Arc d'X

37

NOT LONG AGO I SAID to a friend, “But of course, nothing’s irrevocable.” And she was surprised. “Then you’ve changed your mind,” she said, “because up until now everything you’ve written has been that some things are irrevocable.” For a moment I felt dishonest or exposed. I was certainly confused, because I hadn’t been aware that my view of things had changed so profoundly. I had to give some thought to the possibility that, if I had in fact made this profound change, it was to survive, a necessity I nonetheless couldn’t respect because I don’t believe the truth of the world changes in order to accommodate anyone’s survival. If it’s the nature of some things to be irrevocable they remain so however urgently I may need to feel differently. At any rate, I knew it was a process of age. I knew I was now nearer the end of my life than the beginning, and the facts and incidents of that life take on more significance simply because there will be fewer of them, and so I had to believe that they were in fact less fraught with consequence so that I could go on. So that, in the darkness left by passion’s supernova, I wouldn’t hurtle back into the dead calm that had preceded it. I would defy my own passivity by making the world around me a more passive place, where everything’s ultimately inconsequential and nothing’s irrevocable, where everything can be returned to the way it was before and every choice includes the option of reversing it when it turns out to be a mistake. Where risk isn’t always a matter of life and death. Where at the end of the two years during which you turned your life upside down, rearranging it from top to bottom, you can wind up back where you started, only a bit older and a bit more broken, closer to the end of everything than to the beginning.

And the truth is that I was right all along. Even as the fact of it becomes more overwhelming, more unbearable, some things are irrevocable, if not circumstantially then in the heart and memory, the heart and memory being the only two things that can puncture the flow of time through which hisses the history of the future. Two years ago when I stood with her on the cliffs overlooking the sea beyond that point where the fence ended, we said nothing, we touched nothing, we saw nothing, we were nothing but the two of us together; and afterward nothing, including all the things that had not been said and not been touched and not been seen, would ever be the same for either of us even now when I’m alone once more, as before, and she’s gone. In the bid and hunger for freedom in which she’d lived her whole life, she couldn’t help but be cavalier about love; love would not undo that bid or satisfy that hunger. Everything that’s truly irrevocable finally has to do with love or freedom, but whether you act in the name of the first or the second, one of them ultimately bows to the other and that’s the most irrevocable thing of all.

Standing with her two years ago on those cliffs overlooking the sea, even I knew that.

Etcher’s treacherous boat found its forsaken shore thirty miles up the coast, on the second day after he’d left the city; and though he’d had his hours in the sun, nothing could warm him. The cold of the sea had sunk so deep into his bones that by the time he made his way to the first little village inland, taking a job stocking the meat locker for a local storekeeper, he was like an animal hurrying to the chill of its natural habitat. In the locker his heavy glasses fogged over and froze to his face. Sometimes he thought about Mona and sometimes he thought about Sally; sometimes in his thoughts the two of them blurred together into a flaxen black succubus so sexually lush it repelled him to think of her. So he didn’t think. He worked in the meat locker for four days, drawing wages and hitching a ride out of town up the main highway, bypassing the first station and the second until he reached the third, where he gambled that it would be safe to take a train.

He was always on the lookout for cops. From station to station over the next six days he would constantly change trains, change cars, change seats to the dismay of the conductors. He reached his home village and stayed with his mother one night and then moved on the next day; but he wasn’t racing against time. He was traveling on time’s train and time’s car in time’s seat, shifting from one to the other when seat after seat and car after car and train after train eventually fell behind. He had finally given his compulsions over to his fatalism in the same way the sea left him no choice about Mona. On the trains he huddled in the cold that hadn’t left him since the grotto.

He finally came to the last little town. He paid a guy in a truck the last of his meat-locker wages to give him a lift the twenty miles to Sally’s house. They got there after sundown. The house was dark on the fjord in the distance. The driver said, “You sure someone lives there, pal?” and Etcher lied. He barely heard the truck driving off as he walked up the path, and by the time he got to the house there wasn’t any sound at all.

Until, somewhere, he heard Polly crying.

