Arc d'X

40

THE LAST TIME HE was in the United States, driving aimlessly through Wyoming and the Dakotas for the purpose of being aimless, he heard the news of the Cataclysm the same way he heard all the news that year, on the car radio. He turned the car around at the edge of Iowa and headed back toward the Pacific, assuming the Pacific was still there but never getting far enough to be sure. Every few miles he stopped at a pay phone to try to call anyone in California he could get through to, until it was obvious this was a waste of time, and then somewhere in Utah Erickson came over the ridge of a mountain and saw ten miles ahead on the highway below him the cars backing up in the billowing sheen of the sunset. He met the traffic jam in the middle and they all sat there the rest of the night, no one going anywhere, the cars in front not going and the cars in back waiting for the cars in front to go, until the highway patrol finally came along announcing there was nothing for anyone to do but turn around. At dawn, when he got back up to that mountain ridge, Erickson pulled over and stared westward as though he might see columns of smoke rising in the direction of home, vast and steaming. But there was nothing to see.

Not long before, he’d lived in Los Angeles. For Erickson it had gotten to the point where there was no telling whether L.A. chose him or he chose it; he’d never loved it and had come to distrust people who said they did as much as he distrusted those who claimed they hated it, dismissing the perceptions of both lovers and haters as facile and shallow. He’d been born in Los Angeles, left it at one point in the mid-Seventies to spend some time in Paris and New York, and then returned precisely for L.A.’s profound lack of presence, the way it assimilated the Twentieth Century’s dislocation of memory from time into its own identity. He flattered himself as being liberated by the city’s abyss.

But by the late Eighties the abyss wasn’t liberating anymore, with the end of his marriage and, after that, the most important love affair of his life, in which he invested every dream he still had left. In the midst of this he turned forty. A month later his father died. By 1991 the affair had collapsed and by 1993, with the final failure of his career as a novelist, the ruins around him smoldered close enough to spring him loose in one direction or the other: west, off the edge of a cliff in the Palisades, or east, where the geography offered more potential for emptiness. He gave the west some thought. Being a coward, he went east.

He assumed it was only a matter of time. Over those last two or three years in Los Angeles he kept peering around for the doom that was hounding him. Standing at the corner of an intersection waiting to cross the street, he kept his eyes peeled with passing interest for the stray car that — its driver seized by sudden cardiac arrest — would leap the curb and give Erickson one good bump into eternity. He felt for the throb in his body of this cancer or that virus. Never having been practiced at living in the present, nonetheless he’d been silently shocked by the prospect that his father might not have spent enough of his life being happy, and that the son was doing the same. He wasn’t certain happiness was in his genes. When his love affair had ended, his heart had broken in time to the crumbling of history. He came to understand that while in youth it was quite true that time healed the heart, now the revelation of time’s passage was that the point finally comes when the heart isn’t going to heal again after all. There wasn’t much to do but pursue the purely sensual moment. He might have been better at this if he’d only been without conscience.

With his lover he had glimpsed the possibility of a life that included all of him, the dark interwoven with the light, the bad with the good, the weak with the strong, until he was complete and of a piece. After it was over and he knew this completion wasn’t going to be possible anymore, he accepted and came to terms with the way in which his literary life, his public life, his private life and his secret life lined up like four rooms, with guests, tourists or temporary residents occasionally straying into one room or the other, none of them necessarily knowing there were other rooms with other guests. There was a door between the literary life and the public one, through which someone might slip back and forth, and a similar door between the private life and the secret, and a hidden passage that ran directly from the secret to the literary. But the only one who ever went in all the rooms was Erickson. The only one who even knew there were other rooms was Erickson. No one else was allowed access to all of him again; and when he did things with people in the secret life that remained unknown to those in the private, he understood this arrangement might just be a moral expediency, to justify to himself infidelities and spiritual disarray, even as he also persuaded himself — and sometimes actually believed — that it was the only arrangement keeping him sane.

