Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

The village stood high on a mesa that overlooked the world for as far as Thomas could see. Abandoning the carriage James unlocked Thomas’ chains and the two men made their way by foot up the path alongside the mesa, where they were greeted by the natives, into whose arms Thomas collapsed. Two Indians carried him across a narrow stone bridge that connected the main mesa to a smaller one, so high above the ground that Thomas was overcome with the fatalistic calm of having placed his life utterly in the hands of others. He was taken into an empty adobe house, where he was set on blankets with a bowl of water beside him. When he lay down, his head hurt even more; and so for some time after the natives left he sat upright, soothing the pounding at the back of his skull against the coolness of the dirt wall. He was thirsty for some wine. He kept thinking he should drink the water in the bowl but he hadn’t the energy to lift it to his mouth, and a few moments later he regretted not having taken the opportunity when he woke in the hotel room to find the water gone, displaced by the long-forgotten scent of someone sleeping in the bed several feet away, the strange bald boy with the pictures on his body coming through the door.

SIXTEEN YEARS AFTER THE murder of the unknown man in the Downtown hotel, the police arrested Gann Hurley not far from the peripheral highway where he’d been sighted for the past two months staring out at the lava fields. As it happened Polly was just crossing the fields with her two dogs on her way back to the city, and was just on the other side of the highway, when she saw the officers swoop down on Hurley and drag him to the car. She cried so desperately as she ran alongside the car that all the way back to headquarters the cops shot sullen, reproachful glances at their boss; at headquarters the girl begged them to let her see her father, until she collapsed in the hallway. The boss was unimpressed, unless one counted sheer satisfaction. Even the scar of his face appeared content.

Most of these years Mallory hadn’t really cared much about the unsolved murder, his attention entirely absorbed by Wade’s apprehension in the bowels of the Arboretum. But now the Hurley arrest represented for Mallory the final closure of an obsession that began in earnest the afternoon his face was peeled from the front of his head onto an alley wall. There were still loose ends in the matter, which Mallory might have spent the rest of his life tying up if he seriously believed there was a point; but even Mallory accepted that no one was likely ever to know exactly who the dead man in the hotel had been or what had happened between him and Sally Hemings, though whatever had transpired was presumed motivating enough for Hurley to kill him. The evidence was slim but, thought Mallory to himself, fuck evidence. It was a process of elimination, and when everyone else was eliminated Hurley was left, and his throat was as good for ramming a murder down as anyone’s. Mallory had been so relentless in his pursuits for so long he didn’t know how to stop, and he had half a mind to arrest the daughter as some sort of accomplice, if at the time of the incident she hadn’t been two years old.

Forty-eight hours after Hurley’s arrest, however, Mallory knew something was amiss. The directive came down from Primacy to move Hurley not to the penal colony, where Mallory expected to send him, but the train station. “What bullshit is this?” Mallory asked whoever was within asking range. Hurley was put back in a car and taken to Vagary Junction, where not only a train was waiting but also, on the platform, a flock of white-robed priests, more of them in one place than Mallory had ever seen at one time. Standing in the doorway of the train was Hurley’s daughter and her dogs. The rosary was removed from Hurley’s wrists and now Mallory definitely had this queasy feeling in his stomach. As he became more and more furious his face began to bleed, small red rivulets trickling into the lines and wrinkles.

His daughter threw her arms around him as Hurley got on the train, and Mallory could see them through the windows as they made their way down the aisle of the car. The priests signaled the conductor and the train responded with a lurch, and a minute later obsession’s final sweet resolution was irrevocably beyond Mallory’s reach; all that was left was the volcano in the distance and the steel rails gleaming in the Vog and the man on the other side of the track with the red books in his arms and the blue eyes floating in his glasses like crystal balls. Like Mallory, Etcher stood watching the disappearing train for as long as it was in sight, and then stepped over the rail and up the steps to the platform, where he delivered the books into the possession of the priests, and the rosary that Hurley had worn was snapped around his wrists and he was put in the police car. He was driven down the highway to the penal colony south of the city. Within the colony’s gray walls he was given a gray prisoner’s robe and placed in a large black cell with no windows, for which the sound of the sea in the distance, Etcher told himself, was soothing compensation.

He had his own mattress and was allowed one small bag of personal possessions as long as they didn’t include reading material. He had been in the cell an hour before he realized he shared it with other prisoners, some of them lying so still in the shadows they might have been dead. He was taken to a yard where the ground was littered with forbidden artifacts that had been seized during altar searches; on the rocks of the yard, under the watch of armed priests in black robes, the prisoners smashed the artifacts with dull mallets. Iconic carvings and blasphemous jewelry and children’s books were hammered and pulverized into pulp. First the sensual quality of the object was disfigured and then its meaning, and then its form; and when the object had been pounded into a misshapen lump of wood or mineral or paper, the remains were then beaten into the rock itself until the whole ground throbbed with heresy. Since new artifacts were being delivered every day, this work never ended. The prisoners had no conversation among themselves and gave what they were destroying no special attention.

The days passed and then the weeks. Etcher became old and exhausted by the work. He didn’t eat and in the mornings he had to be brutally awakened by the black-robed guards as though from a stupor. He opened his eyes every day to the devastating regret that he was still alive. Though visiting day was once a month no one came to visit him, nor did he expect anyone; but loneliness that he not only reconciled himself to when he lived in the volcano but coveted was now harder to bear. Though he tried very hard not to think about anything, to drain his mind of any wandering impulse, after a while he found that in the yard beneath the blistering sun he couldn’t help but occasionally gaze through the barbed wire of the penal walls to the volcano in the east and the city to the north. He told himself he had no reason for this reverie, but soon it was the thing he lived for and from which the guards interrupted him. Months went by before Etcher realized one day who it was he was looking for, as though she would appear around a bend or over a hill; and then his heart pleaded with him not to torment it. He reasoned with himself that she was safe now and free and where she belonged, that this after all was why he had made his bargain with the priests, to give back her father after having taken away her mother. He pointed out to himself that if she were to come back to the city she might never be able to leave again and would therefore only risk never seeing her father again. It was not only a preposterous hope to inflict on himself but a cruel one to expect her to fulfill.