Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

Patsy sat down in the next chair. “How is it?”

“It comes and goes,” Thomas said, “I was telling—” He stopped. “It comes midday, and then goes.” He pulled the cold rags from his forehead down over his eyes. He’d recently come to talk about things with Patsy the same way he used to talk with his wife, but Maria wasn’t something he could talk to her about. “It will eventually pass,” he said. “As it always has before.”

“Father,” Patsy finally said, “what about James and Sally?”

“James and Sally?” he said.

“How long will they stay in Paris?”

Thomas lay back in the chair, his eyes closed again. Patsy found this disconcerting. It was like her father to be private, but not evasive.

“As long as it’s …” He shrugged. “Helpful.”

“I would think you might want to send them back to America soon.”

“Why? It’s a dangerous voyage this time of year. We certainly could use them here, especially now that Polly’s with us. It seemed to me you and Sally were friends once.”

“We were little girls, father. When some things didn’t matter.”

“What things?”

“Do James and Sally know they aren’t slaves in Paris?”

Thomas sat up. He pulled the rags from his eyes and looked troubled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I would think James will figure it out if he hasn’t already.”

“And then he will tell Sally.”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever think of telling them?”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“I don’t know.”

Patsy asked, “Doesn’t it still trouble you? It used to trouble you. I mean, the slaves.”

“Yes.”

“Everyone here says it’s rather dreadful.”

“They’re right. It’s rather dreadful.”

“So why—?”

“Because we’re weak,” he answered, before she could ask.

That night Thomas dreamed about the hanging man. He hung from a beam just below the pain in Thomas’ head, not in the king’s palace but a bare room of empty shelves and tattered deep-blue curtains. The hanging man was gaunt and old, not at all like the king; it wasn’t long before Thomas realized it wasn’t the king but himself, hanging in the study of his home in Virginia. The home was dilapidated, ruined, which Thomas somehow found more shocking than his own body spinning in the smoke that curled in through the window. Sometimes in this dream Thomas was standing below looking up at himself, and sometimes he was up there hanging from the beams of the ceiling looking down at his slaves, who were watching him. James will cut me down soon, Thomas thought in his dream. Sally will put cold rags around my scarred neck and run her fingers through my hair. But Sally and James didn’t come, and the black faces below were pitiless. For a moment in his dream he believed it was his slaves who had strung him up here, but then he knew that wasn’t it. Then he knew he’d done it himself. He regretted it now and wanted down. He wanted to call out to his slaves to cut him down but he couldn’t get out the words. As the smoke came in through the window, as he could feel the heat of the fire outside, his only hope seemed to be that a flame through one of the windows would lick the rope and drop him to the floor. He recognized the smoke, of course; he knew it all along. He knew it the moment he first smelled it. And as she burned outside, somewhere unseen but certainly burning, the smell that he’d known since he was five years old, that had caused the first of these pains in his head and the first of his many visions, now became the smell of his own freedom. His best hope was that she would burn so hot, that her immolation would be so intense, the very heat of her black annihilation would burn the rope that held his life. At that moment he loved the smell. At that moment, as the rope choked him tighter, he inhaled its sensuality; he was filled with desire for the burning slavewoman. He could see his slaves below him. He could see them shrink back from the sight of his erection. It would become so big that the weight of it would snap the rope above him and send him groundward, and then send him through the window to the pyre, where he would thrust himself into the ashes of her thighs.

He woke in this pandemonium. No spell was broken. He didn’t shake himself loose of his dream: his dream went on and on, across the bedroom and into the hall. He knew he was awake, he knew he was in the Hotel Langeac and not his house in Virginia; but the smoke was still there. It was as unmistakable as his desire. His head didn’t hurt now. He was filled with exultation at his new conviction, born in his dream, that no ashes of a burning woman would ever rain down from the sky, as he’d believed when he was a child, but that such ashes were only the soft sensual harbor of his desire, waiting between her legs. He followed the smoke to her quarters. What if James, he wondered, should try to stop me? I should have to flog him then, or sell him. He had never flogged or sold a human being. It thrilled him. He felt like a master, a king.

In her bed, Sally lay with her face in her pillow, her eyes open. There was a melee outside her door, coming down the hall, though she couldn’t be sure what was happening. Then she knew.

The revolution, she said to herself, has come.

THE REVOLUTION, SHE SAID to herself, has come. But when she looked up at the crescent-moon window above her bed, there was no light from torches, there were no voices from the streets. She heard her door open; she didn’t move. She lay still with her face in the pillow, but she didn’t turn to look. An uncomprehending terror gripped her: a secret had come stalking her to Paris. Something she’d never known, something she’d never wanted to know, was in her doorway. Like the child she still was, she thought if she lay still he would leave. He’d think she was asleep and therefore inviolate. But he didn’t care whether she was asleep.

He closed the door and with no hesitation came to the bed. He didn’t touch her to see that she was awake; he didn’t grab her roughly, but without thought at all to either roughness or kindness. She looked up into his face in the dark; his eyes were wild. He took the sheets and blankets that covered her and threw them on the floor.

“Sir?” she said. He took hold of her sleeping gown by the neck and pulled it, and she heard it tear. “Sir,” she could barely choke it out again; he tore the rest of the gown off her. Naked, she now pulled away toward the other side of the bed, but he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him. He took from the bedpost the long blue strip that she’d surreptitiously shredded from the curtains that had hung in his bedchamber in Virginia. It’s my fault, she thought, for taking a piece of the curtain to tie back my hair: “I didn’t know,” she said; “I thought it was all right.” He tied her wrists with the cloth. “Please,” she said, but he held her tight, and then, when he loosened his robe, she saw him. In a panic she tried to bolt, but her wrists were bound and he held her by her legs. She fell back onto her bed. Behind her he pulled her hips toward him so she was on her knees, and took her long black hair in a knot in his fist. Before he buried her face in the pillow she had one last chance to gaze up at the crescent-moon window, to look for the light of torches, to listen for the sounds of voices. The window was black and silent.

He separated and entered her. Both of them could hear the rip of her, the wet broken plunder, a spray of blood across the tiny room. She screamed. She screamed so her brother James would hear, so the whole hotel would hear. She didn’t care if he killed her for it, if he pulled the hair out of her head for it, she screamed so they’d all know that their secret had found her. It was their secret, she’d seen it in all their faces, in London and Paris. But he didn’t strike or kill her, and then she knew it had been a secret to him too, and he couldn’t bear to live with it anymore. She screamed as the tip of him emptied his secret far inside her.