Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“Yes? It loses time? Or it’s fast,” said the shopkeeper.

“It runs backward.”

The shopkeeper, of course, found nothing wrong with the clock. “A power surge,” he suggested to Seuroq. “You live in a very old building, right?” But it didn’t seem to Seuroq that a power surge would have unwound the clock by a second; and though his head told him there simply had to be something wrong with the clock, Seuroq’s heart was beginning to hear the whisper of the last years of the second millennium. Since it was the heart speaking to him, he could not rule out the heart’s agenda — that the psychic debris of Helen’s death was gathering like autumn leaves in a storm, blowing together into a meaning; whether the universe cared, Seuroq needed such a meaning. Whether the universe cared, Seuroq needed to believe some purpose might be derived from Helen’s death; and he knew this, he recognized the heart’s agenda, and in the manner of the scientist tried to factor the heart into the equation. And so, as he returned to his university office for the first time in eight months, to pursue the theory brewing someplace between his heart and mind, he continued to insist on the possibility he was just being sentimental, deriving from Helen’s death nothing more than a needy wild conjecture. “What if,” he said to Luc, dismissing with the wave of a hand the assistant’s apology for having left the night before without a goodbye, “time is relative not simply, to the perspective of motion, not simply to what the eye sees from a passing train or a rocket hurtling at the speed of light, but to the heart as well, and the speed at which it travels?”

“What?” said Luc.

What was, Seuroq asked himself, the speed at which the heart travels, in the throes of love or grief or in the fall of its deepest trauma? Across the pages of his logs he calculated until the numbers available wouldn’t calculate anymore, at which point he used new ones, remembering as he did the obscure discovery of a reclusive American mathematician in Cornwall forty years earlier who had found a missing number between nine and ten. Beginning with a given premise, he charted the heart’s arc across the course of lifetime, from the moment it first took flight until the crash into pieces; and like the clanking of prisoners’ chains on a courtyard wall, his head now flooded with a hundred memories of her, ending with her question to him asked in their darkest hour, when they had come close to separating, when they almost lost each other. “But what does life mean, if one isn’t loved?” He had argued it might mean many things. But then he had reduced, in scientific fashion, the meaning of all of those things to a common denominator, and it was always love; and humbled by his wife’s observation, which she had made with no scientific principles whatsoever, which he had to prove to himself with theorems and calculations and equations even as she had known it in a moment’s intuition, he succumbed to the intangible meaning of everything they had been together, and it saved them, until cancer took her and nothing could save them.

Now, scribbling his way through his laboratory at the university, he was flooded by so many memories of Helen he could barely keep up with them, scrambling to translate them into his equations while, over the course of the day and then the next and the next, administrators and other scientists watched him from the hallway through the little window of his door. There was the time he and Helen had driven up the coast and she had unbuttoned his fly while he was driving, and there was the lighthouse on the rocks above the waves as she touched him, and the time they house-sat for a couple in Normandy and for dinner she blackened the fish the way they had it in New Orleans that time they went to the jazz festival, and how in New Orleans at night they slept with the doors of their hotel room open because it was so humid, and the dress he bought her in London when they both knew he couldn’t afford it, and how they argued over dinner that night in Vienna about whether she should get a job — she said yes and he said no — and the time a thief stole a bag of asparagus she had just bought in the market off the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie and she was furious when she went back to get some more and insisted none of the asparagus was as good as what she’d just bought, until the grocer took insult and Seuroq started laughing about it.

And the time her mother died, and then the first miscarriage, and then the other one, until they ran out of chances; and the way he came home from the hospital after the second one and walked the house with the baby’s blankets in his arms, as he’d practiced doing all during Helen’s pregnancy, because he was terrified he wouldn’t know how to carry a baby, and how she had lost both the generation before her and the one behind her and remained undefeated even as she seemed born to such losses, until she was lost to him eight months ago and it seemed to him he should have been the one to go before her because she was the one that life had equipped with the wisdom for loss. As he was barraged by one memory after another, he calculated all the more maniacally, until he had exhausted every possible trajectory of the human heart and then two hearts in tandem and then three, until he came to the heart of history.

Beyond three hearts in tandem was history, and when he reduced the meaning of history he was left not with the common denominator of love but rather that of freedom. And then his calculations split off in two directions, one into the next room off his laboratory, the occupants of which he scribbled out of their occupancy until they were standing in the hallway with the others, watching him through the window; and the other into the hallway itself, scientists and assistants and administrators backing away from him down the hall as though he were something oozing out of the ground. One calculation based itself on history’s denial of the human heart and the other on history’s secret pursuit of the heart’s expression: if one heart’s story was the pursuit and denial of love and if history was the pursuit and denial of freedom, what lay at the arcs’ intersection except the missing moments consumed by memory, the second that was consumed by a memory and then given back to time, when the clock unwound itself from 5:55:55 to 5:55:54? If it was the lesson of the early days of the Twentieth Century that the truth could be dislocated from time, the lesson of the waning days of the second millennium was the dislocation from time of memory, by which the truth is surmised. A wind had blown and chains had rustled against the wall and Seuroq had a memory of a weekend in a hotel with Helen that had nothing to do with chains whatsoever. Perhaps, he thought at first, the association was born of some unconscious conviction that a ghost had brushed past the chains rather than the wind, but once he identified this conviction he had no sense of having held it: it was the sound of the chains, not their movement, that had triggered the memory, a sound that had nothing to do with a weekend in a hotel, and that was when Seuroq realized that a stranger’s memory of the sound of chains had randomly coupled with his, as though memory were a restless thing freefloating in the twilight, like dying ions or dandelion wings, or black notes falling from a sheet of music.

By the time Paris had settled its celebration of long-failed Republics and dead calendars, by the time the misnomered banners had fallen from the windows and the streetlights, Seuroq had found the missing day.

In the labs and the hallways, the scientists and assistants and administrators were giving him a wide berth. They watched his mad numbers as he moved from log to log and desk to desk and blackboard to blackboard. The university called in doctors and wardens in white coats and a couple of police to coax Seuroq out of his frenzy, even to return him peacefully to the numbing dead grief of his mournless mourning; but Seuroq didn’t acknowledge them from the fever of his factoring anymore than he had acknowledged Luc in the courtyard. Finally they sent in Luc himself. From the laboratory doorway Luc inched forth as though to nab a butterfly in the cup of his hands. “Dr. Seuroq?” he whispered, and Seuroq answered nothing until, with Luc only feet away, the old scientist suddenly threw up one hand to signal he was on the verge of a conclusion. He dropped his pencil and raised his eyes to the window.