Arc d'X

25

WHEN HIS AFFAIR WITH Kara ended, Etcher packed his things, settled his affairs, and went to say goodbye to his parents.

They lived in the center of the village. They had so long assumed Etcher would eventually leave that, when the time finally came, they had gotten used to the idea he’d never leave at all. Etcher’s mother had moved to the village many years before to be with Etcher’s father; she came from a warmer part of the world several thousand miles away, and it took the rest of her life for her blood to thicken with the cold. Etcher’s father had been born in the Ice, brooding and stormy. There were only the three of them, mother and father and son, each always something separate unto him or herself, the family a home base they returned to emotionally from their daily routines. The night before his son’s departure, Etcher’s father got quietly drunk at the dinner table. Having arrived at the point where he believed his dignity was in jeopardy, he excused himself to go to bed. “I hope you’ll remember me,” he said to the stunned Etcher, “at my best, feet of clay and all,” and it was unbearable to the son how in that moment of parting his father considered himself to be a failure in his son’s eyes. Etcher watched speechless and confused as his father disappeared through the bedroom door, with nothing more to be said between them — which is to say with everything to be said between them — until fifteen years later, at his father’s deathbed when it was too late.

If Etcher inherited both his father’s brooding fatalism and kindness of heart, he resisted the lessons of life that teach one to be harder. In some ways Etcher taught himself to be softer. And in defiance of life’s lessons that teach one to dim the light in oneself and fight the dark, Etcher intended to do neither. He hated the resignation that life insisted on. He listened, with one ear pressed to the passage walls, to the secret life being lived by himself just on the other side of the life he lived consciously. There was no telling how much good he might have done or how much evil he might have committed had he not been so burdened with a conscience. In the end what he feared most was not his own pain but the pain of others, for which he might bear some responsibility. What he feared was not what his heart could survive but what his conscience couldn’t, which included the smallest infraction — his graceless negligence as a best man at a wedding, for instance. Time and again he was ready to believe the best of someone else. Time and again he was ready to acknowledge the worst of himself. Hating the resignation that life insisted on, he would come to be led by his conscience to resign himself completely to life, before saving his life at the expense of that conscience.

At the nearest station, eighty-five miles away, he boarded a train heading south. He was on the train for six days. He was on the train such a long time that at the end, when he stepped from his car onto the station platform, he continued to feel it traveling beneath him; and later from his hotel window, while the floor of his room continued to move beneath him as well, the blue obelisks of the city vibrated like the forests that accompanied him so endlessly they had seemed to him always the same forest, moving with the train. After so many trees the obelisks were a relief, spires of sea and rock, and he was exhilarated by the sight of them before he came — like everyone in his new city — to dread them.

Soon after he arrived he went to work for the authorities. For a while he was a clerk in the immigration bureau, where he did nothing but file forms nine hours a day. Eventually he was moved to a position in the archives at Church Central. This was but his first crime of resignation. Over the next ten years, as a dead man traveling surreptitiously in the body of a living one, like a convict on the run with a forged passport, he committed so many more such infractions that he lost count. Sometimes in the course of a day or night they numbered in the hundreds, small deferences and numb capitulations including the most sensual, the drink that took him indifferently past drunkenness, the woman he fucked beyond his attraction to her. His aggression itself was passive, the inexorable rush of a gale into a vacuum. He was in the perfect city for deadness and resignation. As he was exhilarated the day he arrived by the blue obelisks of Aeonopolis, so as well he was placated by the repetition of the sea, so as well he was reconciled immediately to how the city’s clerical powers had coopted the tedious questions of spirituality and meaning. So as well he came to anticipate the sirens of the morning and twilight and the time spent in the dark of the small altar room of his unit, where he sat praying to no one and feeling nothing and being no place.

