

It may have been at this moment that Etcher was left with no choice but to let go of Sally, since the only other alternative was to let go of his love, which he couldn’t do. Because while losing Sally would only break his heart, losing his ability to love like this — and he would never again love like this — meant the shattering of something so profound as to defy its naming with names like love or Sally or Thomas. The faith in love that led him to take his life in his own hands, as the priests had put it more accurately than they knew, was the creation of something more and bigger than love, in the process of which love was nothing more or less than the essential element. Something in him, from that moment on, became just a little cruel. The light in him, from that moment on, became marked with the ashes of a black cremation. And finally, when he came to detest himself for his continuing subjugation to the way Sally hurt him, when he knew he could no longer blame anyone but himself for his feeling of humiliation and betrayal, he stepped back across the chasm, from the side of his heart’s blind faith to the side of his heart’s naked nihilism: he got another pair of glasses.

When Sally saw Etcher wearing the new glasses, she finally understood what was at stake. Until now she understood only in her head but not her heart that she was at the edge of losing him. She decided the only thing to do was see neither Etcher nor Joseph, perhaps for a long time. She decided that if she was never again going to be owned, if she was never again going to be a slave, she’d brutally have to drag her own life out into its own outlaw zone and abandon it there. Alone she walked Desire’s wild shoreline, the city to the south of her and the volcano far to the east, and between the two the rising black hulk of the Arboretum. Beneath her she could feel the waves of the sea slash the rocks and rush into the grottoes under her feet, where fissures ran to the surface; with each incoming wave the water sprayed through cracks in the ground in a hundred geysers as though the earth were crying for her to free herself. Confronted with her new decision, Joseph asked that he might be allowed to see her once a month. Etcher, however, insisted he would not hear from her at all. Sally was furious with his adamant terms. But he was now locked in an effort as desperate as hers to free himself, and when she begged him to stay until morning on what they believed was their last night together, when once again he felt himself nearly seduced by her pain, he refused.

The priests at Central noticed that Etcher wore his glasses again. They didn’t have the imagination to understand that at this moment he was vulnerable to everything and everyone, including them; they didn’t have enough empathy for the mess and blood and semen and tears of human life to understand that in his desolation he might have given whatever they asked. Instead, mistaking the new glasses for renewed control, they kept their distance even more; and their moment of potential victory slipped past them.

Two weeks after they had parted, Etcher received a message from Sally. He couldn’t decide whether to go back. It wasn’t because he didn’t still love her utterly but because he’d be returning with such crippled faith on his part, to such crippled determination on hers; he had come to see, in the manner of Polly who silently raised her finger to witness in the flight of gulls something beyond what anyone else could see, that Sally’s inner turmoil would eventually have to be played out. He did return, of course, convincing himself it could be played out with him as well as, maybe better than, without. And though he’d never understand everything, he would come to understand the hard way that, though Joseph was gone from her life, the ghost called Thomas was not.

SOMETIMES IN THE MIDDLE of the night as everyone was sleeping, right after the episode in the hotel, when she was still with Gann, Sally would go out into the circle. She would carry with her the black wooden box with the rose carved on the top. After she left Gann, when she was with Etcher, she would continue to rise and cross the circle in a night so dead even the white of the circle was lightless. In the dark she was searching for what belonged in the box. Night after night she waited in the circle for the Vog to break just enough that the moon might peer through, illuminating her search; she assumed she would know what she was looking for when she found it.

It was the rumble of the volcano that launched her final flight to freedom.

The city woke to it one morning as though to a bomb. The ground shook. People ran from their units into the circles and watched the volcano’s fireball rise into the sky, spat forth from an earth clearing its throat. The city became paralyzed, silent in its panic, passively waiting for the mountain to roll soundlessly across the lava fields and down the streets in a molten wave. In the distance, to the southwest, the tiny white figures of the priests could be seen on the Central rooftop surveying the coming cataclysm. But after several days passed, when the earth began to calm itself and it was clear the cataclysm would not come this time, the city returned to its deadness, the crack of doom that brought it momentarily to life changing from echo to memory to the finally forgotten.

Sally didn’t forget. It wasn’t that she was afraid of the volcano, it was that she was liberated by it, as the entire city had been, though perhaps only Sally saw it this way. She saw it as a sign, the voice of the earth, because something had once happened to her in its mouth, once she had seen herself there, though she didn’t actually remember this. She didn’t actually remember the vision of herself and Etcher in the little house on the volcano’s inner ridge. She just knew that the volcano was speaking to her and that her dream of fleeing to the forests of the Ice in the north, far from the barren lava fields of Aeonopolis, was more within her grasp than it might ever be again. It was within her grasp not because she had the means to grasp it but because, momentarily, she had the will, and because it seemed to her the only way she’d ever be free of her life.

“Take me away from here,” she begged Etcher.

It was one thing to enter the city. It was another to leave. There were two ways to go. They could go by sea on a boat, or on land by train. If they went by boat they went illegally. If they went by train they would have to get visas from Central. Occasionally Etcher heard about those who slipped into Desire, crossed the zone and made their way past the peripheral highway to where, if they were fast enough, they might jump the train. But there were almost always police on the train until it was far from the city, and with Polly such an option wasn’t viable anyway.