Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  Later when I get to know her better and realize it’s a

  remained an infuriating and impossible mystery to him and everyone else, and

  mother thing with her not a lover thing, I tell her about being into women and she laughs and calls me God’s little joke on the male gender. Perhaps so. The boys they do check me out and want to be with me and we all know what that’s about, and I don’t think it’s taken me much of my life to figure that out. It’s funny what I sort of remember from before and what I don’t. As time goes by, some things come back to me but they’re just isolated pictures in my head of a city street though not this city, a thousand shops, a thousand cars and lights and towering buildings—but it’s all another lifetime. I still remember things about myself like being selfconscious, I have this sort of sense of who I am even if I don’t remember the name, and for a while I confess it scares me, it seems important doesn’t it, but honestly? I don’t know that it’s so important, if you think about it. Perhaps my name really is Brontë, it’s not as though it’s impossible. That night the Mistress pulled me out of the water, brought me in, gave me a place to sleep, I felt so strange about everything and awhile there in the water at the end I seriously thought I was about to drown. And when you seriously think you’re about to drown, all the little chambers of your mind become one big room, all the walls between things that happened long ago and not so long ago, things you’ve felt badly about perhaps or things you’re sorry you didn’t get to do I suppose, all the walls come down and memory, it becomes this big open mezzanine, to the extent you’re actually thinking any of that at all as you’re trying to keep from drowning. Except at that moment, when all the little chambers of my mind opened up and all the walls came down, I couldn’t see a thing, though at the time I wasn’t conscious of much other than trying to stay alive. I was looking at what was revealed in that moment, and nothing was revealed. The big open mezzanine of what I remembered from my life was just dark and empty.

  So I was sort of—I’m sure when I first get here I’m a bit

  which I couldn’t be expected to remember but which I know at this very

  hysterical, I’m sure I’m in some sort of shock. At first I don’t know where I am or how I got here and I’m exhausted and scared, and lying in that strange dark room that used to be the Mistress’ ceremony chamber, how do I know it’s not my name when she calls me that? I still don’t know. Later I actually read the books and I’m not sure which she named me after but I like Emily the best, the one about the girl who drives the boy crazy and then even when she dies she goes on driving him crazy, yes I like her best.

  So I know at once the Mistress she’s a bit off but I also decide she’s probably all right too, and it becomes obvious it’s a mother thing. She says something a couple of times that, when I think about it, seems a bit odd, we’ll be talking about the business, the clients and what not, and she says in self-reproach, “What kind of life is it, for a mother to leave to her daughter?” Later after I’ve been here awhile and when I think she knows I won’t get too put off by it, that’s when she tells me how those first nights after I arrived at the Chateau she would come into the chamber while I slept on the mat, sitting and watching and even talking to me. I had no idea. I never heard anything but then I’m a very sound sleeper. I was talking to you, she’ll say, but you were sleeping the sleep of the dead, and perhaps that’s the first real memory I have of before, I can remember someone else saying that. Because that’s exactly what I sleep all right, the sleep of the dead. And if the Mistress isn’t in any hurry for me to leave then I’m not in any hurry to go, not back out there into the lake I came from. I love the Chateau, feel safe here, protected from the lake and after awhile I feel protected by the lake, from the world. I surely don’t feel any great urge to go back and find out things about my life or my past or wherever I came from, to the contrary there’s something a bit lovely about the feeling of starting fresh. What happened before that would make me feel I want to start fresh? Well all right that

  moment here in the birth canal of the lake, as I know so many things, happened

  does nag at me a bit, I do wonder, but not so much. To wonder too much about it, after all, wouldn’t be starting fresh, would it?

  The Chateau, there’s the main room and what I come to call the ceremony room when I begin working it, where I usually sleep except the nights I sleep on the divan out before the fire listening to the sound of the lake and the feeling of the night air coming through the terrace doors—or in the dungeon downstairs. Since it’s below water the dungeon is cool all the time, in the hot months it’s lovely and I sleep down there listening to the radio like the Mistress says she used to when she was ’round my age living in Tokyo—a pirate station broadcasts from a boat out in the lake. It probably makes sense to keep my private space and my working space separate but cool as it is in the dungeon I’m all the more inspired to put something into the discipline, without getting carried away naturally, then if I work up a bit of sweat I can stop and cool off, watch the beads of the lake form on the dungeon walls while the submissive writhes a bit in his shackles. Another good reason for the blindfold, you see—besides the sensory deprivation he can’t see when you’re taking a breather, and he gets all excited the way men do wondering what’s going on, when all you’re really doing is just sitting there enjoying the cool and listening to the currents of the lake against the outer walls. Any one of these days—I’ll tell the client now and then—any minute these walls aren’t going to hold and that lake it’s going to come crashing in. I tell him this and then leave him there by himself awhile chained and naked in the dark thinking about what I said and, you know, listening for the walls to start cracking. During these little recesses the Mistress and I, we have a cup of tea out on the terrace for ten or fifteen minutes and laugh at the sound of the clanking of chains coming up from below through the vents. What a bad girl you are, the Mistress says. Sometimes when I go back, without even being able to touch himself he’s gotten off just from

  to be the very date when, three years old, I stood on the shore of that island

  the terror, so don’t tell me the boys don’t like it in their own way. When I mention this to the Mistress in some amazement, she already knows all about it: the male-wangie is a thing of mystery, she just smiles.

