Arc d'X

28

THE FIRST NIGHT HE went to see Sally, after she’d moved into the new unit, the door was answered by her tiny incarnation. She was three feet high, the replication of her mother but for the fire of her hair and her eyes, which were as blue as Etcher’s own. For a minute Polly stood looking up at him, considering his presence. Then she slammed the door. It took him another minute to work up the courage to knock again.

He hadn’t known many children in his life. He had never been much of a child himself, cocooned in the otherworldly blur of entirely too much reason and silence that missed the point of tantrums and manipulation. The child who greeted Etcher at his lover’s door was just beginning to learn the power of tantrums and manipulation, in a never-ending fight to win the fleeting attention of a self-involved father and haunted mother. She was ready to draw the line at Etcher. She recognized immediately that he was out of his element, and at her mercy. She was charming, hilarious, beautiful, brilliant, strange and shrewd, but she was not merciful and, worse for Etcher, she was two. Like any true barbarian, she’d ruthlessly exploit Etcher’s essentially civilized nature by which civilized people ultimately perish. Across this breach there was nothing left for Etcher and Polly but to bark at each other.

Struck by the vision of a dog in a forbidden children’s book that her father brought home from the Arboretum one night, Polly had the new interloper read her the story from front to back and back to front, over and over, while she barked each time a new dog made an appearance. She commanded Etcher to draw pictures of more dogs, rarely to her approval, until the circle’s obelisk was plastered with them, chartreuse and purple and aqua dogs wet with the spray of the sea and the dew of the Vog. “Dogs, dogs, dogs!” she chanted, marching around the room, until finally he rebelled: “No more dogs!” he snapped and Polly exploded in laughter, the sound of his breaking point music to her ears. Her laugh was so big for such a little person and so untamed that he laughed too, and the more she laughed the more he laughed, and the more she laughed in return. Over time he came to impose order. Over time he came to be for Polly the agent of order. In the presence of her mother she rebelled against it, but when it was just the two of them, Polly and Etcher, she submitted. Then her rebellions took the form of crawling up into his lap, peering into the mammoth blue eyes behind his glasses, and solemnly announcing, “I am not your friend.” He refused to mollify her frustrations. He refused to attend to her tantrums or humor her manipulations. He’d leave her in the middle of the unit screaming her head off while he went into the altar room and closed the door behind him, leaving it ajar just enough so that she knew she hadn’t been deserted.

As each crisis passed, a new order took hold. In the doorway of the unit Etcher would watch her fearlessly chase the seagulls across the white circle in the bleary sunlight from behind the clouds. In the blast of the white circle she’d lift her little arm and, with one little finger, point at the vision of the gulls in rapt silence, as though witnessing in them something no one else could see, a secret revelation glimpsed amid the clockwork of the real, between the gears and wheels, to be forgotten when she was older and knew more, and understood less. Between Polly’s order and Etcher’s, no-man’s-land was the time between waking and sleep, between real and dream, when the two-year-old lay in the dark and, if sleep didn’t come immediately, called out to anyone who was there. Her bed was filled with so many little animals it seemed impossible to Etcher anyone could sleep there. It also seemed to him a sign of the little girl’s possessive aloneness, in a little world that was always filled with people of whom none could be counted on to stay more than a passing moment.

More and more it came to be Etcher who was there when she called. Polly’s father was off with the theater, often unseen for days. Polly’s mother would take her jewelry box over to a neighbor’s and try to work, eking out an existence for her and her daughter. When Etcher took Polly in his arms and carried her out into the circle at night, walking around the obelisk while Polly searched the Vog for the sight of a star, she clung to his neck like someone who had felt the earth shift beneath her too many times and had learned within moments of her own birth how sooner or later everything passes away. She clung hard, silently. Sleep did not loosen her grip on him. And yet in the night when Polly called for her father and he wasn’t there, when she called for her mother and she wasn’t there, the appearance of Etcher at her side was small consolation. Etcher never quite got used to Polly crying at the sight of him because he wasn’t her father. He never got used to the fact, even as he came to understand it, that no matter what he might do for Polly, the sight of him could never delight her, could never make her heart soar, could never bring the spark to her eyes as did the sight of her father. He never quite got used to having the responsibility of being a father without its glory; he never quite got over the small fantastic hope that maybe she’d somehow gotten from him her blue eyes, which she shared with neither her mother nor father. He was never quite sure exactly when it first broke his heart to realize that Polly wasn’t his, and never could be.

