'Arc d'X' is a reckless, visionary elegy for the second millennium and the literary bridge to the third. At its intersection of desire and conscience stands a fourteen-year-old slave girl surrounded by the men who have touched her: Thomas Jefferson, her lover and the inventor of America; Etcher, perched at the mouth of a volcano on the outskirts of a strange theocratic city, who is literally rewriting history; and a washed-up, middle-aged novelist named Erickson, waiting for the end of time in 1999 Berlin while a guerrilla army rebuilds the Wall in the dead of might. Where the center of the soul meets the blunt future of the street, 'Arc d'X' is the novel that has been looming at the end of the American imagination.