Arc d'X

26

AS THOUGH SEARCHING OUT a forsaken beggar, he spent the weeks afterward looking for her. He left his unit early in the mornings so that he might spot her on the way to Church Central, and he no longer worked late in the archives in the evening, so that he could search for her on the way home. He thought he might see her in the city’s voggy unlit streets, where the only sounds were the engines of cop cars and passing buses and the clanking of deserted trolleys. He thought he might hear her whisper in the Market where the vendors waited motionless and mute behind food stands and clothes racks that buyers selected from in silence. He thought the ragged peddlers who slept with their wagons in the back alleys and hobbled to him out of the sooty magenta dusk might sell him an answer from their pile of lamps and rags and dishes and candles, or trade one for something of value. Several hours a day for several weeks he wandered the city with the graffiti of the church peering at him from the city walls through the Vog and shouting in his head amidst his own voices of subversion and disarray. When he returned to the unit at night he told Tedi he’d been working late, in the manner of adulterers who lie about affairs. They fought about sex. He slept in the outer room and held in his dreams the woman who had come looking for Madison Hemings. He didn’t drink.

He used the channels available to him, sending to police headquarters an official Primacy request for a file on Hemings. When it came back he was only mildly surprised to see that her name was Sally. The cop who brought the file said, “A lot of activity on this one lately.”

Two days later in the white afternoon glare of her circle on the edge of the outlaw zone Redemption, Etcher stood in the shadow of the obelisk. He waited a long time before walking up to knock on the door. It opened before he reached it. The man in the doorway was several inches taller than Etcher, several years younger. He had long dark hair and wore a T-shirt. Clutching one of his hands was the little girl Etcher had seen in the archives several weeks before.

“Excuse me,” Etcher said, “I—” and he stopped, not knowing what to say. All the way across town on the bus he’d tried to figure out what he was going to tell her; the sudden appearance of her husband only distracted him more. “I was wondering if I could speak to Mrs. Hurley,” he said.

Hurley raised his thumb and pointed over his shoulder. “Come on, Polly,” he said to the little girl, and they walked across the circle beyond one of the other units. Sally came into the doorway where her husband had been. She wore a plain dress, the earth and ash and blood tones of which, in the sun behind Etcher, weren’t unlike the color of her skin. Her hair was loose. She was even more startled now by the sight of Etcher than she’d been in the archives. Etcher took off his glasses, rendering her a blur.

“Come in,” she said. Etcher stumbled into the unit and immediately ran into a table. “Are you all right?” she asked. He groped for a place to sit and she led him to a couch.

“My name’s Etcher,” he finally said. “I work at Central. A few weeks ago you came to get some information.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “But there was a priest in the lobby, and the archives aren’t open to the public. I didn’t want you to get in trouble.”

She said, “How did you find me?”

“Well, some things aren’t so difficult when you work for the Church.” He didn’t know what to tell her and he wasn’t sure why he was here. He didn’t know whether to tell her about the entry in the volume he’d taken from the archives. Thinking about this on the couch he put his glasses back on instinctively, which he always did when he was confused, when, for instance, he couldn’t hear what someone was saying. The unit around him was dark, the furniture worn. There was a table on which sat a drawer full of beads and trinkets and small silver chains, a pair of pliers and the finished results of some necklaces and earrings. Otherwise the room had been overrun by little stuffed bears and tigers and storybooks and puzzles with missing pieces; there was a small wooden train that went over a small wooden bridge through a small wooden tunnel. The walls of the unit were barren except for pictures drawn with crayons and a crude poster curling at the corners that announced GANN / ARBO.

