Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

Georgie stood gazing down at himself. He would have exchanged in a moment the shame of his semen for the honor of his own blood gurgling from a wound. Once again he glanced around as though someone might have seen him; he was also extremely annoyed that he’d fallen asleep on his graffiti watch. Once again the graffiti had slipped away into the Wall somewhere, through the slit of historical memory to which this piece of the Wall was the livid vulva, like all the graffiti since the first day the Wall came here and SONIC MEN, ANONYMOUS GOD had disappeared. Georgie cleaned himself of his semen, scrubbing himself until he was raw, and then stumbled back to the bed; once again, even in exhaustion — he hadn’t slept since before he’d murdered the American — he thrashed his way through the night. Once again he got up and put on another cassette. Once again he returned to his blank Wall to take the spray can and telegraph another message into the void: THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS he wrote.

And now in the ultimate subversion of himself it was his graffiti that revolted him. Because suddenly the words lost all banality and history; they throbbed before his eyes and hinted at something he could neither resist nor understand, the Wall seething and the words shuddering with danger as he recoiled from them. He wanted them to disappear immediately. If at this moment Georgie had had the means he would have emasculated himself with the swipe of a blade and sprayed the pursuit of happiness with the blood of his amputated sex, until the whole Wall was the red of death’s honor rather than the white of pleasure’s shame.

THE QUEEN OF WANDS is the card of passion. Her throne rises from the rubble of the fallen wall, and the sands of the American plain blow over her from the east. In this way her passion rises from the American earth; she’s a thing of the earth and the passion’s a thing of her. At her feet is a large black cat. A round white sphere rises behind her against a dark blue sky. The rod in her hand intimates magic but the magic’s really in the hand and not the rod. Her brooding beauty cages the very breath of every man who lays eyes on her and blasts loose the underpinnings on which he’s confidently and foolishly built a feeble life. She is without true malice. At her moments of greatest fury the rod may take on the appearance of a knife; that she always fails to use it isn’t a sign of weakness but of a goodness she can’t overcome. Rather her powers of destruction lie not in hate but chaos, just as the antithesis to God is chaos; and her chaos blows across those in her realm like the sands that bury her throne. She’s fickle and will betray, without reason or warning, the one who loves her most. She’s hungry for whatever love any man can give her and because she doesn’t trust either love or herself she’ll abuse both, and rush to the next man who might give her a love the previous man could not, in her search for the love that somehow raises her above her own throne, for which she has contempt. She doesn’t believe in what she deserves and she deserves more than she’ll ever know. Though Georgie imagines her as fair and golden the Queen of Wands is dark, her beauty understands that white is not the color of illumination but emptiness and that black is not the color of the void but eternity. Though the rings of her regeneration grow paler in time the core of her memory becomes the glowing ebony of a collapsed star: in the American Tarot she’s not the Queen of Wands at all but the Queen of Slaves.

Georgie doesn’t know this since he’s never seen her. The card’s great presence for him lies in its absence, because the absence of a single card renders all other cards invalid. Since a year ago when he first stole the deck off an old Parisian Jew in Zoo Station, the meaning of his queen has in her absence grown only more magnificent. Now in the dark in his flat, just below the surface of the floodlights, in every fitful dream he sees just a little more of the woman in the dark yet not enough so that he can tell her hair is black and not gold, her eyes are the green of the sea and not the blue of the sky. She inches just a little further into view. She hovers just a little closer into the present. The shape of her becomes just a little more distinct. But Georgie doesn’t know that the Queen of Wands, or the Queen of Slaves, is not the creature tattooed on his chest for instance. He’s only figured out that his queen is waiting for him in a buried city, like the one in the picture that has replaced her on his wall, and that the buried city is not Berlin but somewhere in America at the future’s farthest point of exhaustion, which means he has a long way to go and not long to get there before the big day arrives, the distance growing farther with every day that time grows shorter.

Nevertheless the black hollow of the Reichstag yawns before Georgie tonight. At this point the nights are running together: was it last night he killed the American, or the night before? Georgie hasn’t gone to the Reichstag in a long time, frequenting when he does only that part of it controlled by the Pale Flame; he’s never gone into the Reichstag basement. The Reichstag basement is verboten by Pale Flame law. But the nights are running together now and there’s no sleep for Georgie from thinking about what happened to him in the dark of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel. Perhaps Georgie thinks that, by his forbidden presence in the basement of the Reichstag, he’ll testify as to his control. Perhaps he believes that if he leaves the Reichstag basement with his erection still unspent and slick with the evidence of a woman the night will forgive him; in such an event he may even forgive himself. But mostly he can’t get out of his head that she may be in the Reichstag basement and he goes there now not to prove she is but to reassure himself she is not, he goes there to prove to himself that the woman who selects her men by a number on the telephone and takes them in the privacy of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel has no need to wander the Reichstag basement available to whoever gets his hands on her first. The squat Reichstag sits in the center of Berlin just off the Tiergarten, apart from everything around it, as though abandoned by the city in the same way Berlin abandoned everything at its center a half century ago. On the Reichstag’s far northern side is the jagged gape where a bomb ripped a hole in the spring of ’96.

Georgie circles the Reichstag basement in apprehension that he’s going to run into some of the Pale Flame. He’s wearing the American’s shirt. He hasn’t really forgotten why he never comes to the Reichstag, which has nothing to do with Pale Flame law, but for the moment he tries not to think about it; the reason is there in the back of his mind, rejected by him. He finally enters the hollow. Everything’s dark. He brushes past people coming and going; through an entryway he sees in the dark the forms of others moving. At a small table with a light, a young woman with short black hair wants some money to let him go on into the arcade. There’s no indication she’s been authorized by anyone to collect a tariff, since there’s no indication any authority exists here at all, but Georgie gives her some money. She hands him a blindfold and informs him he must put it on before he passes beyond the entryway behind her. Other people’s clothes are strewn against the walls and before he undresses Georgie goes through them looking for money; he keeps glancing over his shoulder at the woman with the short black hair. But she isn’t watching, she doesn’t care what he steals. She’s here to enforce nothing but the darkness of a blindfold.

In the darkness of his blindfold he reenters room twenty-eight of the Crystal Hotel. Once more he’s standing in the doorway of the American writer’s rendezvous, the American writer’s darkness. He wanders tentatively forward, his hands before him, waiting for her touch to meet his. He’s surprised by the heat of the basement, it’s the heat of something older than the summer solstice; the smell of ashes is thick around him. The lurking form of the reason he never comes to the Reichstag spies on him from around the corner of his mind, the American bitch. He feels someone grasp the tag around his neck and he feels to be sure it’s a woman. Immediately he becomes erect. He pulls her to the ground which is hard and hot, and says in English, “What’s your name.” When she doesn’t respond he repeats the question in German.