Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“No names,” she answers. She sounds drunk. She touches the bandages on his arms.

He takes her by the neck and shakes her. “What’s your name?” he demands.

She squirms beneath him. “Christina.” He nods, relieved. He opens her and puts himself inside. The reason he never comes to the Reichstag continues to watch from around the corner, treacherous spying American Stasi bitch. Go away, he mutters; the woman beneath him cries out. Go back to your new wall, he seethes, petulant. He now knows the woman beneath him isn’t from the Crystal Hotel even if her name is Christina. Her moans and whimpers don’t sound at all like the female at the Crystal Hotel and her breasts are much smaller. She feels and sounds much smaller and reeks of beer and cognac. He’s sure he sees a flash of light somewhere beyond the darkness of the blindfold, and in the flash he feels the basement freeze around him and it occurs to him he’s been revealed. It occurs to him there are witnesses everywhere. It occurs to him he’s a fool, that it’s all been a trick and he’s the only one wearing a blindfold, and as in a child’s game everyone’s standing around in a circle watching as he stumbles to his next humiliation. Believing this, he doesn’t come but rather wilts to nothing; the woman beneath him sighs with audible relief. Georgie rips the blindfold from his face and jumps to his feet: but no one’s watching. It’s dark, not pitchblack like room twenty-eight but dark nonetheless, a few barely distinguishable forms of people doing indistinguishable things.

He yanks the female up from the floor by the tag chain and drags her out of the basement. He grabs his clothes from where he left them but doesn’t bother to look for hers, and pulls her naked out into the Berlin summer night.

They walk south past the Brandenburg Gate through the bankrupt monument of the unfinished Potsdam Plaza. The moon is full. Christina has long red hair and freckles all over that Georgie can see even in the moonlight, and her most exotic attraction besides her small budding breasts is that except for the hair on her head she’s completely shaved, giving her the body of pubescence even as her face makes clear she’s several years older than Georgie. She’s just sober enough to understand she’s completely naked and that the light above her is the full moon and that the trees of the Tiergarten are in the distance. Georgie pulls the female along with the impatience of a child disgusted by the way some long-coveted toy hasn’t measured up to the coveting, until they reach an S-Bahn station where they ascend to the platform and wait for a train. The few other stragglers waiting for the train see Georgie and his naked woman and desert the platform immediately. The night’s final train arrives and Georgie and Christina get on. Most of the seats are empty, and when the few other passengers see the naked woman and the boy with the tattooed wings, they empty their seats as well. Georgie doesn’t want to sit down. Christina’s legs buckle as she crumples to the ground at his feet. He pulls her back up to her feet by the chain.

Everyone’s a witness now, he tells himself. He grimly believes he’s passed some point of no return, that the Pale Flame will cast him from their ranks or kill him when the word gets out about tonight in the Reichstag basement. In a small street-corner market that’s open late, Georgie buys a beer while Christina stands stunned in the market’s stark overhead light; she covers her face with her hands. The store owner, a Turk, stares at them, not sure which holds his greatest attention; the completely naked shaved woman or the boy buying the beer with the sign on his body of the Pale Flame, which savagely kill Turks as a matter of course. Tonight, however, Georgie says, “Thank you very much,” when the owner returns his change. Georgie pulls Christina back out into the night and to his flat. Just inside the flat, slipped beneath the front door, is the result of Curt’s efforts with the American’s passport. Georgie examines the passport as Christina collapses to the floor.

Georgie puts on a cassette. “This is a good one,” he assures the semiconscious woman. He turns the music up, then down, then back up, and undoes the bandages that have been wrapped around his arms. He ties the bandages into several long strips and binds Christina’s wrists and ankles, lashing her to his slab of the Wall in the center of the flat. In her stupor she groans. Around and around his Wall Georgie circles, stepping over or around Christina’s prostrate body and taking swigs of beer and listening to the cassette. Christina writhes in dazed confusion. Georgie takes the paint can and sprays across the Wall I DREAMED THAT LOVE WAS A CRIME and then returns to his orbit, wishing he had another beer when he finishes the one he bought. Then he goes over to the floodlights and turns them off.

The flat’s dark now, nearly as dark as a room at the Crystal Hotel, darker for sure than the Reichstag. He stumbles to his Wall and touches it; he feels the wet black paint of the new graffiti. He finds her in the dark. He strips off the rest of his clothes and lowers himself to take her, but he’s wrapped her ankles too tight and there’s no separating her. He turns her around but no matter how he tries he can’t get inside her. He thinks perhaps he’ll put himself in her mouth but he can’t even get her mouth open; he keeps turning her this way and that. He keeps telling himself she’s someone else. He tells himself it’s another’s breasts and that the sound that comes from her is another’s sound. But she’s already been too exposed to the light of trains, to the light of late-night markets, to the light of the moon, for him to trick himself into believing he’s never seen her. All his wrath cannot inflate his loins with enough semen and blood to make him erect; his impotence is bigger than the dark. He wails at his situation, rises from the floor and hurls himself in the dark at his Wall so that the wet black paint of his manifesto will leave its imprint on him and tar his wings. But when he hits the Wall there’s no wet black paint anymore: Day X has already sucked his message to the other side through the Wall’s portal, and the Wall is already blank.

He turns the light back on. For a while he sits against the blank Wall. The Female doesn’t move in her bondage except to shiver; in the still of the flat, in the hushed haze of the floodlights, Georgie looks over in the light and sees her eyes are open. A single tear runs down her face. “Don’t cry,” he says and, aiming carefully, reaches over to crush her tear beneath his thumb as he would an insect, or the flame of a candle. The black paint of his graffiti is long gone from the Wall but the paint on his thumb leaves a vague print on her cheek. Outside, the solace of Berlin meets the new upward tick of the hour, the hum of everything indiscernibly escalates to a new pitch, and for a few minutes, perhaps even closer to an hour, Georgie actually dozes in the light without dreams. When he gets up Christina still hasn’t moved, hopelessly bound as she remains to the Wall. Georgie shuts the door of the flat carefully behind him so as not to wake her.

In the Kochstrasse U-Bahn it’s probably half an hour before dawn. The trains will begin running soon. No one closes the stations in the offhours anymore and homeless people sleep on the station platform, those desperate enough not to care who robs or knifes them in their sleep. In this final hour of the night Georgie isn’t here for robbing or knifing. He stands on the platform just feet from where the American writer made the mistake of sitting next to him; but Georgie isn’t thinking of that either. He’s forgotten everything about the American except what he’s taken from him. Georgie lowers himself from the platform and carefully steps over the rails of the track. He crosses to the other side of the tunnel. A gypsy lying on the platform wakes just long enough to look over and mutter a warning before falling back to sleep; on the other side of the tunnel Georgie pulls himself up alongside the wall. Several times he has to jump up to get a grip on the opening of the hole; he tries to hold himself up long enough to peer inside. Beyond the breach of the hole is a relentless darkness, the kind of darkness he’s been looking for since the Crystal Hotel, only to find it now when he doesn’t want it. Now he’d settle for light. Now he’d settle for a window or a bulb or a moon; with a spare hand he’d flick a switch if he could, or light a match. All he can do is look into the dark as hard as he can.