Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

What Etcher most dreaded now wasn’t the smoke of his father’s cremation. What he dreaded was that the billow of the crematorium would be something entirely different from the smoke he had known for the past six days, something purer and conveying a color of the earth, and then there would be forced upon Etcher the realization that the dark smoke that had pursued him from the city was something else. There was no ceremony. Later Etcher was vaguely troubled by this lack of ritual, though he wasn’t sure why, since all three of them in his family had always hated ritual, and the manner of his father’s death was therefore in keeping with the spirit of his life. Over the days that followed, Etcher became enraged by the chains. He threatened to intentionally hurt himself. “I’ll rip my hands off,” he told Mallory. “You can explain to them in Central how I’m supposed to return their precious books with my hands ripped off.”

The whole time Etcher was with his mother, however, Mallory didn’t take off the chains. He didn’t take off the chains until several days later, when Etcher went to see Kara.

The observatory was as good as a prison, Mallory figured. It was made of stone, with no windows, and only a single set of double doors on the northwest side. The only other way to leave the dome, as far as Mallory could see, was to jump from the top; he didn’t really think Etcher was going to risk that. He knew Etcher wasn’t going to risk anything before getting to Sally Hemings. So at the observatory he took the rosary off, more because he was getting sick of it himself than out of consideration for Etcher, for whom he had no consideration one way or the other. The other cops waited outside the door and Mallory patrolled the dome’s stone circumference, just for good measure.

As they had approached the dome, Etcher didn’t smell the smoke at all, only the surrounding trees and the bite of the air. He had nearly gotten to the doors of the observatory when they opened suddenly and she presented herself, as though to take the offensive against time and confront both of them with the ways in which time had deformed them. Her hair was shorter. She was a little heavier, and older of course. He wore the glasses — if not the same pair — that had so appalled her that last night. He hadn’t come to answer anything between them, and he’d brought no questions. Perhaps he wouldn’t have come at all if he hadn’t believed the smoke was the pyre of everything else ending.

He knew Kara smelled her own smoke. He felt, in the grip of her hand as they sat beneath the opening of the dome looking up at the sky, the desperation he recognized as someone smelling smoke. As calmly as Kara pretended to receive him back into her life, he recognized the way everything was tinged with this desperation: it was all around him in the trappings of a rendezvous, in how she would have taken off her clothes and lain naked beneath the night as she had once before if she hadn’t believed it would send him running from her. They talked. He told her, in terms he hoped were explicit enough to warn her but implicit enough to protect what was private, about Sally. She told him, in terms she hoped would obviously belie her assurance that she expected nothing of him, about what had happened to the sky. It had changed. She had looked up one night a couple of months before and had noticed it immediately. It was just after that dusk which everyone crosses sooner or later, when their remaining days recede before them and solitude suddenly reveals itself to be ghastly and endless. She looked up and it was a different sky. It had different quadrants and different stars. There were different worlds and new mortifying suns. Tonight she clung to Etcher, and to what he couldn’t give beyond some requisite tenderness that he would have owed to anyone, but especially her.

When she slept, he lay in the dark of the observatory staring up at its concrete shell, and on the inside of the dome watched all his memories. They were big and in color, and roared out of so many years before in details he would have thought forgotten beyond the possibility of remembrance. He reveled in the luxury of being able to raise his hands to his eyes without the shackles of the rosary, and take off his glasses and cover his eyes, hiding his face away from the light of the memories on the observatory dome. To his astonishment and horror he found himself silently calling his wardens outside to come drag him away. It seemed that, for once, Mallory took forever. In the dark Etcher whispered to Kara, “It’s time to go,” and had to pry her hands loose from his neck.

“MY FATHER IS DEAD” was the first thing he said to Sally when he saw her. Etcher and the cops had continued north across the expanse of the Ice, the trees disappearing and the terrain becoming bleaker and whiter until there was nothing but endless winter, somewhere near the top of the world. The fjord where she lived was jagged and stark. Over its cliffs, which encircled her house, rolled the clouds, each releasing another. At the edge of the fjord gorges cut their way through the earth; the bottoms were filled with water and in the distance there trickled across the ice veins of blue light. A vague gray solstice tumbled across the sky. Polly was the first to see Etcher when he arrived; she ran toward him yelling his name until she got close enough to notice the chains around his wrists. She looked at him confused, not sure whether something was wrong with him or whether she had done something wrong and the chains were somehow for her. When she saw next to him the man with no face, she cried. She turned and ran back toward the house.

“My father is dead,” he said, not yet sure whether he had left the death of his father behind him or brought it with him, or whether he had stashed it in the snow somewhere along the way, to be preserved and recovered later. The abrupt gasp Sally gave might as easily have been to the news as to the sight of him. She was flooded with emotion to see him. She had missed him utterly. In the midst of the precious aloneness she had hoped to find, even with her child and the father of her child in the same house, she had still missed him. She had written him not to come in part because she knew that if she saw him again she might not be strong enough to be alone without him.

He knew this too, though it didn’t much mitigate his rage. He was alive with indignation over her betrayal. He was still sorting out the matter of responsibility for the fact of his life having become a shambles. The shambles was all the more devastating for the promise of two years before, when his affair with her had begun; he remembered the moment of resolution when he’d left Tedi, ruthless in insisting on his right to be happy. He’d been so certain everything was within his control. Now nothing was in his control. He stood in the middle of Sally’s bedroom that was to have been his own as well, facing her and chained to a cop who made little children cry at the sight of him, the father of her child in the room upstairs lying in front of the window that Etcher had dreamed of lying in front of, watching the sky and glaciers gliding past that Etcher had dreamed of watching; and everything couldn’t help but seem ridiculous, everything couldn’t help but appear as though it had come flying back in his face, in return for his having tempted the absurdity of life by thinking he had any power over it. It was just like Etcher to wonder if this humiliating result hadn’t been in the cards all along. He believed just enough in the retribution of destiny to wonder if this place to which he’d now come wasn’t the natural price to be paid for every mistake and every resignation, for every brutal truth, every broken heart.

It was a wonderful house. It made everything worse, that it was a wonderful house, because on first sight of it his deepest dream took on dimensions, took on the form of stone and wood, walls and doors, crossbeams and rafters. His deepest dream rose with the staircase that ascended the middle of the house to the upper room and panorama that swept before its western wall. In the southern wall was a door that led out onto the roof of the lower floor. Outside, next to the door, was a ladder. The ladder led up onto the roof of the upper floor, and on the upper floor the world spilled out at the roof’s edges, north and east and south and west, in a rush so huge and elemental that even when the winds were still one was afraid of being swept off by the sight of it. Goodbye, one automatically whispered to everything on top of that house, where everything was too big for one to really know whether it was a farewell to the world or to what one believed or to the sheer delusion that, standing on top of the world, one was important at all. It seemed an act of preposterous arrogance to stand on top of such a house with the world thundering down in its blue yowl; and that was the greatest lost dream of all, the loss of that preposterous arrogance, because it was the arrogance of someone in the grip of love’s power, and Etcher knew he wasn’t that powerful anymore.