Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

It thrilled him, the possession of her. He only wished she were so black as not to have a face at all. He only wished she was so black that his ejaculation might be the only white squiggle across the void of his heart. When he opened her, the smoke rushed out of her in a cloud and filled the room. It thrilled him, not to be a saint for once, not to be a champion. Not to bear, for once, the responsibility of something noble or good. Didn’t he believe that one must pursue his happiness? Such a pursuit is as ruthless as any other. This possession made him happy, until he came. Then he sank out of his own sight, refusing to look at himself or what he’d done. He fell asleep, half on the bed and half on the floor.

For a long time she lay naked beside him, shuddering. Her face was turned away from him, but she could feel him there; if she could have moved she would have, but she could not. Nothing was more terrible to her than the silence, because she’d screamed so loud there was no way they couldn’t have heard her; she knew they were all awake in their beds in the hotel, James and Patsy and Polly, all lying staring in the dark still hearing the screams to which they didn’t respond. In these first moments she hated them and then she hated herself, for the way they would despise her now. So she lay shuddering, silently awake, and they all lay awake, except him.

Finally Sally slept. When she woke, before dawn, it was he who awakened her.

IT WAS, ACTUALLY, the soothing coolness between her legs that awakened her. When she opened her eyes and saw him, she lurched. Then she didn’t move.

Her hands were untied, the blue ribbon back on the post where it had hung. Blood still streaked the bed. Beside the bed, he knelt on the floor. He held in his hands the cold rags she’d brought for his head the previous afternoon. Sitting on the bed beside her naked body was the peach-colored porcelain bowl. He touched the rags to Sally’s thighs and wiped the blood from her, rinsing and squeezing the rags and putting them to the new wound between her legs, holding them there for a long time. He went on applying the damp rags until finally she stopped shuddering.

When she heard him bury his face into the rags between her legs and sob, she went back to sleep.

WHEN THE BLOOD STOPPED, after he’d taken her many times over the weeks that followed, he didn’t wash her with the rags anymore. It was the hemorrhaging of his conscience to which Thomas tended. If he couldn’t quite forgive the way he fucked her, he accepted it as the dark thing that allowed him otherwise to be good.

Toward the end of the year, when he thought Sally was strong enough, Thomas brought a doctor to the Hotel Langeac to inoculate her for the pox. For several days and nights Sally lay in bed with terror and pox coursing through her; it was left to Patsy and James to care for her. They silently brought her food and, in the same silence, mopped her brow. Their eyes burned with hate. When the fourteen-year-old girl felt how she was banished from the heart of her own brother, her loneliness was without horizon.

Thomas, of course, didn’t come to her during this time. So at first Sally was grateful for the fever. But finally she would have gone through anything to be free of it, and in her spells and exile from everyone around her, she imagined that the white spillage of her dark god might cure her like a potion. Feeling his rejection, she even heard herself call for him. When the fever of the inoculation finally passed and she’d spent another couple of days in bed recovering, she crept to the hotel kitchen one night and smuggled out a carving knife. She told herself she would lop off her tongue before she ever allowed it to call his name like that again.

Thomas and Sally didn’t speak of what was happening. He wouldn’t have chosen to speak of it, and there was no one for her to speak about it to. She was shunned by everyone as the living black secret that spread through the hotel and down its stairs, out its door and into the street. There this secret took the form of the heads of dead deer and the carcasses of dead rabbits stuck on gate tops and pinned to doorways, draping the pillars of the Pont Neuf and lining the walls along the rue St-Lazare. By the end of the first day the stench of dead animals was as political as the cognac and sex that Thomas had smelled on his arrival in the city two years before. The people in the streets said the dead carcasses were a protest against the law that made it a crime to kill the game of the aristocracy. But Sally knew the carnage had emerged from her uterus in the gush of his afterflow, beasts with their fur slicked by semen dashing crazed into impalement on the spires of Paris. The heads of people would be next.

The heads of people will be next, she whispered to him on the first night he came to her after her fever had gone. He’d taken her and then fallen asleep by her. Now at night there was always torchlight through the crescent-moon window above. I called you from the fever, she said to his sleeping face, drawing the carving knife out from beneath her pillow, because I’m so alone, and for that moment I would have rather had you up inside me than been that alone: that’s what you’ve done to me, she said. That’s the worst thing, that you’ve made me actually long for your defilement. Next time I’ll cut off my tongue first. He was sleeping in the light of torches. She looked down to between his legs and an idea gripped the knife in her hands; instead she pressed the blade to his throat. Her own face was inches from his. She had the feeling he wasn’t asleep at all. Something about his breathing was different; she put her eyes right up to his as though to look in. “Master,” she said, “we’ll carve your head and put it on a pike outside, with a rabbit. Your head on a rabbit’s body, and a rabbit’s head on yours. That’s how Patsy and James will find you tomorrow.” She wanted to goad him now out of his pretense of sleep. It would be just like him, she thought, to die without anyone’s ever knowing whether he’d been awake for his own death. How godlike. She put the knife away and lay back on the pillow, waiting for a lion to emerge from her and crash through the hall, down the stairs and into the foyer, spearing itself on the iron poker with which the ashes of the fire below were stirred.

THE NEXT TIME HE came to her she was awake. She heard the door open and let herself go limp in his hands. He took the blue ribbon from the post and tied her wrists. But instead of taking her from behind, he knelt on the floor by the bed as he’d done when he washed her with the cold rags. On the ceiling above her was the riot of light through the window, a blazing crescent-moon in the black. When she had almost lost herself in it, she was shocked by the feeling of something she’d never imagined. It was several seconds before she realized it was his mouth she felt on the small red hinge of her thighs. It didn’t hurt at all. It didn’t hurt in the least. She lay transfixed by it, not daring to look down at his hair the color of fire brushing against her in the dark. She felt his tongue slip inside her. Her inner mutilation hummed to it; the shudder she felt from it was unlike the one in which his first depravity left her. The crescent-moon grew on the ceiling above her. As he continued with her the furor of the streets outside retreated to the low hum of her inner passage. The next shudder took her by surprise as did the one after, and when she felt herself plummeting into the blaze of the crescent-moon, when she felt herself grab the fire of his hair and pull him to her, she knew, with rage, that her violation was total: when she came she knew, with fury, that this was the ultimate rape, the way he’d made her give herself not just to his pleasure but to her own. Then he turned her over and plunged himself into her. But it was too late. If he’d intended to make his own possession of her complete, she had also, if for only a moment, felt what it was like not to be a slave.