Arc D'X (27 page)

He begged Mallory to chain him to Sally's bed.

Mallory complied, not as a favor to Etcher but because he had to find Wade. He knew Wade was there. He knew Wade was hiding beneath the stairs or in some back room. He had begun looking for him as soon as they stepped off the train in the little station twenty-five miles away; he'd asked around in the tiny village. All the way by bus across the desolation of the Ice up to the house, he'd had his eyes peeled for the logical hiding places. But there were no hiding places. There was only ice. When the little girl cried at the sight of him out in the snow and ran back to the house, Mallory hurried behind her pulling Etcher and the other cops along, convinced the kid would tip Wade off and give everything away. Mallory rosaried Etcher to Sally Hemings' bed and ran halfcrazed throughout the house, flinging open closet doors and shoving aside furniture under the rather bemused gaze of Gann Hurley, who was waiting for Sally to bring him his lunch and clean the bathroom and wash the dishes and make his bed. The cop with no face turned the house upside down until he finally reached the top room and the ladder outside. Staring up the ladder, he knew there was STEVE E R I C K S O N • 175

no other place for Wade to go. He knew he had him trapped. This frightened Mallory because, confronted with this moment, he was alone; and he didn't want to meet Wade alone. He called down to the other cops, who couldn't hear him. He screamed until he was hoarse and finally one by one they came outside the house to look up at Mallory on the roof of the first floor. "I've got him!" Mallory cried, pointing up the ladder to the very top of the house. The cops, looking at the top of the house from the ground, couldn't see anyone: "There's no one there," one of them yelled up to Mallory, who ignored him, squawking from every open blister of his head until the other cops came back into the house and up the stairs and out onto the roof of the first floor. "One of you stays here," Mallory said, "and the other two follow me," and he started slowly up the ladder step by step until he reached the very top. When the other cops heard his scream they panicked, believing Mallory had found Wade after all. They didn't know that Mallory was crying at the sight of the world, at the sight of the streaming red sky, at the sight of time cascading toward him in rapids.

Downstairs in the bedroom, Sally and Etcher listened to Mallory running throughout the house around them. For a long time they sat together on the bed in silence, following with their eyes the sounds that moved maniacally from place to place. What's he looking for? she finally asked. I don't know, Etcher answered. By the time Mallory had gotten to the very top of the house, his cry of alarm seemed very far away, and neither Sally nor Etcher was paying attention anymore. Each was now listening to his and her own thoughts, trying hard to hear the other's. Etcher could hear Sally's. He had become so adept at hearing her thoughts he almost heard them, he believed, before she thought them. He knew she was thinking that maybe she didn't want to be alone after all; he knew that with him sitting right next to her her confusion had taken yet another turn. Perhaps she expected him to answer this confusion. Perhaps she expected him either to beg her to let him stay—she didn't really understand yet that the police wouldn't have allowed this in any event—or to confess that it had all become more than he could bear and he was leaving her to her confusion alone, as she professed to want. At any rate she waited for him to share some of the responsibility of this confusion: and she couldn't hear, among his thoughts, his refusal.

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"Maybe," she said, "you should just come here like we planned.

Maybe we should do what we planned all along, and you should come." He didn't answer. "You have to tell me what you're thinking," she said. "Are you angry, are you sad? Are you relieved? Do you want to yell at me, or hit me?"

"I could never hit you," he said.

"But I don't know what you're thinking."

She didn't know, and he could hear her thoughts so clearly.

"You've needed to be free since the first," he said.

"I tried to tell you . . ."

The sound of Mallory's searching had stopped.

"All of my life," she said, "he's been there," and he almost said Who? because he knew it wasn't Mallory and he knew it wasn't Joseph and he didn't believe it was Gann. "All my life I could feel him back there, where I remember things that never happened, in this dream that seems to have replaced everything. He's been there all along. I don't know who he is. I can barely see him in my mind. I can barely hear his voice. Until now he was there to blame.

