Arc D'X (12 page)

The Vog enveloped the blue obelisk at the center of the circle. He wanted to have Mona in the Vog against the white of the circle in the middle of the night. Against the white where no one would see her and against the night where no one would see him and they would be invisible this way, all that would be seen was the drama of their loins, the black of his rod and the pale red of her rose. The next day he had the distinct feeling of things slipping away. Over and over he read Sally Hurley aka Hemings' file. What would he say if they asked why he let her go? He kept feeling Mallory watching him. In the afternoon he left headquarters, driving through the city across Downtown and the Market. He pulled the car over at the corner of Desolate and Unrequited and walked down the alley to the day's graffiti.

It said, I DREAMED THAT LOVE WAS A CRIME.

He got back in the car and drove out of Downtown. He was back on the road that ran between the city and the lava fields, driving through the merciless black shadow of the volcano. The shadow went on and on, it didn't seem to end. Shouldn't there be an end to this shadow? he asked himself. He parked for a while, perplexed by the endlessness of the shadow; but he wasn't in the shadow of the volcano anymore, he was in the shadow of something else. Last night he just sort of lost his head, he told himself. Took a wrong turn somewhere and got confused. Drank too much whiskey, for one thing. Too much damned whiskey and not keeping his head straight: he wouldn't make that mistake again.

A R C D'X • 78

Her breasts were so round. Not so large, not so small: round and perfect like her little baby teeth. The thrilling vacancy of her laugh when she took his money.

Three stages were open in the Fleurs d'X, three dancers. One was the girl who had brought him his whiskey the night before; now, writhing across the stage, she was well served by the extrav-agance of her breasts. He knew it was hours before Mona came on. He sat at the side of the room and signaled one of the other girls for a drink. Not too many whiskeys today, he assured himself.

Maybe he wouldn't even wait for Mona, maybe he'd leave before she came. From over behind the bar Dee brought Wade's drink herself and sat down beside him. Wade put some money on the table and threw the drink back, just to get things started. Not too many today.

"You like one of my girls?" Dee said.

"I've reevaluated the matter of her tits," Wade answered, still watching the dancer on the stage.

"Mona has an early shift tonight," said Dee, "your lucky night.

Mine too, because it means she's on before most of the sailors get here and that means fewer customers you'll be tossing around the room. Let's not let things get out of hand this time."

"I'll decide when things are out of hand," Wade said. "That's my job, to decide when things are out of hand."

"Is that what you're doing, your job?"

"I want another of these," he said to the shot glass. "Not too many today, but I'll have another. When does she come?"

"Another hour," Dee answered, nonplussed. She snatched the empty shot glass and headed back for the bar.

Sometimes everything happens at the same time. Life seems quite normal and then suddenly everything changes rather abruptly, first this and then that, and you think, Sometimes everything happens at the same time. But it also might have been true that it was happening all along, all your life, some small impulse always denied that wasn't going to be denied forever. It wasn't that you changed, it's that who you really were was always there but denied, and then you stop denying it. And there you are suddenly face to face with who you really were all along. There you are face to face with your lucky night. That was the secret of Fleurs d'X, Wade told himself, sipping his third, well maybe it was his fourth, STEVE ERICKSON • 79

whiskey: that you believe, as you step into doors that are entrances or doors that are pictures of doors, that you're stepping into the dream of Fleurs d'X until one night, your lucky night, you understand you've been stepping in and out of your own dream all along, and that everyone else was stepping in and out of your dream as well. Then it doesn't matter any longer what time of day it is outside. He waited to explain this to her. When she got to the club and took off her clothes and stood in the doorway ignoring him—

he knew she wasn't really ignoring him, he knew she was thinking about him every moment that she pretended not to even be aware of him—he waited for her to drift by so he could take her by the wrist and tell her. By his fifth whiskey, or perhaps his seventh—

they were little whiskeys, and he was a big man—she came just close enough for him to catch her.

