Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  Enthralled by her child, Barbrasita is paralyzed. In the weeks after his birth she can’t even bring herself to name the little boy, so afraid is she that her first maternal act will be a mistake, setting everything thereafter wrong. What if I name him something bad? she asks Brontë in broken English. She’s consumed with guilt about having cursed the baby when he was inside her. She’s convinced he heard every word, so now she pets his brown hair and begs his small brown eyes to forgive her. She seems to Brontë in a trance. One night when lightning strikes one of the railway cars outside, the reflection of the flaming mausoleum through the window makes the Indian’s face appear on fire, ecstatic, purged by love; that’s the night Brontë checks in one more time on the Mistress three doors down, turns down the lamp by Barbrasita’s bed, closes Barbrasita’s door behind her, and then takes off her clothes. Is the look on the Indian girl’s face just a variation of the

  and then it was after that that I dreamed, for the first time in my life, not

  one she always wears now as a mother, or a response to Brontë’s naked body next to her? Never with another girl before huh,Brontë whispers, careful should the wound of birth still be tender. Vixen, Bron të accuses herself, I’m no better than Rollin. Afterward, as the young Navajo woman sleeps in her breasts, wrapped in her long gold hair, out of her sleep Brontë reaches over in the dark and slowly rocks the cradle.

  But in the ensuing days, the fire that’s been cast in Barbrasita’s face doesn’t die, rather ecstasy burns down to the diamond of a fixed notion. In her heart, her nameless little boy has opened the door to a vast plateau of fear, stretching out beyond her young years when mortality is supposed to be so inconceivable. In the beginning, perhaps her dread was attached to nothing she could name but now she can name it, pyre of the railway car outside flaming in her face: it’s the way she cursed him made manifest that’s coming for him. Like it was a thought wandering the desert waiting for her to rescue it, she’s come to know in no way she can explain even to herself that it doesn’t matter where she goes, it doesn’t matter how far she tries to get her little boy away,the lightning outside will keep coming for him, moving through the labyrinth of railway cars ring by outer ring, striking closer and closer, and that she can’t be paralyzed anymore. Out in the storm, out where the sky curses the earth in sound and light, lurks her son’s doom and she must stop it. She has to shake herself loose of the love that holds her down and find inside her the love that will save him. She has to go to war with the sky that would take him.

  In the room three doors down, Brontë is alarmed by Lulu’s moans in her sleep. Oh jeez she’s going to die now, Brontë thinks to herself; she sits on the woman’s bed holding her, trying to calm her, but Lulu’s rant—stop her no no no stop, stop her, stop (in

  realizing at first I was dreaming since I had never had a dream and didn’t

  dreams of red)—grows from the depths of something else.Finally, not knowing what else to do, Bronte hurries from the room in search of Wanda only to find Barbrasita standing in the dark hall with her unnamed baby in her arms. Brontë can no longer see the fire in Barbrasita’s face but Barbrasita can, it’s right there in frontof her eyes, getting closer: “What are you doing?” says Brontë. She pulls the young mother back to bed. Then she starts back down the hallway knocking on doors like the night the baby was born, but this time Wanda doesn’t answer: “Where is everybody?” Brontë actually says out loud in the dark at one point. When she turns back to the room, Lulu’s ramblings growing louder and more agitated, Barbrasita is in the hallway again, with her baby in her arms again.

  Brontë takes hold of the girl’s shoulders. “Go to bed,” she says.

  Barbrasita answers, in what sounds to Brontë like remarkably good English, “I know what I know, and I must do what I must do,” and with that shoves the baby boy into Brontë’s arms. “Hey,” Brontë says, Barbrasita striding past her, and in the porticos of the pueblo the Indian girl pulls open the doors that then seem to blast apart in the storm.

  “Hey, hey!” Brontë calls again, holding the child and running in confusion after the other woman, who stops only for a moment in the doorway. Only for a moment in the doorway, everything about Barbrasita’s ravaged life comes to a halt. She’s riveted by a calm that’s still secret to her. She’s riveted by a resolution beyond rationality, by some wisdom forgotten as soon as she’s seen it;’for a second, she lives in the red gazebo of her heart, standing at its placid center where her life surrounds her like a diorama. Brontë can hear her say very clearly, very calmly over the sound of the

  know how to identify one or distinguish it from consciousness, rather in that

  thunder, “Give him a good name,” and then the young mother runs out into the lightning.

