Arc D'X (40 page)

Piece by piece he's stripped himself down, casting aside the shirt and vaccine chain and the contents of his pockets, the water and blanket and even the picture of the buried city, which, in retaliation for its betrayal, he rips to bits and flings above him as though to hurl it out of the canyon altogether. The bits of the picture only rain back down on him. Foolishly he brushes some of the confetti from his wings, comically he wears some on his bare head. He STEVE E R I C K S O N • 257

tears his watch from his wrist and holds it in front of his eyes desperately trying to focus on the hour. In his other hand he clutches the only thing he can't bear to discard, the piece of the Berlin Wall. He stumbles further into the gorge in his fevered daze, sometimes dozing against the canyon's side; in hallucinatory moments he misses Christina with the shaved freckled body writhing in the bondage of his bloody bandages on the floor of his flat. As he lies beneath the gorge's shelter the hours pass and then the rest of the day, until he hears the gray twilight sun sink far beyond the edge of the earth. Not long before midnight, when it's too dark for Georgie even to read the time on his watch, he hears the shadow of the millennium advance across the eastern horizon.

In the dark of the shadow he sees something.

It's so faint he looks again and again, by now distrusting his own eyes, but further into the gorge, suspended a few feet above the ground, is the outline of something. In his delirium the first and only thing he can think of is a coffin, set in the side of the canyon like a jewel. He crosses the crevasse. When he sees the climb he must make he nearly turns back, but slowly he begins, with his watch and his piece of Wall. In a rocky hollow of the canyon he sees it isn't a coffin; within several feet he sees it's another of the city's ancient doors. It doesn't seem possible he could have missed this door. It doesn't seem possible he could have missed anything.

He's been over everything again and again. But there's a door now and the only reason he could see it at all from the other side of the gorge was because coming from behind the door is, unmistakably, a light.

He's terrified. He backs away from the door: terror wars with desperation. He steps back to the door: as he tries to get a grip on it, desperation refutes terror. He holds the watch up to the sliver of light coming through the crack of the door and, behind and below him, the ghost city splayed across the Cataclysm's breach slides into oblivion.

At 11:59, the second hand of the watch hurtling toward twelve, he yanks open the door and steps through.

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The old man stirs in his chair at Georgie's entrance but doesn't wake at first. The bareness of the room is blinding to Georgie; he holds his hands up to his eyes. In the glare he can barely make out the sink and toilet in the corner and the unmade bed against the wall. On the table in front of the lone old man sits a radio that's turned off and Georgie's piece of the Wall, though even as Georgie now looks at the evidence of his empty hands he can't remember putting it there. Beyond the old man on the other side of the room is another door. It's slightly open. Beyond the door is a dark hallway.

The stillness of the room is even more striking to Georgie than the lifelessness of the last several days, though now he isn't so sure about the last several days, whether they were several days ago or several years, or whether days or years still mean what they did moments before. The stillness means to deny the presence of the old man. A buzz in some other part of the building, beyond the door on the other side of the room and down its dark hallway, takes on the audible outline of a TV. The old man looks at the room around him much as Georgie has been looking at it, and he's been staring at the bed for some time and is still staring at it when he asks, so quietly Georgie can barely hear him, "Is there any wine?" He finally turns to Georgie only because Georgie hasn't answered.

The old man smiles. He raises his eyes to Georgie. With his heart in his throat, Georgie stares back into the old man's eyes and knows he's insane.

It isn't like the people on the U-Bahn when they used to stare at Georgie. The old man sees Georgie from the perspective of a finished life: the boy is already drained of the disproportionate meaning of the present. The wings on Georgie's shoulders, the woman with the head of a bird on Georgie's chest, have no impact on the old man at all. The dagger of time hanging by a thread over the old man's wild auric hair dreads its own fall while he anticipates it; his fearlessness fills Georgie with loathing. In the subsiding blaze of STEVE E R I C K S O N • 259

the room the old man's face appears like a vision in the hole of the U-Bahn tunnel at Kochstrasse; and now Georgie is repelled by this grotesque old man in ragged clothes, the torn pants on his long legs and the shoes with holes and the lining of his coat drooping from the hem, who's invaded Georgie's long dream. But the feeling gets much worse when Georgie says, "Who are you?" and the old man answers, his stare unbroken and his smile unchanged, "America," and laughs softly afterward as though he's made a joke.