There was no doubt that Gann Hurley adored Polly more than he adored anyone else in his life or world. He adored Polly for the way she was an extension of him; he adored her for what of himself was in her. Perhaps, Etcher thought, it was this way with all fathers. Hurley had married Sally, after all, for the child she would give him. He had insisted on the child and, because Sally couldn’t stand to be dispossessed, she gave him his child. Gann’s passivity was of a different strain than that of Etcher, who hoped to move through his own life upsetting it, or anyone else’s, as little as possible. Gann consumed lives. His passivity was the vacuum into which lives were sucked. If someone had pointed out to Gann that in choosing to have this child he’d made a fundamental choice about the rest of his life, a choice that entailed a fundamental sacrifice of himself, he would have been confounded if not contemptuous; he would have considered the suggestion that something of himself had to be given up to fatherhood a blow to his integrity. Because his world spun so utterly to his own gravity, reasoning with him as to the wisdom of its various revolutions was like arguing with the sun, with which Gann felt a certain kinship.

Much later, when everything came apart, Gann would look at Etcher in disbelief and say to him, “You went through all of this for a woman?” Maybe this was his retaliation for Etcher’s having taken his wife, though Gann would never have seen the situation as Etcher’s taking his wife, even if that had been the situation, which it was not: it was that his wife had left him, a version of events Gann also rejected. But that Etcher had come slowly but surely to absorb Gann’s responsibilities, that Gann came to live off the fitful sense of honor that Etcher’s love created, was the price of Etcher’s folly. If lives were to be used, Gann was certain that Etcher’s particularly cried out for it. Gann obliged him. That it often came to be Etcher who put the food in Polly’s mouth and the clothes on her back and a roof over her head was only the result of the role Etcher had chosen for himself; no one had chosen it for him. And if Etcher could never quite understand how Gann could live with that, he nonetheless couldn’t completely disagree with it either, the role being the appropriate price for what Etcher saw at the end of his particular night, the glimmer of light that might be happiness. He had felt himself turned alive by not one woman, but two.

Now, with all his power, he ran for that light. Every moment was shot through with its possibility. In so running he would hurl himself into a new life and a new Etcher, because he never before had really believed in happiness; his rush toward the light was the leap of faith of one who had never before had faith. In the pandemonium of his love he arrived at the archives late and left early, carelessly filing the forms and papers however it amused him. He never craved a drink. In her bed at night, in the contraband love stolen within inches of her sleeping child, he smelled the wine of her and the ash, he smeared himself with her until his body was black with the cinders of her soul. He got on his knees before her and hissed her name in the archway of her womb, and took in his teeth the bud of her blistered dreams. He never relented. He ignored her pleas to stop. He parted the fur between her thighs and slipped his mouth over her red silk bell that rang at the tip of his tongue. “No, please,” she moaned centuries away on some unfathomable street of no numbers; and it was his new power that he loved her so much that her no meant nothing to him. On into the night nothing of him moved but his tongue in her, nothing shook his grip of her body or the seizure of her breasts when there trickled down the uterine avenue the gorgeous bitter oil of her black egg. The taste of it flooded his brain like the drug of a star. He said her name. He said it into her, it wound its way up inside her. It hung in the center of her and encircled her heart, sealing off all means of escape, it caught in her throat and filled the back of her mouth. It bled into her eyes and she saw her own name before her written in his terrible alphabet. It crashed the barricades of what they believed and invaded the realm of what they dreaded until for him there was nothing anymore to dread except the limits of his voice to speak her name, the limits of his mouth to swallow what her body flushed onto his lips, the limits of his fingers to hold her fast until he’d pleased her beyond what she could bear. And in those moments on his knees before her he understood how love made a person whole by obliterating him, how it made a person bigger than he’d ever been by taking from him everything he thought he valued, how it could touch a person with the biggest and most obliterating determination of all, the conviction that he could die for someone, that he would die for her.

