Arc d'X

38

THE WIND BLEW THE chains that hung from the northern wall of the Paris courtyard. The wall was over three hundred years old, as were the chains, because they had been laid into the stone when the wall was built, eight sets of shackles that once held the prisoners of dukes and kings and then, after the Revolution, the enemies of the Republic condemned from the highest summit of Robespierre’s Mountain. The shackles dangled listlessly, the rain of centuries having long since washed them of their blood. Now sometimes teenage lovers broke into the courtyard in the middle of the night to play with the shackles and Seuroq would hurry out of the house to chase them away. More exasperating than the mirth of the kids running off was that of Seuroq’s wife, who found amusing the doctor’s indignation at the harmless bondage games — since the shackles could not be locked — being played in his courtyard. Teasing, she would slip into the chains herself, give them a good rattle. “My God, Helen,” Seuroq said with shock, and Helen laughed.

“You always were so proper,” she said.

“Not that proper, was I?” He softened, momentarily worried that, knowing he was not a demonstrably passionate man, he had in the course of the many years they’d been married denied his wife something. “I wasn’t so proper,” he asked quietly, “when it mattered not to be proper, was I?” and she took her wrists from the shackles of the courtyard wall and slipped them around his neck, with that smile that was always young.

No one had broken into the courtyard since Helen’s death.

Now, with the courtyard’s silence interrupted only by the city’s distant festivities and its shadows broken only by the twilight through the sieve of the trees, the assistant stood watching the old man through the library window. He’s mourning again, Luc thought to himself, though that didn’t seem precisely right, since it implied there had been a time in the past eight months when the old man had not mourned. It wasn’t that the expression on Seuroq’s face was mournful but rather the opposite: his had always been a mournful face, even when he was lighthearted; no one was funnier than Seuroq when he laughed, because his face was perpetually cast in mourning and the contradiction of laughter was comic. Then Helen died and the mourning went right out of his face, the face went blank of its natural pathos; in the light of the lamp on the desk in the library, that was the look on Seuroq’s face now, lost somewhere in the thirty-one years of marriage and searching for a ghost. “Dr. Seuroq?” Luc finally called through the window, but as he both expected and feared, the old man didn’t answer, staring right through the window and right through his assistant, which left Luc with the choice of either an even more unseemly intrusion, rapping on the window, or leaving without a goodbye. He had more heart for the goodbyeless departure than the intrusion.

In the eight months since her death the world had learned not to intrude, leaving him in his chair in the library and waiting for him to wake from grief, reconciled to the possibility he would never wake. The university had tried gently to nudge the disconsolate widower back into the realm of the living and the learned, coddling him with propositions of study or teaching that he’d find intriguing but not demanding, understanding that the heart’s grief makes a person into a child who must grow old again, or takes him to the edge of life’s end from which he must again grow young. No one had a formula for grief. For a marriage of thirty-one years, was eight months too much, too little, or about right? That was one month for every four years, more or less. It wasn’t the first night Luc had found Seuroq sitting in the library chair staring into the courtyard, with neither a rap on his window nor the call of his name to arrest him from what Luc was young enough to suppose was a particular recollection rather than simply the gruel of light that wore her face.

On this particular night, however, when Luc was watching Seuroq through the library window, something more extraordinary was happening than just remembering. Seuroq had indeed been thinking of Helen: but at the very moment Luc was in the courtyard trying to get the doctor’s attention, a number of split sensations were tumbling one on top of the other in a single second, initiated by the wind’s rustling the chains on the old courtyard wall and then the instant memory of a night in a very old hotel on the right bank of the city years before, when Helen found the card. Once, when Helen was still married to her first husband, she and Seuroq had a rendezvous in this old hotel; six years later, Helen having long since left her first husband and married Seuroq, the two of them went back as an anniversary of sorts. It was May of 1968. The next morning the tanks rolled down the rue d’X beneath their balcony on the way to the turmoil of the left bank, and the momentum of colossal historic events would steamroll whatever small personal memories of hotel rooms preceded them. Nonetheless, now eight months after Helen’s death, the wind rattled the chains and Seuroq thought of that night in the hotel room, when Helen lost an earring and they pulled the bed away from the corner and found the card in a crack where the walls of the room separated. On it was the picture of a dark woman, sitting on a throne holding a rod. A cat lay at her feet and the landscape around her was strewn with rubble; a white moon rose in a blue sky. “The Queen of Wands,” Helen announced, “is the card of passion.”

