By now an archive of several thousand fills the Vault’s three small walls. Reading by lantern she finds in its place, where it’s been missing the past month, the plastic case with a spine where long ago she printed SPACEMONKEY; damp, with drops of
erections when they dream and so I thought if I fucked enough of them in their
the lake smeared across its cover, clearly it’s been returned just in the past few hours, maybe the past few minutes. Months ago she discovered the Vault was being raided and that every full moon, after one of zen-toy’s sessions, a disk was missing which, a full moon later, would then reappear. To test her theory, last month she pored over the collection to find exactly which one it would be tonight; sometimes she thinks she can almost hear the broadcast herself, south of the wind that comes down off the Hollywood moors. At best it’s a distant sonic smudge in the air. If it’s now obvious to her that zen-toy himself is behind the mysterious monthly broadcasts, she still doesn’t understand why he would confiscate a disk, presumably on his previous visit, have it broadcast and then—replacing the original—bring a copy to her for the explanation and meaning of a song he himself chose. Was it a random selection, made by a man whom she knows in other matters is incapable of even considering the possibility of random chance? This conspiracy isn’t just circular, it’s labyrinthine. That it should have been this particular song only unnerves her all the more.
Now, the SPACEMONKEY disk having been returned tonight as expected, she pores over the archive again looking for an interruption in their order, for a slot where a disk should be but is missing, which will tell her what the next one will be on the next full moon. When she finds it, her heart stops for the second time in less than half an hour, and for a moment she wonders if, like when zen-toy reappeared in the door of the dressing room repeating the same words he had spoken upon his earlier departure only a few minutes before, the space where the song should be is a ghost.
Not that one.
She says it out loud, “No not that one,” and begins looking at all the other disks that come right before and after, thinking it’s just been misfiled. But it hasn’t been misfiled, there’s an empty
sleep I might take away with me a dream splashing in my womb, and yet when
slot where it’s supposed to be: that one; then she wonders if she herself took it and left it somewhere and has forgotten. She wonders if she discarded it unconsciously, in the same way she unconsciously was singing it to herself only half an hour before. She wonders if she cast it to the lake where, on breaking the surface, it turned back into a snake that quickly escaped to the water’s lower depths where it came from. But she knows she hasn’t discarded it. She remembers too well the decision she made to keep it in the first place, because at the time she couldn’t bring herself to discard it as surely as she couldn’t bring herself to hear it.
I’m stirred in a way I don’t want to be. Inside I feel I’m not in control the way I’m supposed to be and now anger becomes a sense of betrayal: he’s supposed to submit to me, and now he’s found a way to be master of events, master of my emotions. She thinks of nine years ago out at Port Justine when he tied her gondola there, the almost arrogant, almost untouchable way he took her hand when she stepped out onto the floating dock. This can’t be coincidence that now, of all of them, this one is missing, particularly right after the last one.
She has no idea at this moment that tonight she’s far from finished with surprise and coincidence, if that’s what it truly is, with the most shattering to come. Her sense of betrayal flares in part because she believes its indignation may protect her from feelings she thought sailed away in a silver gondola nine years ago. Betrayal propels her from the Vault out onto the granite walkway that leads around the crescent edge of the Chateau’s grotto to the stone steps she climbs; in the entryway she closes the outer door behind her then enters the transitional dressing room that would lead her immediately to the Lair beyond if she wasn’t at this moment stopped in her tracks by the sight, there on the rug at her feet, of the little red monkey she walked right past before.