He didn't sit at her feet tonight, he didn't follow her from stage to stage. That wasn't necessary anymore. He caught her by the wrist; in the dark she actually looked surprised to see him, but that was the dark for you, it fooled you, because she knew he was there all along, she knew standing over there in the doorway and serving drinks to the men, to all the men but him, she knew all along he was there. So she couldn't have been surprised. "You stepped into my dream," Wade explained, "it's not that I've stepped into yours.

It's that you've stepped into mine." She tilted her head to one side and smiled: Yes. Like that. Her vacant beauty like an open plain with nothing but the sky for as far as one looked. Looking into her was like descending concentrically through a maze to a door at the center, where you expect to find a confessional and instead step onto a veldt that stretches as far as the eye can see. A hysteria of nothingness, inviting him to mount it, empty himself into it.

But then she shook herself free of him. She looked at him and for a moment he actually believed it wasn't so different from the way she looked at all the others. He gnawed on the inside of his cheek. He pushed away the whiskey; he wasn't at all sure she understood. He didn't watch her dance, the dancing wasn't important anymore. The ritual of her dance and his money had performed its necessary function but it was time for new rituals, or none at all.

He got up from his table as she was dancing, turned his back on her, and walked out of the club. Dee watched him go.

A R C D'X • 80

He waited. He'd never been much for hiding and waiting, but in the shadows of the Arboretum it wasn't so hard. In the shadows of this corridor or that it wasn't so hard, except that the corridors were so small. Waiting for her now he sometimes wondered what time of day it was, but he knew that wasn't a real question anymore. So it was impossible to say when she left the club that night, because in the Arboretum there was no when. Wade followed her.

They walked for half an hour. They took corridors and flights of stairs he'd never seen before; they passed huge arenas where the blue squares of forbidden TVs hung haphazardly in the pitch black, transmitting nothing but waves to an unseen audience in the shadows.

Soon they were in some other part of the neighborhood altogether, an older section where the smells and colors were deeper than he'd smelled before, the Vog hanging in clouds where the corners turned. She never looked behind her. He made no concerted effort to hide himself; she might have looked over her shoulder at any moment and seen him. It didn't seem possible she could miss the sound of his heavy steps. It didn't seem possible she could miss the roar of his blackness against the blank silence of her back.

Off the stage, dressed, she looked smaller. He trained himself in those minutes to know her step so that even in the blackest passages, so black that even the white of her body, even the gold of her hair was denied light, he could hear her. In the blackest passages, she surely must have heard him.

By the time she got to her place, he guessed they'd crossed the Arboretum to the other side. Later, when he was inside her flat and saw the window, a porthole that stared out at the volcano, he knew he'd been right. She had a padlock on the door and went through her pockets to find the key. It was dark but she knew the key and she knew the lock. As she opened the door he was standing only ten feet away, gnawing on his cheek until he could taste blood; at that moment the only thing in his head was the only thing he didn't want to think about, and that was her, not Mona but the other one, who was free of his dream and the world it claimed as its own. Mona was closing the door behind her when he caught it with his hand. She wasn't alarmed to see him, but when she tilted her head to the side in that way of hers, she didn't smile, and he missed her little baby teeth. "Your lucky night," he said.

STEVE E R I C K S O N • 81

When h e fi r s t saw the stone, Wade had no way of knowing he'd been in the Arboretum three nights.

They had simply stretched into the one long endless night that always possessed the Arboretum, though at some point it occurred to him that outside the clocks must have noted his absence. It occurred to him in the amber haze of her cognac, the aquadream of her opium, the porcelain delirium of her body, as he lay naked among the dusty cushions of her flat, his body glistening with the tide that washed out between her legs with its smell of sea and flowers. The clocks outside know I'm not there, it occurred to him; and he was just lucid enough to translate this into its more banal consequences. But he'd think about this only long enough to tell himself not to think about it, instead to gaze at her sprawled unconscious at his feet, disheveled and tangled. She gurgled with the sound of him inside her.

