He took the axe from behind the stove and went into an empty storeroom on the side of the house, closing the door behind him.

He began to chop. Over the next few hours he chopped up the room and when he was finished he began on another, carving away at the house from the most extraneous rooms toward the center.

Day after day he proceeded with increasing ferocity to demolish the house. With each breach of the house's shelter, with each assault through another wall, he felt the sick exhilaration of another hope collapsing before the hopelessness of the night that flooded in through the house's gashes. With his axe he stalked his own life as Sally did with her knife. He cast on the fire of the stove the splinters of the house until gradually one room after another disappeared; he was sure he heard the scream of smoldering iceflies rise through the chimney above the rooftop. Polly was so cold he would have set the whole house on fire if it was the only way to keep her warm.

But Sally wasn't cold at all. Sally was hot. At any moment Etcher thought she'd go up in the dark cloud of her own immolation.

There was no barring her door this time against cops and priests, God and Death; Etcher was hacking up the doors for the purpose of the fire. Now Sally lay naked in the webs that were being woven around her as fast as Etcher could rip them away. Steam rose from beneath the place where she lay like the Vog that once poured out from the place where she stood with Etcher on the cliffs of Aeonopolis. When her cries from the heat were more than he could bear he tore away the room around her, to let in the cold of the night for which she pleaded from whatever station of the journey she'd come to. Finally, when the outer wall of the bedroom was gone, to her momentary relief, he lifted her naked body and carried her through the rubble of the slashed jagged walls out onto the ice itself, pulling behind him into a pyre bits and pieces of the house and torching it. The silence of the night, the void of life, was ghastly. In the light and heat of the huge fire Polly played with her animals on what was left of the house floor. Sally lay nude on the fjord with her eyes full of the night and the half-moon above her and a white mountain in the distance gliding slowly through the dark like a ship. When Etcher knelt beside her, when he ran his STEVE E R I C K S O JV • 201

cold fingers over her body to soothe her shuddering, when he held her breasts in his hands to calm the beating of her heart, he still couldn't be sure she knew he was there.

In his hands like that, you might have been a prayer. In his hands like that, you might have been something he thought he could mid-wife into a new incarnation, strong enough to withstand his love if not your own, wrenching from you the choice that had been killing you since you chose that afternoon in Paris between love and freedom. After that you always insisted it could never again be one or the other. After that it had to be both or neither; you meant to find on your journey the intersection of the two and convince yourself that they could be the same road with two names. You insisted on seeing the wholeness of everything in life but yourself, which lay in bits and pieces around you like the doors and rafters of a broken house: you thought the men only worshiped the bits and pieces of you. You thought their worship had nothing to do with the whole of you. Looking out at it from the inside, you thought your beauty was a thing apart from you. You never understood how the thing they loved most wasn't your face but your voice, how the thing they loved most was that fountain that trickled up from your heart to your mouth and showed everyone who you were, your heart's broken, wounded aspirations to be better than you were or could be or better than anyone could be. That was what he loved about you.

But he never believed freedom and love were the same road with two names. He always believed they were two separate roads and that it was always a matter of moving back and forth between them. On his mouth like that your name might have been an incantation; and far away where you are now, beneath the night sky and the halfmoon, you hear him say it one more time.

Beneath the light of the halfmoon, she says to herself, The revolution has come.

She turns to him on her bed. She isn't going to bury her face in her pillow this time and pretend to be asleep. She isn't a fourteen-year-old girl anymore who thinks that if she lies still enough he'll go away. This time he isn't going to rape her, spraying her blood across the room, and then absolve himself with cool rags between her legs and tears on her thighs. This time she isn't going to scream out in the hope that the night will somehow rescue her; she isn't surprised that the night answers with an unnatural silence. She A R C D'X • 202

isn't surprised by betrayal at all, she expects it; she won't fall this time into the light of the crescent moon above her. She's already well on the way somewhere else. When he comes to take her, without hesitation she greets him with a fierce merciless urgency.

With no delusions that she might resist him, she turns instead to devour him back.

In the light of the fire he sees behind her eyes something moving, something that isn't Sally at all, the sudden swish of its tail, the slithering flick of evidence inside her of the thing to which she's abandoned everything of herself but desire. Desire bleeds at her mouth. It ripples to her fingers. She parts her lips to inhale him and take him in her hand. Though he tries to pull away it's a lie when he tells himself he wants to resist her: he doesn't want to resist her. Though he tries to pull away it's a lie when he tells himself she can survive his fucking her: she cannot survive it. She sweeps away resistance as he swept away the web of the iceflies around her bed. She takes him in her hand and drives him up inside her and he hears the response inside, the scamper of something into the swampland; his cock feels the ripple of the marshes.

He fucks the thing in her so as to find what's left of Sally at the end of the thing: it's a lie when he tells himself he wants to free her.

It's such a huge lie that in his mind it never finishes his own sentence. He's oblivious of the night and he's oblivious of the fjord and he's oblivious of the fire in the distance and, somewhere on the other side of the fire, of the child. And it's only when he thinks of the child that, in horror, he tells himself he has to stop. He can't lie to himself about the child. And when he tells himself he has to stop, it's only then he realizes he's been oblivious of how cold Sally has suddenly become in his arms, beneath his body, holding him in the grip of memory. Desire isn't the only thing left of her after all. The memory is left, a small trace of it in the embers of her slavery that his seed hunts down, the memory of how he loves her and how she loves him and how it's bigger than anything they have ever known or perhaps anyone has ever known, and how it isn't big enough. She whispers in his ear.

"Take care of Polly," she said. And I knew she was gone.

In the light of the fire a shadow scampered across her face, like a serpent taking flight. But it wasn't a serpent. Etcher turned to see STEVE E R I C K S O N • 203

Polly by the edge of the fire. As she'd done on the edge of the city's white circle, announcing with a tiny finger something no one could see in a crowd of birds, she raised her arm and pointed now at the fatal flame of her departed mother.

The wind blew the chains that hung from the northern wall of the Paris courtyard. The wall was over three hundred years old, as were the chains, because they had been laid into the stone when the wall was built, eight sets of shackles that once held the prisoners of dukes and kings and then, after the Revolution, the enemies of the Republic condemned from the highest summit of Robespierre's Mountain. The shackles dangled listlessly, the rain of centuries having long since washed them of their blood.

Now sometimes teenage lovers broke into the courtyard in the middle of the night to play with the shackles and Seuroq would hurry out of the house to chase them away. More exasperating than the mirth of the kids running off was that of Seuroq's wife, who found amusing the doctor's indignation at the harmless bondage games—since the shackles could not be locked—being played in his courtyard. Teasing, she would slip into the chains herself, give them a good rattle. "My God, Helen," Seuroq said with shock, and Helen laughed.

"You always were so proper," she said.

"Not that proper, was I?" He softened, momentarily worried that, knowing he was not a demonstrably passionate man, he had in the course of the many years they'd been married denied his wife something. "I wasn't so proper," he asked quietly, "when it mattered not to be proper, was I?" and she took her wrists from the shackles of the courtyard wall and slipped them around his neck, with that smile that was always young.

No one had broken into the courtyard since Helen's death.

Now, with the courtyard's silence interrupted only by the city's distant festivities and its shadows broken only by the twilight through the sieve of the trees, the assistant stood watching the old A R C D'X • 204

man through the library window. He's mourning again, Luc thought to himself, though that didn't seem precisely right, since it implied there had been a time in the past eight months when the old man had not mourned. It wasn't that the expression on Seuroq's face was mournful but rather the opposite: his had always been a mournful face, even when he was lighthearted; no one was funnier than Seuroq when he laughed, because his face was perpetually cast in mourning and the contradiction of laughter was comic.

Then Helen died and the mourning went right out of his face, the face went blank of its natural pathos; in the light of the lamp on the desk in the library, that was the look on Seuroq's face now, lost somewhere in the thirty-one years of marriage and searching for a ghost. "Dr. Seuroq?" Luc finally called through the window, but as he both expected and feared, the old man didn't answer, staring right through the window and right through his assistant, which left Luc with the choice of either an even more unseemly intrusion, rapping on the window, or leaving without a goodbye.

He had more heart for the goodbyeless departure than the intrusion.

In the eight months since her death the world had learned not to intrude, leaving him in his chair in the library and waiting for him to wake from grief, reconciled to the possibility he would never wake. The university had tried gently to nudge the disconsolate widower back into the realm of the living and the learned, coddling him with propositions of study or teaching that he'd find intriguing but not demanding, understanding that the heart's grief makes a person into a child who must grow old again, or takes him to the edge of life's end from which he must again grow young. No one had a formula for grief. For a marriage of thirty-one years, was eight months too much, too little, or about right? That was one month for every four years, more or less. It wasn't the first night Luc had found Seuroq sitting in the library chair staring into the courtyard, with neither a rap on his window nor the call of his name to arrest him from what Luc was young enough to suppose was a particular recollection rather than simply the gruel of light that wore her face.

On this particular night, however, when Luc was watching Seuroq through the library window, something more extraordinary was happening than just remembering. Seuroq had indeed been STEVE E R I C K S O N • 205

thinking of Helen: but at the very moment Luc was in the courtyard trying to get the doctor's attention, a number of split sensations were tumbling one on top of the other in a single second, initiated by the wind's rustling the chains on the old courtyard wall and then the instant memory of a night in a very old hotel on the right bank of the city years before, when Helen found the card. Once, when Helen was still married to her first husband, she and Seuroq had a rendezvous in this old hotel; six years later, Helen having long since left her first husband and married Seuroq, the two of them went back as an anniversary of sorts. It was May of 1968.

The next morning the tanks rolled down the rue d'X beneath their balcony on the way to the turmoil of the left bank, and the momentum of colossal historic events would steamroll whatever small personal memories of hotel rooms preceded them. Nonetheless, now eight months after Helen's death, the wind rattled the chains and Seuroq thought of that night in the hotel room, when Helen lost an earring and they pulled the bed away from the corner and found the card in a crack where the walls of the room separated.

On it was the picture of a dark woman, sitting on a throne holding a rod. A cat lay at her feet and the landscape around her was strewn with rubble; a white moon rose in a blue sky. "The Queen of Wands," Helen announced, "is the card of passion."

"You're making that up," Seuroq had retorted.

What provoked him to think of this? he wondered now in the library. If he had ever had the temperament for rage he might have now raged that everything, even the most absurd thing like the sound of chains in the wind, reminded him of Helen. I am haunted by associations that aren't even my own, Seuroq thought with desolate bitterness.

The extraordinary thing was not that this entire recollection, in which the chains clanked in the wind and Seuroq and Helen made love in the old hotel on the rue d'X and the earring fell behind the bed and the bed was pulled away from the corner and she found the card tucked between where the walls separated, had taken a single second but rather that, shooting through his heart like a pang, it had taken a second. Because at the moment of the sound of the chains against the wall, Seuroq had looked up at the only particularly modern piece of technology in his library, a digital clock, which had said 5:55:55; and now, a second later, his reverie A R C D'X • 206

disrupted by the departure of his assistant Luc through the courtyard gate, it said 5:55:54. When he was a child he remembered waking sometimes in the middle of the night, on the eve of a holi-day perhaps, to look at a clock and find the night had acquired time rather than spent it; even as a child he reasonably attributed this to his own greedy anticipation of the day. And in his grief over Helen he might have thought it was another trick on his perceptions, except it was hard to mistake an alignment like 5:55:55, and he was quite sure that a second later it said 5:55:54. Now the clock was ticking normally but there was no doubt in his mind that a second had been lost or, looked at another way, gained.

Being a scientist, Seuroq's first assumption was not of the extraordinary but the ordinary; it was not that he had made some earthshaking discovery, but that he had a broken clock. He woke the next morning not to any new enthusiasm for scientific adventure but to the same depression he had felt every morning for the last eight months, the kind that didn't want him to get out of bed, that didn't even want him to wake up. As had been the case every morning, it took all his will to get dressed, have his coffee and bread and jam, and then unplug the clock from the library wall and take it down to the electronics store off St-Germain-des-Pres.

On the boulevard along the way banners flapped halfheartedly in shop windows and from streetlights celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the First Republic in 1793—a muted hoopla, the French having always found the actual Revolution a happier contemplation than all that business with the rolling heads afterward.

This was at a time, moreover, when people's ideas about freedom were confused anyway, Moroccans and Slavs and gypsies overrun-ning the city, not to mention the beginning of the nervous exodus from Berlin. Even the banners themselves, as had been wryly pointed out in the newspapers and on TV, were in error. Year CC, they read, in reference to the revolutionary calendar adopted by the Republic and later discarded by Bonaparte; except that 1993

being the two-hundredth anniversary was therefore in fact the two-hundred-and-^rst year of the Republic, had the Republic lasted that long. Year CCI was what the banners should have read, before they were amended by either bad mathematics or a mis-placed sense of poetry. "The clock's broken," Seuroq told the shopkeeper at the electronics store.

STEVE E R I C K S O N • 207

"Yes? It loses time? Or it's fast," said the shopkeeper.

"It runs backward."

The shopkeeper, of course, found nothing wrong with the clock.

"A power surge," he suggested to Seuroq. "You live in a very old building, right?" But it didn't seem to Seuroq that a power surge would have unwound the clock by a second; and though his head told him there simply had to be something wrong with the clock, Seuroq's heart was beginning to hear the whisper of the last years of the second millennium. Since it was the heart speaking to him, he could not rule out the heart's agenda—that the psychic debris of Helen's death was gathering like autumn leaves in a storm, blowing together into a meaning; whether the universe cared, Seuroq needed such a meaning. Whether the universe cared, Seuroq needed to believe some purpose might be derived from Helen's death; and he knew this, he recognized the heart's agenda, and in the manner of the scientist tried to factor the heart into the equation. And so, as he returned to his university office for the first time in eight months, to pursue the theory brewing someplace between his heart and mind, he continued to insist on the possibility he was just being sentimental, deriving from Helen's death nothing more than a needy wild conjecture. "What if," he said to Luc, dismissing with the wave of a hand the assistant's apology for having left the night before without a goodbye, "time is relative not simply to the perspective of motion, not simply to what the eye sees from a passing train or a rocket hurtling at the speed of light, but to the heart as well, and the speed at which it travels?"

"What?" said Luc.

What was, Seuroq asked himself, the speed at which the heart travels, in the throes of love or grief or in the fall of its deepest trauma? Across the pages of his logs he calculated until the numbers available wouldn't calculate anymore, at which point he used new ones, remembering as he did the obscure discovery of a reclusive American mathematician in Cornwall forty years earlier who had found a missing number between nine and ten. Beginning with a given premise, he charted the heart's arc across the course of lifetime, from the moment it first took flight until the crash into pieces; and like the clanking of prisoners' chains on a courtyard wall, his head now flooded with a hundred memories of her, ending with her question to him asked in their darkest hour, when A R C D'X • 208

they had come close to separating, when they almost lost each other. "But what does life mean, if one isn't loved?" He had argued it might mean many things. But then he had reduced, in scientific fashion, the meaning of all of those things to a common denominator, and it was always love; and humbled by his wife's observa-tion, which she had made with no scientific principles whatsoever, which he had to prove to himself with theorems and calculations and equations even as she had known it in a moment's intuition, he succumbed to the intangible meaning of everything they had been together, and it saved them, until cancer took her and nothing could save them.

Now, scribbling his way through his laboratory at the university, he was flooded by so many memories of Helen he could barely keep up with them, scrambling to translate them into his equations while, over the course of the day and then the next and the next, administrators and other scientists watched him from the hallway through the little window of his door. There was the time he and Helen had driven up the coast and she had unbuttoned his fly while he was driving, and there was the lighthouse on the rocks above the waves as she touched him, and the time they house-sat for a couple in Normandy and for dinner she blackened the fish the way they had it in New Orleans that time they went to the jazz festival, and how in New Orleans at night they slept with the doors of their hotel room open because it was so humid, and the dress he bought her in London when they both knew he couldn't afford it, and how they argued over dinner that night in Vienna about whether she should get a job—she said yes and he said no—and the time a thief stole a bag of asparagus she had just bought in the market off the rue de l'Ancienne Comedie and she was furious when she went back to get some more and insisted none of the asparagus was as good as what she'd just bought, until the grocer took insult and Seuroq started laughing about it.

And the time her mother died, and then the first miscarriage, and then the other one, until they ran out of chances; and the way he came home from the hospital after the second one and walked the house with the baby's blankets in his arms, as he'd practiced doing all during Helen's pregnancy, because he was terrified he wouldn't know how to carry a baby, and how she had lost both the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 209

generation before her and the one behind her and remained un-defeated even as she seemed born to such losses, until she was lost to him eight months ago and it seemed to him he should have been the one to go before her because she was the one that life had equipped with the wisdom for loss. As he was barraged by one memory after another, he calculated all the more maniacally, until he had exhausted every possible trajectory of the human heart and then two hearts in tandem and then three, until he came to the heart of history.

Beyond three hearts in tandem was history, and when he reduced the meaning of history he was left not with the common denominator of love but rather that of freedom. And then his calculations split off in two directions, one into the next room off his laboratory, the occupants of which he scribbled out of their occupancy until they were standing in the hallway with the others, watching him through the window; and the other into the hallway itself, scientists and assistants and administrators backing away from him down the hall as though he were something oozing out of the ground. One calculation based itself on history's denial of the human heart and the other on history's secret pursuit of the heart's expression: if one heart's story was the pursuit and denial of love and if history was the pursuit and denial of freedom, what lay at the arcs' intersection except the missing moments consumed by memory, the second that was consumed by a memory and then given back to time, when the clock unwound itself from 5:55:55 to 5:55:54? If it was the lesson of the early days of the Twentieth Century that the truth could be dislocated from time, the lesson of the waning days of the second millennium was the dislocation from time of memory, by which the truth is surmised. A wind had blown and chains had rustled against the wall and Seuroq had a memory of a weekend in a hotel with Helen that had nothing to do with chains whatsoever. Perhaps, he thought at first, the association was born of some unconscious conviction that a ghost had brushed past the chains rather than the wind, but once he identified this conviction he had no sense of having held it: it was the sound of the chains, not their movement, that had triggered the memory, a sound that had nothing to do with a weekend in a hotel, and that was when Seuroq realized that a stranger's memory of the sound A R C D'X • 210

of chains had randomly coupled with his, as though memory were a restless thing freefloating in the twilight, like dying ions or dan-delion wings, or black notes falling from a sheet of music.

By the time Paris had settled its celebration of long-failed Republics and dead calendars, by the time the misnomered banners had fallen from the windows and the streetlights, Seuroq had found the missing day.

In the labs and the hallways, the scientists and assistants and administrators were giving him a wide berth. They watched his mad numbers as he moved from log to log and desk to desk and blackboard to blackboard. The university called in doctors and wardens in white coats and a couple of police to coax Seuroq out of his frenzy, even to return him peacefully to the numbing dead grief of his mournless mourning; but Seuroq didn't acknowledge them from the fever of his factoring anymore than he had acknowledged Luc in the courtyard. Finally they sent in Luc himself. From the laboratory doorway Luc inched forth as though to nab a butterfly in the cup of his hands. "Dr. Seuroq?" he whispered, and Seuroq answered nothing until, with Luc only feet away, the old scientist suddenly threw up one hand to signal he was on the verge of a conclusion. He dropped his pencil and raised his eyes to the window.

"What is it, doctor?" Luc said very quietly.

