Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“Not on the phone anymore.”

There was silence. “It’s so much safer,” she said.

“No more on the phone.”

He knew from what she said now that she’d been thinking about it too. “It was so random like this,” she explained. “I called several numbers that first time. Sometimes I got a woman, sometimes I got a man who sounded … wrong, and I hung up. Then I called your number, and when they answered they said it was a hotel and they asked what room, and I just said a room number, and they put the call through and it was, by chance, you. I could have dialed any other number instead. A digit higher or lower, or when I got your hotel I could have hung up, as I almost did, or I could have given a different room number, or the number for a room that didn’t exist, or they might have asked for the guest’s name, and I wouldn’t have been able to give them a name. And it seems quite perfect like this, so perfectly random, so perfectly by chance.”

“I see.”

“But you don’t want to do it on the phone anymore.”

“No.”

“Tomorrow night I’ll go to a hotel not far from yours and take a room. I’ll take a room hidden away from the street that’s very private. I’ll call you from there and tell you the number. I’ll let the hotel manager know I’m expecting a guest and for you to come straight up. I’ll leave the door of the room unlocked. The room will be completely dark. The blinds will be completely closed, and the lights will all be off. I’ll be there. Once inside the door you’ll wait in the dark for me to come to you. I’ll be naked. You can undress, or I’ll help you. We won’t speak at all or turn on the light. We won’t say anything.” She paused. “Do you have a tag?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll wear mine too.” She said, “You’ll fuck me then. We won’t say anything. It will be like the phone, where we see nothing and have only our words, except we will say nothing and have only our bodies. When we’re finished I’ll find my clothes and dress and leave you in the dark. We’ll never turn on the light.”

“OK.”

“It will be dark the whole time.”

“The sun sets later now.”

“I’ll call later, after the sun sets.” She hung up. Erickson put the phone back in the cradle. He was up for several hours, with that humming insistence his body couldn’t contain, and when he woke the next morning after a bad night’s sleep, on X-191, the day was slightly more than itself, a fraction of X-190 floating freely and haphazardly across the calendar. Erickson opened the window of his hotel room as he usually did and stood back from the light and peered around him. The room was blurred around the edges, and the light outside had an unfamiliar shimmer and he thought some half life of the night’s dream was lingering in his eyes. But he kept looking around and the blur was still there, around the furniture and the doorway, and the shimmer was still there in the light and he knew time had escalated almost indiscernibly, that everything was now caught in the pull of X and just beginning the inexorable rush to the event horizon at millennium’s end. At the bottom of the stairs, what was left of the hotel’s pet cat lay at his feet, torn to shreds during the night. Erickson looked around for some other sign of the Berlin veldt that had invaded the lobby, a rhinoceros perhaps, a python, the beasts of the zoo having begun the final displacement of furry domestic companions. The manager was nowhere to be seen.

By the human logic of time one should always walk, Erickson told himself, from east to west in Berlin. From east to west one walked from Old Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate into glassy synth-Berlin, which had been built expressly for the purpose of rejecting the claims and biases, the suppositions and ghosts of history, the Berlin that in the glare of the nuclear mirror had created itself anew from the ground up and freed itself from history once and for all. But the last time anyone walked from east to west was ten years ago, when everyone on the one side fled to the other, when everyone abandoned the history of Berlin which, in the fashion of the Twentieth Century, had become one more commodity of ideology. In the 1990s the seduction of Berlin was that one always walked from west to east, against the sun and in the face of memory, and then took the U-Bahn back. Now in the new blur of the day the American took the same walk, west to east, maybe on the theory that the city would lose its blur in the process. In Berlin all the small necessary things had broken down while the larger, more ludicrous enterprises carried on: the trains had stopped running at Zoo Station since the last arrival of refugees from the Russian-Slav civil wars, but in the windows of the top floor of the KaDeWe the lights of the government still burned at night, and in the distance to the south of the city construction continued for the 2000 Olympics, an obsession since the beginning of the Nineties that Berlin refused to relinquish regardless of whatever New Year’s party eternity had planned.

So on this day Erickson walked from west to east, and with the fall of dusk went to take the U-Bahn back. He ducked into the Kochstrasse station and descended underground; he was waiting on the platform for the train when he noticed a familiar figure at the other end.

Georgie was slumped on the bench staring straight ahead. Ten-year-old newspapers blew past his feet, and he was so still he might have been dead. Across the tunnel from where Georgie stared, Erickson saw the small hole in the U-Bahn wall that the Frankfurt banker had pointed out; it was as though Georgie were waiting for a father’s face to appear in the hole at any moment. A little voice in Erickson’s head said to leave him there, but he walked over. He didn’t speak to Georgie but waited for him to look up. Georgie didn’t turn to look until the American sat down next to him.

He turned to look at Erickson and there was no sweetness in Georgie’s face at all. There was nothing in his face of childlike serenity; it was like the night after the two of them had left Georgie’s flat when the sight of the Neuwall in the street had transformed the young Berliner’s perverse earnest innocence to the malevolent fury that tried to kick the wall down. Except that at this moment, as he sat waiting for a face to appear in the hole of the U-Bahn tunnel, Georgie’s transformation had already gone several degrees further. His face was dark like a swarm rising from the other side of a hill, the shadow of having stared too many nights into that hole in the side of the U-Bahn tunnel and having waited too long for a dreamed-of reconciliation that was only met minute after minute and hour after hour and night after night by nothing but the hole’s void. Now the sockets of Georgie’s eyes were so hollow that all Erickson could see in them was something so black it would frighten even the night, a feeling so lightless it would startle even hate. If Georgie recognized the American at all, he showed no sign. In his face there wasn’t the slightest chance a father’s face would appear, there wasn’t the slightest sign of a Tunneler in the catacombs of memory, not a human sight or sound flickered even in the scurrying of someone’s retreat into his own recesses.

Erickson got up. He got up right away. He turned and started walking the other direction, toward the exit of the U-Bahn, where he ascended back to the street and walked, for a change, east to west, which was what he should have done in the first place. For some reason he felt in his coat pocket for the small piece of the Wall he’d bought at the Brandenburg, uncertain whether it reassured or frightened him to realize he’d left it back at the hotel. For a while he thought it was his imagination, for a while he dismissed it as paranoia, but in the last dark block before Checkpoint Charlie he knew the footsteps he heard right behind him were real, and that they were Georgie Valis’. By the time he reached the end of the block the footsteps were all around him, and then he was surrounded in the street by six, then eight, then ten of them, members of the Pale Flame with their heads shaved and their shirts off and their chests bare and each of them with the same tattooed design, a creature with the body of a naked woman and the head of what appeared to Erickson to be a strange bird, rising from a sea of fire against a backdrop of lightning. On all their shoulders they wore tattooed wings. It was as though all of them had been summoned with the snap of fingers, a muttered command, and Erickson turned to Georgie in time to take the first blow, and the last that he would ever count or understand.