25
WHEN HIS AFFAIR WITH Kara ended, Etcher packed his things, settled his affairs, and went to say goodbye to his parents.
They lived in the center of the village. They had so long assumed Etcher would eventually leave that, when the time finally came, they had gotten used to the idea he’d never leave at all. Etcher’s mother had moved to the village many years before to be with Etcher’s father; she came from a warmer part of the world several thousand miles away, and it took the rest of her life for her blood to thicken with the cold. Etcher’s father had been born in the Ice, brooding and stormy. There were only the three of them, mother and father and son, each always something separate unto him or herself, the family a home base they returned to emotionally from their daily routines. The night before his son’s departure, Etcher’s father got quietly drunk at the dinner table. Having arrived at the point where he believed his dignity was in jeopardy, he excused himself to go to bed. “I hope you’ll remember me,” he said to the stunned Etcher, “at my best, feet of clay and all,” and it was unbearable to the son how in that moment of parting his father considered himself to be a failure in his son’s eyes. Etcher watched speechless and confused as his father disappeared through the bedroom door, with nothing more to be said between them — which is to say with everything to be said between them — until fifteen years later, at his father’s deathbed when it was too late.
If Etcher inherited both his father’s brooding fatalism and kindness of heart, he resisted the lessons of life that teach one to be harder. In some ways Etcher taught himself to be softer. And in defiance of life’s lessons that teach one to dim the light in oneself and fight the dark, Etcher intended to do neither. He hated the resignation that life insisted on. He listened, with one ear pressed to the passage walls, to the secret life being lived by himself just on the other side of the life he lived consciously. There was no telling how much good he might have done or how much evil he might have committed had he not been so burdened with a conscience. In the end what he feared most was not his own pain but the pain of others, for which he might bear some responsibility. What he feared was not what his heart could survive but what his conscience couldn’t, which included the smallest infraction — his graceless negligence as a best man at a wedding, for instance. Time and again he was ready to believe the best of someone else. Time and again he was ready to acknowledge the worst of himself. Hating the resignation that life insisted on, he would come to be led by his conscience to resign himself completely to life, before saving his life at the expense of that conscience.
At the nearest station, eighty-five miles away, he boarded a train heading south. He was on the train for six days. He was on the train such a long time that at the end, when he stepped from his car onto the station platform, he continued to feel it traveling beneath him; and later from his hotel window, while the floor of his room continued to move beneath him as well, the blue obelisks of the city vibrated like the forests that accompanied him so endlessly they had seemed to him always the same forest, moving with the train. After so many trees the obelisks were a relief, spires of sea and rock, and he was exhilarated by the sight of them before he came — like everyone in his new city — to dread them.
Soon after he arrived he went to work for the authorities. For a while he was a clerk in the immigration bureau, where he did nothing but file forms nine hours a day. Eventually he was moved to a position in the archives at Church Central. This was but his first crime of resignation. Over the next ten years, as a dead man traveling surreptitiously in the body of a living one, like a convict on the run with a forged passport, he committed so many more such infractions that he lost count. Sometimes in the course of a day or night they numbered in the hundreds, small deferences and numb capitulations including the most sensual, the drink that took him indifferently past drunkenness, the woman he fucked beyond his attraction to her. His aggression itself was passive, the inexorable rush of a gale into a vacuum. He was in the perfect city for deadness and resignation. As he was exhilarated the day he arrived by the blue obelisks of Aeonopolis, so as well he was placated by the repetition of the sea, so as well he was reconciled immediately to how the city’s clerical powers had coopted the tedious questions of spirituality and meaning. So as well he came to anticipate the sirens of the morning and twilight and the time spent in the dark of the small altar room of his unit, where he sat praying to no one and feeling nothing and being no place.
For all of this deadness his memory could never abide the melancholy of another’s misery. It was in the early months of his arrival that he walked out of a bakery one morning to be met by an old beggar so hideous and pitiful that when he shoved his open palm in front of Etcher and pleaded for a piece of bread or a coin, the other man was frozen where he stood, even as his mouth was full of bread and his hand full of coins. Etcher fled without giving the man anything. All day he tried to work in the rubble of his moral paralysis, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and, claiming sickness, left work to return to where he’d last seen the beggar. The beggar was no longer there. All night Etcher looked for him. Exhausted, he finally found the beggar at dawn; into the stunned beggar’s hand Etcher stuffed a wad of money, and fled again. After this episode he never again left empty any human heart that gaped like an open wound. He gave money to whoever asked, as though to ward off the thrusts to his own heart by the things that made him ashamed of life. In the same way he taught himself to become softer, so the immune system of his conscience withered away, unprotected by the antibodies of experience. Among a crowd of hundreds at the teeming Market, a nation of beggars immediately identified him and closed in, no matter how he might hide his face or avoid eye contact, until it seemed they were at his doorstep at dawn, until they had mobilized as a guerrilla army monitoring his various routes, hobbling in pursuit on crutches or little wheels.
It was both the ultimate act of resignation and the ultimate answer to his conscience, his marriage to a schoolteacher for whom Etcher fulfilled an increasingly desperate agenda. Her name was Tedi. She was small and pretty like a doll if not like a beautiful woman, her face framed by gold ringlets. She had a mind for the numbers of things and their mechanics; beneath her sweetness she was obsessed with doom. Her past was strewn with men whom she regarded as having betrayed her and against whom she plotted her vengeance, in exact calculations and with a precision like the plumbing of a building. It didn’t hurt that the small school in town where she taught her little pupils was situated amid the most wrathful and indignant of Primacy’s graffiti. Gazing at the messages around her she took inspiration. But because even Tedi understood that vengeance was a short-term satisfaction, and because her temperament for it didn’t quite match her instincts, she was only left with doom in the end and the realization that its mathematics was more inevitable than any she might concoct to thwart it. Thus she hid in her unit from passing meteorites that might fall from space, searching her out as though with radar; and hidden from the danger of the outside world she was left with the doom that lurked in her like an infection.
Etcher felt as though he’d been jostled among an aimless throng of people and then had bumped into Tedi, at which point he looked down at his cupped hands to see they now held her beating heart. She wouldn’t take it back. He couldn’t give it to someone else. He couldn’t drop it on the ground where it might be trampled underfoot by the throng. He somehow accepted responsibility for this heart by the fact of his having it, and by his inability — even in the depths of his deadness — to be so cruel as to simply refuse or desert it. She closed in on him and he allowed himself to be closed in on, because he’d come to believe, now six years after Kara, that he’d never love like that again and that at the age of thirty-five the dead calm of adulthood called for this final moment of peace. Thus he had never stopped disbelieving in his own blame. That he didn’t have the courage to hurt Tedi sooner only doomed him to devastate her later. This culpability became all the more profound when, having given in to her plans for marriage, he gave in to her plans for a child. They both expected she would become pregnant immediately.