For all of this deadness his memory could never abide the melancholy of another’s misery. It was in the early months of his arrival that he walked out of a bakery one morning to be met by an old beggar so hideous and pitiful that when he shoved his open palm in front of Etcher and pleaded for a piece of bread or a coin, the other man was frozen where he stood, even as his mouth was full of bread and his hand full of coins. Etcher fled without giving the man anything. All day he tried to work in the rubble of his moral paralysis, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and, claiming sickness, left work to return to where he’d last seen the beggar. The beggar was no longer there. All night Etcher looked for him. Exhausted, he finally found the beggar at dawn; into the stunned beggar’s hand Etcher stuffed a wad of money, and fled again. After this episode he never again left empty any human heart that gaped like an open wound. He gave money to whoever asked, as though to ward off the thrusts to his own heart by the things that made him ashamed of life. In the same way he taught himself to become softer, so the immune system of his conscience withered away, unprotected by the antibodies of experience. Among a crowd of hundreds at the teeming Market, a nation of beggars immediately identified him and closed in, no matter how he might hide his face or avoid eye contact, until it seemed they were at his doorstep at dawn, until they had mobilized as a guerrilla army monitoring his various routes, hobbling in pursuit on crutches or little wheels.

It was both the ultimate act of resignation and the ultimate answer to his conscience, his marriage to a schoolteacher for whom Etcher fulfilled an increasingly desperate agenda. Her name was Tedi. She was small and pretty like a doll if not like a beautiful woman, her face framed by gold ringlets. She had a mind for the numbers of things and their mechanics; beneath her sweetness she was obsessed with doom. Her past was strewn with men whom she regarded as having betrayed her and against whom she plotted her vengeance, in exact calculations and with a precision like the plumbing of a building. It didn’t hurt that the small school in town where she taught her little pupils was situated amid the most wrathful and indignant of Primacy’s graffiti. Gazing at the messages around her she took inspiration. But because even Tedi understood that vengeance was a short-term satisfaction, and because her temperament for it didn’t quite match her instincts, she was only left with doom in the end and the realization that its mathematics was more inevitable than any she might concoct to thwart it. Thus she hid in her unit from passing meteorites that might fall from space, searching her out as though with radar; and hidden from the danger of the outside world she was left with the doom that lurked in her like an infection.

Etcher felt as though he’d been jostled among an aimless throng of people and then had bumped into Tedi, at which point he looked down at his cupped hands to see they now held her beating heart. She wouldn’t take it back. He couldn’t give it to someone else. He couldn’t drop it on the ground where it might be trampled underfoot by the throng. He somehow accepted responsibility for this heart by the fact of his having it, and by his inability — even in the depths of his deadness — to be so cruel as to simply refuse or desert it. She closed in on him and he allowed himself to be closed in on, because he’d come to believe, now six years after Kara, that he’d never love like that again and that at the age of thirty-five the dead calm of adulthood called for this final moment of peace. Thus he had never stopped disbelieving in his own blame. That he didn’t have the courage to hurt Tedi sooner only doomed him to devastate her later. This culpability became all the more profound when, having given in to her plans for marriage, he gave in to her plans for a child. They both expected she would become pregnant immediately.

He awaited it hopelessly. He waited for his blank passivity to manifest itself as a small life, an unknowing infant whose existence would foreclose forever the possibilities of Etcher’s own escape. As he waited, he drank more. He scored liquor on the city’s boulevards, sometimes in broad daylight. But he never considered this petty outlawry as an attack on his passivity or even an aberration of it, but rather as more complicity, since the intent and effect of the drinking was to make passivity more tolerable. Like any functioning drunk, Etcher managed his hangovers as well as the hour of the day and the quality of his inebriation would allow; the priests would reprimand him on mornings when he showed up for work obviously toxic from something more than bitterness. In the hollow of his life he fashioned a routine that wouldn’t let him forget how his life was over, spending longer hours in Central’s dark corridors beneath its high empty rafters that were startling for the way they were immaculate of graffiti, reveling dully in his role as power’s flunky and authority’s file clerk. As time went by he found less occasion, as he’d done in the early days of their relationship, to leave work in time to pass the windowless downtown street of Tedi’s school, sometimes waiting for her in back of the classroom staring at the blackboard, where her messages ran off the edge of the slate onto the walls, around the corners and down the hallways — nothing but Tedi and little children and Primacist messages and classroom shelves of bibles and hymn books.

