Arc D'X (28 page)

lived might, should she say it to Etcher, surge with the blood of her life, and in the flush she would dance for only one man and obliterate herself at his hands.

Every night he went to see the Woman in the Dark. She did not tell him her name. He drank again now.

Three months after he'd returned to the city the messages came from the north.

The first came from Kara. It was filled with expectation and insinuating pathos. His responses conveyed as much compassion as their obligatory nature could allow. If he no longer loved Kara as he once had, he nonetheless felt bound to love her for what had happened between them; for the source of his defining anguish to dry completely now would be another betrayal by love too profound for him to live with. But even as his answers to Kara became more perfunctory and less urgent, he wasn't prepared for the simple one-line letter that arrived one afternoon: J don't ever want to hear from you again. For the first split second he thought it was a joke; but he knew it wasn't a joke. He thought, for another split second, of answering; but he didn't answer. And so silence followed until, some time later, another message arrived: Your love was a lie. Then another: You led me on. These memos continued until their terse brutality changed to palpable rage. Now he tried to soothe himself with indignation, that this woman who had rejected him so bluntly and then, after the passage of so many years, beckoned him so summarily could accuse him of leading her on.

But it was a cheap indignation, won by logic but without force of argument on the terrain of aging and abandonment and self-remorse: it was easier for her now to believe their love was a lie than to accept the consequences of having once made the wrong choice.

In the midst of these messages came Sally's.

Now at the age of forty, his father and youth and love all passing at the same moment, he might have seemed comic in his new incarnation. This new role was to embody the recent bitter revelations of beautiful women who had come to assume by the nature of their beauty—even when, as in the case of Sally, they never quite believed in that beauty—that their lives were always to be filled with a hundred romantic choices, any of which could at some point be discarded or undone. Then the moment arrived for one A R C D'X • 182

woman after another, Kara and then Sally, when a choice could not be discarded or undone: and Etcher had been that choice for each of them. Because his love had seemed so enormous and his faith so pure they found his betrayal all the more incomprehensible. Now Sally was in trouble. Her life had become destitute and terrifying. She didn't call Etcher to help her but to love her again.

She called on him to promise her hope. And now Etcher could neither promise nor hope. She wrote scornfully in her letters of how he didn't trust her anymore; he didn't deny it. She wrote scornfully of how she didn't trust love anymore; he couldn't refute it. It infuriated him that she somehow felt love had let her down, when he believed she had let love down. He turned his back on her. His father and youth and love all having simultaneously passed from him, he no longer believed happiness was something pursued timelessly but rather that it was stumbled upon in a moment, seized ruthlessly and sensually with the understanding that it too would pass as quickly as a father or youth or love. But as much as he tried, the one thing Etcher couldn't pretend was that he didn't love her anymore. He couldn't stop the dreams of her. He couldn't stop the voice in his head that spoke to her, or her voice in his head that spoke back.

Then the correspondence stopped and the dreams changed. In the new dreams Sally was sick again, something in her again fluttering for release. As two years before she was in bed dying, the black bloom of her turned livid by fever. At first he thought these dreams were just old memories until in one of them he stopped to look around and saw he wasn't in her old unit in her old circle but in the house far to the north in the Ice where he'd been chained to her bed while police rampaged across the rooftop. He told himself the dreams didn't mean anything. He told himself they were a conspiracy of heart and conscience to provoke him into some kind of flight to her, into rushing back to save her again when he couldn't save anyone anymore. Gann, after all, was there. It wasn't as though she were really alone.

But one night not long after this dream, Etcher saw Gann in a corridor of the Arboretum.

He glanced up from Mona's feet to catch sight of him just beyond the Fleurs d'X door, making his way to the stairwell that held the sound of the tide and led up to the surface; and at that moment he STEVE ERICKSON • 183

knew something was wrong. Sally was up there alone in the Ice after all, with no one but Polly. A cold dread passed through him.

Suddenly oblivious of the Woman in the Dark, he rose to hurry after Gann, dropping his money on the stage and leaving the club behind. He had gotten down the corridor and was beginning to climb the stairs when he felt someone behind him.

