Arc d'X

47

SHE SEARCHED FOR HIM a year. She searched the Arboretum, sometimes returning to Fleurs d’X and the wary glances of the dancers; and then she left the Arboretum and began looking for him in the city. She wandered Downtown and the Market, occasionally sleeping in the street, and even spent a couple of nights in the same hotel, though not the same room, where her mother had awakened to a body many years before. It wasn’t likely she was consciously retracing any steps when she walked up the rock to Church Central. Working in the archives was a priest only a few years older than she, no less alarmed by her than Etcher had been the first afternoon he saw Sally Hemings with Polly in tow; if anything, Polly’s inquiry brought greater consternation. “You have to go now,” the priest croaked, as though the name she’d spoken was reverberating upstairs at this moment and he would be held accountable.

She waited for the archives clerk at the bottom of the rock. When he emerged from Church Central one twilight on a bicycle, Polly followed. He carried a large bag in one arm. Slowly he rode through the city, leaving Downtown and heading east with Polly hurrying along behind at a distance, her big gray dogs dawdling behind her. He crossed the peripheral highway and began pedaling over the lava fields in the direction of the volcano; perhaps, as she followed, she was cloaked in darkness. Perhaps, as she followed, she was cloaked in the rage of her abandonment by the mother’s death and the father’s ego. Perhaps crossing the black fields under the light of the moon in her white dress she would have appeared to the priest, had he looked back, as nothing more than a ripped veil blown over the waves of a black sea, or a robe discarded by a priest at the foot of the road. But no one saw her or the dogs: had she dropped her dress in the midst of the fields and walked naked, in the cloak of her ashy skin, she could not have been more invisible. She never meant to be unseen. She meant, rather, to ask the priest the same question she had asked in the archives. He disappeared in the distance and then returned an hour or so later, gliding right past her as he headed back to the city. Under one arm, where he’d held the bag, he now clutched some papers.

Polly didn’t turn back to the city but pressed onward. She reached the base of the volcano when light began to appear from the other side, and she made out the bicycle’s track as it veered off to the north and ascended the mountain. The track ended in a rocky cove, where she found a red mailbox standing alone with no address or name. The mailbox was empty. At the base of the mailbox was the bag left by the priest; inside were bread and cheese and fruit, water and wine. Her dogs, now thirsty and tired, sniffed at the bag. Polly left it and continued up the trail to the volcano. Not long before noon she reached the highest ridge of the volcano in time to meet the sun coming up the other side. Behind her she could see all of the lava fields and Aeonopolis beyond them and the sea beyond it, the zipper of the train’s tracks heading up the coast. South of the city where the beach twisted was the penal colony, attached to the landscape like a leech.

Below her was the crater. It smelled of sulfur. On the far east side oozed the white molten part of the mountain, the surrounding ground dead except for an occasional shrub or flower, a whimper of green from the black lava. Just inside the crater’s edge, teetering on a volcanic shelf, a tiny hut seemed to grow out of the rock. As the panting dogs ran ahead, sniffing at the crater in search of a lake to drink from, Polly sat watching for some time, once or twice deciding on retreat before she convinced herself she’d come too far to give up. The day began to slide toward the city and the sea. She made her way through the shadows of the crater toward the house.

When she came to the door she knocked quickly, leaving herself no time to change her mind.

Her knock went unanswered. She opened the door and pushed it ajar. “Hello?” she began to call, but it caught in her throat. She stepped into the house. A mattress lay in the corner not far from an unused stove. On the other side of the hut a box of dishes and utensils crumbled beneath the sink. Above the sink a cupboard sagged with the weight of wine bottles that threatened to tumble off any moment and shatter; Polly counted twenty or thirty empty ones rolling along the floor with little red puddles inside. On the other side of the room was another doorway.

