Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

By X-37 it’s begun to get cold. In Flagstaff Georgie tries to steal a coat from the front seat of a four-wheel drive and almost gets caught. He’s pushing himself beyond hunger and cold and exhaustion, exhorted onward by the signs of his progress. He keeps checking the watch. He keeps checking calendars. He keeps track of the days and hours. By the time he reaches what was once the Mojave Desert he’s passed the highway checkpoint beyond which no one’s allowed without authorization. Except now it’s X-18 and the checkpoint’s deserted of soldiers or guards; no one’s around to stop Georgie and turn him away. The desolation of the Cataclysm’s landscape is bitter and overwhelming, rolling dead-white hills. He has some water and not much else; every time he feels hungry, every time he can’t bear the cold, every time he wants to sleep, he looks at his picture of the buried city and thinks of room twenty-eight in the Crystal Hotel. He reads his picture of the buried city like a map, he examines the contours of the Cataclysm dunes and compares the moon in the picture with where the moon now hangs in the night sky. On the night of X-6 a small light glimmers in the distance, and when it shortly becomes two lights, he grows excited by how close they are. Then he realizes the lights are coming toward him, and it isn’t long before a pickup truck pulls to a stop.

In the back of the truck Georgie can see shovels and pickaxes and rags. The driver’s a big man with a beard and a cap pulled over his head and ears; a windbreaker is zipped to his neck. He looks at Georgie in disbelief. “Who the hell are you?” he says.

“Erickson,” says Georgie.

“Well, good lord, Erickson, what the hell do you think you’re doing out here?”

“I’m going to the buried city,” Georgie explains.

The driver’s stunned. “I don’t know where you heard about that,” he shakes his head, “that’s totally hush-hush.”

“Is it much farther?”

“I’ll bet you ran into Fred in Flagstaff, that fuckhead. Get a little tequila and beer in him and Fred’ll tell everyone the secret of the atomic fucking bomb if he knows it, which fortunately he doesn’t. Two weeks ago you couldn’t have gotten within fifty miles of here. But I guess the party’s over now and everyone’s gone home, which is where I’m going, or at least someplace that makes for a passable facsimile.”

“It was in the cards,” Georgie explains about the buried city.

“Hop in, pal. I’ll take you back to Kingman. There’s nothing back there,” he nods in the direction he’s just come from. “Like I said, everyone’s gone home while there’s still time. There’s a waitress I know in Kingman. She works in one of the worst restaurants in the civilized world and we’re going to get a room together, at a motel on the main drag of town.”

“It’s a very old city.”

“Yeah, I know it’s an old city, pal. You ever find out how old, drop us a postcard, will you? We just spent the last year and a half trying to figure out exactly how old.”

“You’ll have to give me your address so I know where to send it.”

The driver considers Georgie solemnly. “I was making a joke,” he finally says, slowly. “I don’t really want you to send me a postcard.” He leans over across the seat and opens the passenger door. “Hop in.”

“I have to go.”

“Man, I’m telling you there’s nothing back there. A few buildings that were probably houses once, and the rest of it so far buried beneath the rubble no one would have ever known it was there if that big dust-up a few years back hadn’t opened up everything. Take my word for it. I can’t believe that asshole Fred. What a mouth.”

“I have a friend there.”

“Man, you do not have a friend there. There’s no one there, I’m telling you.” He motions to the open passenger door.

“No thank you.”

“From this point on you’re on your own. I’m the last soul you’re going to see.”

“OK.”

The driver shakes his head again wearily. “Here.” He reaches behind the passenger seat and pulls out a blanket and a plastic bottle of water. “The blanket’s dirty, but …” He hands them to Georgie through the window.

“Thank you. Do you have the time?”

The driver looks at his watch. “About a quarter to seven.”

Georgie is setting his own watch. “Do you have the exact time?”

The driver looks again. “I’ve got six-forty-eight.” He reaches back across the seat and pulls the passenger door closed. “Take it easy,” he says. He starts the truck and drives off, and Georgie doesn’t wait to watch the tail lights disappear down the highway; he’s continuing on, exhilarated. He puts the water in his pack and wraps the blanket around him.

He reaches the excavation site on the afternoon of X-4. The Cataclysm has cut a savage swathe through the earth, and on the edge of the divide Georgie can make out in the distance the gray befuddled sea. Georgie stares down into the rocky gash where the earth has wrenched loose of itself and, from one end of the Cataclysm’s gorge to the other, he sees staring out of the black rock the dim ravaged faces of ancient white houses, ladders, and scaffolding drooling down the cliffs. Georgie begins his descent. The world is soundless. The crash of the sea is too far away and no wind blows through the canyon, and Georgie hasn’t heard or seen a single stirring of life for days. After months of the flash and clatter of birds in the skies of Berlin this sky is empty and he becomes all the more aware of the crunch of rocks beneath his feet as he makes his way down into the site. By dusk he’s at the bottom. For the first time in days he collapses into the blanket the truck driver gave him and sleeps the whole night, without a single dream’s glint or whisper.

In the morning he wakes in panic. He looks at his watch and then looks again; for a moment the watch has stopped. He taps the face of the watch and the second hand starts back up: was the watch running just a moment ago when he first looked at it, having lost only a split second, or has it been stopped all this time, maybe all night? Perhaps he hit his wrist against one of the rocks on the cliffs. The watch says 8:21. Georgie tries to tell himself calmly that he wasn’t climbing the rocks at 8:21 last night, he’d already reached the bottom by then and fallen asleep; in all likelihood it’s now 8:21 in the morning. But in his disorientation Georgie has a lapse on the day: X- … 3? 2? What, Georgie thinks to himself, does X-3 mean anyway? Does it mean X is three days away, or two? Or four? Stooped deep in the earth’s crevice, rocking on his feet, he miserably holds his head in his hands trying to straighten out everything in his mind. Finally he begins to walk down the gorge in the direction of the excavation. The scaffolding constructed alongside the cliffs has the abandoned air of something deserted quickly. Above one makeshift rampart is a pair of ancient windows and in another clearing he finds the unearthed remains of something resembling a plaza or town square. In the black volcanic earth beneath the gray light of the sun is the outline of a white circle. At its center is the dark stump of some kind of pillar or obelisk.

Georgie spends the rest of the day searching through the unearthed city. By the next day his panic is of a different sort. It’s a panic about food, to begin with; he cannot will away his hunger any longer, and despite all his attempts at conservation his water will last only another day at best. He’s also having more difficulty keeping track of the time. He keeps looking at his watch. When he stares up through the mouth of the gorge, which gets smaller and smaller the further he goes, he sees passing overhead in the sky high above him tumbleweeds and wheels and machine gear and office equipment and supermarket sundries and newspapers and pages from diaries, a panoply of general uselessness spinning wildly westward on a current no wind has ever blown: time is almost up. Most profoundly, Georgie’s beginning to have grave doubts that the Queen of Wands is here. Georgie’s beginning to suspect that the driver of the pickup truck on the highway was right, that no one is here. Growing weaker and more delirious he rushes through the buried city from one room to another looking for her. Trying to sleep on the hillside in one of the ancient houses, when the unleashed night of the desert couples with the unearthed night of the timeless city, he bolts upright again and again to his expectation of ghosts, any of whom might be the one he’s come so far to find. He shivers in the dark. He awaits her touch, for her deliverance into his hands. He would be erect with desire, he assures himself, if he had the strength for it, if delirium were enough to fuel desire, as it nearly is.