Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  “What’s the ‘lavender room’?” he asks.

  “That’s not the important part.”

  “The ‘church chimes’?”

  small Chinatown on the small island in the delta where I grew up, raised by my

  Lulu reaches over, pulls the blanket away from off his shoulder and touches a small forming welt. “I struck you too hard.”

  “I didn’t notice. Truly.” He looks at her now. “You know I want you to hold back nothing.”

  When they look at each other like this, it’s very difficult for her to believe he doesn’t remember that time out at Port Justine, when he was working as a dock hand and secured her gondola. She had convinced herself that afternoon they connected in some way, particularly when, in a kind of paralysis, he watched as she climbed the billboard. At their first session more than a year ago she almost said something but didn’t, since that kind of acknowledgement implicitly threatens an arrangement based on anonymity and discretion. As time passed, however, she understood that he doesn’t remember her at all and it angered her, and she used and channeled that anger in her training of him: This she thinks to herself, touching the welt is that anger. It’s unprofessional she chastises herself. Anger is a betrayal of an implicit understanding of the relationship; it renders personal what’s supposed to be impersonal, the objectivity of the relationship being that which both heightens the senses and clears the mind. Yet at this point in their relationship it’s difficult to maintain the impersonal; she pulls her fingers back from the wound, returning to the interpretation of the parchment. “Something is happening to the lake,” she says.

  “It’s draining,” he tells her.

  He’s surprised at the way the blood seems to run from her face. “What do you mean?” she says.

  “I mean it’s going back. Back wherever it came from.”

  “Here,” she points to a small bright nexus on the parchment, where the last flicker of the melody-snake’s tongue lapped its final drop of blood, “is the event vortex. I say ‘event’

  drunken uncle in the town tavern where I never knew my mother, the closest

  but that doesn’t necessarily mean an event in the sense of an occurrence, it may mean the revelation of something that’s already existed a long time, that will manifest its existence in a way never perceived or comprehended before. Maybe something very obvious, something we’ve thought of in one form that in fact takes another….” She shrugs. “This is vague, I know….”

  He’s never heard her sound so … uncertain before. It unnerves him. “I have to take something back with me … something that can mean the difference between victory and defeat….”

  “You’re not understanding, zen-toy,” the Mistress says. “This”—pointing at the nexus—“renders your victories and defeats insignificant.” Oh yes, Wang thinks to himself, that’s what I’ll tell them: whether we win or lose is insignificant. “You already know these answers, zen-toy. You already know these questions.”

  “What do you mean?” he says.

  She studies him hard. His confusion sounds genuine, and she wonders if she’s wrong in her suspicions; she gambles. “Who’s broadcasting these messages?”

  The question stuns him, given his own suspicions. Instantly and instinctively he analyzes the tone of it: is this a confession on her part? A challenge, a test? Is it just a moment of disingenuousness, when in fact this woman has always seemed anything but disingenuous? “You tell me,” he replies, and the moment of truth collapses between them, each thinking the other has failed it.

  Disappointed, she says, “Drink some more water,” and raises the cup to him. Disappointed, he takes it and drinks. They don’t say anything for a while. “When does your boat return?”

  “I don’t know. He may be there now.”

  I ever came being one day when I was three years old and stood at the edge

  “What do you tell them about why you come here?”

  “I don’t tell them anything. They don’t know anything about you.”

  “They don’t ask.”

  “They ask all the time. They wonder all the time. But it’s part of my … mystique. I suppose, that I don’t have to answer such questions.”

  “But they do know you come here.”

  “They don’t know where I go. The boatman who brings me isn’t one of them. One of the locals….”

  “That seems even more dangerous.”

  Wang stands up from the divan, a bit shaky, but steadies himself. “I’ve taken the liberty of offering him your hospitality, so that he might wait in the outer entryway.”

  “That would be OK.”

  “Thank you. He doesn’t seem to want to anyway. It’s very kind of you to leave him food and drink.” Wang hesitates a moment. “I’ll dress now.” He staggers a bit toward the dressing room and turns; once he goes through this door, he’s not to see her again until next time, so he says, “There was another song,” still a little dazed.

  “What?”

  “Another song. Other than this one—” indicating the parchment with the blood. “It sounded like you were singing.”

  “You’re surrounded by signs,” she answers. “Ignore none of them.”

  He nods and enters the dark dressing room. He pulls on his clothes and coat, and exits the other door of the transitional chamber into the entryway, and then through the outer door into the bracing cool air that blows off the lake into the open Chateau grotto. Slowly he moves down the stone steps to find the boy with the boat waiting for him.

  of the dock in a blue dress holding my uncle’s hand, patiently watching the

  For a while, on the way back, he’s oblivious to everything: the night, the searchlights, the Chateau behind him, the bombs in the distance, the sound of the airlift, the boy in the boat—oblivious to everything including, he finally notices, how the glass hand that has no feeling still wears the fur-lined handcuffs she put on him, the other cuff dangling empty. Wang begins to think about what he’s going to tell Tapshaw and the others; he wonders if she’s becoming less certain of her interpretations or if the very notion of meaning approaches critical mass, beyond which is the void. He can’t tell whether this evening undermines or reinforces a theory he’s had for a while now. He’s not exactly sure when he first formed this theory, although he remembers it was during one of their sessions near the end, when the white moment always seems to open up like an orifice.