The rooms became strewn with furious women. Once it would have meant everything to him if even one of them had loved him. Now they all loved him, when he was either too old for it or too unworthy. A friend argued that there was something about him that almost naturally raised these women’s expectations, something that persuaded them he was incapable of hurting them and was bound to submit, sooner or later, to their tenacity or patience. But in the wake of everything he finally couldn’t convince himself he’d acted in anything other than bad faith, whether he misled them himself or allowed them to mislead themselves, permitting hope to grow into expectation without yanking hope up by the roots, in one room after another repeating the same scene with only a variation of details, the slammed door of a woman’s angry exit or his own dreadful walk out that door with the sound of her crying behind him. “Your love was a lie,” one of them said on his phone machine, a woman he had loved passionately years before and about whom he’d even written his first novel. “I guess it’s the surprise of my life,” said another bitterly, on yet another phone message, “to find out you’re just a bastard like all the rest.” She’d been in some novel or other too, though he couldn’t remember exactly which one, or what character she was.

“You’re just a real fake,” said the last, who had once called him “mythic.”

After the Cataclysm he headed on to Iowa and spent some time there with a friend, and then south to Austin and east to New Orleans and north to New York, as purposefully as aimlessness could be. With the crash the next year he sold the car and headed for Europe, settling first in Amsterdam and then Paris, which was no more or less practical than anyplace else until, a year and a half before his fiftieth birthday, he read about Day X on page seventeen of the International Herald Tribune. The writer figured they had to have known about it for a while. He had to figure the scientists didn’t all just wake up one morning and look at their wrists and tap their watches wondering when, during the night, the small inner coil of infinity missed a beat. Even if he didn’t accept the conspiracy theories — conspiracy, after all, to what end? — he figured there had to have been at least a lurking suspicion, quantum whispers of the slowing cosmic timepiece, out of which seeped into the millennium the lost seconds and then minutes and then hours. On maps of outer space, after all, there are the vague shadows that hint at black holes for years before scientists confirm the discovery. In such a way they must have seen in the present the vague shadows of the future.

On the other hand the American writer never believed, as others argued, that the scientists knew something they weren’t telling everyone. People said that more in hope than cynicism. Erickson didn’t believe the scientists knew much of anything at all. He suspected they knew less than everyone, having finally bumped up squarely against the limits of their vision. Whatever would emerge on the other side of the temporal wormhole fell as much in the imaginational sovereignty of philosophers and fantasists, theologians and crackpots, witches and pornographers and tunnelers: it would be the most purely democratic and totalitarian event ever, having rendered everyone equally subject to its mysteries and revelations. That, of course, was why Erickson had come to Berlin. Because Berlin was the psychitecture of the Twentieth Century, and if he or anyone should emerge on the other side of Day X in the new millennium as anything more than a grease skid on the driveway of oblivion, they were bound to all come out on the Unter den Linden, the only boulevard haunted enough to hold all of it: dictators and democrats, authoritarians and anarchists, accountants and artists, businessmen and bohemians, decadents and the devout each contradicting their lives with their hearts, SS troops with blood running from their fingers wearing the wreaths an American president laid around their necks and GDR soldiers, wrenched from the vantage point of their towers pulling huge blocks of the Wall behind them, led past the Unter den Linden’s grand edifices of delirium and death through the Brandenburg into the Tiergarten by an Aframerican runner with a gold medal around his neck who sprinted all the way from Berlin 1936 into the Berlin games of the year 2000, followed at the rear by a mute army of six million men and women and children utterly white of life but for the black-blue of the numbers their bodies wore, and at the rear the Great Relativist himself doing his clown act, juggling a clock, a globe and a light bulb, tangled in a möbius strip and with a smile on his face that said he for sure knew about Day X anyway, a conspiracy of one.

Erickson received her last phone call the night of the summer solstice. It was around the same time she always called, except as the days had gotten later the night had not yet fallen outside his window, where instead there was the haze of twilight on a street that ran perpendicular to the sun, and therefore never saw either its rise or fall. “Hello,” she greeted him.