Liar, is the word that catches in Georgie's throat. But he warns instead, "That's where I came from." The old man continues to smile at Georgie the way a stranger smiles lewdly at another man's woman even though the other man stands right next to her. Georgie can't even look at the old man. Fury laces hunger and exhaustion to the point of lightheadedness, and he's been sitting in his chair across from the old man rocked by this fury and hunger and exhaustion, staring at the bare wall beyond the bed for four or five minutes, before he realizes with a start what's been right in front of him the whole time.

Someone is sleeping in the bed.

Her back is to him. He has no reason to know it's a female except he just knows, and the horizon of the white sheet displays the shape of her, and Georgie can't believe she's here after all. He had reconciled himself to not finding her, and now she's in the bed right in front of him. "There's someone sleeping," he says.

Thomas nods. The smile on his face hasn't changed, and Georgie thinks perhaps the old man is mocking him; but then the smile gives way to fierce pain. Thomas takes his head in his hands. He squeezes his head as though to wring the pain out of it, until he can't hold on anymore and slumps back in the chair. His face glistens. Exultation sweeps Georgie, because the old man isn't smiling anymore and Georgie has found her sleeping in the bed in front of him; at one point she moves slightly in her sleep. Out of the haze of his pain Thomas picks up the piece of the Wall on the table and peers at it for some time. He examines the back of the shard as though it's the longest sentence in the world, Georgie thinks indignantly to himself. The part of Georgie that recoils from the inscription, the part of him that regards it as something infectious, swarming with moral bacteria, fears that a secret hovers between him and Thomas that will demand its exposure if the old man A R C D'X • 260

doesn't put the stone down soon, which he does only at the last moment.

"What are you doing here?" Georgie says.

Thomas rubs his temples and the back of his neck. He speaks so softly Georgie can barely make him out. "Is there news from Virginia?"

"I don't know," Georgie answers.

"What finally loses a man's soul," Thomas says, "the betrayal of his conscience or the betrayal of his heart?" He looks up at Georgie as though the boy with tattooed wings will actually have an answer to this question; the old man's beatific smile struggles to surface above the pain in his head. He raises an old finger. "Both, you're thinking. Aren't you? You're thinking both." He nods. "But what if you have to choose? What if your life is forced to one or the other and there's no avoiding having to choose? What if your life chooses for you, or she does," and Georgie is startled, because Thomas is indicating the woman in the bed. The old man tries to unbend himself from his chair but doesn't have the energy; he collapses from the effort. He glares around him at the affront of the room's light. He mutters, "Virginia runs with blood, like my dreams of Paris," and he smells of smoke.

"You're a disgrace," Georgie charges. But his voice cracks.

Trying again he manages, "You're drunken scum and it isn't right you call yourself that name." America is the name he means.

Thomas knows it's the name Georgie means. "Of course," he nods, "the flesh," and he pulls at the old weathered skin on his face, "is too pale to be American flesh. Isn't it?" and he keeps pulling at his face for the momentary hot rush of blood to his fingertips. He massages his wrists and Georgie sees how raw they're rubbed, as though they've only recently been released from chains. Thomas looks at the bed and says, "And what if she had answered yes? When I asked her to go back to America with me, what if she had promised different? What if, there in the square of the Bastille among the glass and blood and gunpowder, she had said Yes I'll return with you to America as the slave of your pleasure, instead of turning as she did and disappearing from my life forever into Paris' roiling core, while I stood at the top of the street screaming her name? What if my life had chosen my heart rather than my conscience? What if I'd put a price on her head and STEVE E R I C K S O IS • 261