The ice had frozen the front door around the edges and he had to force it open. The house was dark inside except for the faint glimmer of coals in the cast-iron stove, where a feeble fire had been built hours or perhaps even days before. Its warmth had long since fled the house. The frigid blast in Etcher’s face was the first cold to impress him since his thirty-six hours in the boat; he shuddered not at the cold itself but at recognition that he hadn’t yet met the limits of cold, that something in the world was colder than he was, and that it was this house where he’d once dreamed of living with the woman whom he would have once died loving. Stumbling over a squat wooden stool and kicking a toy duck at his feet, Etcher stood in the dark and listened. For several moments it was quiet and then once more he heard the crying.

He made his way through the front room. He stopped at the foot of the stairs before crossing the kitchen toward the back hallway and listened, peering up the stairs into the blackness to see if anyone was there. He passed one room after another. All of them were so dark that Etcher couldn’t see the small white clouds of his breath he knew were right in front of his eyes. In the back hallway he saw a faint glow shining from Sally’s bedroom. Then he could clearly hear Polly, and a woman’s whispers.

A small lamp burned on a table. Next to the table the mother and her child were in bed. Clothes long since worn and toys long since forsaken were strewn throughout the room, where the walls and ceiling were bare of pictures and a curtain was pulled across the window in a last-ditch effort to keep out the cold. Draped over Sally’s bedroom was a massive silver web. From one corner to the other a swarm of iceflies had spun a cocoon that glittered like a giant jewel. The lamp inside gave the jewel its light, fire flashing off the dense crisscross of ice; and behind the gauzy paleblue membrane of the cell the ephemeral forms of Sally and Polly, moving with a languid vagueness, resembled the metamorphosis of a black larva. For a moment Etcher couldn’t say or do anything. With the sweep of one arm and what he thought was a cry, he tore the web away; but afterward he wasn’t sure he’d cried at all. He heard no echo, and at first neither Sally nor Polly even looked up at him, barely aware in the stupor of their cold and hunger that anyone was there.

He called her name. She barely turned her head. She looked so ravaged and wasted, her face and hair so white like the sheets of her bed and the crystalline bedlam of ice surrounding her, it was as if most of her had vanished altogether, nothing but a pair of deathly distant eyes lying on the pillow and the broken black slash of her mouth. Huddled against her was the small helpless body of her daughter, desperately trying to warm herself against her mother’s fever. Speechless and petrified, Etcher stirred himself from the grip of his shock to rush to them and throw his arms around them; but he’d forgotten how cold he was, and Polly screamed at the touch of him, and her scream in turn jolted Sally to a grunt so meaningless and unearthly that Polly cried more. Sally instinctively clutched at Etcher not because she was aware he’d come back to her but for his coldness, since she was on fire, and the same cold that the daughter recoiled from the mother pulled closer to her so that she might press her whole raging body against his. Thus Etcher was as consumed by Sally as he was rejected by Polly, who tried to beat him away from her even as Sally wouldn’t let him go, the three of them locked in an absurd embrace of ice and fire.

And then he saw that what possessed Sally now wouldn’t be delivered so easily as a white baby gull. The thing inside her, part aerial and part amphibian, was in no hurry to hatch from her and expose itself to the cold outside. So it devoured Sally organ by organ and bone by bone, drinking her fecund blackness and then slumbering in the waste of it, fouling its own nest with relish. It had found an ideal host in Sally’s purity, which was as marked by chaos and desire as it was devoid of guile or malice, the pure folly of a will for transcendence that at the same moment never understood the nature of what was to be transcended: once she might have cut the thing out of her. Once she might have taken her knife and lopped it off at the root, when it attached itself to her thighs and shot its seed into her womb. But cutting it off would have taken the sort of malice and ruthlessness that Sally’s sort of purity didn’t allow for; the purity which attracted her destruction was also the purity that left her no defense. From the beginning Sally Hemings had been laced with her own doom. In the web of the iceflies her transcendence had begun. In the dark delirium of her black fire she’d already started the journey. What Etcher saw as degeneration was the first leap upward; as she seemed to him to be plummeting downward, she in turn watched him fade and disappear from whatever her existence was in the process of becoming, as that existence finally surrendered her beauty. For all of her life her beauty had taken away with one hand the freedom it offered with another; for all her life it had unlocked with one hand the chains the other had bound to her; and she didn’t want to be beautiful anymore. She had never believed in it anyway. She believed every man who had called her beautiful was a liar or a fool, either not to be taken seriously or to be taken seriously only for how he meant to possess her. She didn’t want her body anymore, she didn’t want her face; she would happily leave her witchy incandescent eyes on the pillow, her watery dreamwracked mouth in his hand, where he could hold it like a coin or a plum or a small animal and believe its kiss was a gift of the soul rather than a twitch of the nervous system. She would leave behind the bits of her beauty like souvenirs, and she’d leave the shell of herself to the thing inside her that could devour what she was but not who she was, while she went to a place where the static of love meeting freedom was not to be confused with history.