“Hello,” he answered.

“Do you want me?” she asked, and it seemed appropriate that she would betray her accent most on the word want.

“Not on the phone anymore.”

There was silence. “It’s so much safer,” she said.

“No more on the phone.”

He knew from what she said now that she’d been thinking about it too. “It was so random like this,” she explained. “I called several numbers that first time. Sometimes I got a woman, sometimes I got a man who sounded … wrong, and I hung up. Then I called your number, and when they answered they said it was a hotel and they asked what room, and I just said a room number, and they put the call through and it was, by chance, you. I could have dialed any other number instead. A digit higher or lower, or when I got your hotel I could have hung up, as I almost did, or I could have given a different room number, or the number for a room that didn’t exist, or they might have asked for the guest’s name, and I wouldn’t have been able to give them a name. And it seems quite perfect like this, so perfectly random, so perfectly by chance.”

“I see.”

“But you don’t want to do it on the phone anymore.”

“No.”

“Tomorrow night I’ll go to a hotel not far from yours and take a room. I’ll take a room hidden away from the street that’s very private. I’ll call you from there and tell you the number. I’ll let the hotel manager know I’m expecting a guest and for you to come straight up. I’ll leave the door of the room unlocked. The room will be completely dark. The blinds will be completely closed, and the lights will all be off. I’ll be there. Once inside the door you’ll wait in the dark for me to come to you. I’ll be naked. You can undress, or I’ll help you. We won’t speak at all or turn on the light. We won’t say anything.” She paused. “Do you have a tag?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll wear mine too.” She said, “You’ll fuck me then. We won’t say anything. It will be like the phone, where we see nothing and have only our words, except we will say nothing and have only our bodies. When we’re finished I’ll find my clothes and dress and leave you in the dark. We’ll never turn on the light.”

“OK.”

“It will be dark the whole time.”

“The sun sets later now.”

“I’ll call later, after the sun sets.” She hung up. Erickson put the phone back in the cradle. He was up for several hours, with that humming insistence his body couldn’t contain, and when he woke the next morning after a bad night’s sleep, on X-191, the day was slightly more than itself, a fraction of X-190 floating freely and haphazardly across the calendar. Erickson opened the window of his hotel room as he usually did and stood back from the light and peered around him. The room was blurred around the edges, and the light outside had an unfamiliar shimmer and he thought some half life of the night’s dream was lingering in his eyes. But he kept looking around and the blur was still there, around the furniture and the doorway, and the shimmer was still there in the light and he knew time had escalated almost indiscernibly, that everything was now caught in the pull of X and just beginning the inexorable rush to the event horizon at millennium’s end. At the bottom of the stairs, what was left of the hotel’s pet cat lay at his feet, torn to shreds during the night. Erickson looked around for some other sign of the Berlin veldt that had invaded the lobby, a rhinoceros perhaps, a python, the beasts of the zoo having begun the final displacement of furry domestic companions. The manager was nowhere to be seen.

By the human logic of time one should always walk, Erickson told himself, from east to west in Berlin. From east to west one walked from Old Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate into glassy synth-Berlin, which had been built expressly for the purpose of rejecting the claims and biases, the suppositions and ghosts of history, the Berlin that in the glare of the nuclear mirror had created itself anew from the ground up and freed itself from history once and for all. But the last time anyone walked from east to west was ten years ago, when everyone on the one side fled to the other, when everyone abandoned the history of Berlin which, in the fashion of the Twentieth Century, had become one more commodity of ideology. In the 1990s the seduction of Berlin was that one always walked from west to east, against the sun and in the face of memory, and then took the U-Bahn back. Now in the new blur of the day the American took the same walk, west to east, maybe on the theory that the city would lose its blur in the process. In Berlin all the small necessary things had broken down while the larger, more ludicrous enterprises carried on: the trains had stopped running at Zoo Station since the last arrival of refugees from the Russian-Slav civil wars, but in the windows of the top floor of the KaDeWe the lights of the government still burned at night, and in the distance to the south of the city construction continued for the 2000 Olympics, an obsession since the beginning of the Nineties that Berlin refused to relinquish regardless of whatever New Year’s party eternity had planned.