For Sally those moments were excruciating. She couldn’t remember Gann having ever given her an orgasm or having ever given any indication he cared to; now she clung to some uncomprehending unworthiness, never believing herself deserving of the climax to which her new lover dedicated himself. When the no slipped from her lips at the surge of her body onto his own lips she had no idea what it meant, though she had the sense of having been pleased like this before, and of how the orgasm was at once a transcendence she never believed in and a capitulation she could never forgive herself for making. In the dark she tried to make out the place and time into which these climaxes hurled her. In the dark she tried to make out the name and face of the man who knelt before her. She was overwhelmed by his insistence on beginning his life anew. She could barely stand the burden of his happiness. She could barely live up to the possibilities of her own happiness. He gave everything and took everything, and since she couldn’t get over the feeling that, where he believed there was everything, there was in fact only nothing, the fraud of it filled her with remorse. She knew, in the dark delirium of his pleasing her, that she’d been borne out of being owned into this blackness where she owned him; and in that blackness the one clue to who she really was was there right in front of her, and farther from her reach than ever. And thus what she released onto his lips from the center of her was the echo of a distant memory that would determinedly abort the birth of the person in her who had sworn never to be owned again. She wouldn’t settle for happiness without meaning. She clutched his black hair that fell across her thighs. When his tongue found in her the clearing where the small child waited, in the embrace of the small child’s arms was a small white baby seagull not yet strong or knowing enough to fly from the blinding white circle that engulfed it. Like the tragic alchemy of her face, by which her beauty was released by sorrow, Sally could only fly alone. She could not fly with the only lover she’d ever known who believed in her wings.

Three months after her affair with Etcher began, Sally became mysteriously ill.

It began in the middle of her, in the small of her back, as if the small white seagull was growing inside and beating its wings for release. For some time it was merely pain, and then one morning it overcame her and she collapsed. For an hour Polly wandered the unit, absently playing with this toy or that and crying to her unconscious mother; finally she opened the door and wandered out into the circle, where Cecilia the neighbor saw her. Cecilia went out to talk to the child. “Mama’s sad,” Polly told the woman. “Well, let’s go see what she’s sad about,” Cecilia answered, taking the little girl’s hand. Cecilia found Sally shuddering on the floor. When Etcher returned that night Sally was in bed, the pillow beneath her wet hair a ring of sweat. What dismayed him most was her whiteness. She was as white as anyone he’d ever seen in the Ice. He held her all night to conjure the blackness back into her; in her ear he coaxed her with advice, he beseeched her to breathe the night deep into her lungs, that it would flush her body with the tinge of twilight. The next morning she seemed to have rebounded.

But that night she was worse. Etcher returned from work to find Polly alternately poking at her mother’s somber daze and playing with her mother’s jewelry, having strewn them from one end of the unit to the other. Now Sally was white like ice itself. Her lips were cracked and her hair was matted; the black lines of her eyes and mouth were the very scrawl of death. One moment he’d touch her and she was clammy and cold, the next she was on fire, and she was only fleetingly aware anyone else was there. Polly began to cry. Etcher was astounded. He scooped up the child and wrapped her in the tiny pink blanket of her bedding and paced the floor with her as Sally moaned to the sound of her daughter. “Why is Mama crying?” the little girl bawled. After almost an hour she finally fell asleep. Sally croaked with thirst. In the fit of her fever she hurled her blankets off her. The sheets of the bed were soaked beneath her. Etcher lifted her from the bed and set her on the couch as he plundered the various drawers and shelves for more bedding. He changed the sheets and put Sally back to bed; now she was freezing. He buried her with blankets and laid himself across her. She shook violently beneath him.