A desk sat in the center of the second room, so buried beneath papers and manuscripts and writing implements that not a square inch of the surface showed through. Behind the desk was a shelf of books in old red covers. The binding of the volumes had been ripped apart and the pages were torn and loose, as though attacked by a wild animal. Covering the wall facing the desk was a huge map. Only after she’d studied it some time did Polly understand it was a diagram of the city. Lines were drawn in frantic flourishes from one end of the map to the other, from the volcano in the east to Church Central in the west to a place just north of the city boundaries, which examination revealed to be the Arboretum, crossing at a point of no distinction, a small alley off the Downtown streets of Desolate and Unrequited. Some zones were clearly designated — Sorrow and Ambivalence and Humiliation — and others not, the most confused being the name Redemption, which the map’s author had replaced with Desire, only to cross that out and rewrite Redemption, only to obliterate the first again for the second until all that was left was a crazed blotch of confirmation and denial.

Polly stood looking at the havoc when, without hearing a sound, she knew someone else was in the room. It took several seconds to find the courage to peer over her shoulder. The shadow of the volcano’s ridge rumbled across the floor from the outer doorway to billow up at his feet and engulf him, until all she could be sure of was the cobalt blue of his eyes, as close to the blue of her own as she’d ever seen. They loomed all the larger behind his glasses. It was the only thing of him she recalled immediately; his life had long since been cut loose of not only her memory but his own. His clothes were tattered and filthy. His black hair was splattered with white and gray and, at two or three inches shorter than her father, he might have seemed smaller than she remembered if his humanity hadn’t imploded long before to leave the huge void of him howling at everything within range. The reek of him was more than wine and dirt, it was the stink of a life that had died years before, briefly preserved in ice but having begun its mortifying thaw just in time for her to greet the remains. There was nothing merciful about his impact, nothing compassionate or caring or reachable. She tried to say something. “My name is—”

“Yes,” he said. His eyes finally left her, to assess the situation of his books and papers.

“I didn’t touch anything,” she promised, though she couldn’t imagine how anyone would know, or whether he cared. Taking one or two steps he kicked papers on the floor beneath his feet. He went over to the chair behind the desk and sat down. He paid her no more attention, staring instead at the disarray before him and reaching below the desk to fumble for and hoist up a bottle of wine, which he poured into a dirty glass. She kept waiting for him to say something, even as she tried to think of what to say to him. But he just sat drinking his wine, pouring himself another glass and then another, shuffling about his desk in the dark of the room for a page he could have found only by some mad system. When he lit a candle on the desk and picked up a pen and began to write as though she weren’t there, still not saying a word to her except the yes that had evolved over the minutes into a no, having in the process completely banished her from his awareness, she raised her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. Turning, she ran from the room.

She almost ran from the hut and the volcano but got as far as the front door. The voice that called her back wasn’t his but her own; she slid along the door to the floor and cried, wondering if there was anywhere in time she belonged. The exhaustion of the previous night caught up with her and she fell asleep. It was some time after she awoke in the dark, it was some time after she woke to the red glow that came through the window and she remembered she was sleeping in a volcano, that she also remembered she had passed out by the front door but was now lying on the mattress. In the dark of the night and the glow of the mountain she sat up and searched for a sign of Etcher in the room with her. When she couldn’t find him she went back to sleep.

He wasn’t there either when she woke the next morning, and he didn’t show up until the late afternoon when he came walking over the ridge of the volcano from the west. He was dressed in the same terrible clothes and carried in his arms the bag of food left at the red mailbox on the other side of the mountain. In the hut Etcher didn’t say a word, he didn’t look at Polly at all; but when he put some fruit from the bag in a dusty bowl to set on the floor by the mattress where she’d slept, and she reached to take it from him, he flinched at her hand as though it held a weapon or was raised to accuse him. He hurried into the other room, closing the door behind him. The rest of the day passed without his reappearance.