  But jeez life is lovely in these early days before the business with the Mistress’ lapsinthe. I don’t go ashore for three months after that first night, very contented in the Chateau, standing on the terrace sucking those slices of lemon like I love and dropping the yellow peels in the water below. At first, because I know nothing about the Mistress, to me she’s just an eccentric lonely lady; I haven’t heard the stories about the dominatrix-oracle business or the Saint Kristin stories, which I don’t understand anyway or what they actually have to do with the Mistress, but I see the people camped out on the hillside hour after hour and day after day and week after week watching the Chateau as though expecting a sign. Sure it’s not something the Mistress ever says much about. That is, early on it’s a bit obvious she was in the trade given the shackles on the walls downstairs and then I come on the tool box with the ankle cuffs and fur-lined handcuffs and riding crops and ball-gags and violet wands. I find this tiny collar I think is for a cat or something. Well it’s a collar all right but not for any cat. So I ask her right out and she tells me right out, though I see this look in her eye a moment like she’s trying to decide. She tells me right out and I just say no way. Not really. Really? And here I thought she would be shocked by my liking girls! I’m fascinated from the first. I go right past offense and never even skirt revulsion. Something in my true nature takes to it. Not to pain, I never want to inflict real pain and never have, beyond a good healthy whack in the balls, naturally. The Mistress says she never inflicted real pain either or meant to anyway; if she struck harder than she intended and left so much as a bruise or welt she felt bad, and there was never a drop of blood once—other

  with my u
ncle and gazed on that strange woman across the river, now here in

  than her own, when she did the oracle business—in all the years she did it. It’s about the power isn’t it, and not even so much power over someone else as the power over your own life, and that’s what I like too, that power, I take to it right from the first and you can make of that whatever you want. I can tell you for a fact that as far as I know no one’s ever gotten hurt, so you make of it what you want. You can spend your whole life, the Mistress says to me one time, making peace with your own true nature.

  “What?”

  “Something,” she says, “someone once said to me,” and it’s the strangest thing when she says it, I’m not even sure what it means but it unnerves me some because I know I’ve heard it before, that very thing, back before I came up out of the lake, like the thing about sleeping the sleep of the dead. But if domination was about the power of it for her, if it was the Mistress’ true nature just to take command of her life then how is it four months ago I’m calling up an ambulance-boat on the wireless to come pump out her stomach? Unless that’s her way of taking control of her life for good. So it’s a complicated thing, one’s true nature, isn’t it. Sometime long ago something happened to her, something beyond her control, something she’s not been able to escape from or explain to herself in any way that she’s ever actually believed for any length of time, something that won’t heal. Something no act or ritual of domination has been able to get her through no matter how hard she’s tried. Something. I’ve come to learn things about her life but not that. I think awhile after I first come to the Chateau perhaps it’s better for her, it’s like she regained something, but then—I’m happy to be a daughter to her if that’s what she needs. Why not. And one afternoon a few months after I’ve been here I say as much and I can tell right away it’s the wrong thing to say, I can tell from this look on her face. This shattered look. Perhaps

  the birth canal of the lake I know this and maybe should be astounded by it if

  it’s the casual way I say it, like it doesn’t mean anything either way. Now that I think about it, it’s after that she begins to slip away, except for times we embrace for whatever reason, and I can feel the way she holds onto me that she’s trying to come back, come back from wherever she’s slipping to.

  There was a man once, that much I know. That I’ve figured out. And for a time I thought, well then that’s it isn’t it, a man. He may even have been a client. I’ve never asked, perhaps I’m not the inquisitive sort. Perhaps I have an overly developed male-sense of privacy—that is, for a female. But whoever he was she’s not seen him for a long time. Awhile, though, I thought that’s what it was.

  Now I don’t think so.

  As for the lake, well for sure there’s something between the Mistress and the lake. She stands on the terrace must be hours every day and she and the lake stare each other down. The Mistress, she thinks I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I do. I’ve figured it out. The Mistress thinks the lake is waiting for her to die before it sinks any further, and I’m not going to be the one to say she’s wrong. God’s little joke on the male gender, that’s what the Mistress says I am, and after a while it becomes clear that her god is full of such jokes, and so sometimes I wonder if the lake is God’s joke on her or she’s God’s joke on the lake. It’s almost six months later I hear the Saint Kristin legend, by then I’ve finally left the Chateau for an afternoon now and then, going to Port Justine for supplies and that’s when I hear, when I’m out among the locals, how the Mistress is Saint Kristin’s twin or Saint Kristin returned from the dead or something, I hear it but don’t make much sense of it and I don’t think anyone else makes sense of it or even really wants to. Four months ago when I call the ambulance-boat, well there’s a commotion then on the hillsides, people skittering back and forth like forest animals smelling

  here anything was astounding or, maybe more precisely, if there was nothing

  smoke. You might think a pathetic botched suicide attempt would sort of snuff the legend, what? but instead the offerings just start coming more than ever, the stone steps of the grotto laden with bread and cheese and fruit and drinking water. While the Mistress sleeps I go out on the terrace to see boats bobbing on the lake below, people standing in them staring up in anxious anticipation. She’s all right, I tell them, go home. They don’t move awhile. They’re still suspicious of me, perhaps more than ever, still not sure whether I’m priestess, temptress, judas, magdalene.