He was humoring the old man at first, but then Seuroq started telling him about the missing day, and the more he talked the more frightened Luc became, because either the old man was insane, which unsettled every flimsy foundation a young researcher like Luc had established for himself, or the old man was quite sane, in which case none of the foundations were going to matter much anyway. There it was, Seuroq insisted, pointing to the timeline at his fingertips, a missing day that lay between the 31st of December 1999, and the first of January 2000—twenty hours and seven minutes and thirty-four seconds to be precise, the accumulation, according to Seuroq's calculations, of all the moments over the millennium that grief and passion had consumed from memory and then dribbled back into the X of the arcs of history and the heart, past and present and future rushing toward a dense hole of time into which all of history would collapse. An amazing dark temporal star weighing 72,454 seconds that hovered between the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 211

millennia, on the other side of which everything the past millennium had ever meant might be utterly different, everything history had claimed might utterly shift, the reducibles of freedom succumbing to the reducibles of love, or perhaps vice versa.

Even now Seuroq believed he could sense the acceleration toward the vortex; and when night finally fell on this missing day between the 31st of December and the first of January, we might all be anywhere, or nowhere, or more precisely anywhen or no-when, since this was not a black hole of space but time. We might come out in a lurch onto the year 2493, Seuroq thought to himself, and then upbraided himself for such a banal conclusion, not having quite yet reached the further one, that beyond such a day time would measure itself not by the numbers of the clock but of the psyche, which was to say that history would measure itself not by years but by memory, where the heart is a country. Perhaps on the other side of the 32nd of December or January 0, however one might mark it, one would see that the millennium had already begun much earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, perhaps, or in 1945

when we gazed into the nuclear mirror, or more likely sometime in the middle of an anonymous night in an anonymous hotel room when someone exchanged freedom for love or love for freedom, or entered some irrevocably compromised bargain with a certain happiness that memory doomed to misery before it ever had the chance to remember itself, when the promises of history or the heart first showed the signs of their own betrayal. Perhaps now, in 1993, it was already the Third Millennium, or perhaps it was the ur-Millennium, and a thousand years didn't have anything to do with anything, it was just a presumption, like a republic or a reich.

"Dr. Seuroq," said Luc, "can we go home now?"

"Yes," Seuroq answered, "I'm finished here," and when Luc reached out to touch the old man there was an abruptness about it that gave way to hesitance, which triggered in Seuroq the last memory he would have of Helen tonight. "You're making that up,"

he had answered her in the hotel room when she said the Queen of Wands was the card of passion, and he had reached to take the card from her and look at it; but between their fingers, his and hers, the card crumbled, disintegrating with age, as though it were as old as the hotel. That night she woke him and said she wanted to go home, so they checked out of the hotel at one in the morning, A R C D'X • 212

to the extreme displeasure of the concierge. In the back of the taxi Helen explained to Seuroq that she had been dreaming over and over in her sleep of the card crumbling in their fingers, and it somehow seemed important that they go back home before everything else crumbled. "Everything else?" he had asked. "Like the hotel," she answered, and laughed as she did when she chained herself to the shackles of the courtyard wall. But it wasn't really the hotel she meant.

In the fall of 1998 an American writer living in the same hotel room first read the news on page seventeen of the International Herald Tribune, below the reviews of the latest shows in Paris and London. It would have been more appropriate with the obits, the writer thought to himself later, but at the time he didn't understand the ramifications anymore than anyone else. It wasn't until three months later when a magazine ran day x across its cover—

or jour d'x on the European editions, out of deference to the French scientist who discovered it—that the panic set in and Erickson took the Bullet to Berlin, where they called it X-Tag.

It seemed to the writer that every crucial moment of the Twentieth Century had sooner or later expressed itself in Berlin and therefore it was natural he should go there. But past Han-nover the train just got emptier, and by the time it reached Zoo Station at dawn the writer rose from his sleeper to find himself disembarking alone. He took a room on the third floor of an empty hotel in Savignyplatz. The neighbors led lives even more transitory than his: streetwalkers and barflies and whatever tourists were weird enough to stray into Berlin, the kind of adventurous eccentrics who used to pass up Paris or Maui for Amazon villages or Alaskan outposts. A block from the hotel, passing beneath the tracks of the S-Bahn, he looked up one night to the scream of a runaway train hurtling west. The sound and speed were terrifying, the white boxes of the train's windows empty of life, and in the cold blue shine of the moon the tracks of the S-Bahn glistened across the sky like time's vapor trail. The writer braced himself for STEVE E R I C K S O N • 213

the crash in the distance, the cry of the train flying off the track into space, plunging into a building or park or the waters of Lake Wannsee. That was the night of the first phone call.

As time passed, his memory of this became less exact. As the present slipped into the final year of the millennium, memory became more and more disengaged from the past, like a door that floated from room to room in a house, taking up residence one day in the kitchen and the next day in the basement. The phone in his room had never rung before. The American couldn't have said for sure the phone even worked. Since there was hardly anyone left in Berlin and he didn't know anyone anyway, he assumed it was the hotel manager; maybe there was a problem with the bill. Erickson answered and there was silence for a moment and then a young woman's voice spoke to him in German. "I'm sorry, I don't speak German," the writer said, and there was another pause and the woman said, in English, "I want to take you in my mouth."

For a split, ludicrous second, he thought it was his ex-wife. He hadn't talked to her in several years—only once since the Cataclysm, and then just long enough to assure himself she was all right, blessed as she always was by dumb luck. His ex-wife lived her life in fear of one disaster or another, ranging from the apocalyptic to the mundane, when more than anyone he knew she was always unscathed by events; in a meteor shower she'd be the one who just happened to be off the planet at the time. Now, for a split ludicrous second, he thought she'd tracked him down, though in the next moment he knew that was impossible. With the phone in his hand he instinctively turned to the window, as though someone were watching. He tried to remember what was across the street—another hotel, where someone might be staring at him from a darkened room. "What?" he finally answered foolishly, and she said it again.

"Are you alone?" she asked, after a pause. Hesitantly he answered that he was. "Take off your clothes," she said; and at that moment he was either going to hang up or do what she said. He told her he had to close the blinds on the window. "Did you take off your clothes?" she said when he came back. They talked some more; she described herself. She had blond hair and nice breasts.

She didn't say how old she was, but when he thought about it, which was for only a second, he imagined she was much younger A R C D'X • 214

than he. She didn't say she was beautiful. It became implicitly understood, particularly within the boundaries of the fantasy they were sharing, that outright lying wasn't permitted. The thing he would remember later with dead certainty was that, immediately after it was over and he lay spent on the hotel bed, she asked if he was all right. Not whether the sex had been all right but whether he was all right, his intensity having betrayed itself to her. Yes, he answered, and there was a click.

After that he was shaken. He wanted a real woman, not a fantastic one. He even thought of going to the Reichstag, which he'd never done before, but that scene was too strange for him. He pulled on his clothes and opened the window, expecting somehow to see her revealed; below, a camel loped silently down the empty dark street toward the square. It was more than a month before she called back. She left a message with the hotel manager: Are you really never there, it said, where do you go when there's nothing to do at home? In his mind he imagined her with only a dollop of romanticism—more attractive than plain but not especially pretty, perhaps a bit plump. He wouldn't allow himself to sit in the hotel room waiting for her calls; and yet in Berlin all there was left to do was wait. From his window he watched the dark street for another camel, as though it had been a sign. But when her third call came, the block was empty of beasts, not even the growl of the lion he believed slept in one of the nearby cellars, though he'd never seen it. She fucked him on the phone again and told him when she'd call back, and so already their rendezvous transgressed the spontaneous.

Animals prowled the city. The previous summer, under the cover of darkness, members of the Pale Flame opened the cages in the garden across from Zoo Station; now people were mauled by tigers. In the mouth of the Charlottenburg U-Bahn station the American found what was left of a kangaroo ripped apart by a panther.

For months after the cages were opened, the city was the most alive it had been since the fall of the Wall nine years earlier, the orange and yellow and green noise of exotic birds flashing across a sky still smoky from the Night of the Immolation, when the Pale Flame had captured and set on fire seventeen Asian women in the pattern of a swastika. Sometimes the American could still see or hear the few birds left in the gables of the buildings. Beneath the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 215

Brandenburg Gate he was once so startled by a clap of thunder above him he might have thought it was another runaway S-Bahn, if there was an S-Bahn that ran anywhere nearby; but the sound wasn't a train, it was the pandemonium of escaped birds amid the stone rafters, crashing wildly from one archway to the other. The color and music of birds survived neither Berlin nor winter. Slowly but surely one species of escaped animals wiped out the next, with no cops around to pick up the gutted carcasses.

Berliners said you knew which of the '93-'94 exodus were the cops because they were the ones at the head of the throng. Five years later the few police still left were guarding the German government holed up in the old KaDeWe department store, after the ministers of state had returned to the new capital only to find the Beichstag occupied by warring factions of the Neuwall Brigade on the one hand and the Pale Flame on the other. For weeks bureaucrats wandered homelessly the deserted boulevards off the Wittenbergplatz before winding up on the ransacked KaDeWe's sixth floor. Once the most astonishing gourmet food emporium in the Western World, the sixth floor had been picked over thoroughly in the riots of '95, leaving the government not even a roll to nibble or a bottle of wine to suck on while conducting the affairs of the newest reich, which held the dubious distinction of being an even bigger botch than the third one.

Now in Berlin, in the last spring of the second millennium, on X-257 as it was marked on the punk calendar the American writer had bought in Kreuzberg, every nineteen-year-old with a computer was a reich unto himself. He created his own German state and programmed it to last not a thousand years but ten thousand. He invaded weak peoples, wiped out impure races, torched effete cul-tures, claimed natural living space, and added seventeen new definitions to the term Final Solution. All he needed was the right software and a sector of the city where the juice hadn't been shut off. If the horrific dimensions of his imagination didn't quite have the baroque flamboyance of sixty years before, he made up for it with rudimentary technological acumen, blunt brutishness and a certain obliviousness of irony, since the thrashmetal that served up his anthems would be as unsavory to the Fiihrer as it was passe to whatever decadents were alienated enough still to be here, most of them drifting naked in the sex arcade of the Beichstag basement A R C D'X • 216

in search of anyone with a vaccine tag around his or her neck.

Berlin, once again and for the last time in this century, lay at the crosscoordinates of history's indecision, the final decade of the final century characterized by dissolution in the East and a contriv-ance of unity in the West which barely lasted five minutes beyond the contriving, the gravity of authority versus the entropy of freedom, the human race's opposing impulses devouring each other, order consumed by anarchy and then reordering itself. In the anarchy of each individual's building his own reich, each reich imposed its own order, much like the last reich which supposed humanity could be recreated in its image. Humanity knew the attraction of it. It lied if it said it didn't. It recognized the attraction not in its sense of self-perfection but rather in its imperfections which it so despised and so yearned to transcend, that longing for the fire that burned it clean of its humiliations. In the nihilism that was left, in the void of the obliterated conscience, where every rampart had been reduced to rubble, it longed to take care of God once and for all, the smug motherfucker.

Erickson had been in Berlin two months and was eating dinner one night in a restaurant off the Ku'damm, when a couple of Berliners sitting at his table told him about the Tunneler.

A beautiful young American Marxist student went to East Berlin one weekend in 1977 and fell in love with an East German professor. She wound up defecting, marrying the professor, bearing his son, and becoming an East German citizen. Over the years the professor began to suspect, much to his horror, that his wife was informing on him for the Stasi, the East German secret police. He came to believe, moreover, that she'd been informing on him for some time, certainly since she had become a citizen of East Germany and perhaps before that; in fact, as he thought about it more and more, he eventually concluded that she'd been spying on him from the very beginning, that their initial meeting and love affair had been part of a Stasi plan all along. He was convinced that he'd been seduced in the name of the state and that the young American woman had never loved him at all and that even their little boy was part of the political scheme.

Perhaps this was true and perhaps it wasn't. But clandestinely, with the knowledge of only his closest and most trusted friends, the professor entered a plot to escape to the West by underground STEVE E R I C K S O IV • 217

tunnel near the barren Potsdamerplatz. One morning in the early spring of 1989 he rose from bed, washed and dressed himself, prepared his class papers and packed his briefcase, kissed his wife goodbye and held his ten-year-old son especially close to him, and left his house as he'd done hundreds of mornings over the years, never to be seen again.

A number of high-placed friends who knew of the professor's suspicions concerning his wife were convinced he'd been arrested, and filed a protest with the government. But the Stasi insisted he hadn't been arrested, and that insistence took on some credibility when the Stasi began conducting a thorough search of the city.

After some months passed, a new story began circulating. According to this story the professor himself had believed he was about to be arrested and left his wife and child that fateful morning to head straight for the house with the tunnel, where he conveyed his alarm to his co-conspirators. Convinced that the police were about to descend any moment, the professor's accomplices buried him with food and water in what had been completed of the tunnel. No one knew that only seven months later the rest of them would be sauntering across the border from east to west, through the Wall, with tens of thousands of other Germans.

To this day, according to Erickson's dinner companions, the professor still didn't know. To this day, the story went, he was still down in the tunnel. Not understanding the first thing about digging a tunnel, with no map and apparently not much sense of direction, the professor continued digging until finally, after weeks or months, he made a breakthrough, hacking his way with a pick into what he hoped was the targeted destination, the cellar of a house off Potsdamerstrasse west of the Wall. What he found instead was that he had returned to an earlier point of the tunnel. Slowly and gradually he had circled back on himself. His despair and panic must have been unutterable. For ten years the Tunneler honey-combed the no-man's-land of the ghost Wall; amid the new, unfinished Potsdam Plaza one could hear his echoes from underground in the plaza's empty corridors.

The strange thing was that afterward Erickson began hearing this absurd story everywhere, from anyone still left in the city.

Whenever he bumped into someone long enough to have more than a three-minute conversation, the tale of the Tunneler came A R C D'X • 218

up. He heard it not only in the drunken Teutonic slur of the bars but from other tourists and little old ladies in bookshops and stray bankers from Frankfurt on the U-Bahn, one of whom, standing on the train, pointed at a hole in the underground wall of Kochstrasse station and said to Erickson, out of the blue, "Tunneler." Excuse me? the American answered, not even sure the German was speaking to him, and the Frankfurt banker told him the story of how the Tunneler had dug his way into the U-Bahn and then, terrified he was still in the East, retreated, scurrying back into the blackness. And as Erickson looked at the hole in the wall of the darkened subway he remembered the last time he had come to Berlin, two years after the fall of the Wall, and how he took the U-Bahn from west to east and could still feel the passage from what had once been one side to what had once been the other; the ghosts of division still lurked in the underground. In the case of the Tunneler, however, he'd simply been underground too long, because the fact was that even if there had still been a Wall, Kochstrasse would have placed him not back in the East but in the West, about half a block beyond what was once Checkpoint Charlie.

It was in the rundown Ax Bax Bar near his hotel that the American writer first saw Georgie. He was a twenty-year-old skinhead and reputedly one of the leaders of the Pale Flame, but he didn't appear to be leader of anything; with a face that was almost pretty, his mouth delicate like a girl's, Georgie had a serene sweetness that knocked the edge off any hints of violence, sitting at the table laughing at jokes that didn't include him, told by strangers standing around talking to other strangers. Every time Georgie laughed at one of the jokes, someone looked at him in dismay and moved to another part of the bar. This didn't seem to perturb Georgie either.

Erickson saw him again a few days later at another bar in Kreuzberg, and then about a week after that at the Brandenburg Gate.

The American was walking along the desolate stretch where the old Wall used to be, between the gate and the deserted Potsdam Plaza project, looking at the beginning of the Neuwall. In the distance he could hear the escaped monkeys from the zoo that now lived in the trees of the Tiergarten; as he drew nearer to the gate an alligator shot out of the garden, trailing the water of one of the ponds and slithering across the ugly barren scar of the old border to disappear toward Alexanderplatz. The Neuwall was built in the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 219

dead of night; the Pale Flame usually came along afterward to kick down the results. Sometimes the two forces battled in the gate's shadow among the patches of moonlight. Begun in 1995 by a coa-lition of Stasi victims and Stasi informers, the Neuwall's mortar was made from the rubble of the old Wall as well as the reduced paste and pulp of old Stasi files, which numbered in the millions, and whatever pieces of the Potsdam project—a pillar, a post, a demolished corridor—could be spirited away for the effort. The members of the Neuwall Brigade long ago agreed, not formally but implicitly, never to identify among themselves who had been informers and who had been informed upon, an unspoken treaty that was a by-product of why they seized the files in the first place, when the revelations of 1992 were exposing fellow workers and friends and husbands and wives and children to each other. They began the Neuwall not to eliminate freedom but to resurrect the promise that freedom held only when it was denied; they continued the Neuwall as a tribute to the way the old Wall was the spine of the world's conscience, without which humanity was left to its own worst impulses in considering the final resolution between authority and freedom, order and anarchy.

More than this, however, the Brigade believed—for reasons similar to those that brought Erickson to Berlin—that the city's function as the urban metaphor of the Twentieth Century couldn't be fulfilled without a Wall. When the Wall fell and there stood behind it the naked figure of freedom, those in the East couldn't stand the voluptuousness of her body while those in the West couldn't stand the humanity of her face: there was the awful revelation that while at the outset of the millennium's last decade people had pursued and embraced the ideal of freedom, at decade's close they had come to despise its moral burden and absolve themselves of it. The Neuwall was bone white. It bore no graffiti. Earlier, upon its desecration by the Pale Flame and other gangs, someone among the vandals was just shrewd enough to realize they were only complet-ing the concept, that their graffiti had already been anticipated and was part of the blueprint; thus the Pale Flame simply tore the Neuwall down when they could find it, otherwise leaving it un-marked. The Neuwall's only message was written there by the Brigade itself: hitler was elected. Now the Pale Flame patrolled the city in vain looking for blurts of the Neuwall, which didn't A R C D'X • 220

follow the path of the old but rather an inebriated, slapstick zigzag through the city. The old denominations of East and West no longer mattered; now what mattered was the mortified memory of a wall. It rocketed wildly up this street and down that one. For all that the Berliners of the year 1999 knew, any one of them might go to sleep at night only to find himself barricaded in the next morning, a wave of old Wall rubble and Stasi files petrified in his doorway, through which the only recourse was to tunnel.

Among the vendors still left at the Brandenburg Gate after the Wall's fall, the American stopped to check out the Wall's sad remains, undistinguished except for the vendors' historical claims and, if one looked closely, some telltale bit of graffiti. Erickson always thought about buying a piece, just because someday soon it was all going to be gone. He had this idea that on Day X he'd sit in the hotel window clutching his bit of the Berlin Wall like a human time capsule, taking it with him to the other side. On this particular day that he saw Georgie at the gate, Erickson finally picked out a piece, at first glance the most nondescript chunk on the table because the flat outside part of the stone was blank, not a scribble of graffiti on it to note anything of the Wall at all; rather its markings were on the other side. Which didn't make any sense, since the other side was part of the Wall's craggy gray innards, where it wasn't possible for anyone to have written anything. Yet there it was, the fragment of rhetoric: pursuit of happiness, and Erickson bought the stone and put it in his coat pocket and turned around and was staring right into Georgie Valis' face.

He was smiling. The writer didn't know whether Georgie remembered seeing him in Kreuzberg or the Ax Bax; maybe he was just hanging around the Brandenburg looking for a tourist to mug.

Erickson would have thought it was pretty obvious he wasn't worth mugging. At any rate Georgie was smiling and he started to talk and spoke perfect English, with barely a trace of an accent, or rather he spoke perfect American, which wasn't necessarily surprising since the most interesting thing about Georgie wasn't his repellent political affiliations but what two total strangers had told Erickson on the previous occasions he'd seen Georgie, that on the morning in 1989 when the East German professor left his house ostensibly for work but in fact to begin his life as the Tunneler of STEVE ERICKSON • 221

legend, Georgie was the ten-year-old son he held so close to him that final time.

