Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  here in the birth canal of the lake, suspended in this moment between chaos

  And stupidly instead of falling in the grass like I planned I just sort of stop and turn and look, expecting to see him there on the other side of the glen aiming at me—but he’s not there, at least not that I can see at first, then there’s something lying in the grass like a big wounded buffalo or bear and it’s him, and I hear him moan. I have no idea what brought him down but I start to turn and run into the trees to the south when a hand reaches up out of the grass and takes hold of my wrist and pulls me down.

  It clasps my mouth and I don’t make a sound. I’m not sure when I know it’s him, whether it’s when I turn and actually see him or if something just tells me. But I swear something in Kale’s eyes, they light up like I’ve never seen in any person—in the night you think they’re fireflies darting above the grass. We’re hunkered down in the grass and his head moves slowly from side to side while the rest of him doesn’t move at all, almost like his head sort of swivels on his neck and then it stops and his ears pick up the sound of something.

  I can’t hear anything. “Heart beat,” he says.

  I can’t hear anything. I can’t see anything. He still holds my wrist in his hand and I don’t move at all. And then out of the trees on the northern side of the clearing where I’ve just come from are two more of Armand’s boys, stopping long enough to check out their fallen pal and then turn our direction.

  I look at my wrist. It’s free, though I never felt him let me go. He’s gone from where he was right next to me in the grass, and I think I hear something move through the night before me but it’s the sound of the wind, I think it’s the sound of the wind. I don’t know what it’s the sound of. But Armand’s other henchmen are heading toward me in the grass when there’s another loud crack like I heard just a few moments ago, and then one goes down like the first one and then another crack and then the other

  and God, a point-misser on this matter I must admit, arriving in Tokyo already

  one. There are two more cracks and then no movement in the grass at all, the three men just lying there when I finally stick my head up to look ’cross the glen in the moonlight. I look and there are just the three of them lying there motionless in the grass—and then right in front of me there’s the momentary glow of those eyes like fireflies in the grass and Kale, almost like he’s taken form out of nothing, he comes to me as though gliding, not making a sound, not the rustling of grass or anything. With one hand he’s holding one of the oars from his boat, none the worse for wear for having leveled three men as far as I can see, with the other hand he pulls me to follow.

  I follow him down through the trees of the hillside beneath us and to a cove different from the one where he left me off a few hours ago. I don’t recognize it at all, I have no idea where we are—it will turn out we’re about five miles of shoreline west of where I last saw either Kale or the lake. “Talk about being in the right place at the right time,” I say stupidly when I see the boat in the water. As though, you know, it’s a complete coincidence he happens to be there. As though it’s a complete accident that, at this moment, he happens to be in this one cove out of a thousand. As though some instinct I’ll never understand hasn’t led him here, as though he’s not followed the sound of my heart from the moment I left him.

  I’m freezing out on the lake as he rows us south and then east. I want to go back to the Chateau but he’s not taking me there and I don’t argue. I freeze all the way out to the island where he takes me, the top of one of those old West Hollywood hotels rising from the water where he’s set up a little nook between the stairs and a rooftop storeroom of dead telephone lines and elevator cables. There are some mattresses and blankets that have been lying ’round more years than I want to think about, and a little place where someone built a fire once. “I get the feeling you’ve

  pregnant but not yet knowing I carried inside me a question that I asked once

  done this before,” I finally say about half an hour into thawing out. To the northeast I can see lights I’m pretty sure are the Chateau. I worry about the Mistress, I don’t like having left her alone. I’m angry at myself about the whole evening.

