Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

He assumed it was only a matter of time. Over those last two or three years in Los Angeles he kept peering around for the doom that was hounding him. Standing at the corner of an intersection waiting to cross the street, he kept his eyes peeled with passing interest for the stray car that — its driver seized by sudden cardiac arrest — would leap the curb and give Erickson one good bump into eternity. He felt for the throb in his body of this cancer or that virus. Never having been practiced at living in the present, nonetheless he’d been silently shocked by the prospect that his father might not have spent enough of his life being happy, and that the son was doing the same. He wasn’t certain happiness was in his genes. When his love affair had ended, his heart had broken in time to the crumbling of history. He came to understand that while in youth it was quite true that time healed the heart, now the revelation of time’s passage was that the point finally comes when the heart isn’t going to heal again after all. There wasn’t much to do but pursue the purely sensual moment. He might have been better at this if he’d only been without conscience.

With his lover he had glimpsed the possibility of a life that included all of him, the dark interwoven with the light, the bad with the good, the weak with the strong, until he was complete and of a piece. After it was over and he knew this completion wasn’t going to be possible anymore, he accepted and came to terms with the way in which his literary life, his public life, his private life and his secret life lined up like four rooms, with guests, tourists or temporary residents occasionally straying into one room or the other, none of them necessarily knowing there were other rooms with other guests. There was a door between the literary life and the public one, through which someone might slip back and forth, and a similar door between the private life and the secret, and a hidden passage that ran directly from the secret to the literary. But the only one who ever went in all the rooms was Erickson. The only one who even knew there were other rooms was Erickson. No one else was allowed access to all of him again; and when he did things with people in the secret life that remained unknown to those in the private, he understood this arrangement might just be a moral expediency, to justify to himself infidelities and spiritual disarray, even as he also persuaded himself — and sometimes actually believed — that it was the only arrangement keeping him sane.

The rooms became strewn with furious women. Once it would have meant everything to him if even one of them had loved him. Now they all loved him, when he was either too old for it or too unworthy. A friend argued that there was something about him that almost naturally raised these women’s expectations, something that persuaded them he was incapable of hurting them and was bound to submit, sooner or later, to their tenacity or patience. But in the wake of everything he finally couldn’t convince himself he’d acted in anything other than bad faith, whether he misled them himself or allowed them to mislead themselves, permitting hope to grow into expectation without yanking hope up by the roots, in one room after another repeating the same scene with only a variation of details, the slammed door of a woman’s angry exit or his own dreadful walk out that door with the sound of her crying behind him. “Your love was a lie,” one of them said on his phone machine, a woman he had loved passionately years before and about whom he’d even written his first novel. “I guess it’s the surprise of my life,” said another bitterly, on yet another phone message, “to find out you’re just a bastard like all the rest.” She’d been in some novel or other too, though he couldn’t remember exactly which one, or what character she was.

“You’re just a real fake,” said the last, who had once called him “mythic.”

After the Cataclysm he headed on to Iowa and spent some time there with a friend, and then south to Austin and east to New Orleans and north to New York, as purposefully as aimlessness could be. With the crash the next year he sold the car and headed for Europe, settling first in Amsterdam and then Paris, which was no more or less practical than anyplace else until, a year and a half before his fiftieth birthday, he read about Day X on page seventeen of the International Herald Tribune. The writer figured they had to have known about it for a while. He had to figure the scientists didn’t all just wake up one morning and look at their wrists and tap their watches wondering when, during the night, the small inner coil of infinity missed a beat. Even if he didn’t accept the conspiracy theories — conspiracy, after all, to what end? — he figured there had to have been at least a lurking suspicion, quantum whispers of the slowing cosmic timepiece, out of which seeped into the millennium the lost seconds and then minutes and then hours. On maps of outer space, after all, there are the vague shadows that hint at black holes for years before scientists confirm the discovery. In such a way they must have seen in the present the vague shadows of the future.

On the other hand the American writer never believed, as others argued, that the scientists knew something they weren’t telling everyone. People said that more in hope than cynicism. Erickson didn’t believe the scientists knew much of anything at all. He suspected they knew less than everyone, having finally bumped up squarely against the limits of their vision. Whatever would emerge on the other side of the temporal wormhole fell as much in the imaginational sovereignty of philosophers and fantasists, theologians and crackpots, witches and pornographers and tunnelers: it would be the most purely democratic and totalitarian event ever, having rendered everyone equally subject to its mysteries and revelations. That, of course, was why Erickson had come to Berlin. Because Berlin was the psychitecture of the Twentieth Century, and if he or anyone should emerge on the other side of Day X in the new millennium as anything more than a grease skid on the driveway of oblivion, they were bound to all come out on the Unter den Linden, the only boulevard haunted enough to hold all of it: dictators and democrats, authoritarians and anarchists, accountants and artists, businessmen and bohemians, decadents and the devout each contradicting their lives with their hearts, SS troops with blood running from their fingers wearing the wreaths an American president laid around their necks and GDR soldiers, wrenched from the vantage point of their towers pulling huge blocks of the Wall behind them, led past the Unter den Linden’s grand edifices of delirium and death through the Brandenburg into the Tiergarten by an Aframerican runner with a gold medal around his neck who sprinted all the way from Berlin 1936 into the Berlin games of the year 2000, followed at the rear by a mute army of six million men and women and children utterly white of life but for the black-blue of the numbers their bodies wore, and at the rear the Great Relativist himself doing his clown act, juggling a clock, a globe and a light bulb, tangled in a möbius strip and with a smile on his face that said he for sure knew about Day X anyway, a conspiracy of one.

Erickson received her last phone call the night of the summer solstice. It was around the same time she always called, except as the days had gotten later the night had not yet fallen outside his window, where instead there was the haze of twilight on a street that ran perpendicular to the sun, and therefore never saw either its rise or fall. “Hello,” she greeted him.

“Hello,” he answered.

“Do you want me?” she asked, and it seemed appropriate that she would betray her accent most on the word want.