It continued all night. All through the night Sally thrashed in a rage of heat and cold, as Etcher would lift her from the bed and remake it, changing the sheets that were wet with her sweat. His hope was that she would expel the disease in the torrent of her fever; he held her so close and she was so hot that their embrace seared him, and when he wasn’t holding Sally he attended to Polly, who woke hourly through the night and called to her mother. When her mother didn’t come she cried. When she cried Sally stirred from the sleep that Etcher spent the night fighting for. At dawn, when the little girl tumbled from bed and came over to pull her mother’s hair, Etcher bathed and dressed Polly, fed her some breakfast, and took her to the neighbor. “Help me,” he begged.

“Where’s her father?” Cecilia answered, taking the child.

For the first time Sally seemed to sleep peacefully in the morning light. Etcher, allowing himself to hope the crisis had passed, crossed downtown on the way to Central; he didn’t make his usual morning stop to see Tedi. At the archives in the early afternoon he was gripped by a sense of something ominous. He took the lift up to one of the offices on the next level, where he found one of the priests. “I have to go now,” he told the priest.

“What are you talking about?” the priest said, taken aback.

“I’ll return when I can.” He had found a new capacity for ruthlessness in his life. It was part of a new power that didn’t allow for second-guessing in the matters about which he’d found a new determination. When he returned home, a moment beyond the door’s threshold he discovered a metamorphosis taking place. Laid out on the bed she was drained of color or cognizance. The blood in her was as still as stone. She was lividly caught in some abyss that denied Sally Hemings had ever existed. He put on his coat and went to the next circle and found a doctor.

The doctor came back with Etcher. He took one look at the woman on the bed and said, “She’s dead.”

Etcher gazed calmly at the doctor. “Let me explain something,” he answered, “she’s not dead.”

“It’s in the hands of God,” the shaken doctor protested.

“Let me explain something.” Etcher looked down at Sally and back at the doctor. “Things have changed around here, so you can’t be expected to have known. I’ve been running for the light, is the thing. I’ve been running and I’m almost there, and the light isn’t going to flicker out just at the moment I reach it. It’s not going to happen that way. You have to take into account the new power. You have to take into account the new capacity for ruthlessness.” He said, “There’s been a shake-up, so to speak.” He pulled the doctor down to his knees. “God works for me now.” He thrust the doctor’s face into Sally’s, whose eyes were open and still. “Listen: she breathes.” The doctor listened, terror-stricken. “You can’t be expected to have known,” Etcher assured him. The doctor and Etcher watched Sally for a long time.

She breathed.

The rest of the night Etcher kept the doctor there by the scruff of his neck. He pressed him into mixing concoctions and formulae; but the doctor, at a loss as to what was wrong with Sally, couldn’t treat her. Finally, when Etcher lifted Sally from the bed in order to change the sheets for what seemed the hundredth time, he turned around to find the door wide open; the doctor had made his escape.

Not long after, the doctor returned with the police. The cop in charge was a small wiry man with red hair and a mass of bandages where his nose used to be. The sound of his words seemed to leak out of everywhere but his mouth, which now jagged sharply skyward; there was no way for Etcher to know he’d seen this cop before, in the lobby of the Church in the middle of the night. The police left the doctor with Sally and took Etcher crosstown, up to the rock.

At the rock, Etcher was met by the priest who had left his key in the vault door months before. He didn’t say anything but took Etcher by a lift to a top floor of the Church, where Etcher had never been in the nine years he worked as a file clerk. The door of the lift opened on a long hallway, at the end of which were two open doors and, beyond them, a white room. The priest led Etcher to a small office off to the side of the hall, where another priest in a white robe was sitting at his desk waiting for him.

Etcher had seen this priest before, at one time or another. He’d never spoken to him. The priest in the white robe looked up at Etcher from his desk and motioned for him to take a seat. The priest who brought him disappeared.

The priest in the office was curt and officious. “You’re Etcher?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been working here for a while, haven’t you, Etcher?”

