Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“I don’t know,” Georgie answers.

“What finally loses a man’s soul,” Thomas says, “the betrayal of his conscience or the betrayal of his heart?” He looks up at Georgie as though the boy with tattooed wings will actually have an answer to this question; the old man’s beatific smile struggles to surface above the pain in his head. He raises an old finger. “Both, you’re thinking. Aren’t you? You’re thinking both.” He nods. “But what if you have to choose? What if your life is forced to one or the other and there’s no avoiding having to choose? What if your life chooses for you, or she does,” and Georgie is startled, because Thomas is indicating the woman in the bed. The old man tries to unbend himself from his chair but doesn’t have the energy; he collapses from the effort. He glares around him at the affront of the room’s light. He mutters, “Virginia runs with blood, like my dreams of Paris,” and he smells of smoke.

“You’re a disgrace,” Georgie charges. But his voice cracks. Trying again he manages, “You’re drunken scum and it isn’t right you call yourself that name.” America is the name he means.

Thomas knows it’s the name Georgie means. “Of course,” he nods, “the flesh,” and he pulls at the old weathered skin on his face, “is too pale to be American flesh. Isn’t it?” and he keeps pulling at his face for the momentary hot rush of blood to his fingertips. He massages his wrists and Georgie sees how raw they’re rubbed, as though they’ve only recently been released from chains. Thomas looks at the bed and says, “And what if she had answered yes? When I asked her to go back to America with me, what if she had promised different? What if, there in the square of the Bastille among the glass and blood and gunpowder, she had said Yes I’ll return with you to America as the slave of your pleasure, instead of turning as she did and disappearing from my life forever into Paris’ roiling core, while I stood at the top of the street screaming her name? What if my life had chosen my heart rather than my conscience? What if I’d put a price on her head and shackled her naked in the cabin of my ship like the property she was, what if I’d smuggled her back to Virginia pleasing my heart every day for the rest of my life and left my conscience to God or the hypocrites who claim to serve him? Let them try to stop me from taking her back, Paris and its revolution. Let it shrivel and petrify like a small black fossil, my tyrannic conscience. Happiness is a dark thing to pursue,” the old man hisses at Georgie, his eyes glimmering brighter and madder at the bald boy, “and the pursuit itself is a dark thing as well. Even God knows that. Above everything else, God especially knows that.” Thomas seizes his racked head. When the pain subsides just enough he whispers, “What if I’d loved her my whole life.” His old eyes are wet. “Would the conscience be as shriveled and petrified as the heart is now? Where’s the frontier of the first irrevocable corruption? Where’s the first moment in the negotiation of the heart and conscience when one so betrays the other that the soul’s rotting begins? God’s hypocrites will say there’s no difference between one corruption and another, that the smallest is as damnable as the biggest: but I made a country once. It was the country of redemption, somewhere this side of God’s. It was the frontier of the first irrevocable compromise between the heart’s freedom and the conscience’s justice, past which the soul can still redeem itself.” He clutches his head again and moans, “The blood.”

There floods into his face the sound of every promise, the claim of every choice, the crash of his heart into his conscience and everything of himself that died from the collision, the stricken memory of happiness that abandoned him, the mourned wife and departed black fourteen-year-old lover, the shouts and gunshots of revolution, the shattered ideals in which even his own betrayal cannot stop him from believing; the ideals still believe him even as he can no longer believe them. And suddenly he appears ancient. Suddenly the misery sags his face and he can’t decide which to hold, the racking thunder of his head or the red burn of his wrists, and he says, “I have to sleep.” He pulls himself from the chair and gropes toward the bed. He can hardly move from the pain and stumbles in the glare of the room. He holds himself up against the far wall and lowers himself slowly onto the bed, and seems to float the rest of the way to the pillow, laying himself down beside her as Georgie watches in horror.

The revulsion that washes over the young Berliner, to see the old man lying in bed next to the one for whom Georgie’s come so far, displaces exultation; rage nearly paralyzes him in his place. “What if she’d said yes,” the old man whispers, trailing off; beneath their lids his eyes dart madly to dreams of his black slave queen emerging from the carriage in Virginia pregnant with his son, managing as the mistress of his house and lands. Georgie rises from his chair and stands looking down at the bed. “Liar,” he says when he brings the last extant piece of the Wall crashing down on the old man’s skull; the wound seems as tidy as it is fatal. It seems a full minute before the blood trickles from the old man’s ears, though the eyes immediately stop darting, their dreams having shut off like a light. Georgie stands examining the tainted stone in his hand with sorrow, to see if some small part of its inscription has been left in the creases of the old man’s brow or the roots of the white-fire hair. He sits down at the table still holding the stone and turns on the radio, but then returns to the bed.

The old man is bleeding more. For the first time the woman responds in her sleep to the room’s turbulence, rearranging herself where she lies, confusion flashing across her sleep as she turns to Georgie for the first time. For the first time he actually sees her face. The ecstatic blackness that comes rushing up from her staggers him where he stands.

It isn’t simply her blackness but her beauty that is the worst trick. He can deny neither her blackness nor beauty even as he’s sure the one must deny the other. Her raven hair falls across her face, and in the corner of her mouth like a drop of wine is a word that begins to run down her chin; a tear waits beneath one fluttering lash. She lies lushly delivered of something she doesn’t know and won’t begin to suspect until she wakes from the dream that’s now devouring her life, at which point only the devouring will be left. She doesn’t suspect what’s only moments beyond her eyelids. It’s as though Georgie would deliver her from the waking world, as he’s delivered Thomas to the last mad dream of his life, it’s as though for something more than reprisal against the terrible trick of her beauty and blackness that Georgie lifts the piece of Wall once more in order to bring it crashing down onto Sally’s head as well. Several times he raises the stone over her before he lowers his arm without striking. He’s only slightly more confounded when she turns again and he sees dangling from her fingers, poised to fall beside her, the knife. He turns and walks out of the room into the hotel hallway, leaving the door open behind him. He walks down the hallway and the hotel stairs and through the empty lobby; the buzz of the distant TV becomes clearer.

Outside, in the dead calm of the city; he can smell the sea.

Now it’s not even exhilaration and rage anymore, it’s the bitterness of futility and the pointlessness of continuing, along with exhaustion and adrenaline and memory. Georgie sobs hysterically at the cruelty of his eyes that insisted on both her blackness and her beauty, at the treachery of a hand that couldn’t kill either. As he wanders the dead of night from circle to circle and obelisk to obelisk, halfnaked and crying, it’s a wonder he doesn’t arouse the entire city; three hours later Dee, behind the bar of the Fleurs d’X, concludes from the look on Georgie’s face that he’s under the spell of a drug she’s never seen before, brought from some city she’s never heard of. He’s stopped crying by now, but the look in his eyes makes uneasy the Fleurs d’X girls who have learned to be unnerved by nothing. It’s also clear that the boy with the tattoos has no money, that he literally hasn’t the shirt on his back. Dee sends over a shot of whiskey anyway, figuring Georgie will finally just pass out on the floor, from where he can be dragged down the hall and dropped down the stairwell.