The child returned to her mother’s side.
“What are you doing here?” Etcher said in panic. He kept looking over at the priest in the lobby.
“His name was Madison Hemings,” the woman tried to explain quickly. “He was a distant relative, I think, perhaps an uncle or cousin—”
“This office isn’t open to the public,” Etcher cut in. “We don’t have that kind of information.”
“Oh,” she answered, “I’m sorry.”
“You should go to the police for that sort of thing.”
“No,” she shook her head, “no, I can’t go to the police,” and before the little girl could take off again the mother scooped her up into her arms. “Well, thank you anyway,” she said very quietly, and walked from the archives across the lobby as the priest and Etcher watched her go.
Etcher was miserable for the rest of the day. He wanted a drink, after not having had one since before the first night he’d entered the vault. It was instead of drinking that he took home with him that night the volume that covered material from Heathen to Holy; when he was sure Tedi was asleep, when he’d finally fended off her constant pleas that he come to bed, he went into the privacy of the altar room, shut the door behind him and, in the faint glow of the light above, opened the book. He didn’t really expect to find an entry for Madison Hemings. The only Hemings listed was a woman named Sally, briefly identified as the slave and mistress of the leader of a country Etcher had never heard of.
26
AS THOUGH SEARCHING OUT a forsaken beggar, he spent the weeks afterward looking for her. He left his unit early in the mornings so that he might spot her on the way to Church Central, and he no longer worked late in the archives in the evening, so that he could search for her on the way home. He thought he might see her in the city’s voggy unlit streets, where the only sounds were the engines of cop cars and passing buses and the clanking of deserted trolleys. He thought he might hear her whisper in the Market where the vendors waited motionless and mute behind food stands and clothes racks that buyers selected from in silence. He thought the ragged peddlers who slept with their wagons in the back alleys and hobbled to him out of the sooty magenta dusk might sell him an answer from their pile of lamps and rags and dishes and candles, or trade one for something of value. Several hours a day for several weeks he wandered the city with the graffiti of the church peering at him from the city walls through the Vog and shouting in his head amidst his own voices of subversion and disarray. When he returned to the unit at night he told Tedi he’d been working late, in the manner of adulterers who lie about affairs. They fought about sex. He slept in the outer room and held in his dreams the woman who had come looking for Madison Hemings. He didn’t drink.
He used the channels available to him, sending to police headquarters an official Primacy request for a file on Hemings. When it came back he was only mildly surprised to see that her name was Sally. The cop who brought the file said, “A lot of activity on this one lately.”
Two days later in the white afternoon glare of her circle on the edge of the outlaw zone Redemption, Etcher stood in the shadow of the obelisk. He waited a long time before walking up to knock on the door. It opened before he reached it. The man in the doorway was several inches taller than Etcher, several years younger. He had long dark hair and wore a T-shirt. Clutching one of his hands was the little girl Etcher had seen in the archives several weeks before.
“Excuse me,” Etcher said, “I—” and he stopped, not knowing what to say. All the way across town on the bus he’d tried to figure out what he was going to tell her; the sudden appearance of her husband only distracted him more. “I was wondering if I could speak to Mrs. Hurley,” he said.
Hurley raised his thumb and pointed over his shoulder. “Come on, Polly,” he said to the little girl, and they walked across the circle beyond one of the other units. Sally came into the doorway where her husband had been. She wore a plain dress, the earth and ash and blood tones of which, in the sun behind Etcher, weren’t unlike the color of her skin. Her hair was loose. She was even more startled now by the sight of Etcher than she’d been in the archives. Etcher took off his glasses, rendering her a blur.
“Come in,” she said. Etcher stumbled into the unit and immediately ran into a table. “Are you all right?” she asked. He groped for a place to sit and she led him to a couch.
“My name’s Etcher,” he finally said. “I work at Central. A few weeks ago you came to get some information.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “But there was a priest in the lobby, and the archives aren’t open to the public. I didn’t want you to get in trouble.”
She said, “How did you find me?”
“Well, some things aren’t so difficult when you work for the Church.” He didn’t know what to tell her and he wasn’t sure why he was here. He didn’t know whether to tell her about the entry in the volume he’d taken from the archives. Thinking about this on the couch he put his glasses back on instinctively, which he always did when he was confused, when, for instance, he couldn’t hear what someone was saying. The unit around him was dark, the furniture worn. There was a table on which sat a drawer full of beads and trinkets and small silver chains, a pair of pliers and the finished results of some necklaces and earrings. Otherwise the room had been overrun by little stuffed bears and tigers and storybooks and puzzles with missing pieces; there was a small wooden train that went over a small wooden bridge through a small wooden tunnel. The walls of the unit were barren except for pictures drawn with crayons and a crude poster curling at the corners that announced GANN / ARBO.
Sally got up from the couch. “Gann always keeps it dark in here,” she said. She pulled open the window curtains and the light blasted her in retaliation; she put her hand in front of her eyes and stepped sideways into the obelisk’s shadow. She returned to the couch and sat down, the obelisk still casting its black denial across the top of her face. It nearly obscured how sad she appeared, sitting beside Etcher on the couch. She looked as though she would break if she learned one more secret, which was why he didn’t tell her about the entry in the book from the archives, or if she suffered one more betrayal, which was why the news was on the tip of his tongue. He thought the most tragic thing about her was how her sorrow made her more beautiful. It seemed the worst trick of her beauty, that the chemistry of sorrow would make it so much more luminous. Her touching sweet smile was most lovely as the smile that obviously masked heartbreak; it was when her heartbreak was unmasked, as when the shadow of the obelisk dissipated into a gray twilight pool that poured from her face and flooded the unit, that her beauty somehow defied either the rules or definitions of the earth. Etcher could neither bear to look at her nor bear not to.
“Well,” he said, “that was what I wanted to tell you.” They sat on the couch a moment in silence and he thought he should get up and leave. He pointed at the drawer of jewelry, the necklaces and earrings. “Did you make these?” he asked.
“Yes.” She picked up one of the necklaces and held it against her brown neck.
“It’s nice,” he said. At first he was being polite. But he reached over and touched the necklace; she placed it in his hand. He’d never seen a necklace like this. Strange charms and primitive symbols hung from its links. “Have the police ever searched you during an alert?” he asked, and realized how abrupt the question sounded.
“I … don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to be sure. When you’re in the altar room you never know if they’re here or not. No one knows if they even come out to this zone.”