Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

He took the axe from behind the stove and went into an empty storeroom on the side of the house, closing the door behind him. He began to chop. Over the next few hours he chopped up the room and when he was finished he began on another, carving away at the house from the most extraneous rooms toward the center. Day after day he proceeded with increasing ferocity to demolish the house. With each breach of the house’s shelter, with each assault through another wall, he felt the sick exhilaration of another hope collapsing before the hopelessness of the night that flooded in through the house’s gashes. With his axe he stalked his own life as Sally did with her knife. He cast on the fire of the stove the splinters of the house until gradually one room after another disappeared; he was sure he heard the scream of smoldering iceflies rise through the chimney above the rooftop. Polly was so cold he would have set the whole house on fire if it was the only way to keep her warm.

But Sally wasn’t cold at all. Sally was hot. At any moment Etcher thought she’d go up in the dark cloud of her own immolation. There was no barring her door this time against cops and priests, God and Death; Etcher was hacking up the doors for the purpose of the fire. Now Sally lay naked in the webs that were being woven around her as fast as Etcher could rip them away. Steam rose from beneath the place where she lay like the Vog that once poured out from the place where she stood with Etcher on the cliffs of Aeonopolis. When her cries from the heat were more than he could bear he tore away the room around her, to let in the cold of the night for which she pleaded from whatever station of the journey she’d come to. Finally, when the outer wall of the bedroom was gone, to her momentary relief, he lifted her naked body and carried her through the rubble of the slashed jagged walls out onto the ice itself, pulling behind him into a pyre bits and pieces of the house and torching it. The silence of the night, the void of life, was ghastly. In the light and heat of the huge fire Polly played with her animals on what was left of the house floor. Sally lay nude on the fjord with her eyes full of the night and the halfmoon above her and a white mountain in the distance gliding slowly through the dark like a ship. When Etcher knelt beside her, when he ran his cold fingers over her body to soothe her shuddering, when he held her breasts in his hands to calm the beating of her heart, he still couldn’t be sure she knew he was there.

In his hands like that, you might have been a prayer. In his hands like that, you might have been something he thought he could midwife into a new incarnation, strong enough to withstand his love if not your own, wrenching from you the choice that had been killing you since you chose that afternoon in Paris between love and freedom. After that you always insisted it could never again be one or the other. After that it had to be both or neither; you meant to find on your journey the intersection of the two and convince yourself that they could be the same road with two names. You insisted on seeing the wholeness of everything in life but yourself, which lay in bits and pieces around you like the doors and rafters of a broken house: you thought the men only worshiped the bits and pieces of you. You thought their worship had nothing to do with the whole of you. Looking out at it from the inside, you thought your beauty was a thing apart from you. You never understood how the thing they loved most wasn’t your face but your voice, how the thing they loved most was that fountain that trickled up from your heart to your mouth and showed everyone who you were, your heart’s broken, wounded aspirations to be better than you were or could be or better than anyone could be. That was what he loved about you. But he never believed freedom and love were the same road with two names. He always believed they were two separate roads and that it was always a matter of moving back and forth between them. On his mouth like that your name might have been an incantation; and far away where you are now, beneath the night sky and the halfmoon, you hear him say it one more time.

Beneath the light of the halfmoon, she says to herself, The revolution has come.

She turns to him on her bed. She isn’t going to bury her face in her pillow this time and pretend to be asleep. She isn’t a fourteen-year-old girl anymore who thinks that if she lies still enough he’ll go away. This time he isn’t going to rape her, spraying her blood across the room, and then absolve himself with cool rags between her legs and tears on her thighs. This time she isn’t going to scream out in the hope that the night will somehow rescue her; she isn’t surprised that the night answers with an unnatural silence. She isn’t surprised by betrayal at all, she expects it; she won’t fall this time into the light of the crescent moon above her. She’s already well on the way somewhere else. When he comes to take her, without hesitation she greets him with a fierce merciless urgency. With no delusions that she might resist him, she turns instead to devour him back.

In the light of the fire he sees behind her eyes something moving, something that isn’t Sally at all, the sudden swish of its tail, the slithering flick of evidence inside her of the thing to which she’s abandoned everything of herself but desire. Desire bleeds at her mouth. It ripples to her fingers. She parts her lips to inhale him and take him in her hand. Though he tries to pull away it’s a lie when he tells himself he wants to resist her: he doesn’t want to resist her. Though he tries to pull away it’s a lie when he tells himself she can survive his fucking her: she cannot survive it. She sweeps away resistance as he swept away the web of the iceflies around her bed. She takes him in her hand and drives him up inside her and he hears the response inside, the scamper of something into the swampland; his cock feels the ripple of the marshes. He fucks the thing in her so as to find what’s left of Sally at the end of the thing: it’s a lie when he tells himself he wants to free her. It’s such a huge lie that in his mind it never finishes his own sentence. He’s oblivious of the night and he’s oblivious of the fjord and he’s oblivious of the fire in the distance and, somewhere on the other side of the fire, of the child. And it’s only when he thinks of the child that, in horror, he tells himself he has to stop. He can’t lie to himself about the child. And when he tells himself he has to stop, it’s only then he realizes he’s been oblivious of how cold Sally has suddenly become in his arms, beneath his body, holding him in the grip of memory. Desire isn’t the only thing left of her after all. The memory is left, a small trace of it in the embers of her slavery that his seed hunts down, the memory of how he loves her and how she loves him and how it’s bigger than anything they have ever known or perhaps anyone has ever known, and how it isn’t big enough. She whispers in his ear.

“Take care of Polly,” she said. And I knew she was gone.

In the light of the fire a shadow scampered across her face, like a serpent taking flight. But it wasn’t a serpent. Etcher turned to see Polly by the edge of the fire. As she’d done on the edge of the city’s white circle, announcing with a tiny finger something no one could see in a crowd of birds, she raised her arm and pointed now at the fatal flame of her departed mother.

THE WIND BLEW THE chains that hung from the northern wall of the Paris courtyard. The wall was over three hundred years old, as were the chains, because they had been laid into the stone when the wall was built, eight sets of shackles that once held the prisoners of dukes and kings and then, after the Revolution, the enemies of the Republic condemned from the highest summit of Robespierre’s Mountain. The shackles dangled listlessly, the rain of centuries having long since washed them of their blood. Now sometimes teenage lovers broke into the courtyard in the middle of the night to play with the shackles and Seuroq would hurry out of the house to chase them away. More exasperating than the mirth of the kids running off was that of Seuroq’s wife, who found amusing the doctor’s indignation at the harmless bondage games — since the shackles could not be locked — being played in his courtyard. Teasing, she would slip into the chains herself, give them a good rattle. “My God, Helen,” Seuroq said with shock, and Helen laughed.