Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

This is not a dream, he answered.

For some time we discussed this, my father gently pressing the point that this was real. And nothing had ever seemed more real. I could feel the wind through the windows and see the trees swaying outside, and my father was as vivid as he’d ever been. On his lap he held a small plate. On the plate was a small pastry. He gave me the pastry and said, Here, taste this; and I did. He said, You can taste it, can’t you? and I could. He said, You can taste it because it isn’t a dream; and it was true that it didn’t taste like any dream, it was true that I couldn’t remember ever having been able to taste something in a dream before, taste being the one sense that’s beyond my imagination. But I still wouldn’t believe him. What my mind had come to believe in as the reality of his death was too strong for my heart, which was confronted with the reality of his talking to me now, and offering me a pastry.

And then I woke, at the beckoning of my mind, which feared that it would lose this argument with my heart. Except I didn’t wake to reality but rather into another dream, which I later forgot as immediately as I forget all my dreams, moments beyond the thin silver horizon of waking, beyond the edge of the blade of consciousness. Another dream that wasn’t in the least important except for the fact that it was there waiting beyond the archway of my last meeting with my father, a place for a coward to hurry when he wasn’t brave enough for his visions.

Everyone I’ve ever told about this has said the same thing. Every one of them has said my father was right.

AFTER ETCHER RETURNED TO Aeonopolis, a calm settled over his daily life. But his nights were filled with dreams of his father and dreams of Kara and mostly dreams of Sally, and worse were the waking moments when he lay staring in the dark unable to believe he wasn’t with her anymore. “I can’t believe what happened to us,” he said out loud in the dark. When his nights became nothing but the same dreams again and again, he went looking for another kind of night.

He found himself at the feet of a naked blonde.

In the rosy stupefaction of the wine he wasn’t always aware she was there. Sometimes he looked right through her. Her yellow hair was tied back and she had long legs and wore only long black stockings and high heels, and she danced for him though he knew she danced for everyone. Somewhere in the onslaught of his dreams and the stupefaction of the wine he understood the true nature of his exchange with the naked blonde, and realized that in such an exchange it was not the woman who gave herself to the dance but the man, that it was only the man’s folly and conceit that allowed him to believe it was a naked blonde giving herself to him, and everything about the exchange was contingent on that conceit. The dance wasn’t about her obliteration but his. It was he who lost his persona in the dark of the club, it was she whose persona became all-pervasive in her body’s celebration. And so there were moments he took comfort in this, losing himself in the same way a man loses himself in the climax of sex, and there were also moments he wasn’t aware she was there at all, when he looked right through her, those moments when there was too much of him to lose no matter how much he might have wished to.

Those were the moments she noticed him. The moments when her spell over him was broken, and her power over him was gone; and she danced to those moments in the expectation of seizing them back from him, and in the hope she never would.

He dropped his glasses one night. The two of them crawled together on the floor of the Fleurs d’X, and when she found them and he put them on he couldn’t help but see her then, her breasts close enough to touch and her mouth close enough to kiss. She laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“You’re very beautiful,” he explained in the dark. “I’m just like all the others.”

“Yes,” she answered, relieved. He could tell she was from the Ice. Not long after, it might have been the next night or the next — in the onslaught of dreams and the stupefaction of wine and the time of the Arboretum it was difficult to know or wonder why it was important — when she came to talk to him at the edge of the Fleurs d’X he said, I’m from the Ice too. “You don’t have an accent,” she said.

“I lost it after I came to the city.”

“I never leave the neighborhood,” she said, by which she meant the Arboretum, “so I never lose anything.” She added, “You don’t look like you’re from the Ice.”

He could tell, even in the dark, that with each passing moment she doubted more and more he was really from the Ice. She believed it was just another fiction of the Fleurs d’X, where everyone had their fictions, the girls most of all. That was one of the attractions of Fleurs d’X, the invention and acceptance of fictions. So he just answered, “I know.” After a moment he said, “My father is dead,” and was appalled that he’d reduced his father’s death to a seduction, only because he couldn’t bring himself to so reduce what had happened with Sally.

“My father’s dead too,” said the woman in the dark, and more than just the cold of the Ice was in her voice.

“Who are you?”

“Call me the Woman in the Dark.” Mona was the fiction she offered all the other men, the one that had been claimed by the black giant who lived in her flat on the other side of the neighborhood; and she looked around her as she said it because though the giant wasn’t here she knew he was watching from her flat, peering at the living map he’d painted across the walls where she lived. If she’d thought there was any corner of the Arboretum that was hidden from sight in the walls of her flat, she might have taken Etcher by the hand and led him there. Or she might not. It might have been that any violation of her relationship with the men she danced for was too monumental, though of course it had already been violated by the man who lived in her flat. It never crossed her mind to fuck Etcher. She wasn’t sure it crossed his either. But she supposed that finally she’d found a man to whom, in some dark cold corner of her life, she might say, “Keep me warm,” and it would mean something entirely different from what it had always meant before. “Keep me warm,” she might say to him, and not feel colder for it. The dead part of her heart in which her father lived might, should she say it to Etcher, surge with the blood of her life, and in the flush she would dance for only one man and obliterate herself at his hands.

Every night he went to see the Woman in the Dark. She did not tell him her name. He drank again now.

Three months after he’d returned to the city the messages came from the north.

The first came from Kara. It was filled with expectation and insinuating pathos. His responses conveyed as much compassion as their obligatory nature could allow. If he no longer loved Kara as he once had, he nonetheless felt bound to love her for what had happened between them; for the source of his defining anguish to dry completely now would be another betrayal by love too profound for him to live with. But even as his answers to Kara became more perfunctory and less urgent, he wasn’t prepared for the simple one-line letter that arrived one afternoon: I don’t ever want to hear from you again. For the first split second he thought it was a joke; but he knew it wasn’t a joke. He thought, for another split second, of answering; but he didn’t answer. And so silence followed until, some time later, another message arrived: Your love was a lie. Then another: You led me on. These memos continued until their terse brutality changed to palpable rage. Now he tried to soothe himself with indignation, that this woman who had rejected him so bluntly and then, after the passage of so many years, beckoned him so summarily could accuse him of leading her on. But it was a cheap indignation, won by logic but without force of argument on the terrain of aging and abandonment and self-remorse: it was easier for her now to believe their love was a lie than to accept the consequences of having once made the wrong choice.