But offhours, in the shifts between his employment and his marriage, his drunkenness allowed him a fantasy. In this fantasy he ran through the streets of the city during one of the daily searches, with everyone huddling in their altar rooms, as he had his way with freedom, flush with the same rage of pleasure he’d poured into the flesh portals of so many faceless women. These fantasies were, in a sense, the same authoritarian fantasies of those who held power, a wild howl of sensuality derived from the submission of others. He’d merely been, he realized now, ten years too soon for Synthia, who had so longed for someone to make her yield to this sort of submission. She’d marvel now, if he were to happen upon her, at the steel of his hands that pinned her beneath him until he finished with her, at his integrity dribbling away inside her. But there was something else about his fantasies that had nothing to do with power. There was something about his fantasies that would have appalled the totalitarian Synthia, that had to do with anarchy and a lurking subversion ticking away inside him along with the weeks and months during which Etcher waited for Tedi to become pregnant and, mysteriously, she did not. In the dark of the archives he came to realize that with every passing month fate kept giving him another opportunity to make a break for it. He also came to realize that, each time he turned down the chance, it might be his last.

He was excited and terrified by the growing sound of the ticking. On the afternoon he discovered the archives’ back room, the ticking was loud enough to be indistinguishable from that of his heart.

His duties in the archives were to keep in order the records of the city’s affairs, and to file and search out records for the priests who used them. The door in back of the archives was so inconspicuous that Etcher always assumed it was a closet or storage space of some sort; it wasn’t only locked but had the dusty, uncracked look of not having been opened in a long time. Etcher worked for Central seven years before he saw a priest wearing the white robes of a church leader unlock the door one afternoon, enter and then close it behind him. This was the first sign to Etcher that whatever was beyond the door was not a closet. The second sign was that the priest didn’t emerge from the room for two hours. When he did, he had a large book under his arm and was looking for a place to put it in order to lock the door. “Want me to take that?” said Etcher.

The priest jumped at the sound of Etcher’s voice. It was as if he were unaware Etcher had ever been there, though Etcher was in plain sight and had always been there. “No,” the priest blurted, reluctantly putting the book on the ground and fumbling through his robes for the door’s key. He locked the door and left.

The next morning a different priest brought the book back. This priest wore the pale-blue robes of a second-level clergyman; Etcher recognized him as an assistant to the one who had been there the day before. As he unlocked the narrow door, the assistant asked Etcher to locate a file for him. When the priest disappeared inside the room Etcher, rummaging through the archives’ files, saw that the key to the room had been left in the lock.

He had no idea why he did it. He knew that if he’d been too hungover to think of it, or so sober he might have thought about it too long, he never would have done it. But now Etcher walked quickly to the door, took the key from the lock, and put it in his pocket.

When the priest in the light-blue robes came out of the room, closing the door behind him, he would have turned to lock it except that Etcher said, “Here’s your file.” The priest took the file and stood there several moments examining it. “I also pulled these, in case you need them,” Etcher said.

The priest looked up into Etcher’s monstrous blue eyes floating behind his glasses. “No, I don’t need those,” the priest said. Then he walked away, still reading the file.

It was shortly after noon when the priest returned. Frantically rushing to the door in back, he stared at the lock for a minute in disbelief. He turned to Etcher. He was pale as he said, “There was a key.”

“I’m sorry?” said Etcher.

“There was a key,” the priest repeated. He wiped his mouth with his hand. “Did you see it?”

“In the door?”

“Yes in the door,” he nearly shrieked.

“I thought you took it,” Etcher said.

“What?”

“You took it. You came out and took the key. Remember? I gave you the file?”

“I took the key?”

“And then I gave you the file.”

“Are you sure?”

“I thought so. Perhaps it fell out of your pocket.”

The priest kept wiping his mouth. He looked at the door and then at the floor around his feet as though the key might materialize. His eyes were twitching when he said, “You remember me taking the key. And putting it in my pocket.”

