Arc d'X

24

WHEN LAUREN WAS AN old woman, she would stand on the Kansan desert and watch the leaves. They would dance in dark patterns across her feet, and disappear over the small white hills that filled the dead fields. It was several autumns before she actually walked from her porch to one of the small hills and, turning over a few handfuls of dirt, discovered the rail of a small bridge; she recognized it as a moonbridge, like the ones she’d seen in California years before, from which people had watched the trajectory of the moon across the night sky. The nights that the young girl Kara came to visit Lauren for supper, it was Kara’s gaze that found those skies, a mass of starry light for which the adolescent had a thousand names. Lauren fixed a simple meal and they ate on a plain tablecloth in the main room of Lauren’s house. They talked of Kara’s parents, who lived in Chicago and had sent their daughter to the ranch for children possessed by deep disturbances, odd visions, strange talents. Kara’s talent was renaming every star in the sky and following them as they shifted from one quadrant of the night to another; but as she grew older Kara progressed beyond the ravages of her deep disturbances, beyond the grip of her odd visions, beyond the enthrallment of her strange talents, all of which manifested themselves one last time on the night she found the bottle.

She’d been waiting for the headlights of the brown bus that would take her back to the ranch, and had come across a star she couldn’t account for. When she ran from the porch it was not to the bus but the unaccountable light, which she soon realized wasn’t a star after all but the glint of something lodged in the white earth. Kara brushed away the sand and dug the object from the small hill; the bottle had been caught, it turned out, in the railing of one of the old buried bridges. She held up the bottle and, in the light of every star in the skies above, saw two blue eyes blinking at her.

The eyes in the bottle were old and sad and nearly blind. At first Kara thought she could speak to them and that somehow they understood her; in the same way that she could compute the language of stars, she might compute the language of eyes as they communicated in return. But she concluded they were useless, like blue fish in water, and she was only to be their keeper, and so over the years she kept the bottle wrapped in cloth that the blind eyes might be protected from the light. The bottle became a secret that Kara and Lauren withheld from each other, a pact of mutual betrayal maintained not by choice but because the secret was somehow too laden with meaning for either woman to divulge to the other. The only person Kara ever told about the bottle was the stranger who came down the road one afternoon as she was nearing her fifteenth birthday; Lauren invited him to share a meal and spend the night in the back room. Georgie was around twenty years old, good-looking, even pretty, it seemed to Kara. His head was completely shaved and there crept up around his neck, above the collar of his shirt, a dark growth. At first Kara thought he was horribly scarred, until later that night in his room when she saw the tattoo.

In the light of the small gas lamp by his bed Kara made her bargain, that if she could examine the nude woman with the bird’s head standing in a sea of fire on Georgie’s chest, if she could run her hands along the brilliant wings he wore on his shoulders, she would reveal something in return. In the light of the small gas lamp, she unwrapped from the cloth the bottle with the eyes, and the man and girl sat looking at them together. Georgie understood this secret was very important to Kara, and in the bottom of his backpack he searched for another forbidden thing of his own to show her: it was a stone, flat on one side and rough on the other, a little larger than Georgie’s hand. “But look,” Georgie said, when he could see the girl was disappointed, and turned the stone over; on the rough side was written pursuit of happiness. Kara nodded, trying to appear impressed. “It’s a nice rock,” she offered, without conviction, “but you have to admit it’s not as good as a bottle with eyes, or even wings on your back.”

When the young girl saw the old woman standing in the doorway of her house gazing out at the sand and muttering a strange man’s name, Kara knew this was the moment Lauren began to die. A week of uncollected mail sitting in the box by the road greeted Kara’s next visit; inside the house she found Lauren slumped in her rocking chair. After Lauren had been buried among the white hills of the plains where she lived, Kara examined the mail and discovered a letter sent to the old woman many years before when she lived in California. How the letter finally found its way to Kansas, how it had taken so many years to get there, was nearly as mystifying as the contents of the envelope itself, one letter enclosed inside another which in turn enclosed another, until the answer at the core simply said I’m waiting. But whoever was out there waiting for Lauren would now wait forever, and for Kara it was something like a child’s first understanding that everyone dies, this lesson of how love can wait in the heart unanswered.