Over and over she told herself to leave. Every time she convinced herself to go, she convinced herself to stay. She took walks with the dogs around the volcano but mostly stayed close to the house, in case he should emerge from the back room. She had hoped to charm him or ingratiate herself, something she’d been good at since she was small, but he gave her no opportunity. The next day went by and then the next, without one word exchanged between them. As the days passed, her white dress became darker and darker until it was black, and Etcher drank more and more wine until by nightfall she’d look out the window of the house to see him dallying precariously on the crater’s edge, as though daring sobriety to prevent his toppling over. Any moment she was prepared to rush and save him, except that she remembered how he had flinched at the sight of her hands that first day and she was afraid if she sprang to retrieve him he’d take a fatal step back. Eventually he always wound up, by his own maneuvers, asleep in the chair behind the desk, while she lay on the mattress thinking of the Arboretum. By now she knew her father had noticed her absence. By now she assumed her father had noticed some part of him was missing, like a limb or an eye; he’d raised one of his arms by now to blithely observe that the appendage usually found at the end was replaced by a stump. She couldn’t be sure which tormented her more, that he might be wrenched by the discovery she was gone or indifferent to it.

On the third day Polly followed Etcher in the early hours of morning as he set out on another walk to the red mailbox. From the highest summit she watched him leave the papers he’d written the previous night, to be picked up by the priest on the bicycle, who left in return the bag of food and water and wine. Often Etcher seemed so drunk or hungover that Polly couldn’t see how he got beyond the hut’s porch, let alone all the way over the top of the mountain; and one morning after she’d been there a week, when he still hadn’t said a single word to her beyond that first yes, she found him snoring in his chair behind the desk with the night’s tortured pages wadded in his fists. She took the pages and smoothed them out on the floor and set off with the dogs for the mailbox.

Hours later she met Etcher on the way back, huffing and puffing up the side of the crater. Within twenty feet of her he stopped, his furious magnified eyes regarding the bag of food in her arms. “I took the papers to the mailbox for you,” she said. He answered this news with more of his black silence, approaching to take the bag from her. “I can carry it,” she assured him, and for a moment they tussled over the bag until he grabbed it away. He turned back toward the house and she followed in a hush. She had resolved over the course of the days and nights that she wouldn’t go until he told her to. She would outrage him from his wordlessness, if she had to. At the house, in the doorway, he suddenly turned to her.

“Where’s your father?” he said.

“Behind me,” she said, and he looked over her shoulder at the volcano’s horizon, but then realized that wasn’t what she meant. He went on inside the hut. She believed the opportunity was at hand: “I can barely remember you,” she said, directing her words straight at the past. “That’s good,” he answered, and ripped the bag ferociously to liberate some bread at the bottom, taking a bottle of wine from the cupboard above the sink and storming into the back room. For several minutes she stood staring at the closed door, trying to talk her anger into bursting through it and confronting him.

She had a dream that night in which a dead woman who looked much like her lay on the mattress in the corner of the hut where Polly herself was now sleeping. How the woman had died wasn’t clear, and for a moment, when she seemed to turn her head, Polly thought perhaps the woman was alive after all; then the woman disappeared, and Polly’s relief gave way to the certainty that the disappearance and not the death was the delusion. At the end of the dream Polly had the strangest impression she was dead herself, even though her life didn’t yet understand this: the circumstances of her life had gone so awry that ending it seemed the only viable option. Everything in the dream simply seemed so hopeless and involved such futility that suicide wasn’t an emotional decision but a practical one; she didn’t want to do it but was overwhelmed by the feeling that it was the only out.

When she woke, it was as though a noise had awakened her. But the hut was still and she felt entirely alienated from her dream, until she realized it wasn’t hers: rather this dream had smuggled itself from the other room, slipping through the doorway and across the floor to the mattress, where it invaded her ear and ate its way voraciously into her mind. She could see its form in the dark of the hut, like a crustacean from the lava sea outside, skittering across the room. The dogs on the porch whimpered and sniffed at the door. Then there was the abrupt crash of glass in the back room, which gave way to a strange commotion, and she jumped from the mattress and pushed opened the back door, where she half expected to find a battle taking place between Etcher and some beast lurking in the shadows.