  If this theory is correct, that in fact she’s the one who’s transmitting the broadcasts, then it raises many questions, and so he’s always been careful not to reveal too much. He’s never actually explained to her who he is, although he knows she understands he’s a man of “mystique” as he put it, of power and position, as are most of her clients who from time to time need to shed power and position and control. He’s never told her of his past and she’s never pried, which he’s always taken to be part of her professionalism, a demonstration of her discretion and respect for his privacy; if anything, sometimes her lack of inquisitiveness gives him the feeling in fact there’s nothing about him she doesn’t already somehow know. He might even believe she knows him better than he knows himself, if one can live his life at odds with his own true nature. For a so-called rationalist he certainly has a lot of dreams and visions, not to mention the mystic menstrual prophecies of L.A.’s most famous bondage queen—so if she’s the one broadcasting the messages, then for whom or what is she a medium? Between Wang and whom does she serve as translator

  island ferry cross the river to a woman on the far other side who then didn’t

  and interpreter? And then suddenly out in that darkest part of the water, somewhere close to its source, he remembers how pale she went when he told her that Zed is dying, and gets it in his head that, as he is her slave for the few hours they spend together, she is the lake’s.

  For as long as they both have been here, Wang and the lake have lived in mutual denial, each barely acknowledging the other. Once he might have supposed the lake could
be a source of comfort to him, for the way it raised the latitude and shortened the longitude of everything: a tower becomes much smaller when half of it is underwater. The lake leveled everything for a man who never looks up, and in fact coincided neatly with his new fear since, not so long before he came to Los Angeles, back on the east coast he had been not a man afraid to look up but, to the contrary, a man who lived in the sky, riding floating boxes. Ironically, once it was the sky that offered him solace from ground-level—to be precise the ground level of city squares; ironically, once it was the ground he fled, until the day the sky betrayed him and came crashing down. When that happened he became a man caught in limbo between the sky and the ground, someone who lives looking only straight ahead in a state of hovering, for which a lake should have been perfect. But as both the mirror of the sky above and the window of the ground below, the lake became the worst of all: liquid ground, liquid sky: lake zero.

  The lake is coming for me, he used to write in his letters to Kristin from the city’s southern shore. The truth is he’s never stopped thinking that. The truth is he thinks it even now, if he allows himself to. The lake is coming for me, to expose me for the fraud I am. There’s a certain contradiction in his thinking about both the chaos he rejects and the higher order he believes is mathematically untenable: Is the lake God, he sometimes asks himself, is the lake chaos? He’s never believed in God or chaos,

  board the boat but rather shook her head, turned and vanished, something a

  he thinks chaos is as religious a concept as God and that God is about as scientific as chaos—but sometimes he wonders. Sometimes he thinks that when he was a mathematics student his professors did their work better than he wants to believe, successfully having imprinted on his subconscious the conviction that everything is empirical after all. He always liked to think he departed from such teachings when, as a young rebel, he embraced the heresies of freedom and desire and redemption in their most truly heretical form, not as calculations of sociology or biology or some quantifiable philosophical value system but as entities unto themselves; but he’s pushed from his mind, more times into the thousands than he can count, like he’s pushed away every thought of the lake, every question of whether it’s really possible to believe in freedom, desire or redemption if you don’t believe in chaos or God—if not both, then one or the other. The lake is coming for me. He ignores it even as he’s in the middle of it, even as his boat cuts through its water, the way one tries to ignore an old lover who’s standing very conspicuously on the other side of a room just entered.

  When his boat reaches the guerrilla encampment on the southern edge of the lake, Wang is surprised to note on the pylon of the dock, in the light of the full moon, the watermark of the lake from just a few hours ago when he disembarked for the Chateau. Clearly the lake has already gone down several inches. No sooner has Wang cleared the boat than the boy pushes off again, rowing back out with determination. Above him the moon erupts, a lava of light pouring from the white mouth of the cosmos’ black volcano; no longer darting among the dark zones, the boy heads northwest in a straight line making remarkable time, until after a while he can see his hotel-island in the distance. He slows down as he nears the island, on his guard for marauders and pirates and stray cultists who still circle grounds they can’t decide are holy or

  three-year-old could only find as baffling as it was devastating, after which I

  haunted. The boy who now calls himself Kuul, a name half the language of childhood-memory and half the language of owl, has never believed the Hamblin either holy or haunted; he returned here a year ago only by some instinct he doesn’t understand. Having seen the city and lake from any number of high vantage points over the course of his young life, he finds the perspective from the top of the Hamblin only a variation on that view. If it ever reminds him of when his mother brought him up here to the rooftop as a toddler, it’s only for a moment more brief than his mind can grasp or wants to.