He was there as the one who wouldn't let me go. But that's not it anymore. It isn't him that won't let me go, it's me. Once, when I had the chance, I chose something else—love or safety or the home that made me its slave, I don't know, but I chose to go back with him and be his slave and because I made that choice, because I loved him or because I was afraid to be without him, because I was afraid to be free, everything changed. Everything about my life changed. Everything about his life changed. Time and the country changed. Did I return with him just so I'd have one more chance to kill him? Did I return with him just so I'd have one more chance to be raped by him, or to be made love to by him, or to wonder which was which? Why am I like this, Etcher? Why isn't it enough to love you and be loved by you? I know I'm a fool to let you go. No one ever loved me like you. You saved my life. You pulled me from the fever. You adored me more than I deserved. Tell me I'm wrong.

Tell me this is a mistake."

He said nothing. He had decided, he had had lots of time on the train to decide, that unless she knew for certain she wanted him with her, he had no arguments left for her. He wasn't going to talk her into anything. He tried to raise his hands to his eyes; he needed STEVE E R 1 C K S O N • 177

to take off his new glasses. They had filled with so many tears he couldn't see through them anymore.

But the chains that bound him to her bed caught his hands and pulled them back. He was left at the mercy of her hands. It was worse, somehow, to be at the mercy of her free hands. They now took the glasses from him, from the eyes of her own bound slave, and wiped the tears from his face for him, again and again.

Two weeks after he died, I had a dream.

I'd been expecting it. I hadn't really mourned my father; I'm not sure I have even now, years later. It may be that I mourned some passing of him before he died, or it may be that the loss still hasn't sunk in, or it may be that on some deeper level I already understood that everything is loss, that our lives are a race against the clock of loss, a race to lose the vessel of our lives before we lose everything that vessel contains. Surely when my mother goes, should she go before me, the aloneness that's almost become a psychological vanity for me, the aloneness I like to think I understand so damned well, will take on dimensions I never imagined; because then the loss of the only two things that all the moments of my life have had in common will leave me utterly alone either to know who I am—as I've always flattered myself I do—or to the desolation of a deluded life. In that case I'll be at the mercy of either God or his antithesis, not the Devil, since I don't believe in the Devil, but Chaos, against which the only weapon God has ever given us is memory.

In this dream about my father I was walking through the corridors of a rest home. It was a very pleasant rest home. The windows were open and the wind that came through was balmy and a pale lovely blue and beyond the windows I could see the trees swaying.

As I walked the corridors I saw to the sides large rooms with rows of clean crisp beds, all of which were empty, until I came to the room where my father was. He was sitting up in one of the beds.

He looked fine. There was color in his face and he appeared tran-A R C D'X • 178

quil and happy, perhaps more than I'd ever seen him before. He greeted me. But I distinctly remembered, I completely understood that he was dead; in this dream my sense of time was grounded and I understood he'd died just two weeks before. "Oh," I said to him, "this is a dream."

This is not a dream, he answered.

For some time we discussed this, my father gently pressing the point that this was real. And nothing had ever seemed more real. I could feel the wind through the windows and see the trees swaying outside, and my father was as vivid as he'd ever been. On his lap he held a small plate. On the plate was a small pastry. He gave me the pastry and said, Here, taste this; and I did. He said, You can taste it, can't you? and I could. He said, You can taste it because it isn't a dream; and it was true that it didn't taste like any dream, it was true that I couldn't remember ever having been able to taste something in a dream before, taste being the one sense that's beyond my imagination. But I still wouldn't believe him. What my mind had come to believe in as the reality of his death was too strong for my heart, which was confronted with the reality of his talking to me now, and offering me a pastry.

And then I woke, at the beckoning of my mind, which feared that it would lose this argument with my heart. Except I didn't wake to reality but rather into another dream, which I later forgot as immediately as I forget all my dreams, moments beyond the thin silver horizon of waking, beyond the edge of the blade of consciousness. Another dream that wasn't in the least important except for the fact that it was there waiting beyond the archway of my last meeting with my father, a place for a coward to hurry when he wasn't brave enough for his visions.