  He sleeps next to me. If he had wanted to get in under the blankets with me I would have let him, as long as he kept his hands to himself. I think he doesn’t want to put me in the position of saying yes or no, you see? He wants to take the decision out of my hands, into his, so there will be no question of the night being anything other than what it is. And I’m relieved and looking back perhaps I should have told him it was all right to get under the blankets with me, but I don’t because I’m not sure he’ll take it the right way and I’m too tired to want to think about it—but you see I think he knows that too so that’s why he doesn’t ask. And it moves me about him, that he wants to spare me having to be in control of anything for that moment when I don’t want to be in control of anything, I want to give up all control and be able to trust it’s going to be all right, I want to be able to trust him, to trust the night will pass without event or misunderstanding and I’ll wake the next morning and he’ll already be awake walking ’round the edge of the island looking out at whatever, and I get up and start looking ’round too, wrapping the blanket ’round me because there I am still in my corset and stockings which are pretty trashed from the night before, but there’s nothing else to wear till I get back to the Chateau. I’m stumbling ’round the rooftop in the gray morning sun checking it out and trying to get warm, and there I have another distinct memory of something from before: of sleeping on another rooftop somewhere like this one, beneath an enormous sky.

  Back in the little gutted room with the elevator cables I turn and he’s standing there in the doorway blocking it. For a second all my defenses go up the way they do when a woman is cornered

  as a little girl, running one afternoon into my uncle’s bar and crying out

  and a man is blocking her way out. All my defenses go up and suddenly he looks crestfallen, he’s seen it in my face, seen the way I got a bit afraid of him, the way I hate him just a bit after everything he’s done, after the way he’s slept next to me and hasn’t even tried to get under the blanket with me; for me to suddenly get wary and afraid of him, well, I can see how it hurts him. As though he would ever do anything to me. As though he would ever threaten me in any way. He’s hurt by my collapse of trust in this moment and something else, I know there’s something else, I knew from the first night he came to me. “Sorry,” I half murmur, half snap, and that comes off a bit defensive too.

  He nods. He backs out of the doorway to let me by.

  In the doorway I take his face between my hands. “I’m sorry,” I say again, gentler.

  He nods again.

  “Jeez,” I say, “what is it Kale. Are you in love with me, is that it? Do you just want to fuck me, is that all this is about?”

  “Those are two different questions,” he answers.

  “Why,” taken aback, “that’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever heard you say.” I take his hand and pull him down in the doorway and we sit together our legs entwined. I reach out from beneath my blanket and take his hands in mine and hold them. It’s not like that with me and boys, I try to explain. I know a man always thinks he can change a girl like me if he only gets the chance but that’s not going to happen. Really, at this moment I’m not trying to be a bitch, if anything I’m sort of begging him to understand. You’re pretty though, I’ll give you that, I say to him looking at his water-green eyes that light up in the night and putting my hand in his brown feathery hair that smells like tall dry grass—but it’s more than that. Somehow I feel it’s more than that. Later, back at the Chateau and lying in my own bed, I think about how it’s more than that. Part of me thinks well I can’t see

  What’s missing from the world? and years later from L.A. to Tokyo there

  him any more, because it just torments him, but the other part of me isn’t sure I can st
ay away, because there’s a connection for sure. Not like we’re lovers but … something else.

  Over the next couple of weeks I go out with him again to the island called the Hamblin because it’s truly mega out there even if there’s no blue anymore, even under the gray sky and looking out over the gray water, and also because of that connection. Because I can’t help wanting to spend time with him. But after a few times I know I can’t anymore, that it means too much to him to be with me and it hurts him too much not to make love to me. Like the first night out on the Hamblin he never imposes himself on me in any way except one time standing next to him looking out at the lake I put my arm in his as the wind comes up and then he puts his arm ’round me and his fingers brush my breast ever so slightly like it’s an accident—boys will be boys, eh? One night he comes to the Chateau with some food and money to be my slave again but we’re somehow too far past that scene anymore, and there in the Lair before the fire he tries to tell me, I know what he’s trying to say and I’m thinking oh no don’t, don’t say it, and he can’t, it catches in his throat or he can’t come up with the words or something, and he starts talking with his hands. His eyes coming at me fixed, relentless, he starts talking in this sort of sign language, his hands making these urgent elaborate pictures in the air, and he becomes more and more frustrated, his eyes closed tight, hands darting in front of him faster and faster till finally I just take them in my own, “Hey, hey,” to try and calm him. He relaxes and his hands rest in mine and he opens his eyes and just looks at me.

