Arc d'X

33

“MY FATHER IS DEAD” was the first thing he said to Sally when he saw her. Etcher and the cops had continued north across the expanse of the Ice, the trees disappearing and the terrain becoming bleaker and whiter until there was nothing but endless winter, somewhere near the top of the world. The fjord where she lived was jagged and stark. Over its cliffs, which encircled her house, rolled the clouds, each releasing another. At the edge of the fjord gorges cut their way through the earth; the bottoms were filled with water and in the distance there trickled across the ice veins of blue light. A vague gray solstice tumbled across the sky. Polly was the first to see Etcher when he arrived; she ran toward him yelling his name until she got close enough to notice the chains around his wrists. She looked at him confused, not sure whether something was wrong with him or whether she had done something wrong and the chains were somehow for her. When she saw next to him the man with no face, she cried. She turned and ran back toward the house.

“My father is dead,” he said, not yet sure whether he had left the death of his father behind him or brought it with him, or whether he had stashed it in the snow somewhere along the way, to be preserved and recovered later. The abrupt gasp Sally gave might as easily have been to the news as to the sight of him. She was flooded with emotion to see him. She had missed him utterly. In the midst of the precious aloneness she had hoped to find, even with her child and the father of her child in the same house, she had still missed him. She had written him not to come in part because she knew that if she saw him again she might not be strong enough to be alone without him.

He knew this too, though it didn’t much mitigate his rage. He was alive with indignation over her betrayal. He was still sorting out the matter of responsibility for the fact of his life having become a shambles. The shambles was all the more devastating for the promise of two years before, when his affair with her had begun; he remembered the moment of resolution when he’d left Tedi, ruthless in insisting on his right to be happy. He’d been so certain everything was within his control. Now nothing was in his control. He stood in the middle of Sally’s bedroom that was to have been his own as well, facing her and chained to a cop who made little children cry at the sight of him, the father of her child in the room upstairs lying in front of the window that Etcher had dreamed of lying in front of, watching the sky and glaciers gliding past that Etcher had dreamed of watching; and everything couldn’t help but seem ridiculous, everything couldn’t help but appear as though it had come flying back in his face, in return for his having tempted the absurdity of life by thinking he had any power over it. It was just like Etcher to wonder if this humiliating result hadn’t been in the cards all along. He believed just enough in the retribution of destiny to wonder if this place to which he’d now come wasn’t the natural price to be paid for every mistake and every resignation, for every brutal truth, every broken heart.

It was a wonderful house. It made everything worse, that it was a wonderful house, because on first sight of it his deepest dream took on dimensions, took on the form of stone and wood, walls and doors, crossbeams and rafters. His deepest dream rose with the staircase that ascended the middle of the house to the upper room and panorama that swept before its western wall. In the southern wall was a door that led out onto the roof of the lower floor. Outside, next to the door, was a ladder. The ladder led up onto the roof of the upper floor, and on the upper floor the world spilled out at the roof’s edges, north and east and south and west, in a rush so huge and elemental that even when the winds were still one was afraid of being swept off by the sight of it. Goodbye, one automatically whispered to everything on top of that house, where everything was too big for one to really know whether it was a farewell to the world or to what one believed or to the sheer delusion that, standing on top of the world, one was important at all. It seemed an act of preposterous arrogance to stand on top of such a house with the world thundering down in its blue yowl; and that was the greatest lost dream of all, the loss of that preposterous arrogance, because it was the arrogance of someone in the grip of love’s power, and Etcher knew he wasn’t that powerful anymore.

He begged Mallory to chain him to Sally’s bed.