He couldn’t move her. There was no way he could get her and Polly through the ice the twenty miles to town, and he had no idea whether having made the effort he would find anyone in town who could help them anyway. Nor would he leave her in order to go find someone who might help: it had taken so much and so long to get here that he had no money left and couldn’t be sure there would be a way back. As he walked from room to room with the small table lamp in his hand, he saw that the blast of cold that met him when he came into the house was more than just the air. The iceflies were everywhere. The house was a catacomb of webs spun from doorway to rafter, from crossbeam to window frame, the corners filled with thousands of cocoons hatching thousands of flies until they dangled from his elbow and buzzed around his glasses and his black hair was alive with them. He foraged the house for kindling to stuff in the iron stove, but after he had chopped up the furniture with an axe there was nothing left to burn except food and toys and the house itself. Etcher and Sally and Polly ate the remaining bread, cans of fish and fruit. When he gathered into his arms Polly’s wooden animals and flutes and trains and the pictures she’d drawn of birds and kitties and butterflies, to feed to the stove in a cremation of innocence, he turned to see the little girl in the doorway of the room as though some child’s instinct had alerted her, bringing her from her mother’s bed: “Do you want to play with my toys?” she asked in a tiny pitiful voice. He was awash with shame. He looked at the toys in his arms and dropped them to the floor, and she ran quickly to retrieve her favorite horse, as though she understood he hadn’t really meant to play with them at all and now she’d rescue at least one when she had the chance.

He took the axe from behind the stove and went into an empty storeroom on the side of the house, closing the door behind him. He began to chop. Over the next few hours he chopped up the room and when he was finished he began on another, carving away at the house from the most extraneous rooms toward the center. Day after day he proceeded with increasing ferocity to demolish the house. With each breach of the house’s shelter, with each assault through another wall, he felt the sick exhilaration of another hope collapsing before the hopelessness of the night that flooded in through the house’s gashes. With his axe he stalked his own life as Sally did with her knife. He cast on the fire of the stove the splinters of the house until gradually one room after another disappeared; he was sure he heard the scream of smoldering iceflies rise through the chimney above the rooftop. Polly was so cold he would have set the whole house on fire if it was the only way to keep her warm.

But Sally wasn’t cold at all. Sally was hot. At any moment Etcher thought she’d go up in the dark cloud of her own immolation. There was no barring her door this time against cops and priests, God and Death; Etcher was hacking up the doors for the purpose of the fire. Now Sally lay naked in the webs that were being woven around her as fast as Etcher could rip them away. Steam rose from beneath the place where she lay like the Vog that once poured out from the place where she stood with Etcher on the cliffs of Aeonopolis. When her cries from the heat were more than he could bear he tore away the room around her, to let in the cold of the night for which she pleaded from whatever station of the journey she’d come to. Finally, when the outer wall of the bedroom was gone, to her momentary relief, he lifted her naked body and carried her through the rubble of the slashed jagged walls out onto the ice itself, pulling behind him into a pyre bits and pieces of the house and torching it. The silence of the night, the void of life, was ghastly. In the light and heat of the huge fire Polly played with her animals on what was left of the house floor. Sally lay nude on the fjord with her eyes full of the night and the halfmoon above her and a white mountain in the distance gliding slowly through the dark like a ship. When Etcher knelt beside her, when he ran his cold fingers over her body to soothe her shuddering, when he held her breasts in his hands to calm the beating of her heart, he still couldn’t be sure she knew he was there.

