Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

In these five years she’s forgotten all about it. It’s a small plastic monkey in a red spacesuit with a space helmet. She thinks about that last day in the gondola five years ago, Kirk clutching in his hand the monkey he named after himself; she remembers slipping into the water and hearing his heartbeat under the water, and looking up through the water and seeing him peer over the edge of the gondola, still holding the monkeyman he called Kulk in his fingers. She remembers now the terrible emptiness of the gondola when she returned to the water’s surface a minute later, the way there had been no sign of him at all, and now she looks at the toy monkey that’s come floating up to her out of the lake and says

  I’m coming

  and slips her naked body, pink with the light of the red sky, over the gondola’s side. As she slips beneath the water she thinks maybe she hears someone on the shore finally break the silence of the lake and shout out No! but she isn’t certain about that, that may be in my own head. Because I also hear if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me but I look around for some sign of the melody bolder than the others, having dared to swim into this forbidden zone of the lake but I don’t see it, so the song must be in my head too … all the songs and all the No’s are in my head. I sink. I don’t swim to the hole below, I let it pull me. I didn ’t even get a good gulp of air first, I’m calm in my chest and my descent, and feel the peace that maybe comes with drowning, once the panic is over … I don’t know why I don’t panic. I look up and see the gondola above me like I saw it above me the last time I went this way, five years ago, but this time without his small head looking over the side. As I sink there rise around me the small canyon houses that went under when the lake first appeared, I can see below me the sidewalks that once lined the boulevard below me too, and around me the neighborhood where I walked years ago pregnant not much more than a week from labor, drawn here as I’m drawn now, only to find at my feet a black puddle where now is the dark hole I can see through the water’s murk, coming up at me, the opening of the lake’s birth canal, here it comes. Here it comes. Too small it would seem for anyone to slip through, and yet I

  slip through anyway, drawn beyond any resistance, pushed through in a new

  birth, when domination is submission and submission is domination, shaking

  myself loose of the love that held me down so as to find inside me the love that

  2017(2016)

  will save him, continuing down with bits of everyone I’ve ever been falling

  away from me, down down down down in what I know is my own passage, as

  In his sleep, the dome of his eyelids is red, like the bloody red sky of L.A. that he remembers from nine years ago, and he hears the song like he heard it that day in the Square twenty-eight years ago.

  In his dream, which he has often, he’s standing there in the Square again, although it’s not clear to him whether he’s nineteen again, as he was then, or in his late forties, as he is now. He clutches her yellow dress in his hand—K, beautiful betrayer—and watches the tank roll toward him. Even looking at the famous photograph that thrilled the world, one still couldn’t know how big that tank really was.

  though it’s unique to me as the same passage would be unique to someone

  But when he stood there in the Square that day twenty-eight years ago, watching it come closer, it rolled toward him like a huge metallic wave, followed by another behind it, and another behind that and another behind that.

  Now in his dream the tank rolls toward him more like a giant stainless-steel egg, with another behind it. The rolling of the eggs always nauseates him; once he lurched from the dream running for the latrine, vomiting in the outer tunnel. Just as it was twenty-eight years ago, in the dream he knows that somewhere, along with the rest of the world, she’s watching. Somewhere she’s watching, was what he thought to himself on that June day, and in his dream he thinks it to himself now; and knowing this, he can die, because he’s not just dying for the freedom of man, he’s dying for the tyranny of love. Kristin, he whispers into the barrel of the tank’s gun as though it’s the opening between her legs and he’s her slave again, whispering her name that curls up into her body like smoke.

  In his dream, standing in the Square as the tanks roll toward him like great eggs, he hears the song as he heard it that morning. Hears it drift out from what he reasoned at the time must be, beneath the red sky, some unknown window.

  else, the same but different, a passage without time, that might take a minute

  For a moment in his dream he’s distracted. As he did that morning, he searches for it, a melody he would hear again only once, years later.

  A gust rises on the Square as mysterious as the song, as though to blow the song away, as though to blow him out of the way of the tanks: Is the gust, he wondered at the time, an ally meaning to rescue me, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove me? before he learned it was really an anarchist without conviction. He stands his ground. The tank tries to go around him, he moves to block it. The tank moves again, so does he. Was it only six minutes, as a newsmagazine reported? Of course it seemed much longer. There in the Square he’s ecstatic in his terror: Try to deny me now, he says to her, as I defy the world. As happened then, he hears the melody and in his dream is just beginning to remember its source, leaning into the large gun barrel of the tank before him, when there is out of the corner of his vision a blinding flash of something, and he raises his hand to shield his eyes. At some point in the dream he sees her appear at the far end of the Square that’s empty except for him and the tanks, a distant figure crossing the Square toward him.