In his short acquaintance with Georgie, Erickson never asked whether this was true. It seemed at times too personal and at other times too ridiculous, and there was no telling whether Georgie would have given a straight answer or not. What Erickson did note was Georgie's profoundly ambivalent and furiously mystic obsession with the idea of America. More often than not this was a secret America that Erickson liked to think had little to do with the real one: Georgie was full of stories about great American geniuses Erickson had never heard of, cracked Midwest Nazi mes-siahs and white supremacists who Georgie assumed commanded the same rapt attention of everyone in the United States. Georgie's obsession with America often got the better of his politics. Ultimately he didn't discriminate between Thomas Paine and Crazy Horse, between sex goddesses and television stars and soul singers; Erickson was never sure Georgie recognized the contradic-tions. It didn't seem possible Georgie could have listened to that blues tape of his and somehow heard a white man singing. Yet Georgie's corrosive racial romanticism burned the black right off the singer until all that was left was the scarlet muscle of a beating heart.

They didn't talk about politics. The American listened as Georgie rattled on, blithely and earnestly; Erickson would reproach himself afterward for not having said something. He'd reproach himself for not realizing that good manners, even in someone else's country, had their limits. Only once during a Georgie monologue about nig-gers and fags and kikes and gooks—and it was a monologue rather than a rant; a rant might have provoked more of a response—did the writer suddenly blurt, "Maybe that's just a lot of horseshit."

Erickson wished it had been pure moral indignation on his part but it was more reflexive than that, born of some growing dread in the back of his brain that he was going to have to spend the rest of the millennium ashamed of the fact that he hadn't said anything while Georgie conducted his own personal holocaust. So Erickson said it.

Georgie stopped. He'd been staring straight ahead of him and now he stopped, and he didn't turn to the other man or meet his AR C D'X • 222

eyes. He stopped as though the distant abrupt backfire of a car had disrupted his train of thought, and then Georgie just got back on the train, he just started back up where he'd been interrupted, and after a while he got onto the subject of America again, the betrayal of its promise, a theme they could both agree on, except Georgie's version of the promise was rather different from the American's version of the promise, Georgie's version of the betrayal was different from Erickson's version of the betrayal, which finally brought them around to Georgie's real interest in the writer, the real reason he'd approached Erickson at the Brandenburg: the small chunk of Wall the writer had bought, with the remnant of its phrase on the back. Georgie had recognized it immediately.

He took the American to his flat in Kreuzberg. In the flat a dull light shone up from the floor. Out of a secret place in the floor against one wall Georgie hauled up a tape player and some tapes, skipping wildly from one musical selection to another, L.A. punk bands and Hollywood movie soundtracks and 1950s Julie London albums. High on the wall beyond anyone's easy reach was what Georgie called his American Tarot. The cards were tacked to the wall in six rows of thirteen. From the floor peering up into the shadows of the wall it was impossible for the writer to see the cards clearly, but they appeared very old, and the thing one noticed immediately was the missing card: a place had been left for it in the seventh spot of the third row, right in the middle.

Georgie's flat was empty because in the badlands of Berlin one kept little except what one wasn't afraid to lose, like his tapes, or what he couldn't bring himself to disown, like his American Tarot, or what couldn't be hauled away by scavengers. And in Georgie's flat was also something that definitely couldn't be hauled away by scavengers. It was a slab of the Wall, the old Wall, and it stood in the center of the huge flat towering over the emptiness, where it looked a lot bigger than it had out in the middle of the city ten years before. Erickson hadn't a clue how Georgie got the Wall up there. At its base sat a can of black spray paint, and across the Wall's surface, where the old graffiti had been sandblasted away, Georgie wrote his own, including phrases from the music that was blacker than his love for it would acknowledge.

Georgie and Erickson stood looking at his Wall and the writer thought about Georgie's apocryphal American mother, who had STEVE E R I C K S O N • 223

rejected her country so she might drive Georgie's apocryphal German father into the mother earth of the fatherland. That night, leaving the flat and heading for a bar, the two of them turned up a small sidestreet only to see, as though melting into the pavement, an afterthought of the Neuwall jutting insanely onto the landscape

"rom a neighboring alley. Before the American's eyes, Georgie transformed from innocence to ferocity. Struck motionless in his tracks, the young Berliner shook himself free of his stunned inertia to approach the Neuwall's small pitiful sputter, still fresh from someone's efforts only minutes before, where he kicked it, at first almost playfully. After a moment he wasn't playful. Soon he was wailing futilely at the Neuwall as though trying to kick the whole thing down himself, his face black with rage, while the writer watching him realized in a flash that at this moment Georgie's mother was up there with the Brigade in the Reichstag, in whatever wing the Pale Flame wasn't occupying, one of the former informers decimating Stasi files into paste.

The last time he was in the United States, driving aimlessly through Wyoming and the Dakotas for the purpose of being aimless, he heard the news of the Cataclysm the same way he heard all the news that year, on the car radio. He turned the car around at the edge of Iowa and headed back toward the Pacific, assuming the Pacific was still there but never getting far enough to be sure. Every few miles he stopped at a pay phone to try to call anyone in California he could get through to, until it was obvious this was a waste of time, and then somewhere in Utah Erickson came over the ridge of a mountain and saw ten miles ahead on the highway below him the cars backing up in the billowing sheen of the sunset. He met the traffic jam in the middle and they all sat there the rest of the night, no one going anywhere, the cars in front not going and the cars in back waiting for the cars in front to go, until the highway patrol finally came along announcing there was nothing for anyone to do but turn around. At dawn, when he got back up to that mountain ridge, Erickson pulled over and stared A R C D'X • 224

westward as though he might see columns of smoke rising in the direction of home, vast and steaming. But there was nothing to see.

Not long before, he'd lived in Los Angeles. For Erickson it had gotten to the point where there was no telling whether L.A. chose him or he chose it; he'd never loved it and had come to distrust people who said they did as much as he distrusted those who claimed they hated it, dismissing the perceptions of both lovers and haters as facile and shallow. He'd been born in Los Angeles, left it at one point in the mid-Seventies to spend some time in Paris and New York, and then returned precisely for L.A.'s profound lack of presence, the way it assimilated the Twentieth Century's dislocation of memory from time into its own identity. He flattered himself as being liberated by the city's abyss.

But by the late Eighties the abyss wasn't liberating anymore, with the end of his marriage and, after that, the most important love affair of his life, in which he invested every dream he still had left. In the midst of this he turned forty. A month later his father died. By 1991 the affair had collapsed and by 1993, with the final failure of his career as a novelist, the ruins around him smoldered close enough to spring him loose in one direction or the other: west, off the edge of a cliff in the Palisades, or east, where the geography offered more potential for emptiness. He gave the west some thought. Being a coward, he went east.

He assumed it was only a matter of time. Over those last two or three years in Los Angeles he kept peering around for the doom that was hounding him. Standing at the corner of an intersection waiting to cross the street, he kept his eyes peeled with passing interest for the stray car that—its driver seized by sudden cardiac arrest—would leap the curb and give Erickson one good bump into eternity. He felt for the throb in his body of this cancer or that virus. Never having been practiced at living in the present, nonetheless he'd been silently shocked by the prospect that his father might not have spent enough of his life being happy, and that the son was doing the same. He wasn't certain happiness was in his genes. When his love affair had ended, his heart had broken in time to the crumbling of history. He came to understand that while in youth it was quite true that time healed the heart, now the revelation of time's passage was that the point finally comes when the heart isn't going to heal again after all. There wasn't much to STEVE ERICKSON • 225

do but pursue the purely sensual moment. He might have been better at this if he'd only been without conscience.

With his lover he had glimpsed the possibility of a life that included all of him, the dark interwoven with the light, the bad with the good, the weak with the strong, until he was complete and of a piece. After it was over and he knew this completion wasn't going to be possible anymore, he accepted and came to terms with the way in which his literary life, his public life, his private life and his secret life lined up like four rooms, with guests, tourists or tempo-rary residents occasionally straying into one room or the other, none of them necessarily knowing there were other rooms with other guests. There was a door between the literary life and the public one, through which someone might slip back and forth, and a similar door between the private life and the secret, and a hidden passage that ran directly from the secret to the literary. But the only one who ever went in all the rooms was Erickson. The only one who even knew there were other rooms was Erickson. No one else was allowed access to all of him again; and when he did things with people in the secret life that remained unknown to those in the private, he understood this arrangement might just be a moral expediency, to justify to himself infidelities and spiritual disarray, even as he also persuaded himself—and sometimes actually believed—that it was the only arrangement keeping him sane.

The rooms became strewn with furious women. Once it would have meant everything to him if even one of them had loved him.

Now they all loved him, when he was either too old for it or too unworthy. A friend argued that there was something about him that almost naturally raised these women's expectations, something that persuaded them he was incapable of hurting them and was bound to submit, sooner or later, to their tenacity or patience.

But in the wake of everything he finally couldn't convince himself he'd acted in anything other than bad faith, whether he misled them himself or allowed them to mislead themselves, permitting hope to grow into expectation without yanking hope up by the roots, in one room after another repeating the same scene with only a variation of details, the slammed door of a woman's angry exit or his own dreadful walk out that door with the sound of her crying behind him. "Your love was a lie," one of them said on his phone machine, a woman he had loved passionately years before A R C D'X • 226

and about whom he'd even written his first novel. "I guess it's the surprise of my life," said another bitterly, on yet another phone message, "to find out you're just a bastard like all the rest." She'd been in some novel or other too, though he couldn't remember exactly which one, or what character she was.

"You're just a real fake," said the last, who had once called him

"mythic."

After the Cataclysm he headed on to Iowa and spent some time there with a friend, and then south to Austin and east to New Orleans and north to New York, as purposefully as aimlessness could be. With the crash the next year he sold the car and headed for Europe, settling first in Amsterdam and then Paris, which was no more or less practical than anyplace else until, a year and a half before his fiftieth birthday, he read about Day X on page seventeen of the International Herald Tribune. The writer figured they had to have known about it for a while. He had to figure the scientists didn't all just wake up one morning and look at their wrists and tap their watches wondering when, during the night, the small inner coil of infinity missed a beat. Even if he didn't accept the conspiracy theories—conspiracy, after all, to what end?—he figured there had to have been at least a lurking suspicion, quantum whispers of the slowing cosmic timepiece, out of which seeped into the millennium the lost seconds and then minutes and then hours.

On maps of outer space, after all, there are the vague shadows that hint at black holes for years before scientists confirm the discovery. In such a way they must have seen in the present the vague shadows of the future.

On the other hand the American writer never believed, as others argued, that the scientists knew something they weren't telling everyone. People said that more in hope than cynicism. Erickson didn't believe the scientists knew much of anything at all. He suspected they knew less than everyone, having finally bumped up squarely against the limits of their vision. Whatever would emerge on the other side of the temporal wormhole fell as much in the imaginational sovereignty of philosophers and fantasists, theolo-gians and crackpots, witches and pornographers and tunnelers: it would be the most purely democratic and totalitarian event ever, having rendered everyone equally subject to its mysteries and revelations. That, of course, was why Erickson had come to Berlin.

STEVE E R I C K S O N • 227

Because Berlin was the psychitecture of the Twentieth Century, and if he or anyone should emerge on the other side of Day X in the new millennium as anything more than a grease skid on the driveway of oblivion, they were bound to all come out on the Unter den Linden, the only boulevard haunted enough to hold all of it: dictators and democrats, authoritarians and anarchists, accoun-tants and artists, businessmen and bohemians, decadents and the devout each contradicting their lives with their hearts, SS troops with blood running from their fingers wearing the wreaths an American president laid around their necks and GDR soldiers, wrenched from the vantage point of their towers pulling huge blocks of the Wall behind them, led past the Unter den Linden's grand edifices of delirium and death through the Brandenburg into the Tiergarten by an Aframerican runner with a gold medal around his neck who sprinted all the way from Berlin 1936 into the Berlin games of the year 2000, followed at the rear by a mute army of six million men and women and children utterly white of life but for the black-blue of the numbers their bodies wore, and at the rear the Great Relativist himself doing his clown act, juggling a clock, a globe and a light bulb, tangled in a mobius strip and with a smile on his face that said he for sure knew about Day X anyway, a conspiracy of one.

Erickson received her last phone call the night of the summer solstice. It was around the same time she always called, except as the days had gotten later the night had not yet fallen outside his window, where instead there was the haze of twilight on a street that ran perpendicular to the sun, and therefore never saw either its rise or fall. "Hello," she greeted him.

"Hello," he answered.

"Do you want me?" she asked, and it seemed appropriate that she would betray her accent most on the word want.

"Not on the phone anymore."

There was silence. "It's so much safer," she said.

"No more on the phone."

He knew from what she said now that she'd been thinking about it too. "It was so random like this," she explained. "I called several numbers that first time. Sometimes I got a woman, sometimes I got a man who sounded . . . wrong, and I hung up. Then I called your number, and when they answered they said it was a hotel and they A R C D'X • 228

asked what room, and I just said a room number, and they put the call through and it was, by chance, you. I could have dialed any other number instead. A digit higher or lower, or when I got your hotel I could have hung up, as I almost did, or I could have given a different room number, or the number for a room that didn't exist, or they might have asked for the guest's name, and I wouldn't have been able to give them a name. And it seems quite perfect like this, so perfectly random, so perfectly by chance."

"I see."

"But you don't want to do it on the phone anymore."

"No."

"Tomorrow night I'll go to a hotel not far from yours and take a room. I'll take a room hidden away from the street that's very private. I'll call you from there and tell you the number. I'll let the hotel manager know I'm expecting a guest and for you to come straight up. I'll leave the door of the room unlocked. The room will be completely dark. The blinds will be completely closed, and the lights will all be off. I'll be there. Once inside the door you'll wait in the dark for me to come to you. I'll be naked. You can undress, or I'll help you. We won't speak at all or turn on the light. We won't say anything." She paused. "Do you have a tag?"

"Yes."

"I'll wear mine too." She said, "You'll fuck me then. We won't say anything. It will be like the phone, where we see nothing and have only our words, except we will say nothing and have only our bodies. When we're finished I'll find my clothes and dress and leave you in the dark. We'll never turn on the light."

"OK."

"It will be dark the whole time."

"The sun sets later now."

"I'll call later, after the sun sets." She hung up. Erickson put the phone back in the cradle. He was up for several hours, with that humming insistence his body couldn't contain, and when he woke the next morning after a bad night's sleep, on X-191, the day was slightly more than itself, a fraction of X-190 floating freely and haphazardly across the calendar. Erickson opened the window of his hotel room as he usually did and stood back from the light and peered around him. The room was blurred around the edges, and the light outside had an unfamiliar shimmer and he thought some STEVE E R I C K S O N • 229

half life of the night's dream was lingering in his eyes. But he kept looking around and the blur was still there, around the furniture and the doorway, and the shimmer was still there in the light and he knew time had escalated almost indiscernibly, that everything was now caught in the pull of X and just beginning the inexorable rush to the event horizon at millennium's end. At the bottom of the stairs, what was left of the hotel's pet cat lay at his feet, torn to shreds during the night. Erickson looked around for some other sign of the Berlin veldt that had invaded the lobby, a rhinoceros perhaps, a python, the beasts of the zoo having begun the final displacement of furry domestic companions. The manager was nowhere to be seen.

By the human logic of time one should always walk, Erickson told himself, from east to west in Berlin. From east to west one walked from Old Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate into glassy synth-Berlin, which had been built expressly for the purpose of rejecting the claims and biases, the suppositions and ghosts of history, the Berlin that in the glare of the nuclear mirror had created itself anew from the ground up and freed itself from history once and for all. But the last time anyone walked from east to west was ten years ago, when everyone on the one side fled to the other, when everyone abandoned the history of Berlin which, in the fashion of the Twentieth Century, had become one more commodity of ideology. In the 1990s the seduction of Berlin was that one always walked from west to east, against the sun and in the face of memory, and then took the U-Bahn back. Now in the new blur of the day the American took the same walk, west to east, maybe on the theory that the city would lose its blur in the process. In Berlin all the small necessary things had broken down while the larger, more ludicrous enterprises carried on: the trains had stopped running at Zoo Station since the last arrival of refugees from the Russian-Slav civil wars, but in the windows of the top floor of the KaDeWe the lights of the government still burned at night, and in the distance to the south of the city construction continued for the 2000 Olym-pics, an obsession since the beginning of the Nineties that Berlin refused to relinquish regardless of whatever New Year's party eternity had planned.

So on this day Erickson walked from west to east, and with the fall of dusk went to take the U-Bahn back. He ducked into the A R C D'X • 230

Kochstrasse station and descended underground; he was waiting on the platform for the train when he noticed a familiar figure at the other end.

Georgie was slumped on the bench staring straight ahead. Ten-year-old newspapers blew past his feet, and he was so still he might have been dead. Across the tunnel from where Georgie stared, Erickson saw the small hole in the U-Bahn wall that the Frankfurt banker had pointed out; it was as though Georgie were waiting for a father's face to appear in the hole at any moment. A little voice in Erickson's head said to leave him there, but he walked over. He didn't speak to Georgie but waited for him to look up. Georgie didn't turn to look until the American sat down next to him.

He turned to look at Erickson and there was no sweetness in Georgie's face at all. There was nothing in his face of childlike serenity; it was like the night after the two of them had left Georgie's flat when the sight of the Neuwall in the street had transformed the young Berliner's perverse earnest innocence to the malevolent fury that tried to kick the wall down. Except that at this moment, as he sat waiting for a face to appear in the hole of the U-Bahn tunnel, Georgie's transformation had already gone several degrees further. His face was dark like a swarm rising from the other side of a hill, the shadow of having stared too many nights into that hole in the side of the U-Bahn tunnel and having waited too long for a dreamed-of reconciliation that was only met minute after minute and hour after hour and night after night by nothing but the hole's void. Now the sockets of Georgie's eyes were so hollow that all Erickson could see in them was something so black it would frighten even the night, a feeling so lightless it would startle even hate. If Georgie recognized the American at all, he showed no sign. In his face there wasn't the slightest chance a father's face would appear, there wasn't the slightest sign of a Tunneler in the catacombs of memory, not a human sight or sound flickered even in the scurrying of someone's retreat into his own recesses.

Erickson got up. He got up right away. He turned and started walking the other direction, toward the exit of the U-Bahn, where he ascended back to the street and walked, for a change, east to west, which was what he should have done in the first place. For STEVE ERICKSON • 231

some reason he felt in his coat pocket for the small piece of the Wall he'd bought at the Brandenburg, uncertain whether it reassured or frightened him to realize he'd left it back at the hotel. For a while he thought it was his imagination, for a while he dismissed it as paranoia, but in the last dark block before Checkpoint Charlie he knew the footsteps he heard right behind him were real, and that they were Georgie Valis'. By the time he reached the end of the block the footsteps were all around him, and then he was surrounded in the street by six, then eight, then ten of them, members of the Pale Flame with their heads shaved and their shirts off and their chests bare and each of them with the same tattooed design, a creature with the body of a naked woman and the head of what appeared to Erickson to be a strange bird, rising from a sea of fire against a backdrop of lightning. On all their shoulders they wore tattooed wings. It was as though all of them had been summoned with the snap of fingers, a muttered command, and Erickson turned to Georgie in time to take the first blow, and the last that he would ever count or understand.

And memory broke free once and for all, floating above him like the balloon a child lets go. In that moment the writer was neither quick enough for escape nor afraid enough for panic. He shouted out only once and then succumbed to the only hope left him, that the storm of the assault would blow over him and move on.

Five minutes later Georgie said to the others, "All right."

They stopped with the kicking and beating. They shone in the twilight, six eight ten fiery birdwomen glistening in righteous satisfaction. One of them pushed the body over and they stood examining it. Georgie tapped the writer's face with his shoe to see if there was a reaction, and when there was nothing he started going through the dead man's pockets. He found a wallet and a hotel key, but not what he was looking for. "Shit!" he yelled in frustration, slapping the body alongside its head. For a while he sat slumped in the street pouting at the dead American while his troops stood by waiting. Georgie looked at the address on the hotel key. "Know where this is?" he said to one of the others.

