Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“What is it, doctor?” Luc said very quietly.

He was humoring the old man at first, but then Seuroq started telling him about the missing day, and the more he talked the more frightened Luc became, because either the old man was insane, which unsettled every flimsy foundation a young researcher like Luc had established for himself, or the old man was quite sane, in which case none of the foundations were going to matter much anyway. There it was, Seuroq insisted, pointing to the timeline at his fingertips, a missing day that lay between the 31st of December 1999, and the first of January 2000—twenty hours and seven minutes and thirty-four seconds to be precise, the accumulation, according to Seuroq’s calculations, of all the moments over the millennium that grief and passion had consumed from memory and then dribbled back into the X of the arcs of history and the heart, past and present and future rushing toward a dense hole of time into which all of history would collapse. An amazing dark temporal star weighing 72,454 seconds that hovered between the millennia, on the other side of which everything the past millennium had ever meant might be utterly different, everything history had claimed might utterly shift, the reducibles of freedom succumbing to the reducibles of love, or perhaps vice versa.

Even now Seuroq believed he could sense the acceleration toward the vortex; and when night finally fell on this missing day between the 31st of December and the first of January, we might all be anywhere, or nowhere, or more precisely anywhen or nowhen, since this was not a black hole of space but time. We might come out in a lurch onto the year 2493, Seuroq thought to himself, and then upbraided himself for such a banal conclusion, not having quite yet reached the further one, that beyond such a day time would measure itself not by the numbers of the clock but of the psyche, which was to say that history would measure itself not by years but by memory, where the heart is a country. Perhaps on the other side of the 32nd of December or January 0, however one might mark it, one would see that the millennium had already begun much earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, perhaps, or in 1945 when we gazed into the nuclear mirror, or more likely sometime in the middle of an anonymous night in an anonymous hotel room when someone exchanged freedom for love or love for freedom, or entered some irrevocably compromised bargain with a certain happiness that memory doomed to misery before it ever had the chance to remember itself, when the promises of history or the heart first showed the signs of their own betrayal. Perhaps now, in 1993, it was already the Third Millennium, or perhaps it was the ur-Millennium, and a thousand years didn’t have anything to do with anything, it was just a presumption, like a republic or a reich.

“Dr. Seuroq,” said Luc, “can we go home now?”

“Yes,” Seuroq answered, “I’m finished here,” and when Luc reached out to touch the old man there was an abruptness about it that gave way to hesitance, which triggered in Seuroq the last memory he would have of Helen tonight. “You’re making that up,” he had answered her in the hotel room when she said the Queen of Wands was the card of passion, and he had reached to take the card from her and look at it; but between their fingers, his and hers, the card crumbled, disintegrating with age, as though it were as old as the hotel. That night she woke him and said she wanted to go home, so they checked out of the hotel at one in the morning, to the extreme displeasure of the concierge. In the back of the taxi Helen explained to Seuroq that she had been dreaming over and over in her sleep of the card crumbling in their fingers, and it somehow seemed important that they go back home before everything else crumbled. “Everything else?” he had asked. “Like the hotel,” she answered, and laughed as she did when she chained herself to the shackles of the courtyard wall. But it wasn’t really the hotel she meant.

In the fall of 1998 an American writer living in the same hotel room first read the news on page seventeen of the International Herald Tribune, below the reviews of the latest shows in Paris and London. It would have been more appropriate with the obits, the writer thought to himself later, but at the time he didn’t understand the ramifications anymore than anyone else. It wasn’t until three months later when a magazine ran DAY X across its cover — or JOUR D’X on the European editions, out of deference to the French scientist who discovered it — that the panic set in and Erickson took the Bullet to Berlin, where they called it X-Tag.

IT SEEMED TO THE writer that every crucial moment of the Twentieth Century had sooner or later expressed itself in Berlin and therefore it was natural he should go there. But past Hannover the train just got emptier, and by the time it reached Zoo Station at dawn the writer rose from his sleeper to find himself disembarking alone. He took a room on the third floor of an empty hotel in Savignyplatz. The neighbors led lives even more transitory than his: streetwalkers and barflies and whatever tourists were weird enough to stray into Berlin, the kind of adventurous eccentrics who used to pass up Paris or Maui for Amazon villages or Alaskan outposts. A block from the hotel, passing beneath the tracks of the S-Bahn, he looked up one night to the scream of a runaway train hurtling west. The sound and speed were terrifying, the white boxes of the train’s windows empty of life, and in the cold blue shine of the moon the tracks of the S-Bahn glistened across the sky like time’s vapor trail. The writer braced himself for the crash in the distance, the cry of the train flying off the track into space, plunging into a building or park or the waters of Lake Wannsee. That was the night of the first phone call.

As time passed, his memory of this became less exact. As the present slipped into the final year of the millennium, memory became more and more disengaged from the past, like a door that floated from room to room in a house, taking up residence one day in the kitchen and the next day in the basement. The phone in his room had never rung before. The American couldn’t have said for sure the phone even worked. Since there was hardly anyone left in Berlin and he didn’t know anyone anyway, he assumed it was the hotel manager; maybe there was a problem with the bill. Erickson answered and there was silence for a moment and then a young woman’s voice spoke to him in German. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,” the writer said, and there was another pause and the woman said, in English, “I want to take you in my mouth.”

For a split, ludicrous second, he thought it was his ex-wife. He hadn’t talked to her in several years — only once since the Cataclysm, and then just long enough to assure himself she was all right, blessed as she always was by dumb luck. His ex-wife lived her life in fear of one disaster or another, ranging from the apocalyptic to the mundane, when more than anyone he knew she was always unscathed by events; in a meteor shower she’d be the one who just happened to be off the planet at the time. Now, for a split ludicrous second, he thought she’d tracked him down, though in the next moment he knew that was impossible. With the phone in his hand he instinctively turned to the window, as though someone were watching. He tried to remember what was across the street — another hotel, where someone might be staring at him from a darkened room. “What?” he finally answered foolishly, and she said it again.

“Are you alone?” she asked, after a pause. Hesitantly he answered that he was. “Take off your clothes,” she said; and at that moment he was either going to hang up or do what she said. He told her he had to close the blinds on the window. “Did you take off your clothes?” she said when he came back. They talked some more; she described herself. She had blond hair and nice breasts. She didn’t say how old she was, but when he thought about it, which was for only a second, he imagined she was much younger than he. She didn’t say she was beautiful. It became implicitly understood, particularly within the boundaries of the fantasy they were sharing, that outright lying wasn’t permitted. The thing he would remember later with dead certainty was that, immediately after it was over and he lay spent on the hotel bed, she asked if he was all right. Not whether the sex had been all right but whether he was all right, his intensity having betrayed itself to her. Yes, he answered, and there was a click.