Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  Kuul sees the approaching boat far away. Quickly he gathers together the old woman in order to put her in the rowboat, but intuitively rethinks this and decides instead on the gondola. Maybe he just can’t imagine leaving the gondola behind. Maybe the old woman can’t imagine it either. As he carefully helps her down into the gondola from the top of the hotel fire escape, he sees she’s still smiling as when she woke, having known as she did sometime in the night that they would be taking this journey. Actually she’s already taking it. Actually, in her mind Doc is on it now, at this moment, and has been on it for some time; making her a bed in the bottom of the gondola and laying her there as comfortably as he can, with the pole Kuul pushes them off from the island and around its corner, heading northeast toward the lake’s source. Gleaming glass-white in the sunlight, the boat might almost be seen from a castle tower or, high above, a daylocked owl frantically in search of the night that’s set sail without him.

  In her mind, Doc has been on this journey a long time. The exact hour of its beginning is nameless but certainly she’s been riding this silver gondola since that afternoon years before when

  I was at the end of my rope I went to live with him in his house in the

  Kristin sailed her out to a hotel not far from the Hamblin to read its walls and diagnose its mysteries. In the world outside Doc’s mind it’s been thirteen years but on this particular journey that sort of measure of time is meaningless and besides, the lake is drowning in itself, going back down its drain, and memory is moving backwards. Consumptive houses, malaria houses, alzheimer houses, heart-attack houses, houses with tumors growing out the attic or the bedroom windows or the family rooms … Doc knew them all once, healed them all or consoled them when they couldn’t be healed, back when she was in the business of being strong, back when she was in the business of being indomitable. In a city congenitally incapable of a tragic sense, she was the ultimate citizen: she had come to Los Angeles expressly to leave all sense of tragedy behind. In her new scheme of things she had made sure there was no such thing as tragedy anymore, there were only life’s processes and passages, in which loss was only another fact.

  She had never before diagnosed a house or room or building dying of sorrow. Dying not of physical dissolution or even a fatigue of body and spirit as triggered by sorrow, but of sorrow itself. She had made herself believe sorrow beyond its logical self-exhaustion was an illusion, a collapse of fortitude on the part of the afflicted, a failure to surmount. This changed the afternoon Kristin sailed her out to the flooded hotel, where the two of them wandered through the abandoned apartment with its books and animé posters and the same famous photo on the wall that Kristin

  Hollywood Hills according to the terms of the agreement always nude which I

  had on hers.

  There in the walls Doc heard the song of the sorrow that can’t be surmounted or endured, the sorrow that life’s processes can’t process, that its passages can’t pass away. She’s been in the gondola ever since. She lies in the bottom staring at the black sea of the sky rolling by overhead, white waves of clouds; fleeing—for the second time in her life ’ sorrow’s song, she escaped the hotel in the silver gondola but then, in the years after, couldn’t escape the gondola itself. Unable to escape the gondola itself, sometime in the night that began thirteen years ago or a thousand, she set sail back to the sorrow because she needs to face it again before she herself passes away, although why and what she’ll do when she finds it she has no idea. It isn’t a matter of conquering anything. She now knows this sorrow is beyond conquest. She’s reconciled herself to her tragic sense she thought she left behind when she came to Los Angeles; it isn’t a matter of understanding anything; the whole point of this sorrow is how its song is beyond human understanding. The whole point is how pretending to understand is conceit, presumption, hubris that calls itself insight.

  So there’s no human or rational reason for Doc to face this sorrow again, but she has to or feel her existence will have been one of cowardice, stupidity, cruelty that calls itself compassion. As she lies in the bottom of the gondola in the night of her mind, with the cool night breeze blowing in her face, the lake is much bigger, a vast ocean aswirl, because even here in her mind the lake is going down its drain. For a long time the young man who takes care of her has been rowing them toward the center of a black whirlpool, having left his owls far behind on land. He has amber green eyes and once light hair that’s darkened with adolescence; he doesn’t really look much like his mother. As they near the whirlpool they feel the churning of the black water broken by

  didn’t care about even if the world’s never been as casual about my nakedness

  white foam. Bubbles rise at the center of the whirlpool—and finally the gondola’s passengers feel themselves caught in the current of the vortex and begin the long journey down to the whirlpool’s center.