"Savignyplatz."

"I'm going," Georgie said.

"Not real smart, man," one of them advised timidly, after a pause. "Someone will see you." He pointed at the body. "If the A R C D'X • 232

cops ask questions they'll wind up at that hotel sooner or later and someone will be able to tell them he saw you."

"If the cops ask questions," repeated Georgie. "What fucking cops? I don't see any cops. Cops don't even pick up all the fucking dead animals," waving his hand at the landscape around him, though at that particular moment there weren't any dead animals to be seen.

"This isn't a dead animal."

"Tell that to him," Georgie said. "Tell that to the cops." He looked at the hotel key and got up off the ground.

"Want us to go with you?"

"No. I'll see you later." He headed back toward the U-Bahn in time to find that his shirt had already been lifted from the bench where he'd left it, and to take the same train the American had planned to catch. He rode the U-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse and changed to the S-Bahn heading in the direction of Wannsee; after several more stops he got off and changed cars because people on the train were looking at the halfbird halfwoman figure of the Pale Flame on his bare chest, before glancing away when he returned their gaze. He disembarked for good at the Savignyplatz station and wandered around the neighborhood looking for the American's hotel. It was dark when he found it.

He was trying to think what he was going to do about the hotel manager. But there was no hotel manager that he could see, only the remains of a dead cat on the stairs, and so Georgie went up the stairs to the room number that was on the key. He opened the door and went inside. While there was something thrilling about the invasion, like a child finding a secret world just beyond the back-yard fence, he wasn't much interested in exploring: he quickly perused the room, ignoring its other contents until he found what he was looking for, after not so much effort, in the second drawer of the table next to the bed.

It hadn't been disguised or hidden, it was just there in the drawer, the little shard of Wall with the impossible inscription on the wrong side. Georgie sat on the American's bed contemplating the stone for a while, and then finally returned his attention to the things he'd overlooked. In the same drawer where the stone had been was the American's passport and traveler's checks, cash including German marks and Dutch guilders and French francs, a STEVE ERICKSON ' 233

vaccine tag on its chain with a key in the lock. Georgie unlocked the chain and put the tag around his neck. He stood in front of the hotel-room mirror looking at himself with the tag on. He took it off after a few minutes because the tag kept dangling across the face of the birdwoman and a tag wasn't all that cool anyway, an insinuation of stigma that was intolerable for a Pale Flame leader.

He went over the rest of the room. He took several of the American's cassettes, Frank Sinatra and a Billie Holiday album, after he threw away the picture of the singer. There was a reggae album Georgie discarded with disgust, and a tape of soul music that the American had apparently compiled personally, the names of the artists written on the label in what must have been the American's hand; the American had titled the cassette / Dreamed That Love Was a Crime, a line he took from a 1960s song in which a jury of eight men and four women find the singer guilty of love. He went through the books that were stacked on the hotel dresser, though Georgie never read books, Faulkner, James M. Cain, a 1909 hard-cover edition of Ozma of Oz, and several that Georgie didn't recognize until he realized from a picture inside that the author of the books was in fact the man he'd just left dead in the street an hour before. On the cover of one of the American writer's books was a picture of a city buried in sand, a black cat in the foreground beside a bridge, a huge white moon rising in the blue night sky. Georgie tore off the cover and threw the rest of the book away. He went back and forth between his new treasures, particularly the stone and the picture of the buried city, and had put the vaccine tag back around his neck and was studying it in the mirror again when the phone rang.

He answered it without hesitation. He said nothing, just listening to whatever was on the other end with the same curiosity he had had while looking through the writer's possessions. He listened as though the sound at the other end of the phone was another thing that had once belonged to the writer but was now his. At first there was silence, in the duration of which the voice on the other end of the line decided to take Georgie's own silence as a confirmation of something: "The Crystal Hotel," she finally said in English with a German accent, "room twenty-eight," and hung up.

Georgie nodded to the dead line as though this made perfect sense. He put back the phone and took from the closet one of the A R C D'X • 234

American's shirts, which he didn't wear but rather used to wrap the cassettes and the piece of the Wall, and then tied it to his belt.

He folded the picture of the buried city and put it in his pockets with the passport and traveler's checks and cash and the wallet he had taken off the writer's body. He left the tag around his neck.

On his way back to the S-Bahn suddenly there was the Crystal Hotel right in front of him. It hadn't even crossed his mind after the phone call to go to the hotel and it couldn't be said now that he made a reasoned decision about it; reason wasn't part of the process. Reason would have said to keep on going to the S-Bahn:

"Even I know that," Georgie said to himself, laughing out loud. But he had the writer's passport and money and music and piece of the Wall and picture of the buried city, and now the hotel of the writer's phone call had presented itself to him. He was sorry to find that, unlike the last hotel, the lobby wasn't empty but that instead there was a night manager, an extremely old man who worked behind the front desk. The old man appeared even sorrier to see in the doorway of his hotel a bald boy with red wings on his back and fire and lightning and a naked woman with an eagle's head and something dripping from its mouth on his chest. "Excuse me," Georgie said to the old man, "I have a friend in room twenty-eight."

"Yes," it took the manager some time to say it, "she said you would be along. Well," he added with great reluctance, "she said to send you right up."

"Thank you," Georgie said. Beyond the lobby was a bar that hadn't been occupied in years; the stairs were to the left. Georgie went up the stairs floor by floor. He went down each shadowy unlit corridor looking for room twenty-eight until he found it near the back of the hotel, where it occurred to him for the first time that he had no idea what he was doing. He knocked so halfheartedly he could barely hear the knock himself. He slowly turned the door knob and found it unlocked.

For several moments he stood in the open doorway staring into a pitch-black room. He searched the wall next to him for a light but the switch wasn't there. At first he thought the room was empty but then he knew it wasn't empty; he knew someone was close by and he felt the dark of the room challenging him, he felt the night STEVE E R I C K S O N • 235

challenging him as though there was one more thing for him to prove. He was inside the room with the door partly but not altogether closed behind him and was surprised how quickly she was suddenly there next to him; all he saw of her was, very dimly, the arm that shot out of the dark to push the door closed. Then he heard her breathing and smelled her hair. He waited for her to say something and wondered what he would answer. He waited for her to turn on the light. He felt her surprise when the tips of her fingers brushed his bare chest; they flinched as though singed by the flames of his tattooed belly. But then her fingers returned to him. He felt them fumble toward his neck to confirm the chain with its tag. She grabbed the chain and pulled him forward into the room until he stumbled against the bed. Though he now understood there wasn't going to be any light, he still waited for her to say something, and then he understood there wasn't going to be anything said. For a moment he was confused, wondering where she was in the dark, until he realized she was on the bed that he stood alongside. Lying at its edge, she unbuttoned his pants and freed him and put him in her mouth. He touched her long hair and her breasts in consternation.

Her breasts felt big to him but he couldn't be sure, since he'd never felt a woman's breasts. Even if he might have been able to construct a mental picture of the woman who lay before him, even if—like a blind man listening to descriptions of colors he's never seen—he wasn't utterly without reference points in the touch of a woman's breast, he would have rejected such a vision anyway.

Since he'd never had a woman before, the sanctuary of the dark was immense; he would have killed anyone who violated it. Later, upon leaving the hotel, when she nearly gave in to curiosity and turned on the light after all, she never knew that she had survived only by virtue of having left the light off. In the total darkness he quickly became hard; his erection was a response to the invisibility of the moment, the blur of the frantically waning millennium nowhere to be seen. Within seconds he was already shuddering toward an orgasm. Sensing this she released him from her mouth, and took him in her hand as she knelt on the bed away from him; with trepidation he ran his hands forward along the downward slope of her back to her hair. She put him inside her. Blood roared AR C D'X • 236

to his head like a drug. Savagely he pulled her to him. When he heard her gasp and whimper into the pillow where her face was buried, he was at first confounded and then appalled by the lurking presence of love.

The Woman in the Dark says, Everything is humming. The night hums, the city. Everything is seconds ahead of itself, I can feel the whirring of the room. Walking to the hotel tonight I heard the growl of animals in the cellars all along the street, they're disturbed by the hum. They perk up to the sound of time. The dark glows with their eyes. The solstice rushes to catch up with the light of the west. Rudi must be home by now. He's wondering where I am and looking over the loft. Maybe he's found the package from Prague, what will I tell him when he asks about it? What will I tell him when he asks where I was tonight? I don't care any longer. Maybe I won't go back. If I stay tonight in this room, will the American lover stay with me, and what then? It wasn't supposed to be a whole night together. I knew sooner or later he'd say, Not on the phone anymore. I knew sooner or later he'd insist on this. I admit I wanted to as well but I might have waited if I hadn't heard the power in his voice. I might have waited until the end of summer or the beginning of autumn. I might have waited until the eve of the New Year to go into the black hole of X-Tag on my hands and knees being fucked from behind rather than with Rudi, I'd rather feel my tits in the hands of a stranger I cannot see than be with Rudi's dead heart. It doesn't matter. Ry the New Year Rudi and I won't be together anyway. Rudi and I won't be together by the end of the week. The American lover hums with the night. I could taste on the end of his cock the drop that anticipated his satisfaction. On the New Year I'll pop him at midnight like a champagne bottle, his splash will precede us into the future.

Perhaps he won't be here on the New Year. Perhaps he won't be in Rerlin anymore. Perhaps the power in his voice on the phone was because he's leaving. But I don't believe he's leaving. I don't believe he has anywhere to go. I believe he's come to Berlin for the STEVE E R 1 C K S O N • 237

New Year, it's the only reason to come to Berlin, for what's to come. Otherwise you get out of Berlin. Otherwise you're me and still in Berlin calling one number after another listening for the voice of what you need. He was shy for a moment when he first arrived, I saw his form hesitate in the doorway. I was surprised that he'd already taken off his shirt, he must have started undressing in the hallway. He must have begun undressing on the stairs, loosening the first buttons in the street. When I cry out, I feel his excitement. He's a beast, of course. I might have known. From the wound in his voice on the phone. From the sound of his orgasm the first time I called, the groan at the end. I've come to learn that nothing can be defiled anymore. I part my legs and open myself at the junction of my soul. It's the ping of freedom in my mind, like the tap of a wine glass that rings through the house, when the first tiny white drop of him falls into the pool of me and ripples out-ward. When the heart is broken and the dream is gone, annihilation is delicious. I find in it my last place of peace on the journey into the whirl. The only bastion left me before the siege of what I remember, a flash of red across the black in the distance, a kind of deliverance or, even, a miracle.

"America," he heard her say, and exploded in confusion. As he slumped to the floor at the side of the bed, his mortification was grateful for the dark. He covered his face with his hands as though even in the dark a bystander might have seen the shame of his satisfaction. Five minutes went by and then ten.

Suddenly he heard her rise from the bed. There were only a few more moments in which he heard her rustling in the room, and then the door of the room opened and she paused to think about turning on the light to see him; and then he heard her footsteps hurry down the stairs. Where had she gone? How long would it be before she came back? He picked himself up from the floor and lay on the bed. His enervation, the way he felt as though he'd receded up into himself, was appalling. Everything had been fine until she said it. Even when he was in her mouth it had been fine.

A R C D'X • 238

He was convinced he could have stopped himself before he lost control. But he'd had his first orgasm and now the only thing he kept telling himself was that it was dark and there were no witnesses, that even she wasn't a witness. Was the old man downstairs behind the front desk a witness? Would she tell the old man that Georgie had lost control? She wouldn't tell the old man, Georgie reassured himself. But none of this calmed him much because unfortunately there had been a witness and the witness was Georgie. There was no lying to Georgie about it. There had been a witness and the witness was Georgie and he saw himself now in the dark standing over him: the eyes of the birdwoman burned with accusation. It was not the fucking, it was the collapse of control and the indulgent expense of his essence. The solitude of the orgasm, the loneliness of it, was disgusting. Everything had been fine until she said it.

What had it meant, that at the height of his power over her and in the depths of his humiliation of her, she had said it and he'd lost everything? She'd said it like a magic word and immediately it had broken his power over her. The more he thought about this the more he knew he had to wait for her to come back so he could strip her and take her by the neck and hold her in the deathgrip of love and fuck her again in triumph without capitulation. She'd be disabused of any meaning she thought his orgasm might have had.

He waited in the dark for several hours and only after he decided he could bear to see himself did he get up and find a light and turn it on. He did this because he was seized by curiosity about her and wanted to find out what he could by rifling through her belongings and because he suddenly had this alarming idea that maybe she robbed him of the American's cassettes and the piece of the Wall.

But in the light he found on the floor, halfway between the door and the bed, the shirt with the objects wrapped in it.

He also found, to his great bewilderment, the room empty. There were no belongings. There were no clothes in the closet or drawers, nothing in the bathroom. It didn't take even Georgie long to understand the woman might not be coming back at all.

America, she'd said; but she wasn't American. He could tell on the phone she was German. He pulled out of his pants' pocket the American's wallet and began going through it looking for a name, STEVE E R I C K S O N • 239

perhaps scribbled on a tiny scrap of paper, but there was no name, there was no tiny scrap of paper; Georgie yelped in fury and frustration. For another hour he sat on the bed and then pulled on his pants, tied the American's shirt to his belt, and went downstairs.

The old man wasn't behind the desk now. During the time Georgie had been upstairs the old man had gone off his shift and now no one was behind the desk, and the hotel door was locked with no key to be found. I'm locked in the fucking hotel! Georgie thought to himself in disbelief. He kicked his foot through the door and glass came raining down in such an explosion he even startled himself, covering his face with his arms; with his bare elbow he knocked out the rest of the glass and stepped through. Animals howled in the distance. Now there will be witnesses, was all he could think; even more miserably he supposed that since he'd broken the glass he couldn't very well return the next night to ask the old man about the woman who had been in number twenty-eight.

Everything's fucked up now, Georgie thought disconsolately, looking at his bleeding arms.

The S-Bahn was closed. Georgie walked from Savignyplatz to the Ku'damm, where he might have been in the mood to vandalize a few of the stores if he hadn't had other things on his mind, and if he hadn't already been bleeding from broken glass. It had been some time since he'd been to the Ku'damm and now he noted how many of the stores were no longer there. Two stray taxis rolling up and down the boulevard refused to stop for him; for half a block he ran along the second one pounding on the side, swearing the Pale Flame's eternal revenge. By morning the taxi driver, having thought over the threat, would be halfway to Munich.

To avoid the Wittenbergplatz where most of the city's remaining cops were, Georgie headed to Zoo Station and then northeast through the Tiergarten, constantly on the alert for police and tigers. It was pretty obvious he couldn't allow himself to get picked up by cops with all the American's things. He thought of disposing of the wallet but he'd still have the passport, which was too valuable to cast aside, and Georgie wanted to go through the wallet one more time anyway in case he'd missed something. He had to get rid of the wallet carefully because if anyone found anything that they could connect with the body at Checkpoint Charlie, they A R C D'X • 240

might trace the American back to his hotel in the Savignyplatz; in modern day Berlin the police never went to that sort of trouble but this was an American, and maybe that made it different. Georgie found himself giving the various details of this particular murder more attention than usual, and was still thinking about it when he came upon a segment of the Neuwall standing completely isolated in a clearing of the park, gleaming in the moonlight through the trees. It had the impact of a white tomb. Before tonight Georgie would have attacked it mercilessly; now he shrank from it.

It was dawn by the time he reached his flat.

He bandaged his arms and sat up all day looking at the American's things. He burned the driver's license and social security card, and was surprised to find no credit cards; didn't all Americans have credit cards? This afternoon he'd take the passport over to Curt on the other side of Kreuzberg and put him to work on it.

Erickson wasn't a bad name; Georgie could make use of it. It could have been worse, Rodriguez or Tyrone Something, but on the other hand Georgie wouldn't have wasted his time with a fucking Rodriguez or Tyrone. Would a Rodriguez or Tyrone have this piece of the Wall? Georgie couldn't get enough of looking at the stone. He unfolded the cover of the American's book, tearing away the title and the author's name and everything else until all that was left was the picture of the buried city and the black cat in the white sand that glistened in the light of the huge white moon like the lump of Neuwall Georgie had seen in the Tiergarten a few hours before. In his flat he went over to where he'd pinned the seventy-seven cards of his American Tarot and stuck the picture of the buried city in the place of the missing seventy-eighth. For a while he played the American's cassettes.

He was not right. I'm not right today, Georgie said to himself, why not? Was he beginning to blur around the edges like everything else? Was he several seconds ahead of his moment like everything else? He couldn't stop thinking about her. He waited impatiently for the dark as though down the hall from his flat, outside in the street somewhere, a phone would ring with the arrival of night and she would have for him another hotel and another room number. He kept his eyes peeled for witnesses; he lay in bed with his hands on his chest and became transfixed, for STEVE ERICKSON • 241

the first time, not with the head of the birdwoman who walked from the flames, not with what dripped from her mouth, but her breasts. Their violation in his mind reduced them to the ornaments of pathetic degradation they were, and he sprang from his bed and prowled the flat as the animals used to do in the Tiergarten's cages, waiting for their release. The pupil of the night's eye dilated around him. He stood and gazed at his tarot and at the picture of the buried city that replaced the card he'd always missed; he went to his slab of Wall in the center of the flat and now it too took on the appearance of a tomb, much as had the Neuwall in the woods.

Georgie seized the spray can that sat on the floor and wrote the return OF the queen of wands. Then he sat on the floor in front of his new graffiti and waited.

He'd never watched the graffiti actually disappear before. He had no idea whether it vanished in the blink of an eye or faded away slowly, over the course of hours or only minutes: "This is a good time to figure this out," Georgie advised himself. He sat waiting, staring out of the dim floodlights of the flat at his new black message until he'd fixed his attention on it so long and so fiercely he finally drifted. He slumped on the floor and slipped into a dark room where he saw the bare outline of a woman. He recognized the slope of her back and the fullness of her breasts, he recognized the caress of being inside her even as he couldn't make out her face. When he woke he'd spilled his semen for the second time of his life, within twenty-four hours of the first. On his Wall the graffiti was gone.

Georgie stood gazing down at himself. He would have exchanged in a moment the shame of his semen for the honor of his own blood gurgling from a wound. Once again he glanced around as though someone might have seen him; he was also extremely annoyed that he'd fallen asleep on his graffiti watch. Once again the graffiti had slipped away into the Wall somewhere, through the slit of historical memory to which this piece of the Wall was the livid vulva, like all the graffiti since the first day the Wall came here and SONIC men, anonymous god had disappeared. Georgie cleaned himself of his semen, scrubbing himself until he was raw, and then stumbled back to the bed; once again, even in exhaustion—he hadn't slept since before he'd murdered the American—he A R C D'X • 242

thrashed his way through the night. Once again he got up and put on another cassette. Once again he returned to his blank Wall to take the spray can and telegraph another message into the void: the pursuit of happiness he wrote.

And now in the ultimate subversion of himself it was his graffiti that revolted him. Because suddenly the words lost all banality and history; they throbbed before his eyes and hinted at something he could neither resist nor understand, the Wall seething and the words shuddering with danger as he recoiled from them. He wanted them to disappear immediately. If at this moment Georgie had had the means he would have emasculated himself with the swipe of a blade and sprayed the pursuit of happiness with the blood of his amputated sex, until the whole Wall was the red of death's honor rather than the white of pleasure's shame.

