Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  kale lies on the ground and stares up through the black leaves at the gray afternoon sky and has a childhood memory of when it used to be blue, he doesn’t know that what he feels in his chest is the deflowering of a virgin heart, because until not so long ago it was as much the heart of an owl as a man. he doesn’t want to think about Her but he cannot, i cannot not think about Her. i lie awhile then get back in the boat and go back out to the place in the water where i can see the light where She lives, i wait for Her to come out and see me and wave to me and call, i would sleep next to Her and not touch Her but just watch Her while She sleeps if She said to, i would touch Her long gold hair only if She said, i cannot not think of Her gold hair. Why can i not not think of Her smile, i would be Her slave all the time, Her best true slave i who have led armadas of owls, i who have multiplied and divided tides and winds, i who Big Agua has never ruled. Slave to no one and nothing else, i try to remember out on the water in my boat what it was not to have known Her. i wish it could be that way again but i don’t wish it. i want to not remember Her but i don’t want it. i want to have never known Her but i don’t want it. i want to forget Her but i don’t, i would rather die about Her than live past Her. What does it mean that i feel this, i must be sick some way. Divide the times i think of Her by the gold strands of Her hair, multiply that by the light of Her mouth—but i can’t figure the

  breaking down and glass buildings shattering and cherry blossoms from the

  numbers of it. It’s math i don’t know. Why does it hurt me to have known Her. Why can i no longer hear the sound of my own heartbeat, or any heart on the water but Hers. If i was a girl would She want me then.

  i cry for Her like a girl please, isn’t that enough.

  Next day i wait again for Her sign, there is no sign. Next day and the next and next, and then one day i take the boat out to Her steps and Her door and knock, i wait in the boat for Her sign, there’s no sign, i go back and knock on the door again. She doesn’t come and i wait longer before i go inside.

  i’ve never been inside in the day before, i think i should take off my clothes like night-time and so i go through the rooms without my clothes and think when i see Her i’ll get down at Her feet, through each door i think She’ll be there and i’ll get down at Her feet. But She isn’t there. She isn’t there and standing in the afternoon sunlight in the middle of the empty lair he realizes she’s gone. Realizes she’s gone not just for an hour, not just for a single sun or moon, not just for a single room but gone with who was here with her; clothes are gone as well, there’s that feeling of place when it’s been abandoned, and it’s the feeling of his existence because he’s been abandoned too.

  Not for the first time.

  He goes out onto the terrace of the Chateau and says, more to himself at first, where are You. He barely knows what it is, his own crying. He tells himself he hates her now but knows he doesn’t. Standing there on the terrace, over the sound of the lake he listens for her heart, but wherever it is now, it’s too far away. Standing there on the terrace, looking out over the lake listening, it occurs to him for the first time they’re all gone too, the disciples. The faithful who for years worshipped at the waterline of the Chateau X are gone and it occurs to him that in fact now that he thinks about it, he hasn’t seen them for a while; and that’s when he

  trees set loose in a special panic, and the question What’s missing from the

  knows for certain she isn’t coming back.

  Turning his back on the lake he walks back into the Chateau from the terrace and through the main lair, back out through the transitional chambers into the grotto where he edges along the small stone walkway that circles the water leading to an old door with a brass ring for a knob that he used to know very well. He finds the door slightly ajar and opens it and steps in, gazing over the shelves that once held in captivity thousands of melodies from a thousand snakes expired in menstrual blood, but now the shelves are empty as if ransacked although the webs in the corners indicate the Vault was already vacated long ago, the songs having escaped of their own accord or having been set free by someone who couldn’t stand to keep them anymore.

  He thinks maybe he might find one in particular but when he doesn’t he leaves the Vault and, one more time, goes back up into the Lair to stand gazing around him in a daze, seeing nothing for a moment until, blinked clear of tears, his eyes lock on the mantle above the hearth. He walks over to the hearth: i don’t remember this he thinks—but it had always been night-time before, his eyes cast down in subjugation. Be a man who never looks up and you’re likely to miss something.

  i don’t remember this here. He holds the toy monkey in his hand then goes back out through the transitional chamber into the entryway, back out onto the stone steps of the grotto to his boat. Still naked he begins to row back out onto the lake, and rows for a while east by southeast then veering slightly northward from the single coordinate drawn above him by the line of a collapsed skytram from many years before. After a while he comes to the place. This is the place he’s rowed by and past and over many times as though it meant nothing to him, as though it held no recollection of anything at all for him; but that was night-time and this is day, and maybe he’s known all along anyway. All along

  world? calling up to me from that womb of mine that already predated me, that

  he’s known, ignoring this place as if it couldn’t hurt his heart, but now everything hurts his heart, and he rows here and stops and stares down into the water, leaning over the boat and putting his face as close to the water as he can without capsizing, wondering if god lives down there and might explain something to him at long last. Out on the wide open lake at the place, above the spot, without her, abandoned again and his heart feeling not only what it’s never felt but all the things it’s felt but denied, breaking beyond what he can stand, he believes he’s drifted into the fourteenth room of the Hotel of Thirteen Losses. When god doesn’t talk to him from beneath the water Kale finally begins to row back along the shoreline he followed the last time he saw her disappearing into the Chateau doorway. He’s stopped crying, rowing relentlessly until he reaches the black cove of burned trees and black water where he climbs out of the boat and lies where he lay before, with the red monkey in his hand on the black Zed shore.

