Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

He was always on the lookout for cops. From station to station over the next six days he would constantly change trains, change cars, change seats to the dismay of the conductors. He reached his home village and stayed with his mother one night and then moved on the next day; but he wasn’t racing against time. He was traveling on time’s train and time’s car in time’s seat, shifting from one to the other when seat after seat and car after car and train after train eventually fell behind. He had finally given his compulsions over to his fatalism in the same way the sea left him no choice about Mona. On the trains he huddled in the cold that hadn’t left him since the grotto.

He finally came to the last little town. He paid a guy in a truck the last of his meat-locker wages to give him a lift the twenty miles to Sally’s house. They got there after sundown. The house was dark on the fjord in the distance. The driver said, “You sure someone lives there, pal?” and Etcher lied. He barely heard the truck driving off as he walked up the path, and by the time he got to the house there wasn’t any sound at all.

Until, somewhere, he heard Polly crying.

The ice had frozen the front door around the edges and he had to force it open. The house was dark inside except for the faint glimmer of coals in the cast-iron stove, where a feeble fire had been built hours or perhaps even days before. Its warmth had long since fled the house. The frigid blast in Etcher’s face was the first cold to impress him since his thirty-six hours in the boat; he shuddered not at the cold itself but at recognition that he hadn’t yet met the limits of cold, that something in the world was colder than he was, and that it was this house where he’d once dreamed of living with the woman whom he would have once died loving. Stumbling over a squat wooden stool and kicking a toy duck at his feet, Etcher stood in the dark and listened. For several moments it was quiet and then once more he heard the crying.

He made his way through the front room. He stopped at the foot of the stairs before crossing the kitchen toward the back hallway and listened, peering up the stairs into the blackness to see if anyone was there. He passed one room after another. All of them were so dark that Etcher couldn’t see the small white clouds of his breath he knew were right in front of his eyes. In the back hallway he saw a faint glow shining from Sally’s bedroom. Then he could clearly hear Polly, and a woman’s whispers.

A small lamp burned on a table. Next to the table the mother and her child were in bed. Clothes long since worn and toys long since forsaken were strewn throughout the room, where the walls and ceiling were bare of pictures and a curtain was pulled across the window in a last-ditch effort to keep out the cold. Draped over Sally’s bedroom was a massive silver web. From one corner to the other a swarm of iceflies had spun a cocoon that glittered like a giant jewel. The lamp inside gave the jewel its light, fire flashing off the dense crisscross of ice; and behind the gauzy paleblue membrane of the cell the ephemeral forms of Sally and Polly, moving with a languid vagueness, resembled the metamorphosis of a black larva. For a moment Etcher couldn’t say or do anything. With the sweep of one arm and what he thought was a cry, he tore the web away; but afterward he wasn’t sure he’d cried at all. He heard no echo, and at first neither Sally nor Polly even looked up at him, barely aware in the stupor of their cold and hunger that anyone was there.

He called her name. She barely turned her head. She looked so ravaged and wasted, her face and hair so white like the sheets of her bed and the crystalline bedlam of ice surrounding her, it was as if most of her had vanished altogether, nothing but a pair of deathly distant eyes lying on the pillow and the broken black slash of her mouth. Huddled against her was the small helpless body of her daughter, desperately trying to warm herself against her mother’s fever. Speechless and petrified, Etcher stirred himself from the grip of his shock to rush to them and throw his arms around them; but he’d forgotten how cold he was, and Polly screamed at the touch of him, and her scream in turn jolted Sally to a grunt so meaningless and unearthly that Polly cried more. Sally instinctively clutched at Etcher not because she was aware he’d come back to her but for his coldness, since she was on fire, and the same cold that the daughter recoiled from the mother pulled closer to her so that she might press her whole raging body against his. Thus Etcher was as consumed by Sally as he was rejected by Polly, who tried to beat him away from her even as Sally wouldn’t let him go, the three of them locked in an absurd embrace of ice and fire.

And then he saw that what possessed Sally now wouldn’t be delivered so easily as a white baby gull. The thing inside her, part aerial and part amphibian, was in no hurry to hatch from her and expose itself to the cold outside. So it devoured Sally organ by organ and bone by bone, drinking her fecund blackness and then slumbering in the waste of it, fouling its own nest with relish. It had found an ideal host in Sally’s purity, which was as marked by chaos and desire as it was devoid of guile or malice, the pure folly of a will for transcendence that at the same moment never understood the nature of what was to be transcended: once she might have cut the thing out of her. Once she might have taken her knife and lopped it off at the root, when it attached itself to her thighs and shot its seed into her womb. But cutting it off would have taken the sort of malice and ruthlessness that Sally’s sort of purity didn’t allow for; the purity which attracted her destruction was also the purity that left her no defense. From the beginning Sally Hemings had been laced with her own doom. In the web of the iceflies her transcendence had begun. In the dark delirium of her black fire she’d already started the journey. What Etcher saw as degeneration was the first leap upward; as she seemed to him to be plummeting downward, she in turn watched him fade and disappear from whatever her existence was in the process of becoming, as that existence finally surrendered her beauty. For all of her life her beauty had taken away with one hand the freedom it offered with another; for all her life it had unlocked with one hand the chains the other had bound to her; and she didn’t want to be beautiful anymore. She had never believed in it anyway. She believed every man who had called her beautiful was a liar or a fool, either not to be taken seriously or to be taken seriously only for how he meant to possess her. She didn’t want her body anymore, she didn’t want her face; she would happily leave her witchy incandescent eyes on the pillow, her watery dreamwracked mouth in his hand, where he could hold it like a coin or a plum or a small animal and believe its kiss was a gift of the soul rather than a twitch of the nervous system. She would leave behind the bits of her beauty like souvenirs, and she’d leave the shell of herself to the thing inside her that could devour what she was but not who she was, while she went to a place where the static of love meeting freedom was not to be confused with history.

He couldn’t move her. There was no way he could get her and Polly through the ice the twenty miles to town, and he had no idea whether having made the effort he would find anyone in town who could help them anyway. Nor would he leave her in order to go find someone who might help: it had taken so much and so long to get here that he had no money left and couldn’t be sure there would be a way back. As he walked from room to room with the small table lamp in his hand, he saw that the blast of cold that met him when he came into the house was more than just the air. The iceflies were everywhere. The house was a catacomb of webs spun from doorway to rafter, from crossbeam to window frame, the corners filled with thousands of cocoons hatching thousands of flies until they dangled from his elbow and buzzed around his glasses and his black hair was alive with them. He foraged the house for kindling to stuff in the iron stove, but after he had chopped up the furniture with an axe there was nothing left to burn except food and toys and the house itself. Etcher and Sally and Polly ate the remaining bread, cans of fish and fruit. When he gathered into his arms Polly’s wooden animals and flutes and trains and the pictures she’d drawn of birds and kitties and butterflies, to feed to the stove in a cremation of innocence, he turned to see the little girl in the doorway of the room as though some child’s instinct had alerted her, bringing her from her mother’s bed: “Do you want to play with my toys?” she asked in a tiny pitiful voice. He was awash with shame. He looked at the toys in his arms and dropped them to the floor, and she ran quickly to retrieve her favorite horse, as though she understood he hadn’t really meant to play with them at all and now she’d rescue at least one when she had the chance.