Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“No.”

“You have nowhere to go.”

“Your hand’s bleeding,” she said; “you should go home.”

“If you leave now you’ll never see your family again. You’ll never see America again. You’ll be in a strange country forever, with strange people and a strange language you don’t know—”

“I’ll learn.”

“In Virginia you will be the mistress of my house. The queen of my bed.” He ran after her.

She turned to confront him. “I would just try to kill you again,” she said. “I’d keep trying until I did.”

“Where do you suppose you’ll go? How will you live?”

She resumed walking from the square down the winding street. This is the way to the river, she thought to herself. She heard him behind her.

“You belong to me,” she heard him say.

“Not anymore.”

“You belong to me,” he asserted, “I’ll take you back forcibly. I’ll put a price on your head and shackle you naked in the cabin of my ship like the property you are. Sally.”

“Goodbye.”

“Sally?”

She kept walking. The river is this way, she told herself. The smell of gunpowder wafted by.

“Sally,” he called from the top of the street. Above her she saw windows opening at the sound of his voice and people sticking their heads out to look. “Sally!” The violence of his voice was unbearable. In all her life she’d never heard him raise it. In confrontations with kings and revolutionists and priests and slaves alike, in his angriest, most determined and demanding moments, she had never heard his voice rise to a shout but rather fall to a whisper, except for that sound he made on the death of his wife, that wordless abysmal sound that sent Sally at the age of nine running from the deathbed. Down into the winding center of the city she made herself walk on, not daring to stop let alone look back at the figure of the tall man screaming her name at the top of the street littered with glass and blood.

He did not follow her, though she might have expected him to, or even hoped it. All that followed was her legend, which swept her along in its path through the riots and famine, massacres and purges, around fountains and under archways, beneath streetlights and over bridges and past cafés of swirling leaflets and ringing declarations: she moved through the Revolution like a shudder. She was the ultimate insurrectionist, who had liberated herself of the world’s greatest revolutionary, leaving him proclaiming his ownership and crying her name. Her eyes did not lose the druggy glow of her dreams. She did not take off the fine dress he once bought for her, now spattered with blood that many insistently mistook for the carnage of the Bastille even as it was in fact from Thomas’ own hand. Her legend swept her from the flat-topped smoking mountain of her vision, where she saw the daughter she never had, to the Mountain of the convention hall, where the new Republic’s leaders sat against one wall overlooking the wreckage of their wrath, Sally on the top tier in a gown of blood that became brown with years, the black muse of a new calendar with a choice she never made lying in rubble at her feet, the throne of a Queen of Slaves rejected for a revolution’s realm.

On the top tier of the Mountain, the squalling deputies of the convention below them debating the law of a new era and whether under that law blood flowed uphill, Maximilien sat on one side of Sally and on the other Georges, whom Sally called Jack. They were hyena and lion respectively. In the mornings she stared at Maximilien across his sitting chamber, waiting for whatever inspiration would unlock him from his impotence; because Maximilien meant to be a god the prospect of an erection only terrified him, every failure only convincing him anew of how godlike he was. Because Jack had no interest in being a god he slipped Sally from Maximilien’s bedroom in the dead of night and fucked her heartily, returning her to his rival’s chaste contemplation by sunup. I’ve exchanged a complete American revolutionary for a couple of half-finished French ones, Sally laughed to herself one rainy afternoon, wondering if the two added up to something more or less than the one. She was watching, for what must have been the thousandth time, the earthbound glide of the guillotine in the place de la Concorde. In the gray wet sky the blade gleamed like a dead star doomed to fall from space again and again. When her ecstasy reached the point of delirium, when in her mind she had brought the knife down into Thomas’ body so many times she just couldn’t do anything more to free herself of him, Sally returned from the guillotine one twilight to stand in Maximilien’s atrium, her dress soaked with more blood than could ever dry to brown in a lifetime. Blood was on her hands, blood was smeared across her face. Maximilien appeared in the archway and looked at her. “What kind of monster have I become?” she asked him.

“You’ve become,” was his cool answer, “the symbol of the Revolution’s glory, its purity of purpose and pitiless justice.”

“It’s enough blood, Maxime. It’s been more than enough.”

“There’s yet another head to drop,” he advised. “So take your animal pleasure from him tonight while he’s still around to give it.”

It took every argument and entreaty, every tactic and ruse for Sally to persuade Jack to flee France that night and save his own life. Finally it took her promise to go with him, since he insisted he would not go without her. They lived together in London not far from the house of the American couple where Sally had stayed her first night after crossing the Atlantic five years before. What was left of the Eighteenth Century passed in Sally’s whispered counsel and Georges’ underground manifestos smuggled to France, where with his departure the Revolution had been deprived of its last chance to consume itself. With the collapse of the Bonaparte Putsch of ’98 and the beheading of its leader, and the Revolution’s uninterrupted metamorphosis into totalitarian state, Jack lost heart, trying to pinpoint where everything had gone wrong, when the Revolution had first foreshadowed the terrorist tenet of the modern age, which holds that freedom is not the ideal of the slave but the luxury of the bourgeois, that one is not a victim in spite of his innocence but because of it, because the terrorist holds innocence to be the guiltiest and most contemptible of political infractions.

Mostly, in the tradition of all egoists, Jack mourned his own irrelevance. Sally could not mistake his resentment toward her for it, how he held her accountable; in retrospect he would rather have given up his neck than his place in history, though he could bear to give up neither if it meant relinquishing his claims on her body. “My God,” he sputtered one night in an exceptionally lucid moment, “does all of history think with its dick?” His happiest moment may well have been his last, on the eve of the Nineteenth Century, when he discovered that history remembered him after all. A stranger entered a tavern where he found Jack having supper. Throwing wide his arms the stranger exclaimed, in French, “Can this honor actually be mine? Is it really the great Danton I see before me?” and before Sally could take the ale from her mouth to warn him, Jack, literally flattered to death, expansively allowed as how he indeed was that person. The stranger smiled, pulled a pistol from under his cloak and blew Jack halfway across the room. Three other diners rose from their tables to reveal themselves as revolutionary grenadiers. “By the judgment of the Committee on Public Safety,” the stranger pronounced to Jack’s dead body, and then turned to the shocked twenty-five-year-old Sally: “Citizen Robespierre sends for you, madame.” Six hours later she was crossing the Channel back to France.