Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  Kierkegaard Blumenthal broke and emptied from me, and that night dropping

  Brontë can do is huddle in her bed trying to decide whether to cover her ears or eyes; she wishes they had never left the lake. She’s only seen such fire and noise once before but can’t remember it. The next morning she finally gets Lulu to eat some cereal cooked by the manager’s wife; next door she finds the station still closed, and when it’s still closed that afternoon and the next morning and the next afternoon as well, she gets this feeling. Oh any time, says Roy the manager with red hair when Brontë asks what hour the station opens. Deep in the middle of the third night, in the middle of a dream she hears a rumbling and rushes to the window in time to see the light of a train disappearing down the track. Yes, replies Roy the following morning when she asks, anytime now that train ought to be coming back through here: maybe tomorrow or the next day. You said that yesterday, Brontë finally stops answering after a while.

  After a while longer she stops asking. Built in the Nineteenth Century as the grandest estancia in northern Arizona by a Spanish aristocrat who fled San Sebastian in disgrace with his fortune, then eventually handed down to his great great grandson, the pueblo was finally lost by the family in the Wall Street crash of ninety-nine years ago. Serenely the great great grandson walked out through the adobe porticoes into the desert never to be seen again. Taken over by the Santa Fe railway, the mansion was converted into a railroad hotel. In the fourth and fifth decades of the Twentieth Century it bustled with travelers to and from the Midwest stopping for a meal or the night; with its sweeping entryways and arched passages and suspended staircases, the pueblo was all blue tile and hacienda-deco then. A quarter century ago the electrical storms blew in from the Juarez wastelands to the east, and both the railroad and hotel began to die. The tile isn’t blue anymore, and besides Roy and his wife Wanda there’s no one

  to my knees I moaned for him to come back come back come back, dropping to

  else in the hotel except Barbrasita the Navajo girl who delivers meals and cleans the rooms and mops the wide black-oak hallways, and Rollin the other guest three rooms down.

  Moving from city to city selling shady weather reports until stranded by a west-bound train a few weeks before, Rollin is a traveling meteorologist in his mid-fifties. Soon after Brontë and Lulu’s arrival he takes to rapping on their door day and night, posting himself there for hours on end, chatting up the younger woman. He’s too unabashedly stupefied by her breasts to even pretend interest in anything else about her. If his knock goes unanswered, he invites himself in regardless. Ceaselessly he recounts the itinerary of his life and expounds with great expertise on the caprice of lightning, talking about anything and everything except—as Wanda dryly points out—his wife and daughter back in St. Louis. Bronte finds him too ridiculous to be threatening, but when he accosts her one night in a darkened corridor, she can’t help wondering where’s a whip and a good pair of handcuffs when a girl needs them. As the nights go by, the moody Barbrasita who Brontë saw slipping into Rollin’s room the first night becomes more sullen, lingering outside his door to less and less attention, as the music of a radio can be plainly heard on the other side.

  Whenever she sees Brontë, Barbrasita’s expression grows darker. Delivering dinner from the kitchen downstairs, she practically hurls it in the other’s face, and when she refuses to help change Lulu’s bed a week later, the two young women have a blistering bilingual argument in the hallway that neither understands. “I think,” Bronte finally tries to confront things head-on, “perhaps you’ve the wrong idea about me and your weatherman—” to which Barbrasita grabs the soup spoon from a meal tray and lunges at the other woman to scoop out her eyes, before Wanda pulls

  my knees I retracted every stern admonition I had already given him, I scooped

  her away. Walking the hotel corridors at night, Brontë takes to rounding darkened corners at a wide arc in anticipation of ambush. When she’s not waking to the sound of trains, it’s to the expectation of the Indian girl standing over her, lethal spoon in hand. Somehow Rollin is oblivious to all this. He assumes everyone basks in his bonhomie. Day after day then week after week, as Barbrasita lurks outside his room, he lurks outside Brontë’s, telling again and again the same stories he’s told before, each time embellishing wildly as though no one ever would notice the variance with earlier versions. Sometimes Bronte thinks he’s forgotten about seduction altogether, so satisfied is he by his own regalement. It occurs to her to set him straight on her preferences but she’s got the feeling Rollin would just find further inspiration in ever preposterous reveries of the two women in all their possible permutations.