Sally got up from the couch. “Gann always keeps it dark in here,” she said. She pulled open the window curtains and the light blasted her in retaliation; she put her hand in front of her eyes and stepped sideways into the obelisk’s shadow. She returned to the couch and sat down, the obelisk still casting its black denial across the top of her face. It nearly obscured how sad she appeared, sitting beside Etcher on the couch. She looked as though she would break if she learned one more secret, which was why he didn’t tell her about the entry in the book from the archives, or if she suffered one more betrayal, which was why the news was on the tip of his tongue. He thought the most tragic thing about her was how her sorrow made her more beautiful. It seemed the worst trick of her beauty, that the chemistry of sorrow would make it so much more luminous. Her touching sweet smile was most lovely as the smile that obviously masked heartbreak; it was when her heartbreak was unmasked, as when the shadow of the obelisk dissipated into a gray twilight pool that poured from her face and flooded the unit, that her beauty somehow defied either the rules or definitions of the earth. Etcher could neither bear to look at her nor bear not to.

“Well,” he said, “that was what I wanted to tell you.” They sat on the couch a moment in silence and he thought he should get up and leave. He pointed at the drawer of jewelry, the necklaces and earrings. “Did you make these?” he asked.

“Yes.” She picked up one of the necklaces and held it against her brown neck.

“It’s nice,” he said. At first he was being polite. But he reached over and touched the necklace; she placed it in his hand. He’d never seen a necklace like this. Strange charms and primitive symbols hung from its links. “Have the police ever searched you during an alert?” he asked, and realized how abrupt the question sounded.

“I … don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to be sure. When you’re in the altar room you never know if they’re here or not. No one knows if they even come out to this zone.”

“This is the kind of thing they would confiscate. You should hide it,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Are you from here?” he said, and that sounded abrupt too.

“No.” The certainty of her answer wavered in the air. “Are you?”

“I come from a village far away to the north, up in the Ice.”

She said, “I come from somewhere else too.”

“Have you been in the city long?”

“I — Awhile. As long as we’ve been married, anyway. A couple of years, anyway. We married when I became pregnant. Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have children?”

His mouth was dry. “Yes. May I have something to drink?”

“OK.” She stood and got him a glass of water and brought it back. She sat down and said, after a moment, “How many?”

“What?”

“Children.”

“None,” he shook his head.

“Oh,” she said, “I thought you just said you had children.”

“No, not at all.”

“I thought you did.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Two.”

“Did you tell me that before?”

“I said we got married when I became pregnant.”

“What’s her name?” he asked, although he knew what her name was.

“Polly.”

He drank his water. “I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything. I can go.”

“Gann was just taking Polly for a walk.”

“I hope it’s not a problem, my coming here.”

“No. I’m glad you came.” It immediately sounded to both of them like a strange thing to say. They were moved by it, and uncomfortable. “Have we ever met before?” she asked.

“At the archives,” he nodded, “about three weeks ago.”

“Yes, of course,” she laughed. “I mean, did we ever meet before then?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you want to have children?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because we were talking about children.”

“Tedi wants to have children.”

“Does that mean you want to have children?”

“Uh.” He took another drink of water. “I promised.”

“You promised?”

“Tedi. My wife.”

“That you would have children?”

“Yes.”

“Because she wants it?”

“Yes.”

She looked toward the front door. “You should be sure about what you want,” she said resolutely.

“Maybe you’re never sure what you want,” he said. “When I got married I thought, No one’s ever sure until they do it. If you wait until you’re sure, you never do it.” He realized he had just made his marriage sound less like a capitulation and more like a grand gamble.

“Are you sure now?”

“No.”

“But more sure than you were.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean — Well, it’s strange to be having this conversation.”

“I should probably go.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“I think I said the wrong thing.”

“No. I came by to say I’m sorry about the other day.”

“We’re both sorry a lot.”

“Well, let’s agree not to be sorry anymore.”

“All right,” she laughed.

The altar alert came on.

They were both startled by it. “Is it that late?” she said.

“I forgot about it,” he said. “Most of the time I’m working in the archives and I just hear it in the distance.”

“I guess all the priests don’t have to run into their little rooms like the rest of us,” she smiled.