I still didn’t dream then, not yet eighteen years old I finally left the small town
The sob bubbles up from her throat before she can swallow it. Although Kristin may have plucked it from the lake and left it in the gondola when she returned to the lake’s source nine years ago, the incarnation of her called Lulu who was left behind and bid farewell to Kristin from the lakeshore that morning after the fire hasn’t seen the monkey since the day fourteen years ago she left Kirk, in order to save him from being swept away by the breaking water of a pregnant malevolent century; she recognizes it instantly. She falls to her knees. Gently she picks up the toy as if it’s a small body, and all promises are broken now, all bargains unmade: the bargain with God, with whom she made a pact somewhere in an abdicated future to give up her son if it meant sparing him some fate that hadn’t yet come to pass; the bargain with the lake, who spared her from the flames of guilt that consumed her house if she would agree to live with the waves of guilt that flooded her past; and especially the bargain with her Other Self to whom she waved goodbye when she watched Kristin set out naked in the gondola to go back to the Other Lake. All these promises, all these bargains, made so she could live in some kind of truce and endure the only loss in human life that simply can’t be endured, for all the ways one might find to go on functioning. Now her heart is broken again down to the bone of the soul. The lake is dying, returning to where it came, an irony too bitter to even be mere irony, since it means all of her efforts of years before to stop the lake were unnecessary and everything that effort cost her was pointless; she clutches the monkey to her as if it’s him. She sees him before her with his sun-lit head and amber-flecked sea-green eyes and the sanguine mad-monk mouth, and pulls him to her and begs for another vision that will make her mad too, begs to be trapped in a mad vision of him and never sane again.
traveling for a while in the company of a millennial religious cult that I
In his sleep, the dome of his eyelids is strewn with stars. Disoriented, he looks around for the Square, and a moment passes before he remembers.
No not here. Better the Square than here—but he is here, an immense rooftop spread out before him on top of the world, just inches beneath the night. A quadrant of the world lies in moonlight before him. He can see the curve of the earth in a white shimmering arc against the black of space. It’s a dream he never has because he’s struck a deal with his subconscious to never raise this memory although, now that he thinks of it, he wonders what his end of the bargain was ever supposed to be. Nonetheless this is his unconsciousness’ betrayal: better the Square. In the dream he looks not for Kristin but a young woman he met only three times and who he’s put out of his mind ever since one dazed night years ago back east: The Emperor of Elevators, he murmurs in his sleep, feeling the tail-end of a familiar gust blowing from a vent in a low rectangular storage hut near the rooftop’s edge. He wonders if this gust is an ally meaning to rescue him, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove him, before he remembers it’s an anarchist without conviction.
In his dream he crosses the building rooftop to the vent and looks deep into it. Mistress my Mistress, he whispers and hears the song and feels the gust of the Oblivion Wind in his face; and when he pulls his face away, the vent has become the gun barrel of the
learned in the nick of time meant to sacrifice me on New Year’s Eve, then to
tank and he’s back in the Square with the tanks rolling toward him like great eggs. He looks up and the sky is bloody red again; standing his ground, the gust dies. The tank tries to go around him, he moves to block it, and when the tank moves again so would he, to block it again, if he weren’t transfixed by the song. From out of the corner of his eye, he sees a blinding flash of something and raises his hand to shield his eyes, and a moment later he’s aware of the hot pain in his hand, his hand burning, the small explosion in the palm where one’s fortune is told. He looks up
at his hand quizzically to see a bit of red wedged in the middle, and thinking at first it’s blood, he realizes he’s seeing through the new hole a spot of the red sky beyond.
He hears the song, the gust rises again, and she appears at the far end of the Square that’s otherwise empty but for him and the tanks, a figure walking across the Square toward him. The Mistress isn’t dressed in her stockings and heels but in her black silk robe, vines the color of jade climbing up her body and binding her. When she reaches Wang, she holds a cool cloth in her hand and mops his brow.
She gently lays the other healing hand on the welt on his shoulder that she left earlier that evening with her riding crop. It’s all right, he says in the dream, I don’t want you to hold anything back. But….
But? she says.
San Francisco with a pair of psychotic lesbian lovers I learned in the nick of
But what do the broadcasts mean? he says.
What? she asks, confused.
Why do you do it? Why the broadcasts? What are they for?