  A couple of weeks stretch into a couple more. Only after Brontë and Lulu have been at the pueblo almost a month does Rollin—peviously in no great hurry to leave a hotel so conveniently remote and teeming with comely Indian maidens and pneumatic golden-haired pixies—suddenly become very anxious himself about the next train. For several nights Brontë hears the sound of terrible fights coming from his room. Whatever Barbrasita is saying, Rollin seems to understand very well.

  One afternoon Brontë sees from her window a distant car, snubbed and blunted like a discharged bullet, weaving its way toward the pueblo through the storm, daring the lightning to take it out. Driving in thirty miles from the northeast, a family of four has come for the train. When dark falls they roam the lobby waiting, an older man and woman and a younger man who dozes on one of the wooden monastery benches strewn throughout the foyer, and a

  him up in a puddle and held him in the cup of my hands just as I did up there a

  boy of about eleven who plays games on an ancient laptop. It’s not clear to Brontë how the four are related. “Here to bury her son,” the old man shrugs at the woman sitting quietly alone, “killed in the fighting up in Zion. Going back home now,” but not east it turns out, rather back the way Bronte and Lulu came. Graying hair pulled back, the woman sits on her bench for hours saying nothing,staring ahead of her and only lifting her eyes and nodding slightly whenever the old man whispers to her. She never settles into the bench, rather she sits at the edge in anticipation of something she’s already too late for, as though so flabbergasted by her grief she doesn’t feel it, as though distilled in this moment is the tenor of her entire life. For a while Brontë waits up to see with her own eyes if a train actually rolls through, heading any direction.

  Finally around midnight she goes back up to her room where, after cooling Lulu’s fevered brow with a damp cloth, she sleeps.

  She’s awakened by yet another argument between Rollin and Barbrasita. This is by far the most violent she’s heard, coming not from the room just a few doors away but downstairs. From the darkened landing of the stairs she can see Barbrasita below with a furious grip on Rollin’s arm, pulling him from the family that, apparently, has given up on the train and now means to drive back through the storm and the night; over her screams, desperately Rollin beseeches them to take him. The family seems stricken. Somewhere Roy and Wanda hide beneath their covers. Finally shaking themselves free of their bereaved inertia, the older man and woman, the young man and the boy dash madly for the bullet car; and confronted with the choice of the storm before him or Barbrasita behind him, Rollin bolts in pursuit past the same adobe porticos through which the great great grandson of the San Sebastian aristocrat vanished almost a century ago—as though

  few minutes ago on the lake, or down there, whichever way the lake is now, in

  he thinks he can charm the lightning.

  In the following weeks, Barbrasita watches from the pueblo’s front window for signs of how far Rollin got—but out here, Wanda tells Brontë, even the vultures don’t fly. Soon the Navajo girl gives up her vigil and instead takes to sitting every day for hours on a stark high-back chair in the hallway outside Brontë’s door, not unlike the way the woman who lost her son in the fighting up in Zion sat all night on the bench downstairs. With no rooms other than Brontë’s and Lulu’s
to make up, no other clean towels to be delivered, no other lunches or dinners to be served, she stares at her growing belly and rains on it the same black curses she rained on the child’s father the night he left. Sitting at her own window staring out at the desert stonehenge of railway cars surrounding the pueblo, Brontë realizes she no longer knows for sure whether she’s waiting for a train or for the woman in the bed to die; on the frontier of a kind of catalepsy, from time to time Lulu arouses herself to an uncognitive waking, drinking and eating only enough to endure but never to speak or, as far as Bronte can tell, truly know. Brontë herself cannot know, for instance, that, beyond the windows, Lulu sees—as no one else sees—the melody-snakes crawling up out of the parched dust long enough to rattle a few notes before lightning cuts short their songs in a throttled shriek. Female screams fill the charged air. Lulu hears them even as she slips back to sleep, the way Bronte hears trains.