  Pulling in the oars, gripping the sides of the boat, the boy guides them down the whirlstream as the sunken city of Los Angeles flows by behind the dark-glass curtains of the lake that rise around them—sunken palm trees and boulevards until, in the distance, at the center of the whirlpool she sees the Hotel of the Thirteen Losses. It’s nothing like the hotels she’s seen before in L.A., nothing like the one she visited with Lulu, it’s much bigger, extending as far as she can see with glistening ebony walls, huge deserted atriums, grand forsaken lobbies; it looms larger as the gondola speeds through the big open doors

  into the foyer, up cascading stairways and down the long blue corridors into the first room which is the Room of the Lost Home. This is an unostentatious room. It’s plain, almost barren except for purely functional furniture; but as the silver gondola slowly glides through, Doc and the boy will note—as they’ll note with the twelve other rooms to come—how from different perspectives the room takes on a different appearance. In the natural course of things, loss of home is the easiest to bear, particularly if it’s the voluntary loss that comes with growing up. Only from the far corner of the room

  as I, wandering nakedly aimlessly up and down the stairs of the house that was

  does the room’s loneliness give way to desolation and then terror, not only the walls and beams of the room but all light and warmth falling away, when the loss is an act of catastrophe or when the room suddenly opens up into the adjoining room that is the Room of Lost Livelihood. This includes a small sitting room of Lost Fortune, not as impressive as the Room of Lost Livelihood that’s more spacious because it must encompass the loss of not only past fortune but prospective fortune as well. The sitting room of Lost Fortune, however, does have a nice big window for jumping purposes. The Room of Lost Livelihood is plush with overstuffed sofas and high-armed chairs to remind those who pass through of a graciousness of living they’ll never attain. From the gondola Doc notes, however, that there’s nothing practical about this room, there aren’t even bare necessities, just promises that shimmer enticingly before disappearing, like the vanishing walls and light and warmth of the Room of the Lost Home.

  These are the first and last rooms that will manifest themselves so materially, as is this corridor down which the gondola now sails. As terrible as

  stacked against the hillside, smelling through the open windows the nearby

  these rooms can be, their dim e n s i ons remain very concrete; from here on, the rooms into which Doc and the boy sail in their gondola have no truly fixed dimensions. Their terror is, in varying degrees, as profound as it sometimes is illusory. The most shape-changing of all is the Room of Lost Love. Here in the Hotel of Thirteen Losses this is the most chameleon of rooms. It reflects more the nature of the guest passing through than the nature of the loss itself, because this loss has no true nature of its own. This room is a bombardment of hallucinations, which isn’t to say the hallucinations aren’t truly devastating, because they’re revelations of the self, a rave of the id: when Doc first sails into this room it’s nothing but a massive fireplace, with a roaring fire; suddenly the fire is go
ne and the hearth

  eucalyptus and smoke, standing for hours in the large windows overlooking a

  becomes the cold slab of a grave. The Room of Lost Love is never stationary. It isn’t to be found in any one permanent location of the hotel; it moves from floor to floor, from the beginning of one hallway to the end of another, from the penthouse to the basement. As the gondola sails through, the room may tend to settle, its mercurial torments exhausted; when one has sailed far and deep enough into the room’s recesses, it may lose all ephemerality and transform to a different space altogether that’s both the same room but a different room, which is the Room of the Lost Mate, utterly uninhabitable for some and a way station of sorts for others. As the gondola leaves the Room of Lost Love, it remains to be seen whether it will sail out the same door it sailed in or an altogether different exit. Something melancholy grips Doc on her voyage through this room, and she realizes that this is the only loss that someone might envy if she’s never known it; there is, then, perfectly contained within the Room of Lost Love another room with no walls at all that’s the Room of the Loss of Lost Love—the loss of never having had the experience of losing love. Leaving the Room of Lost Love, Doc’s gondola sails into a huge ballroom or, in fact, three ballrooms that are conjoined as one. These are the Ballroom of Lost Faith, the Ballroom of Lost Dignity and the Ballroom of the Lost Soul. It would be difficult to tell where one finishes and one starts; the conjoined ballrooms are mirrored from one end to the other and the chandeliers that hang from

