Arc d'X

18

IT MAY NOT HAVE BEEN until that moment that Wade knew for certain he was going back to the Fleurs d’X. Even driving Sally back from police headquarters he believed he could resist returning to the Arboretum. But when the small child ran to Sally’s arms, and the mother grabbed her daughter to her breast, Wade reeled where he stood, a huge wavering black blot on the blinding circle beneath his feet. He staggered back to his car. Gann Hurley, tall and thin with long brown hair, stood in the doorway of the third unit watching his wife and daughter.

In the afternoon light the Arboretum was an aberration, something that should have been invisible until darkness fell.

The entrance was obscure, indifferent. At the end of one of the neighborhood’s jutting extensions, cut in a grungy wooden wall about a foot off the ground so Wade had to step up, it was by chance or intention the neighborhood’s single doorway, wide enough for only one person to go through at a time. There was no actual door that opened or closed. Wade walked down a long narrow corridor as the light from outside grew dimmer. Soon there was nothing but blackness.

For a man as large as Wade the claustrophobia was uncompromising. The corridor wound slowly downward and then back up as the distant sounds of the inner Arboretum became more distinct. Through the walls Wade could feel vibrations from far away, the churning of machinery and the hum of unknown music punctuated by garbled profanities, violent outbursts, high female moans. Then the corridor made a U-turn, opening onto a small chamber where a dirty bulb burned high on one wall, revealing two doorways to the left and one to the right, and another directly on the other side of the chamber. The doors on the left and right opened to other corridors to other intersections, eventually leading to the theater, TV arcade, artists’ grottoes and bars, and units where people lived.

The doorway directly in front of him revealed a spiral stairway. Descending the stairs Wade passed any number of other doors; he’d never gone far enough to be sure how many. It had been two or three trips before he realized the sound he heard from the bottom of the stairwell was water, not like a river but a tide that rolled in and out, lapping at the subterranean walls. Deep in the heart of the Arboretum its sensual history was told in the smells of the people who had been there, floors and walls soaked with wine and the juice of lovers’ couplings. There was also the Vog that had drifted in when the Arboretum was layers younger, before its labyrinth had crept inexorably across Desire’s terrain, the belch of the volcano’s most ancient ambitions caught in the Arboretum’s inner sancta and frantically drifting from hall to hall in search of the way out. The same panicked search was shared by the lost ones Wade met as he made his way through the neighborhood, their confusion compounded by the narrowness of corridors that wouldn’t let more than two people pass: anyone crossing Wade’s path, for instance, found he wasn’t inclined to back up. Thus the Vog Travelers, as they were called, spent as much time going backward in the passageways as forward. Sometimes one would mutter to Wade, asking where “the door” was. But usually they said nothing, concealing their plight because thieves in the Arboretum preyed on the Vog Travelers who wandered perpetually until they found exhaustion or delirium.

In all the times Wade had been in the Arboretum he’d never seen a single sign. One learned to count and remember. Deep in the heart of the Arboretum were the drawings of artists who scurried from corridor to corridor looking for bare walls, since honor dictated that no one vandalized the work of others. No one wrote graffiti because graffiti was the propaganda of authority. In the final corridor that ran to the Fleurs d’X, a short squat painter without a shirt, grim colors splattered across his chest, rendered with dimensional exactitude the image of another corridor, which had the effect of providing Fleurs d’X its ultimate camouflage, particularly since elsewhere in the Arboretum was a corridor where the artist had rendered the image of this one, complete with two naked girls leaning in one of the doorways. So Wade, who had been to the club just twenty hours before, couldn’t be sure it was real until he actually stepped into it.

Once again it was almost empty. Three stages were open; no bodies waited in the dressing room. Wade sat down and Dee, who was watching him, motioned one of her girls over to his table. She was small and dark, with breasts too large for her body. “Where’s Mona?” he said. Mona, she answered, didn’t come on for another three hours. Wade considered the political ramifications of whiskey and ordered one anyway, and then another; after an hour a fourth stage opened and after another hour a fifth and sixth. The Fleurs d’X began to fill. Wade was aware he should have been back at headquarters some time ago. But each time he thought of Sally Hemings standing in the white circle with the small child whose hair was the color of fire, he’d call over the small dark girl and order another whiskey as he contemplated her disproportionate breasts, shrinking them in his mind. He waited.

