Hour after hour, watching Mona dance for the sad blackhaired man with the glasses, Wade began drinking little whiskeys just as in the old days, signaling to Dee behind the bar as the sad man dropped his glasses in the dark and, on her hands and knees, Mona helped to find them. When the blackhaired man surrendered the rest of his money at Mona’s feet and walked from the club, Wade got up from his table to follow; and as he passed her stage he looked once at her, trapped in her dance, and felt her watch him all the way out of the Fleurs d’X.
The other man was at the end of the corridor. Shred by shred Wade tore the clothes from his own body for the last time and left them in his trail; by the time he reached the stairs, he was naked again. He pulled the other man from the stairs, hurling him against the corridor wall, the glasses skidding the length of the hallway. Dazed, the man groped blindly around him, tumbling into some more profound, unspoken incapacitation. Wade beat him furiously. Blood splattered the corridor walls. The man took the beating without resistance, crumpling to the floor beneath the assault until in his incapacitation he finally groaned a single word. It was the only sound the man made.
“Sally.”
Wade tottered at the sound of it. If the man with the black hair had risen up and surprised Wade with a blow of retaliation, it couldn’t have struck with more force or shock. Wade lowered his hands and stood panting over the man, wondering if he believed his ears just as he’d wondered before when, with Mona, he’d said the same name. And then the man said it again, through the blood in his mouth, utterly unaware of Wade as though there was nothing and no one there in the corridor but blood and broken heart; and the reality from which Wade had fled into the Arboretum three years before floated in the hallway between the two men, in a word.
He turned to see Mona at the end of the hall. She had followed the trail of his clothes from the doorway of the Fleurs d’X. In this last moment he would ever actually lay eyes on her, she looked almost as she had the first time, naked but for her black stockings and high-heeled shoes; now in the dank light of the Arboretum corridor rather than the dark of her flat or the blush of the club, she seemed more frail, even as Wade was the more naked of the two. Mona didn’t look at Wade at all. She put her hands to her mouth, gazing at the beaten man beneath him. When Wade reached out to her, she turned and ran. He called out and started after her, then was jerked back to his victim as though the name the man had spoken was a web that bound them. It was the best Wade could do to reach down and pick up the man’s glasses and hand them back to him.
He trampled his own clothes underfoot as he ran after her. He was naked when he burst into the Fleurs d’X to find her. The women stopped dancing to look at him; Dee behind the bar stopped pouring drinks. He ran down the corridors of the Arboretum toward her flat; turning every corner he expected to run her down. People cowered before the sight of him; he took no notice of them. He couldn’t understand why, with every corner he turned, he hadn’t caught up with her; it wasn’t until he reached the flat that he knew she was gone for good. The door was open. The lock dangled from the outside. Inside nothing was amiss, but her departure hovered in the room, over the floor that was painted to look as though there were no floor, beneath the ceiling painted to look as though there were no ceiling, between the walls rendered to appear as though there were no walls. Her goodbye hovered like the explosion of his desire when she’d ripped him from inside her that first time she’d returned to find he had taken such possession of her world.
Wade sat in the flat by himself for a while. For some reason it occurred to him to look in the corner where he had kept his clothes that were now scattered throughout the Arboretum passageways. The stone with the graffiti, which he’d hidden there, was gone. Wade roared at the betrayal.
They heard it all over the neighborhood. They heard it in the distance, as the roar grew louder and closer. Soon it rushed through the corridors, preceding him as he ran up and down passageways, up and down stairs, through doors and chambers, as he swept the Arboretum from end to end, top to bottom, looking for her. The roar crashed through the Arboretum until the neighborhood was submerged in it, the torrent eventually trickling down the long black entryway and out the single door into the world outside. As the years passed, the roar slowly wound its way into the city. The months stretched into years, to whatever extent in the Arboretum years could be measured, and finally, after he’d prowled the corridors a long time, he came to accept that he’d never find her.
When he’d drunk the last of her cognac and smoked the last of her opium, his charge became a wayward stagger, stunned and endless. When he ceased to be the marauder of the Arboretum’s food and drink and flesh, he was left to scavenge its dread and rumor and panic, stalking the maze that grew wider and higher as its core grew deeper and darker. He wandered the Arboretum for sixteen years when a vision came to him, and it lasted only a moment.
He turned a corner of the long Arboretum night and saw Sally Hemings.
He stopped where he stood, slumped against whatever wall was behind him. She came from an unlit auditorium, looking around carelessly with two large gray dogs following at her heels; then she saw the apparition at the end of the hall. She’d heard about the naked giant who lurked in the Arboretum passages; there wasn’t much doubt this was he. And he was looking back at her, and she was younger and more fair than he’d remembered. Her dark hair had a touch of fire in it. “Sally?” he said.
Her mouth fell slightly. She watched him in wonder.
“Sally?” He started toward her. For a moment she was frozen, and then she shook herself free of the sight and sound of him, turning to vanish into the shadows.
23
IN HIS LAST HOUR inside the Arboretum, lying in a heap in the transformed flat where he’d lived with Mona, from a stupor he saw three more visions. Even he knew the first wasn’t real.
It was Mona, standing before him, looking as she’d always looked. She was naked as she’d always been naked, and wet, her golden hair in strands on her bare shoulders as though she’d just climbed from the bottom of the sea. She stood in a pool of water. Even in his stupor he remembered it had been many years since she’d gone. Her head tilted to the side and she smiled, of course, and even though he knew she wasn’t really there, when she held out the stone to him, he reached for it. He closed his eyes and then opened them again and she was gone and his hand was empty. Dimly he nodded to himself.
At first, he didn’t think the second vision was real either.
It was Sally Hemings again, as he’d seen her in another part of the Arboretum. He closed his eyes and said her name, expecting she’d disappear as Mona had, and only the echo of her name would be left in the room with him; but when he opened his eyes, she was still there. “I’m not Sally,” she shook her head, “Sally was my mother.”
He narrowed his eyes and tried to think. “Was?”
“I’m looking for a man,” the girl went on, and now Wade could see she was indeed younger and fairer than Sally. “His name is Etcher. He wore thick glasses and had black hair …” and he laughed until the effort of laughing exhausted him, and he passed out.