  strange city I didn’t know and the panorama of strange little houses and

  the ballroom ceiling glitter not only in the mirrors and the mirrors’ reflections of each other but off the water and off Doc’s silver gondola, so that the cumulative light is blinding. Thus all perceptions are refracted, dazzled, suspect. What seems to be lost faith may be a failure of will or nerve. What seems to be lost dignity may be wounded pride or ego. And at the far end of the ballroom, where tides flow in from all other rooms of the hotel and collide, and it’s all the boy can do to right the gondola’s course, it’s often impossible to know which transgressions of behavior, integrity and conscience will drag the soul down into the undertow of the irredeemable.

  So from out of the Three Ball rooms, Doc’s silver gondola is drawn into two small, tran si tion al rooms linked together that, from here, provide the only passage on to the rest of the hotel.

  The first transitional room is the Room of Lost Youth and the second is the Room of the Lost Parent. Because both are rooms in which the traveler learns her earliest,

  strange little trees and strange little cars driving up strange winding streetlit

  most significant lessons in mortality, at first they appear to Doc to be the same. In both, all the furniture has been covered with sheets as on moving day—but the sheets are black rather than white, and gauzy and transparent, so the outline of the furniture beneath them can always be seen. There are two differences between the rooms: in the Room of Lost Youth there’s a crack in the corner of one wall through which a gale blows, disheveling the sheets on the furniture so that sometimes the Room of Lost Youth might take the form of the Room of Lost Health, for instance, or the Room of Lost Promise—which is to say one might enter the Room of Lost Youth early in life or late, age isn’t a factor, no one checks for identification at the door. It’s the same with the Room of the Lost Parent, which may also be either one of the first or last rooms in

  roads that seemed to drop off in midair, not finding it so disconcerting, even

  the hotel one passes through; it’s even possible to be born in the Room of the Lost Parent. The other difference between the two rooms is that in the Room of Lost Youth, a pillar stands in the center from floor to ceiling, while in the Room of the Lost Parent the pillar is gone, although its shadow remains both night and day cast by no apparent light across the length of the room and always leaving the exit on the other side in darkness. But there is a navigable exit, after all; a guest adjusts to her stay in these rooms and sooner or later leaves, the losses endured if always felt.

  Having sailed through these transitional rooms, then Doc’s gondola emerges in the hotel’s lavish mezzanine. All this time, sailing through the Hotel of Thirteen Losses, Doc and the boy navigating the boat have followed a very distant melody made only more obscure by the oceanic symphony that plays it. Doc recognizes it. Even faint as it is she can barely stand to hear it again, even as she knows that it’s for this melody she’s come here. Now in the hotel’s lavish mezzanine the song is louder; other than a single small door at the far end of the mezzanine that leads to either some sort of closet or pantry, before the gondola are three sets of double-doors to three separate suites and Doc knows it’s from one of these suites the song comes. She knows she’s closer

