Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

X-l.

Deeper into the city he wanders. The mouth of the gorge above him has finally disappeared altogether. Like his legendary father tunneling subterranean Berlin Georgie’s becoming lost, beginning to circle back on his own steps through one after another of the Cataclysm’s revealed rooms. He doesn’t have the strength to climb another scaffold. He doesn’t have the strength to call her name. Piece by piece he’s stripped himself down, casting aside the shirt and vaccine chain and the contents of his pockets, the water and blanket and even the picture of the buried city, which, in retaliation for its betrayal, he rips to bits and flings above him as though to hurl it out of the canyon altogether. The bits of the picture only rain back down on him. Foolishly he brushes some of the confetti from his wings, comically he wears some on his bare head. He tears his watch from his wrist and holds it in front of his eyes desperately trying to focus on the hour. In his other hand he clutches the only thing he can’t bear to discard, the piece of the Berlin Wall. He stumbles further into the gorge in his fevered daze, sometimes dozing against the canyon’s side; in hallucinatory moments he misses Christina with the shaved freckled body writhing in the bondage of his bloody bandages on the floor of his flat. As he lies beneath the gorge’s shelter the hours pass and then the rest of the day, until he hears the gray twilight sun sink far beyond the edge of the earth. Not long before midnight, when it’s too dark for Georgie even to read the time on his watch, he hears the shadow of the millennium advance across the eastern horizon.

In the dark of the shadow he sees something.

It’s so faint he looks again and again, by now distrusting his own eyes, but further into the gorge, suspended a few feet above the ground, is the outline of something. In his delirium the first and only thing he can think of is a coffin, set in the side of the canyon like a jewel. He crosses the crevasse. When he sees the climb he must make he nearly turns back, but slowly he begins, with his watch and his piece of Wall. In a rocky hollow of the canyon he sees it isn’t a coffin; within several feet he sees it’s another of the city’s ancient doors. It doesn’t seem possible he could have missed this door. It doesn’t seem possible he could have missed anything. He’s been over everything again and again. But there’s a door now and the only reason he could see it at all from the other side of the gorge was because coming from behind the door is, unmistakably, a light.

He’s terrified. He backs away from the door: terror wars with desperation. He steps back to the door: as he tries to get a grip on it, desperation refutes terror. He holds the watch up to the sliver of light coming through the crack of the door and, behind and below him, the ghost city splayed across the Cataclysm’s breach slides into oblivion.

At 11:59, the second hand of the watch hurtling toward twelve, he yanks open the door and steps through.

THE OLD MAN STIRS in his chair at Georgie’s entrance but doesn’t wake at first. The bareness of the room is blinding to Georgie; he holds his hands up to his eyes. In the glare he can barely make out the sink and toilet in the corner and the unmade bed against the wall. On the table in front of the lone old man sits a radio that’s turned off and Georgie’s piece of the Wall, though even as Georgie now looks at the evidence of his empty hands he can’t remember putting it there. Beyond the old man on the other side of the room is another door. It’s slightly open. Beyond the door is a dark hallway.

The stillness of the room is even more striking to Georgie than the lifelessness of the last several days, though now he isn’t so sure about the last several days, whether they were several days ago or several years, or whether days or years still mean what they did moments before. The stillness means to deny the presence of the old man. A buzz in some other part of the building, beyond the door on the other side of the room and down its dark hallway, takes on the audible outline of a TV. The old man looks at the room around him much as Georgie has been looking at it, and he’s been staring at the bed for some time and is still staring at it when he asks, so quietly Georgie can barely hear him, “Is there any wine?” He finally turns to Georgie only because Georgie hasn’t answered.

The old man smiles. He raises his eyes to Georgie. With his heart in his throat, Georgie stares back into the old man’s eyes and knows he’s insane.

It isn’t like the people on the U-Bahn when they used to stare at Georgie. The old man sees Georgie from the perspective of a finished life: the boy is already drained of the disproportionate meaning of the present. The wings on Georgie’s shoulders, the woman with the head of a bird on Georgie’s chest, have no impact on the old man at all. The dagger of time hanging by a thread over the old man’s wild auric hair dreads its own fall while he anticipates it; his fearlessness fills Georgie with loathing. In the subsiding blaze of the room the old man’s face appears like a vision in the hole of the U-Bahn tunnel at Kochstrasse; and now Georgie is repelled by this grotesque old man in ragged clothes, the torn pants on his long legs and the shoes with holes and the lining of his coat drooping from the hem, who’s invaded Georgie’s long dream. But the feeling gets much worse when Georgie says, “Who are you?” and the old man answers, his stare unbroken and his smile unchanged, “America,” and laughs softly afterward as though he’s made a joke.

Liar, is the word that catches in Georgie’s throat. But he warns instead, “That’s where I came from.” The old man continues to smile at Georgie the way a stranger smiles lewdly at another man’s woman even though the other man stands right next to her. Georgie can’t even look at the old man. Fury laces hunger and exhaustion to the point of lightheadedness, and he’s been sitting in his chair across from the old man rocked by this fury and hunger and exhaustion, staring at the bare wall beyond the bed for four or five minutes, before he realizes with a start what’s been right in front of him the whole time.

Someone is sleeping in the bed.

Her back is to him. He has no reason to know it’s a female except he just knows, and the horizon of the white sheet displays the shape of her, and Georgie can’t believe she’s here after all. He had reconciled himself to not finding her, and now she’s in the bed right in front of him. “There’s someone sleeping,” he says.

Thomas nods. The smile on his face hasn’t changed, and Georgie thinks perhaps the old man is mocking him; but then the smile gives way to fierce pain. Thomas takes his head in his hands. He squeezes his head as though to wring the pain out of it, until he can’t hold on anymore and slumps back in the chair. His face glistens. Exultation sweeps Georgie, because the old man isn’t smiling anymore and Georgie has found her sleeping in the bed in front of him; at one point she moves slightly in her sleep. Out of the haze of his pain Thomas picks up the piece of the Wall on the table and peers at it for some time. He examines the back of the shard as though it’s the longest sentence in the world, Georgie thinks indignantly to himself. The part of Georgie that recoils from the inscription, the part of him that regards it as something infectious, swarming with moral bacteria, fears that a secret hovers between him and Thomas that will demand its exposure if the old man doesn’t put the stone down soon, which he does only at the last moment.

“What are you doing here?” Georgie says.

Thomas rubs his temples and the back of his neck. He speaks so softly Georgie can barely make him out. “Is there news from Virginia?”