The Queen of Wands is the card of passion. Her throne rises from the rubble of the fallen wall, and the sands of the American plain blow over her from the east. In this way her passion rises from the American earth; she's a thing of the earth and the passion's a thing of her. At her feet is a large black cat. A round white sphere rises behind her against a dark blue sky. The rod in her hand intimates magic but the magic's really in the hand and not the rod. Her brooding beauty cages the very breath of every man who lays eyes on her and blasts loose the underpinnings on which he's confidently and foolishly built a feeble life. She is without true malice. At her moments of greatest fury the rod may take on the appearance of a knife; that she always fails to use it isn't a sign of weakness but of a goodness she can't overcome.

Rather her powers of destruction lie not in hate but chaos, just as the antithesis to God is chaos; and her chaos blows across those in her realm like the sands that bury her throne. She's fickle and will betray, without reason or warning, the one who loves her most.

She's hungry for whatever love any man can give her and because she doesn't trust either love or herself she'll abuse both, and rush to the next man who might give her a love the previous man could STEVE E R I C K S O N • 243

not, in her search for the love that somehow raises her above her own throne, for which she has contempt. She doesn't believe in what she deserves and she deserves more than she'll ever know.

Though Georgie imagines her as fair and golden the Queen of Wands is dark, her beauty understands that white is not the color of illumination but emptiness and that black is not the color of the void but eternity. Though the rings of her regeneration grow paler in time the core of her memory becomes the glowing ebony of a collapsed star: in the American Tarot she's not the Queen of Wands at all but the Queen of Slaves.

Georgie doesn't know this since he's never seen her. The card's great presence for him lies in its absence, because the absence of a single card renders all other cards invalid. Since a year ago when he first stole the deck off an old Parisian Jew in Zoo Station, the meaning of his queen has in her absence grown only more magnificent. Now in the dark in his flat, just below the surface of the floodlights, in every fitful dream he sees just a little more of the woman in the dark yet not enough so that he can tell her hair is black and not gold, her eyes are the green of the sea and not the blue of the sky. She inches just a little further into view. She hovers just a little closer into the present. The shape of her becomes just a little more distinct. But Georgie doesn't know that the Queen of Wands, or the Queen of Slaves, is not the creature tattooed on his chest for instance. He's only figured out that his queen is waiting for him in a buried city, like the one in the picture that has replaced her on his wall, and that the buried city is not Berlin but somewhere in America at the future's farthest point of exhaustion, which means he has a long way to go and not long to get there before the big day arrives, the distance growing farther with every day that time grows shorter.

Nevertheless the black hollow of the Beichstag yawns before Georgie tonight. At this point the nights are running together: was it last night he killed the American, or the night before? Georgie hasn't gone to the Beichstag in a long time, frequenting when he does only that part of it controlled by the Pale Flame; he's never gone into the Beichstag basement. The Beichstag basement is ver-boten by Pale Flame law. But the nights are running together now and there's no sleep for Georgie from thinking about what happened to him in the dark of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel.

A R C D'X • 244

Perhaps Georgie thinks that, by his forbidden presence in the basement of the Reichstag, he'll testify as to his control. Perhaps he believes that if he leaves the Reichstag basement with his erection still unspent and slick with the evidence of a woman the night will forgive him; in such an event he may even forgive himself. But mostly he can't get out of his head that she may be in the Reichstag basement and he goes there now not to prove she is but to reassure himself she is not, he goes there to prove to himself that the woman who selects her men by a number on the telephone and takes them in the privacy of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel has no need to wander the Reichstag basement available to whoever gets his hands on her first. The squat Reichstag sits in the center of Berlin just off the Tiergarten, apart from everything around it, as though abandoned by the city in the same way Berlin abandoned everything at its center a half century ago. On the Reichstag's far northern side is the jagged gape where a bomb ripped a hole in the spring of '96.

Georgie circles the Reichstag basement in apprehension that he's going to run into some of the Pale Flame. He's wearing the American's shirt. He hasn't really forgotten why he never comes to the Reichstag, which has nothing to do with Pale Flame law, but for the moment he tries not to think about it; the reason is there in the back of his mind, rejected by him. He finally enters the hollow.

Everything's dark. He brushes past people coming and going; through an entryway he sees in the dark the forms of others moving. At a small table with a light, a young woman with short black hair wants some money to let him go on into the arcade. There's no indication she's been authorized by anyone to collect a tariff, since there's no indication any authority exists here at all, but Georgie gives her some money. She hands him a blindfold and informs him he must put it on before he passes beyond the entryway behind her. Other people's clothes are strewn against the walls and before he undresses Georgie goes through them looking for money; he keeps glancing over his shoulder at the woman with the short black hair. But she isn't watching, she doesn't care what he steals. She's here to enforce nothing but the darkness of a blindfold.

In the darkness of his blindfold he reenters room twenty-eight STEVE E R I C K S O IS • 245

of the Crystal Hotel. Once more he's standing in the doorway of the American writer's rendezvous, the American writer's darkness. He wanders tentatively forward, his hands before him, waiting for her touch to meet his. He's surprised by the heat of the basement, it's the heat of something older than the summer solstice; the smell of ashes is thick around him. The lurking form of the reason he never comes to the Reichstag spies on him from around the corner of his mind, the American bitch. He feels someone grasp the tag around his neck and he feels to be sure it's a woman. Immediately he becomes erect. He pulls her to the ground which is hard and hot, and says in English, "What's your name."

When she doesn't respond he repeats the question in German.

"No names," she answers. She sounds drunk. She touches the bandages on his arms.

He takes her by the neck and shakes her. "What's your name?"

he demands.

She squirms beneath him. "Christina." He nods, relieved. He opens her and puts himself inside. The reason he never comes to the Reichstag continues to watch from around the corner, treacherous spying American Stasi bitch. Go away, he mutters; the woman beneath him cries out. Go back to your new wall, he seethes, petulant. He now knows the woman beneath him isn't from the Crystal Hotel even if her name is Christina. Her moans and whimpers don't sound at all like the female at the Crystal Hotel and her breasts are much smaller. She feels and sounds much smaller and reeks of beer and cognac. He's sure he sees a flash of light somewhere beyond the darkness of the blindfold, and in the flash he feels the basement freeze around him and it occurs to him he's been revealed. It occurs to him there are witnesses everywhere. It occurs to him he's a fool, that it's all been a trick and he's the only one wearing a blindfold, and as in a chijd's game everyone's standing around in a circle watching as he stumbles to his next humiliation. Believing this, he doesn't come but rather wilts to nothing; the woman beneath him sighs with audible relief.

Georgie rips the blindfold from his face and jumps to his feet: but no one's watching. It's dark, not pitchblack like room twenty-eight but dark nonetheless, a few barely distinguishable forms of people doing indistinguishable things.

A R C D'X • 246

He yanks the female up from the floor by the tag chain and drags her out of the basement. He grabs his clothes from where he left them but doesn't bother to look for hers, and pulls her naked out into the Berlin summer night.

They walk south past the Brandenburg Gate through the bank-rupt monument of the unfinished Potsdam Plaza. The moon is full.

Christina has long red hair and freckles all over that Georgie can see even in the moonlight, and her most exotic attraction besides her small budding breasts is that except for the hair on her head she's completely shaved, giving her the body of pubescence even as her face makes clear she's several years older than Georgie.

She's just sober enough to understand she's completely naked and that the light above her is the full moon and that the trees of the Tiergarten are in the distance. Georgie pulls the female along with the impatience of a child disgusted by the way some long-coveted toy hasn't measured up to the coveting, until they reach an S-Bahn station where they ascend to the platform and wait for a train. The few other stragglers waiting for the train see Georgie and his naked woman and desert the platform immediately. The night's final train arrives and Georgie and Christina get on. Most of the seats are empty, and when the few other passengers see the naked woman and the boy with the tattooed wings, they empty their seats as well. Georgie doesn't want to sit down. Christina's legs buckle as she crumples to the ground at his feet. He pulls her back up to her feet by the chain.

Everyone's a witness now, he tells himself. He grimly believes he's passed some point of no return, that the Pale Flame will cast him from their ranks or kill him when the word gets out about tonight in the Reichstag basement. In a small street-corner market that's open late, Georgie buys a beer while Christina stands stunned in the market's stark overhead light; she covers her face with her hands. The store owner, a Turk, stares at them, not sure which holds his greatest attention, the completely naked shaved woman or the boy buying the beer with the sign on his body of the Pale Flame, which savagely kill Turks as a matter of course. Tonight, however, Georgie says, "Thank you very much," when the owner returns his change. Georgie pulls Christina back out into the night and to his flat. Just inside the flat, slipped beneath the front door, is the result of Curt's efforts with the American's pass-STEVE E R I C K S O JV • 247

port. Georgie examines the passport as Christina collapses to the floor.

Georgie puts on a cassette. "This is a good one," he assures the semiconscious woman. He turns the music up, then down, then back up, and undoes the bandages that have been wrapped around his arms. He ties the bandages into several long strips and binds Christina's wrists and ankles, lashing her to his slab of the Wall in the center of the flat. In her stupor she groans. Around and around his Wall Georgie circles, stepping over or around Christina's prostrate body and taking swigs of beer and listening to the cassette.

Christina writhes in dazed confusion. Georgie takes the paint can and sprays across the Wall i dreamed that love was a crime and then returns to his orbit, wishing he had another beer when he finishes the one he bought. Then he goes over to the floodlights and turns them off.

The flat's dark now, nearly as dark as a room at the Crystal Hotel, darker for sure than the Reichstag. He stumbles to his Wall and touches it; he feels the wet black paint of the new graffiti. He finds her in the dark. He strips off the rest of his clothes and lowers himself to take her, but he's wrapped her ankles too tight and there's no separating her. He turns her around but no matter how he tries he can't get inside her. He thinks perhaps he'll put himself in her mouth but he can't even get her mouth open; he keeps turning her this way and that. He keeps telling himself she's someone else. He tells himself it's another's breasts and that the sound that comes from her is another's sound. But she's already been too exposed to the light of trains, to the light of late-night markets, to the light of the moon, for him to trick himself into believing he's never seen her. All his wrath cannot inflate his loins with enough semen and blood to make him erect; his impotence is bigger than the dark. He wails at his situation, rises from the floor and hurls himself in the dark at his Wall so that the wet black paint of his manifesto will leave its imprint on him and tar his wings. But when he hits the Wall there's no wet black paint anymore: Day X has already sucked his message to the other side through the Wall's portal, and the Wall is already blank.

He turns the light back on. For a while he sits against the blank Wall. The Female doesn't move in her bondage except to shiver; in the still of the flat, in the hushed haze of the floodlights, Georgie A R C D'X • 248

looks over in the light and sees her eyes are open. A single tear runs down her face. "Don't cry," he says and, aiming carefully, reaches over to crush her tear beneath his thumb as he would an insect, or the flame of a candle. The black paint of his graffiti is long gone from the Wall but the paint on his thumb leaves a vague print on her cheek. Outside, the solace of Berlin meets the new upward tick of the hour, the hum of everything indiscernibly escalates to a new pitch, and for a few minutes, perhaps even closer to an hour, Georgie actually dozes in the light without dreams. When he gets up Christina still hasn't moved, hopelessly bound as she remains to the Wall. Georgie shuts the door of the flat carefully behind him so as not to wake her.

In the Kochstrasse U-Bahn it's probably half an hour before dawn. The trains will begin running soon. No one closes the stations in the offhours anymore and homeless people sleep on the station platform, those desperate enough not to care who robs or knifes them in their sleep. In this final hour of the night Georgie isn't here for robbing or knifing. He stands on the platform just feet from where the American writer made the mistake of sitting next to him; but Georgie isn't thinking of that either. He's forgotten everything about the American except what he's taken from him.

Georgie lowers himself from the platform and carefully steps over the rails of the track. He crosses to the other side of the tunnel. A gypsy lying on the platform wakes just long enough to look over and mutter a warning before falling back to sleep; on the other side of the tunnel Georgie pulls himself up alongside the wall.

Several times he has to jump up to get a grip on the opening of the hole; he tries to hold himself up long enough to peer inside. Beyond the breach of the hole is a relentless darkness, the kind of darkness he's been looking for since the Crystal Hotel, only to find it now when he doesn't want it. Now he'd settle for light. Now he'd settle for a window or a bulb or a moon; with a spare hand he'd flick a switch if he could, or light a match. All he can do is look into the dark as hard as he can.

Into the hole he calls, "Papa?"

There's only one response to his question as he drops from the hole. He hears it come first from the tunnel of the U-Bahn and with some concern he believes, at first, that the sound is the first train of the day. He thinks maybe he should get off the track. Georgie STEVE E R I C K S O N • 249

doesn't know, no one really knows, about the new pitch to which Berlin has escalated; one or two of the gypsies on the station platform also wake to the rumble. At that point Georgie decides the rumble isn't a train. He steps over the rail and stands in the middle of the track staring down into the black tunnel of the U-Bahn. The din slowly breaks the surface of the city's hush. And then, so quickly it startles Georgie, a hyena darts out of the blackness of the tunnel and across the platform, creating a small furor among the waking sleepers who have begun to gather themselves up in apprehension. The animal lurches up the stairs of the U-Bahn to the street level. People on the platform are looking around them, expecting something to happen.

Georgie raises his eyes. Now the sound has risen above him. He looks down into the tunnel once more, following the string of small white lights that line the hills and curves and valleys of the track for as far as he can see; he crosses back to the platform. He hoists himself back up onto the platform and heads back up the stairs to the station entrance. At the top of the stairs he freezes. In front of him an albino peacock spreads its white fan and furiously shudders. Beyond that an emaciated antelope bolts. At the station entrance the rumble is louder; on the street the new pitch is almost audible. On the street Georgie turns to see, thundering toward him from the other end of the block, the last escapees of the Tiergarten's autumnal cages, purring panthers which hunger has left no longer fleet, spindly ostriches and hobbling kangaroos and barely lumbering bears, the surviving cats and wolves and reptiles shaken loose from the cellars of Berlin by the growing roar of the rush toward the black twenty hours that wait beyond the millennium's final chime. Georgie leaps up onto a U-Bahn signpost, where he clings for safety as the animals stampede past him in the silvery blue of the unlit dawn, their ragged sprint westward as though from a pursuing inferno in the jungle.

A R C D'X • 250

Curt did a g o o d j o b, Georgie thinks to himself on the airplane. Once Georgie has finally begun to relax from the takeoff, he studies the passport carefully. Curt has put Georgie's picture in place of the American's and changed the birth date from 1950 to 1980; the name's been left alone. Georgie leans forward in his seat to put the passport back in the bag under his feet, but it means unlatching the seat belt; Georgie hasn't unlatched the seat belt since he got on the plane. This is the first time he's ever been on an airplane. On takeoff he clutched the armrests so hard that for several minutes he didn't notice how the old woman in the next seat, taking pity on him, was holding his hand. If he hadn't been so terrified he probably would have yanked his hand away from her, but he let her go on holding it; they were well in the air before he let go. She's an old woman, Georgie tells himself; with some concern he suspects she's Jewish. But she makes jokes about the flight and puts Georgie at ease, and soon he's doing things for her, walking up and down the aisle of the plane getting magazines for her and a pillow, and the stewardesses are charmed by the friendship between the older woman and the disconcertingly sweet young man with the shaved head. In New York City, as they're going through customs at the airport, the woman tells him he's in the wrong line: "The one for U.S. citizens is over here," she says, pointing at the blue American passport Georgie holds in his hand.

When they say goodbye she offers him money, which he politely but firmly refuses. Two hours later at Fifty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, a black girl offers to sell herself to him; he accepts and follows her long enough to push her into a trashcan and rob her.

Is something wrong with America? he wonders. He sees more human flotsam in New York than he ever saw in Berlin, even in the early Nineties, coloreds everywhere and obvious queers, and a fuckload of Jews. He regards them all with more curiosity than hostility, like someone who's wandered into the freak tent of a circus. When his bed in the flophouse on Eighth Avenue winds up STEVE E R I C K S O N • 251

in the same room with an Ethiopian, Georgie protests, arguing with the manager in the hallway while the Ethiopian watches; but there aren't any other available beds and Georgie doesn't have the money to sleep anywhere else. The Ethiopian understands what's happening well enough to keep his eye on Georgie with stony wari-ness the rest of the night. Tomorrow, Georgie tells himself, I'll get out of New York and make my way west to the real America.

But the next morning he's violently sick. For several days he can barely move from the bed except to crawl to the toilet, not sure whether to straddle it or wrap his arms around it as his stomach erupts upward and his bowels explode downward. In his fever he feels infested with the American bacteria, struck low among Afri-cans and fags, a prisoner without pity in New York. Almost four days have passed before, in the swelter of the night and the light of the streetlamp that shines through the window, he's well enough to climb from bed out onto the flophouse fire escape, where he can unfold his picture of the buried city to remind himself where he's going and why. He counts his money, including what he took off the black girl that first afternoon. The next day he slinks out of the flophouse and catches a cab to Penn Station, where he buys a bus ticket for as far west as he can go.

X-148. She's waiting for him and he doesn't have much time.

He takes the bus to Philadelphia and then Memphis, and from there to St. Louis. He likes the bus better than the plane. Watching out the window his heart leaps at the sight of the red, white and blue crucifixes that line the highway and the billboards of a ferocious Jesus with piercing blue eyes who holds an American eagle in his arms. On the horizon in the distance he spots the old drive-in movie screens from the Fifties that have been painted black as monolithic signposts of the converted plague camps. He dozes and her outline becomes more distinct before him. A light from an unknown source reveals her inch by inch. Sometimes he thinks about Berlin; he wonders if anyone has found Christina yet, tied to the Wall in his flat. In the dead of night, as the bus rolls on and everyone sleeps, Georgie slips from his seat and lifts a watch off another passenger two rows back. He winds the watch and puts it in his pocket; at the next stop he'll get the exact time.

In St. Louis it's X-134. The blur of edges gleams shinier and faster, the light of the days grows more metallic. Time is a mineral.

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X-132 and it's Kansas City. X-129 and Georgie sets out on foot, few cars stopping to give him a lift. X-124 he sits in the back bedroom of Lauren's house on the Kansan flatlands and shows the piece of Wall to Kara, who says, "It's a nice rock. But you have to admit, it's not as good as a bottle with eyes, or even wings on your back."

He walks out of the summer into the west. The spasms of the last solstice barely reach him anymore. His progress is reduced to ground level; he's tapped out of money and in these final days must rely on people's good will. He's struck and confused by the kindness of Indians he meets in New Mexico. Sometimes when people ask him he tells them his real name and sometimes he doesn't. In the middle of the desert far from civilization he finds written on the concrete bridges of highway overpasses graffiti hailing thrashmetal bands, and stops to listen for nomads in the desert playing boomboxes. By Arizona, people sit rocking on the front porches of their desert houses cradling clocks in their arms. The lines of ink that streak the front pages of newspapers become increasingly indecipherable until finally the news takes the form of a lost hiero-glyphic. Tumbleweeds skitter along the highway before him, the dust of the desert rushes past him, though no wind blows; the weeds and dust blow to a different force. Soon it occurs to him that none of the cars on the highway go his direction anymore. Every car passes him heading east; he hasn't seen a single car going west for as long as he can remember. By X-52 there aren't any cars going east either. He constantly checks the time of the watch he stole on the bus. He constantly asks convenience-store clerks if their clocks are right, and calls the time-of-day on the pay phones along the highway that still work, as he slips from time zone to time zone picking up one hour after another. With his sweetness that catches people off guard he gets a bite to eat here and there, but he isn't hungry much. He's long since discarded the American's passport, back around the Texas Panhandle. At night when he closes his eyes there's only blackness; the west has drained his sleep of dreams.