  This crucible of loss now only makes him realize how lonely he’s always been. It only makes him realize that although he might not have had a name for desolation it was there anyway. He’s now aware in a way he’s never been how he believes no one cares for him, and what it means to be this untouched by another human heart. He’s now aware in a way he’s never been how the deflowered heart has an altogether other kind of music, a music altogether different from the percussion of blood. He’s now aware in a way he’s never been of how seared into the retina of memory are the echoes of all the questions he never got to ask someone, all the great questions of life and love and death that begin to occur to you when you’re a small boy, maybe in the night just as you’re about to fall asleep; he’s now aware in a way he’s never been of how there was never anyone there to answer these questions for him. Feeling forsaken as he hasn’t felt since he was a small boy in

  womb of mine already older than I was, the question calling up to me amid the

  a silver boat, he’s about to slip off into the sleep of the void when, like a voice speaking out loud to him, like someone right there at his side, there floats up from somewhere deep in his mind something that was left there years ago, planted in his ear one night while he slept and having sunk deep into him, and now opened like a time capsule that was waiting for precisely this moment of loneliness to unlock it, there in the darkening hush of the trees

  your mama loves you

  and he sits straight up to it. Like someone right there at his side has whispered it. He sits straight up to it and it’s still there, the thing he just heard, it hasn’t disappeared like a dream. It hasn’t vanished into memory like one of the Lapses of the Lake. It’s still there
in the air and, seeing it, his eyes light, like fireflies darting above the grass.

  historical rumors and little spasms of collective memory ripping outward, and

  at twilight I would look out toward Tokyo Bay from the window of the ryokan

  2001—2089

  where I stayed when I first got to Japan and I would watch the pixilated black

  waves rolling in and with them they brought that memory I had forgotten, of

  He gets out late winter. He’s off on the exact day by thirty-some hours, which isn’t bad calculations. He made a decision when he went in to keep track of the days, because he knew it was the intention of his jailers to jettison his sense of time; they brought him in 2037 in a metal truck with no windows. The rumor is that the penitentiary is somewhere in the plains of the Montana-Saskatchewan annex. When he’s released, a metal truck takes him back to Seattle; they open the doors of the truck and the glitter of the afternoon sea is like glass in his eyes. He sits back in the truck until someone says, Move.

  standing with my uncle as a little girl on the banks of the river and seeing the

  They put him on a boat going down the coast to Los Angeles. For five days and fifteen hundred miles he doesn’t see anyone except a soldier here and there, like the guards at the Northwest-Mendocino border. The boat sails into L.A. mid-dusk, past the smoky moors of the Hollywood Peninsula, navigating the outlying swamps where the Hancock Park mansions loom in ruin, water rolling in and out of the porticoes. It crosses the rest of the lagoon into downtown, then up the main canal. Cale can see the smaller canals trickling off between the buildings that are black like the mansions behind him, and there’s a sound of bubbling music from the Chinese storefronts along the water. It comes out of the buildings, a distinct and different melody from each one; addresses on the doors are scratched and defaced, and there are no signs on the street corners anymore. Ask someone how to get to this place or that, and she’ll sing you the directions.

  Two women on a train. Their destination is the end of an argument. They’ve been riding the argument all night since they got on the train originally and carelessly bound for … what? dinner? a movie … they almost can’t remember, they have been riding 2001 and changing trains so many hours now. Each knows something more is at risk in this particular argument on this particular evening than just its resolution, than one woman conceding to the other if only to placate the moment. This particular argument has always been just a little too profound to call merely a lovers’ quarrel.

  woman on the other side, and it was only there in Tokyo staring out over the

  To others riding the train with them, the two might appear to be mother and daughter. One of them is close to fifty, with a recently cropped mane of increasingly silvery hair and serenity woven in the air around her like a web; the other is barely a woman at all, nineteen years old. The older woman, who doesn’t like to think or speak of the age difference, has to acknowledge to herself that indeed it makes their argument more complicated. They’ve had some version of this argument many times now in the last several months, and this time each senses that they won’t, as in the past, just move on when it’s over. Or rather: they’ll move on, but without each other. Although the older woman seems the less agitated of the two, the less heated in her words, that’s more a function of maturity; in fact she feels more is at stake for her—but, you know, try telling the younger woman that. Thinking about it in the many silences that fall between each of the argument’s flare-ups, the older woman realizes that to the younger woman, with her entire future still ahead of her, the decision has consequences that much more resounding. So maybe, Sara admits to herself, it’s not so fair to say she has more at stake. I have too little time, the girl has too much. She admits this to herself but not out loud; admitting it out loud, she would lose everything.