  finding it reassuring, even finding I felt profoundly secure to spend my

  now to the end of her search. She knows that behind one of these three double-doors is the suite of the most unendurable loss of all, the loss she felt that day with Kristin in the other woman’s apartment. She assumes such a room and such a loss must be at once splendid and terrible. They sail through the first set of double doors into the Suite of Lost Freedom. She might expect this suite to look like a dungeon, chains hanging from the walls, shackles close to the floor, mechanisms of torture in place of a bed or chair. She would expect no windows. In fact the suite is well-appointed. It’s comfortable. It’s secure: the lock is on the inside of the doors, not outside. The Suite of Lost Freedom has a huge bed and love seat, and a window opens from an alcove through which blows a fresh breeze. A grand light fixture hangs from the ceiling which makes the room very bright, even happy. It not only doesn’t seem such a terrible room, it’s an inviting room. There’s maid service, room service. Someone could very well choose to live here, particularly with someone else; behind the bed there’s a secret panel although it must not be very secret if Doc knows it’s there, and from the Suite of Lost Freedom to the Room of Lost Love there’s a secret passage; many of the hotel’s guests spend a lot of time wandering back and forth in this passage. In fact the room is filled with secret panels and secret passages to other rooms of loss, to which this suite seems eminently preferable. It isn’t until Doc and the boy sit floating in the gondola for some time that she notices something: the .walls are closing in. Almost imperceptibly the suite is growing

  existence entirely within the walls of a space I never saw from the outside,

  smaller. Then she notices something else: the light above is growing dimmer. Almost imperceptibly the room grows darker. In the early moments of the suite becoming smaller and darker, the guest still has the capacity, with a word and the will, to stop the walls, to turn back up the light, if that’s what she wants to do. It’s almost impossible to say at exactly what point this suite goes from being a room where one would choose to live to a room that one must escape at all cost; and to that end, even when the room has become very small and dark, the far window still glows slightly, so that even as the walls become so close as to crush anyone between them, the possibility of escape, however increasingly difficult, remains, and may even become a distant promise that gives life a meaning it never had before. For all these reasons, because there are times when the Suite of Lost Freedom is hospitable, even apparently civilized, where one’s stay is content, even apparently fulfilling, and because even when the suite is at its least human, when one is desperately trying to hold back the walls with her hands, there’s still a faint hope of escape, and it seems clear to Doc that this isn’t the most unendurable of losses, that it can be not only endured in its smallest measure but reversed at its greatest extreme, that it’s a loss that can bring out the best and noblest and most inspiring in people, even to the point where they would choose over the Suite of Lost Freedom the very next suite over, to which Doc’s gondola now sails, back out into the great mezzanine and then slowly and with more difficulty

  existing as a kind of erotic furniture, of w
hich I took a functional view having

  through the next set of double-doors into the Suite of Lost Life. Well, Doc thinks to herself, certainly this has to be the most unendurable loss; what loss could be greater than the loss of one’s life? Isn’t, she thinks to herself, every other loss in life measured against this one? Isn’t every other loss ultimately endured in order to avoid this one? The gondola sails into the middle of the Suite of Lost Life—which suddenly vanishes: the walls, the ceiling, the floors all gone in the blink of an eye, leaving the gondola suspended in a void of black. Then the suite suddenly reappears, as a rounded blue chamber. Of all the suites this is the most capricious in form and nature; and as with the Suite of Lost Freedom and its secret passage to the Room of Lost Love, populated by nomads wandering between the two, the Suite of Lost Life is riddled with secret passages to other rooms in the hotel such as the Ballroom of Lost Faith or the Ballroom of the Lost Soul, all with their own wandering exiles. Whereas Doc could feel in the other rooms the presence of hurt, walls faintly throbbing with pain, here in the Suite of Lost Life there’s nothing to be felt at all except, when the suite assumes the incarnation of the blue chamber, a kind of peace. And Doc realizes that in fact the loss of one’s life isn’t the most unendurable of losses, that in fact whether life’s end is a blue chamber or black void, there’s nothing to be endured at all—that in some ways this suite shouldn’t even be in the Hotel of Thirteen Losses, that the loss of one’s life is really endured by others, who are guests of the hotel in other rooms, such as the Room of the Lost Parent or the Room of the Lost Mate.