Wine ran down the large map on the opposite wall where he’d thrown first the glass, then the bottle. The glass had broken and the bottle lay at the base of the wall gurgling out the remains of its contents. He sat hunched over the desk with his face in his hands and, as though gripped by a seizure, suddenly flailed at the desk so recklessly that the candle was about to tip over and set everything on fire. Polly grabbed the candle. Light darted over the room. In the darting light Etcher didn’t look up, he didn’t move his hands; his glasses lay on the papers in front of him. In the privacy of his hands he said, “Do you know what it does to me to see you?” She had to clutch the candle hard to keep from dropping it; he still wouldn’t show himself, he still wouldn’t look at her. “To see her face looking at me over your shoulder …”

“I’m sorry,” Polly said.

“You’re sorry?” and that released him. His hands fell to the desk and his cheeks were streaked and flushed. “You’re sorry for your face?” The force of his fury seemed to raise him up from where he sat, though in fact he didn’t move at all; in his blind eyes, their glasses still lying on the desk, flashed the last freak moment left of a vision’s halflife from years before, when he loved Polly’s mother and saw everything. “She must have been sorry every day of her life,” he said in a furious whisper. “I must have heard her say she was sorry more times than I could count. She was sorry for her face and she was sorry for her heart, she was sorry for the way everyone told her she had something to be sorry for. She was sorry for the right choices and sorry for the wrong ones and sorry for not knowing which was which, which was almost all of the time. She was sorry for me and she was sorry for the others, but she was never sorry enough for herself except when it was time not to be sorry anymore. Are you here for revenge?”

“Wh-what?”

“It’s a waste of time, if you’ve come for revenge. It’s a waste of time, if you’ve come to hate me. Because there’s no hate you can muster half as good as mine. No revenge you can take half as final as me getting up from this chair and walking out that door and off the edge of the precipice into the fire, a course of action I consider daily, or perhaps it’s hourly. Do you want to be the one who pushes me?”

“I …”

“Come on then,” he said, rising from the chair. He leapt around the desk and grabbed her by the wrist; she screamed, nearly dropping the candle. He pulled her through the front room and out of the house across the porch, past the dogs out onto the ledge, the red mist hanging in the night around them.

“Please,” she begged.

“Do you remember the train ride back, after she died?” A thousand times over the years he must have told himself he was over her. A thousand times in response he must have called himself a liar. Like a wild animal that returns to a habitat it’s never known, but which is its natural one nonetheless, Etcher had come to the mouth of the volcano, and now overlooking the lava he staggered as though to slip over. She screamed again, pulling him back. “It went on forever, all the way back to the city, and you wouldn’t talk to me except to say, like you had a hundred times before, ‘I’m not your friend.’ And then on the station platform you ran to your father and he picked you up in his arms and took you away, and I waited for you to look back at me just once, and you never did. And I knew I’d lost both of you.”

“I was just a little girl.”

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” he cried. In the sheen of the fire his eyes grew wide with the sound of it, as though he could see the admission floating in front of him over the crater, and he wanted to reach out from the void of his life and pull it back.

“You didn’t kill anyone,” she pleaded. “Please come away from the edge.”

“I meant to save her, like I did before.”

“You couldn’t save her either. You didn’t kill her and you couldn’t save her.”

“I was supposed to take care of you. She said, Take care of Polly, and I let him take you.”

“He was my father, Etcher. And I was just a little girl. And I don’t remember much of what happened except that you loved my mother, even then I knew that, and that’s why I’ve come back. And if you hate yourself now then you let me down when I need you most, when I need you to tell me all the things about her that my father won’t or can’t because he never really knew her, when I need to know there was someone in our lives who loved us more than his own life, and that was you. So you have to come away from the fire now, and tell me. Please.”

In the glow of the crater, his face in his hands, he wept. The tears ran through his fingers and down to the ragged sleeves of his shirt. When he finished and came away from the fire he seemed very old to the girl, as though his legs would buckle beneath him, and there was enough of the father in her to find selflessness a revelation, to find the human burden of carrying an old man away from the fire a frightening thing to accept. She sat against the wall as he slept, not at his desk but on the mattress at her feet, spent of his nightmares that plopped one after another from his brain to the floor, scattering helplessly for shelter.