Arc d'X

16

SOMETIMES EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT the same time, Wade told himself later looking back on this particular day. As he finished the altar shift and was heading back to headquarters, he’d already thought about swinging by to check out the day’s graffiti. But if by any chance he’d forgotten about the graffiti, what he saw at the Fleurs d’X would have reminded him.

Wade knew he was going to have to take a better look at the day’s second dead body than he had the first. For the cops to get called in about a “disturbance” in Desire, it had to be pretty disturbing; what probably happened this time was that someone panicked before cooler heads could prevail. Desire got away with more than the usual shit because it operated out at the edge of the lava fields just barely within — or without — Primacy’s threshold of righteous indignation; the zone’s anarchy particularly manifested itself in a huge neighborhood called the Arboretum, a single unit of chambers, lofts, urban caves and underground grottoes linked by hundreds of corridors and passages that shot off in every direction. The Arboretum’s nefarious activities included a theater, TV arcade, book outlets and, Wade had heard, a floating emporium of forbidden artifacts, most of which had been seized by police during altar-search shifts before making their way back onto the black market. You needed either a map or a very weird brain to find your way through the Arboretum, and since no map existed because no one person knew everything that was in it, that narrowed the neighborhood’s demographics to the very weird. Sailors docked up the coast and drove down across the tip of the lava fields in old bombed-out buses in the dead of night, just to get lost in the Arboretum for weeks.

Wade spent an hour bullying his way through the labyrinth to the Fleurs d’X, where twelve stages and a bar operated twenty-four hours a night, since daylight never invaded the Arboretum. Between the lights and liquor and women the club usually got pretty steamy and crazy, but now it was empty. Bodies on the decidedly rigorous side of mortis probably didn’t do much for business. No suspects were waiting in bed with the dead man this time, just the faces of the girls watching from behind the curtains as Wade walked into the club’s dressing room. The dead man slouched on the bench was more a kid, really — about twenty, Wade supposed — good-looking and muscular, bare-chested and his head completely shaven. Covering his chest was the tattoo of a voluptuously naked woman with the head of a bird, standing in a sea of fire. Something dripped from the birdwoman’s mouth, and behind her was a strange insignia of crossed blue lightning bolts; on the back of the boy’s shoulders were tattooed red wings. His eyes stared openly before him, their terror frozen and eternal; his chest was ripped and his fingernails bloody with his own flesh, as though he had attacked his own body. From the look on his face Wade figured heart failure as the cause of death, but that was another thing for the coroner to work out. As with the body in the hotel bed earlier this morning, Wade had never seen this guy before. The nice thing about a bald kid with wings tattooed on his back was that if you’d ever seen him before, you sort of remembered later.

Behind the bar a tall darkhaired woman named Dee, whom Wade had known as a stripper herself in younger days, poured him a drink. He waved it away. “Somebody panicked,” he said, “that’s how I figure it.”

“You going to get it out of here?” said Dee.

“How long’s he been dead?”

“All night.”

“Outside in the real world,” Wade explained, “the night’s just starting. In this place ‘all night’ means anything.”

“I would have dumped him myself except I heard someone called the cops,” Dee said with some disgust. “I decided it would be better if there was a body when you got here rather than me trying to convince you there wasn’t.”

“Ever seen him before?”

“No.”

“The girls?”

“Nobody knows him at all. Things broke up fast when it went down. Jenny, one of the dancers, became hysterical. It made for a shitty evening.”

“So who called it in?”

“You’re the cop, you tell me. Could have been anybody.”

“Your girl?”

Dee shook her head.

“So exactly what happened?”

“You’re the cop, you tell—”

“Is this Jenny here tonight?”

“I didn’t want This Jenny around. I told you, she was hysterical.”

“It would have been a lot easier for both of us if I could have asked This Jenny a few questions.”

“She doesn’t know anything anyway,” Dee said, “she never even talked to the guy. You going to drink this or not?” She answered her own question and drank it for him, and then poured another. “Actually, Mona’s the one who talked to him.”

“Who’s Mona?”

“Right there.”

She pointed to the nearest stage and there was Mona.

Wade had never seen her at the Fleurs d’X before. Nineteen years old, her long blond hair tied back, she stood on stage in nothing but black stockings and black high heels and the pink light. Dee waved her over and Mona came down off the stage, fanning her face futilely with her hand; unlike the other girls, she didn’t appear remotely alarmed by Wade. When she smiled, with her head tilted to one side like a child, she had little baby teeth, perfectly lined up and white. She smiled at Wade now, who gnawed on his cheek. “The guy in the back room,” he said, “with the tattoos.”

Mona leaned against the bar, one arm folded beneath the other, fanning her face with her hand. “Tattoos?” she said.

“The pictures,” Dee explained to Mona, pointing to her chest.

“Yes,” Mona nodded, understanding now, “it was the pictures,” and Wade could tell from the accent she was from the Ice to the north.

“What do you mean it was the pictures?” he asked.

“He said they were changing.”

“The man said the tattoos were changing?”

“He was sitting watching,” and she pointed over at the stage, “and then we talked after. He came back to where we dress,” and now she pointed in the direction of the body, “and I said he couldn’t be back there, it wasn’t allowed. One of the other girls was with me.”

