Arc d'X

32

AT FIRST IT WAS a trick of the wind, the smell of the smoke. In all the years Etcher had lived in the city he had never smelled the smoke of the lava fields, the wind from the southwest blowing the wine of the sea through the streets and in turn the smell of the smoke north. Now he was heading north on the train; in the company of a police entourage. They had seized half a car for his transport. In the dank light of the train one cop sat in the seat across from him, another in the seat behind him, another by the door nearest him and the fourth right next to him. The one next to him was the cop who had come to take him off to Central the time Sally was sick. One didn’t forget him. His name was Mallory and his nose was missing and the whole bottom of his face lurched upward into a scar; it was sometimes impossible to be sure what he was saying, words leaking out of various orifices in the front of his head like the sea that sprayed up through fissures of the earth along the coast or the Vog that rose from the lava fields. The chains that the cops called a rosary bound Etcher to Mallory by one wrist and to his seat by the other. In the pitch of night, whenever one man slumped into sleep, the slip of his hand would yank the other man awake, and this went on until the dawn, each man falling asleep in time to wake the other man. When Etcher needed to use the toilet Mallory accompanied him. When his heavy new glasses fell from his face into his lap, he had to wait until the cop in the seat across from him put them back on.

It was in the middle of the night that Etcher smelled the smoke. The smell began unpleasantly enough but then, no matter how far behind the train left the black fields, it got worse. It went from a distinct unpleasantness to a horrific stench, and it was then that Etcher knew the smoke wasn’t a trick of the wind anymore, it was a trick of the soul, and there was no tricking the soul back. It was then he knew this wasn’t just the smell of the volcano but the smell of what waited for him, a moment far north to which his whole life rushed. This was the very smell of his odyssey into the black and it was the smell of the end, of something dead in him that was caught in this particular crevice of time and wasn’t to be dislodged, but would go on decaying just beyond his reach, just beyond his capacity to work it loose from where it was caught and grasp it and hurl it out of his life forever. When the smoke grew unbearable, when he was afraid he was either going to suffocate or vomit where he sat, he lunged for the train window to open it, jerking Mallory so hard from the slumber that hissed from the various punctures of his face that the cop believed Etcher was trying to escape. Mallory yelled a strange strangled yell. “My God, that smoke!” Etcher cried. The other cops jumped to their feet, subduing Etcher and wrestling him back into his seat. “Please, open the window,” Etcher begged them, and the smoke grew so powerful in his lungs, and his hands were so restrained by the rosaries, that he would have crashed his face through the glass of the window in order to get some air.

Mallory raised his fist to level a blow at Etcher. He stopped only at the last moment, the other cops yelling because the priests had made it clear Etcher was to come back in one piece. “Open the window,” Mallory muttered, lowering his arm. They opened the window. But what came through the window wasn’t fresh air but a new billow of smoke, like the smell of someone being burned alive. “No, close it,” Etcher moaned, now trying to find his glasses which had fallen off.

After six days, only twenty minutes from his home town, Etcher suddenly knew, with a calm utterly mysterious to him, that his father was dead.

He knew he would reach his home and his mother would be waiting for him in the doorway, and she would say, “He’s gone.” And that was exactly how it happened. They came to his old house on a back road of the village, Etcher in chains with his police guard, Mallory opening the front door for him without knocking. Etcher stepped in to see his mother standing there as though she’d been waiting for him. Two other women were in the room crying. For a moment Etcher’s mother was bewildered by the police and the rosary, but then she just said, “He’s gone,” the way he knew it would happen; he’d died only half an hour before, at the moment Etcher knew it. The son held the mother, Mallory hovering over them obscenely by the dictates of the chains. After another moment the doctor came out of the back room. “He’s still back there in bed if you want to go see him,” his mother said. “He looks like he’s sleeping.”