“I think so.”

“No,” the priest said emphatically, “you do remember it. If anyone asks, you remember I took the key and put it in my pocket. I didn’t leave it in the door. I put it in my pocket and it fell out somewhere along the way. Where nobody would find it. Where nobody would know what it was if they happened to pick it up. We’ll get another key made. We don’t have to bother anyone else about it. I took the key from the lock and put it in my pocket and you gave me the file, you remember that. If anyone should ask.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t just walk away and leave it in the door. I didn’t do that.”

“Yes. I mean no.”

An hour later a locksmith appeared to make another key for the door.

For several months Etcher kept the key hidden away, occasionally considering whether to dispose of it, not simply because it was incriminating but because he’d never really thought about opening the door to see what was behind it. Etcher wasn’t concerned with what was behind the door. It was never his reason for taking the key. He took the key simply for the taking, and he was struck afterward by how easily he’d done it, how easily he’d lied about it when the priest had returned looking for the key in panic. It was only later that he was tempted to press his luck and actually open the door; and then he was unnerved by how tempting it was, though curiosity as to what was behind the door was never a part of it. It was the act of opening he couldn’t resist, as it had been the act of taking. And as every month passed in which he expected Tedi to tell him she was pregnant and that his fate and responsibility were decided, as every month went by that he was once again reprieved by some conspiracy of biology and destiny, his own recklessness grew more irresistible until the moment came when, in the latest hours of the night, he gave in to it.

He would try to open the door, he decided. He assumed the locksmith had changed the lock anyway when he made the other key. He would try to open the door, and when it wouldn’t unlock, he could then dispose of the key, the temptation having been succumbed to and thwarted.

The locksmith, however, had not changed the lock. In the dark of the archives, the door opened.

Etcher had been right about its being a very small room, the size of a walk-in vault. There was nothing inside but the books — nearly a hundred of them, all like the one the priest had removed and the other priest had returned. The books were old and dusty, in grimy red covers that had no titles or authors’ names but were simply identified, on labels that ran along the edges of the shelves, as the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History: and at that moment Etcher almost turned from the vault and slammed the door behind him. At that moment, though he had no idea what the volumes meant, suspicion crowded subversion in his brain; instantly Etcher somehow knew that if he were to be discovered here, he’d disappear forever, that no one would ever see him again. That the breach of entering this room with these books was more than simply treason, it was heresy. He lingered long enough to pull one and then another volume down and open them. In them were listed events Etcher had never heard of. The volumes told of people no one had ever known and countries no one had ever seen. He read of lives no one had ever lived and pored over maps of places no one had ever been. Every sound of Church Central, every creak in the walls and every footstep in its distant quarters, resonated in the vault until, with dawn just over the horizon, his nerves could no longer stand it.

He was terror-stricken, some minutes later, to hurry from the archives into the lobby of Church Central only to see, there in the middle of the night, two cops.

He could tell they were cops. One was a large black man and the other a short man with red hair; they appeared tense. He was certain they had been waiting for him, tipped off by a witness in the shadows or an alarm miles away. But in fact the cops paid Etcher little attention. They just stood in the middle of the lobby as Etcher walked furtively past them. He got all the way to the door expecting them to call out after him, and it was only when they did not, it was only when he left the lobby and building and, outside, felt the cold sweat on his face and the night air in his constricted lungs, and only when he got home to find Tedi sleeping, with no fateful news on her lips, that he truly believed he’d gotten away with it. Then he couldn’t sleep. Then he wanted a drink, but after he dug his forbidden bottle out of the cupboard where he kept it, he changed his mind and put it back. He was seized by the impulse to rid himself of the key for good; outside in the middle of the night he walked around the circle’s obelisk, muttering to himself. For a long time he tried to think of where to dispose of the key, and the more he thought, the more the impulse for getting rid of it subsided, until he decided — much to his own dismay — that perhaps getting rid of it wasn’t so necessary after all.

He allowed himself then what he believed would be his last subversion: keeping the key. The fires of subversion in him were banked; he felt spent, calm.

