Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  training, I’ll give him permission to pleasure himself if he chooses. But that’s up to him, he does it without any help at all from me, though if he wants to do it in front of me I may allow him, depending. A female client, she’s different, to the extent I’ve had any and can really tell. I confess I wouldn’t mind more female clients. For a while I was a bit surprised I didn’t have more but that was me being naive, women just aren’t wired that way are they. Someone else will have to explain that, I can’t. Perhaps for women submission has been such a fact of life for so long that they don’t have the luxury of making a game of it. I’ve had two female submissives but I’m not sure they count, the first was part of a couple, she and I performing for her man and while I think perhaps she liked it more than he did or more than he wanted her to, she wasn’t really my type; the second wasn’t really one client but several thousand, the all-female Freek Recherche that’s the most famous of the movable lunatiques that take place clandestinely night to night in one canyon or the other ’round here. Which in a strange way doesn’t count either. By then I had a reputation and while I usually don’t like doing outcall I confess I was flattered that they came looking for me, a couple of the women putting on the fete sailing out to the Chateau and offering me the job. It would be an honor, one says to me—how do you resist that? Flattery or not I’m not sure I could have anyway.

  This was the night I found out something interesting about myself. After all the days and weeks and months of wondering about my past, of wondering who I was before I came up out of the lake, this was when I found out perhaps I don’t really want to know. The night of the Freek Recherche the two women come back for me and sail me over to shore and drive me in a beat-up thirty-year-old Jag through the pass in the hills to Nichols Canyon and I think I’ll remember till the day I die the sight of all those women there by Nichols Pond that looked like it was on fire from

  human experience like losing a child can be a universe of meaning unto

  the melody-snakes imported and dumped in, flashing and singing. How did they get all those snakes? Where did all those women come from? I didn’t know there were that many women still in L.A., they had to have traveled from all the far reaches of the lagoon thousands of them, a vast memory-carnival of women dancing to the music of the snakes and drinking lapsinthe like there’s no yesterday. My job is to stand on this little platform and crack my whip at the girls dancing ’round me as well as the blindfolded man fastened naked to the spinning wheel behind me ’sinthed out of his mind voluntarily or not—I don’t know and don’t want to—erection subject to the whims of centrifuge and the object of much collective amusement. At some point in all this someone presses into my hand a shot of ’sinthe and instead of drinking it down right away I stand there looking at the shot glass in my hand thinking about it and considering whether to drink it—that is, do I want to remember, after all? Face to face with the prospect of actually knowing what came before, I balk. What if it’s something terrible? What if there’s a very good reason I’m not remembering? So I just set it there on the small table next to me trying to decide, and it’s very distracting. In a lot of ways it’s the best time I’ve ever had, the best time of my life, well the best I know of anyway, cracking the whip and dancing with the women like I’m Queen of the Zed Night like they used to call the Mistress, all of them worshipping me and cheering and wanting to touch me as I stand over them on the platform and getting paid for it on top of it, what can be better, except the whole time all I can think about is whether to drink that little shot of the sepia-colored liqueur.

  The strange thing now is, I don’t remember whether I drank it or not. Don’t remember, I just look at the glass in my hand at one point as dawn’s coming up over the hills and the medicine is gone—did I drink it, spill it, try to seduce some woman with it? I swear I don’t remember. Perhaps that in itself means I must have

  itself, how far I might have gone with him rather than, through a strange

  drunk it—is that one of the side effects, not even remembering you’ve taken it? I suppose I should ask someone sometime, next time the Freek Recherche or another of the big-time lunatiques passes through.