  Brontë has no idea why it’s important to get to Chicago. Actuallyshe doesn’t think it’s important at all, Chicago’s just the place the train happens to go to. She doesn’t really suppose it will make any difference to Lulu. But this hotel seems to her an intolerable placefor someone to die—better the Chateau. On the pay phone downstairs, she tra cks down a doctor in the territory who drives in

  the gondola where I came from, when his answer to my call came bubbling up

  two days later. Half Indian, half white, he’s never diagnosed someone dying of sorrow, dying not of physical dissolution or even a fatigue of body and spirit as triggered by sorrow, but sorrow itself: Isn’t there somewhere to take her, Brontë asks, a hospital or rest home? The doctor answers that there’s something about this dying that’s beyond the peace of hospitals and rest homes. When she tries to call him again a week later, the phone is out of order. The weeks become months. Outside, the storm is unmoved by the change of seasons, and the arrival of spring.

  Brontë discovers a television one afternoon in one of the back suites on the first floor, but as she might have expected, there’s nothing on it except a faint broadcast from Flagstaff, buzzing out of the clouds to the west. Constantly awakened by trains taunting her, constantly gazing out the windows for signs of a light coming up the track, at night she takes to drifting through the dark hacienda and cold cinderblock foyer, past the bare newsstand and forsaken gift shops and faded Indian murals and the bar lined with tequila bottles and cracked martini glasses drunk on their own dust. She scours the stray pieces of hotel literature as well as the volumes of local lore on the shelves; after a while she knows more about the pueblo and the families that built it and lived here than she does her own life. When the storms originally came, the first part of the hotel to have been closed was the dining room, once the finest in the territory. Now for the pueblo’s rare guest Wanda cooks in the hotel kitchen a traditional soup half spicy black bean and half sweet corn, sending it up to Brontë along with lemon slices.

  Boarded up after the dining room was the cavernous ballroom, its once-blue ceiling that’s flecked with silver now gray like the overcast sky outside. The small tadpoles of silver flicker like the

  from the bottom, so in the same way the night I miscarried him I splashed

  lightning’s stray offspring. One night Brontë peeks past the slabs of wood that barricade the ballroom entrance and pulls one away, stepping through; because of how the silver flashes in the dark ceiling, there in the black of the old ballroom she can almost believe there are no ceiling or walls, that there’s no pueblo at all. She can almost believe the massive Navajo carpet across the ballroom floor is a great rooftop floating high above the earth. Actually tottering a bit where she stands, she reaches for the wall to steady herself; before her, a quadrant of the world is ablaze with lightning. It curves in an electric white arc against the black of space. A lake glitters far below to the west, lunar gales howl in the sky below, and pacing the eye of the storm Brontë contemplates the shimmering suture of the northern mesas. For a moment she can almost believe that here one sleeps above her dreams—for good or ill, depending on the dreams.

  Lately Brontë has been having dreams of a small boy. Only after she found a crumbling old book on a remote shelf did she learn the story that the official literature of the hotel doesn’t tell: that on the afternoon the great great grandson of the Spaniard who built the pueblo walked out its porticos into the desert, he left behind a sole inheritor of his ruin. This was a three-year-old child who he so refused to acknowledge as his own son that the forsaken mother, a local Indian woman, died giving birth in a ravine just beyond the western garden. Even when the infant boy was taken in by the hotel servants, his cry was regarded by the father as simply a stray sirocco blowing through the abandoned ballroom. Thus three years later, with the hacienda empty of everyone else, on his nonchalant stroll into the desert the newly destitute patrician walked right past the child as though he was invisible, and for hours the little boy stood in the open doorway first watching the disappearance then awaiting the return of the father who had never

  myself with him then, splashed him on my face and neck and breasts until I

  held or kissed or spoken to him.