“You’re making that up,” Seuroq had retorted.

What provoked him to think of this? he wondered now in the library. If he had ever had the temperament for rage he might have now raged that everything, even the most absurd thing like the sound of chains in the wind, reminded him of Helen. I am haunted by associations that aren’t even my own, Seuroq thought with desolate bitterness.

The extraordinary thing was not that this entire recollection, in which the chains clanked in the wind and Seuroq and Helen made love in the old hotel on the rue d’X and the earring fell behind the bed and the bed was pulled away from the corner and she found the card tucked between where the walls separated, had taken a single second but rather that, shooting through his heart like a pang, it had taken a second. Because at the moment of the sound of the chains against the wall, Seuroq had looked up at the only particularly modern piece of technology in his library, a digital clock, which had said 5:55:55; and now, a second later, his reverie disrupted by the departure of his assistant Luc through the courtyard gate, it said 5:55:54. When he was a child he remembered waking sometimes in the middle of the night, on the eve of a holiday perhaps, to look at a clock and find the night had acquired time rather than spent it; even as a child he reasonably attributed this to his own greedy anticipation of the day. And in his grief over Helen he might have thought it was another trick on his perceptions, except it was hard to mistake an alignment like 5:55:55, and he was quite sure that a second later it said 5:55:54. Now the clock was ticking normally but there was no doubt in his mind that a second had been lost or, looked at another way, gained.

Being a scientist, Seuroq’s first assumption was not of the extraordinary but the ordinary; it was not that he had made some earthshaking discovery, but that he had a broken clock. He woke the next morning not to any new enthusiasm for scientific adventure but to the same depression he had felt every morning for the last eight months, the kind that didn’t want him to get out of bed, that didn’t even want him to wake up. As had been the case every morning, it took all his will to get dressed, have his coffee and bread and jam, and then unplug the clock from the library wall and take it down to the electronics store off St-Germain-des-Prés. On the boulevard along the way banners flapped halfheartedly in shop windows and from streetlights celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the First Republic in 1793—a muted hoopla, the French having always found the actual Revolution a happier contemplation than all that business with the rolling heads afterward. This was at a time, moreover, when people’s ideas about freedom were confused anyway, Moroccans and Slavs and gypsies overrunning the city, not to mention the beginning of the nervous exodus from Berlin. Even the banners themselves, as had been wryly pointed out in the newspapers and on TV, were in error. YEAR CC, they read, in reference to the revolutionary calendar adopted by the Republic and later discarded by Bonaparte; except that 1993 being the two-hundredth anniversary was therefore in fact the two-hundred-and-first year of the Republic, had the Republic lasted that long. YEAR CCI was what the banners should have read, before they were amended by either bad mathematics or a misplaced sense of poetry. “The clock’s broken,” Seuroq told the shopkeeper at the electronics store.

“Yes? It loses time? Or it’s fast,” said the shopkeeper.

“It runs backward.”

The shopkeeper, of course, found nothing wrong with the clock. “A power surge,” he suggested to Seuroq. “You live in a very old building, right?” But it didn’t seem to Seuroq that a power surge would have unwound the clock by a second; and though his head told him there simply had to be something wrong with the clock, Seuroq’s heart was beginning to hear the whisper of the last years of the second millennium. Since it was the heart speaking to him, he could not rule out the heart’s agenda — that the psychic debris of Helen’s death was gathering like autumn leaves in a storm, blowing together into a meaning; whether the universe cared, Seuroq needed such a meaning. Whether the universe cared, Seuroq needed to believe some purpose might be derived from Helen’s death; and he knew this, he recognized the heart’s agenda, and in the manner of the scientist tried to factor the heart into the equation. And so, as he returned to his university office for the first time in eight months, to pursue the theory brewing someplace between his heart and mind, he continued to insist on the possibility he was just being sentimental, deriving from Helen’s death nothing more than a needy wild conjecture. “What if,” he said to Luc, dismissing with the wave of a hand the assistant’s apology for having left the night before without a goodbye, “time is relative not simply, to the perspective of motion, not simply to what the eye sees from a passing train or a rocket hurtling at the speed of light, but to the heart as well, and the speed at which it travels?”

“What?” said Luc.

