Arc d'X

12

SHE SLEPT A LONG time.

She was vaguely aware of morning and the sun in her eyes. Far away in her mind she thought she should wake up and go, before someone came along and arrested her and took her back to prison, or abducted her to sell her. In her sleep she laid end to end all the dead masters with knives protruding from their gullets. But worse was that in her sleep, the sun sliding across the sky, she missed Thomas, and all she could hear was the rip of his body when she’d killed him, and all she could see was the black moths flying up out of him, and she wanted to gather them all up and put them back inside him and take back the knife and close him up, and feel him drink her as a father drinks a daughter.

When she woke it was late afternoon, and she was on a terrain unlike any she’d seen.

She stood up slowly and looked around her. Her head pounded and she was very thirsty, her life drunk dry. There were no woods. Beneath her feet where she’d slept so many hours wasn’t grass but cold cinder. She was on the ridge of a large mountain; to one side of her, far down below her, stretched a plain of the black cinder, and to the other side was the mountain’s crater. The horizon of the mountaintop was flat, as though its peak had been lopped off by God, and from the pit of the crater beneath her feet rose a steady stream of smoke and the light of a fire.

She was very thirsty. She wondered if someone had picked her up after all and deposited her far from Paris. But she didn’t remember anything like that.

She walked down into the crater toward the light. The fire grew brighter, and soon she came to a house.

It was twilight when she reached the house. It sat on a small plateau overlooking the crater’s mouth, and it wasn’t like any other house she’d known. It looked like no French house, no English house. It didn’t look like any house she’d seen in Virginia. It wasn’t like the house a white man would live in, but closer to the ramshackle slave quarters on Thomas’ plantation, except that it seemed to be made of the very rock of the mountain. On the porch of the house slept two large gray dogs, who raised their heads to greet her. She passed the dogs and paused at the door, afraid to knock; but she was very thirsty, and perhaps someone would give her some water. The crater loomed to her side, its smoke rising and dying in the darkening of the sky.

She stood at the door of the house, her ear pressed close to it. But she didn’t hear anything and finally she rapped her hand on the wood. The door opened, and she saw herself.

She saw herself standing in the doorway, looking back at her. The two of them stared at each other agape; the only thing momentarily reassuring to Sally, the only reason she didn’t scream and run immediately, was that the other one looked as amazed as she. If Sally had had the presence of mind she would have raised her hand to feel if it was a mirror; but she wouldn’t have felt a mirror in any event. Sally instead put her hand to her mouth, too late to stifle her cry; the other one cried out too.

“Polly?” She heard a voice from a back room of the house. At the sound of Polly’s name her first reaction was that it was Thomas’ voice, but it wasn’t Thomas; and then the voice said again, “Polly, what is it?” And then the speaker stepped out from the back room.

Sally had never seen him before. In his midfifties, he was of normal build, not as tall as Thomas but older; he had a wild mass of black hair speckled with white and gray. Thick spectacles made his eyes loom like blue crystal balls. As he tottered in the doorway his dissolution was profound, beyond simple drunkenness, and though Sally was at first relieved and disappointed to see that it wasn’t Thomas, the sight of the older man with the black hair roared out of unfamiliarity into the psychic zone of distant but unshakable recognition, remembered more than prophesied. He looked at her and screamed, in a gasp whose sound died midair. The color of his drinking vanished from his face and for a moment he was on the verge of fainting; the other Sally inside the house stepped toward him as though to catch him. But he caught himself, gazing from one woman to the other, and Sally felt her fear transformed by his own into something they shared that neither of them understood. Now he said not Polly’s name but her own: “Sally,” and he choked on it. Like the earlier cry it didn’t all come out, part of it caught in the ventricles of his heart where it had been a long time.

Sally turned from the door. She ran past the gray dogs and the porch, back up the side of the crater toward the ridge of the mountaintop. She ran down the other side of the mountain toward the black plains. She hadn’t a thought in her head now of water or prison or slavery. Later she would have liked to believe it was a dream; she’d have given anything to believe it was a dream. But at this moment she knew it wasn’t a dream and so she ran parched and exhausted and half out of her mind. She never looked back at the crater or the house or herself standing in the doorway watching her go; when she finally reached the bottom of the mountain she went on running and stumbling across the black plain. Sometime in the night a wagon picked her up. Sometime in the night she felt and heard beneath her the turning of wheels; she felt and tasted on her lips the trickle of water. Into the night she didn’t dream or think at all. The wagon took her back to Paris.

In the early hours of morning she pulled herself off the back of the wagon and again wandered aimlessly as she’d done after burying the carving knife in Thomas’ sleeping body. It wasn’t until she saw Thomas that she stopped.

It was dawn and, pulled by the tides of the city, Sally found herself returned to what was the center of the Parisian moment, the black prison with eight towers. Smoke still hung on the square. Blood had long since overcome the scent of lilac from the perfume shop. People streamed freely across the prison drawbridge in and out of the prison gate; high on the dark red pikes that surrounded the square were the heads of garrison soldiers. Women wept over the cobblestones where their men had died.

Thomas moved from widow to widow, talking to them, holding them in comfort. To each of the widows he gave some money. It reminded Sally of when she was a little girl and one day had seen him seize the whip from a man beating a slave. She sat dazed in the street, amid the glass of the perfume-shop window, watching. Pieces of glass glittered in the dawn sun.

He finally saw her. He stood in the smoke staring at her. When he came toward her she couldn’t help but find his judgment terrifying. He looked at the glass all around her: “You’re going to cut yourself,” he finally said. Picking her up he caught himself on a shard in the folds of her tattered dress he’d bought her; together they watched his hand bleed. As he carried her in his arms she tore from her dress, as she’d once torn from the discarded bed curtains in Virginia, a long strip and wrapped it around his hand. She wanted to fall asleep in his arms but said, “Put me down.”

He put her down. Her knees buckled beneath her and he had to catch her to keep her from falling in the street.

“Three conditions,” she said. “First, I will be the mistress of your house. Second, you will never sell me to another. Third, you will free all our children when they come of age.”

“I trust,” Thomas answered, “you agree in turn not to murder me in my sleep.”

“You’re in no position to negotiate,” she murmured sleepily.

“If I accept your conditions, do you promise to go back to America with me?”

“I promise,” she answered, and only in the last moment, before completely submitting to exhaustion, did she open her eyes to look up from his shoulder at the shadow that crossed his face. Nothing much astonished her now. It was the cloud of black moths descending on them.

Except that it was much greater than a cloud, much more than a plague of moths: they filled the sky from one end of the square to the other and then, as they lit on his coat and his brow and his bleeding hand, the man and girl realized they weren’t moths at all and never had been. He touched them and they crumbled in his fingers. They left a black smudge. After waiting for their dreadful rain since he was a boy of five, he realized with a gasp that they had finally fallen, the ashes of the slave named Evelyn who poisoned her master Jacob Pollroot forty years before.