  “No!” Brontë screams after her. But Barbrasita runs for the burning railway car, not to meet the fire but to head off the storm’s advance and conduct up into her, between her legs, through the place she gave birth, all the sky’s electric rage. Just outside the blowing, slamming doors of the hacienda, ëronte is pelted by rain and wind, stopped in her tracks as she turns her back on the wet and cold to protect the baby; at her side Wanda has finally appeared, eyes wide, and Brontë goes on crying “No!” over her shoulder at Barbrasita now far beyond earshot in the dark distance splattered with wet light—until there streaks from the black sky a bolt that suspends the girl in a momentary glow. Then she’s gone. She’s stepped through a white rip in the sky to some other desert on the Other Side where mothers don’t fear for the loss of their children. Brontë thinks it’s her own cry that she hears until she realizes it comes from the other end of the pueblo, Lulu sitting up in her bed in her room tearing at the sheets around her.

  Will they make a saint of her? Lulu wonders, collapsed back into her pillow and red dreams. Will they all come out and gather on the mesas surrounding the electric desert, revering the place where she went up in smoke, Saint Barbrasita of the Loud Light? Wherever she is now, on the Other Side of the cracked sky,does she wonder to herself, What have I done? What mad love made me abandon him, in order that I might believe I could save him from all the vagaries of life? Does she find herself burned into some place between chaos and God, neither within reach? Does she sing to herself if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me when it’s a higher light jagged like a knife she meant to take

  first dream I believed that the small flicker of light I saw on the other side of

  up into her womb and snuff out? Wherever she is now in the Other Desert, staring around in bewilderment in a place where the same storm seethes and everything is the same except that her child is gone, missing him she doesn’t even know what to call him.

  For a while, all she knew she remembered was red. Here’s Lulu’s lie: that she would not die on the lake. It’s now been so long since that day when some other naked version of her left to sail back where she left her small son in that silver gondola that she can’t be certain anymore it really happened at all. She can’t be certain it wasn’t a dream or hallucination, she can’t be certain of anything she ever did or didn’t do, she can’t be certain of her own life except: the one thing she knows for certain was ever real is him—that she knows—and she also knows she wouldn’t die anywhere else but on that lake even if she could, as if she could leave her heart behind and forget where it was and then, having lost it, forget there ever was a heart. So as the lake stopped draining, because it would wait to die with its mistress, so the Mistress in return has laid suspended on the edge of death four hundred days waiting for the lake to die: Well no kidding, Lulu says to herself in her fever. Who’s the point-misser now. She waits for the lake, the lake waits for her. But now in the first vision she’s had in a long time, like those she used to have going back to her very earliest, when she would sit on her bathroom floor reading the patterns of her periods in the porcelain toilet, now as if she’s conducting one final ceremony and as if a melody-snake has wound its way up out of the desert from the ashen place where
the lightning took Barbrasita, Lulu has a new epiphany.

  In it she runs after Barbrasita to stop her, into the wind and the

  the darkness, on the other side of unconsciousness, was the very dream itself,

  rain. As she almost catches her, the girl stops and turns and the lightning rips the sky in two and, inside the radiance that Barbrasita becomes, the red that’s been the only thing Lulu could remember finally takes form: and she sees him standing there in the Chateau lair with the small red toy monkey in his hand, wondering how it is he’s been abandoned again. First confronted by this vision, she can’t face the question of whether she left the toy behind accidentally or, so to speak, accidentally on purpose, but once the memory of red takes the form of the red monkey, then in this ozone between living and dying, for the first time since motherhood, Lulu fights to live …

  … and opens her eyes, and he’s gone. Opens her eyes and she lies in her bed in the pueblo and, outside, after four hundred days, the lightning has finally subsided. It flashes just enough that the snow falling glitters like glass—but that isn’t what she notices. What she notices is the bird beyond the window of her room, in the high black branches of a charred tree, very calmly unperturbed by the falling ice, as though the tree’s surrounding wisps might actually shelter it. “Look,” she says.