So on this day Erickson walked from west to east, and with the fall of dusk went to take the U-Bahn back. He ducked into the Kochstrasse station and descended underground; he was waiting on the platform for the train when he noticed a familiar figure at the other end.

Georgie was slumped on the bench staring straight ahead. Ten-year-old newspapers blew past his feet, and he was so still he might have been dead. Across the tunnel from where Georgie stared, Erickson saw the small hole in the U-Bahn wall that the Frankfurt banker had pointed out; it was as though Georgie were waiting for a father’s face to appear in the hole at any moment. A little voice in Erickson’s head said to leave him there, but he walked over. He didn’t speak to Georgie but waited for him to look up. Georgie didn’t turn to look until the American sat down next to him.

He turned to look at Erickson and there was no sweetness in Georgie’s face at all. There was nothing in his face of childlike serenity; it was like the night after the two of them had left Georgie’s flat when the sight of the Neuwall in the street had transformed the young Berliner’s perverse earnest innocence to the malevolent fury that tried to kick the wall down. Except that at this moment, as he sat waiting for a face to appear in the hole of the U-Bahn tunnel, Georgie’s transformation had already gone several degrees further. His face was dark like a swarm rising from the other side of a hill, the shadow of having stared too many nights into that hole in the side of the U-Bahn tunnel and having waited too long for a dreamed-of reconciliation that was only met minute after minute and hour after hour and night after night by nothing but the hole’s void. Now the sockets of Georgie’s eyes were so hollow that all Erickson could see in them was something so black it would frighten even the night, a feeling so lightless it would startle even hate. If Georgie recognized the American at all, he showed no sign. In his face there wasn’t the slightest chance a father’s face would appear, there wasn’t the slightest sign of a Tunneler in the catacombs of memory, not a human sight or sound flickered even in the scurrying of someone’s retreat into his own recesses.

Erickson got up. He got up right away. He turned and started walking the other direction, toward the exit of the U-Bahn, where he ascended back to the street and walked, for a change, east to west, which was what he should have done in the first place. For some reason he felt in his coat pocket for the small piece of the Wall he’d bought at the Brandenburg, uncertain whether it reassured or frightened him to realize he’d left it back at the hotel. For a while he thought it was his imagination, for a while he dismissed it as paranoia, but in the last dark block before Checkpoint Charlie he knew the footsteps he heard right behind him were real, and that they were Georgie Valis’. By the time he reached the end of the block the footsteps were all around him, and then he was surrounded in the street by six, then eight, then ten of them, members of the Pale Flame with their heads shaved and their shirts off and their chests bare and each of them with the same tattooed design, a creature with the body of a naked woman and the head of what appeared to Erickson to be a strange bird, rising from a sea of fire against a backdrop of lightning. On all their shoulders they wore tattooed wings. It was as though all of them had been summoned with the snap of fingers, a muttered command, and Erickson turned to Georgie in time to take the first blow, and the last that he would ever count or understand.

And memory broke free once and for all, floating above him like the balloon a child lets go. In that moment the writer was neither quick enough for escape nor afraid enough for panic. He shouted out only once and then succumbed to the only hope left him, that the storm of the assault would blow over him and move on.

Five minutes later Georgie said to the others, “All right.”

They stopped with the kicking and beating. They shone in the twilight, six eight ten fiery birdwomen glistening in righteous satisfaction. One of them pushed the body over and they stood examining it. Georgie tapped the writer’s face with his shoe to see if there was a reaction, and when there was nothing he started going through the dead man’s pockets. He found a wallet and a hotel key, but not what he was looking for. “Shit!” he yelled in frustration, slapping the body alongside its head. For a while he sat slumped in the street pouting at the dead American while his troops stood by waiting. Georgie looked at the address on the hotel key. “Know where this is?” he said to one of the others.

“Savignyplatz.”