By X-37 it's begun to get cold. In Flagstaff Georgie tries to steal a coat from the front seat of a four-wheel drive and almost gets caught. He's pushing himself beyond hunger and cold and exhaustion, exhorted onward by the signs of his progress. He keeps checking the watch. He keeps checking calendars. He keeps track of the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 253

days and hours. By the time he reaches what was once the Mojave Desert he's passed the highway checkpoint beyond which no one's allowed without authorization. Except now it's X-18 and the checkpoint's deserted of soldiers or guards; no one's around to stop Georgie and turn him away. The desolation of the Cataclysm's landscape is bitter and overwhelming, rolling dead-white hills. He has some water and not much else; every time he feels hungry, every time he can't bear the cold, every time he wants to sleep, he looks at his picture of the buried city and thinks of room twenty-eight in the Crystal Hotel. He reads his picture of the buried city like a map, he examines the contours of the Cataclysm dunes and compares the moon in the picture with where the moon now hangs in the night sky. On the night of X-6 a small light glimmers in the distance, and when it shortly becomes two lights, he grows excited by how close they are. Then he realizes the lights are coming toward him, and it isn't long before a pickup truck pulls to a stop.

In the back of the truck Georgie can see shovels and pickaxes and rags. The driver's a big man with a beard and a cap pulled over his head and ears; a windbreaker is zipped to his neck. He looks at Georgie in disbelief. "Who the hell are you?" he says.

"Erickson," says Georgie.

"Well, good lord, Erickson, what the hell do you think you're doing out here?"

"I'm going to the buried city," Georgie explains.

The driver's stunned. "I don't know where you heard about that," he shakes his head, "that's totally hush-hush."

"Is it much farther?"

"I'll bet you ran into Fred in Flagstaff, that fuckhead. Get a little tequila and beer in him and Fred'll tell everyone the secret of the atomic fucking bomb if he knows it, which fortunately he doesn't.

Two weeks ago you couldn't have gotten within fifty miles of here.

But I guess the party's over now and everyone's gone home, which is where I'm going, or at least someplace that makes for a passable facsimile."

"It was in the cards," Georgie explains about the buried city.

"Hop in, pal. I'll take you back to Kingman. There's nothing back there," he nods in the direction he's just come from. "Like I said, everyone's gone home while there's still time. There's a waitress I know in Kingman. She works in one of the worst restaurants in the A R C D'X • 254

civilized world and we're going to get a room together, at a motel on the main drag of town."

"It's a very old city."

"Yeah, I know it's an old city, pal. You ever find out how old, drop us a postcard, will you? We just spent the last year and a half trying to figure out exactly how old."

"You'll have to give me your address so I know where to send it."

The driver considers Georgie solemnly. "I was making a joke,"

he finally says, slowly. "I don't really want you to send me a postcard." He leans over across the seat and opens the passenger door.

"Hop in."

"I have to go."

"Man, I'm telling you there's nothing back there. A few buildings that were probably houses once, and the rest of it so far buried beneath the rubble no one would have ever known it was there if that big dust-up a few years back hadn't opened up everything.

Take my word for it. I can't believe that asshole Fred. What a mouth."

"I have a friend there."

"Man, you do not have a friend there. There's no one there, I'm telling you." He motions to the open passenger door.

"No thank you."

"From this point on you're on your own. I'm the last soul you're going to see."

"OK."

The driver shakes his head again wearily. "Here." He reaches behind the passenger seat and pulls out a blanket and a plastic bottle of water. "The blanket's dirty, but. . ." He hands them to Georgie through the window.

"Thank you. Do you have the time?"

The driver looks at his watch. "About a quarter to seven."

Georgie is setting his own watch. "Do you have the exact time?"

The driver looks again. "I've got six-forty-eight." He reaches back across the seat and pulls the passenger door closed. "Take it easy," he says. He starts the truck and drives off, and Georgie doesn't wait to watch the tail lights disappear down the highway; he's continuing on, exhilarated. He puts the water in his pack and wraps the blanket around him.

STEVE E R I C K S O N • 255

He reaches the excavation site on the afternoon of X-4. The Cataclysm has cut a savage swathe through the earth, and on the edge of the divide Georgie can make out in the distance the gray befuddled sea. Georgie stares down into the rocky gash where the earth has wrenched loose of itself and, from one end of the Cataclysm's gorge to the other, he sees staring out of the black rock the dim ravaged faces of ancient white houses, ladders, and scaffolding drooling down the cliffs. Georgie begins his descent. The world is soundless. The crash of the sea is too far away and no wind blows through the canyon, and Georgie hasn't heard or seen a single stirring of life for days. After months of the flash and clatter of birds in the skies of Berlin this sky is empty and he becomes all the more aware of the crunch of rocks beneath his feet as he makes his way down into the site. By dusk he's at the bottom. For the first time in days he collapses into the blanket the truck driver gave him and sleeps the whole night, without a single dream's glint or whisper.

In the morning he wakes in panic. He looks at his watch and then looks again; for a moment the watch has stopped. He taps the face of the watch and the second hand starts back up: was the watch running just a moment ago when he first looked at it, having lost only a split second, or has it been stopped all this time, maybe all night? Perhaps he hit his wrist against one of the rocks on the cliffs. The watch says 8:21. Georgie tries to tell himself calmly that he wasn't climbing the rocks at 8:21 last night, he'd already reached the bottom by then and fallen asleep; in all likelihood it's now 8:21 in the morning. But in his disorientation Georgie has a lapse on the day: X-. .. 3? 2? What, Georgie thinks to himself, does X-3 mean anyway? Does it mean X is three days away, or two? Or four? Stooped deep in the earth's crevice, rocking on his feet, he miserably holds his head in his hands trying to straighten out everything in his mind. Finally he begins to walk down the gorge in the direction of the excavation. The scaffolding constructed alongside the cliffs has the abandoned air of something deserted quickly.

Above one makeshift rampart is a pair of ancient windows and in another clearing he finds the unearthed remains of something resembling a plaza or town square. In the black volcanic earth beneath the gray light of the sun is the outline of a white circle. At its center is the dark stump of some kind of pillar or obelisk.

A R C D'X • 256

Georgie spends the rest of the day searching through the unearthed city. By the next day his panic is of a different sort. It's a panic about food, to begin with; he cannot will away his hunger any longer, and despite all his attempts at conservation his water will last only another day at best. He's also having more difficulty keeping track of the time. He keeps looking at his watch. When he stares up through the mouth of the gorge, which gets smaller and smaller the further he goes, he sees passing overhead in the sky high above him tumbleweeds and wheels and machine gear and office equipment and supermarket sundries and newspapers and pages from diaries, a panoply of general uselessness spinning wildly westward on a current no wind has ever blown: time is almost up. Most profoundly, Georgie's beginning to have grave doubts that the Queen of Wands is here. Georgie's beginning to suspect that the driver of the pickup truck on the highway was right, that no one is here. Growing weaker and more delirious he rushes through the buried city from one room to another looking for her. Trying to sleep on the hillside in one of the ancient houses, when the unleashed night of the desert couples with the unearthed night of the timeless city, he bolts upright again and again to his expectation of ghosts, any of whom might be the one he's come so far to find. He shivers in the dark. He awaits her touch, for her deliverance into his hands. He would be erect with desire, he assures himself, if he had the strength for it, if delirium were enough to fuel desire, as it nearly is.

X-l.

Deeper into the city he wanders. The mouth of the gorge above him has finally disappeared altogether. Like his legendary father tunneling subterranean Berlin Georgie's becoming lost, beginning to circle back on his own steps through one after another of the Cataclysm's revealed rooms. He doesn't have the strength to climb another scaffold. He doesn't have the strength to call her name.

Piece by piece he's stripped himself down, casting aside the shirt and vaccine chain and the contents of his pockets, the water and blanket and even the picture of the buried city, which, in retaliation for its betrayal, he rips to bits and flings above him as though to hurl it out of the canyon altogether. The bits of the picture only rain back down on him. Foolishly he brushes some of the confetti from his wings, comically he wears some on his bare head. He STEVE E R I C K S O N • 257

tears his watch from his wrist and holds it in front of his eyes desperately trying to focus on the hour. In his other hand he clutches the only thing he can't bear to discard, the piece of the Berlin Wall. He stumbles further into the gorge in his fevered daze, sometimes dozing against the canyon's side; in hallucinatory moments he misses Christina with the shaved freckled body writhing in the bondage of his bloody bandages on the floor of his flat. As he lies beneath the gorge's shelter the hours pass and then the rest of the day, until he hears the gray twilight sun sink far beyond the edge of the earth. Not long before midnight, when it's too dark for Georgie even to read the time on his watch, he hears the shadow of the millennium advance across the eastern horizon.

In the dark of the shadow he sees something.

It's so faint he looks again and again, by now distrusting his own eyes, but further into the gorge, suspended a few feet above the ground, is the outline of something. In his delirium the first and only thing he can think of is a coffin, set in the side of the canyon like a jewel. He crosses the crevasse. When he sees the climb he must make he nearly turns back, but slowly he begins, with his watch and his piece of Wall. In a rocky hollow of the canyon he sees it isn't a coffin; within several feet he sees it's another of the city's ancient doors. It doesn't seem possible he could have missed this door. It doesn't seem possible he could have missed anything.

He's been over everything again and again. But there's a door now and the only reason he could see it at all from the other side of the gorge was because coming from behind the door is, unmistakably, a light.

He's terrified. He backs away from the door: terror wars with desperation. He steps back to the door: as he tries to get a grip on it, desperation refutes terror. He holds the watch up to the sliver of light coming through the crack of the door and, behind and below him, the ghost city splayed across the Cataclysm's breach slides into oblivion.

At 11:59, the second hand of the watch hurtling toward twelve, he yanks open the door and steps through.

AR C D'X • 258

The old man stirs in his chair at Georgie's entrance but doesn't wake at first. The bareness of the room is blinding to Georgie; he holds his hands up to his eyes. In the glare he can barely make out the sink and toilet in the corner and the unmade bed against the wall. On the table in front of the lone old man sits a radio that's turned off and Georgie's piece of the Wall, though even as Georgie now looks at the evidence of his empty hands he can't remember putting it there. Beyond the old man on the other side of the room is another door. It's slightly open. Beyond the door is a dark hallway.

The stillness of the room is even more striking to Georgie than the lifelessness of the last several days, though now he isn't so sure about the last several days, whether they were several days ago or several years, or whether days or years still mean what they did moments before. The stillness means to deny the presence of the old man. A buzz in some other part of the building, beyond the door on the other side of the room and down its dark hallway, takes on the audible outline of a TV. The old man looks at the room around him much as Georgie has been looking at it, and he's been staring at the bed for some time and is still staring at it when he asks, so quietly Georgie can barely hear him, "Is there any wine?" He finally turns to Georgie only because Georgie hasn't answered.

The old man smiles. He raises his eyes to Georgie. With his heart in his throat, Georgie stares back into the old man's eyes and knows he's insane.

It isn't like the people on the U-Bahn when they used to stare at Georgie. The old man sees Georgie from the perspective of a finished life: the boy is already drained of the disproportionate meaning of the present. The wings on Georgie's shoulders, the woman with the head of a bird on Georgie's chest, have no impact on the old man at all. The dagger of time hanging by a thread over the old man's wild auric hair dreads its own fall while he anticipates it; his fearlessness fills Georgie with loathing. In the subsiding blaze of STEVE E R I C K S O N • 259

the room the old man's face appears like a vision in the hole of the U-Bahn tunnel at Kochstrasse; and now Georgie is repelled by this grotesque old man in ragged clothes, the torn pants on his long legs and the shoes with holes and the lining of his coat drooping from the hem, who's invaded Georgie's long dream. But the feeling gets much worse when Georgie says, "Who are you?" and the old man answers, his stare unbroken and his smile unchanged, "America," and laughs softly afterward as though he's made a joke.

Liar, is the word that catches in Georgie's throat. But he warns instead, "That's where I came from." The old man continues to smile at Georgie the way a stranger smiles lewdly at another man's woman even though the other man stands right next to her. Georgie can't even look at the old man. Fury laces hunger and exhaustion to the point of lightheadedness, and he's been sitting in his chair across from the old man rocked by this fury and hunger and exhaustion, staring at the bare wall beyond the bed for four or five minutes, before he realizes with a start what's been right in front of him the whole time.

Someone is sleeping in the bed.

Her back is to him. He has no reason to know it's a female except he just knows, and the horizon of the white sheet displays the shape of her, and Georgie can't believe she's here after all. He had reconciled himself to not finding her, and now she's in the bed right in front of him. "There's someone sleeping," he says.

Thomas nods. The smile on his face hasn't changed, and Georgie thinks perhaps the old man is mocking him; but then the smile gives way to fierce pain. Thomas takes his head in his hands. He squeezes his head as though to wring the pain out of it, until he can't hold on anymore and slumps back in the chair. His face glistens. Exultation sweeps Georgie, because the old man isn't smiling anymore and Georgie has found her sleeping in the bed in front of him; at one point she moves slightly in her sleep. Out of the haze of his pain Thomas picks up the piece of the Wall on the table and peers at it for some time. He examines the back of the shard as though it's the longest sentence in the world, Georgie thinks indignantly to himself. The part of Georgie that recoils from the inscription, the part of him that regards it as something infectious, swarming with moral bacteria, fears that a secret hovers between him and Thomas that will demand its exposure if the old man A R C D'X • 260

doesn't put the stone down soon, which he does only at the last moment.

"What are you doing here?" Georgie says.

Thomas rubs his temples and the back of his neck. He speaks so softly Georgie can barely make him out. "Is there news from Virginia?"

"I don't know," Georgie answers.

"What finally loses a man's soul," Thomas says, "the betrayal of his conscience or the betrayal of his heart?" He looks up at Georgie as though the boy with tattooed wings will actually have an answer to this question; the old man's beatific smile struggles to surface above the pain in his head. He raises an old finger. "Both, you're thinking. Aren't you? You're thinking both." He nods. "But what if you have to choose? What if your life is forced to one or the other and there's no avoiding having to choose? What if your life chooses for you, or she does," and Georgie is startled, because Thomas is indicating the woman in the bed. The old man tries to unbend himself from his chair but doesn't have the energy; he collapses from the effort. He glares around him at the affront of the room's light. He mutters, "Virginia runs with blood, like my dreams of Paris," and he smells of smoke.

"You're a disgrace," Georgie charges. But his voice cracks.

Trying again he manages, "You're drunken scum and it isn't right you call yourself that name." America is the name he means.

Thomas knows it's the name Georgie means. "Of course," he nods, "the flesh," and he pulls at the old weathered skin on his face, "is too pale to be American flesh. Isn't it?" and he keeps pulling at his face for the momentary hot rush of blood to his fingertips. He massages his wrists and Georgie sees how raw they're rubbed, as though they've only recently been released from chains. Thomas looks at the bed and says, "And what if she had answered yes? When I asked her to go back to America with me, what if she had promised different? What if, there in the square of the Bastille among the glass and blood and gunpowder, she had said Yes I'll return with you to America as the slave of your pleasure, instead of turning as she did and disappearing from my life forever into Paris' roiling core, while I stood at the top of the street screaming her name? What if my life had chosen my heart rather than my conscience? What if I'd put a price on her head and STEVE E R I C K S O IS • 261

shackled her naked in the cabin of my ship like the property she was, what if I'd smuggled her back to Virginia pleasing my heart every day for the rest of my life and left my conscience to God or the hypocrites who claim to serve him? Let them try to stop me from taking her back, Paris and its revolution. Let it shrivel and petrify like a small black fossil, my tyrannic conscience. Happiness is a dark thing to pursue," the old man hisses at Georgie, his eyes glimmering brighter and madder at the bald boy, "and the pursuit itself is a dark thing as well. Even God knows that. Above everything else, God especially knows that." Thomas seizes his racked head. When the pain subsides just enough he whispers, "What if I'd loved her my whole life." His old eyes are wet. "Would the conscience be as shriveled and petrified as the heart is now?

Where's the frontier of the first irrevocable corruption? Where's the first moment in the negotiation of the heart and conscience when one so betrays the other that the soul's rotting begins? God's hypocrites will say there's no difference between one corruption and another, that the smallest is as damnable as the biggest: but I made a country once. It was the country of redemption, somewhere this side of God's. It was the frontier of the first irrevocable compromise between the heart's freedom and the conscience's justice, past which the soul can still redeem itself." He clutches his head again and moans, "The blood."

There floods into his face the sound of every promise, the claim of every choice, the crash of his heart into his conscience and everything of himself that died from the collision, the stricken memory of happiness that abandoned him, the mourned wife and departed black fourteen-year-old lover, the shouts and gunshots of revolution, the shattered ideals in which even his own betrayal cannot stop him from believing; the ideals still believe him even as he can no longer believe them. And suddenly he appears ancient.

Suddenly the misery sags his face and he can't decide which to hold, the racking thunder of his head or the red burn of his wrists, and he says, "I have to sleep." He pulls himself from the chair and gropes toward the bed. He can hardly move from the pain and stumbles in the glare of the room. He holds himself up against the far wall and lowers himself slowly onto the bed, and seems to float the rest of the way to the pillow, laying himself down beside her as Georgie watches in horror.

A R C D'X • 262

The revulsion that washes over the young Berliner, to see the old man lying in bed next to the one for whom Georgie's come so far, displaces exultation; rage nearly paralyzes him in his place.

"What if she'd said yes," the old man whispers, trailing off; beneath their lids his eyes dart madly to dreams of his black slave queen emerging from the carriage in Virginia pregnant with his son, managing as the mistress of his house and lands. Georgie rises from his chair and stands looking down at the bed. "Liar," he says when he brings the last extant piece of the Wall crashing down on the old man's skull; the wound seems as tidy as it is fatal. It seems a full minute before the blood trickles from the old man's ears, though the eyes immediately stop darting, their dreams having shut off like a light. Georgie stands examining the tainted stone in his hand with sorrow, to see if some small part of its inscription has been left in the creases of the old man's brow or the roots of the white-fire hair. He sits down at the table still holding the stone and turns on the radio, but then returns to the bed.

The old man is bleeding more. For the first time the woman responds in her sleep to the room's turbulence, rearranging herself where she lies, confusion flashing across her sleep as she turns to Georgie for the first time. For the first time he actually sees her face. The ecstatic blackness that comes rushing up from her staggers him where he stands.

It isn't simply her blackness but her beauty that is the worst trick. He can deny neither her blackness nor beauty even as he's sure the one must deny the other. Her raven hair falls across her face, and in the corner of her mouth like a drop of wine is a word that begins to run down her chin; a tear waits beneath one flutter-ing lash. She lies lushly delivered of something she doesn't know and won't begin to suspect until she wakes from the dream that's now devouring her life, at which point only the devouring will be left. She doesn't suspect what's only moments beyond her eyelids.

It's as though Georgie would deliver her from the waking world, as he's delivered Thomas to the last mad dream of his life, it's as though for something more than reprisal against the terrible trick of her beauty and blackness that Georgie lifts the piece of Wall once more in order to bring it crashing down onto Sally's head as well. Several times he raises the stone over her before he lowers his arm without striking. He's only slightly more confounded when STEVE E R I C K S O N • 263

she turns again and he sees dangling from her fingers, poised to fall beside her, the knife. He turns and walks out of the room into the hotel hallway, leaving the door open behind him. He walks down the hallway and the hotel stairs and through the empty lobby; the buzz of the distant TV becomes clearer.

Outside, in the dead calm of the city, he can smell the sea.

Now it's not even exhilaration and rage anymore, it's the bitterness of futility and the pointlessness of continuing, along with exhaustion and adrenaline and memory. Georgie sobs hysterically at the cruelty of his eyes that insisted on both her blackness and her beauty, at the treachery of a hand that couldn't kill either. As he wanders the dead of night from circle to circle and obelisk to obelisk, halfnaked and crying, it's a wonder he doesn't arouse the entire city; three hours later Dee, behind the bar of the Fleurs d'X, concludes from the look on Georgie's face that he's under the spell of a drug she's never seen before, brought from some city she's never heard of. He's stopped crying by now, but the look in his eyes makes uneasy the Fleurs d'X girls who have learned to be unnerved by nothing. It's also clear that the boy with the tattoos has no money, that he literally hasn't the shirt on his back. Dee sends over a shot of whiskey anyway, figuring Georgie will finally just pass out on the floor, from where he can be dragged down the hall and dropped down the stairwell.