“Jenny,” said Wade.

“Suddenly he was very excited. Very upset. He said the tat …”

“Tattoos.”

“He said they were changing on his body.” She looked down at herself and absently straightened the top of one stocking that came up to her thigh. He was thrilled by her fearless vacancy. “He took his hands,” and she raised her own hands and curled her fingers to show him, “and clawed at his chest,” and she ran her fingers over her breasts, “and tore at the tattoos. I think he wanted to remove them.” She wasn’t unintelligent, she wasn’t without expression. She smiled easily. It was the way she smiled, Wade thought to himself later: with her little baby teeth, vacant of concern and introspection and moral contemplation. As though she could search her soul in seconds flat and find not only everything she was looking for but everything she needed, because all she would ever need was the means that would further whatever needs were immediate, to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty, to cover herself when cold and fan her face when hot, to sleep when tired and fuck when excited, to use the world to survive, vacant of artificial meanings and tomorrows that existed nowhere but in people’s heads.

Outside Wade radioed in to headquarters to send another squad car for the body. No one but Wade would have thought much about the dead kid with the tattoos, writing him off as insane or under the influence of some new bootleg drug; but when Wade heard the story about a man who believed tattoos changed on his body, he knew he had to go check the graffiti. He didn’t expect the graffiti to have any answers but he did expect, as had been true every day for the past year, the graffiti to have changed like the tattoos. Wade crossed Desire. In his mind he entered Mrs. Hurley’s cell and took her as Mona watched, smiling vacantly with her little baby teeth and her head tilted to the side. Wade decided to go by Mrs. Hurley’s address; he parked at the center of the circle in the dark, trying to remember which unit was the one. He turned off the lights of his car. For ten minutes he watched the windows for a glimpse of someone who might be Gann Hurley or Sally’s little girl. In several of the units people kept glancing out at him.

Finally Wade left the circle and then Desire, driving along the highway that surrounded the city of Aeonopolis. He was happy to leave behind him the sound of the sea against the cliffs to the west; it was replaced by the sound of the evening train on its way into Vagary Junction, passing through the control zone that divided the city from the outlands. On one side of the highway to Wade’s right was the silhouette of the Arboretum rising in the night sky, on the other the lava fields to the east and beyond the lava fields the looming shadow of the volcano, its peak flat as though lopped off by God. From the mountain, where a steady stream of smoke could be seen rising by day, came a red glow from the crater’s fires. Soon Wade reentered the city. He passed the barbed-wire entry points of several districts and drove into Downtown, finally pulling up to the corner of Desolate and Unrequited. He got out of the car and made his way down the cobblestones of a small alley.

The city was full of graffiti. By ordinance, defacement was designed into the basic urban blueprint; architects built it into their work. In this way Primacy confronted chaos, disorder and revolution by preempting the result of their vandalism, devaluing if not utterly obscuring the occasional scribble of outlaws. Primacy’s graffiti took the form of sloganeering, nursery rhymes or, most often, scriptures; but this one Wade had noticed a year before: SONIC MEN, ANONYMOUS GOD,’ it had read, in dark blue block letters. Wade never really understood what it meant. He only knew that SONIC MEN, ANONYMOUS GOD wasn’t the sort of thing the priests over at Central were cooking up. He directed Mallory to direct someone else to remove it. The next day Mallory reported his man couldn’t find it. Since he never passed up an opportunity to make an idiot out of Mallory, Wade personally dragged him out to Desolate and Unrequited and down the cobblestone alley to point out the graffiti and ask how anyone could have missed it. Except that now, in the same dark blue block letters, it said BLUES FALLING DOWN LIKE HAIL.

There was no doubt it was by the same hand. Wade walked up and down the alley in search of the previous day’s graffiti, feeling more and more foolish; inspecting the wall, he scraped at it with his fingernail as though the sonic men and anonymous god lurked beneath the granite surface. But there was nothing underneath. The message had simply changed.

It continued to change over the next year. Every day that Wade went by the alley at Desolate and Unrequited, the graffiti was different. Old letters disappeared and new ones appeared, or old ones rearranged themselves to form new words. Wade didn’t mention the graffiti to anyone or try again to have it removed; since it was always changing, no one could exactly accuse him of neglecting his duty. The messages, after all, were removing themselves. He wrote each down, one after another, in a log he kept. Each came to seem somehow more seditious than the one before, even as each became more obscure, until finally there was one he didn’t understand at all: ICH BIN EIN BERLINER.

So when he heard there was a man who claimed the tattoos on his body were changing, Wade didn’t entirely discount it. Tonight, stumbling down the dark alley without any other light, he searched for the graffiti by lighting one match after another and tossing them away as they singed his fingers. The last message had been the rather vague and irritating THE RETURN OF THE QUEEN OF WANDS. It seemed urgent to Wade not to miss whatever the graffiti might say today of all days; he found the corner and was down to his last match. He struck the match and held it up to the wall, and was immediately disappointed by the most innocuous and meaningless bulletin yet. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.

“You’re running out of ideas, my man,” Wade muttered out loud. In his dismay he forgot about the burning match, crying out when it reached his fingertips and flicking it in the air where it fell like a dead firefly.