He awaited it hopelessly. He waited for his blank passivity to manifest itself as a small life, an unknowing infant whose existence would foreclose forever the possibilities of Etcher’s own escape. As he waited, he drank more. He scored liquor on the city’s boulevards, sometimes in broad daylight. But he never considered this petty outlawry as an attack on his passivity or even an aberration of it, but rather as more complicity, since the intent and effect of the drinking was to make passivity more tolerable. Like any functioning drunk, Etcher managed his hangovers as well as the hour of the day and the quality of his inebriation would allow; the priests would reprimand him on mornings when he showed up for work obviously toxic from something more than bitterness. In the hollow of his life he fashioned a routine that wouldn’t let him forget how his life was over, spending longer hours in Central’s dark corridors beneath its high empty rafters that were startling for the way they were immaculate of graffiti, reveling dully in his role as power’s flunky and authority’s file clerk. As time went by he found less occasion, as he’d done in the early days of their relationship, to leave work in time to pass the windowless downtown street of Tedi’s school, sometimes waiting for her in back of the classroom staring at the blackboard, where her messages ran off the edge of the slate onto the walls, around the corners and down the hallways — nothing but Tedi and little children and Primacist messages and classroom shelves of bibles and hymn books.
But offhours, in the shifts between his employment and his marriage, his drunkenness allowed him a fantasy. In this fantasy he ran through the streets of the city during one of the daily searches, with everyone huddling in their altar rooms, as he had his way with freedom, flush with the same rage of pleasure he’d poured into the flesh portals of so many faceless women. These fantasies were, in a sense, the same authoritarian fantasies of those who held power, a wild howl of sensuality derived from the submission of others. He’d merely been, he realized now, ten years too soon for Synthia, who had so longed for someone to make her yield to this sort of submission. She’d marvel now, if he were to happen upon her, at the steel of his hands that pinned her beneath him until he finished with her, at his integrity dribbling away inside her. But there was something else about his fantasies that had nothing to do with power. There was something about his fantasies that would have appalled the totalitarian Synthia, that had to do with anarchy and a lurking subversion ticking away inside him along with the weeks and months during which Etcher waited for Tedi to become pregnant and, mysteriously, she did not. In the dark of the archives he came to realize that with every passing month fate kept giving him another opportunity to make a break for it. He also came to realize that, each time he turned down the chance, it might be his last.
He was excited and terrified by the growing sound of the ticking. On the afternoon he discovered the archives’ back room, the ticking was loud enough to be indistinguishable from that of his heart.
His duties in the archives were to keep in order the records of the city’s affairs, and to file and search out records for the priests who used them. The door in back of the archives was so inconspicuous that Etcher always assumed it was a closet or storage space of some sort; it wasn’t only locked but had the dusty, uncracked look of not having been opened in a long time. Etcher worked for Central seven years before he saw a priest wearing the white robes of a church leader unlock the door one afternoon, enter and then close it behind him. This was the first sign to Etcher that whatever was beyond the door was not a closet. The second sign was that the priest didn’t emerge from the room for two hours. When he did, he had a large book under his arm and was looking for a place to put it in order to lock the door. “Want me to take that?” said Etcher.
The priest jumped at the sound of Etcher’s voice. It was as if he were unaware Etcher had ever been there, though Etcher was in plain sight and had always been there. “No,” the priest blurted, reluctantly putting the book on the ground and fumbling through his robes for the door’s key. He locked the door and left.
The next morning a different priest brought the book back. This priest wore the pale-blue robes of a second-level clergyman; Etcher recognized him as an assistant to the one who had been there the day before. As he unlocked the narrow door, the assistant asked Etcher to locate a file for him. When the priest disappeared inside the room Etcher, rummaging through the archives’ files, saw that the key to the room had been left in the lock.
He had no idea why he did it. He knew that if he’d been too hungover to think of it, or so sober he might have thought about it too long, he never would have done it. But now Etcher walked quickly to the door, took the key from the lock, and put it in his pocket.
When the priest in the light-blue robes came out of the room, closing the door behind him, he would have turned to lock it except that Etcher said, “Here’s your file.” The priest took the file and stood there several moments examining it. “I also pulled these, in case you need them,” Etcher said.
The priest looked up into Etcher’s monstrous blue eyes floating behind his glasses. “No, I don’t need those,” the priest said. Then he walked away, still reading the file.
It was shortly after noon when the priest returned. Frantically rushing to the door in back, he stared at the lock for a minute in disbelief. He turned to Etcher. He was pale as he said, “There was a key.”
“I’m sorry?” said Etcher.
“There was a key,” the priest repeated. He wiped his mouth with his hand. “Did you see it?”
“In the door?”
“Yes in the door,” he nearly shrieked.
“I thought you took it,” Etcher said.
“What?”
“You took it. You came out and took the key. Remember? I gave you the file?”
“I took the key?”
“And then I gave you the file.”
“Are you sure?”
“I thought so. Perhaps it fell out of your pocket.”
The priest kept wiping his mouth. He looked at the door and then at the floor around his feet as though the key might materialize. His eyes were twitching when he said, “You remember me taking the key. And putting it in my pocket.”
“I think so.”
“No,” the priest said emphatically, “you do remember it. If anyone asks, you remember I took the key and put it in my pocket. I didn’t leave it in the door. I put it in my pocket and it fell out somewhere along the way. Where nobody would find it. Where nobody would know what it was if they happened to pick it up. We’ll get another key made. We don’t have to bother anyone else about it. I took the key from the lock and put it in my pocket and you gave me the file, you remember that. If anyone should ask.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t just walk away and leave it in the door. I didn’t do that.”
“Yes. I mean no.”
An hour later a locksmith appeared to make another key for the door.