The large hands on his back tore him from the stairs and hurled him against the wall. Etcher fumbled to try to catch his glasses as they flew off his face. In the force of his collision with the wall of the corridor, as he slipped bloodily to the floor, he was aware of nothing but that his glasses were somewhere in the hall where he couldn't see them; in the vertigo of his blind haze and the smell of blood around him he was reminded not of when he'd smashed his glasses before the priests but of how far from the grace of love's power he'd fallen. He called out to Gann in his mind, thinking, Something is wrong and I have to find Gann. But what he said out loud, what everything came down to, as it had all come down to since the first moment he saw her, was her name.

He was vaguely aware of someone at the end of the hall. He might have recognized her as the Woman in the Dark if in the light she hadn't been transparent. If he could have seen anything he might still not have recognized the big black man from the church lobby years before, since the big man was more naked than the woman. Etcher reached to his mouth to touch his blood. It glistened from the blur of his hands. He was still saying her name when the large man placed his glasses in his hands and ran down to the other end of the hall.

All the way back to his unit he held out his hands before him and said her name, as though the blood were the medium of their communication and he spoke to her now through his wet fingers.

All through the night he lay on his bed with his hands open at his sides. He could tell his hands were still wet with blood in the wind that came through the crack beneath his door. Something's wrong, he told himself over and over; he did not sleep so as not to dream, because he couldn't bear to dream of Sally dying alone in the Ice.

It was as well that he didn't catch up with Gann, he tried to tell himself: what would he have said to him anyway? "Gann, I've been having dreams." Now as he lay on his bed he shook himself awake each time he thought he might fall to sleep. He didn't change posi-A R C D'X • 184

tions because he didn't want to wipe the blood from his hands onto the sheets beneath him. He had almost slipped to sleep when there was a knock on the door.

Gann, he thought. "Sally," he said.

"It's me," she answered behind the door.

He sat up. "Sally?" he said, astonished. The blood didn't matter anymore, it had conjured her, he thought, and it didn't matter if he got blood on the door when he went to open it.

"It's me," Mona repeated, in his doorway.

"It's you," he agreed, looking at her. She had a coat pulled around her, and appeared cold. He stepped aside and she stepped through the doorway into the dark of his unit. He closed the door and turned on a lamp. He motioned her toward the only chair as he sat on the bed. She sat on the chair for a moment, and when neither of them said anything she got up and came to the bed and sat on the edge of it next to him. In the light of the lamp she touched the battered side of his face, where he'd been thrown against the wall of the Arboretum.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Yes."

She took one of his hands. "You're still bleeding?"

"No," he shook his head, "I'm all right."

"I think I caused trouble for you."

"No."

"I think so," she nodded.

"Do you know him?"

"Yes."

"Does he hurt you?"

"Yes. No. I can't go back now, except to leave." They sat in silence, the light of the lamp growing a little dimmer. Glancing casually around the unit, she turned back to him to say, "Do you want to sleep?"

"I can't sleep," he answered, exhausted.

"If you try."

"I mean I can't let myself. I have dreams."

"Oh."

"Do you have dreams?"

"I dream of the room falling." She stood and took off her coat STEVE ERICKSON • 185

and he wasn't surprised that beneath the coat she wore only the black stockings of the Fleurs d'X. She sat casually naked on his bed. He worried that she was cold. "Should I go?" she said.

"Are you cold?"

"I'm cold," she admitted.

Instinctively he moved to put his arm around her.

"It's all right," she said, raising her hands.

He pulled back. "OK."

She hadn't meant he couldn't touch her. She hadn't really thought through, as she followed him from the Arboretum out of Desire into the city, whether or not she would let him touch her.

She had only recoiled from the promised shelter of his arms, not from his bloody hands touching her. Just as instinctively as he'd moved to put his arms around her, she touched herself, since it was her job to touch herself—a vocational habit—since she'd long since come to define all of her relations with men by the way she touched herself in place of their own hands. I'll do the touching for you, was what she said to every man. And so when Etcher came to her not so much out of desire as to protect her from the cold, and when she rebuffed him, she tried to repair the reproach by touching herself for him. Her little gift to him.