Why do I do it? she says. I thought it was you. Me?
Yes.
You thought it was me?
Yes.
He shakes his head. It’s not you?
No.
Then …? as Wang wakes suddenly in his quarters, lying on his cot in the dark. Opens his eyes, knowing that in just seconds there will be a pounding on the door.
He fumbles for the lamp on the nearby desk. Sitting on the edge of the cot he holds his face in his hands and waits; barely before the first knock has finished he says, “Come in,” and there’s a hesitant moment before the soldier enters.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Parsons.”
The soldier is disconcerted. “Uh, yes, sir,” he finally says, “that’s correct, sir.”
“What?”
“That’s my name, sir.”
“I know it’s your name.”
“Sir?”
“You told me earlier this evening.”
“Uh, with your permission, sir.”
“Yes?”
“That couldn’t have been me. Sir.”
“Parsons …” Wang says.
time meant to murder me in my sleep, finally arriving in Los Angeles where
“I mean, we’ve never spoken, sir.”
“I want you to find something to get this off.” Wang holds up his hand.
The young soldier is flummoxed, first by the glass in Wang’s hand and then the Mistress’ fur-lined cuff that still dangles from his wrist. “Sir. We’ll get someone to file it off.”
“I don’t want to file it off. Find a master key of some sort.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wang stares straight ahead of him in the dark. “Who put that up?” he says after a moment, quietly.
“Sir?”
On the wall in front of him, where there was a blank space when he went to sleep after returning from the Chateau X, looms the inevitable image. “I said,” Wang can barely spit it out between his teeth, “who put that up. Who came into my own quarters while I was sleeping and put that back up.”
“Sir?”
“Did you put that up?” He’s barely raising his voice.
“Me, sir?”
Wang slowly rises from the cot. “Parsons.” He’s so silently furious he can’t quite think what to say. “Take it down,” he finally tells the soldier.
“The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”
“If I see it up there again, I’ll have you arrested for insubordination,” although he doesn’t really have the authority to do that.
“Sir?” Parsons says, and a couple of miles away, out in the western darkness of the lake on the hotel-island called Hamblin, Kuul listens to a song and begins to cry. Having pulled a blanket up around the sleeping old woman and eaten some of the bread and cheese and fruit from the Chateau X, having made his way in the light of the full moon around to the storage space that holds all the
after a week of living and sleeping on the streets from Hollywood to Century
hotel’s long dead phone and power lines, as well as an old sound system the Order of the Red left behind with everything else, he’s pulled a disk from his shirt, flipped off the switch to the outside speakers, and put the disk in the carrier tray.
When he presses the play button, he begins to cry and doesn’t know why. But since he was a small child, music has been the sound of freedom and desertion, and although he’s barely conscious of remembering this particular song, inside him it opens up a door—if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me—that closes again before he can go through. As when he chose this song from the Chateau’s archives in the first place, for reasons as mysterious to him as most choices, fingers just running along the walls of the Vault until they stopped, he hears music in silence like an owl sees in the dark; it’s an instinct that’s become a little more than human by now; too human for him to understand is the instinct that makes him cry now when he hears this song: ‘Cause I know this sea wants to carry me / in a sweet sweet sound she sings / for my release. He can almost hear her singing it somewhere that feels close but also like another life, a life that feels at once gone forever and at the same time just beyond the bend of the lake or maybe on the next lake over, wherever such a lake might be. Although he can barely remember her, the sound of this song makes him wrack his brain to try and figure out, as he’s tried before, what he did when he was three that was so terrible it would make her leave him.