  I wait for Armand and his boys to show up. I figure it’s a matter of time, that they’re not going to let that night go unanswered for, so I gather up all the cash they paid me and keep it handy on the off-chance that somehow returning the money will

  inside me that question was beginning to grow into its own answer, What was

  satisfy them though I don’t believe that at all. My only concern now is that no harm comes to the Mistress. I’ve almost convinced myself it’s all been forgotten when yesterday afternoon I finally hear the approaching sound of the motor of the powerboat, and get the money and go out the back, down the stone steps into the grotto. The boat approaches and it’s my friend who drove me in the limo and chased me into the glen—on his forehead he has the scar of a pretty good gash where Kale leveled him with the oar.

  He’s about as happy to see me as I am to see him. For a moment the boat just bobs on the water in the afternoon shadows of the grotto. “Cunt,” he finally says.

  I let that one pass. “Look,” I say, “here’s the money back,” thrusting it in front of me with both hands.

  “What do you mean?” he says.

  “Here’s your money back. Tell your boss I’m sorry.”

  Well what can I say. You’re not going to believe this, but—Turns out Armand doesn’t want his money back, and he’s not sent his boys out to beat me up or kill me or ransack the Chateau. Turns out he wants me to come back up to the house and do the whole thing over again. Without the other girls joining in this time but all the rest of it: the blindfold, the cuffs, the little red ball in his mouth—he especially liked the little red ball—the whole thing except we’ll do it in private or, if I feel safer, he’ll come out to the Chateau and send his bodyguards away and we’ll do it here, all night if I’m agreeable and he’ll pay me double what he paid the first time, up front. I have to wear the white lace corset and stockings, though. That’s the only stipulation.

  Men! Fucking unbelievable, what? I just stand there with my mouth open and finally stammer I need a bit of time to think about it, because I don’t want to say yes and I’m afraid to say no. Back ’cross the lake goes the boat to Armand, from the grotto steps

  missing from the world, and although I didn’t yet know it was growing inside

  I watch it cross the lake, trying to think what I’m going to do. I don’t want to go back to that house, I tell the Mistress, but I don’t want these boys out at the Chateau either. There’s a lot I don’t tell the Mistress. I don’t tell her everything that happened that night in the hills because every time I see her now she just looks older, she seems to come out of her bedroom less and less, and to move more and more slowly—and I’m onto the business with the lapsinthe. I’ve figured out what that’s about, to the extent it makes sense at all, she thinks one night she’s going to finally take one too many that’s going to put her over the edge once and for all, whatever the edge is. But I figure the last thing she needs to hear about is what happened that night at Armand’s, just so she can worry about me. I tell her a bit about Kale, not really so much except, you know, There’s this boy—because there’s not that much I know to tell, is there? except he’s strange and sort of sweet and he’s in love with me. Yes she whispers they all fall a little in love with you, and I say no, this boy’s in love with me. And what do you think about that, she asks, and I say well it’s not something I can reciprocate, is it (perhaps she’s checking for some weakness in my lesbian resolve), but he’s sweet I say and very strange and I don’t want to hurt him (I haven’t really told her how he saved my little pixie behind) and the last time I saw him, I saw it in his eyes, this hurt, and I just wanted to run because I had never seen a boy hurt like that over me, not like that. I thought I was happy making the men cry a bit, what with a good healthy thrashing that would get a few tears flowing and the blood moving—but not like that, and it shocked me. And the Mistress she says well then you know you should send him away. It’s only right. You should send him away. And I say, I know.