“Yes.”

The priest wasn’t looking at Etcher. He was making notes on something that had nothing at all to do with Etcher. “You’re very lucky to be able to work for the Church,” the priest said. Etcher, thinking this over, didn’t say anything. The priest looked up. “Do you want to keep your position as an employee of the Church?”

“I’m not really sure,” Etcher said. “Actually, I’ve been giving this matter some thought.”

This wasn’t the response the priest had expected. “You’re not sure?”

“Well …”

“There are reports, Etcher, that you’ve been acting rather strange lately. There are complaints about your recent work habits and behavior.”

“Complaints?”

The priest stopped taking notes and put down his pen. “Do you find this amusing?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, I haven’t thought about whether it’s amusing. In the larger scheme of things it might appear amusing. At some later point, I mean.”

The priest studied him.

“At some later point, it might—”

“Be quiet.” The priest had thought this was going to be a routine disciplinary session. He resented having to give it extraordinary attention or energy. “I’m putting you on suspension,” he said. “I hadn’t intended to do this. I assumed we would straighten this out in short order. I hadn’t anticipated your attitude, your impertinence. In several weeks we’ll reassess the situation. Maybe then, after several weeks without pay, you’ll appreciate your position. Maybe you’ll take the matter more seriously.”

“The problem is, I need the pay.”

“Yes,” the priest answered coolly, “I understand that. It would have been constructive if you had understood that before we had this discussion. Perhaps next time you’ll be less cavalier. More prudent.”

“You don’t seem to understand,” Etcher explained, “I can’t take a leave at this time. Not until I figure out what I’m going to do. I have a friend who’s very sick.”

“You don’t seem to understand,” the priest retorted, incredulous. “I didn’t say this was a leave, I said it was suspension. It isn’t something that you have any say about whatsoever.”

“Oh no. That’s not true. I have complete say.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known. But things have changed.”

“Changed?”

“I have the books.”

The priest blinked. “The books?”

“The old red ones. From the vault downstairs. The Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History, such as they are.” Etcher said, “I have all of them.”

The priest went as white as his robe. He went whiter than the people of the Ice, he went whiter than Sally Hemings’ disease. His mouth finally curled into a desperate smile. “It’s preposterous.”

“Well, it’s understandable you would think so,” Etcher admitted.

“You’ve taken your life in your hands,” the priest croaked, “if you’ve so much as touched a single one of those books.”

Etcher laughed. “Well, now that you put it that way, that’s it exactly. I’ve taken my life in my hands.” He laughed for several minutes. When he stopped laughing he added, “There’s been a shake-up.”

The priest jumped from his chair and ran from the room.

Etcher sat waiting nearly forty-five minutes. He became tired of sitting and waiting; he was worried about Sally. He had finally given up waiting and was walking out of the office toward the lift when the priest returned. He appeared to Etcher to be in something of a state. “Come with me,” he gasped.

They walked down to the other end of the hall, through the open doors of the white room. Several other priests were sitting behind a crescent table, in front of which was an empty chair. The head of this group, sitting in the middle between the others, said, “Sit down, Etcher.”

Etcher wasn’t sure he’d ever seen this particular priest. “I’ve been sitting for an hour,” he answered irritably. “I have a sick friend.”

“Sit down,” the head priest said again, motioning to the empty chair. Etcher sat. After a moment the priest leaned forward, his hands folded on the table in front of him; the other priests leaned with him. “The books are gone,” he brought himself to say, after a moment.

“That’s what I explained to the other one,” Etcher answered.

“Did you take them?” the priest said. Something was funny in his voice.

“We’ve gone over this,” Etcher told them, shifting in his chair to indicate the priest he had spoken to in the other office, who was now standing behind him in the doorway. “Didn’t we go over this?” he said. The priest in the doorway wrung his hands in response. “We went over this,” Etcher said to the head priest with impatience.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” the head priest said.

“Yes. I’ve taken the books.”

“Where are they?”

“I have them.”

“The police are on their way to your unit at this very moment, to find the books.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t keep them there, would I?” Etcher said.