  He knows it isn’t his Kristin. Rather, as she grows in the distance it’s the Mistress; in his dream he vaguely knows she doesn’t belong here, that she’s out of time. She’s dressed as

  or a hundred years depending on the one being born through it, from

  always, in stockings and garters and heels and a small chain belt around her waist, but the attire is more an assertion of power than a suggestion of seduction. In one hand she carries the chain leash she keeps for him, in the other her black riding crop. She has shoulder-length sandy hair; she isn’t beautiful but commanding. She doesn’t offer her sensuality but marshals it. As she strides toward him across the Square, her eyes locked on him never averted, not alluring but imperious, a spreading pool of black water precedes her like an honor guard. As she grows closer, the pool spreads faster and wider, seeping across the Square until it’s a wet black mirror tinged with red, reflecting the sky above.

  There’s a cracking sound. Is it the explosion of guns, or red thunder announcing a red rain? Not the marxist red of the State…. A seed in the uterus of history to be washed away in the flow of the womb’s rejection, he recognizes it rather as the dark rust-red of his Kristin’s blood on their thighs after they have made love during her period. There’s another round of explosions

  and he wakes and

  in the dark, as he lies on his cot, someone pounds on his door.

  He sits up from the cot, holds his face in his hands. “Sir?” comes a voice from the other side of the door; Wang fumbles for the small lamp on a nearby desk. “Sir?” comes the voice again. When he turns on the light he sees the picture looming over him as always, it’s everywhere, on every wall up and down the front line; a flash of rage comes over him. I took that down, he thinks to himself. Someone put it back up. In my own quarters.

  The men draw inspiration from it, one of his officers explained not long ago. Well I don’t draw inspiration from it, Wang had answered. They can paper the entire front with it if they want but he doesn’t understand why they have to hang it in his

  somewhere that was a minute ago or a hundred years ago, a passage from my

  own quarters. He sees quite enough of it everywhere he goes, every headquarters, every outpost, every barracks—raised over the battlefields like the towering banners the Party used to hoist of its leaders back in his home country so I don’t see why I have to look at it in my own quarters. Back in his
home country they would have called this a “cult of personality.”

  No wonder I dream every night.

  The pounding on the door continues. “Come in,” Wang says.

  The soldier comes in. “Sir,” he says.

  “Why is that on my wall?” Wang says.

  “Sir?”

  “Why is that on my wall.” Wang points at the picture. “I took it down. Someone came into my quarters and put it back up after I took it down.”

  The young guerrilla looks at the enlarged photo. “The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”

  “My own quarters.”

  “Yes, sir. The men—”

  “Yes I’ve heard how the men are inspired by it but I’m not inspired by it. Why don’t you put up something that inspires me?”

  The soldier, a kid, not much older than Wang in the photo, seems flummoxed. “Uh … what would that be, sir?”

  He tried to get them to stop calling him “sir” since he’s not an officer and in fact has no ranking at all, but that only seemed to cause more chaos among the ranks. “What’s your name?”

  “Parsons, sir.”

  “Parsons, let me ask you something.”

  “Sir.”

  “How do you know it’s me?”

  “Sir?”

  “I said how do you know it’s me,” Wang points at the

  own unique chaos maybe to my own unique god, and as I slip on down through

  poster. “It’s almost thirty years old, this picture, blown up about a hundred times its original size … that man”—pointing at the lone figure before the tanks—“is a blur … he could be anybody. So how do you know it’s me?” This is perverse, Wang thinks. Such questions just undermine the resolve of Tribulation III … is it Tribulation III now, he asks himself, or still Tribulation II? “Never mind,” he says, his face in his hands again. “Please take it down.”

  The young soldier takes down the picture. He rolls it up and puts it under his arm.

  Wang still sits on the cot, exhausted by his restless sleep. “So what is it?”

  “Sir?”

  “What did you wake me for?”

  “Sir. Major Tapshaw reminds you it’s a full moon tonight, sir.”

  “Tell him to send up the flare.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Give me a few minutes.”

  “Sir.” The soldier leaves and for a while Wang sits on his cot looking at the blank square of wall where the picture was a few minutes ago. Tribulation II or Tribulation III … how can I be confused about such a thing? He gets up and moves to the desk and wakes the computer and turns the desk lamp off again; now there’s only the light from the computer. He takes off all his clothes and for a moment stands naked before the computer before he sits, inputting his password and opening the mail. He addresses a new message, staring at it as he composes in his head.

  the birth canal of the lake then I have three visions there before me in the

  With his one good hand, he begins to type.

  To: MistressL@aquamail.com

  From: FalseMartyr@4june89.net

  my Mistress,

  Your devoted possession requests the honor of subjecting himself to Your Cruel Pleasure on this night. Abjectly apologize for the short notice and duly expect to feel Your Exquisite Discipline for the impertinence, i await an answer, unworthy as ever of my humiliation, and remain Your

  zen-toy

  Wang looks over the message, considering the tone and double-checking the proper Upper/lower-case etiquette. He sends the message and waits to see if he receives an answer immediately, as sometimes he does, but after several minutes there’s still no response. He closes the program and dresses and pulls on his coat, and opens his door to the outer tunnel that leads above ground.

