already decided in those young years of mine that life was a matter of trading
So this then leaves to Doc and her pursuit of the unendurable loss only one remaining possibility, and that’s the final suite next to this one; and so the silver gondola sails back out into the grand mezzanine toward the final set of double-doors. Doc braces herself. Lying in the bottom of the gondola, remembering that afternoon in the apartment of the other hotel with Kristin, she becomes afraid as the boy rows them through the last set of double-doors into a suite of nothing but doors, each with a mirror, much like the mirrors of the Three Ballrooms, except that, as the gondola passes, each mirror loses its reflection and turns into a window, with strange faces on the other side peering in. This is the Suite of Lost Memory. Beyond the doors with the mirrors that turn into windows are corridors that run to every single other room in the hotel, because the Suite of Lost Memory may also be the Suite of the Lost Self, although that remains to be known. It’s uncertain, what with corridors running to the Ballroom of Lost Dignity or the Suite of Lost Freedom, what constitutes the self, and what of the self still exists when self-consciousness is gone. This is why the Suite of Lost Memory and the Ballroom of the Lost Soul aren’t the same room although they might seem the same to those outside the windows gazing in. And it’s partly because of this unanswerable mystery that Doc, braced for the great wave of anguish she expected from this final suite, realizes this isn’t the most unendurable loss either, that it’s a kind of death, in some ways more profound than the body’s death, and as a kind of death
on one’s most valuable commodity whether it be intelligence, strength, talent,
it’s something to be endured not by the one who has lost her memory but by those around her who watch her recede into life’s horizon in the gondola of amnesia. Now Doc is perplexed. Lying in the bottom of the gondola adrift in this last suite, having taken this long voyage on the lake of her mind down to the Hotel of Thirteen Losses at the bottom of the whirlpool so as to face what she couldn’t face all those years before, she tries to remember all the suites and all the ballrooms and all the guest rooms and sitting rooms she’s been through but can’t, and then realizes of course she can’t remember because, after all, she’s in the Suite of Lost … well, now she can’t even remember what suite she’s in, but she still has enough presence of mind to lift her arm and point the way out. For a moment the boy can’t remember the way, but circling the windowed doors around the perimeter of the room he finally finds the exit and rows them out of … now it comes
back to her, the Suite of Lost Memory, yes … and out into the mezzanine, bobbing above its flooded marble floors in the whirlpool’s current, where it all comes back to her and she counts the losses to herself: home, fortune, livelihood, love, faith, dignity, the soul, health, parent, freedom, life, memory … that’s twelve. Feebly she holds up her fingers and counts them again, and wonders where in their voyage they missed a room. Bobbing there in the water, puzzled she can hear the song clearly, the song that was coming from none of the three suites, and lies there listening—“Can you hear it?” she cries out to the boy—when the boy picks up the oars and begins to row, and rows them to the far end of the mezzanine and the small single pantry door, or perhaps it’s a
charisma or beauty, and so in order to survive I traded on my nakedness and
simple door to a janitor’s closet, that earlier they not so much ignored as dismissed. And as they grow closer to the door, the song becomes louder. As they reach the plain unadorned door it’s so distinct now it frightens her, and she’s about to cry out to the boy and tell him to stop when he takes the door knob in his hand and opens it. Out of it roars a music that’s more than pain, more than anguish, more than desolation, more than sorrow, more than grief. Out of it roars the greatest of all losses, the loss that can’t be endured. It’s not a loss that one truly survives let alone surmounts, it’s not a loss that one out-exists let alone outlives; it’s the loss that breaks your heart and it never mends. It never mends. It calls into question everything, so that it entails in some way all the other losses: home is lost; fortune and livelihood have no more meaning; love not only has no more meaning but becomes a kind of emotional treason; faith becomes a kind of spiritual treason; dignity becomes a joke; the soul is forever in the terminal grip of a psychic cancer; health is an affront; the loss of a parent is the perverse twin of this loss, like the reflection in the mirror of a funhouse; freedom is a curse; life is torture. Memory is worst of all. From the doorway of this tiny closet or pantry one would almost gladly flee, if possible, to the Suite of Lost Memory or, failing to reach that, perhaps even the Suite of Lost Life. This is the Unendurable Loss because it involves the one thing that one loves more than one’s own life; and no meaning that one strives to give her own life, however great or good, can ever truly compensate for what’s been lost, will ever be truly convincing in any scheme of things that in the heart of hearts one believes. This loss is the essence of the universe’s impossibility, it’s the one thing for which a benevolent God never has a persuasive answer, and which a malevolent God holds over the head of humanity. Although she wants the boy to row far away from this door as fast as he can, in the wave of music that roars out of the tiny closet
his needs, which bound him more than they bound me, particularly since many
Doc, weeping, takes hold of the sides of the gondola and summons all her strength and courage to rise from the bottom so she can look inside and face it at last. Inside the closet is nothing but a hole, the birth canal down through which rushes the lake back to wherever it came, and inside this hole Doc sees a vision of a young Asian boy maybe ten or twelve years old, unknown to her, growing up among his animé posters in the apartment Doc visited with Kristin that one afternoon thirteen years ago, suddenly swept under by the lake and reaching for a hand too far from him, and Doc can hear the mother crying for him frantic, disbelieving, but the boy descends; and out of the hole in his place Doc sees rise the Unendurable Loss like a bubble of black air
this is the loss of one’s child
At some point past Coldwater Canyon, gliding westward into the lengthening shadows of the hills, Kuul looks down at her lying in the bottom of the gondola and knows she’s gone.
