Free Arc D'X by Steve Erickson

didn't avenge her violations but fled them.

    STEVE E R I C K S O N • 51

    She searched a long time. She crossed the great river that lay to the west, and continued on where neither white man nor black had gone, into the land of the red. She collapsed one winter's day from cold and exhaustion and hunger in the middle of a field of snow, and when she woke she was in an Indian tent with several women who were admiring the jewelry from her box. She stayed with the Indians through the winter. She gave them the jewelry.
    Now all she had was the knife. With it she drew for the Indians pictures in the dirt of a tall man with a head of flame; but she had trouble communicating to them his whiteness, since she was now so far west some hadn't seen a white man. For a while in her own mind Sally pictured Thomas as she supposed the Indians did, black in the sun. Often in her imagination she made him blacker than she. She stripped him nude and placed irons around his ankles and chained his arms, and rode along behind him on her horse, the reins in one hand and a whip in the other.

    In the spring she set out again, on a new horse and blanket, wearing the clothes the Indians had given her. She crossed land as red as the Indians, land so red she could only believe the Indians who lived on it had emerged straight from the ground made of its rich red dirt. She rode as the Indian woman of an unknown tribe, and when she met other tribes and they asked her to identify her own, sometimes she said Virginia and sometimes she said Paris, and sometimes she tried to say another word that she'd been trying to say a long time, except it had caught in the ventricles of her heart like her own name in the ventricles of a strange vision she'd once had. For the remainder of her journey the word rested there and she couldn't clear her heart or throat of it, she couldn't bring it to her lips. Under the searing sun of the summer she rode, con-centrating on nothing but saying it, and she didn't finally say it until she'd found him.

    She found him in an Indian village high on a mesa that overlooked the world as far as she could see it. She stumbled onto the village by chance, meeting some Indians at the foot of the mesa and allowing them to lead her up the path along the mesa's side.
    Ihey offered her a place to sleep and took her to an adobe house that waited on the other side of a narrow stone bridge that crossed the main mesa to a smaller one. The bridge was so narrow and high that, as she crossed, she didn't dare look anywhere but A R C D'X • 52

    straight ahead. The house was empty and cool. Some water was in a bowl. Some blankets were in the corner where she could sleep.

    As she was falling to sleep, she had a dream. She dreamed she was back in the Hotel Langeac on the rue d'X, back in the bedroom where she'd slept with Thomas. She dreamed it was once again that night when he'd told her they were going home and she'd been devastated by the realization of how she'd miss him, as possessor and master and father, if she stayed behind in Paris. In this dream she once again reached behind the headrest of the bed and took the knife from the red Parisian glove and, as she had that night, raised the knife above her head and brought it down into him.
    Except this time no moths flew from the bed. This time she could hear the wet sound of the rip of the knife and she knew she'd killed him. When she dreamed this, the word that had been caught in the ventricles of her heart loosened itself and floated up to her throat; she could feel it on the back of her tongue. The knife slipped from her fingers.

    She heard it fall to the floor. Which was odd, because she was sleeping on the floor, and there was nowhere for the knife to fall.

    She heard a strange sound in the room, and it took her some time to identify it as music, playing very low. At some point, in the low clouds of her sleep, there was also the shriek of a siren, like the alarm of an air raid.

    The word was