“No,” he agreed. She got up from the couch and walked over to the back wall and opened the altar-room door. “Your husband and child?” he said.

“Who knows,” she said. She stood in the open doorway. “You can come in if you want.”

He got up and went over to the room, and she closed the door behind them.

In the dark he felt, with a lurch, what he thought was a spider’s web brushing his face. But it was a string, which Sally pulled to turn on the light overhead. This altar room was even smaller than most. On the floor against one wall was a mattress. There was a pillow. There was a little pink horse with a saddle and long green hair, and children’s books in the corner. There were a couple of other books that didn’t appear the sort Primacy approved; Sally retrieved them quickly as though to hide them from view, though there wasn’t anywhere to hide them. There was also a half-drunk bottle of wine, which she now regarded with mortification. She glanced at Etcher.

“Let’s drink some wine,” he said.

“Really?” she said. They sat on the mattress. She handed him the bottle. An altar was in the corner. It was a very unorthodox altar, like the jewelry Etcher had seen in the front room, filled with primitive icons and forbidden fetishes he didn’t recognize. In the center of the altar was a black wooden box with a rose carved on the top. Etcher had been studying the altar awhile when she said, “Probably not what the Church has in mind.”

“It’s not your regulation altar,” Etcher admitted. He took a long drink from the bottle. It was the first drink he’d had in several weeks, and he found very satisfactory all the possibilities that washed into his mind with the wine. He realized he’d been sitting there staring at the altar for some time when he said, “We forgot to hide the jewelry.”

“It’s just jewelry,” Sally said, somewhat defensively.

For the first time in a long time, the tide of wine brought the possibilities into Etcher’s mind rather than taking them out. “I’m not the Church,” he said to her.

“What?”

He offered her the bottle and she took a drink. “I’m not a priest. I don’t care about the books,” he said, nodding at the books she had tried to hide. “I don’t care about the wine. I buy my own from a bootlegger.” He waved it all away. “Don’t care about the altar either,” he said, amazed at what the one drink had done to his head. “Do the cops come out to Redemption?”

“Every once in a while you hear of someone put on report or taken in. No one seems to know if it’s an official Church zone or not.”

“That’s because the Church doesn’t know if it’s an official Church zone. According to the Church everything’s theoretically an official Church zone.” Etcher took the bottle back from her. “They’re of two minds. The first is that it’s easier to keep things under control if they try to control the zone, and the second is that it’s easier to keep things under control if they leave the zone alone.” He looked at the door. “I gather your husband doesn’t take it too seriously.”

“The only thing Gann takes seriously is Gann.”

“Will he be back soon?” Etcher asked, still looking at the door.

“I don’t know. He may have gone to the theater.”

“Where’s the theater?”

“In the Arboretum.”

“He took your daughter to the Arboretum?” The slush of the wine in his head was settling just enough for him to take another drink. “Is that a good idea?”

“It’s a good idea if Gann thinks it’s a good idea.” She said, “I don’t mind the searches. I don’t mind the seclusion from everything. Gann never comes in. Sometimes I bring Polly.” She smiled and held up the pink horse with the green hair.

He said, “I like the box.”

“What?”

“The box.” He reached over toward the black wooden box in the altar, then drew back.

“It’s all right,” she said, handing him the box, “you can look at it.” He held the box and opened it; it was empty. “I haven’t figured out what to put inside.”

He ran his fingers over the rose carved on top. “It’s very beautiful,” he said. It was voluptuous in its blackness. At that moment he could smell her next to him; he adjusted his glasses. “Where did you get it?”

“I don’t remember. I thought I had lost it, I thought I’d given it to someone. And then I came home one day and there it was.” She asked, “What’s it like up in the Ice?”

“I haven’t been in a long time. I had to leave.”

“Do you have family there?”

“Yes.”

“I guess you don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“Everything’s white except for the forests, which are dark and go on forever. Everyone’s white, with white skin and white hair, except me. I always had the feeling it was because my hair was black that I couldn’t see, that all the color of my vision rushed up into my hair, which was the flag of my blindness.” He added, “I was in love.”