  Rocking in a chair at the foot of the bed, resting with a brown baby in her arms, Bronte opens her eyes at the sound of Lulu’s voice, a little astonished. “Hello,” she brings herself to say.

  “Look,” Lulu says again, weakly raising her arm to point through the window, and Bronte turns to look.

  It takes a moment for Brontë’s eyes to communicate the color of the bluejay to her mind, or perhaps it’s the other way around: “It’s not a trick of the light, is it,” says Brontë. “That is, it’s not really just some strange shade of green and gray mixed together.

  which I approached across some limbo between consciousness and sleep, and

  It’s really blue?”

  “All color is a trick of the light,” Lulu explains.

  After a moment, “It’s New Year’s.”

  “Really?”

  “Day before yesterday, actually.”

  Lulu looks at the baby in Brontë’s arms. “How long since …?”

  “Five weeks.”

  “Five weeks?”

  “You would come to just long enough for me to get some soup in you. You don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  “Some part of you must have wanted to stick around awhile.”

  “Have you named him?”

  “Not yet,” Brontë sighs, shaking her head. “Want to hold him?”

  Lulu has a pang at the sight of him. “His mother: she chose you.”

  “No,” Brontë argues, “I was just the one who happened to be there, that’s all.” She doesn’t mention the night she and Barbrasita slept together. “Who else was she going to give him to? Wanda I suppose, but….”

  it was like the flicker of a gunshot in the distance, a small flash on the far

  “She chose you,” Lulu insists, as vehemently as her weakness allows, “with boobs like those, she figured you were the woman for the job.”

  “Well aren’t you feeling better,” Brontë says. “They’re not exactly baby-ready.”

  “Tell him that. Put a bottle between them and he’ll never know the difference.”

  “He’ll just grow up to be another breast-blinded man like his father.”

  “He’ll grow up to be that anyway. The male wangie at its most basic.”

  “Hold him while I go get you some soup,” and Bronte gets up and gives the baby to Lulu. While she’s gone Lulu barely brings herself to look in the little boy’s brown eyes. She holds him pretending he isn’t there. She hears his gurgles pretending she doesn’t; the soft brown of his hair, she pretends she doesn’t feel that. The small hand that waves in the air for her finger, she pretends she doesn’t see it. She pretends she’s not thinking of names. Brontë comes back and sets the baby in his cradle nearby and feeds the other woman some soup, then when she’s finished she lies in the bed next to Lulu and picks up the little boy as he starts to cry. Bronte pretends she’s sick and fucking tired of crying babies. She pretends it was the unluckiest day of her life when Barbrasita pushed this child in her arms and ran out into the storm. What I get for seducing her, she thinks. She looks at the baby in her arms who’s stopped crying. “Why does he make me afraid?”

  horizon, until I finally identified the sound coming from it as crying, and when

  “Because there’s nothing a mother fears more,” Lulu says closing her eyes, “than the chaos of the world.” Before she sleeps, she looks once more to see if the bluejay is still in the black tree outside; together, the two women on the bed watch it with the baby asleep between them. “Brontë….”

  “I know.”

  “I have to go back.”

  Jeez, Brontë wonders, you don’t suppose Armand is still chained up in that dungeon, do you? “I know.”

  It’s the fur. There’s something about it that makes his flesh crawl. He would vastly prefer the cold hard metal of regular handcuffs cutting into his skin. With every twist of his body, with every struggle against his constraints, then the more the fur of 2018 (2004-2089) the cuffs softly caresses his wrists. A wave of disgust washes over him. There’s something depraved about it; it’s like a strange animal, mutated and hermaphrodite, curling between Tapshaw’s hands. Oh God don’t even…. He actually thinks he’s going to throw up. “Can’t you use rope or something?” he says.

  “I don’t have rope,” the other man says. “I thought you would find those comfortable.”