  They’ve just gotten on the subway line heading south. It’s become a ritual of this argument, in the way all arguments have rituals, that every time a cessation of hostilities coincides with a subway station, the women get off the train and change to another. At this point they’re not paying attention to which train or which station. Somehow as long as they keep moving—as opposed to going to a café somewhere and thrashing things out for good—perhaps some rubicon can avoid being crossed. Lately the younger woman has begun to feel things are out of control, a feeling she hates. She doesn’t want to bring up the age thing with Sara. It’s always been

  water that I finally realized it had been my mother on the other side of that

  a psychological obstacle for the couple to surmount, particularly for the older woman who’s that much more keenly aware, the younger realizes, of everything such a divide in years represents. By now the girl accepts there’s something maternal in her attraction to the older woman, and doesn’t understand why this is any less a basis for love or a romantic bond than anything else. Women are drawn to father figures all the time so why can’t I be drawn to a mother figure.

  That this probably says something about her relationship with her real mother, the girl understands. Ironically it was this that brought her to Sara as a patient in the first place. Somehow, though, they never got into it in any of their sessions, and she’s trying to remember if she was always the one avoiding the topic or if, now that she thinks about it, it was Sara who avoided it, once the attraction became apparent. Rather quickly it seems, now that the girl thinks about it, they wound up talking more about Sara than her. “You’ll spend your whole life,” Sara said that first session, “making peace with your own true nature,” and every now and then Sara repeats it as though to imply she understands the girl’s nature better than the girl does. The girl still isn’t sure what it actually means, the business about one’s true nature, or whether it’s just something Sara says to sound superior. But at this moment it seems to her perhaps it says a lot more about Sara than about her.

  True to the cliche about therapists, Sara’s past seems its own sort of mess when it’s not a blank altogether, and the girl realizes the divide in years is more remarkable for all the experience Sara never had. Whereas the girl’s first sexual encounter—with another girl—took place at eleven, Sara’s had been in her mid-twenties with an emotionally fetal man she wound up dating

  river staring back at me, her shoulders sagging in defeat when she couldn’t

  thirteen years, never marrying, never living together. After this relationship didn’t so much collapse as trail off into nothingness, with the man simply moving on to another job in another city, Sara’s next was with a woman, also a client like the girl, lasting eight months and then followed by a chasm of nearly ten years in which, as far as the girl can tell, Sara had no intimate human relations of any sort. So talk about spending your life making peace with your own nature. When you get right down to it, then, who’s really the senior partner here, the girl asks herself on the train now.

  So as to establish some control in the relationship, the girl always made it a rule never to make the first move in these things. She broke the rule in Sara’s case, figuring it was the only way anything would ever happen. Now she wonders if this was a mistake. In any other situation she can’t help thinking a nineteen-year-old would never come on to a woman nearly thirty years older but perhaps that’s naïve; after all, nineteen-year-old girls come on to older men all the time. Within six months of their first doctor/patient session, the two moved in together. It’s been a year since, and was a lovely time up till the whole baby obsession that, the girl can pinpoint exactly, began one night four or five months ago. They went across town for dinner at the brownstone of another lesbian couple, who disclosed that without much luck they had been investigating ways of having a child. All the talk that evening of eggs going back and forth from one person to another boggled the girl’s mind so much it gave her a headache.

  On the train now the girl feels trapped by how often and fervently she’s insisted to Sara the difference in age means nothing to her. Now, subway track rattling beneath them
, that argument restrains her from giving voice to the fact that, in her view,

  find the courage to face her small abandoned daughter who not so long

  the daughter/mother nature of their relationship renders what Sara wants a bit bizarre. But is this really what troubles her most? the girl wonders. Leaving aside everything else—leaving aside even how it would be her body, after all, serving as laboratory, incubator, assembly line in the processing of some anonymous male sperm just so Sara’s long latent, now suddenly urgent maternal drive might be satisfied—what strange new dynamic would be loosed not only between them but within the girl herself? If, consciously or not, defined as such or not, on some level the girl plays the role of daughter in her relationship with Sara, then would a baby in some way be a grand-daughter? A sister to her own mother?

  Like all those eggs being bandied about over dinner, this makes her head hurt. Perhaps she should get off the train. And naturally, she realizes, we keep talking about this baby as though it goes without saying it would be a girl: what if it’s a boy? Do we know how to raise a boy? Do I know how to raise a boy, if it should ever fall to me to do it alone given—muttered under the breath of her mind—how much older Sara is? Somehow the notion it could be a boy, it just makes the whole idea, monumental to begin with, that much more overwhelming, although the younger woman has to confess there’s something irresistible about someday reminding the young teenage barbarian, fumbling with girls in car seats to heavy metal on the radio, that he’s literally the son of a jerkoff; it wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying with a daughter.

  You couldn’t have thought of all this ten years ago could you, the girl says to Sara in her mind, with such force of resentment that for a moment she’s sure she said it out loud. But then she realizes the illogic of her own bitterness: of course if Sara had thought of it ten years ago, in all likelihood she would be with someone else