There was no blood on her fingers. Her fingers were clean and dry of blood. They didn't mar the butter of her thighs or the precarious labyrinth of her labia to which she attended every moment, pampering its petals and soothing its inflammations after Wade's violations. Watching, Etcher sank into the swirl of her. On the bed next to her he reached out to touch the place where her body opened, that he might raise his fingers to his mouth and taste something other than blood, since taste was the one sense he never dreamed, since taste was the sense that told him it was not a dream. He was inches from her when she knew she had to decide now to let him touch her or not: she never said no, but her abrupt gasp at the moment of truth made him draw back again. He felt a bit humiliated, in his position. In her position, he knew instantly, a man would feel humiliated as well, except that it was the fundamental difference between a man and woman, the difference in their brands of humiliation. "I was made," she explained, "to be seen and not touched."

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He nodded. It was the fundamental difference between a man and woman that she would not, in such a position, feel she'd let him down. But she did offer a consolation.

"I can take you from the city," she said.

She added, as an afterthought, since she didn't believe it would matter to him, "It's dangerous," though she might have meant the two of them sitting there together, in the silence and the dark.

"How?" he finally asked, startled.

"Things can happen."

"I don't mean how is it dangerous. I mean how would you get me out of the city."

"Through the Arboretum."

"There's a way out of the city through the Arboretum?"

Her voice dropped. "I can take you and show you," she said.

"You have to be sure. No one changes his mind at the last minute.

They'll kill you before they let you change your mind."

"The police are watching me," he advised her. "They know you're here right now."

She got up and put on her coat. Looking around, she said, "It has to be tonight. Do you understand?"

"I'm not sure."

"It has to be tonight, if you want me to take you from the city. It has to be now. You'll need money and you can't bring anything with you. Do you have money?"

"Some," he answered, wary.

She knew he didn't trust her. "Well, it's up to you," she said.

Her accent was most pronounced when she was speaking colloqui-ally. She leaned over and turned out the lamp, and when she'd turned out the lamp she leaned over and kissed him, in case she never saw him again, or in case he was the sort of fool who trusted a kiss. "I'll be at the Arboretum in an hour. . . ."

"Where will I find you—?"

"I'll find you, if you decide to come. One hour. I won't be there STEVE E R I C K S O N • 187

after that. He's looking for me." She opened the front door soundlessly and sailed out against the rapids of the night. She didn't close the door the whole way and he sat on the edge of the bed looking out the crack of the door until he got up to push it almost shut.

With the flash of her blond hair the police would certainly see her leave. In the dark Etcher changed his clothes as quietly as possible and got together all the money that he still had after what he'd sent north to Sally. Then he sat for ten more minutes and waited.

He waited for that moment when the police would begin to relax, having seen the blonde leave and decided Etcher had gone to sleep. There would be no fooling them for long but he needed that extra minute or two; once he got as far as the outlaw zone they would fall back a little. He couldn't appear to be up to anything but another trip back to Fleurs d'X. It was going to make the police nervous no matter how you cut it, two trips to the Arboretum in one night; it was going to look unusual. Etcher hoped it wasn't that maniac Mallory who was out there.

It figured that if there was a way out of the city it was the Arboretum, though Etcher couldn't imagine what it was short of a hot-air balloon from the top-level tenements or an underground tunnel through fifty miles of cold lava. But he couldn't wait anymore. He couldn't stand this feeling he had, he couldn't stand any more dreams. Whether the Woman in the Dark was telling the truth or lying, whether she was correct or mistaken in what she thought she knew, if there was any getting out of Aeonopolis it figured to be through the Arboretum; and he couldn't wait anymore and that was that, and he got up from the bed and pulled open the door he hadn't quite shut, and stepped out into the circle. He didn't run but walked, not across the white of the circle but around the black edge, and then he slipped out of the circle between two darkened units. He didn't look back to see the police following him. He didn't think about never coming back again.