From his stupor he gazed dimly at the door, which he'd secured on the inside with the lock that had been on the outside when he first arrived. He was trying to remember what he'd done with the key. He reached blindly for the cognac and knocked something over, and heard the splash and saw the rising amber cloud around him. To the catastrophe of the spilled cognac he said something even he didn't understand.

He sat up from the cushions and pillows that were propped beneath him. He took her long yellow hair in his hand and studied it stupidly; he ran his hand down her back to her thigh. He pulled her beneath him and heard her unconscious moan of dread, the response of her recesses to the realization that her vacancy wasn't big enough for him, that her vacancy wasn't one moment larger or smaller than her own body and she couldn't hold all of him. When he exploded in her he spilled out of every crevice, he ran down her chin and hung from the lobes of her ears like pearls. She didn't laugh anymore like when she picked up his money after dancing for him, she didn't laugh like when he picked up the sailor from his chair and dropped him on the ground; her laughter had turned A R C D'X • 82

to the resistant whimper that made him soar, until exhilaration got the better of him and, in the throes of the way he fucked her and the long endless night of the Arboretum, he said, "Sally."

It stopped him the moment he said it. It turned him befuddled, and she felt it. He looked down at her beneath him and, there through the part of her lips, were her baby teeth and the smile of victory.

He let her go, she fell limply beneath him. He staggered to his feet, the name he'd spoken ringing in his ears, except that as the moments passed he wasn't at all sure he'd actually said it. He looked at her as she dozed on the pillows, and almost asked if he'd said it, except that he didn't trust her answer. Suddenly he had to go to the toilet; now looking around he realized, for the first time in three nights, that the toilet was a converted altar room. It surprised him, actually, that anybody had ever bothered building an altar room in the Arboretum.

He was trying to think what he'd done with the key as he stumbled around the unit, which was in some disarray from when Mona had torn the place apart (hours ago? days ago?) looking for the key herself. That was when he saw the stone. It was in a small cabinet that sat next to the porthole that stared out at the volcano, smoldering in the night and smoking in the day, except now Wade couldn't remember ever seeing anything in the porthole but night, he couldn't remember ever seeing daylight at all. He touched the glass of the porthole as though it might be a painting hanging on the wall, rendered by the short, squat artist who was slowly transforming all the hallways of the Arboretum into other hallways.

Wade put his face to the porthole and peered in. The closer he looked, the drunker he felt. He gazed back at Mona on the pillows, then turned to the cabinet.

On the top shelf was the key to the lock. He had no recollection whatsoever of putting it there. But now more interesting to him were the cabinet's other contents, a small collection of forbidden artifacts from the black market: a child's doll and a pair of dice, mildly pornographic pictures and a comic book, small wooden carvings like the woman's head he had found a few days ago and still had in his coat pocket, and next to the key a stone. It seemed out of place. Wade examined it. It was flat and smooth on one side, rough and broken on the other, and fit his large hand; but what STEVE E R I C K S O N • 83

caught Wade's eye, what sobered Wade for the first time since he'd lost himself to Mona's sanctum, was the writing. It was a fragment of graffiti. But the graffiti wasn't written on the smooth side of the stone, rather it was scrawled across the rough part where it seemed impossible that anything could be written; and though the beginning and end were lost, the core of the message was unmistakable: pursuit of happiness

The actual calligraphy was nothing like the graffiti in the alley at Desolate and Unrequited, which made the coincidence all the more astounding to Wade; and suddenly it became very important to him that he keep this stone. For the first time in a while he found himself chewing the inside of his cheek, where the wound of his confusion had healed amid the cognac and opium and flesh. When he'd gotten his clothes and dressed, he took from his coat pocket the carving of the woman's head and placed it in the cabinet in exchange for the stone, which he put in his pocket. It was heavy and weighed the side of his coat down. He thought it might fall through the bottom of the pocket. He also took the key. He opened the door to the black hallway and stood for some time staring down the corridor to a dark end he couldn't see, wondering if he had the bearings to find his way out.