He did not look like he was sleeping. Etcher and Mallory went into the back bedroom and Etcher’s father was propped up on the pillows in bed, and he looked like he was dead. Every impulse of life had fled his face, which was the color of sand; his mouth was slightly open. Perhaps if he’d looked as though he were sleeping, Etcher might have remained to say something to him. He might have said goodbye, for instance; he had thought, on the train in the smoke, of the things he might say, but there didn’t seem anything that had to be reconciled. Wasn’t there always something that had to be reconciled? Wasn’t there always some final breach to be bridged between parent and child, particularly when they’re so different, when Etcher knew his father had long before stopped trying to identify the ways in which his son refused to live between the incandescence to one side of him and the abyss to the other, attempting instead to straddle both, to place one foot in each? Etcher was filled with regret not that there was something he hadn’t had the chance to say to his father, but that his father might have needed to say something to him. When, at the sight of his father’s body, Etcher brought his hand to his mouth with a gasp, he pulled Mallory into the gesture like a marionette.

What Etcher most dreaded now wasn’t the smoke of his father’s cremation. What he dreaded was that the billow of the crematorium would be something entirely different from the smoke he had known for the past six days, something purer and conveying a color of the earth, and then there would be forced upon Etcher the realization that the dark smoke that had pursued him from the city was something else. There was no ceremony. Later Etcher was vaguely troubled by this lack of ritual, though he wasn’t sure why, since all three of them in his family had always hated ritual, and the manner of his father’s death was therefore in keeping with the spirit of his life. Over the days that followed, Etcher became enraged by the chains. He threatened to intentionally hurt himself. “I’ll rip my hands off,” he told Mallory. “You can explain to them in Central how I’m supposed to return their precious books with my hands ripped off.”

The whole time Etcher was with his mother, however, Mallory didn’t take off the chains. He didn’t take off the chains until several days later, when Etcher went to see Kara.

The observatory was as good as a prison, Mallory figured. It was made of stone, with no windows, and only a single set of double doors on the northwest side. The only other way to leave the dome, as far as Mallory could see, was to jump from the top; he didn’t really think Etcher was going to risk that. He knew Etcher wasn’t going to risk anything before getting to Sally Hemings. So at the observatory he took the rosary off, more because he was getting sick of it himself than out of consideration for Etcher, for whom he had no consideration one way or the other. The other cops waited outside the door and Mallory patrolled the dome’s stone circumference, just for good measure.

As they had approached the dome, Etcher didn’t smell the smoke at all, only the surrounding trees and the bite of the air. He had nearly gotten to the doors of the observatory when they opened suddenly and she presented herself, as though to take the offensive against time and confront both of them with the ways in which time had deformed them. Her hair was shorter. She was a little heavier, and older of course. He wore the glasses — if not the same pair — that had so appalled her that last night. He hadn’t come to answer anything between them, and he’d brought no questions. Perhaps he wouldn’t have come at all if he hadn’t believed the smoke was the pyre of everything else ending.

He knew Kara smelled her own smoke. He felt, in the grip of her hand as they sat beneath the opening of the dome looking up at the sky, the desperation he recognized as someone smelling smoke. As calmly as Kara pretended to receive him back into her life, he recognized the way everything was tinged with this desperation: it was all around him in the trappings of a rendezvous, in how she would have taken off her clothes and lain naked beneath the night as she had once before if she hadn’t believed it would send him running from her. They talked. He told her, in terms he hoped were explicit enough to warn her but implicit enough to protect what was private, about Sally. She told him, in terms she hoped would obviously belie her assurance that she expected nothing of him, about what had happened to the sky. It had changed. She had looked up one night a couple of months before and had noticed it immediately. It was just after that dusk which everyone crosses sooner or later, when their remaining days recede before them and solitude suddenly reveals itself to be ghastly and endless. She looked up and it was a different sky. It had different quadrants and different stars. There were different worlds and new mortifying suns. Tonight she clung to Etcher, and to what he couldn’t give beyond some requisite tenderness that he would have owed to anyone, but especially her.

When she slept, he lay in the dark of the observatory staring up at its concrete shell, and on the inside of the dome watched all his memories. They were big and in color, and roared out of so many years before in details he would have thought forgotten beyond the possibility of remembrance. He reveled in the luxury of being able to raise his hands to his eyes without the shackles of the rosary, and take off his glasses and cover his eyes, hiding his face away from the light of the memories on the observatory dome. To his astonishment and horror he found himself silently calling his wardens outside to come drag him away. It seemed that, for once, Mallory took forever. In the dark Etcher whispered to Kara, “It’s time to go,” and had to pry her hands loose from his neck.