When Mona finally appeared from the back of the club, she didn’t acknowledge Wade at all; she didn’t acknowledge anyone. For a while she served drinks and stood in the doorway where it was cooler, waiting to give her first performance: all the stages were now operating. Wade got up from his table, staggering a bit because he’d had many whiskeys. He went over to Mona’s stage where the seats were full of other men; randomly he tapped one on the shoulder. “You’re in my seat,” he said.

The sailor looked up at Wade. “Fuck off,” he answered.

Wade picked the man up and dropped him on the floor. He sat in the chair while the man thrashed painfully on the ground. Mona smiled at Wade with her little baby teeth; on the floor the sailor continued seething, mumbling obscene comments. Mona laughed. Wade laughed too. He ordered another drink.

The dancers rotated among the stages so that a man sitting at one stage long enough would eventually see all the girls. Wade, however, followed Mona from stage to stage; soon men gave up their seats without having to be removed from them. For each dance Wade put more money on the side of the stage, and after each dance Mona picked up the money. She laughed at the money in the same way she laughed at the sailors being dropped on the floor, and Wade laughed back. There wasn’t any doubt in his mind she danced for him. He could tell by the way her head tilted to the side and she smiled with her little baby teeth when she knelt on the stage and opened herself; he didn’t care so much about her opening herself. He didn’t care so much about the secrets of her body. He did feel affection for the roundness of her breasts, which were not too large; he admired that her nipples were always erect. He understood that she might act as though she danced for the other men, he understood she might smile at them in the same way and show them the same things; she had to deceive them, he understood, in order that they would give her their money. But he knew, with more and more clarity as he drank more whiskey, that her dance for him was special, and a promise, and they could laugh together at how round her breasts were, at how erect her nipples were, at how it sent his blood rushing through him, how it sent his very blackness rushing through him.

They laughed at the ludicrousness of how black he was and how white she was, how pale she’d be to his penetration, as dark as the deepest passages of the Arboretum or the ashen Vog that circulated its hallways. Wade gazed on her vacancy in wonder at how it was big enough to receive the white rage of his heart, the white pain of his having arrested the previous afternoon a woman whose file was white, whose past was black, whose whiteness or blackness was blank. The vacancy of Mona’s soul could receive Wade’s rage and pain without either of them making the slightest impression on her except for the way their sensations pleased her or interrupted her boredom; Wade believed if he could just ravish this blond child in the wide-open spaces of her vacant soul he would not only free himself of the way Sally Hemings’ captivity revolted his conscience, but celebrate it. Mona was the refutation of everything Sally stirred in Wade, including the sound of chains that followed him all day and night. If Wade could have opened up Sally and split her in two, he believed the opposite who would have stepped out of Sally’s dark voluptuous rubble was Mona; at this moment he saw and felt all this even as he couldn’t identify it in the dark. Perhaps all he saw was his anticipation of the time to come when he would wish he’d never laid eyes on Mona. It was, however, Mona’s job to be laid eyes on. She liked the men at her feet; more than anything else it may have been why she danced at the Fleurs d’X, for the way men had to look up at her, leaning their heads so far back it was difficult for them to breathe. They had to gasp for air just to catch the merest glimpse of what she showed them, and it seemed to her an entirely reasonable price for them to pay.

When he passed out, he heard her laughing in his ear. From down in his unconsciousness, as his bulk slid from the chair to the floor, there bubbled up to his mouth a gurgle of laughter in return.

He woke in the dark, the lights of the stage above his head gone dead. He pulled himself up on the chair and looked around at the club, which was empty but for a single dancer on one of the far stages, dancing to a single customer while several other men lay sprawled on the floor to the side. One of the dancers worked the bar; Dee was gone. Mona was gone. Walking out of the Fleurs d’X, Wade held his hands before him as though the doorway wasn’t real but an artist’s rendering. He was almost disappointed when it allowed him to leave.

Sliding around the corner of the passage he continued blindly ahead. He’d gone some way, turning several corners and moving the length of several passageways, before he vaguely realized nothing was familiar. The light and air were dank and the walls close, and suddenly the whiskey inside him lurched to his throat and he vomited on the floor. “How do I get out,” he whispered. He turned another corner to find himself back at the Fleurs d’X, two naked girls in the doorway watching him approach. “Oh,” he said, when he slammed the palm of his hand into one of their faces and it was nothing but a flat wall. He continued to barrel down hallways that became tighter and tighter, becoming more and more lost until he stepped through a doorway and found himself almost tumbling down a hole, catching himself on the rail of the stairwell that had originally brought him from the surface.