He’s never seen death in a person before, only in owls, but the stillness is the same; it’s not like sleep. The small smile she had on her face for a moment isn’t there anymore. The cheeks of her face are wet—from the lake, he supposes; or some
times he was really too drunk to do anything anyway except lie in the throes of
astonishing dream maybe? He’s close enough to shore that now he uses the pole to push the boat into the mist off Beverly Glen, trying to think what he’ll do with her. Don’t people put their dead in the ground? Or do they burn them? Do they eat them? But he has nothing with which to dig out the ground except his hands, or to start a fire, which doesn’t seem a good idea anyway, and the owls leave their dead where they die, which seems more sensible than anything else. So beaching the gondola on the banks of the glen, he steps out into the mud and turns and pushes the silver boat with the old woman’s body back into the water and watches it disappear back into the mist, floating back out into the western part of the lake where it will eventually become caught in the current that leads to the sea.
Except now, of course, he has no boat anymore. He’ll have to get another. He looks around him at the trees and the rising hillside throttled with fog, and calls to the owls for direction. When he receives no answer, he calls again. He still receives no answer and, in his head, divides the number of shadows by the minutes of twilight, arriving for the first time in his life at the sum of zero. He begins to make his way up the hillside. For an hour as he makes his way up the hillside he calls again and again to the owls, and again and again receives no answer until he finally understands that, having crossed the experiential threshold of human death, he’s now on his own.
his terrible headaches muttering his wife
’s name and dreaming of his unborn
daughter as I rubbed his head for him, the two of us almost never conversing
2028
at all except when I would whisper in his ear as he slept how ridiculous he
was, how absurd he was, what with slavegirls having gone out with the
These are the memoirs of Lulu Blu, otherwise known as Mistress Lulu, the Dominatrix-Oracle of the Lake, Queen of the Zed Night, once called Kristin.
I still live in the tower of the Chateau X, I’ve been here almost seventeen years. I never leave anymore. Minions bring food and wine, leave it on the stone steps that disappear into the water … sometimes a client-submissive pays in supplies rather than cash, which doesn’t count for much these days. I’m in retirement. Once my subjects numbered in the scores but now Brontë brings in the business…. After the Unrest moved north ten years ago and as I got older, my services as both Domme and seer
Twentieth Century, and I went on living there with him then until he simply
were in less demand, except for the occasional businessman who flew in from Bangkok, Tokyo, New Delhi, but now they come for Brontë who takes them into the dungeon downstairs where I hear the wet echo of the lashing up through the vents. Not too hard now girl I think to myself when she lets loose a particularly sharp crack of the whip.
She’s a natural.
She’s a natural but you might ask, What kind of life is this for a mother to give a girl? Has my own life become such I can connect even to the people I care about only through the means and devices of domination? Dark falls as I write this, sitting by the terrace just inside the walls … a week ago the moon was full but tonight with the fog everything is black, none of the lake’s usual lights…. Ever since the water level finally dropped enough to expose the rooftops of the old Strip’s long-sunken shops and clubs, night-torches have burned from them forming a winding watery corridor—but there are no torches tonight, no glow or its accompanying music from the lunatiques in the canyons just over the near north hills…. Lately for the first time I can remember, waves have been crashing the Chateau’s sides, I don’t remember when it began, the crashing of waves sometime in the past months, I just woke one night to the lake pounding the Chateau and at first I thought it was an earthquake, or explosion. Waves have been crashing like an ocean shoreline, the lake has become an angry sea, furious at something and I believe it’s me. Is this fury the despair of old age, rage of midlife, the cynicism of young adulthood? is the lake only in its adolescence and this is its rebellion? All these years I wondered if she was my sister or lover or bride … has the lake in fact been my daughter, intent on getting my attention?
A memoir I call this but that’s a misnomer, truly I choose to remember as little as possible. I think as little as possible of my
vanished overnight after I discovered behind the locked door on the bottom
past, and with every night’s dose of lapsinthe greater than the night before, my mind becomes more resistant to its effects until soon I’ll overdose on memory or amnesia. Every night that my life sheds is one less to get through, one less link in the chain that leashes my heart like that leashing a slave’s collar. Each night one more dose until finally I just slip over the line. Four months ago Brontë found me in the transitional chamber slumped on the floor, face brushing the place where—eleven years ago? twelve—I found his little monkey. My life has been cruel enough to give me every now and then the hope or reassurance of some new clarity, once a decade or so before snatching it away … hope on a leash like a slave like my heart … but since that night eleven years ago I’ve slipped toward an ending not simply out of despair but rather as a flight to freedom, of course. But not a cry for help. Please. Maybe Brontë tells herself I’m crying for help. She called it in on the wireless and the ambulance-boat came with a pump so my belly might be as empty as the rest of me….
