48
WHEN HE LEFT the city, the beggars followed.
He had returned in broad daylight years before, met by neither cops nor priests, who were only beginning to adjust to the trauma of his escape and therefore hardly expected his reappearance. In the voggy glare of midafternoon, under the eyes of the city, he moved himself and the red books to the volcano, and only the beggars took note, the beggars who had zeroed in on his unguarded conscience from every alley and corner, in the midst of every crowd. Now they poured into the streets from the curbs and doorways, following along behind not to beg anything more of him but simply to say goodbye, the broken army of the city’s forsaken standing at the edge of town alongside the peripheral highway silently watching him disappear into the lava fields. It was only this demonstration that alerted the authorities of Aeonopolis, half a day late, that Etcher had again slipped in and out of their grasp. As the Arboretum had long since proved, authority was never particularly equipped for dealing with audacity.
Larger audacities were to confront them.
Page by page, Etcher was rewriting the books.
Page by page he left the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History in the red mailbox at the volcano’s base, as had been arranged with the Church; what had not been arranged was that, leaf by leaf, each was transformed by him. As the years passed, the precarious placement of the volumes on the shores of the crater’s fire, where Etcher might drop them one by one into the lava, unraveled the nerves of the priests while discouraging the plans of police to swoop down on the tiny house and seize what was in it. Etcher had taken the lessons of stalemate to the ultimate edge of stalemate, and then began to write. He wrote every day that he didn’t throw himself into the crater with as many of the books as his arms could carry.
He did it because, having not had a single night since her death when he didn’t dream of her, having plummeted into the dark hole of his heart, all he could find in his control was history. As his heart had been undone, as he would undo his own memory in some pointless effort to forget her, he would now undo history minute by minute, detail by detail. He gave history its false cues, he misspoke its passwords. In his rewritten history bombs failed to detonate, assassins’ guns misfired in the theater. Secret tunnels were dug from the killing grounds of the Commune by which escaped whole revolutions; invasions were distracted by the pornographic obsessions of dictators. Motorcades were delayed by a flat tire. The earth of Etcher’s new history shimmered with the fission of reactor meltdowns, and wars that had once ended in four years went on for forty. Hard moral lessons were corrupted. The conscience of history became as relative as its science, and memory became a factor of expedience in the equation of power.
Complicit in Etcher’s assault were the priests themselves, who gave no indication they understood the revisions. Perhaps they actually believed it didn’t matter, as long as the books were returned to their vault where they might again become sacred. Likelier they suppressed their worst suspicions, flinging the returned pages back into the dark and lunging the door closed behind them to secure the books not from thieves but themselves, who might come to know what they couldn’t stand to know. Likeliest was that the priests had rarely read the history in the first place and wouldn’t have known it was not the same even if they bothered to read it now. Rummaging in the heart’s basement, stepping into history through the doorway of the heart as the second hand hurtled toward midnight, perhaps not unlike the priests Etcher believed he would find a resurrection. Not his own, since he didn’t believe in that anymore, but hers, since hers was his anyway. Failing such a discovery he thrived on the energy of destruction and anarchy until the night of his confession to Polly, at which point he thrived on her. At least for a while the mad storm of his work calmed. The molten flow of the mountain receded into the earth and the fire of the volcano cooled to embers, around which the old man and the girl circled to stories of her mother, which often broke down early in the telling.
He would compose himself and begin again. Sometimes they talked so long into the night that history, for a night, passed unviolated, returned to the red mailbox intact and without changes, though in new contexts from changes that had come before. Etcher drank less. And then, from the choke in her voice at the mention of her father, he knew that sooner or later Polly would leave, that her fury at her father was the defiance of a heartbreak that sooner or later must reconcile itself to the source. And that was when he knew she’d go back to her father because she couldn’t leave as far behind as she might have hoped or believed the little girl who had run to her father on the station platform, who adored him more than anyone else in the world and always would. So once more Etcher began to drink. Once more he began to write. He was back in the heart’s doorway, passing through to seek its most malevolent possibility. If he could not, once more, find a resurrection, he would locate a trapdoor instead, a lever to pull through which Gann Hurley would plummet to oblivion. But though he might actually find such a trapdoor, though he might actually find such a lever, the fact was that this was his heart, not Polly’s, where her father was safe and untouchable, arrogantly secure, forever protected from even his daughter’s own rage.
In the back room he wrote faster and more furiously. At first he thought, on the night the knock came on the door, that it was the pounding in his own head; and when he realized it was not in his own head, when he realized it wasn’t Polly banging around in the other room or the dogs sniffing at the residue of wine in the empty bottles, he assumed any other possibility but the fantastic truth. He assumed it was the clerk from Central on his bicycle, though the clerk had never before passed the red mailbox. He assumed it was the cops. He assumed it was Hurley, who had come for his daughter. When Etcher called out the girl’s name and then called again, and went into the front room where Polly was frozen in the open doorway, he never assumed it would be Sally Hemings standing there on the porch outside, on the eve of a choice that would change everything, staring aghast into Polly’s face, which stared back. The mother, at fourteen, was several years younger than the daughter.
He nearly fainted.
Polly rushed as though to catch him but he caught himself, gazing from one girl to the other. Since the thing that terrified him most wasn’t simply her ghost but how in the doorway Sally looked at him as though she’d never seen him before, he said her name almost as a question. It didn’t entirely get past his lips, part of it caught in that doorway of the heart where it had lingered so long.
Sally turned from the door. She ran past the gray dogs curled on the porch, up the side of the crater toward the ridge of the mountaintop. She ran down the other side of the mountain toward the lava fields. She hadn’t a thought in her head of water or prison or slavery; later she would have liked to believe it was a dream, she’d have given anything to believe it was a dream. But at this moment she knew it wasn’t a dream and so she ran parched and exhausted and half out of her mind. She never looked back at the crater or the house or Polly standing in the doorway watching her go; when she finally reached the bottom of the volcano she went on running and stumbling across the black plain. Sometime in the night a wagon picked her up. Sometime in the night she felt and heard beneath her the turning of wheels; she felt and tasted on her lips the trickle of water. Into the night she didn’t dream or think at all. The wagon took her back to Paris.