Arc d'X

29

SHE WAS SITTING UP in bed the next day. Three days later she rose from the bed for the first time since she’d fallen ill. Gann returned with Polly. Etcher returned to Church Central.

It was only for a brief moment that it struck Etcher as odd, to be history’s file clerk. He barely took notice of the priests. Over the days and then the weeks, they circled him with the solicitous respect that’s always accorded a wild sick animal right up to the opportune moment when it can be destroyed. Only after some time had passed did Etcher notice they brought him no forms or papers to file. Quickly his job turned into being some sort of custodian, a watchman on the lookout for anyone who trespassed into his light; for days and then weeks he sat among the archives doing nothing but staring out to the Central lobby. He was thinking about the limitations of his view when his presence was requested upstairs.

In the white room, around the crescent table, they were seated in their half-circle. “We were just wondering,” said the head priest, “if you’re ready to return the books now.”

“I was giving that matter some serious thought this very morning,” Etcher answered.

The priests looked at each other with anticipation. “Really?” asked the head priest.

“I’m ready to begin right now, as a matter of fact.”

“This is very good news,” the head priest said after a moment.

Etcher reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to the priest, who unfolded and studied it for several minutes.

“What’s this?” the priest said.

“Page one.”

The priest continued studying the paper in his hands. “Page one,” he repeated, almost absently.

“Tomorrow I’ll give you page two.”

“Do you mean to tell us,” and it was difficult to be sure without his glasses, but Etcher supposed he heard in the priest’s voice a rising hysteria that struggled for control, “that you’re going to return the books page by page?”

“I’d like a window,” Etcher answered.

“What?”

“A window. In the archives. The view is limited, staring out at the lobby. There’s no light in the lobby. I’d like a window. Can you do that please? If you put in a window, I’ll bring you pages six through nine perhaps, or eight through eleven. A window on the light. A window on the sea.”

A month later, after they had put in the window, he decided he wanted to move the archives altogether. He had them relocated upstairs in the northernmost part of Central, where he could see in one direction the sea and in the other direction the volcano. Here he could always smell the wine in the air, which rolled in with the ocean and bubbled hot in the volcano’s crater.

So Etcher had found his light, having been fired by love to defy God and seize history. And the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History trickled back to Primacy page by page, in no great rush, since Etcher well understood that when the day came years later that the last page had been returned, his life would be over, there would be no more history left to protect him from Primacy, in the same way that if the return of the pages was to stop there would also be nothing to protect him, since there would be nothing for Primacy to lose by ridding itself of him. Everything came down to a trickle of pages. The trickle couldn’t be either too fast or too slow. Sometimes, for a window, sometimes for a new view of things, the pages returned in threes or fours, occasionally half a dozen at a time. There were, after all, close to fifty thousand; Etcher could occasionally afford to be generous. It was important to instill hope in the priests. It would be dangerous if they should feel overwhelmed by the futility.

Etcher lived with the woman he loved, in the way he had once come to believe he’d never love again, and with her child whose love he coveted beyond what was possible, beyond what was possible for a man who would be her father if he could, and could never be her father no matter how much he would.

In the haze of his life without glasses, everything was wine and light and pages. But when the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come to Etcher. And when he woke from them, the light wasn’t the same.

In the first dream, nearly a year after Etcher had left his marriage, Sally was sitting on the floor, her knees pulled up under her chin, and she was talking. She told him, in this dream, that she was in love with another man.

He woke from this dream and discounted it. He discounted it even though, somewhere in the back corner of what he’d come to know, he understood that this dream was the expression of an inkling. But he discounted it and didn’t think about it again, until the very next night when he made love to Sally and there slipped from her lips a name that was not his, slipped so clandestinely she wasn’t even aware she’d said it. But Etcher heard it, unmistakably. “Thomas,” she whispered.