“I want to live in the Ice someday.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Well.”

“What?”

“Just …” he shrugged. “Is that where Madison Hemings is?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Actually, I assume Madison Hemings is dead.”

“Who was he?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to find out.”

“But how do you know there was a Madison Hemings?”

“I inherited some money from him. The postman brought it, like the propaganda newsletter every month, or the tax bill. It’s all gone now.”

“The money?”

“It just came in the mail.”

“But how do you live?”

“With difficulty.”

“Does your husband make any money?”

“No.”

“But someone must be supporting your daughter.”

“I’ve been working on the jewelry. It’s hard when there’s Polly, she’s at that age where she wants attention all the time. She’s just beginning to figure out she isn’t a baby anymore, and she doesn’t like it. It’s easier being a baby. It’s easier being helpless.”

“But her father.”

“Her father loves her. I wouldn’t want to give you the impression he doesn’t. He wanted Polly the moment I told him she was inside me.”

“You can’t make the money and take care of the house and your daughter all at the same time.”

“It’s hard.”

“It’s not right,” he said furiously, feeling the wine.

“I’ve been thinking about trying to get a stall in the Market. Do you know how I do that?”

“You have to apply to the Church for a license, like getting a unit.”

“Would I have to go through the police?”

“One way or another the application winds up going through the police.” He said, “Perhaps I could help you.”

She said, “They think I killed a man.”

He was less shocked than skeptical, having read the police file. “You’d be in jail if they thought that,” he said.

“Maybe they aren’t sure,” she said.

“They don’t have to be sure. They can put you in jail because they’re as sure as they are unsure, or as sure as they want to be. They can put you in jail because they like the idea. They don’t like the idea or you’d be in jail.”

“I believe I did it.”

“What?”

“I believe I killed him.” She took a drink from the bottle of wine.

“Why do you think so?” he finally asked, not sure what else to say.

“I remember doing it. I’m sure I remember. I remember the knife. I know it was mine. I remember holding it in my sleep.”

“You remember a knife?”

“Yes.”

“You remember killing him with a knife?”

“Yes.”

“But he wasn’t killed with a knife.”

For a moment it didn’t register, then she turned to him. “What?”

“He wasn’t killed with a knife.”

“How do you know that?” she said.

“I saw the police file. It’s how I found you. He wasn’t killed with a knife. He was knocked over the head.”

She began to cry.

“Hey.” She continued crying, shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” he said, a little baffled.

She shook her head. “Why didn’t they tell me? Why did they let me go on thinking I’d done it? Didn’t they know how I felt?”

“Sure they knew how you felt.”

“They didn’t care.”

He felt curiously spent, having divulged to her a secret he didn’t know he had. “This is the Church we’re talking about.”

“It’s hateful.” She sat in betrayed silence.

He said, “I stole a book.”

“What?” she finally answered, preoccupied.

“They keep it locked away in a vault they never open. It’s a history book. But it’s … another history.” On the mattress he slumped beside her. “The history of our secrets.” He was suddenly tired; he closed his eyes. “The history inside us. And I stole it.” He closed his eyes, waiting for her to say something, and when she didn’t he slowly let himself go to the wine’s languid calm. He was only half aware that the glasses fell from his face. He kept waiting for her to say something. He had told her about the book because he didn’t want to leave her alone with her crime. His body was tense but he let go of that as well; he knew he was collapsing against her and he tried to hold himself back. For a moment he opened his eyes and then he shut them again.

He was only distantly aware that it had become dark around him. The light beyond the lids of his eyes went black, and he heard the clicking of the light above him in the altar room, the light attached to the string that he thought at first was a web brushing his face. In the rise and fall of her breath next to him he came to believe that, far away, he heard the sound of the sea against the cliffs. He knew he’d fallen asleep when he didn’t hear the all-clear siren but rather remembered it from moments or hours before. “It’s the all-clear,” he murmured so long after it happened that even he was vaguely aware his murmuring made no sense. “Doesn’t matter,” he told himself, “not in Redemption. Cops don’t come to Redemption anyway.”

