For several months Etcher kept the key hidden away, occasionally considering whether to dispose of it, not simply because it was incriminating but because he’d never really thought about opening the door to see what was behind it. Etcher wasn’t concerned with what was behind the door. It was never his reason for taking the key. He took the key simply for the taking, and he was struck afterward by how easily he’d done it, how easily he’d lied about it when the priest had returned looking for the key in panic. It was only later that he was tempted to press his luck and actually open the door; and then he was unnerved by how tempting it was, though curiosity as to what was behind the door was never a part of it. It was the act of opening he couldn’t resist, as it had been the act of taking. And as every month passed in which he expected Tedi to tell him she was pregnant and that his fate and responsibility were decided, as every month went by that he was once again reprieved by some conspiracy of biology and destiny, his own recklessness grew more irresistible until the moment came when, in the latest hours of the night, he gave in to it.
He would try to open the door, he decided. He assumed the locksmith had changed the lock anyway when he made the other key. He would try to open the door, and when it wouldn’t unlock, he could then dispose of the key, the temptation having been succumbed to and thwarted.
The locksmith, however, had not changed the lock. In the dark of the archives, the door opened.
Etcher had been right about its being a very small room, the size of a walk-in vault. There was nothing inside but the books — nearly a hundred of them, all like the one the priest had removed and the other priest had returned. The books were old and dusty, in grimy red covers that had no titles or authors’ names but were simply identified, on labels that ran along the edges of the shelves, as the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History: and at that moment Etcher almost turned from the vault and slammed the door behind him. At that moment, though he had no idea what the volumes meant, suspicion crowded subversion in his brain; instantly Etcher somehow knew that if he were to be discovered here, he’d disappear forever, that no one would ever see him again. That the breach of entering this room with these books was more than simply treason, it was heresy. He lingered long enough to pull one and then another volume down and open them. In them were listed events Etcher had never heard of. The volumes told of people no one had ever known and countries no one had ever seen. He read of lives no one had ever lived and pored over maps of places no one had ever been. Every sound of Church Central, every creak in the walls and every footstep in its distant quarters, resonated in the vault until, with dawn just over the horizon, his nerves could no longer stand it.
He was terror-stricken, some minutes later, to hurry from the archives into the lobby of Church Central only to see, there in the middle of the night, two cops.
He could tell they were cops. One was a large black man and the other a short man with red hair; they appeared tense. He was certain they had been waiting for him, tipped off by a witness in the shadows or an alarm miles away. But in fact the cops paid Etcher little attention. They just stood in the middle of the lobby as Etcher walked furtively past them. He got all the way to the door expecting them to call out after him, and it was only when they did not, it was only when he left the lobby and building and, outside, felt the cold sweat on his face and the night air in his constricted lungs, and only when he got home to find Tedi sleeping, with no fateful news on her lips, that he truly believed he’d gotten away with it. Then he couldn’t sleep. Then he wanted a drink, but after he dug his forbidden bottle out of the cupboard where he kept it, he changed his mind and put it back. He was seized by the impulse to rid himself of the key for good; outside in the middle of the night he walked around the circle’s obelisk, muttering to himself. For a long time he tried to think of where to dispose of the key, and the more he thought, the more the impulse for getting rid of it subsided, until he decided — much to his own dismay — that perhaps getting rid of it wasn’t so necessary after all.
He allowed himself then what he believed would be his last subversion: keeping the key. The fires of subversion in him were banked; he felt spent, calm.
After several days passed, however, and then a week and then two, Etcher realized nothing had changed. If the target of his subversion was his own life, nothing about the few clandestine moments he’d spent in the archives’ vault had delivered him. The moments in the vault were like a drug that had been taken and experienced and then had worn off, leaving him jangly and unsettled and blinking around him at how his circumstances had remained untransformed. And though there wasn’t any way in which stealing into the vault could transform the circumstances, an unconscious impulse insisted such an act would slowly change Etcher himself until he’d crossed the rubicon of his subversion and there was no way back. He had no idea what such a point of no return would look like. He had no idea what he would look like once he’d passed it. He clung to the notion that he would easily see this point approaching in the distance before he got there, allowing him enough time to change his mind.
He began working late in the archives every night. He drifted further and further from home, spending first five minutes, then ten, then half an hour in the archives vault studying the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History and their blasphemous reality. The more alien this reality was to him, the more he intuitively believed it. Thus he surely and deliberately found for himself a corner with no exits, where he had no choice but to plot his own revolution against a reality that had no history, and in which he no longer had faith. His breakthrough act came on the night that he not only opened the vault to invade its contents but took one of the volumes from the vault, carried it through the lobby and out of Central, into the dark of the city. It was the volume that included all the entries between Heathen and Holy. Etcher not only chose this volume because of what happened that afternoon but soon realized that but for what happened he might not ever have taken any of the books. He might well have just lurked forever in his corner of no exits, never finding the courage to fulfill his plots.
The woman who walked into the archives that afternoon seemed lost, gazing at the walls around her. With her she had her two-year-old child, who bore a striking resemblance to the mother except for the fire in the little girl’s hair.
Somewhere between twenty and thirty, between white and black, her eyes somewhere between brown and green as her wild dark hair fell across her face, the woman impressed Etcher less with her beauty than the audacity of her presence, since he’d never seen anyone walk into the archives but a priest. Indeed, a priest in the lobby also stopped to look at her, as struck by her as Etcher. The woman was very shy as she approached, pulling the small girl behind her. “I was wondering—” she began in the quietest voice like water, when she stopped, staring at the looming blue eyes behind Etcher’s thick glasses almost as Kara had looked at them almost ten years before, as something sprung loose from the oceanbed of a dream. For a moment Etcher found himself once again on the brink of a terrible rejection, though nothing had ever passed between him and this woman to be rejected.
It was a long minute before she shook herself from the sight of him. The little girl, in the meantime, was running up and down the aisles of the archives. The priest in the lobby appeared mortified. “Polly,” the woman said to the little girl, “come here.” The child didn’t pay much attention. The mother shut her eyes in weary futility. She looked at Etcher again, struggling for composure. “I was wondering if you could help me,” she said. “I’m trying to get some information on a relative. I’ve been — Polly!”