“I’m going,” Georgie said.

“Not real smart, man,” one of them advised timidly, after a pause. “Someone will see you.” He pointed at the body. “If the cops ask questions they’ll wind up at that hotel sooner or later and someone will be able to tell them he saw you.”

“If the cops ask questions,” repeated Georgie. “What fucking cops? I don’t see any cops. Cops don’t even pick up all the fucking dead animals,” waving his hand at the landscape around him, though at that particular moment there weren’t any dead animals to be seen.

“This isn’t a dead animal.”

“Tell that to him,” Georgie said. “Tell that to the cops.” He looked at the hotel key and got up off the ground.

“Want us to go with you?”

“No. I’ll see you later.” He headed back toward the U-Bahn in time to find that his shirt had already been lifted from the bench where he’d left it, and to take the same train the American had planned to catch. He rode the U-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse and changed to the S-Bahn heading in the direction of Wannsee; after several more stops he got off and changed cars because people on the train were looking at the halfbird halfwoman figure of the Pale Flame on his bare chest, before glancing away when he returned their gaze. He disembarked for good at the Savignyplatz station and wandered around the neighborhood looking for the American’s hotel. It was dark when he found it.

He was trying to think what he was going to do about the hotel manager. But there was no hotel manager that he could see, only the remains of a dead cat on the stairs, and so Georgie went up the stairs to the room number that was on the key. He opened the door and went inside. While there was something thrilling about the invasion, like a child finding a secret world just beyond the backyard fence, he wasn’t much interested in exploring: he quickly perused the room, ignoring its other contents until he found what he was looking for, after not so much effort, in the second drawer of the table next to the bed.

It hadn’t been disguised or hidden, it was just there in the drawer, the little shard of Wall with the impossible inscription on the wrong side. Georgie sat on the American’s bed contemplating the stone for a while, and then finally returned his attention to the things he’d overlooked. In the same drawer where the stone had been was the American’s passport and traveler’s checks, cash including German marks and Dutch guilders and French francs, a vaccine tag on its chain with a key in the lock. Georgie unlocked the chain and put the tag around his neck. He stood in front of the hotel-room mirror looking at himself with the tag on. He took it off after a few minutes because the tag kept dangling across the face of the birdwoman and a tag wasn’t all that cool anyway, an insinuation of stigma that was intolerable for a Pale Flame leader.

He went over the rest of the room. He took several of the American’s cassettes, Frank Sinatra and a Billie Holiday album, after he threw away the picture of the singer. There was a reggae album Georgie discarded with disgust, and a tape of soul music that the American had apparently compiled personally, the names of the artists written on the label in what must have been the American’s hand; the American had titled the cassette I Dreamed That Love Was a Crime, a line he took from a 1960s song in which a jury of eight men and four women find the singer guilty of love. He went through the books that were stacked on the hotel dresser, though Georgie never read books, Faulkner, James M. Cain, a 1909 hardcover edition of Ozma of Oz, and several that Georgie didn’t recognize until he realized from a picture inside that the author of the books was in fact the man he’d just left dead in the street an hour before. On the cover of one of the American writer’s books was a picture of a city buried in sand, a black cat in the foreground beside a bridge, a huge white moon rising in the blue night sky. Georgie tore off the cover and threw the rest of the book away. He went back and forth between his new treasures, particularly the stone and the picture of the buried city, and had put the vaccine tag back around his neck and was studying it in the mirror again when the phone rang.

He answered it without hesitation. He said nothing, just listening to whatever was on the other end with the same curiosity he had had while looking through the writer’s possessions. He listened as though the sound at the other end of the phone was another thing that had once belonged to the writer but was now his. At first there was silence, in the duration of which the voice on the other end of the line decided to take Georgie’s own silence as a confirmation of something: “The Crystal Hotel,” she finally said in English with a German accent, “room twenty-eight,” and hung up.