What was, Seuroq asked himself, the speed at which the heart travels, in the throes of love or grief or in the fall of its deepest trauma? Across the pages of his logs he calculated until the numbers available wouldn’t calculate anymore, at which point he used new ones, remembering as he did the obscure discovery of a reclusive American mathematician in Cornwall forty years earlier who had found a missing number between nine and ten. Beginning with a given premise, he charted the heart’s arc across the course of lifetime, from the moment it first took flight until the crash into pieces; and like the clanking of prisoners’ chains on a courtyard wall, his head now flooded with a hundred memories of her, ending with her question to him asked in their darkest hour, when they had come close to separating, when they almost lost each other. “But what does life mean, if one isn’t loved?” He had argued it might mean many things. But then he had reduced, in scientific fashion, the meaning of all of those things to a common denominator, and it was always love; and humbled by his wife’s observation, which she had made with no scientific principles whatsoever, which he had to prove to himself with theorems and calculations and equations even as she had known it in a moment’s intuition, he succumbed to the intangible meaning of everything they had been together, and it saved them, until cancer took her and nothing could save them.

Now, scribbling his way through his laboratory at the university, he was flooded by so many memories of Helen he could barely keep up with them, scrambling to translate them into his equations while, over the course of the day and then the next and the next, administrators and other scientists watched him from the hallway through the little window of his door. There was the time he and Helen had driven up the coast and she had unbuttoned his fly while he was driving, and there was the lighthouse on the rocks above the waves as she touched him, and the time they house-sat for a couple in Normandy and for dinner she blackened the fish the way they had it in New Orleans that time they went to the jazz festival, and how in New Orleans at night they slept with the doors of their hotel room open because it was so humid, and the dress he bought her in London when they both knew he couldn’t afford it, and how they argued over dinner that night in Vienna about whether she should get a job — she said yes and he said no — and the time a thief stole a bag of asparagus she had just bought in the market off the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie and she was furious when she went back to get some more and insisted none of the asparagus was as good as what she’d just bought, until the grocer took insult and Seuroq started laughing about it.

And the time her mother died, and then the first miscarriage, and then the other one, until they ran out of chances; and the way he came home from the hospital after the second one and walked the house with the baby’s blankets in his arms, as he’d practiced doing all during Helen’s pregnancy, because he was terrified he wouldn’t know how to carry a baby, and how she had lost both the generation before her and the one behind her and remained undefeated even as she seemed born to such losses, until she was lost to him eight months ago and it seemed to him he should have been the one to go before her because she was the one that life had equipped with the wisdom for loss. As he was barraged by one memory after another, he calculated all the more maniacally, until he had exhausted every possible trajectory of the human heart and then two hearts in tandem and then three, until he came to the heart of history.

Beyond three hearts in tandem was history, and when he reduced the meaning of history he was left not with the common denominator of love but rather that of freedom. And then his calculations split off in two directions, one into the next room off his laboratory, the occupants of which he scribbled out of their occupancy until they were standing in the hallway with the others, watching him through the window; and the other into the hallway itself, scientists and assistants and administrators backing away from him down the hall as though he were something oozing out of the ground. One calculation based itself on history’s denial of the human heart and the other on history’s secret pursuit of the heart’s expression: if one heart’s story was the pursuit and denial of love and if history was the pursuit and denial of freedom, what lay at the arcs’ intersection except the missing moments consumed by memory, the second that was consumed by a memory and then given back to time, when the clock unwound itself from 5:55:55 to 5:55:54? If it was the lesson of the early days of the Twentieth Century that the truth could be dislocated from time, the lesson of the waning days of the second millennium was the dislocation from time of memory, by which the truth is surmised. A wind had blown and chains had rustled against the wall and Seuroq had a memory of a weekend in a hotel with Helen that had nothing to do with chains whatsoever. Perhaps, he thought at first, the association was born of some unconscious conviction that a ghost had brushed past the chains rather than the wind, but once he identified this conviction he had no sense of having held it: it was the sound of the chains, not their movement, that had triggered the memory, a sound that had nothing to do with a weekend in a hotel, and that was when Seuroq realized that a stranger’s memory of the sound of chains had randomly coupled with his, as though memory were a restless thing freefloating in the twilight, like dying ions or dandelion wings, or black notes falling from a sheet of music.

By the time Paris had settled its celebration of long-failed Republics and dead calendars, by the time the misnomered banners had fallen from the windows and the streetlights, Seuroq had found the missing day.

