""Happiness is a dark thing to pursue and the pursuit itself is a dark thing as well." These are the words of Erickson's Thomas, inventor of the American dream and guiding spirit of this passionate, brave, unforgettable novel. In Thomas' love for his fourteen-year old slave, Sally, and in her irrevocable choice to forfeit freedom for that love, lies the emblematic dilemma that has forged our nation's destiny - the tension between history's denial of the dictates of the human heart and our secret pursuit of the heart's expression." "Over Arc d'X hovers the smoke of an eighteenth-century slave who was burned at the stake for murdering the white man who raped her. Through the ashes move the many incarnations of Sally, and the men who are touched by her-Etcher, perched on the mouth of a volcano on the outskirts of a strange theocratic city, who is literally rewriting history; a washed-up, middle-aged American novelist waiting in the city of Berlin in the year 1999 for the end of time, while a small guerrilla army rebuilds the Wall in the dead of night." "Arc d'X is a reckless, visionary elegy for the second millennium and a literary bridge to the third, where feeling is at once heightened and debased, language drained of significance but filled with portent, meaning tensed at the intersection of desire and conscience, male and female, black and white. It is the novel that has been looming at the end of the American imagination, where the center of the soul meets the blunt future of the street."--BOOK JACKET.