Arc d'X

19

WHEN HE FIRST SAW the stone, Wade had no way of knowing he’d been in the Arboretum three nights.

They had simply stretched into the one long endless night that always possessed the Arboretum, though at some point it occurred to him that outside the clocks must have noted his absence. It occurred to him in the amber haze of her cognac, the aquadream of her opium, the porcelain delirium of her body, as he lay naked among the dusty cushions of her flat, his body glistening with the tide that washed out between her legs with its smell of sea and flowers. The clocks outside know I’m not there, it occurred to him; and he was just lucid enough to translate this into its more banal consequences. But he’d think about this only long enough to tell himself not to think about it, instead to gaze at her sprawled unconscious at his feet, disheveled and tangled. She gurgled with the sound of him inside her.

From his stupor he gazed dimly at the door, which he’d secured on the inside with the lock that had been on the outside when he first arrived. He was trying to remember what he’d done with the key. He reached blindly for the cognac and knocked something over, and heard the splash and saw the rising amber cloud around him. To the catastrophe of the spilled cognac he said something even he didn’t understand.

He sat up from the cushions and pillows that were propped beneath him. He took her long yellow hair in his hand and studied it stupidly; he ran his hand down her back to her thigh. He pulled her beneath him and heard her unconscious moan of dread, the response of her recesses to the realization that her vacancy wasn’t big enough for him, that her vacancy wasn’t one moment larger or smaller than her own body and she couldn’t hold all of him. When he exploded in her he spilled out of every crevice, he ran down her chin and hung from the lobes of her ears like pearls. She didn’t laugh anymore like when she picked up his money after dancing for him, she didn’t laugh like when he picked up the sailor from his chair and dropped him on the ground; her laughter had turned to the resistant whimper that made him soar, until exhilaration got the better of him and, in the throes of the way he fucked her and the long endless night of the Arboretum, he said, “Sally.”

It stopped him the moment he said it. It turned him befuddled, and she felt it. He looked down at her beneath him and, there through the part of her lips, were her baby teeth and the smile of victory.

He let her go, she fell limply beneath him. He staggered to his feet, the name he’d spoken ringing in his ears, except that as the moments passed he wasn’t at all sure he’d actually said it. He looked at her as she dozed on the pillows, and almost asked if he’d said it, except that he didn’t trust her answer. Suddenly he had to go to the toilet; now looking around he realized, for the first time in three nights, that the toilet was a converted altar room. It surprised him, actually, that anybody had ever bothered building an altar room in the Arboretum.

He was trying to think what he’d done with the key as he stumbled around the unit, which was in some disarray from when Mona had torn the place apart (hours ago? days ago?) looking for the key herself. That was when he saw the stone. It was in a small cabinet that sat next to the porthole that stared out at the volcano, smoldering in the night and smoking in the day, except now Wade couldn’t remember ever seeing anything in the porthole but night, he couldn’t remember ever seeing daylight at all. He touched the glass of the porthole as though it might be a painting hanging on the wall, rendered by the short, squat artist who was slowly transforming all the hallways of the Arboretum into other hallways. Wade put his face to the porthole and peered in. The closer he looked, the drunker he felt. He gazed back at Mona on the pillows, then turned to the cabinet.

On the top shelf was the key to the lock. He had no recollection whatsoever of putting it there. But now more interesting to him were the cabinet’s other contents, a small collection of forbidden artifacts from the black market: a child’s doll and a pair of dice, mildly pornographic pictures and a comic book, small wooden carvings like the woman’s head he had found a few days ago and still had in his coat pocket, and next to the key a stone. It seemed out of place. Wade examined it. It was flat and smooth on one side, rough and broken on the other, and fit his large hand; but what caught Wade’s eye, what sobered Wade for the first time since he’d lost himself to Mona’s sanctum, was the writing. It was a fragment of graffiti. But the graffiti wasn’t written on the smooth side of the stone, rather it was scrawled across the rough part where it seemed impossible that anything could be written; and though the beginning and end were lost, the core of the message was unmistakable: pursuit of happiness

The actual calligraphy was nothing like the graffiti in the alley at Desolate and Unrequited, which made the coincidence all the more astounding to Wade; and suddenly it became very important to him that he keep this stone. For the first time in a while he found himself chewing the inside of his cheek, where the wound of his confusion had healed amid the cognac and opium and flesh. When he’d gotten his clothes and dressed, he took from his coat pocket the carving of the woman’s head and placed it in the cabinet in exchange for the stone, which he put in his pocket. It was heavy and weighed the side of his coat down. He thought it might fall through the bottom of the pocket. He also took the key. He opened the door to the black hallway and stood for some time staring down the corridor to a dark end he couldn’t see, wondering if he had the bearings to find his way out.