Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

A solution presented itself, in the form of a surfacing undercurrent. His name was Mallory and he was a cop. His face was a swirl of scar tissue, having been smashed against the wall at the corner of Desolate and Unrequited two years before. Coming from Mallory the solution was so literal-minded as to be, in the current situation, imaginative. Etcher would voluntarily give himself over to the authority of the police and travel north in the company of several officers, who would present papers signed by the prisoner to anyone challenging their jurisdiction. Mallory volunteered for the assignment not out of a devotion to duty nor even to slavishly impress the priests (as was Mallory’s wont), but because he was convinced that Etcher would lead him to Sally Hemings, and that in turn would lead to the man who had obliterated his face and then disappeared off the face of the earth like a trolley car or displaced obelisk or a message on the wall.

Sitting in a church hospital for months picking the scabs off what used to be a nose, Mallory had had plenty of time to figure this out. It was obvious the big black called Wade had gone off the deep end for Sally Hemings the minute he laid eyes on her. He’d made certain she understood she was looking at a murder rap and then cut a deal with her, probably that afternoon in the car driving her out to her circle after springing her loose from jail. He probably pointed out to her how she now owed him everything and how everything was exactly what he wanted; then he spent several days putting together a plan, jumping a train or boat out of the city an hour after he’d left Mallory crumpled in the alley, heading north where he’d been waiting for her all this time. This guy Etcher wasn’t anything to the Hemings woman but a connection on the inside, a glorified file clerk who fell under her spell just like Wade and could get her out of town. Now she was stiffing Etcher: Mallory knew this because the police read the fucking mail. Now she was saying she wanted to be alone.

Mallory knew that Wade and the Hemings woman were up there together right now. They had figured the priests would never let Etcher go, and they were almost right; what they didn’t figure was how smart Mallory was. They just never figured, Mallory said to himself, what a smart guy I am. Now they were in for a big surprise. Now let’s see Wade try to hide, up there in all that fucking Ice.

AT FIRST IT WAS a trick of the wind, the smell of the smoke. In all the years Etcher had lived in the city he had never smelled the smoke of the lava fields, the wind from the southwest blowing the wine of the sea through the streets and in turn the smell of the smoke north. Now he was heading north on the train; in the company of a police entourage. They had seized half a car for his transport. In the dank light of the train one cop sat in the seat across from him, another in the seat behind him, another by the door nearest him and the fourth right next to him. The one next to him was the cop who had come to take him off to Central the time Sally was sick. One didn’t forget him. His name was Mallory and his nose was missing and the whole bottom of his face lurched upward into a scar; it was sometimes impossible to be sure what he was saying, words leaking out of various orifices in the front of his head like the sea that sprayed up through fissures of the earth along the coast or the Vog that rose from the lava fields. The chains that the cops called a rosary bound Etcher to Mallory by one wrist and to his seat by the other. In the pitch of night, whenever one man slumped into sleep, the slip of his hand would yank the other man awake, and this went on until the dawn, each man falling asleep in time to wake the other man. When Etcher needed to use the toilet Mallory accompanied him. When his heavy new glasses fell from his face into his lap, he had to wait until the cop in the seat across from him put them back on.

It was in the middle of the night that Etcher smelled the smoke. The smell began unpleasantly enough but then, no matter how far behind the train left the black fields, it got worse. It went from a distinct unpleasantness to a horrific stench, and it was then that Etcher knew the smoke wasn’t a trick of the wind anymore, it was a trick of the soul, and there was no tricking the soul back. It was then he knew this wasn’t just the smell of the volcano but the smell of what waited for him, a moment far north to which his whole life rushed. This was the very smell of his odyssey into the black and it was the smell of the end, of something dead in him that was caught in this particular crevice of time and wasn’t to be dislodged, but would go on decaying just beyond his reach, just beyond his capacity to work it loose from where it was caught and grasp it and hurl it out of his life forever. When the smoke grew unbearable, when he was afraid he was either going to suffocate or vomit where he sat, he lunged for the train window to open it, jerking Mallory so hard from the slumber that hissed from the various punctures of his face that the cop believed Etcher was trying to escape. Mallory yelled a strange strangled yell. “My God, that smoke!” Etcher cried. The other cops jumped to their feet, subduing Etcher and wrestling him back into his seat. “Please, open the window,” Etcher begged them, and the smoke grew so powerful in his lungs, and his hands were so restrained by the rosaries, that he would have crashed his face through the glass of the window in order to get some air.

Mallory raised his fist to level a blow at Etcher. He stopped only at the last moment, the other cops yelling because the priests had made it clear Etcher was to come back in one piece. “Open the window,” Mallory muttered, lowering his arm. They opened the window. But what came through the window wasn’t fresh air but a new billow of smoke, like the smell of someone being burned alive. “No, close it,” Etcher moaned, now trying to find his glasses which had fallen off.

After six days, only twenty minutes from his home town, Etcher suddenly knew, with a calm utterly mysterious to him, that his father was dead.

He knew he would reach his home and his mother would be waiting for him in the doorway, and she would say, “He’s gone.” And that was exactly how it happened. They came to his old house on a back road of the village, Etcher in chains with his police guard, Mallory opening the front door for him without knocking. Etcher stepped in to see his mother standing there as though she’d been waiting for him. Two other women were in the room crying. For a moment Etcher’s mother was bewildered by the police and the rosary, but then she just said, “He’s gone,” the way he knew it would happen; he’d died only half an hour before, at the moment Etcher knew it. The son held the mother, Mallory hovering over them obscenely by the dictates of the chains. After another moment the doctor came out of the back room. “He’s still back there in bed if you want to go see him,” his mother said. “He looks like he’s sleeping.”

He did not look like he was sleeping. Etcher and Mallory went into the back bedroom and Etcher’s father was propped up on the pillows in bed, and he looked like he was dead. Every impulse of life had fled his face, which was the color of sand; his mouth was slightly open. Perhaps if he’d looked as though he were sleeping, Etcher might have remained to say something to him. He might have said goodbye, for instance; he had thought, on the train in the smoke, of the things he might say, but there didn’t seem anything that had to be reconciled. Wasn’t there always something that had to be reconciled? Wasn’t there always some final breach to be bridged between parent and child, particularly when they’re so different, when Etcher knew his father had long before stopped trying to identify the ways in which his son refused to live between the incandescence to one side of him and the abyss to the other, attempting instead to straddle both, to place one foot in each? Etcher was filled with regret not that there was something he hadn’t had the chance to say to his father, but that his father might have needed to say something to him. When, at the sight of his father’s body, Etcher brought his hand to his mouth with a gasp, he pulled Mallory into the gesture like a marionette.