  It’s been a decent business and it’s allowed me to repay the Mistress and help support our lives in the Chateau. Sometimes the client he offers to pay in bottles of the “evilixir” but I don’t accept, I don’t want it in the Chateau with the Mistress or perhaps I don’t want it ’round for my own reasons, so usually he pays in cash and sometimes foodstuffs and material, transportation coupons which in this town are preferable, or something I can trade at Port Justine or the outpost over in Los Feliz. At first some clients they come expecting the oracular aspects of the sessions as the Mistress used to perform them but by now the word is out I’m not Mistress Lulu but Mistress Brontë, and instead of fortune-telling what they get from me are long gold hair and colossal boobs. Now when there’s an appointment the Mistress retreats behind her own closed doors. She knows most of the clients would find her presence more disruptive than welcoming, and those who might actually want her there, well, that would be a whole other kink we’re not into. The Mistress is already about to retire the night the young boatman who brought the flowers appears at the grotto door of the Chateau with not nearly enough cash for a session—though who knows where he got what he had: It’s not enough, I say looking at the currency in his cupped hands in the light of the doorway lantern. He ponders the money and closes one fist over the pitiful bills and coins too proud to say anything. “Oh come in then,” I say impatiently and pull him into the entryway, closing the outer door behind him, “wait here.”

  It’s all completely irregular, I never just take a client on like that, there’s a process, an interview like I said before, nothing spur-of-the-moment. I leave him in the entryway. I go through the

  chance-meeting with a Japanese boy who robbed graves at the time-capsule

  transitional chamber that leads to the room where I sleep, and from there into the outer room where the fire roars. The Mistress, she’s standing on the terrace like she often does, as though always looking for someone—Lu, I say. She turns and I say, “I’ve got one out in the entryway.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I know. I’ll send him off. He doesn’t have enough to pay anyway.”

  She nods and I’m about to leave when she says, “It’s all right, I’m going to bed,” and she comes in from the terrace moving very slowly, she seems suddenly old, “I mean if you want to send him away …” shrugging “… but not on my account.”

  “Come here,” I take her arm helping her. “Are you all right?” helping her into the back bedroom. I haven’t seen her look so old. I think she’s in her forties and on this night she seems twenty years older. “Lu?”

  “I’m all right.” She lies on the bed.

  I sit on the bed beside her and we lock eyes. “None of the ’sinthe tonight,” I say. She shrugs again, a small smile, and while I sit there on the bed close to a quarter hour holding her hand, waiting for her to go to sleep, my eyes search the room for the little sepia-colored bottles. When I think she’s finally fallen asleep and I let go of her hand, she murmurs something. “What?” I lean my ear to her mouth, and when I still can’t make it out, I ask again. “What kind of life?” she whispers.

  “Shhh.”

  “For a mother to give a daughter,” she says.

  “Go to sleep.”

  “What if I was your mother?” she whispers.

  “You are.”

  She smiles for a moment and then shuts her eyes again,

  cemetery now under water on the west side of town, winding up in Tokyo that

  “Your client….”

  “Gone by now,” I kiss her forehead—but in fact he’s still there when I turn off the light by her bed and go back into the outer room and through the ceremony room and the transitional chamber to the entryway. “You’re still here,” I say and he just looks at me and I say, “Do you talk?”

&n
bsp; “Yes.”

  “Do you know what I do?”

  “I think.”

  “All right. Do you know what I don’t do?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well we’re not going to have sex. Do you understand that?”

  He seems to consider this a moment and nods.

  “I’m not a prostitute, do you understand?”

  He nods. He sticks out the fistful of bills.

  “Next time—if there is a next time—you have to bring more than that, and you can’t pay in flowers either.” I take the cash and take him by the empty hand. “What’s your name?”

  “Kale,” he says.

  “Come here then.” I take him into the dressing room. “Take off all your clothes”—and he begins to pull the white shirt off over his head so I stop him—“wait till I finish with your instructions. Take off all your clothes and hang them here on the door”—I point at the hook on the door—“and then go through this door and you’ll be in a room where you’ll see another open door, and go through that door. Are you paying attention?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did I give you permission to look at Me?”

  “No.”

  “‘No, Mistress Brontë.’”