  I finally reached it I saw it was a baby sitting on the ground waiting for

  For a moment Tapshaw stops struggling. “You’re a sick….” I’m definitely going to throw up, he thinks, drenched in sweat; another long moment goes by before the feeling subsides. “You’ve taken leave of your senses,” he croaks. Sitting on the other side of the room, Wang considers this: That’s it, he thinks. He turns it over in his head, deliberating it in all its meaning: I’ve taken leave of my senses. Regaining his composure, Tapshaw growls, “You don’t even know how to use that.”

  “Uh,” Wang says, studying the gun in his hand, “I point it at you and a bullet comes out and hurts you?”

  “How in God’s name you ever became the hero of a revolution, I’ll never understand.”

  “Well, I’ll admit it was from staring into guns rather than firing them.” Wang gets up from the chair and walks to the window. “Anyway I never said I was a hero. And is that what this is, a ‘revolution’?” Leaning in the sill, he’s noticed lately the sky is less and less blue. In the nearby hills, the observatory above Los Feliz glows in the sun like a skull. “I thought this was a ‘crusade,’ and I’m the mystic—I who don’t have a mystic bone in my body—divining messages that come singing out of the sky or floating up in boats in the form of children’s toys. Which is really more a crusade-thing than a revolution-thing. What sort is this anyway?”

  Tapshaw snorts in contempt.

  “Oh, all right,” Wang shrugs, “it’s a nine-millimeter. You see? I’m not as hopeless as both of us like to suppose.”

  me, and he stopped crying and looked up at me blinking, and now in the

  “It’s an old nine-millimeter that will probably….” Tapshaw stops a moment for the nausea to pass, “… that will probably blow up in your hand when you fire it.”

  “Yes, well,” Wang goes back to the chair where he was sitting, staring at the captive man on the floor, “there’s one way to find that out, isn’t there.”

  “These things are going to make me puke,” the bound officer gasps, swallowing frantically.

  “Tapshaw,” … Wang answers gently and not completely without sympathy, “if you’ll permit me: that may say just a little more about you than it does about anything else. Anyway the handcuffs are all I have and they’re not coming
off, not for a while anyway. So if I were you, I would calm down.”

  After a moment Tapshaw says, “Where are we?”

  “Actually,” Wang sets the gun down on the old table next to him, “I used to live here.” He gazes around the tiny one-room wooden house. “When I first came to Los Angeles, this part of the city wasn’t even under water.” He gets back up and returns to the window. “There was a park over there,” he nods, “right down those banks, at what used to be the corner of Alvarado and Sixth. A nice park once, I think I heard, back in the earlier part of the last century, 1930s, ’40s. I got here at the end of’1, from … well, by way of that proverbial slow boat from China but in a roundabout fashion, let’s put it like that. I would sit here at this same window at a table a lot like this one and smell the Mexican bread baking, I could never figure out where exactly, and …” In the northwest, the sky is definitely less blue than it used to be. “… write letters, lots of letters.” He says, “Each right

  memory-stream of the lake’s birth canal, remembering it so distinctly, I can

  after the other. Hadn’t mailed one before I started the next.”

  “In code, no doubt,” says Tapshaw, leaning back against the wall taking deep breaths, “to the other side you were spying for.” “Yes, that’s right,” Wang snaps impatiently, “that’s the way we top agents send all our secret messages—by the postal service. Now you’re just being irrational. This was seventeen years ago, remember such a time? Before there was another side for me to spy for, if in fact I were spying for anyone, now or then or ever.” He sighs, paces back to the chair. For a while neither of them says anything. “You know,” Wang finally decides to try again, “you can believe what you want of me. You will anyway. And when your men catch up with us, as I know they’re bound to, persuasion brought to bear will undoubtedly get me to say exactly whatever it is our superiors—well, your superiors—want said. But right now, before the truth becomes so opportunistic, I’m telling you two things, assuming the truth means anything to you at all. The first is this. I promise you, I absolutely guarantee you, that most of what we call, oh, history, happens for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with why we think it happens. The second is, that kid had nothing to do with anything. You want to tell yourself I’m whatever it is you want to believe I am, go ahead. But all that boy ever did was row me in that boat.” He runs his hand through his hair. “He was barely verbal.”