In his hands like that, you might have been a prayer. In his hands like that, you might have been something he thought he could midwife into a new incarnation, strong enough to withstand his love if not your own, wrenching from you the choice that had been killing you since you chose that afternoon in Paris between love and freedom. After that you always insisted it could never again be one or the other. After that it had to be both or neither; you meant to find on your journey the intersection of the two and convince yourself that they could be the same road with two names. You insisted on seeing the wholeness of everything in life but yourself, which lay in bits and pieces around you like the doors and rafters of a broken house: you thought the men only worshiped the bits and pieces of you. You thought their worship had nothing to do with the whole of you. Looking out at it from the inside, you thought your beauty was a thing apart from you. You never understood how the thing they loved most wasn’t your face but your voice, how the thing they loved most was that fountain that trickled up from your heart to your mouth and showed everyone who you were, your heart’s broken, wounded aspirations to be better than you were or could be or better than anyone could be. That was what he loved about you. But he never believed freedom and love were the same road with two names. He always believed they were two separate roads and that it was always a matter of moving back and forth between them. On his mouth like that your name might have been an incantation; and far away where you are now, beneath the night sky and the halfmoon, you hear him say it one more time.

Beneath the light of the halfmoon, she says to herself, The revolution has come.

She turns to him on her bed. She isn’t going to bury her face in her pillow this time and pretend to be asleep. She isn’t a fourteen-year-old girl anymore who thinks that if she lies still enough he’ll go away. This time he isn’t going to rape her, spraying her blood across the room, and then absolve himself with cool rags between her legs and tears on her thighs. This time she isn’t going to scream out in the hope that the night will somehow rescue her; she isn’t surprised that the night answers with an unnatural silence. She isn’t surprised by betrayal at all, she expects it; she won’t fall this time into the light of the crescent moon above her. She’s already well on the way somewhere else. When he comes to take her, without hesitation she greets him with a fierce merciless urgency. With no delusions that she might resist him, she turns instead to devour him back.

In the light of the fire he sees behind her eyes something moving, something that isn’t Sally at all, the sudden swish of its tail, the slithering flick of evidence inside her of the thing to which she’s abandoned everything of herself but desire. Desire bleeds at her mouth. It ripples to her fingers. She parts her lips to inhale him and take him in her hand. Though he tries to pull away it’s a lie when he tells himself he wants to resist her: he doesn’t want to resist her. Though he tries to pull away it’s a lie when he tells himself she can survive his fucking her: she cannot survive it. She sweeps away resistance as he swept away the web of the iceflies around her bed. She takes him in her hand and drives him up inside her and he hears the response inside, the scamper of something into the swampland; his cock feels the ripple of the marshes. He fucks the thing in her so as to find what’s left of Sally at the end of the thing: it’s a lie when he tells himself he wants to free her. It’s such a huge lie that in his mind it never finishes his own sentence. He’s oblivious of the night and he’s oblivious of the fjord and he’s oblivious of the fire in the distance and, somewhere on the other side of the fire, of the child. And it’s only when he thinks of the child that, in horror, he tells himself he has to stop. He can’t lie to himself about the child. And when he tells himself he has to stop, it’s only then he realizes he’s been oblivious of how cold Sally has suddenly become in his arms, beneath his body, holding him in the grip of memory. Desire isn’t the only thing left of her after all. The memory is left, a small trace of it in the embers of her slavery that his seed hunts down, the memory of how he loves her and how she loves him and how it’s bigger than anything they have ever known or perhaps anyone has ever known, and how it isn’t big enough. She whispers in his ear.

“Take care of Polly,” she said. And I knew she was gone.

In the light of the fire a shadow scampered across her face, like a serpent taking flight. But it wasn’t a serpent. Etcher turned to see Polly by the edge of the fire. As she’d done on the edge of the city’s white circle, announcing with a tiny finger something no one could see in a crowd of birds, she raised her arm and pointed now at the fatal flame of her departed mother.