  “No, Mistress Brontë.”

  mirror-city of L.A. where east and west are smeared and where I eventually

  “Go through the open door you see and you’ll be in a large room with a fire. In the middle of the room will be a black circular rug. Kneel on the rug and wait for Me. When you see Me, lower your face in the rug till I instruct you otherwise.” Usually this is all prearranged with the client. The grotto door would be left unlocked and the inner doors open at the appointed hour so that the client, he doesn’t see me at all till he’s in the main room awaiting my entrance and command. That way a strictly defined relationship exists from the first, I’m already in my role as Dominant and he’s already in his as submissive before his training begins. I leave Kale in the dressing room, take my apparel from the ceremony chamber and go into the outer room which I make dark except for some burning candles. Then I change into the black leather garter-belt and stockings and heels and the red silk robe I was given by another client to replace the old black robe the Mistress gave me my first night at the Chateau, and I take the riding crop and wait out on the terrace.

  When I fit him with a collar and ask him what his favorite color is, he says blue and I strike him lightly ’cross the face. “Is the kale-toy being impertinent?” I say, “you know there’s no blue anymore,” choosing a velvet purple collar for him. From the outset he’s the most compliant stoic sort I’ve ever had, while at the same time being the least truly submissive. This unspoken defiance comes into his eyes even while he’s doing everything I tell him. The more compliant his body is, the more his spirit is somehow beyond enslavement. Drifting outside himself the way he seems to, there’s no self to be humiliated. During that first session I keep asking him if he feels humiliated and he says no, and a week later when he shows up again, still holding out in his cupped hands the cash that’s not enough, I don’t know why I don’t just tell him it’s insufficient and make him leave—it would be a very legitimate reason not to see him. But somehow it feels like a

  worked as a memory girl in the revolving memory hotels of Kabuki-cho amid

  defeat, and so instead during the second session I change strategies, applying a more rigorous discipline; but when I ask again if he’s humiliated he says no, and though I strike him ’cross his back when he says it, I know it’s true, he’s not. I beat him harder than I’ve ever beaten a client, till I have to stop myself. Are you humiliated now, slave kale? I say, and he keeps saying no no no, and he’s not. It’s obvious it’s not his true nature to be either submissive or dominant. He’s one of those rare few whose true nature is to neither follow nor lead—more like a woman in that way, I should say. Or perhaps I mean more like me.

  Which means what attracts him isn’t the idea of submission, which is what attracts the others. I’m what attracts him, so I know from the first there’s a potential problem. Really I don’t want to encourage him. I know he’s here for the wrong reason, I know he’s taken with me, and if I didn’t know before, sure I know it the night he sails me to shore when I get another outcall, after the one I did for the Freek Recherche, up at one of the houses on the Hollywood Peninsula. It’s my biggest offer ever and something tells me from the start to stay away from it—these very unpleasant sorts in a powerboat show up in the Chateau grotto one afternoon with a handful of cash and I’m not keen on the looks of them. But though cash isn’t the easiest currency to deal in ’round here anymore, well it’s a lot of cash, and they want me to come up that night to some house on the peninsula owned I guess by whoever sent his messenger boys with the proposition: There’s going to be a party, they say. I say to this one guy in the powerboat, I’m not a hooker.

  “It’s OK,” he says flatly.

  What sort of answer is that? “Do you understand,” I say again, “that I do not have sex for money?”

  “It all right,” he says, còunting out there on the grotto steps more cash than I’ve ever seen, and so, really, it’s my own fault

  its surrounding bars and brothels and strip joints and massage parlors and

  isn’t it, looking back on it. I know that. All my intuition is saying no don’t do this, here I’m trying to explain the situation, what I do and what I don’t, and they’re just giving out with this vague it’s all right it’s OK—but I’m dazzled by the money, and perhaps I’ve gotten over-confident about being able to take care of myself. So that night at the agreed hour I sail out to the cove behind the Chateau where a car is waiting to take me up to the house, and Kale, he’s the one who takes me.