“Redemption,” he finally heard her say in the dark, “is the Church name.”

“Yes …”

“Desire,” he heard her say in the dark, “is our name.”

He nodded, though there was no way she could see that in the dark. “It’s dark,” he said.

“Do you want me to turn the light back on?”

“No.” He fumbled for his glasses.

“They’re here.” He felt her hand him his glasses.

“Don’t turn on the light.”

“I won’t.”

“Are they back?” He meant her husband and child. He couldn’t hear anything beyond the altar-room door.

She knew whom he meant. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“We would probably hear Polly if they were back.”

“Can you see anything?”

“Not in the dark.”

“Like me.”

“Maybe someday we’ll go together to the Ice,” she said.

“All right.”

“I meant to say that before. But it didn’t seem right.”

“It seems right.”

“It didn’t seem right, considering everything.”

“Considering everything, it seems right.”

“You should be sure of what you want.”

“I know.”

“I mean, about having a child. It’s too big not to be sure.” He nodded. She couldn’t see him nodding in the dark. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“There’s something monstrous about my life.”

“Of course not.”

“The bigger my life is, the smaller I am in it.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

He dropped his glasses beside him and fumbled until he found her hand.

“I’ve been owned by everyone,” she said, and in the dark he heard the resolution in her voice. “I’ve been owned by this one and that one, my whole life. And the biggest thing I ever did was to free myself. I did it with a knife. I cut myself loose. And now I find out I didn’t do it after all. Do you understand? I find out I didn’t do it. You’ve freed me today of the burden of having killed a man. But if I didn’t kill him, it means I’m still a slave. God damn everyone who’s ever owned me,” he heard her say. “The police and the priests, and Gann, and the one before him.”

“The one before him?”

“Why do I feel close to you? I feel close to you, heart to heart.”

“I know.”

“Redemption is their word,” she said.

He pulled her to him in the dark, or perhaps she pulled him to her. It was better in the dark, that neither one of them would ever know who had first gone to the other. At first he couldn’t quite dispel from his mind the idea that she could see him in the dark even though he couldn’t see her, because he didn’t have his glasses and he couldn’t get over it, the idea that without his glasses he was either blind or invisible. But now that she pulled him to her he knew he wasn’t invisible.

In the black altar room the air was thick with wine. He clutched her dress; its tones of earth and ash and blood, not unlike the color of her skin, ran between his fingers. The feeling of its cotton, not unlike the touch of her body, ran through his hands. His head pounded with wine and blood. For a moment he thought of the glasses, he worried they would be smashed underneath, and then the idea of it — his smashed glasses — went straight to his head like wine and blood. When he kissed her he emptied wine and blood and the freedom of smashed glasses into her mouth.

The air was thick with possession. The sound of the wine bottle against the wall was thick with defiance; and then the crash of the altar in the corner, though it sounded very far away, much farther away than the corner, though it sounded like the distant collapse of another altar in another country, was thick with submission. In the dark he felt her breasts fall from her dress. They fell so heavily it shocked him. He wanted to pull the string on the light above and assure himself it was she. But he knew that even with the light on there would be no assurance because he couldn’t have seen her anyway, his eyes spinning like wild blue suns in the sudden light, all their vision leaked into the black of his hair. He caught her beneath him. As he’d been stunned by the heavy fall of her breasts, he was now struck by the speed of her nakedness: possession was everywhere. It opened itself to him, bared its wrists.

