Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

Nonetheless, he couldn’t help but look for her. With every day she didn’t come, the wound of his heart grew a little larger and deeper and he got a little older and sicker, until one afternoon as he was slamming his mallet against a rock in the heat, trying to remember what the artifact was he had just destroyed, he realized it was his glasses. Pitching face first into his heartbreak he collapsed not into the black robes of a guard but the black arms of another prisoner.

ETCHER DIDN’T RECOGNIZE THE other prisoner. That time so many years before in the hallway of the Arboretum all he’d been aware of was his own blood and the assailant’s looming form. Now when Etcher regained consciousness on the mattress in his cell, the other man was there to give him a drink of water and a bite of bread. The two of them didn’t speak for a long time. The first thing Etcher asked several mornings later was, “Did she come today?”

Wade didn’t know what he was talking about. “No,” he answered.

After a moment Etcher said, “I thought maybe she came.”

“Get some sleep,” Wade said. After that Etcher asked every time he woke, sometimes only hours apart, since in his growing delirium he lost track of the days. Wade dreaded Etcher’s awakenings, when he always had the same answer to the same question. “It makes no sense that she should come,” Etcher reasoned out loud. “She shouldn’t come.”

“You’re not well enough to see anyone anyway,” Wade said. “You haven’t moved from this mattress in three weeks.”

“I’ll get up if she comes,” Etcher insisted.

“OK.”

“Promise you’ll tell me.”

“OK.”

But of course she did not come. Soon, working in the yard, Wade found himself searching for her as Etcher had, his eyes constantly peeled for a sign of her up the road in the distance. Now he had a pretty good idea who he was looking for. And when the sun set he returned to the cell wondering whether it took more courage to tell Etcher a lie or the truth.

Etcher’s moments of cognizance dwindled. Soon he was spitting blood, and after that pissing it. With one arm the black man held the white man up over the hole in the corner of the cell that served as a toilet; in his other hand he held Etcher’s dick for him while he watched the stream of blood in the dark. When he carried Etcher back to the mattress he could hear the pieces of the man’s heart rattle in his chest. It was the sound he thought of when Etcher gave him the box.

Etcher had awakened one last time. Wade held him in his arms. Etcher barely had the strength to speak, so his eyes asked instead and Wade answered, “She came today.” Etcher gripped the other man’s arm harder than Wade would have thought he could grip. His eyes pleaded with more longing than Wade would have thought blind eyes could plead. Wade swallowed and went on, “She was here. I saw her. I talked to her a second or two through the wall. She asked about you. She’ll be back tomorrow.” It was an awful gamble. He was gambling that Etcher wouldn’t make it through the night. He was gambling against Etcher’s life that Etcher might take with him into death one last dream. Etcher pulled Wade’s ear down to his mouth.

“Listen to me,” he whispered, “there are only three things you die for. Love, freedom, or nothing.”

That was when Etcher gave Wade the box. He had Wade bring his bag of possessions and he dug it out from the bottom. It was an old black box, once very beautiful but now battered and nicked, with a rose carved on the top. Etcher shoved the box into the other man’s hands and Wade opened it as though it held something significant, the final revelation of a man’s life. But the box was empty except for some rubble that rolled in tiny pieces from corner to corner, and though Wade hadn’t the faintest idea what use he would ever make of a box, since he would never have anything to put inside, he accepted it as the momentous gift he assumed it was and held it while Etcher died, one final word rising to the dead man’s lips where it stuck unspoken. Wade knew what it was.

IT WAS ONLY AFTER the priests had come for the body, wrapping it in sheets and taking it from the cell, that Wade examined the remains of the rubble in the box more closely and, piecing together several tiny fragments, realized that with a little patience he could reassemble nearly all of pursuit of happiness. And then he knew that in his possession he had the most forbidden artifact of all, and buried it so deep in his corner of the cell that he gladly risked never retrieving it again, if it meant it would never be obliterated into the ground outside.

In the yard the next day he saw, through the penal walls, the wagon come up the road. The girl at the reins had found the charred wagon out in the lava fields, its horse wandering in confusion looking for a patch of grass if not a familiar street, the blaze of the Bastille still in its eyes. Two large gray dogs ran alongside. Wade watched the wagon pass the wall nearest him, and Polly was met at the colony gates by several priests who loaded the body in the back, draped in the same sheet with which they had wrapped it the night before. If he could have talked to her for only a moment, Wade would have asked whether she had known he was dead or whether she just came a day too late; but all he could do was stand and watch her go, even as the guards barked at him to return to work. She disappeared up the road. She came to the highway that led to the city and crossed the highway, continuing on over the hard lava. She neared the volcano and was wondering how she was going to get the body up beyond the ridge and as far as the crater when, though it might have been simply the sound of the ocean breeze, she stopped the horse to turn and see the breeze lift the sheet right off the body, because she thought she had heard someone say something.

And she watched take flight, like a black moth from his dead mouth, the name of the woman he loved.