Exhaustion and adrenaline, whiskey and memory whip Georgie back and forth between silent stupor and desperate outbursts. By deep into the evening he doesn't really know anymore who he is or where he is or how he got there; every once in a while he's aware of a naked woman presenting herself to his inspection but not his touch. The dream of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel is far away. Girls keep putting shots of liquor in front of him as he babbles; sitting at the stage he's just sober enough to understand that when the girls dance the other men give them money. Two or three times Georgie actually searches his own pocket as though he's going to find something to offer.

This has been going on for a while when he feels a drop on his chest.

He looks up at the ceiling. "There's a leak," he mutters to no one. He momentarily grabs one of the girls by the wrist: "Got a leak up there," he slurs, staring into the dark above him. The girl A R C D'X • 264

thinks it means he's got to piss. He keeps running his hand across his belly and his chest to wipe something away but nothing's there, even though he feels the drops. He moves to another seat, but wherever he moves he feels something dripping, and the more he wipes his hands over his body the more frustrated he becomes to find nothing, not water or whiskey or blood, just drip drip drip. He cannot, in the dark of the Fleurs d'X, see the drops falling from the mouth of the woman with the head of a bird on his chest.

He feels the shudder in his shoulders of wings trying to break free, flapping.

There, at the side of the stage, a vision rises from the dark before him.

She rises from the dark on the other side of the stage, head first into the light until the light holds all of her, from the gold of her hair to the black stockings of her long legs; and Georgie knows that though she's not the Queen of Wands, she is the Woman in the Dark. If he were either a little less drunk or a little more he might reach out to fill one hand with one breast so as to measure it against the memory of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel, what remnants of its memory remain. He would have her say the word America to see if it matches memory's echo, faint as it may now be. In the light she smiles at him like a child. None of the others have smiled like this. He's too naive to understand that they haven't smiled because he has no money and they're waiting for him to intoxicate himself into oblivion, all he knows is that the Woman in the Dark is smiling at him and, for the first time in so long, nothing seems quite as hopeless. She's pure white and gold.

There's not the flicker of blackness across her face. In the light she consumes his existence and leaves only the trace of his relief; he settles into a rapturous peace.

But something is happening in his shoulders. Something is happening on his chest. Somewhere in time a trolley disappears and an obelisk moves several feet; on a back alley official graffiti gives way to heresy written on a slab of Wall into which messages disappear one by one. Something is unraveling memory by memory, not only the memories of the moment but of the moments to come and the moments that have already come.

And for a moment, while there's still time, Georgie returns to his rapture. Shamed by her smile, shamed by his poverty, he places STEVE E R I C K S O N • 265

the piece of the Wall at her feet, the only thing he has to offer, entirely confident it must mean as much to her as it does to him.

When the dance is over she picks up the stone and looks at it: there's something written, Georgie almost says to her, when she thanks him and disappears before he has the chance.

Raising his hands to his chest, he begins to scratch.

Many years later, watching the new girl audition, Dee had completely forgotten the strange young man with the tattoos. But she did remember Wade, who thought he had come to the Fleurs d'X looking for a dead body and turned out to be looking for another kind of body altogether. Dee may not have remembered the first time Wade talked to Mona but she remembered the second, when he waited hours for her and kept throwing men out of their chairs, and she remembered the time he tore off his clothes and mauled one of the other customers who had shown too much interest in her, or perhaps it was that she had shown too much interest in him. At any rate, that was the night Mona disappeared forever, and the last time Dee ever saw Wade in the Fleurs d'X, though like everyone she'd heard the stories about the naked giant who wandered the Arboretum year after year searching for his lost dancer. And so from time to time she had occasion to be reminded of Wade even as the boy with the tattoos was blotted from memory within twenty-four hours of the cops' dragging from the back room his shredded corpse.

Halfway through the third and climactic part of the routine, the new girl auditioning for Dee finally balked. She froze midmusic and scooped up her clothes and rushed from the stage, standing off to the side of the club now, probably feeling like a fool. Oh God, don't start crying on me, Dee thought to herself, watching the dim form of the girl struggling in the shadows to regain composure.

This was why Dee held auditions in the slow hours, when it was less overwhelming and the customers were at their least demanding; she wasn't surprised about this one, sharing the men's disappointment and the other dancers' relief, because this particular A R C D'X • 266

girl was the most beautiful to walk into the club for as long as Dee could remember, which was one of the things that had gotten Dee to remembering Mona and Wade. Beautiful girls often failed auditions because they weren't damaged enough or not damaged in the right way or too damaged in the wrong way, or not so innocent of damage they'd take off their clothes in the street for the fun of it, if fun were legal.

The new girl reminded Dee of Mona for the way she was beautiful and of Wade for the way she was a glimpse of black. She pulled on her white dress and turned in the dark, walking past the stage toward the bar. "Sorry," she muttered, half chastened and half defiant.

"Forget it," Dee said. "Maybe you're just not cut out for it. Why do you want to do this anyway?"

Once the sense of defeat passed, the girl didn't really look too crestfallen: damaged in the wrong way, Dee concluded. The girl's selfpossession, which had so dissolved in the glare of the stage light, slowly reasserted itself. She was tall and big-boned, gangly in her negotiations of light and shadow; stray genes wandered across her wild dark hair and liquid mouth, the blue in her eyes hijacked from some other eyes, the hair's transient glint of gold that ran the border at midnight from another country into her own. Every head in the Fleurs d'X had turned when she walked in, which was something Dee hadn't seen in a while; it took a lot to turn a man's head in a room full of naked women, or maybe the point was it didn't take much at all. The girl had been all bravado in the beginning, a little too much bravado in retrospect: she was accustomed to demanding the chance to prove herself. "I need the work," the girl answered.

"Yes, well, everyone needs the work," Dee said, "but people choose this kind of work for a reason. Maybe all your life you've been told you're beautiful. Maybe it's the only thing you know about yourself. But up there," she pointed at the stage, "you either didn't believe it or didn't care, it wasn't worth anything to you. Up there beautiful not only isn't everything, it isn't even the main thing." Dee guessed the girl had just arrived in the city. "Where's your family?"

"The theater," she answered, "on the other side."

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"In the Arboretum?" For the first time tonight Dee was amazed, and in the Arboretum tonight was always a long time.

"I don't want to talk about my father," the girl said with such a hard look in her eyes that Dee immediately thought to herself, So that's what this is. We take off our clothes and humiliate daddy.

And as if she'd read Dee's mind, the girl continued, "It has nothing to do with him. I've been looking for someone."

"And you thought you'd find him here?"

"All the men come here sooner or later, don't they?"

"Maybe yours already came through and moved on. Or maybe he won't come around for a while yet. You could take off your clothes for a lot of men waiting to take them off for one in particular."

The girl nodded.

"Does he know you're here?"

"I don't see how."

"I mean your father."

"No."

"Go home and forget it."

"I don't care if my father knows," the girl insisted. "I think this is about the only thing I could do that would bother him at all."

"Sounds like maybe this does have something to do with him."

"Thank you for giving me the chance," the girl said.

"Come back if you ever want another shot. The men would love you and the girls would get used to it."

From the Fleurs d'X the girl carried Dee's memory with her; with the snap of her fingers the two large gray dogs curled up against the wall followed. She returned to the theater where her father lived with the other actors; he didn't ask where she'd been.

She didn't expect he would. Once or twice she considered bursting his self-absorption with an announcement, once or twice she thought some guy might stumble into the theater who just happened to have seen her feeble audition; he'd point her out and create a small furor, perhaps. Instead, in the silence of her stoicism, the seed of Dee's memory flowered in the girl's own consciousness until she recognized it one hour in the Arboretum corridor. It also recognized her.

She turned her corner as Wade, crazy with drugs and cognac AR C D'X • 268

and loss, turned his. He was far more stunned by the sight of her than she was by him. What shocked her instead was when he said, with the strangest look on his face, "Sally?" and then said it again and started toward her until she shook herself free of the sight and sound of him and ran. The next time she saw him, she didn't run.

She found him in a flat at the far end of the Arboretum lying in a heap against one wall. He was sweating profusely, mumbling nonsense and slipping in and out of consciousness. She approached and stood at his feet; when he opened his eyes, just cognizant enough to say the name again, she shook her head. "I'm not Sally,"

she answered. "Sally was my mother."

In his drunken haze, he narrowed his eyes to think. "Was?"

"I'm looking for a man," Polly said. "His name is Etcher."

She searched for him a year. She searched the Arboretum, sometimes returning to Fleurs d'X and the wary glances of the dancers; and then she left the Arboretum and began looking for him in the city. She wandered Downtown and the Market, occasionally sleeping in the street, and even spent a couple of nights in the same hotel, though not the same room, where her mother had awakened to a body many years before. It wasn't likely she was consciously retracing any steps when she walked up the rock to Church Central. Working in the archives was a priest only a few years older than she, no less alarmed by her than Etcher had been the first afternoon he saw Sally Hemings with Polly in tow; if anything, Polly's inquiry brought greater consternation. "You have to go now," the priest croaked, as though the name she'd spoken was reverberating upstairs at this moment and he would be held accountable.

She waited for the archives clerk at the bottom of the rock.

When he emerged from Church Central one twilight on a bicycle, Polly followed. He carried a large bag in one arm. Slowly he rode through the city, leaving Downtown and heading east with Polly hurrying along behind at a distance, her big gray dogs dawdling behind her. He crossed the peripheral highway and began pedaling STEVE E R I C K S O N • 269

over the lava fields in the direction of the volcano; perhaps, as she followed, she was cloaked in darkness. Perhaps, as she followed, she was cloaked in the rage of her abandonment by the mother's death and the father's ego. Perhaps crossing the black fields under the light of the moon in her white dress she would have appeared to the priest, had he looked back, as nothing more than a ripped veil blown over the waves of a black sea, or a robe discarded by a priest at the foot of the road. But no one saw her or the dogs: had she dropped her dress in the midst of the fields and walked naked, in the cloak of her ashy skin, she could not have been more invisible. She never meant to be unseen. She meant, rather, to ask the priest the same question she had asked in the archives. He disappeared in the distance and then returned an hour or so later, gliding right past her as he headed back to the city. Under one arm, where he'd held the bag, he now clutched some papers.

Polly didn't turn back to the city but pressed onward. She reached the base of the volcano when light began to appear from the other side, and she made out the bicycle's track as it veered off to the north and ascended the mountain. The track ended in a rocky cove, where she found a red mailbox standing alone with no address or name. The mailbox was empty. At the base of the mailbox was the bag left by the priest; inside were bread and cheese and fruit, water and wine. Her dogs, now thirsty and tired, sniffed at the bag. Polly left it and continued up the trail to the volcano.

Not long before noon she reached the highest ridge of the volcano in time to meet the sun coming up the other side. Behind her she could see all of the lava fields and Aeonopolis beyond them and the sea beyond it, the zipper of the train's tracks heading up the coast. South of the city where the beach twisted was the penal colony, attached to the landscape like a leech.

Below her was the crater. It smelled of sulfur. On the far east side oozed the white molten part of the mountain, the surrounding ground dead except for an occasional shrub or flower, a whimper of green from the black lava. Just inside the crater's edge, teetering on a volcanic shelf, a tiny hut seemed to grow out of the rock. As the panting dogs ran ahead, sniffing at the crater in search of a lake to drink from, Polly sat watching for some time, once or twice deciding on retreat before she convinced herself she'd come too far to give up. The day began to slide toward the city and the sea.

AR C D'X • 270

She made her way through the shadows of the crater toward the house.

When she came to the door she knocked quickly, leaving herself no time to change her mind.

Her knock went unanswered. She opened the door and pushed it ajar. "Hello?" she began to call, but it caught in her throat. She stepped into the house. A mattress lay in the corner not far from an unused stove. On the other side of the hut a box of dishes and utensils crumbled beneath the sink. Above the sink a cupboard sagged with the weight of wine bottles that threatened to tumble off any moment and shatter; Polly counted twenty or thirty empty ones rolling along the floor with little red puddles inside. On the other side of the room was another doorway.

A desk sat in the center of the second room, so buried beneath papers and manuscripts and writing implements that not a square inch of the surface showed through. Behind the desk was a shelf of books in old red covers. The binding of the volumes had been ripped apart and the pages were torn and loose, as though attacked by a wild animal. Covering the wall facing the desk was a huge map. Only after she'd studied it some time did Polly understand it was a diagram of the city. Lines were drawn in frantic flourishes from one end of the map to the other, from the volcano in the east to Church Central in the west to a place just north of the city boundaries, which examination revealed to be the Arboretum, crossing at a point of no distinction, a small alley off the Downtown streets of Desolate and Unrequited. Some zones were clearly designated—Sorrow and Ambivalence and Humiliation—

and others not, the most confused being the name Redemption, which the map's author had replaced with Desire, only to cross that out and rewrite Redemption, only to obliterate the first again for the second until all that was left was a crazed blotch of confirmation and denial.

Polly stood looking at the havoc when, without hearing a sound, she knew someone else was in the room. It took several seconds to find the courage to peer over her shoulder. The shadow of the volcano's ridge rumbled across the floor from the outer doorway to billow up at his feet and engulf him, until all she could be sure of was the cobalt blue of his eyes, as close to the blue of her own as she'd ever seen. They loomed all the larger behind his glasses.

STEVE ERICKSON • 271

It was the only thing of him she recalled immediately; his life had long since been cut loose of not only her memory but his own. His clothes were tattered and filthy. His black hair was splattered with white and gray and, at two or three inches shorter than her father, he might have seemed smaller than she remembered if his humanity hadn't imploded long before to leave the huge void of him howl-ing at everything within range. The reek of him was more than wine and dirt, it was the stink of a life that had died years before, briefly preserved in ice but having begun its mortifying thaw just in time for her to greet the remains. There was nothing merciful about his impact, nothing compassionate or caring or reachable.

She tried to say something. "My name is—"

"Yes," he said. His eyes finally left her, to assess the situation of his books and papers.

"I didn't touch anything," she promised, though she couldn't imagine how anyone would know, or whether he cared. Taking one or two steps he kicked papers on the floor beneath his feet. He went over to the chair behind the desk and sat down. He paid her no more attention, staring instead at the disarray before him and reaching below the desk to fumble for and hoist up a bottle of wine, which he poured into a dirty glass. She kept waiting for him to say something, even as she tried to think of what to say to him.

But he just sat drinking his wine, pouring himself another glass and then another, shuffling about his desk in the dark of the room for a page he could have found only by some mad system. When he lit a candle on the desk and picked up a pen and began to write as though she weren't there, still not saying a word to her except the yes that had evolved over the minutes into a no, having in the process completely banished her from his awareness, she raised her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. Turning, she ran from the room.

She almost ran from the hut and the volcano but got as far as the front door. The voice that called her back wasn't his but her own; she slid along the door to the floor and cried, wondering if there was anywhere in time she belonged. The exhaustion of the previous night caught up with her and she fell asleep. It was some time after she awoke in the dark, it was some time after she woke to the red glow that came through the window and she remembered she was sleeping in a volcano, that she also remembered she had A R C D'X • 272

passed out by the front door but was now lying on the mattress. In the dark of the night and the glow of the mountain she sat up and searched for a sign of Etcher in the room with her. When she couldn't find him she went back to sleep.

He wasn't there either when she woke the next morning, and he didn't show up until the late afternoon when he came walking over the ridge of the volcano from the west. He was dressed in the same terrible clothes and carried in his arms the bag of food left at the red mailbox on the other side of the mountain. In the hut Etcher didn't say a word, he didn't look at Polly at all; but when he put some fruit from the bag in a dusty bowl to set on the floor by the mattress where she'd slept, and she reached to take it from him, he flinched at her hand as though it held a weapon or was raised to accuse him. He hurried into the other room, closing the door behind him. The rest of the day passed without his reappearance.

Over and over she told herself to leave. Every time she convinced herself to go, she convinced herself to stay. She took walks with the dogs around the volcano but mostly stayed close to the house, in case he should emerge from the back room. She had hoped to charm him or ingratiate herself, something she'd been good at since she was small, but he gave her no opportunity. The next day went by and then the next, without one word exchanged between them. As the days passed, her white dress became darker and darker until it was black, and Etcher drank more and more wine until by nightfall she'd look out the window of the house to see him dallying precariously on the crater's edge, as though daring sobriety to prevent his toppling over. Any moment she was prepared to rush and save him, except that she remembered how he had flinched at the sight of her hands that first day and she was afraid if she sprang to retrieve him he'd take a fatal step back.

Eventually he always wound up, by his own maneuvers, asleep in the chair behind the desk, while she lay on the mattress thinking of the Arboretum. By now she knew her father had noticed her absence. By now she assumed her father had noticed some part of him was missing, like a limb or an eye; he'd raised one of his arms by now to blithely observe that the appendage usually found at the end was replaced by a stump. She couldn't be sure which tormented her more, that he might be wrenched by the discovery she was gone or indifferent to it.

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On the third day Polly followed Etcher in the early hours of morning as he set out on another walk to the red mailbox. From the highest summit she watched him leave the papers he'd written the previous night, to be picked up by the priest on the bicycle, who left in return the bag of food and water and wine. Often Etcher seemed so drunk or hungover that Polly couldn't see how he got beyond the hut's porch, let alone all the way over the top of the mountain; and one morning after she'd been there a week, when he still hadn't said a single word to her beyond that first yes, she found him snoring in his chair behind the desk with the night's tortured pages wadded in his fists. She took the pages and smoothed them out on the floor and set off with the dogs for the mailbox.

Hours later she met Etcher on the way back, huffing and puffing up the side of the crater. Within twenty feet of her he stopped, his furious magnified eyes regarding the bag of food in her arms. "I took the papers to the mailbox for you," she said. He answered this news with more of his black silence, approaching to take the bag from her. "I can carry it," she assured him, and for a moment they tussled over the bag until he grabbed it away. He turned back toward the house and she followed in a hush. She had resolved over the course of the days and nights that she wouldn't go until he told her to. She would outrage him from his wordlessness, if she had to. At the house, in the doorway, he suddenly turned to her.

"Where's your father?" he said.

"Behind me," she said, and he looked over her shoulder at the volcano's horizon, but then realized that wasn't what she meant.

He went on inside the hut. She believed the opportunity was at hand: "I can barely remember you," she said, directing her words straight at the past. "That's good," he answered, and ripped the bag ferociously to liberate some bread at the bottom, taking a bottle of wine from the cupboard above the sink and storming into the back room. For several minutes she stood staring at the closed door, trying to talk her anger into bursting through it and confront-ing him.

She had a dream that night in which a dead woman who looked much like her lay on the mattress in the corner of the hut where Polly herself was now sleeping. How the woman had died wasn't clear, and for a moment, when she seemed to turn her head, Polly A R C D'X • 274

thought perhaps the woman was alive after all; then the woman disappeared, and Polly's relief gave way to the certainty that the disappearance and not the death was the delusion. At the end of the dream Polly had the strangest impression she was dead herself, even though her life didn't yet understand this: the circumstances of her life had gone so awry that ending it seemed the only viable option. Everything in the dream simply seemed so hopeless and involved such futility that suicide wasn't an emotional decision but a practical one; she didn't want to do it but was overwhelmed by the feeling that it was the only out.