  After a while they drift back to shore. Return to their vigil. That same afternoon I go out to the back grotto behind the Chateau to find a lone man in a boat leaving on the steps an offering of flowers. Not much good for anything, flowers, I think, but he lays them up and down the stone stairs. The tide will just take most of them, I tell him.

  He looks up. He’s in his mid- maybe late-twenties. That afternoon he looks up at me and his jaw drops a bit, and I see that expression I’ve seen before and think, Oh I’m about to become God’s little joke again. But he’s pretty for a boy, I’ll say that for him, eyes the color of the lake and hair like owl feathers. I see him again about a week later, one twilight all by himself on the lake in his boat—what, does he live in that boat? I wonder. He’s all by himself drifting out there watching the Chateau like they all watch it, except that where all the rest of them are waiting for the Mistress, I know he’s waiting for me. We just look at each other and don’t wave or anything, just look at each other till I go back inside, but there are more flowers on the steps the next morning except for the ones the lake has stolen, a trail of garlands leading back to him I’m sure. Then I see him a lot over the next week or so and don’t pay much attention, never wave or say anything, thinking I shouldn’t encourage him too much. I like the notion of men under my spell, I confess, it’s the whole point of what I do,

  that was not astounding, and I can’t help wondering how my life might have

  but if I’m to be God’s little joke then I don’t want it to be any crueler than the sport of it calls for. And then I don’t see him at all awhile, perhaps another week, and then he’s there one night on the grotto steps again not with flowers, not delivering anything except himself. He’s there as a client.

  By now I’ve really got the business going. Twenty or thirty steady regulars, more than I can handle really, and then all the semi’s who drop in and out of the picture, and new ones showing up fairly often and a lot of them come back. From the short time I’ve been here already it seems to me nothing in L.A. ever quite fits any sort of real pattern anyway, and this sort of work is volatile by nature; sometimes when the fighting up north gets worse or there’s especially ominous news from back east you can almost predict an upturn in traffic, men wanting to explore their dark sides before the end. More often than not these are men of some power or influence, men in control of others, men in positions of responsibility who long to be free for an hour or two of power, control, responsibility, free of themselves—men who want to turn power and control and the Self over to someone else. Perhaps they feel guilty about the way they fuck over other people all the time and want to be fucked over by me in return as a sort of penance—every client is different isn’t he. Some have lives they need to escape from and others have no lives at all, that is no lives of emotional connection or intimacy, and they’re the problem-ones because then they want me to be their life, and I can’t, can I. I just can’t. Those are the ones who start hounding me till I have to cut them loose. You probably think they’re all creeps and losers in which case you would be in for the surprise of your life, I won’t say most of them are nice normal men because, take it from me, there are no nice normal men—nice perhaps but not normal. But some of them are actually a bit sweet—sad and messed up yes but a bit sweet and like I told the Mistress that very first day it’s not

  been different had I known, how far I might have gone with him to unlock the

  like I don’t like men, sometimes they actually can be easier to deal with
than women because everything’s so straightforward in terms of what they want. So don’t get the idea I do this because I hate men. Perhaps back somewhere in my mystery past before I came up out of the lake I was a cliche, you know, the molested daughter or whatever—but I just don’t think so. So before I take on a client we’ll usually talk awhile and I’ll try to figure out what his story is and why he’s there and whether what he wants is something I can give him, and I make it clear then that there are things I don’t do and I don’t need to go into those here, just things that cross my own line of dignity if not the client’s. There’s humiliation and then there’s humiliation. Like I said before, there’s a line drawn on the discipline I’ll inflict, because while it’s all very amusing to blindfold and harness a naked man by his ankles and wrists and beat him awhile, it’s not like I’m a sadist or something. Erotoasphyxiation, electrocution, cattle prods, I don’t go in for any of that. It’s all about limits isn’t it, the ones you test and the ones you observe. There’s a code word the client and I agree on that he’ll say if things are going farther than he wants or he changes his mind about something, something besides “no” or “stop” because in such situations people say no or stop all the time without meaning it. For a while I was coming up with a different word for each client but that became confusing and I was always afraid I might forget, though I imagine I would have remembered when I heard it, but anyway now I have a one-code-fits-all policy and the word is zed.

  But no one’s said it yet.

  There’s no sex. Not with me, anyway. Do you get that? I’m not a hooker. The need and situation may be sexual to the client and I understand that in the submissive’s own weird way I’m an object of sexual interest. At the end of the session, before releasing him, if he’s been obedient and I feel he’s done well in his

  riddle of how every life is a millennium unto itself, of how the single smallest