Everyone I've ever told about this has said the same thing. Every one of them has said my father was right.

After Etcher returned to Aeonopolis, a calm settled over his daily life. But his nights were filled with dreams of his father and dreams of Kara and mostly dreams of Sally, and worse STEVE ERICKSON - 179

were the waking moments when he lay staring in the dark unable to believe he wasn't with her anymore. "I can't believe what happened to us," he said out loud in the dark. When his nights became nothing but the same dreams again and again, he went looking for another kind of night.

He found himself at the feet of a naked blonde.

In the rosy stupefaction of the wine he wasn't always aware she was there. Sometimes he looked right through her. Her yellow hair was tied back and she had long legs and wore only long black stockings and high heels, and she danced for him though he knew she danced for everyone. Somewhere in the onslaught of his dreams and the stupefaction of the wine he understood the true nature of his exchange with the naked blonde, and realized that in such an exchange it was not the woman who gave herself to the dance but the man, that it was only the man's folly and conceit that allowed him to believe it was a naked blonde giving herself to him, and everything about the exchange was contingent on that conceit.

The dance wasn't about her obliteration but his. It was he who lost his persona in the dark of the club, it was she whose persona became all-pervasive in her body's celebration. And so there were moments he took comfort in this, losing himself in the same way a man loses himself in the climax of sex, and there were also moments he wasn't aware she was there at all, when he looked right through her, those moments when there was too much of him to lose no matter how much he might have wished to.

Those were the moments she noticed him. The moments when her spell over him was broken, and her power over him was gone; and she danced to those moments in the expectation of seizing them back from him, and in the hope she never would.

He dropped his glasses one night. The two of them crawled together on the floor of the Fleurs d'X, and when she found them and he put them on he couldn't help but see her then, her breasts close enough to touch and her mouth close enough to kiss. She laughed. "I'm sorry," he said.

"It's all right," she said.

"You're very beautiful," he explained in the dark. "I'm just like all the others."

"Yes," she answered, relieved. He could tell she was from the Ice. Not long after, it might have been the next night or the next—

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in the onslaught of dreams and the stupefaction of wine and the time of the Arboretum it was difficult to know or wonder why it was important—when she came to talk to him at the edge of the Fleurs d'X he said, I'm from the Ice too. "You don't have an accent," she said.

"I lost it after I came to the city."

"I never leave the neighborhood," she said, by which she meant the Arboretum, "so I never lose anything." She added, "You don't look like you're from the Ice."

He could tell, even in the dark, that with each passing moment she doubted more and more he was really from the Ice. She believed it was just another fiction of the Fleurs d'X, where everyone had their fictions, the girls most of all. That was one of the attrac-tions of Fleurs d'X, the invention and acceptance of fictions. So he just answered, "I know." After a moment he said, "My father is dead," and was appalled that he'd reduced his father's death to a seduction, only because he couldn't bring himself to so reduce what had happened with Sally.

"My father's dead too," said the woman in the dark, and more than just the cold of the Ice was in her voice.

"Who are you?"

"Call me the Woman in the Dark." Mona was the fiction she offered all the other men, the one that had been claimed by the black giant who lived in her flat on the other side of the neighborhood; and she looked around her as she said it because though the giant wasn't here she knew he was watching from her flat, peering at the living map he'd painted across the walls where she lived. If she'd thought there was any corner of the Arboretum that was hidden from sight in the walls of her flat, she might have taken Etcher by the hand and led him there. Or she might not. It might have been that any violation of her relationship with the men she danced for was too monumental, though of course it had already been violated by the man who lived in her flat. It never crossed her mind to fuck Etcher. She wasn't sure it crossed his either. But she supposed that finally she'd found a man to whom, in some dark cold corner of her life, she might say, "Keep me warm," and it would mean something entirely different from what it had always meant before. "Keep me warm," she might say to him, and not feel colder for it. The dead part of her heart in which her father STEVE E R I C K S O N • 181