When she woke, it was as though a noise had awakened her. But the hut was still and she felt entirely alienated from her dream, until she realized it wasn't hers: rather this dream had smuggled itself from the other room, slipping through the doorway and across the floor to the mattress, where it invaded her ear and ate its way voraciously into her mind. She could see its form in the dark of the hut, like a crustacean from the lava sea outside skitter-ing across the room. The dogs on the porch whimpered and sniffed at the door. Then there was the abrupt crash of glass in the back room, which gave way to a strange commotion, and she jumped from the mattress and pushed opened the back door, where she half expected to find a battle taking place between Etcher and some beast lurking in the shadows.

Wine ran down the large map on the opposite wall where he'd thrown first the glass, then the bottle. The glass had broken and the bottle lay at the base of the wall gurgling out the remains of its contents. He sat hunched over the desk with his face in his hands and, as though gripped by a seizure, suddenly flailed at the desk so recklessly that the candle was about to tip over and set everything on fire. Polly grabbed the candle. Light darted over the room. In the darting light Etcher didn't look up, he didn't move his hands; his glasses lay on the papers in front of him. In the privacy of his hands he said, "Do you know what it does to me to see you?" She had to clutch the candle hard to keep from dropping it; he still wouldn't show himself, he still wouldn't look at her. "To see her face looking at me over your shoulder . . ."

"I'm sorry," Polly said.

"You're sorry?" and that released him. His hands fell to the desk and his cheeks were streaked and flushed. "You're sorry for your STEVE E R I C K S O N • 275

face?" The force of his fury seemed to raise him up from where he sat, though in fact he didn't move at all; in his blind eyes, their glasses still lying on the desk, flashed the last freak moment left of a vision's halflife from years before, when he loved Polly's mother and saw everything. "She must have been sorry every day of her life," he said in a furious whisper. "I must have heard her say she was sorry more times than I could count. She was sorry for her face and she was sorry for her heart, she was sorry for the way everyone told her she had something to be sorry for. She was sorry for the right choices and sorry for the wrong ones and sorry for not knowing which was which, which was almost all of the time. She was sorry for me and she was sorry for the others, but she was never sorry enough for herself except when it was time not to be sorry anymore. Are you here for revenge?"

"Wh-what?"

"It's a waste of time, if you've come for revenge. It's a waste of time, if you've come to hate me. Because there's no hate you can muster half as good as mine. No revenge you can take half as final as me getting up from this chair and walking out that door and off the edge of the precipice into the fire, a course of action I consider daily, or perhaps it's hourly. Do you want to be the one who pushes me?"

"I..."

"Come on then," he said, rising from the chair. He leapt around the desk and grabbed her by the wrist; she screamed, nearly dropping the candle. He pulled her through the front room and out of the house across the porch, past the dogs out onto the ledge, the red mist hanging in the night around them.

"Please," she begged.

"Do you remember the train ride back, after she died?" A thousand times over the years he must have told himself he was over her. A thousand times in response he must have called himself a liar. Like a wild animal that returns to a habitat it's never known, but which is its natural one nonetheless, Etcher had come to the mouth of the volcano, and now overlooking the lava he staggered as though to slip over. She screamed again, pulling him back. "It went on forever, all the way back to the city, and you wouldn't talk to me except to say, like you had a hundred times before, T'm not your friend.' And then on the station platform you ran to your A R C D'X • 276

father and he picked you up in his arms and took you away, and I waited for you to look back at me just once, and you never did.

And I knew I'd lost both of you."

"I was just a little girl."

"I didn't mean to kill her," he cried. In the sheen of the fire his eyes grew wide with the sound of it, as though he could see the admission floating in front of him over the crater, and he wanted to reach out from the void of his life and pull it back.

"You didn't kill anyone," she pleaded. "Please come away from the edge."

"I meant to save her, like I did before."

"You couldn't save her either. You didn't kill her and you couldn't save her."

"I was supposed to take care of you. She said, Take care of Polly, and I let him take you."

"He was my father, Etcher. And I was just a little girl. And I don't remember much of what happened except that you loved my mother, even then I knew that, and that's why I've come back. And if you hate yourself now then you let me down when I need you most, when I need you to tell me all the things about her that my father won't or can't because he never really knew her, when I need to know there was someone in our lives who loved us more than his own life, and that was you. So you have to come away from the fire now, and tell me. Please."

In the glow of the crater, his face in his hands, he wept. The tears ran through his fingers and down to the ragged sleeves of his shirt. When he finished and came away from the fire he seemed very old to the girl, as though his legs would buckle beneath him, and there was enough of the father in her to find selflessness a revelation, to find the human burden of carrying an old man away from the fire a frightening thing to accept. She sat against the wall as he slept, not at his desk but on the mattress at her feet, spent of his nightmares that plopped one after another from his brain to the floor, scattering helplessly for shelter.

STEVE E R I C K S O N • 277

When he left the city, the beggars followed.

He had returned in broad daylight years before, met by neither cops nor priests, who were only beginning to adjust to the trauma of his escape and therefore hardly expected his reappearance. In the voggy glare of midafternoon, under the eyes of the city, he moved himself and the red books to the volcano, and only the beggars took note, the beggars who had zeroed in on his unguarded conscience from every alley and corner, in the midst of every crowd. Now they poured into the streets from the curbs and doorways, following along behind not to beg anything more of him but simply to say goodbye, the broken army of the city's forsaken standing at the edge of town alongside the peripheral highway silently watching him disappear into the lava fields. It was only this demonstration that alerted the authorities of Aeonopolis, half a day late, that Etcher had again slipped in and out of their grasp. As the Arboretum had long since proved, authority was never particularly equipped for dealing with audacity.

Larger audacities were to confront them.

Page by page, Etcher was rewriting the books.

Page by page he left the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History in the red mailbox at the volcano's base, as had been arranged with the Church; what had not been arranged was that, leaf by leaf, each was transformed by him. As the years passed, the precarious placement of the volumes on the shores of the crater's fire, where Etcher might drop them one by one into the lava, unraveled the nerves of the priests while discouraging the plans of police to swoop down on the tiny house and seize what was in it.

Etcher had taken the lessons of stalemate to the ultimate edge of stalemate, and then began to write. He wrote every day that he didn't throw himself into the crater with as many of the books as his arms could carry.

He did it because, having not had a single night since her death when he didn't dream of her, having plummeted into the dark hole of his heart, all he could find in his control was history. As his heart A R C D'X • 278

had been undone, as he would undo his own memory in some pointless effort to forget her, he would now undo history minute by minute, detail by detail. He gave history its false cues, he mis-spoke its passwords. In his rewritten history bombs failed to deto-nate, assassins' guns misfired in the theater. Secret tunnels were dug from the killing grounds of the Commune by which escaped whole revolutions; invasions were distracted by the pornographic obsessions of dictators. Motorcades were delayed by a flat tire.

The earth of Etcher's new history shimmered with the fission of reactor meltdowns, and wars that had once ended in four years went on for forty. Hard moral lessons were corrupted. The conscience of history became as relative as its science, and memory became a factor of expedience in the equation of power.

Complicit in Etcher's assault were the priests themselves, who gave no indication they understood the revisions. Perhaps they actually believed it didn't matter, as long as the books were returned to their vault where they might again become sacred. Likelier they suppressed their worst suspicions, flinging the returned pages back into the dark and lunging the door closed behind them to secure the books not from thieves but themselves, who might come to know what they couldn't stand to know. Likeliest was that the priests had rarely read the history in the first place and wouldn't have known it was not the same even if they bothered to read it now. Rummaging in the heart's basement, stepping into history through the doorway of the heart as the second hand hurtled toward midnight, perhaps not unlike the priests Etcher believed he would find a resurrection. Not his own, since he didn't believe in that anymore, but hers, since hers was his anyway. Fail-ing such a discovery he thrived on the energy of destruction and anarchy until the night of his confession to Polly, at which point he thrived on her. At least for a while the mad storm of his work calmed. The molten flow of the mountain receded into the earth and the fire of the volcano cooled to embers, around which the old man and the girl circled to stories of her mother, which often broke down early in the telling.

He would compose himself and begin again. Sometimes they talked so long into the night that history, for a night, passed un-violated, returned to the red mailbox intact and without changes, STEVE E R I C K S O N • 279

though in new contexts from changes that had come before. Etcher drank less. And then, from the choke in her voice at the mention of her father, he knew that sooner or later Polly would leave, that her fury at her father was the defiance of a heartbreak that sooner or later must reconcile itself to the source. And that was when he knew she'd go back to her father because she couldn't leave as far behind as she might have hoped or believed the little girl who had run to her father on the station platform, who adored him more than anyone else in the world and always would. So once more Etcher began to drink. Once more he began to write. He was back in the heart's doorway, passing through to seek its most malevolent possibility. If he could not, once more, find a resurrection, he would locate a trapdoor instead, a lever to pull through which Gann Hurley would plummet to oblivion. But though he might actually find such a trapdoor, though he might actually find such a lever, the fact was that this was his heart, not Polly's, where her father was safe and untouchable, arrogantly secure, forever protected from even his daughter's own rage.

In the back room he wrote faster and more furiously. At first he thought, on the night the knock came on the door, that it was the pounding in his own head; and when he realized it was not in his own head, when he realized it wasn't Polly banging around in the other room or the dogs sniffing at the residue of wine in the empty bottles, he assumed any other possibility but the fantastic truth.

He assumed it was the clerk from Central on his bicycle, though the clerk had never before passed the red mailbox. He assumed it was the cops. He assumed it was Hurley, who had come for his daughter. When Etcher called out the girl's name and then called again, and went into the front room where Polly was frozen in the open doorway, he never assumed it would be Sally Hemings standing there on the porch outside, on the eve of a choice that would change everything, staring aghast into Polly's face, which stared back. The mother, at fourteen, was several years younger than the daughter.

He nearly fainted.

Polly rushed as though to catch him but he caught himself, gazing from one girl to the other. Since the thing that terrified him most wasn't simply her ghost but how in the doorway Sally looked at A R C D'X • 280

him as though she'd never seen him before, he said her name almost as a question. It didn't entirely get past his lips, part of it caught in that doorway of the heart where it had lingered so long.

Sally turned from the door. She ran past the gray dogs curled on the porch, up the side of the crater toward the ridge of the mountaintop. She ran down the other side of the mountain toward the lava fields. She hadn't a thought in her head of water or prison or slavery; later she would have liked to believe it was a dream, she'd have given anything to believe it was a dream. But at this moment she knew it wasn't a dream and so she ran parched and exhausted and half out of her mind. She never looked back at the crater or the house or Polly standing in the doorway watching her go; when she finally reached the bottom of the volcano she went on running and stumbling across the black plain. Sometime in the night a wagon picked her up. Sometime in the night she felt and heard beneath her the turning of wheels; she felt and tasted on her lips the trickle of water. Into the night she didn't dream or think at all.

The wagon took her back to Paris.

In the early hours of morning she pulled herself off the back of the wagon. She wandered aimlessly as she'd done the night she buried the carving knife in what she believed was Thomas' sleeping body back on the rue d'X. Pulled by the tides of the city, Sally returned to the center of the Parisian moment: the black prison with eight towers, which the revolution had stormed forty hours before. Smoke still hung on the square. Blood had long since overcome the scent of lilac from the broken window of the perfume shop. People streamed freely across the prison drawbridge in and out of the prison gate; high on the dark red pikes that surrounded the square were the heads of garrison soldiers. Women wept over the cobblestones where their men had died. Moving from widow to widow, talking to them, holding them in comfort, was Thomas.

Sally watched for some time. To each of the women Thomas gave some money. It reminded her of when she was a little girl and one day had seen him seize the whip from a man beating a slave.

She sat dazed in the street amid the glass of the perfume-shop window; pieces of glass glittered in the dawn sun. Finally he saw her. In the smoke he stood staring at her. When he came toward her she couldn't help but find his judgment terrifying. He looked at the glass all around her and said, "You're going to cut yourself,"

STEVE E R I C K S O N • 281

and picked her up and caught himself on a shard in the folds of the tattered dress he'd bought her; together they watched his hand bleed. As he carried her in his arms she tore from her dress a long strip and wrapped it around his hand. She wanted to sleep in his arms but said, "Put me down."

He put her down. Her knees buckled beneath her and he had to catch her from falling in the street. She pulled herself from his arms and began walking away. "You're too weak to walk," he said.

"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, A R C D'X • 282

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 cafes 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 STEVE E R I C K S O N • 283

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.

A R C D'X • 284

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 5

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 Com-mittee 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.

As it happened, her reunion with Maximilien was limited to his image on the edifices and banners and statues of Paris, where he had become deity of the Revolution's secular religion. Sally and her guards arrived at the Luxembourg Palace just in time to hear the news that, at the moment the assassin's bullet shattered Jack's chest, Maximilien had clutched his own heart with a cry and tumbled from his seat at the very summit of the Mountain. Only the rush of several flacks to the podium of the convention hall broke the fall, prolonging life one more day until its final agonizing rup-ture. In her carriage the soldier who had shot Jack took the news with relative calm. "Robespierre is dead. Citizen Saint-Just is Dictator now," he announced. "May I drop you elsewhere, madame?"

and Sally allowed as how she'd just as soon be taken across the river to the Hotel Langeac. By the time her carriage reached the rue d'X her legend had transformed yet again, from the woman who had declined a queendom of slaves and a place as mistress of the Revolution to become instead a subversive's whore. Perpetu-STEVE E R I C K S O N • 285

ating this legend was not the folly of her choice but the sanguine conviction of it. In the Hotel Langeac she had a room with a fire-place and a four-poster bed, and a window that pointed the other direction from where Thomas' balcony had looked the night he watched her run from the hotel for the last time as his slave. At night she could see from her window the streetlights of the boulevards in the distance and the carriages that brought the men to her. They left her gifts, small porcelain figures and little snow-storms imprisoned in crystal balls which adorned the shelf of her room.

During the day she made jewelry, necklaces and earrings, and recalled her greatest creation. I invented a country, she had heard Thomas say, with the arrogance of a man who thinks it's the business of men to make countries and the business of women to make jewelry. But it had taken her all her life to realize it was she who made the country and that the country had always been hers to make, that it waited for either her yes or no that afternoon in the place de la Bastille so as to be born one thing or the other, as an embryo waits for one chromosome or another to be born man or woman. It had taken all her life to hope that in saying no, thus denying herself the chance ever to see her country again, she had made it a purer thing. But she wasn't so sure about purity anymore, having survived a revolution so obsessed with purity of conscience that its heart had gone first to stone, then to dust, before scattering to nothing.

She couldn't be so sure about America either. A visiting mystic brought her news in the first year of the Nineteenth Century about the slave wars and the mad philosopher general who led them after he'd sold himself to his own slaves in bondage. "No more,"

Sally said, "I don't want to hear any more." But when her visitor was leaving and she extracted from him the obligatory gift, she begged that it be something of America; and though there was no real way for her to be certain that the deck of cards he produced was an American Tarot, as he insisted, she took his word for it, convinced of the momentousness of the sacrifice when the owner gave up a single card, without which none of the deck's other seventy-seven had meaning. Tacking the Queen of Wands to her bedchamber wall, she looked at it the last thing on going to sleep at night and the first thing on waking in the morning and, lost in its A R C D'X • 286

message in between, every night and every morning for the next thirty-four years until the day she died in the Hotel Langeac on the rue d'X at the age of sixty-two. The year was 1835, or year XLIII of what was once called the Revolution but which Maximilien had renamed before his death, with the obvious self-referential implications, the Deliverance.

In 1790 her legend swept Thomas home. Halfway across the sea the ship's crew became alarmed to find Thomas missing from his cabin and nowhere on deck. He was finally located in the ship's hull, looking for the deepest and coolest place to soothe the blinding pain in his head. When he wouldn't leave the hull, living there like a rat all the way back to America, James Hemings took over Thomas' cabin, sleeping in Thomas' bed and eating Thomas'

meals, reading Thomas' books and drinking Thomas' wine, making the arrangements for the rest of the voyage. At the harbor in Norfolk the ship was met by a carriage with black window shades, behind which a semiconscious Thomas hid from sunlight and America in equal measure.

When he reached home and his slaves turned out to welcome the carriage's return, their enthusiasm dissolved into confusion as minutes passed into hours with no one emerging while the carriage sat in front of the house. Again and again James would open the carriage door and peer in, the slaves watching as whispers passed back and forth between driver and unseen passenger, each exchange concluding with James shutting the door and the master declining to appear. Occasionally the slaves would lend the situation an increasingly tepid cheer as though to encourage Thomas out of the carriage; but finally the crowd simply dispersed, returning to their labors, the carriage left alone in the yard. Darkness fell. James unhitched the horses. He spent the rest of the evening with his mother, to whom he broke the news that she would never see her daughter again. Whether it was her wails of despair or simply the cold dead of night that inspired Thomas to make an escape, in the morning the slaves found the carriage open and empty, and word spread over the plantation that the master was finally in the house.

The country was riveted by the news of Thomas' return. Its elite flocked to his porch only to find themselves rudely rebuffed by James, who announced to all that the master would be receiving STEVE E R I C K S O N • 287

no one. The plea of the country's government that Thomas accept a seat of power went unanswered except for the laughter heard coming from the house's darkest quarters. James ran the affairs of the plantation as he had managed the business of the oversea voyage. Several years passed. One summer day an erstwhile visitor to the plantation, undeterred by the rumors of the Monticello Mad-ness, rode up within sight of the house on a far hill and found his way blocked by a particularly grisly wall of wood and wire and thistle. It was the sort of fence constructed not as demarcation but barricade. Much more astonishing, the wall was guarded by armed slaves. "See here, boy," the visitor ordered one, "let me pass that I may have an audience with Mr. Jefferson." The slave cocked his musket with an aim as true as the light in his eyes. "Beyond this point is Free Virginia, your fucking majesty," the black guard answered. "Go let your horse shit somewhere else."

Free Virginia? the man thought in horror riding away. By nightfall Richmond had heard and by dawn the rest of the nation. By week's close the realization that Thomas' plantation had been transformed into an armed compound was supplemented by bulletins of arriving black guerrillas from Haiti and Santo Domingo slipping through the South Carolina coast. By the end of the month the world knew that a slave army of hundreds, perhaps thousands, led by their silent pale general, was camped in the heart of America. By the last days of summer the terrified white citizenry was mobilizing in haste as the country's new president went to Virginia to talk to an old friend.

The president arrived at dusk in a carriage of his own, protected by superfluous guards who could be made short work of by the black troops that spread over the hills beyond the barricades.

Watching from his carriage window the president saw bonfires on the knolls, cotton fields completely uprooted and cleared away for training grounds, free blacks and former slaves with guns and what had once been the plantation slave quarters converted to barracks, food bins and munitions sheds. A white flag flew from the president's carriage top. Another white flag was draped across his chest, though whether it provided a better target than sanctuary became a joke that traveled so quickly among the slavesoldiers that James Hemings had already heard it by the time the president reached the door of the house.

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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 sen-tries 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 re-STEVE E R 1 C K S O N • 289

sent 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 pup-pet, 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 A R C D'X • 290

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 STEVE E R I C K S O N • 291

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 Pennsylva-nia 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.

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 A R C D'X • 292

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 unim-pressed, 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 STEVE E R I C K S O N • 293

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 A R C D'X • 294

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 STEVE E R I C K S O N • 295

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.

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.

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"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 STEVE E R I C K S O N • 297

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 A R C D'X • 298

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.

About t h e Author

Steve Erickson was born in 1950 in Los Angeles. He graduated from UCLA with degrees in cinema and journalism, and over the years has lived in New York, Paris, Rome and Amsterdam. He has pub-lished three novels—Days Between Stations (1985), Rubicon Beach (1986) and Tours of the Black Clock (1989)—and a political memoir, Leap Year (1989), in England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Hol-land, Greece and Japan. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire and Rolling Stone, and he is curently the film critic for L.A. Weekly.