Kara left Kansas and traveled west. Because her gaze had been fixed so long on the stars, she barely noticed the strange shimmer of everything that passed her, how as she headed west everything was blurred around the edges in its rush to an abysmal moment. She continued traveling until she came to a river, where she took a boat navigated by a young man with white hair growing on his arms like fur. The man had been sailing the boat for fifteen years, the length of her own life, back and forth between the shore and an island less than a mile away; from the deck of the boat she looked for the stars in the sky. They were gone. For a moment, between the island and the shore, there was nothing except the boat in the fog on the water. “But why have you come?” the boatman asked when they reached the island and she was about to step ashore; unseen in her coat, she cradled the bottle with the eyes. “To bury something,” she murmured.

The answer was still on her lips when she woke. It was still in her ears when she sat up in bed in the dark of the strange motel. She stared in alarm at the strange man sleeping next to her with the white hair on his body that grew like fur; she had no idea who he was or what she was doing in this motel room. She only knew that whatever her life had been before now was consumed by this night’s dream, and that the only remaining trace of that dream was some forgotten thing peering out at her from behind glass, twin blue ghosts joined at the soul by the last thread of memory. Immediately she rose from the bed to check her coat, which lay on a chair, as though it protected something. But nothing was there. Before dawn she slipped from the room and caught a bus at the side of the road.

The bus drove through an endless forest. Watching from the window she couldn’t remember having ever seen, on the ground and in the trees and hovering in the sky, so much ice. On a far hillside four days west, Kara lived in an observatory as caretaker and chief stargazer. If it was now beyond her waking consciousness to name any stars, she accepted that beneath that consciousness lurked the names that didn’t need to be remembered in order to be known. In the isolation of the observatory she felt safe enough in her exposure to the heavens to walk the dark nightlit cavern of the concrete bubble naked, the bright pink of her bare body the only violation of the black-blue sky and its gray outpost. In this way she felt the freedom of loving something that couldn’t be expected to love her back, until — after nearly ten years had passed — she met a man who insisted on loving her more than she could stand.

He lived on the outskirts of the village below the observatory. During the week he worked odd jobs in the village, delivering groceries for his mother’s store and building doors with his carpenter father. On the foothill trails that he had walked all his life, his path crossed Kara’s one dusk; the trees were sheathed by the glistening silver webs of the iceflies, which emerged from their cold white cocoons every year when the winter melted. The young man had been thinking about a wedding some years before that had taken place beneath these same trees, not far from this particular trail. It was a harsh, wincing memory. He’d been the wedding’s best man, a particularly bad best man, ignorant of the rituals of best men, of obligatory dances with the bride and toasts to the happy couple. No one had told him about being a best man; and in the oblivious anguish of his own love for one of the bridesmaids, a girl he would never see again after that wedding, he’d taken her down this same foothill trail as the wedding party awaited his presence in growing confusion and fury. His dereliction of duties as best man became for him, years later, the evidence in his life of his own destructive innocence. He never cared much for weddings after that. Years later, when he had left the village after his disastrous affair with Kara, in a white seaside city far away on the morning of his own wedding, the only thing about his pending marriage for which he felt some relief was that at least he wouldn’t have to worry about his transgressions as a best man, being merely the groom instead.

