Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

Into the hole he calls, “Papa?”

There’s only one response to his question as he drops from the hole. He hears it come first from the tunnel of the U-Bahn and with some concern he believes, at first, that the sound is the first train of the day. He thinks maybe he should get off the track. Georgie doesn’t know, no one really knows, about the new pitch to which Berlin has escalated; one or two of the gypsies on the station platform also wake to the rumble. At that point Georgie decides the rumble isn’t a train. He steps over the rail and stands in the middle of the track staring down into the black tunnel of the U-Bahn. The din slowly breaks the surface of the city’s hush. And then, so quickly it startles Georgie, a hyena darts out of the blackness of the tunnel and across the platform, creating a small furor among the waking sleepers who have begun to gather themselves up in apprehension. The animal lurches up the stairs of the U-Bahn to the street level. People on the platform are looking around them, expecting something to happen.

Georgie raises his eyes. Now the sound has risen above him. He looks down into the tunnel once more, following the string of small white lights that line the hills and curves and valleys of the track for as far as he can see; he crosses back to the platform. He hoists himself back up onto the platform and heads back up the stairs to the station entrance. At the top of the stairs he freezes. In front of him an albino peacock spreads its white fan and furiously shudders. Beyond that an emaciated antelope bolts. At the station entrance the rumble is louder; on the street the new pitch is almost audible. On the street Georgie turns to see, thundering toward him from the other end of the block, the last escapees of the Tiergarten’s autumnal cages, purring panthers which hunger has left no longer fleet, spindly ostriches and hobbling kangaroos and barely lumbering bears, the surviving cats and wolves and reptiles shaken loose from the cellars of Berlin by the growing roar of the rush toward the black twenty hours that wait beyond the millennium’s final chime. Georgie leaps up onto a U-Bahn signpost, where he clings for safety as the animals stampede past him in the silvery blue of the unlit dawn, their ragged sprint westward as though from a pursuing inferno in the jungle.

CURT DID A GOOD JOB, Georgie thinks to himself on the airplane. Once Georgie has finally begun to relax from the takeoff, he studies the passport carefully. Curt has put Georgie’s picture in place of the American’s and changed the birth date from 1950 to 1980; the name’s been left alone. Georgie leans forward in his seat to put the passport back in the bag under his feet, but it means unlatching the seat belt; Georgie hasn’t unlatched the seat belt since he got on the plane. This is the first time he’s ever been on an airplane. On takeoff he clutched the armrests so hard that for several minutes he didn’t notice how the old woman in the next seat, taking pity on him, was holding his hand. If he hadn’t been so terrified he probably would have yanked his hand away from her, but he let her go on holding it; they were well in the air before he let go. She’s an old woman, Georgie tells himself; with some concern he suspects she’s Jewish. But she makes jokes about the flight and puts Georgie at ease, and soon he’s doing things for her, walking up and down the aisle of the plane getting magazines for her and a pillow, and the stewardesses are charmed by the friendship between the older woman and the disconcertingly sweet young man with the shaved head. In New York City, as they’re going through customs at the airport, the woman tells him he’s in the wrong line: “The one for U.S. citizens is over here,” she says, pointing at the blue American passport Georgie holds in his hand. When they say goodbye she offers him money, which he politely but firmly refuses. Two hours later at Fifty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, a black girl offers to sell herself to him; he accepts and follows her long enough to push her into a trashcan and rob her.

Is something wrong with America? he wonders. He sees more human flotsam in New York than he ever saw in Berlin, even in the early Nineties, coloreds everywhere and obvious queers, and a fuckload of Jews. He regards them all with more curiosity than hostility, like someone who’s wandered into the freak tent of a circus. When his bed in the flophouse on Eighth Avenue winds up in the same room with an Ethiopian, Georgie protests, arguing with the manager in the hallway while the Ethiopian watches; but there aren’t any other available beds and Georgie doesn’t have the money to sleep anywhere else. The Ethiopian understands what’s happening well enough to keep his eye on Georgie with stony wariness the rest of the night. Tomorrow, Georgie tells himself, I’ll get out of New York and make my way west to the real America.

But the next morning he’s violently sick. For several days he can barely move from the bed except to crawl to the toilet, not sure whether to straddle it or wrap his arms around it as his stomach erupts upward and his bowels explode downward. In his fever he feels infested with the American bacteria, struck low among Africans and fags, a prisoner without pity in New York. Almost four days have passed before, in the swelter of the night and the light of the streetlamp that shines through the window, he’s well enough to climb from bed out onto the flophouse fire escape, where he can unfold his picture of the buried city to remind himself where he’s going and why. He counts his money, including what he took off the black girl that first afternoon. The next day he slinks out of the flophouse and catches a cab to Penn Station, where he buys a bus ticket for as far west as he can go.

X-148. She’s waiting for him and he doesn’t have much time.

He takes the bus to Philadelphia and then Memphis, and from there to St. Louis. He likes the bus better than the plane. Watching out the window his heart leaps at the sight of the red, white and blue crucifixes that line the highway and the billboards of a ferocious Jesus with piercing blue eyes who holds an American eagle in his arms. On the horizon in the distance he spots the old drive-in movie screens from the Fifties that have been painted black as monolithic signposts of the converted plague camps. He dozes and her outline becomes more distinct before him. A light from an unknown source reveals her inch by inch. Sometimes he thinks about Berlin; he wonders if anyone has found Christina yet, tied to the Wall in his flat. In the dead of night, as the bus rolls on and everyone sleeps, Georgie slips from his seat and lifts a watch off another passenger two rows back. He winds the watch and puts it in his pocket; at the next stop he’ll get the exact time.

In St. Louis it’s X-134. The blur of edges gleams shinier and faster, the light of the days grows more metallic. Time is a mineral. X-132 and it’s Kansas City. X-129 and Georgie sets out on foot, few cars stopping to give him a lift. X-124 he sits in the back bedroom of Lauren’s house on the Kansan flatlands and shows the piece of Wall to Kara, who says, “It’s a nice rock. But you have to admit, it’s not as good as a bottle with eyes, or even wings on your back.”

He walks out of the summer into the west. The spasms of the last solstice barely reach him anymore. His progress is reduced to ground level; he’s tapped out of money and in these final days must rely on people’s good will. He’s struck and confused by the kindness of Indians he meets in New Mexico. Sometimes when people ask him he tells them his real name and sometimes he doesn’t. In the middle of the desert far from civilization he finds written on the concrete bridges of highway overpasses graffiti hailing thrashmetal bands, and stops to listen for nomads in the desert playing boomboxes. By Arizona, people sit rocking on the front porches of their desert houses cradling clocks in their arms. The lines of ink that streak the front pages of newspapers become increasingly indecipherable until finally the news takes the form of a lost hieroglyphic. Tumbleweeds skitter along the highway before him, the dust of the desert rushes past him, though no wind blows; the weeds and dust blow to a different force. Soon it occurs to him that none of the cars on the highway go his direction anymore. Every car passes him heading east; he hasn’t seen a single car going west for as long as he can remember. By X-52 there aren’t any cars going east either. He constantly checks the time of the watch he stole on the bus. He constantly asks convenience-store clerks if their clocks are right, and calls the time-of-day on the pay phones along the highway that still work, as he slips from time zone to time zone picking up one hour after another. With his sweetness that catches people off guard he gets a bite to eat here and there, but he isn’t hungry much. He’s long since discarded the American’s passport, back around the Texas Panhandle. At night when he closes his eyes there’s only blackness; the west has drained his sleep of dreams.