Mallory complied, not as a favor to Etcher but because he had to find Wade. He knew Wade was there. He knew Wade was hiding beneath the stairs or in some back room. He had begun looking for him as soon as they stepped off the train in the little station twenty-five miles away; he’d asked around in the tiny village. All the way by bus across the desolation of the Ice up to the house, he’d had his eyes peeled for the logical hiding places. But there were no hiding places. There was only ice. When the little girl cried at the sight of him out in the snow and ran back to the house, Mallory hurried behind her pulling Etcher and the other cops along, convinced the kid would tip Wade off and give everything away. Mallory rosaried Etcher to Sally Hemings’ bed and ran halfcrazed throughout the house, flinging open closet doors and shoving aside furniture under the rather bemused gaze of Gann Hurley, who was waiting for Sally to bring him his lunch and clean the bathroom and wash the dishes and make his bed. The cop with no face turned the house upside down until he finally reached the top room and the ladder outside. Staring up the ladder, he knew there was no other place for Wade to go. He knew he had him trapped. This frightened Mallory because, confronted with this moment, he was alone; and he didn’t want to meet Wade alone. He called down to the other cops, who couldn’t hear him. He screamed until he was hoarse and finally one by one they came outside the house to look up at Mallory on the roof of the first floor. “I’ve got him!” Mallory cried, pointing up the ladder to the very top of the house. The cops, looking at the top of the house from the ground, couldn’t see anyone: “There’s no one there,” one of them yelled up to Mallory, who ignored him, squawking from every open blister of his head until the other cops came back into the house and up the stairs and out onto the roof of the first floor. “One of you stays here,” Mallory said, “and the other two follow me,” and he started slowly up the ladder step by step until he reached the very top. When the other cops heard his scream they panicked, believing Mallory had found Wade after all. They didn’t know that Mallory was crying at the sight of the world, at the sight of the streaming red sky, at the sight of time cascading toward him in rapids.

Downstairs in the bedroom, Sally and Etcher listened to Mallory running throughout the house around them. For a long time they sat together on the bed in silence, following with their eyes the sounds that moved maniacally from place to place. What’s he looking for? she finally asked. I don’t know, Etcher answered. By the time Mallory had gotten to the very top of the house, his cry of alarm seemed very far away, and neither Sally nor Etcher was paying attention anymore. Each was now listening to his and her own thoughts, trying hard to hear the other’s. Etcher could hear Sally’s. He had become so adept at hearing her thoughts he almost heard them, he believed, before she thought them. He knew she was thinking that maybe she didn’t want to be alone after all; he knew that with him sitting right next to her her confusion had taken yet another turn. Perhaps she expected him to answer this confusion. Perhaps she expected him either to beg her to let him stay — she didn’t really understand yet that the police wouldn’t have allowed this in any event — or to confess that it had all become more than he could bear and he was leaving her to her confusion alone, as she professed to want. At any rate she waited for him to share some of the responsibility of this confusion: and she couldn’t hear, among his thoughts, his refusal.

“Maybe,” she said, “you should just come here like we planned. Maybe we should do what we planned all along, and you should come.” He didn’t answer. “You have to tell me what you’re thinking,” she said. “Are you angry, are you sad? Are you relieved? Do you want to yell at me, or hit me?”

“I could never hit you,” he said.

“But I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

She didn’t know, and he could hear her thoughts so clearly. “You’ve needed to be free since the first,” he said.

“I tried to tell you …”

The sound of Mallory’s searching had stopped.

“All of my life,” she said, “he’s been there,” and he almost said Who? because he knew it wasn’t Mallory and he knew it wasn’t Joseph and he didn’t believe it was Gann. “All my life I could feel him back there, where I remember things that never happened, in this dream that seems to have replaced everything. He’s been there all along. I don’t know who he is. I can barely see him in my mind. I can barely hear his voice. Until now he was there to blame. He was there as the one who wouldn’t let me go. But that’s not it anymore. It isn’t him that won’t let me go, it’s me. Once, when I had the chance, I chose something else — love or safety or the home that made me its slave, I don’t know, but I chose to go back with him and be his slave and because I made that choice, because I loved him or because I was afraid to be without him, because I was afraid to be free, everything changed. Everything about my life changed. Everything about his life changed. Time and the country changed. Did I return with him just so I’d have one more chance to kill him? Did I return with him just so I’d have one more chance to be raped by him, or to be made love to by him, or to wonder which was which? Why am I like this, Etcher? Why isn’t it enough to love you and be loved by you? I know I’m a fool to let you go. No one ever loved me like you. You saved my life. You pulled me from the fever. You adored me more than I deserved. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me this is a mistake.”

He said nothing. He had decided, he had had lots of time on the train to decide, that unless she knew for certain she wanted him with her, he had no arguments left for her. He wasn’t going to talk her into anything. He tried to raise his hands to his eyes; he needed to take off his new glasses. They had filled with so many tears he couldn’t see through them anymore.

But the chains that bound him to her bed caught his hands and pulled them back. He was left at the mercy of her hands. It was worse, somehow, to be at the mercy of her free hands. They now took the glasses from him, from the eyes of her own bound slave, and wiped the tears from his face for him, again and again.