  Brontë goes back through all the other old books of the hotel to try and find out what happened to the son left behind. But as the forbidden history of the pueblo would have it, he’s still standing in the doorway waiting for his father, and at night sometimes Brontë wakes to his small sirocco-cry from somewhere in the hotel. She presses her ear to the walls listening for him, convinced the brown-haired brown-eyed child scampers up and down secret passages between the rooms looking for his father who’s hiding from him, as though his abandonment has been only a game. Outside, the storms seem to stop moving over the mesas, rather it’s as though the earth continues turning its way into a single endless storm that rolls on and on and on into the coming years.

  As Barbrasita gets bigger, she begins lumbering slowly up and down the hall snarling at the growing child inside her in ever blacker language. Even to someone who doesn’t understand the Spanish, it’s awful. In her sleep Lulu hears the girl cursing her unborn baby and murmurs for someone to make her stop. Bronte stands at the window staring for trains and thinks that between the dying woman in the bed behind her and the pregnant girl outside in the hall, perhaps she’ll go insane: Perhaps I will. Then what willthey do, she rages silently, what will they do when I’m crazy. As her belly grows in the passing months, Barbrasita curses it more and Lulu curses back, and this exchange continues until the night Brontë finally wakes to find the Mistress sitting straight up in bed, streaked with the electric frost of the storm outside, eyes wide to the sound of something Bronte can’t hear through the cracked euphonium of the storm, until it trails off in a baby’s cry.

  Brontë rushes into the hall of the darkened pueblo. Searching for

  couldn’t distinguish the tears of my eyes from the discharge of my uterus, until

  the sound of the crying, she finds Barbrasita who, like a cat, has taken her labor into the linen closet, producing a bloody baby between her thighs, umbilical snake singing between them; the young Indian mother seems in shock. Down the dark deserted halls Bronte runs knocking on doors until Wanda appears. Calmly taking a flashlight hanging from a hook, grabbing from the kitchen the knife used for slicing Brontë’s lemons, she follows the crying to its source and, with a single swipe, slashes the cord. Its song howls into silence. Bronte reels. “Can you warm up a pot of water, miss,” Wanda says, “not too hot?”

  Barbrasita doesn’t curse her baby anymore after that. In the days after that, she sits in her bed so rapt at the sight of the little boy that she almost has to be reminded to feed him, his small hands pawing her breast. Trying to explain it’s not a good idea for the two to sleep together, Wanda has to gently pry the child from the mother’s arms: You could roll over on him dear, she says, wedging the baby on his side in a small makeshift cradle a few feet away. Commissioned to keep an eye on the infant while Barbrasita sleeps, Brontë fumes. It’s
very convenient for everyone isn’t it.It’s very convenient that a train abandoned me here so I could baby-sit a dying woman and a newborn. Brontë feels no affinity for babies. She believes she has a man’s sense of privacy that doesn’t accommodate babies. But as more weeks pass and she tires of watching for trains in whose arrival she has no more faith, she finds herself looking in on the baby anyway, even when the mother is awake. “Just thought I should check,” she tells the Indian girl. “Force of habit.”

  Later, almost four hundred days after coming to the Pueblod’Elektrik, standing out on the station platform one night and seeing at long last, long after faith’s exhaustion, the small distant

  both had seeped into me and I was bone dry, profoundly unmistakably empty,

  light of an approaching train, Brontë will note it’s not so much like a full moon at all. But one night a few months before, before she can even imagine let alone know what’s to happen, out on the station platform one night she sees a globe of light emerge down the line over the far ridge and for a moment thinks it’s a train before realizing it’s the moon growing larger and larger like a plummeting airplane, its nose a burning bomb. That’s when she doesn’t believe in trains anymore. That’s when she thinks that she and the Mistress have as much chance of riding the moon to Chicago—assuming the moon ever traveled from west to east. But of course this moon like all others travels from east to west, back the way they came from. There in the pueblo station, what Brontë doesn’t yet know is that, as the four hundred days of the Pueblo d’Elektrik tick down, the two women come nearer their destination than she thinks: the end of the lie that they can or ever could leave the lake, or live beyond it.