Between Amanda, the bridesmaid with whom he’d walked on the foothill trail, and Kara whom he met on the same trail eight years later, there was Synthia. Beautiful and shattered, cruel and totalitarian, Synthia was the woman that divided his romanticism in two because, of all those he loved, she was least worthy of it. Prostrate in her adoration of an iron fist, and for the way it might piece her together according to its own design after smashing her to bits, Synthia despised the young man for the way there was no iron in his fist, no iron in his heart. Rather his heart was soft for her: she couldn’t tolerate it. Rather his hands were gentle on her body: she held them in contempt for how they were respectful of her, for the way they refused to violate the most fragile of orifices, refused to draw with exquisite brutality the starting line of his pleasure at the line where hers never began. That he was the only man who ever gave her an orgasm was something she only hated him for all the more; it was something that only made him all the weaker in her eyes. Synthia was the beginning of the end of his idealism about love, though that idealism would be another fifteen years in dying. She was the end of the division in him between love and sex, and of his naïve conviction that the two — the protests of philosophers notwithstanding — didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. It was the end of his idealistic supposition that freedom wasn’t the price of love, and that slavery wasn’t ever the choice of those who had the freedom to choose.

Amanda, the girl he had loved on the foothill trail not far from the wedding party, was the last he loved chastely, and the last who wasn’t beautiful. He would have a lot of time, living out his later years as an old man inside the rim of a volcano, to consider why something as corrupt as beauty so held him in its grip. He’d have enough time to consider that perhaps, in his blindness, neither Synthia nor Kara was ever as beautiful as he thought. His blindness was too profound even to know he couldn’t see, until in the dim light of the lamp by which he read at night he found himself holding the pages only inches from his face. It was just like history to teach him what love couldn’t. He went and got some glasses. He couldn’t stand for Kara to see him wearing them, as he crashed into the chamber of the observatory that last night and found her naked below the sliver of night wedged in the observatory dome, the fine hair of her arms on end and the nipples of her breasts erect in the cold. He crept up behind her and before she could protest enveloped her in the warmth of his arms and lit her womb with the fire of his cock up inside her and it wasn’t until afterward that she sent him away, not because she hadn’t surrendered willingly to the way he fucked her but because, no longer able to resist seeing her, he had pulled from his coat pocket afterward his new glasses and put them on.

She looked at him. She grabbed him with fistfuls of his black hair and, staring at his face on the floor of the observatory, recoiled. With his blue eyes grown huge by the magnification of the glasses, there came back to her the memory of two eyes in a bottle dug up from beneath the sands of a dream, and all the heartbreak of that dream which she’d lived her waking life to avoid. She sent him away that night without explanation or comprehension. She was left more naked to the night than she’d ever intended, whispering “Etcher, Etcher” as she’d heard an old woman whisper a strange name in a dream’s doorway on the other side of a dream’s river.

And a little more of me died. I was twenty-eight. There were moments in the months that followed when I didn’t care if I lived or not, too dead to take an active part in ending my life, too alive not to let the days roar past me until the very sound of them had passed as well, and only in the subsequent quiet could I identify the stirring far inside me as something resembling survival. Some might have said I was weak. I never felt weak. I never felt weak that I could have loved so much. I never felt weak that I could give myself over to love, or throw everything away for it. I never felt small that love could be so much bigger than I. It was later, when others might have said I was strong, that I felt weak, later when no love was as big as I that I felt small. Later when, for the ten years that passed after Kara, there was no possibility of a love like that again in my life, and nothing left to me but to write my books in pursuit of more commonplace glory. To tell the story of everyone else’s dreams but mine: Kara’s dream and Lauren’s dream and Wade’s, glib dreams of buried cities and haunted jungles and flooded streets, the erotic fevers that change everyone strong enough to change but me; until finally I changed too. And only when the ten years had passed after Kara, only when I’d given myself passively to my marriage in the conviction that I had metamorphosed from the dead childhood of love’s idealism to the dead adulthood of loss’ resignation, only when from the dead wisdom of such an adulthood I had come to believe in nothing but the palpable reality that could be drunk from the hinge of a woman’s legs, was I surprised by love again. She was black and white. She was quiet and wild, her voice watery and melancholy, her smile sweet and hushed. She was the most beautiful woman I ever knew and for as long as it would last I was a force of nature. And if I had never really known her in order to write about her here, then I would have dreamed her, on and on into my nights with no sight of her ever to break the spell and cast another in its place. Maybe that would have been better. But she wasn’t a dream. And until there’s another dream, and until there’s another spell, this is my last book.