  Then we’re quiet in front of the fire. What is it, I say, and she smiles thinly, It’s death, she says, “spreading through the baseboards and ceiling,” and I can’t really say what that last bit

  me and my son was growing with it, still I somehow knew, and everywhere that

  means but I guess I know anyway, and I suppose I’m not that surprised. But how? I ask, and she answers, It’s not always easy to say, sometimes it’s something unbearably sad you never recover from … sometimes when a woman dies, it’s an act of sacrifice.

  One thing I know, though, she says after a few more moments. One thing I know—and she says it with more force than I’ve heard her say anything—I know I don’t want to die on this lake.

  I go to bed not long after that and, lying in bed and struggling to fall asleep, is it a Lapse I have, like everyone else on the lake used to have all the time when the lake was sinking? Or a dream? Or a dislodged memory. That night of the Freek Recherche lunatique, did I drink that shot after all and now I’m having a ’sinthe flashback? Whatever, there I am back on that night I first swam to the Chateau and the Mistress, back on that night I first came up out of the lake, back under the water not so much floating up to the surface but expelled, by something below me, born, out of some other life, the placenta of a previous consciousness trailing behind me as I make my way to the surface. Bits and pieces of whoever I was before, falling away from my naked body, and then bits and pieces of distant recollection falling away as I swim upward, flashes of a remembrance washed away in the cold of the lake, a horrific flash of rubble and fire and confusion and terror and chaos and of having been hurled through the opening of the lake in a full-force gale of ash and obliteration. Control and its loss assert themselves as the parameters of my new psyche, right there in the water. And somehow I know now, returning to this moment in my Lapse or dream or memory or whatever it is, that this passage is different for everyone isn’t it, that it’s a passage without time, a passage that might have taken me a moment or a hundred years, from somewhere that was a

  I went then I went as the bearer of chaos, with everything coming apart around

  moment or a hundred years ago, and that whatever was on the other side of the hole at the bottom of the lake is different for each of us, that whatever it is this birth-passage brought me from was not necessarily where anyone else comes from, or where anyone else would go to if she were to try and go back, if it were even possible to go back. This particula
r passage through the opening of the lake, from wherever I came, it was my own, my unique journey from a unique place and moment, and more than that, from my own personal moment of unique chaos, whatever that was, for unique reasons having to do uniquely with me, beyond all control. And that’s all I understand about it other than that somewhere in my rise to the surface I have a vision of the Mistress or someone much like her, swimming right past me except going the other way.

  I also have a vision of Kale I don’t understand: chaos’ son. Or perhaps it is that I’m chaos’ daughter. And it’s not till finally the Lapse finishes that I sleep, my sound sleep from which no one and nothing can stir me, the sleep of the dead….

  These are the memoirs of Brontë Blu, dungeon-mistress of the Chateau X, white avenging angel of the Hollywood Hills, God’s little joke on the male gender.

  The afternoon before, Kale watches the powerboat with Armand’s men heading for the Chateau. Sitting in his own boat under the eaves of the shoreline trees, he takes his oar in hand ready again to go to Her rescue; he waits because he doesn’t want to interject himself too soon and agitate the situation unnecessarily. When he sees Armand’s boat leave, he begins rowing hurriedly toward the grotto and gets there in time to see Her disappearing back into the Chateau through the door at the top of the steps; for a while there on the lake he waits, watches, to assure himself everything is all right before he starts back out to the Hamblin. Halfway to the Hamblin he turns to look back at the Chateau and

  me, upheaval and confusion in my path, radios going haywire and subways

  see if perhaps She has come out onto the terrace to wave to him, but She doesn’t appear and he realizes he doesn’t want to go to the Hamblin, that now it only reminds him of Her. So he turns west and makes his way along the shoreline. The boat drifts awhile and he finally beaches it about a mile from the Chateau, at yet another small cove where some of the trees are still black from a fire almost a quarter of a century before. The lake there seems blacker too. he gets out of the boat into the black water and pulls it up onto shore and ties it to one of the black trees.