Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

In the midst of these messages came Sally’s.

Now at the age of forty, his father and youth and love all passing at the same moment, he might have seemed comic in his new incarnation. This new role was to embody the recent bitter revelations of beautiful women who had come to assume by the nature of their beauty — even when, as in the case of Sally, they never quite believed in that beauty — that their lives were always to be filled with a hundred romantic choices, any of which could at some point be discarded or undone. Then the moment arrived for one woman after another, Kara and then Sally, when a choice could not be discarded or undone: and Etcher had been that choice for each of them. Because his love had seemed so enormous and his faith so pure they found his betrayal all the more incomprehensible. Now Sally was in trouble. Her life had become destitute and terrifying. She didn’t call Etcher to help her but to love her again. She called on him to promise her hope. And now Etcher could neither promise nor hope. She wrote scornfully in her letters of how he didn’t trust her anymore; he didn’t deny it. She wrote scornfully of how she didn’t trust love anymore; he couldn’t refute it. It infuriated him that she somehow felt love had let her down, when he believed she had let love down. He turned his back on her. His father and youth and love all having simultaneously passed from him, he no longer believed happiness was something pursued timelessly but rather that it was stumbled upon in a moment, seized ruthlessly and sensually with the understanding that it too would pass as quickly as a father or youth or love. But as much as he tried, the one thing Etcher couldn’t pretend was that he didn’t love her anymore. He couldn’t stop the dreams of her. He couldn’t stop the voice in his head that spoke to her, or her voice in his head that spoke back.

Then the correspondence stopped and the dreams changed. In the new dreams Sally was sick again, something in her again fluttering for release. As two years before she was in bed dying, the black bloom of her turned livid by fever. At first he thought these dreams were just old memories until in one of them he stopped to look around and saw he wasn’t in her old unit in her old circle but in the house far to the north in the Ice where he’d been chained to her bed while police rampaged across the rooftop. He told himself the dreams didn’t mean anything. He told himself they were a conspiracy of heart and conscience to provoke him into some kind of flight to her, into rushing back to save her again when he couldn’t save anyone anymore. Gann, after all, was there. It wasn’t as though she were really alone.

But one night not long after this dream, Etcher saw Gann in a corridor of the Arboretum.

He glanced up from Mona’s feet to catch sight of him just beyond the Fleurs d’X door, making his way to the stairwell that held the sound of the tide and led up to the surface; and at that moment he knew something was wrong. Sally was up there alone in the Ice after all, with no one but Polly. A cold dread passed through him. Suddenly oblivious of the Woman in the Dark, he rose to hurry after Gann, dropping his money on the stage and leaving the club behind. He had gotten down the corridor and was beginning to climb the stairs when he felt someone behind him.

The large hands on his back tore him from the stairs and hurled him against the wall. Etcher fumbled to try to catch his glasses as they flew off his face. In the force of his collision with the wall of the corridor, as he slipped bloodily to the floor, he was aware of nothing but that his glasses were somewhere in the hall where he couldn’t see them; in the vertigo of his blind haze and the smell of blood around him he was reminded not of when he’d smashed his glasses before the priests but of how far from the grace of love’s power he’d fallen. He called out to Gann in his mind, thinking, Something is wrong and I have to find Gann. But what he said out loud, what everything came down to, as it had all come down to since the first moment he saw her, was her name.

He was vaguely aware of someone at the end of the hall. He might have recognized her as the Woman in the Dark if in the light she hadn’t been transparent. If he could have seen anything he might still not have recognized the big black man from the church lobby years before, since the big man was more naked than the woman. Etcher reached to his mouth to touch his blood. It glistened from the blur of his hands. He was still saying her name when the large man placed his glasses in his hands and ran down to the other end of the hall.

All the way back to his unit he held out his hands before him and said her name, as though the blood were the medium of their communication and he spoke to her now through his wet fingers. All through the night he lay on his bed with his hands open at his sides. He could tell his hands were still wet with blood in the wind that came through the crack beneath his door. Something’s wrong, he told himself over and over; he did not sleep so as not to dream, because he couldn’t bear to dream of Sally dying alone in the Ice. It was as well that he didn’t catch up with Gann, he tried to tell himself: what would he have said to him anyway? “Gann, I’ve been having dreams.” Now as he lay on his bed he shook himself awake each time he thought he might fall to sleep. He didn’t change positions because he didn’t want to wipe the blood from his hands onto the sheets beneath him. He had almost slipped to sleep when there was a knock on the door.

Gann, he thought. “Sally,” he said.

“It’s me,” she answered behind the door.

He sat up. “Sally?” he said, astonished. The blood didn’t matter anymore, it had conjured her, he thought, and it didn’t matter if he got blood on the door when he went to open it.

“It’s me,” Mona repeated, in his doorway.

“It’s you,” he agreed, looking at her. She had a coat pulled around her, and appeared cold. He stepped aside and she stepped through the doorway into the dark of his unit. He closed the door and turned on a lamp. He motioned her toward the only chair as he sat on the bed. She sat on the chair for a moment, and when neither of them said anything she got up and came to the bed and sat on the edge of it next to him. In the light of the lamp she touched the battered side of his face, where he’d been thrown against the wall of the Arboretum.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She took one of his hands. “You’re still bleeding?”

“No,” he shook his head, “I’m all right.”

“I think I caused trouble for you.”

“No.”

“I think so,” she nodded.

“Do you know him?”

“Yes.”

“Does he hurt you?”

“Yes. No. I can’t go back now, except to leave.” They sat in silence, the light of the lamp growing a little dimmer. Glancing casually around the unit, she turned back to him to say, “Do you want to sleep?”

“I can’t sleep,” he answered, exhausted.

“If you try.”

“I mean I can’t let myself. I have dreams.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have dreams?”

“I dream of the room falling.” She stood and took off her coat and he wasn’t surprised that beneath the coat she wore only the black stockings of the Fleurs d’X. She sat casually naked on his bed. He worried that she was cold. “Should I go?” she said.

“Are you cold?”

“I’m cold,” she admitted.

Instinctively he moved to put his arm around her.

“It’s all right,” she said, raising her hands.

He pulled back. “OK.”

She hadn’t meant he couldn’t touch her. She hadn’t really thought through, as she followed him from the Arboretum out of Desire into the city, whether or not she would let him touch her. She had only recoiled from the promised shelter of his arms, not from his bloody hands touching her. Just as instinctively as he’d moved to put his arms around her, she touched herself, since it was her job to touch herself — a vocational habit — since she’d long since come to define all of her relations with men by the way she touched herself in place of their own hands. I’ll do the touching for you, was what she said to every man. And so when Etcher came to her not so much out of desire as to protect her from the cold, and when she rebuffed him, she tried to repair the reproach by touching herself for him. Her little gift to him.