Georgie nodded to the dead line as though this made perfect sense. He put back the phone and took from the closet one of the American’s shirts, which he didn’t wear but rather used to wrap the cassettes and the piece of the Wall, and then tied it to his belt. He folded the picture of the buried city and put it in his pockets with the passport and traveler’s checks and cash and the wallet he had taken off the writer’s body. He left the tag around his neck.

On his way back to the S-Bahn suddenly there was the Crystal Hotel right in front of him. It hadn’t even crossed his mind after the phone call to go to the hotel and it couldn’t be said now that he made a reasoned decision about it; reason wasn’t part of the process. Reason would have said to keep on going to the S-Bahn: “Even I know that,” Georgie said to himself, laughing out loud. But he had the writer’s passport and money and music and piece of the Wall and picture of the buried city, and now the hotel of the writer’s phone call had presented itself to him. He was sorry to find that, unlike the last hotel, the lobby wasn’t empty but that instead there was a night manager, an extremely old man who worked behind the front desk. The old man appeared even sorrier to see in the doorway of his hotel a bald boy with red wings on his back and fire and lightning and a naked woman with an eagle’s head and something dripping from its mouth on his chest. “Excuse me,” Georgie said to the old man, “I have a friend in room twenty-eight.”

“Yes,” it took the manager some time to say it, “she said you would be along. Well,” he added with great reluctance, “she said to send you right up.”

“Thank you,” Georgie said. Beyond the lobby was a bar that hadn’t been occupied in years; the stairs were to the left. Georgie went up the stairs floor by floor. He went down each shadowy unlit corridor looking for room twenty-eight until he found it near the back of the hotel, where it occurred to him for the first time that he had no idea what he was doing. He knocked so halfheartedly he could barely hear the knock himself. He slowly turned the door knob and found it unlocked.

For several moments he stood in the open doorway staring into a pitch-black room. He searched the wall next to him for a light but the switch wasn’t there. At first he thought the room was empty but then he knew it wasn’t empty; he knew someone was close by and he felt the dark of the room challenging him, he felt the night challenging him as though there was one more thing for him to prove. He was inside the room with the door partly but not altogether closed behind him and was surprised how quickly she was suddenly there next to him; all he saw of her was, very dimly, the arm that shot out of the dark to push the door closed. Then he heard her breathing and smelled her hair. He waited for her to say something and wondered what he would answer. He waited for her to turn on the light. He felt her surprise when the tips of her fingers brushed his bare chest; they flinched as though singed by the flames of his tattooed belly. But then her fingers returned to him. He felt them fumble toward his neck to confirm the chain with its tag. She grabbed the chain and pulled him forward into the room until he stumbled against the bed. Though he now understood there wasn’t going to be any light, he still waited for her to say something, and then he understood there wasn’t going to be anything said. For a moment he was confused, wondering where she was in the dark, until he realized she was on the bed that he stood alongside. Lying at its edge, she unbuttoned his pants and freed him and put him in her mouth. He touched her long hair and her breasts in consternation.

Her breasts felt big to him but he couldn’t be sure, since he’d never felt a woman’s breasts. Even if he might have been able to construct a mental picture of the woman who lay before him, even if — like a blind man listening to descriptions of colors he’s never seen — he wasn’t utterly without reference points in the touch of a woman’s breast, he would have rejected such a vision anyway. Since he’d never had a woman before, the sanctuary of the dark was immense; he would have killed anyone who violated it. Later, upon leaving the hotel, when she nearly gave in to curiosity and turned on the light after all, she never knew that she had survived only by virtue of having left the light off. In the total darkness he quickly became hard; his erection was a response to the invisibility of the moment, the blur of the frantically waning millennium nowhere to be seen. Within seconds he was already shuddering toward an orgasm. Sensing this she released him from her mouth, and took him in her hand as she knelt on the bed away from him; with trepidation he ran his hands forward along the downward slope of her back to her hair. She put him inside her. Blood roared to his head like a drug. Savagely he pulled her to him. When he heard her gasp and whimper into the pillow where her face was buried, he was at first confounded and then appalled by the lurking presence of love.