Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

The house was utterly dilapidated. Doors hung on their hinges and shutters from the windows. Vines from the growth outside slid through the guest chambers like snakes. The ballroom had been gutted to become a strategy room, with a huge topography of the countryside laid out on a table and a flurry of markers depicting lines of attack so ominous the president averted his eyes, afraid he’d see something that jeopardized his life. “Doesn’t matter, Mr. President,” James assured him, “nothing there your white ass would understand anyway.” James led the president deeper into the house until they came to a back room where two armed sentries stepped aside to let them pass.

The dead smell of the room was overpowering. The president stood in the dark long enough to believe his eyes would never adjust to it. A dim form finally began to appear on the other side of the room. “Could you please light a candle?” came a familiar whisper to the form of a second guard, who lit a candle to reveal the form of yet a third guard. The white flag on the president’s chest soaked up the candlelight like a sponge, glowing back. “Hello, John,” the man seated on the other side of the room whispered.

The president stepped forward. “My God, Thomas,” he answered.

“How’s the country these days?” Thomas didn’t look directly at the president but shielded his eyes from the dull throb of the pinpoint of candlelight.

“The headaches,” John surmised, remembering.

“It’s not even a headache anymore, John. There are rare moments when the pain actually goes away, I mean moments, ten or fifteen seconds, and you know what I think when that happens? For those ten or fifteen seconds I’m afraid I’ve died, because it’s the only thing I can imagine taking away the pain. It’s become the kind of pain that reminds me I’m alive.”

“The country is damned terrified, to answer your question. Are you planning to take over with your slaves? You never fooled me about your appetite for power, Thomas. The others, Abigail, well, she’s always been irrationally fond of you, with a preternatural faith in that part of you that was always so good at being all things to all men. But you resent it that I’m president, I know that. It’s been like this between us ever since we’ve been friends. You resent it deeply.” He whined, “I deserve to be president.” He stepped closer. “What the hell has happened to you?”

The tawny circle of the candlelight widened now to reach Thomas’ brow, and it was with a shock that John then saw the other man was naked.

“Thomas,” he croaked, his throat becoming thick, to which Thomas raised his hand to his eyes once more and John heard the clanking of the chains and saw the shackles on his wrists. “Oh no,” he said. He looked at the two armed guards standing to each side of the naked white man. “Oh no, Thomas.” He looked around him for James Hemings, unsure whether he was still in the dark of the room by the door. Vehemently he cried at the two guards, “This is an abomination. This is an outrage.” He lunged at Thomas as though to rip him free of the chains, but Thomas raised his hand just a half a second behind the guards raising their guns; whether Thomas was signaling John to stop in his tracks or the guards to refrain from shooting John wasn’t clear, perhaps even to Thomas.

“Please, John. My head hurts badly enough. No one has taken me prisoner. I sold myself.”

“What?” said the president.

“It was all above board. As legal as a transaction can be.” He turned to one of the guards. “Is there any wine?” he said. “Would you like some wine, John?” The guards didn’t move or answer. “I can’t take this light anymore, please snuff the candle.” The guard on Thomas’ left leaned forward and, with a quick puff, blew the room back into darkness. Instinctively the other white man recoiled. “It’s the final resolution of the dilemma of power,” he heard Thomas say in the dark, “to be at once both king and slave. To at once lead an army and be its waterboy. To command every man and woman within miles, and be subject to the whim of any little colored child who wanders in and orders me to dance like a puppet, or make a funny face, or wear something silly on my head such as the peel of an orange or an animal turd. Sometimes I just wish for a woman, is all. Sometimes I wish for just one, who in turn may ride me chained through the hallways of the house like a beast of burden. I wish there was just one woman who could come into the dark and arouse me, and drain the pain from my head to my loins through her lips. But there’s no woman who can do that anymore, try though I might, beautiful though one might be.”

“You’re mad,” John’s voice cracked.

“You haven’t even asked what my price was,” Thomas sulked. “Ask me what my price was.”

“You’re insane.”

“The first price was too high, of course. The first price was too impossible. It was her, naturally: she was the price. When they refused that, I would have settled for a single night with her, and when they refused that I would have settled for an hour. But she simply wasn’t part of the bargain, was she? They couldn’t have sold her to me even if they wanted because, you know, it’s a funny thing, but she had entirely other ideas about it. So finally I settled on a bottle of wine. It was a good bottle of wine. You should make that clear to others when you go back, it was a good bottle of wine. You should make sure they understand it was a bottle of French vintage that James brought back from Paris. I drank it in an hour. While I drank,” he said, “I saw her face and touched her hand, and it was hours before she left me again, before the edges of her began to dissipate in the dark until she was just a small black pool on the floor next to my bed.”

“It was that girl in London,” John said.

There was a pause that seemed momentous to John only because it was so dark, and then he heard Thomas say, “I can’t see your white flag anymore, John.”

“It was that girl in London, who brought over your daughter. And Abigail said, She shouldn’t go to Paris; and I was a fool, not because I didn’t believe her but because I knew she was right and I wouldn’t admit it. She shouldn’t go to Paris, Abigail said. If you had come to get your daughter in London as had been planned, everything would have been different. You would have gotten your daughter in London as planned and taken her back to Paris with you, and that girl would have been on the first ship back to America.”

“I can’t see your white flag anymore so I think you better go. If you stay longer, no one will be able to see your white flag. Nothing stays white here very long.”

John turned, stumbling in the dark toward the door. He grappled for it so frantically that the white flag ripped from his chest. He ran from the room clutching it in his hand; he ran down the hall of the house past the armed slaves and through the house’s entryway. He virtually leapt into the waiting carriage, jarring it so hard the horses took the impact as a signal to lurch down the road in full gallop. Half of Virginia was behind them before they stopped.

Thomas’ army moved that night. Thomas rode with James in his black carriage, chains around his wrists and clothed in an Indian blanket; the president’s militia reached the plantation in time to find squealing pigs and lingering mules as its new custodians. The slave army alternately lumbered and darted across the American countryside, disbanding in one hamlet to reassemble in another valley, engulfed by skirmishes from Virginia to Ohio to Pennsylvania and New York, back down to Maryland through the fall and into winter; never quite deciding whether to try to seize the country or leave it. Every once in a while Thomas would emerge after sundown from his carriage or tent. He would walk through the camp, directing his army’s maneuvers on their march west to the Louisiana territories while the autumn wind blew his tall frail body and tattered rags and his masters ordered him to feed the horses and clean the rifles. When the campaign’s climactic battle decimated the forces so disastrously even retreat wasn’t feasible, when America washed itself in a tide of slave blood, James chained Thomas to the carriage seat and they made their escape into a country that had no name but west. Eventually they came to an Indian village.