  Outside his door in the tunnel, a guard snaps to attention. Like the soldier who just woke him, the guard wears the regulation lake-blue of the guerrilla insurgency as well as the blood-red beret. Hanging on the outside of the door is a picture identical to the one that was in his quarters a few minutes ago. “Guard,” he says.

  “Sir,” says the guard.

  “How long has this been here?” indicating the picture.

  amniotic dark, or maybe more precisely two visions and a presence, with the

  “Sir?”

  “Hanging on this door. It wasn’t here when I came down a few hours ago: how long has it been here?”

  “I couldn’t really say, sir.”

  “You couldn’t really say? How long have you been standing here?”

  “Sir, I came on duty at nineteen hundred hours, sir.”

  “And was it here when you came on duty?”

  “I don’t really remember, sir.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You don’t remember whether this was on this door right in front of you when you came on duty?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’ve been staring at this door for almost two hours and you don’t remember if it was here?”

  “Sir. Permission to speak.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”

  Wang’s shoulders slump in defeat. He grabs the top of the poster to rip it from the door but stops himself, and instead starts up the tunnel to the surface where he can hear the shelling in the distant night and the planes of the airlift coming and going.

  Guards and soldiers snap to attention as he passes. A dozen small fires dot the expanse of the campground, where guerrillas

  first being of God Himself naked and erect, shackled and restrained,

  who don’t have tents sleep on exposed cots or the ground. Major Tapshaw meets him at the end of the barricade. “It may,” Tapshaw says, “be any time now.”

  “Transcriber?”

  “Waiting for us.”

  “You send up the flare?”

  Tapshaw hesitates.

  Wang says, “Do we have to have this discussion every time?”

  When Tapshaw is angry his black face grows even darker and now in the night all Wang can see of him are his eyes. “I think it’s better,” Wang hears the tension in the major’s voice, “if one of the men takes you across the lake.”

  “I know you do, because we have this discussion every time.”

  Tapshaw turns and calls over his shoulder to a soldier who appears as though he’s been waiting. “Send up the flare,” Tapshaw tells him quietly. He turns back to Wang as Wang watches the guerrilla disappear toward the far rampart. “You knew you were going to wind up sending up the flare,” says Wang, “so why do we have to go through this?”

  “I suppose I feel the need to keep making the same point.”

  Together in the dark they start walking to the listening station. “I think by now I’ve gotten the point.”

  “We don’t know anything about this boy. And he’s … slow.”

  “We know he knows the lake better than anyone,” Wang answers, “that’s what we know.” The two men mount the steps of the barricade, and Wang barely glances up at the sky above him for the full moon he knows is there.

  blindfolded and swaddled in latex, enslaved and cuffed around His wrists and

  He’s a man who never looks up. Over time, the acrophobia he developed in the last fifteen years has grown only more acute; as much as possible he lives on the latitude of his dreams. He breaks into a sweat just climbing the barricade, less than twenty feet high. This is something he hasn’t told anyone; he can barely bring himself to look at the sky above him when in fact, once, in one of his aimless lives before this, he lived closer to the sky than the ground, as close to the sky as one can live without being on a mountain or in an airplane. “I hope this time,” Wang says, “we’re going to be able to hear something over the shelling.”

  “We have a recorder with the transcriber.”

  “I know but last time it took the recorder half the night to clean up the disk.”

  “This transcriber
is better than the last one. Maybe she’ll be able to catch parts of the transmission if the recorder doesn’t.” They reach the rampart where both the recorder and transcriber, waiting with recording equipment and a laptop, come to attention. “As you were,” Tapshaw says; from the station can be seen the distant lights of Baghdadville in the west and the abandoned downtown skyscrapers lit by searchlights to the northeast. The sky above Wang that he can’t bring himself to look at is illuminated by the flare, a star momentarily brighter than the flaming white moon. The entire L.A. bay lights up. As the flare fades and the sky becomes black again, Wang says to the transcriber, “Are we ready?” and she answers, her fingers at her keyboard; the recorder pulls at some cables. “How quickly can you clean this up and get it back to us?” Wang asks.

  “Thirty minutes maybe,” the recorder answers. “Turn it on

  ankles, red rubber ball-gag in His mouth and awaiting His humiliation, and

  now,” Wang says, “so we get it all from the beginning.” They wait. A wind off the lake triggers a memory in Wang and he realizes it reminds him of the gust in his dream, blowing across the Square—and now the whole dream, which he had forgotten, returns to him. He’s thinking of the black water spreading across the Square when suddenly it comes from somewhere out over the lake, out of the night.

  The shelling actually stops, as though the bombs are listening too. An occasional plane from Occupied Albuquerque flies by overhead.

  The broadcast isn’t that loud and doesn’t sound that far away, maybe no more than several miles. It’s over in a few minutes. For about ten seconds everything remains silent, then the shelling begins again. “You get it?” Wang says to the recorder and transcriber.

  “As best I could,” the young woman transcribing says, apologetic, “I didn’t understand some of it….”

  “It’s all right,” Wang says, “that’s what he’s for,” nodding at the recorder.

  “I think I can get you a pretty clean copy,” says the recorder.