  In the boat he doesn’t say anything, not that he ever says anything anyway. But he can tell from my bag of tricks I have with me and the way I’m dressed under my long green cloak that I’m working. It’s dusk and the light’s fading and halfway from the Chateau to the cove a fog drifts in and as the fog gets heavier a car onshore begins flashing its lights that get hazier and hazier. Are you sulking? I finally say to him and regret it right away, it’s a question that instantly makes us more familiar than I want to be. What? he says and by now I’ve already learned with Kale what? might mean anything. What? might mean I didn’t hear you, it might mean I heard you but I didn’t understand you, it might mean I understood you but I don’t know why you would ask that question, it might mean I understand why you’re asking but I don’t want to answer. Somehow all the things that what? might mean coming from anyone else, with Kale it’s just multiplied, because he’s this boy that you just don’t know at all, he’s unknowable and I don’t think it’s just me. I realize, moments from shore, that in this boat our roles are reversed, what with him navigating—my most compliant but least submissive client in control and me, the woman in control, at his mercy though who knows whether he thinks of it like that since there’s no telling what he thinks even when it’s the other way ’round. Other than the one thing about him I know that I keep trying to ignore, that he’s totally taken with me, there’s not

  porn shops, in a city of no order where streets have no names or addresses of

  any telling about Kale about anything at all. Walking up the shore to the car I find myself turning ’round to look over my shoulder at him back at the lake behind me, another concession to some strange connection or familiarity I’m not too happy about. I find myself turning ’round to look at him behind me—and he’s not looking at me at all. He’s pushing the boat away from the shore with the oar and, for a moment, panic wells up in me, I feel stranded, I want to call him to come back and take me back to the Chateau. But I fight it and go on.

  The car is one of those old stretch limos from the turn of the century. In the back is a bar with crystal bottles of the lovely-looking sepia liqueur, and suspended from the ceiling of the limo there’s a little television turned to probably the only channel th
at can still pick up a satellite signal, from some station out beyond the Mojave. I haven’t seen a television since I swam up out of the lake but I know what it is anyway and while I have no idea what’s going on—a man and woman are arguing—I can’t help watching with fascination as the car winds up the mountain road to the house. I have no idea where we’re going or how far but I’m in the car a good fifteen minutes. Beyond the dark limo windows, one old abandoned mansion after another rolls by dark and hulking, sometimes I see a light go out in one window or another where squatters hide from the headlights of the car. When we get to the house where the party is, it’s buried in black palms and cypresses and darkness, walls invisible in the night and the only thing I can see is a small glowing rectangle in the distance, a yellow doorway in the night, and we get out of the limo and I can see the driver is the man in the powerboat who gave me all the cash that afternoon. Roughly he takes me by the elbow and directs me to the door.

  The house, it doesn’t seem all that impressive inside, not that much bigger than the Lair—the light is dim as though to hide

  any sequence that makes sense in space, rather it’s a sequence of time,

  general dilapidation. The grime of the walls, the carpets. It must be seventy, eighty years old, from the middle of the last century, the left wall of the open living room lined with bookshelves with latticed doors but no books, and in the right wall of the living room a hearth that’s not burned a fire in years though some wood is stacked on one side of the fireplace and on the other side is a poker and instruments for stirring embers, cleaning ashes. ’Cross the room from where I stand windows run from the ceiling to the floor and past those I can make out in the moonlight a pool no one has swum in a long time because in the moonlight I can see the surface of the pool covered with leaves, and past the pool is a mega view of the lake and all L.A.’s islands, not that you can really see the lake itself in the dark. But in a way that’s the impressive thing, the panorama of islands all glittery in a way I’ve never seen L.A. You can almost get a sense of the whole of the thing, of the city and lagoon, the way you never do in L.A.