Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

In his short acquaintance with Georgie, Erickson never asked whether this was true. It seemed at times too personal and at other times too ridiculous, and there was no telling whether Georgie would have given a straight answer or not. What Erickson did note was Georgie’s profoundly ambivalent and furiously mystic obsession with the idea of America. More often than not this was a secret America that Erickson liked to think had little to do with the real one: Georgie was full of stories about great American geniuses Erickson had never heard of, cracked Midwest Nazi messiahs and white supremacists who Georgie assumed commanded the same rapt attention of everyone in the United States. Georgie’s obsession with America often got the better of his politics. Ultimately he didn’t discriminate between Thomas Paine and Crazy Horse, between sex goddesses and television stars and soul singers; Erickson was never sure Georgie recognized the contradictions. It didn’t seem possible Georgie could have listened to that blues tape of his and somehow heard a white man singing. Yet Georgie’s corrosive racial romanticism burned the black right off the singer until all that was left was the scarlet muscle of a beating heart.

They didn’t talk about politics. The American listened as Georgie rattled on, blithely and earnestly; Erickson would reproach himself afterward for not having said something. He’d reproach himself for not realizing that good manners, even in someone else’s country, had their limits. Only once during a Georgie monologue about niggers and fags and kikes and gooks — and it was a monologue rather than a rant; a rant might have provoked more of a response — did the writer suddenly blurt, “Maybe that’s just a lot of horseshit.” Erickson wished it had been pure moral indignation on his part but it was more reflexive than that, born of some growing dread in the back of his brain that he was going to have to spend the rest of the millennium ashamed of the fact that he hadn’t said anything while Georgie conducted his own personal holocaust. So Erickson said it.

Georgie stopped. He’d been staring straight ahead of him and now he stopped, and he didn’t turn to the other man or meet his eyes. He stopped as though the distant abrupt backfire of a car had disrupted his train of thought, and then Georgie just got back on the train, he just started back up where he’d been interrupted, and after a while he got onto the subject of America again, the betrayal of its promise, a theme they could both agree on, except Georgie’s version of the promise was rather different from the American’s version of the promise, Georgie’s version of the betrayal was different from Erickson’s version of the betrayal, which finally brought them around to Georgie’s real interest in the writer, the real reason he’d approached Erickson at the Brandenburg: the small chunk of Wall the writer had bought, with the remnant of its phrase on the back. Georgie had recognized it immediately.

He took the American to his flat in Kreuzberg. In the flat a dull light shone up from the floor. Out of a secret place in the floor against one wall Georgie hauled up a tape player and some tapes, skipping wildly from one musical selection to another, L.A. punk bands and Hollywood movie soundtracks and 1950s Julie London albums. High on the wall beyond anyone’s easy reach was what Georgie called his American Tarot. The cards were tacked to the wall in six rows of thirteen. From the floor peering up into the shadows of the wall it was impossible for the writer to see the cards clearly, but they appeared very old, and the thing one noticed immediately was the missing card: a place had been left for it in the seventh spot of the third row, right in the middle. Georgie’s flat was empty because in the badlands of Berlin one kept little except what one wasn’t afraid to lose, like his tapes, or what he couldn’t bring himself to disown, like his American Tarot, or what couldn’t be hauled away by scavengers. And in Georgie’s flat was also something that definitely couldn’t be hauled away by scavengers. It was a slab of the Wall, the old Wall, and it stood in the center of the huge flat towering over the emptiness, where it looked a lot bigger than it had out in the middle of the city ten years before. Erickson hadn’t a clue how Georgie got the Wall up there. At its base sat a can of black spray paint, and across the Wall’s surface, where the old graffiti had been sandblasted away, Georgie wrote his own, including phrases from the music that was blacker than his love for it would acknowledge.

Georgie and Erickson stood looking at his Wall and the writer thought about Georgie’s apocryphal American mother, who had rejected her country so she might drive Georgie’s apocryphal German father into the mother earth of the fatherland. That night, leaving the flat and heading for a bar, the two of them turned up a small sidestreet only to see, as though melting into the pavement, an afterthought of the Neuwall jutting insanely onto the landscape from a neighboring alley. Before the American’s eyes, Georgie transformed from innocence to ferocity. Struck motionless in his tracks, the young Berliner shook himself free of his stunned inertia to approach the Neuwall’s small pitiful sputter, still fresh from someone’s efforts only minutes before, where he kicked it, at first almost playfully. After a moment he wasn’t playful. Soon he was wailing futilely at the Neuwall as though trying to kick the whole thing down himself, his face black with rage, while the writer watching him realized in a flash that at this moment Georgie’s mother was up there with the Brigade in the Reichstag, in whatever wing the Pale Flame wasn’t occupying, one of the former informers decimating Stasi files into paste.

THE LAST TIME HE was in the United States, driving aimlessly through Wyoming and the Dakotas for the purpose of being aimless, he heard the news of the Cataclysm the same way he heard all the news that year, on the car radio. He turned the car around at the edge of Iowa and headed back toward the Pacific, assuming the Pacific was still there but never getting far enough to be sure. Every few miles he stopped at a pay phone to try to call anyone in California he could get through to, until it was obvious this was a waste of time, and then somewhere in Utah Erickson came over the ridge of a mountain and saw ten miles ahead on the highway below him the cars backing up in the billowing sheen of the sunset. He met the traffic jam in the middle and they all sat there the rest of the night, no one going anywhere, the cars in front not going and the cars in back waiting for the cars in front to go, until the highway patrol finally came along announcing there was nothing for anyone to do but turn around. At dawn, when he got back up to that mountain ridge, Erickson pulled over and stared westward as though he might see columns of smoke rising in the direction of home, vast and steaming. But there was nothing to see.

Not long before, he’d lived in Los Angeles. For Erickson it had gotten to the point where there was no telling whether L.A. chose him or he chose it; he’d never loved it and had come to distrust people who said they did as much as he distrusted those who claimed they hated it, dismissing the perceptions of both lovers and haters as facile and shallow. He’d been born in Los Angeles, left it at one point in the mid-Seventies to spend some time in Paris and New York, and then returned precisely for L.A.’s profound lack of presence, the way it assimilated the Twentieth Century’s dislocation of memory from time into its own identity. He flattered himself as being liberated by the city’s abyss.

But by the late Eighties the abyss wasn’t liberating anymore, with the end of his marriage and, after that, the most important love affair of his life, in which he invested every dream he still had left. In the midst of this he turned forty. A month later his father died. By 1991 the affair had collapsed and by 1993, with the final failure of his career as a novelist, the ruins around him smoldered close enough to spring him loose in one direction or the other: west, off the edge of a cliff in the Palisades, or east, where the geography offered more potential for emptiness. He gave the west some thought. Being a coward, he went east.