“We’ll check the unit where you used to live with your wife,” the priest said. “We’ll check the Hurley woman’s residence as well.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Etcher snapped. “The books aren’t in any of those places — you can turn them upside down for all I care. I would have expected,” Etcher said to the head priest, “that at least you had figured it out. I would have expected that at least you knew there’s been a change.”

“You don’t know what those books are.”

“Of course I don’t know what they are. Who’s more dangerous, a man who knows he’s carrying a bomb or a man who doesn’t? The man who knows, and has to get rid of the bomb as soon as possible, because he realizes that any moment it’s going to go off? Or the man who doesn’t know and is walking around without a concern in the world, while the bomb ticks away in his suitcase? The chaos of the situation lies in his ignorance, because he doesn’t know enough about the situation to get the hell out before it’s too late, to give up his control of the situation before it’s too late. Look.” He took his glasses off and put them on the crescent table. He raised his fists above his head and brought them down, smashing the glasses.

The priests sitting around the outer rim of the crescent table cried out, covering their faces with their arms. Their white robes sparkled with slivers of glass and blood. Etcher raised his hands to his face; in the blur of his vision he could make out only the smear of red on his fingers. He lifted his eyes to the white of the room, to the vibrating hum of the sea: it was the light he’d been running for, here in front of him. He could barely make out the priests; the white blur of them wasn’t nearly as impressive as the smear of red. Reaching across the table he wiped his hands on the head priest’s robes.

In the heat of their shock, which he felt on his brow, he heard the gasp of history. He heard history open its mouth and silently gape, no sound coming from it, only the silence that consumed everything around it. If there had been a sound it could have been a cry, it might have been a laugh, most likely it would have been the utterance in which a cry is indistinguishable from a laugh. In a city that lay outside of history, in a church that presumed itself unthreatened by the collision of time and memory that named its own truth, it was the joke of their arrogance that they presumed history might be locked away in a room without a single guard. They presumed their power was such that no one would ever turn a key and walk in and carry history out under his arm. What they now wouldn’t have given to have placed a guard by the door. What they now wouldn’t have given to have put on an extra padlock. What they now wouldn’t have given for a bell that rang in alarm, or a whistle that blew; and what they wouldn’t have given to have entertained a single thought that once told them, Perhaps our hold on history is not so secure or inviolable. Perhaps our confidence in God isn’t so justified. None of them said anything at this particular moment. Maybe they tried to say something and Etcher simply couldn’t, in the blur of his new freedom, see the contortions of their shock or insult.

“I have to go,” he explained, turning to leave. It was almost an afterthought when, pausing in the doorway, he said, “I’ll be back when Sally’s better. When I think it’s the right time, I’ll return the books.” He walked down the hall, took the lift to the lobby, and left the Church and the rock behind him.

He found her alone when he got home. The doctor was gone. As far as he could tell, no police had searched the premises. She was alone in her bed, just barely revived by her terror. The curtain of the window was cracked, the sun had shone in her eyes all afternoon; she hadn’t the strength to move where she lay, let alone get up and close the curtains. Now Sally, sensing a presence, barely raised her head from the pillow to see who else was in the room. Etcher knelt at her side. Her yellow eyes, circled in black, welled with tears. He had to lean very close to hear her, putting his ear to her lips, when she whispered her first words in days. She said, “I’m afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid,” he answered.

She said something else. He leaned so close he was afraid she’d smother beneath him.

“What?” he said.

He could hardly hear her when she asked, “Am I going to die?”

“No,” he told her.

“Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

“Am I going to get better?”

“Yes.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I’m going to get better.”

“I promise.”

“Are you sure?” she cried, the smallest of cries.

“Yes.”