Not a cry for help … in a way it’s just the opposite. The only way of taking control over my life: by taunting it, flirting with an ending … the only way to place life at the end of a lash as I’ve so placed over the years everything and everyone I would have submit to me—after first coming to L.A. an orphan three decades ago and serving as the sexual serf of a man I never really knew or understood, out of which came the only thing in my life I ever truly loved so huge … at which point I had a mother’s fear of the world’s chaos; and nothing is as afraid as that. Is it so bad, to have wanted control when I never had it before? with men not so unlike the one who fathered my son, who themselves just wanted to give up all control for a few hours? Yes of course I’ve asked myself—cracking the riding crop across their asses (they never touch me)—asked myself whether in fact I was resisting their fantasies or fulfilling them. But at that point, when domination is a kind of
floor the huge blue calendar he had made that circled its room and covered
submission and submission a kind of domination, it all gets a little complicated.
In any event I had found some reconciliation with my life … until the night I found the monkey. Found the little toy monkey and suddenly could only wonder if it had all been a hoax I perpetrated on myself, that vision-dream-hallucination I had of going back back back down the hole of the lake, down down down to where I came from a quarter of a century ago now, down down down through the hole to the Other Lake to see if he’s still there in the boat, still waiting for me, still in the moment where I left him. And in fact if it was all just a vision, a dream, an hallucination, if in fact it was all just a hoax I played on myself, I can only wonder how it is I so easily accepted such a delusion, so easily abandoned my search for him in this life, on this lake, to take control, to put at the end of my lash, under the crack of my whip, my despair. Because despair, I think I heard someone say once, isn’t a grief of the heart, but the soul.
And then I wondered if he was still out there, and has been all along. On this lake, in these hills, a man now, wondering why I never came to find him….
I would chain myself to my bed and let the lake take me some night as it rises, if it were rising. But the lake hasn’t risen for a long time. For ten years it slowly but surely sank and then suddenly stopped a year ago last spring, in remission, putting off death just a while longer. Waiting for something to happen, before it dies.
I know what it’s waiting for.
People have stopped trying to understand the lake. They accept that the lake has its own logic, stranger and bigger than the rationale of tides, geology. Before even the geologists knew, those who live with the lake knew the sinking had stopped, because the Lapses stopped … those who live with the lake felt stop, for the
every wall and blotted out every window and flowed over onto the floor and
duration of its remission, the draining of time. Felt stop, in its pause before death, the way that every day after tomorrow was answered by another day before yesterday. Felt stop the pendulum of memory swinging ever wider as the lake drained … they knew because time stopped going backwards, because everything that’s been about the lake and of the lake finally stopped vanishing overnight into the literal fog of memory … people, events, philosophies, meanings … one night about six or seven years ago even the color blue vanished, no one has seen it since. Now the lake is green or gray or black … now somewhere out there over the water beyond the hedge of fog lurks zero-year, or zed-year. My own Lapses ended last year in a cluster … I woke one morning to
find myself lying not
in my bed in the Chateau but the Santa Monica hospital just a few weeks after returning from Tokyo, when I was seventeen. I was seventeen again, it was eleven-thirty at night again, the thirty-first of December again of that year, under the white explosion of delivery room lights overhead, the doctor and nurse having the same argument I remember them having over my labor that night a little less than twenty-eight years ago, about millennial arithmetic, between the calculations of my dilations and the dwindling minutes of my contractions. I looked into the white lights
above me, pain shot through me … I was startled to be back at this moment again but not amazed of course, since this kind of thing had been happening for a while now … what are you doing talking about, the nurse was saying to the doctor in exasperation, “if it’s tonight, or tomorrow, then what was all that hoopla a year ago about?”
“It wasn’t about anything,” the doctor was saying, “that’s what I’m explaining to you. It was about a lot of people getting it wrong, is what it was about.”
“All those people celebrating all over the world?” said the
ceiling and completely reordered history to the chronology and logic of
nurse. “All those fireworks over the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, or whatever….”
Excuse me, I muttered.
“… everyone got it wrong but you, that’s what you’re saying?”
“Zero isn’t the number before one,” the doctor lectured smugly, “zero isn’t a number at all. In the case of the calendar, zero is ten, and ten comes after nine.”
“Thank you, I think I know ten comes after nine.”
“This is a ten-year,” the doctor checked his watch, then looked at a clock on the wall, “in another hour and a half it will be a one-year, and that’s the true beginning of it.”
Our Ecstatic Days Page 14
