Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

For several moments he stood in the open doorway staring into a pitch-black room. He searched the wall next to him for a light but the switch wasn’t there. At first he thought the room was empty but then he knew it wasn’t empty; he knew someone was close by and he felt the dark of the room challenging him, he felt the night challenging him as though there was one more thing for him to prove. He was inside the room with the door partly but not altogether closed behind him and was surprised how quickly she was suddenly there next to him; all he saw of her was, very dimly, the arm that shot out of the dark to push the door closed. Then he heard her breathing and smelled her hair. He waited for her to say something and wondered what he would answer. He waited for her to turn on the light. He felt her surprise when the tips of her fingers brushed his bare chest; they flinched as though singed by the flames of his tattooed belly. But then her fingers returned to him. He felt them fumble toward his neck to confirm the chain with its tag. She grabbed the chain and pulled him forward into the room until he stumbled against the bed. Though he now understood there wasn’t going to be any light, he still waited for her to say something, and then he understood there wasn’t going to be anything said. For a moment he was confused, wondering where she was in the dark, until he realized she was on the bed that he stood alongside. Lying at its edge, she unbuttoned his pants and freed him and put him in her mouth. He touched her long hair and her breasts in consternation.

Her breasts felt big to him but he couldn’t be sure, since he’d never felt a woman’s breasts. Even if he might have been able to construct a mental picture of the woman who lay before him, even if — like a blind man listening to descriptions of colors he’s never seen — he wasn’t utterly without reference points in the touch of a woman’s breast, he would have rejected such a vision anyway. Since he’d never had a woman before, the sanctuary of the dark was immense; he would have killed anyone who violated it. Later, upon leaving the hotel, when she nearly gave in to curiosity and turned on the light after all, she never knew that she had survived only by virtue of having left the light off. In the total darkness he quickly became hard; his erection was a response to the invisibility of the moment, the blur of the frantically waning millennium nowhere to be seen. Within seconds he was already shuddering toward an orgasm. Sensing this she released him from her mouth, and took him in her hand as she knelt on the bed away from him; with trepidation he ran his hands forward along the downward slope of her back to her hair. She put him inside her. Blood roared to his head like a drug. Savagely he pulled her to him. When he heard her gasp and whimper into the pillow where her face was buried, he was at first confounded and then appalled by the lurking presence of love.

THE WOMAN IN THE DARK says, Everything is humming. The night hums, the city. Everything is seconds ahead of itself, I can feel the whirring of the room. Walking to the hotel tonight I heard the growl of animals in the cellars all along the street, they’re disturbed by the hum. They perk up to the sound of time. The dark glows with their eyes. The solstice rushes to catch up with the light of the west. Rudi must be home by now. He’s wondering where I am and looking over the loft. Maybe he’s found the package from Prague, what will I tell him when he asks about it? What will I tell him when he asks where I was tonight? I don’t care any longer. Maybe I won’t go back. If I stay tonight in this room, will the American lover stay with me, and what then? It wasn’t supposed to be a whole night together. I knew sooner or later he’d say, Not on the phone anymore. I knew sooner or later he’d insist on this. I admit I wanted to as well but I might have waited if I hadn’t heard the power in his voice. I might have waited until the end of summer or the beginning of autumn. I might have waited until the eve of the New Year to go into the black hole of X-Tag on my hands and knees being fucked from behind rather than with Rudi, I’d rather feel my tits in the hands of a stranger I cannot see than be with Rudi’s dead heart. It doesn’t matter. By the New Year Rudi and I won’t be together anyway. Rudi and I won’t be together by the end of the week. The American lover hums with the night. I could taste on the end of his cock the drop that anticipated his satisfaction. On the New Year I’ll pop him at midnight like a champagne bottle, his splash will precede us into the future. Perhaps he won’t be here on the New Year. Perhaps he won’t be in Berlin anymore. Perhaps the power in his voice on the phone was because he’s leaving. But I don’t believe he’s leaving. I don’t believe he has anywhere to go. I believe he’s come to Berlin for the New Year, it’s the only reason to come to Berlin, for what’s to come. Otherwise you get out of Berlin. Otherwise you’re me and still in Berlin calling one number after another listening for the voice of what you need. He was shy for a moment when he first arrived, I saw his form hesitate in the doorway. I was surprised that he’d already taken off his shirt, he must have started undressing in the hallway. He must have begun undressing on the stairs, loosening the first buttons in the street. When I cry out, I feel his excitement. He’s a beast, of course. I might have known. From the wound in his voice on the phone. From the sound of his orgasm the first time I called, the groan at the end. I’ve come to learn that nothing can be defiled anymore. I part my legs and open myself at the junction of my soul. It’s the ping of freedom in my mind, like the tap of a wine glass that rings through the house, when the first tiny white drop of him falls into the pool of me and ripples outward. When the heart is broken and the dream is gone, annihilation is delicious. I find in it my last place of peace on the journey into the whirl. The only bastion left me before the siege of what I remember, a flash of red across the black in the distance, a kind of deliverance or, even, a miracle.

“AMERICA,” HE HEARD her say, and exploded in confusion. As he slumped to the floor at the side of the bed, his mortification was grateful for the dark. He covered his face with his hands as though even in the dark a bystander might have seen the shame of his satisfaction. Five minutes went by and then ten.

Suddenly he heard her rise from the bed. There were only a few more moments in which he heard her rustling in the room, and then the door of the room opened and she paused to think about turning on the light to see him; and then he heard her footsteps hurry down the stairs. Where had she gone? How long would it be before she came back? He picked himself up from the floor and lay on the bed. His enervation, the way he felt as though he’d receded up into himself, was appalling. Everything had been fine until she said it. Even when he was in her mouth it had been fine. He was convinced he could have stopped himself before he lost control. But he’d had his first orgasm and now the only thing he kept telling himself was that it was dark and there were no witnesses, that even she wasn’t a witness. Was the old man downstairs behind the front desk a witness? Would she tell the old man that Georgie had lost control? She wouldn’t tell the old man, Georgie reassured himself. But none of this calmed him much because unfortunately there had been a witness and the witness was Georgie. There was no lying to Georgie about it. There had been a witness and the witness was Georgie and he saw himself now in the dark standing over him: the eyes of the birdwoman burned with accusation. It was not the fucking, it was the collapse of control and the indulgent expense of his essence. The solitude of the orgasm, the loneliness of it, was disgusting. Everything had been fine until she said it.