He went to the window. Outside he could see the blur of Cecilia and Polly playing in the circle. Polly looked up just as Etcher was peering out the window. She ran to the door; Etcher opened it. The little girl stood in the doorway awhile and looked at the woman on the bed who was her mother. She was afraid to approach, and then Sally turned slightly, slightly raised her hand to her little girl, slightly called her little girl’s name. Polly ran to her side. Tears ran down Sally’s face. She thought she remembered something somewhere far in the past when she was a little girl herself, a dying mother in a house far away, beckoning her children to her. But she didn’t see how she could have a memory of anything like that, other than in a dream.

When Polly had gone with Cecilia, Etcher drew the curtain closed. He went to the door and bolted it. He piled all the furniture in front of it — the dresser and table, the chairs, Polly’s toy chest. The night came. Etcher took off his clothes and got in bed next to Sally and put his arms around her.

Come on then, he said to the door in the dark. Come on, he said in the dark, where he was freest of all, his phony vision left behind him in shards of glass, caught in the robes of phony priests. He no longer needed to see her to know who she was, the woman in his arms. He no longer needed to see her to know she was beautiful or afraid. Come on, he said to whoever would come through this door, to priests and police, to her child or the father of her child. He said it to the city and to history, to memory and the future. He said it to God, he said it to Death. Come on, and try to take her.

This continued the next night, and the next and the next. It continued through the fever, through the horrible chills and the flashing heat. It continued through the wet sheets that Etcher washed and hung to the obelisk in the center of the circle, along with Polly’s chartreuse and purple dogs. It continued through the sirens, morning and twilight. It continued for five nights, until finally someone knocked on the door. For some time the knocking continued and Etcher didn’t answer. He didn’t rise from the bed until, from the depths of her delirium, Sally cried out, “He’s here.”

“Sally?” the voice outside the door said. It was Gann. Etcher rose from the bed. He looked outside into the dark through the curtains of the window. “Sally?” Gann said again.

“She’s sick,” Etcher finally said in the window.

After a moment Etcher heard Gann say, “What’s wrong with her?” Etcher couldn’t see anything in the dark. But Gann was closer, next to the window.

“She’s been sick for a week.”

“Where’s Polly?”

“At the neighbor’s.”

“What’s wrong with Sally?”

“I told you. She’s been sick. She has a fever.”

“Will she be all right?”

“Go take care of your daughter,” Etcher said. He dropped the curtains into place and backed away from the window. He stood for a while listening to Gann’s footsteps walking away.

On the sixth night, Etcher woke with a start.

He heard the flapping of the wings before he heard her scream. He heard it inside her, trying to smash its way out, that wild ferocity of even the frailest creature when it’s trapped; and she screamed again. He held her. Her body didn’t merely convulse, it thrashed in upheaval, and when he put his face right up next to hers, right close to hers, he could see in the dark and in his blindness the horror in her eyes, the startled realization of something about to be delivered. And he held her thighs and pulled her to him even as she fought him off with a new maniacal power; and in the rush of the black spill of her womb he almost believed, though he couldn’t be sure, since the room was so black and the vision of his eyes was so black and the spill of her was so black, that there flew from out of her a white baby gull. He could hear it rise in the room. He could hear it flying around him shaking the afterbirth from its wings, insistent on its freedom until the room filled with the rip of the curtain and the crash of the window, and the funnel of the night air poured through. And Etcher leapt from the bed and began, bit by bit, pulling the furniture away from the door, the dresser, the table and chairs, Polly’s toy chest, until the way was clear and he flung the door open. He stepped out into the circle and dropped to his knees.

He began searching the ground with his hands. He knew that if he should find there in the glass of the broken window a dead bloody bird, then he had lost Sally. He would have lost Sally and he would have lost the light and he would have lost everything. Only if the bird had made it, only if the bird had broken the bonds of its own wounds and taken flight by a sheer will for freedom, would Sally make it as well; and so he searched on his hands and knees for the rest of the night. On and on through the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, on his hands and knees he searched the entire white circle.

He never found the bird.

He walked back into the unit at dawn. Stepping through the doorway rubble of his barricade, in the light of the broken window and the afterbirth of her fever, in the trail of her own thwarted death, he heard her say, “I love you, Etcher.” And then she went to sleep.