In the labs and the hallways, the scientists and assistants and administrators were giving him a wide berth. They watched his mad numbers as he moved from log to log and desk to desk and blackboard to blackboard. The university called in doctors and wardens in white coats and a couple of police to coax Seuroq out of his frenzy, even to return him peacefully to the numbing dead grief of his mournless mourning; but Seuroq didn’t acknowledge them from the fever of his factoring anymore than he had acknowledged Luc in the courtyard. Finally they sent in Luc himself. From the laboratory doorway Luc inched forth as though to nab a butterfly in the cup of his hands. “Dr. Seuroq?” he whispered, and Seuroq answered nothing until, with Luc only feet away, the old scientist suddenly threw up one hand to signal he was on the verge of a conclusion. He dropped his pencil and raised his eyes to the window.

“What is it, doctor?” Luc said very quietly.

He was humoring the old man at first, but then Seuroq started telling him about the missing day, and the more he talked the more frightened Luc became, because either the old man was insane, which unsettled every flimsy foundation a young researcher like Luc had established for himself, or the old man was quite sane, in which case none of the foundations were going to matter much anyway. There it was, Seuroq insisted, pointing to the timeline at his fingertips, a missing day that lay between the 31st of December 1999, and the first of January 2000—twenty hours and seven minutes and thirty-four seconds to be precise, the accumulation, according to Seuroq’s calculations, of all the moments over the millennium that grief and passion had consumed from memory and then dribbled back into the X of the arcs of history and the heart, past and present and future rushing toward a dense hole of time into which all of history would collapse. An amazing dark temporal star weighing 72,454 seconds that hovered between the millennia, on the other side of which everything the past millennium had ever meant might be utterly different, everything history had claimed might utterly shift, the reducibles of freedom succumbing to the reducibles of love, or perhaps vice versa.

Even now Seuroq believed he could sense the acceleration toward the vortex; and when night finally fell on this missing day between the 31st of December and the first of January, we might all be anywhere, or nowhere, or more precisely anywhen or nowhen, since this was not a black hole of space but time. We might come out in a lurch onto the year 2493, Seuroq thought to himself, and then upbraided himself for such a banal conclusion, not having quite yet reached the further one, that beyond such a day time would measure itself not by the numbers of the clock but of the psyche, which was to say that history would measure itself not by years but by memory, where the heart is a country. Perhaps on the other side of the 32nd of December or January 0, however one might mark it, one would see that the millennium had already begun much earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, perhaps, or in 1945 when we gazed into the nuclear mirror, or more likely sometime in the middle of an anonymous night in an anonymous hotel room when someone exchanged freedom for love or love for freedom, or entered some irrevocably compromised bargain with a certain happiness that memory doomed to misery before it ever had the chance to remember itself, when the promises of history or the heart first showed the signs of their own betrayal. Perhaps now, in 1993, it was already the Third Millennium, or perhaps it was the ur-Millennium, and a thousand years didn’t have anything to do with anything, it was just a presumption, like a republic or a reich.

“Dr. Seuroq,” said Luc, “can we go home now?”

“Yes,” Seuroq answered, “I’m finished here,” and when Luc reached out to touch the old man there was an abruptness about it that gave way to hesitance, which triggered in Seuroq the last memory he would have of Helen tonight. “You’re making that up,” he had answered her in the hotel room when she said the Queen of Wands was the card of passion, and he had reached to take the card from her and look at it; but between their fingers, his and hers, the card crumbled, disintegrating with age, as though it were as old as the hotel. That night she woke him and said she wanted to go home, so they checked out of the hotel at one in the morning, to the extreme displeasure of the concierge. In the back of the taxi Helen explained to Seuroq that she had been dreaming over and over in her sleep of the card crumbling in their fingers, and it somehow seemed important that they go back home before everything else crumbled. “Everything else?” he had asked. “Like the hotel,” she answered, and laughed as she did when she chained herself to the shackles of the courtyard wall. But it wasn’t really the hotel she meant.

In the fall of 1998 an American writer living in the same hotel room first read the news on page seventeen of the International Herald Tribune, below the reviews of the latest shows in Paris and London. It would have been more appropriate with the obits, the writer thought to himself later, but at the time he didn’t understand the ramifications anymore than anyone else. It wasn’t until three months later when a magazine ran DAY X across its cover — or JOUR D’X on the European editions, out of deference to the French scientist who discovered it — that the panic set in and Erickson took the Bullet to Berlin, where they called it X-Tag.