When he took her in the dark of the altar’s ruins they both knew it was more than she’d ever given and more than anyone had ever taken, and that neither was enough. She was touched that Etcher would make love to her so tenderly but she felt no choice except to insist on ferocity: possession was everywhere, and now she demanded it. She’d be restrained by him or, if he couldn’t restrain her, she’d devour him. In their struggle either her best nature, the part of her that spent her whole life coveting freedom, would triumph or her true nature, the part of her that spent her whole life choosing slavery, would abide; and in this moment in the dark she would accept either the triumph or the abiding, whichever it might be, as the truth of who she was, until once again her other nature stirred inside her and she wrestled with its relentless nagging. “You,” she said, because she couldn’t remember his name, “oh you,” she said, waiting for him to claim her. But he wouldn’t do that. The part of him that would enslave her was overwhelmed by the part of him that would free her, if it was up to him to free her, which of course it was not: it had always been up to her to free herself. So he felt her grip him inside, he felt her contractions swirl around his invasion of her; and he would have thought, in the dark, that his hair had gone white, the wine and blood and freedom of smashed glasses rushing to the only moment of him that was real, lashing the uterine passage to that place inside her where nothing is possessed and nothing possesses.

The tears rolled down her face. He felt them in her hair. No light penetrated the black of the altar room, instead the black rushed from her. It poured from the middle of her, more blackness than she’d ever believed was hers, the truth of her rushing out even as the blackness of the altar room became wan with the tears that rolled down her face. It was only at that moment she realized her wrists were tangled in the string of the light above; and now at the moment she slipped from its bondage, in the jerk of her wrists, the room’s light flashed on and off long enough to leave a small rip in her memory through which she couldn’t bear to look, even as her lover saw everything. And there was that suspension again, not unlike the one they had felt when the all-clear siren had sounded. Everything was still, the dark was clear of wine and possession and choices; neither of them could be certain she had said she loved him or he had said he loved her, but all that mattered was that he was sure he had said it and heard it, and she was sure she had said it and heard it, and both were sure it was true. And in the dark there was no telling whether it was wine or tears or blood or the torrent of blackness that passed between them, but in the slick of their love they slipped into each other; and only much later did he hear a little voice on the other side of the altar-room door. “Mommy,” it said, and started to open the door, and then another voice, a man’s voice, said, “Don’t open that, Polly.”

In the dark Sally pulled on her dress. It was intact, untattered. Etcher found his glasses; they were intact, unbroken. But everything else was in pieces. “Sally,” he whispered. “Yes,” she whispered back. Beyond the door a child and the child’s father waited. At that moment Etcher couldn’t be sure he would ever have her again; he grabbed her to him, by her hair. He would have crushed her into him.

She opened the door and the little girl stood looking up at her.

It was night, but the curtains had been drawn again, as when Etcher first arrived. Some of the beads and trinkets of the jewelry on the table had been strewn on the floor, where the child had played with them. Gann Hurley was sitting on the couch reading a handbill. He didn’t even look up; to have looked up at his wife and the other man would have been a concession that whatever passed between them mattered to him in the least, that he could be affected by anything that was beyond his control. At the front door Sally stood holding her daughter; for a moment the little girl looked at Etcher and then turned away. Etcher gazed back at Sally in confusion. “Will you be all right?” he finally said.

“Yes.”

Will I see you again? he wanted to ask. But he was afraid of ruining everything.

He left the circle, and after waiting a long time caught a bus on the road back into the city proper. Whatever I do now, he said to himself on the bus, staring out the window at the volcano in the distance, I cannot do for her. I cannot assume she’ll be mine. I must act on the assumption she’ll never be mine, that it will never be less impossible than it all seems at this moment. I must act on the assumption that I’ll never see her again, except for a passing moment in the street or the Market, and that love has been left hanging in the black space of a small room, and that in the light, with a husband and a child, she’ll feel very different tomorrow, if she doesn’t already. Therefore, whatever I do now ultimately has nothing to do with her. It has to do with the life I’ve been living. It has to do with the man I’ve been and who I am now, without her, and what my life is now without her.

He went home and left his wife.