Outside the Arboretum, in the Vog of dawn, he lay across the front seat of his car. Before he dozed off he promised he would never see her again. It wasn’t a prayer; Wade didn’t pray, one of the few acts of subversion he allowed himself. I’ll never see her again, he repeated, and then asked, Her? wondering to whom he made the promise, and which of two women he meant. At police headquarters no one said anything to him. No one asked where he’d been all the day before, or why he looked the way he did. After a while he felt almost clean and unscathed, as though nothing had happened. Throughout the day he got up and walked over to the window to look out and see what time of day it was and feel therefore that his life was real after all. Sometimes he caught Mallory glancing over at him, but decided today he wouldn’t worry about political intrigues; at any moment he might get a call from Central to explain why he’d released Sally Hurley, but this had the potential for being just a bit more overwhelming than he could deal with, so he dismissed it. He wanted to go home and sleep, and late in the afternoon he did.

He lived at Circle Four in Humiliation. He arrived during an altar-room alert, from which he was exempt; he drew the curtains of the windows and lay on his bed in his darkened unit listening to the radio before drifting off.

He woke in the middle of the night and looked out the window. The Vog enveloped the blue obelisk at the center of the circle. He wanted to have Mona in the Vog against the white of the circle in the middle of the night. Against the white where no one would see her and against the night where no one would see him and they would be invisible this way, all that would be seen was the drama of their loins, the black of his rod and the pale red of her rose. The next day he had the distinct feeling of things slipping away. Over and over he read Sally Hurley aka Hemings’ file. What would he say if they asked why he let her go? He kept feeling Mallory watching him. In the afternoon he left headquarters, driving through the city across Downtown and the Market. He pulled the car over at the corner of Desolate and Unrequited and walked down the alley to the day’s graffiti.

It said, I DREAMED THAT LOVE WAS A CRIME.

He got back in the car and drove out of Downtown. He was back on the road that ran between the city and the lava fields; driving through the merciless black shadow of the volcano. The shadow went on and on, it didn’t seem to end. Shouldn’t there be an end to this shadow? he asked himself. He parked for a while, perplexed by the endlessness of the shadow; but he wasn’t in the shadow of the volcano anymore, he was in the shadow of something else. Last night he just sort of lost his head, he told himself. Took a wrong turn somewhere and got confused. Drank too much whiskey, for one thing. Too much damned whiskey and not keeping his head straight: he wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Her breasts were so round. Not so large, not so small: round and perfect like her little baby teeth. The thrilling vacancy of her laugh when she took his money.

Three stages were open in the Fleurs d’X, three dancers. One was the girl who had brought him his whiskey the night before; now, writhing across the stage, she was well served by the extravagance of her breasts. He knew it was hours before Mona came on. He sat at the side of the room and signaled one of the other girls for a drink. Not too many whiskeys today, he assured himself. Maybe he wouldn’t even wait for Mona, maybe he’d leave before she came. From over behind the bar Dee brought Wade’s drink herself and sat down beside him. Wade put some money on the table and threw the drink back, just to get things started. Not too many today.

“You like one of my girls?” Dee said.

“I’ve reevaluated the matter of her tits,” Wade answered, still watching the dancer on the stage.

“Mona has an early shift tonight,” said Dee, “your lucky night. Mine too, because it means she’s on before most of the sailors get here and that means fewer customers you’ll be tossing around the room. Let’s not let things get out of hand this time.”

“I’ll decide when things are out of hand,” Wade said. “That’s my job, to decide when things are out of hand.”

“Is that what you’re doing, your job?”

“I want another of these,” he said to the shot glass. “Not too many today, but I’ll have another. When does she come?”

“Another hour,” Dee answered, nonplussed. She snatched the empty shot glass and headed back for the bar.