  When he reaches the square brick island, he sidles the boat up to the top of what used to be the hotel’s fire escape. He ties the boat and takes from it the basket of bread and fruit and cheese and wine left for him at the Chateau X. Luna completely lights up the Hamblin and he makes his way easily around the door that used to lead to the stairway inside the hotel, now completely submerged except for the top. Tucked away in an alcove formed by the rooftop door and an adjacent storage space that used to house all the hotel phone lines is an old silver gondola that stands upright like a small altar; propped up inside, resting against an assembled mass of old blankets, pillows and bits of old mattress, is a woman now somewhere in her early sixties but who seems much older. Once her eyes were older than her face but her face has caught up. Once her smile was younger but it’s raced to the edge of death before the rest of her. The hair that Kuul’s mother once saw as lost between the auburn of yesterday and the silver of tomorrow has long since found its way to a white amnesiascape.

  Now the old woman’s mind wanders its own rooms from one to the next. Kuul has no idea who this woman is. He found her here left behind on Hamblin Island following its abandonment by the Order of the Red, and for a year now has cared for her, protecting her from the rains and the wind off the lake and bringing

  began to realize over the years that in my nights I never dreamed, no dreams

  her what food he can find. Round-luna has become a sign of bounty because he knows it means there will be a flare and he’ll row the man with the hand to the Chateau and there will be a basket of food. As the boy tears off pieces of the bread and slowly feeds it to the old woman, he likes to pretend she’s his mother and that he’s nursing her to health. He knows she isn’t his mother but she doesn’t seem so very unlike who he imagines his mother might have been.

  Touching it, slowly running his finger down its side, he knows this silver gondola was her boat. With his mother having slipped over the edge of this small altar and given herself to Big Agua for reasons he doesn’t understand and that he only remembers in bits and fragments, it just seems fitting then that he might think of this woman who takes shelter in this gondola now as a kind of mother for whom he’ll care. When he finishes feeding her the bread, he raises the wine to her mouth just enough so she won’t drink too quickly, feeds her a bit of fruit and cheese and then some more wine, and when she’s done and her eyes close to sleep, he lays his hand against the side of her face.

  From her window on the top floor of the Chateau X, Lulu watches in the light of the full moon the boat with the two men make its way back across the lake.

  She feels the blood of her womb stir to the moon’s pull and backs away. When I was pregnant sometimes at night I would

  at all until finally as a teenager dreamstarved I would prowl the small town

  open the window and expose my belly to the moonlight but now thinking of her diminishing periods I wonder if it cast a spell on me, laid some claim on what I carried inside me. Among the moon, the sky, the lake, she doesn’t know who are her allies anymore, who are her enemies. Gazing out the window, mindlessly she sings to herself an old song. ‘Cause I know this sea wants to carry me. She turns from the window back to her lair, and her heart stops.

  Wrapped in the blanket that she pulled over him while he was unconscious, the man she knows as zen-toy stands naked at the other end of the room, at the door of the dressing room and the transitional passage that leads outside. “I heard another song,” he says, “it sounded like you were singing.”

  “Uh….” She tries to think what she said before … something about not ignoring the signs. “Yes,” is all she can manage now, and then he turns and opens the door and disappears. She does notice this time, as she didn’t when this same moment took place just a few minutes ago, that her fur-lined handcuffs still dangle from his wrist she forgot to set free.

  She whirls around back to the window. She can still see the boat crossing the lake, with the figures of two men. She turns back to the dressing room door but no one is there
. Her heart is thundering in her chest: Have I just had an hallucination? Was it a ghost? Some strange synapse in her mind by which something that just happened not fifteen minutes ago looped its way back into the present? She turns again to look at the boat from her window: is it a decoy, a trick, is this a plot to make her crazy … and if so, to what end? Now suddenly angry, purposefully she crosses the Lair to the dressing room door and flings it open to confront the ghost; but the room is empty. In two steps she’s crossed to the door on the other side and out into the entryway, which is also empty.

  and its tourist hotel after sundown because I heard somewhere that men have

  She crosses the entryway out onto the stone steps that lead down to the landing, but there’s no one there either, the boat having already departed just as she witnessed minutes ago from her window upstairs.

  She makes her way down the stone steps to the granite walkway that circles the hotel’s grotto, to a small chamber she calls the Vault, its own door just a few feet above the lake and unremarkable except for the large rusted brass ring of a doorknob. On the walkway she stops, swallows hard. “Hello!” she calls defiantly to someone lurking in the shadows; she takes one of the lanterns that overhangs the steps and holds it up in front of her to blast the shadows away … but no one’s there. She looks at the vault door and now makes her way to it along the narrow walkway above the water. Still holding the lantern she futilely inspects the brass ring as if there might be a telltale sign of someone’s entrance; she notices the glimmer at her feet of a melody-snake’s glistening residue. Casting the light of the lantern around her one more time, she sees something else on the side of the stone steps leading down to the landing: a fresh watermark, almost half a foot above the lake’s present level.

  She throws open the vault door.

  She shoves the lantern out in front of her into the dark of the Vault. But the Vault is empty except for gleaming traces across the floor of a nocturnal tune that’s slithered away. Once again she looks out on the landing to convince herself no one is there, then turns and goes back into the Vault among its shelves of disks from all the melody-snakes she’s charmed and captured over the years.