He sits slumped against the wall until it finishes. He doesn’t think he can listen to it again. He knows there will be no more broadcasts, which were an accident in the first place when he discovered the sound system on the island a year before and was half way through playing something when he realized the speakers outside were on too, blaring so loudly everyone within two or three miles could hear. After that the music just became
City to Baghdadville on the beach I responded to a personals ad from a
part of a full-moon ritual that has no particular meaning at all, at least none he knows of. He rises from the floor where he’s been sitting and walks out onto the Hamblin rooftop and takes solace in the moon that floats at the end of a chain of utterly random events like a balloon at the end of a string; like letting go of a balloon, he would like to watch the moon float away for nothing but the sake of watching it float away. He hears the bombs and fly-overs in the distance and wakes the next morning with the song he doesn’t want to listen to anymore still in his head, and the sky a brilliant blue, more and more rare in the Age of the Lake. Sitting up in her gondola as though it’s a chariot is the old woman. She actually has a small smile on her lips as though she’s expecting something to happen. Off to the edge of the Hamblin, Kuul pulls up from out of the cold lake a bottle of milk tied to some twine, and as he’s pulling up the bottle he’s struck by the wet trail of the water down the hotel wall: sometime in the night, the lake fell.
He’s thinking about this and still hearing the song in his head while he brings the milk over to the woman and pours her a cup. She’s still smiling and he smiles back at her but the song is still in his head and soon he can’t resist anymore, and he goes back into the little makeshift broadcasting booth and stares at the disk player awhile before submitting to the impulse. He doublechecks to make sure the outside speakers are off
then, reconsidering—he lets go of the chain, up behind the blue sky the moon begins to rise—flicks the speakers back on, and turns up the volume.
Hesitating again, he presses the play button.
It doesn’t start anything like he remembers from last night. Does it start like this? he wonders when the vocal begins
“Humans are running, lavender room …”
No….
“Hovering liquid, move over moon …” No, that’s not
middle-age man who had been abandoned by his pregnant Asian wife and was
right. “For my spacemonkey….” He stops the disk then presses the play button again, as if tha
t will correct the error, then stops it again. He ejects the disk. He picks it up and looks at it, turns it over as if that will reveal an answer, turns it over and over and over and over. He puts it back in the player and plays it again, then stops and ejects it again.
He feels something so unknown to him that he’s incapable of identifying it as emotional panic. He gazes around for the right disk but he knows better, he knows there is no other disk, that this is the disk he played last night and left in the player. He also knows that the song he’s hearing now is the one he returned to the Vault last night when his passenger with the hand was inside the Chateau, and that yesterday’s song has somehow replaced last night’s, and that this is difficult to understand even for a boy who has an owl’s sight for invisible music. In the tower of the Chateau X to the north, wearing her silk robe, she stops brewing her tea and cocks her head; she’s been up all night crying and drinking, sitting at her divan before the dying fire, staring at the red monkey perched above the hearth, and now, almost beyond the capacity for confusion, she hears it. She goes to the window and stares out over the lake to the south. On a clear blue day when there’s no wind off the hills to separate the music from her, she can hear it. She thinks to go back down to the Vault and doublecheck whether the song she found returned to the archive last night is still there. But she doesn’t.
In a water-craft a couple of miles to the east, speeding toward Hamblin Island, Tapshaw says to Wang, “Do you hear that?”
Over the roar of the boat, the song is almost indistinguishable. It may be, as Wang tries to reason, amid the vertigo that buffets him now on the watery sky of the lake
looking for a pleasure-slave although he wouldn’t put it in that fashion, and as
spanning out all around him, that this is his mind playing another trick on him; but sometime in the last twelve hours he’s come to realize that because something is a trick of the mind doesn’t mean it’s not real. That the real of the remembered is no less profound than the real of the perceived. This morning, when Tapshaw asked him what Wang found out in the mysterious hours that have lately come to accompany full moons and mysterious songs, thinking a moment Wang answered, “We’re surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” Now he looks at the Hamblin in the distance and his ears and mind try to filter out the sound of the boat for the sound of the song, but then he doesn’t hear it anymore and isn’t altogether certain he did in the first place. As well, however, he isn’t altogether certain he didn’t.
Our Ecstatic Days Page 12