shackled her naked in the cabin of my ship like the property she was, what if I'd smuggled her back to Virginia pleasing my heart every day for the rest of my life and left my conscience to God or the hypocrites who claim to serve him? Let them try to stop me from taking her back, Paris and its revolution. Let it shrivel and petrify like a small black fossil, my tyrannic conscience. Happiness is a dark thing to pursue," the old man hisses at Georgie, his eyes glimmering brighter and madder at the bald boy, "and the pursuit itself is a dark thing as well. Even God knows that. Above everything else, God especially knows that." Thomas seizes his racked head. When the pain subsides just enough he whispers, "What if I'd loved her my whole life." His old eyes are wet. "Would the conscience be as shriveled and petrified as the heart is now?

Where's the frontier of the first irrevocable corruption? Where's the first moment in the negotiation of the heart and conscience when one so betrays the other that the soul's rotting begins? God's hypocrites will say there's no difference between one corruption and another, that the smallest is as damnable as the biggest: but I made a country once. It was the country of redemption, somewhere this side of God's. It was the frontier of the first irrevocable compromise between the heart's freedom and the conscience's justice, past which the soul can still redeem itself." He clutches his head again and moans, "The blood."

There floods into his face the sound of every promise, the claim of every choice, the crash of his heart into his conscience and everything of himself that died from the collision, the stricken memory of happiness that abandoned him, the mourned wife and departed black fourteen-year-old lover, the shouts and gunshots of revolution, the shattered ideals in which even his own betrayal cannot stop him from believing; the ideals still believe him even as he can no longer believe them. And suddenly he appears ancient.

Suddenly the misery sags his face and he can't decide which to hold, the racking thunder of his head or the red burn of his wrists, and he says, "I have to sleep." He pulls himself from the chair and gropes toward the bed. He can hardly move from the pain and stumbles in the glare of the room. He holds himself up against the far wall and lowers himself slowly onto the bed, and seems to float the rest of the way to the pillow, laying himself down beside her as Georgie watches in horror.

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The revulsion that washes over the young Berliner, to see the old man lying in bed next to the one for whom Georgie's come so far, displaces exultation; rage nearly paralyzes him in his place.

"What if she'd said yes," the old man whispers, trailing off; beneath their lids his eyes dart madly to dreams of his black slave queen emerging from the carriage in Virginia pregnant with his son, managing as the mistress of his house and lands. Georgie rises from his chair and stands looking down at the bed. "Liar," he says when he brings the last extant piece of the Wall crashing down on the old man's skull; the wound seems as tidy as it is fatal. It seems a full minute before the blood trickles from the old man's ears, though the eyes immediately stop darting, their dreams having shut off like a light. Georgie stands examining the tainted stone in his hand with sorrow, to see if some small part of its inscription has been left in the creases of the old man's brow or the roots of the white-fire hair. He sits down at the table still holding the stone and turns on the radio, but then returns to the bed.

The old man is bleeding more. For the first time the woman responds in her sleep to the room's turbulence, rearranging herself where she lies, confusion flashing across her sleep as she turns to Georgie for the first time. For the first time he actually sees her face. The ecstatic blackness that comes rushing up from her staggers him where he stands.

It isn't simply her blackness but her beauty that is the worst trick. He can deny neither her blackness nor beauty even as he's sure the one must deny the other. Her raven hair falls across her face, and in the corner of her mouth like a drop of wine is a word that begins to run down her chin; a tear waits beneath one flutter-ing lash. She lies lushly delivered of something she doesn't know and won't begin to suspect until she wakes from the dream that's now devouring her life, at which point only the devouring will be left. She doesn't suspect what's only moments beyond her eyelids.

It's as though Georgie would deliver her from the waking world, as he's delivered Thomas to the last mad dream of his life, it's as though for something more than reprisal against the terrible trick of her beauty and blackness that Georgie lifts the piece of Wall once more in order to bring it crashing down onto Sally's head as well. Several times he raises the stone over her before he lowers his arm without striking. He's only slightly more confounded when STEVE E R I C K S O N • 263