Sometimes everything happens at the same time. Life seems quite normal and then suddenly everything changes rather abruptly, first this and then that, and you think, Sometimes everything happens at the same time. But it also might have been true that it was happening all along, all your life, some small impulse always denied that wasn’t going to be denied forever. It wasn’t that you changed, it’s that who you really were was always there but denied, and then you stop denying it. And there you are suddenly face to face with who you really were all along. There you are face to face with your lucky night. That was the secret of Fleurs d’X, Wade told himself, sipping his third, well maybe it was his fourth, whiskey: that you believe, as you step into doors that are entrances or doors that are pictures of doors, that you’re stepping into the dream of Fleurs d’X until one night, your lucky night, you understand you’ve been stepping in and out of your own dream all along, and that everyone else was stepping in and out of your dream as well. Then it doesn’t matter any longer what time of day it is outside. He waited to explain this to her. When she got to the club and took off her clothes and stood in the doorway ignoring him — he knew she wasn’t really ignoring him, he knew she was thinking about him every moment that she pretended not to even be aware of him — he waited for her to drift by so he could take her by the wrist and tell her. By his fifth whiskey, or perhaps his seventh — they were little whiskeys, and he was a big man — she came just close enough for him to catch her.

He didn’t sit at her feet tonight, he didn’t follow her from stage to stage. That wasn’t necessary anymore. He caught her by the wrist; in the dark she actually looked surprised to see him, but that was the dark for you, it fooled you, because she knew he was there all along, she knew standing over there in the doorway and serving drinks to the men, to all the men but him, she knew all along he was there. So she couldn’t have been surprised. “You stepped into my dream,” Wade explained, “it’s not that I’ve stepped into yours. It’s that you’ve stepped into mine.” She tilted her head to one side and smiled: Yes. Like that. Her vacant beauty like an open plain with nothing but the sky for as far as one looked. Looking into her was like descending concentrically through a maze to a door at the center, where you expect to find a confessional and instead step onto a veldt that stretches as far as the eye can see. A hysteria of nothingness, inviting him to mount it, empty himself into it.

But then she shook herself free of him. She looked at him and for a moment he actually believed it wasn’t so different from the way she looked at all the others. He gnawed on the inside of his cheek. He pushed away the whiskey; he wasn’t at all sure she understood. He didn’t watch her dance, the dancing wasn’t important anymore. The ritual of her dance and his money had performed its necessary function but it was time for new rituals, or none at all.

He got up from his table as she was dancing, turned his back on her, and walked out of the club. Dee watched him go.

He waited. He’d never been much for hiding and waiting, but in the shadows of the Arboretum it wasn’t so hard. In the shadows of this corridor or that it wasn’t so hard, except that the corridors were so small. Waiting for her now he sometimes wondered what time of day it was, but he knew that wasn’t a real question anymore. So it was impossible to say when she left the club that night, because in the Arboretum there was no when. Wade followed her. They walked for half an hour. They took corridors and flights of stairs he’d never seen before; they passed huge arenas where the blue squares of forbidden TVs hung haphazardly in the pitch black, transmitting nothing but waves to an unseen audience in the shadows.

Soon they were in some other part of the neighborhood altogether, an older section where the smells and colors were deeper than he’d smelled before, the Vog hanging in clouds where the corners turned. She never looked behind her. He made no concerted effort to hide himself; she might have looked over her shoulder at any moment and seen him. It didn’t seem possible she could miss the sound of his heavy steps. It didn’t seem possible she could miss the roar of his blackness against the blank silence of her back. Off the stage, dressed, she looked smaller. He trained himself in those minutes to know her step so that even in the blackest passages, so black that even the white of her body, even the gold of her hair was denied light, he could hear her. In the blackest passages, she surely must have heard him.

By the time she got to her place, he guessed they’d crossed the Arboretum to the other side. Later, when he was inside her flat and saw the window, a porthole that stared out at the volcano, he knew he’d been right. She had a padlock on the door and went through her pockets to find the key. It was dark but she knew the key and she knew the lock. As she opened the door he was standing only ten feet away, gnawing on his cheek until he could taste blood; at that moment the only thing in his head was the only thing he didn’t want to think about, and that was her, not Mona but the other one, who was free of his dream and the world it claimed as its own. Mona was closing the door behind her when he caught it with his hand. She wasn’t alarmed to see him, but when she tilted her head to the side in that way of hers, she didn’t smile, and he missed her little baby teeth. “Your lucky night,” he said.