After several days passed, however, and then a week and then two, Etcher realized nothing had changed. If the target of his subversion was his own life, nothing about the few clandestine moments he’d spent in the archives’ vault had delivered him. The moments in the vault were like a drug that had been taken and experienced and then had worn off, leaving him jangly and unsettled and blinking around him at how his circumstances had remained untransformed. And though there wasn’t any way in which stealing into the vault could transform the circumstances, an unconscious impulse insisted such an act would slowly change Etcher himself until he’d crossed the rubicon of his subversion and there was no way back. He had no idea what such a point of no return would look like. He had no idea what he would look like once he’d passed it. He clung to the notion that he would easily see this point approaching in the distance before he got there, allowing him enough time to change his mind.

He began working late in the archives every night. He drifted further and further from home, spending first five minutes, then ten, then half an hour in the archives vault studying the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History and their blasphemous reality. The more alien this reality was to him, the more he intuitively believed it. Thus he surely and deliberately found for himself a corner with no exits, where he had no choice but to plot his own revolution against a reality that had no history, and in which he no longer had faith. His breakthrough act came on the night that he not only opened the vault to invade its contents but took one of the volumes from the vault, carried it through the lobby and out of Central, into the dark of the city. It was the volume that included all the entries between Heathen and Holy. Etcher not only chose this volume because of what happened that afternoon but soon realized that but for what happened he might not ever have taken any of the books. He might well have just lurked forever in his corner of no exits, never finding the courage to fulfill his plots.

The woman who walked into the archives that afternoon seemed lost, gazing at the walls around her. With her she had her two-year-old child, who bore a striking resemblance to the mother except for the fire in the little girl’s hair.

Somewhere between twenty and thirty, between white and black, her eyes somewhere between brown and green as her wild dark hair fell across her face, the woman impressed Etcher less with her beauty than the audacity of her presence, since he’d never seen anyone walk into the archives but a priest. Indeed, a priest in the lobby also stopped to look at her, as struck by her as Etcher. The woman was very shy as she approached, pulling the small girl behind her. “I was wondering—” she began in the quietest voice like water, when she stopped, staring at the looming blue eyes behind Etcher’s thick glasses almost as Kara had looked at them almost ten years before, as something sprung loose from the oceanbed of a dream. For a moment Etcher found himself once again on the brink of a terrible rejection, though nothing had ever passed between him and this woman to be rejected.

It was a long minute before she shook herself from the sight of him. The little girl, in the meantime, was running up and down the aisles of the archives. The priest in the lobby appeared mortified. “Polly,” the woman said to the little girl, “come here.” The child didn’t pay much attention. The mother shut her eyes in weary futility. She looked at Etcher again, struggling for composure. “I was wondering if you could help me,” she said. “I’m trying to get some information on a relative. I’ve been — Polly!”

The child returned to her mother’s side.

“What are you doing here?” Etcher said in panic. He kept looking over at the priest in the lobby.

“His name was Madison Hemings,” the woman tried to explain quickly. “He was a distant relative, I think, perhaps an uncle or cousin—”

“This office isn’t open to the public,” Etcher cut in. “We don’t have that kind of information.”

“Oh,” she answered, “I’m sorry.”

“You should go to the police for that sort of thing.”

“No,” she shook her head, “no, I can’t go to the police,” and before the little girl could take off again the mother scooped her up into her arms. “Well, thank you anyway,” she said very quietly, and walked from the archives across the lobby as the priest and Etcher watched her go.

Etcher was miserable for the rest of the day. He wanted a drink, after not having had one since before the first night he’d entered the vault. It was instead of drinking that he took home with him that night the volume that covered material from Heathen to Holy; when he was sure Tedi was asleep, when he’d finally fended off her constant pleas that he come to bed, he went into the privacy of the altar room, shut the door behind him and, in the faint glow of the light above, opened the book. He didn’t really expect to find an entry for Madison Hemings. The only Hemings listed was a woman named Sally, briefly identified as the slave and mistress of the leader of a country Etcher had never heard of.