But not our child. And he should have been.
He turns to look another direction, anywhere but west. The girl turns her radio on low, tries to find the right soundtrack for a darkling world before her; but perhaps the only soundtrack that’s right is silence. She settles into the base of the transmission mast. She never asked why the song was so important because it wasn’t her business and’ getting right down to it, she doesn’t really care.
me, because the very first dream I ever had in my life wasn’t until that night I
With most women, she tells herself, curiosity is an unchecked reflex; perhaps I’m not the inquisitive sort. Perhaps I have an overly developed male sense of privacy—that is, for a female. Perhaps that’s why it’s women not men who have babies, because as a gender women are predisposed not only to not value privacy so much but to unconsciously abhor it like nature does a vacuum, because it’s women who are capable of that generous voluntarily surrender of profound privacy, the privacy of the body, the privacy of the heart.
I have nowhere to go tonight, it suddenly occurs to her. She watches the Asian man pacing the rooftop and then changes the station on the radio again: Are you a musicologist? she asked when he first showed up at the library, and he said no and then sometime later in the conversation revealed he had been a mathematics student in college before “history had its way with me,” by which she assumed he meant he became a history student instead—which doesn’t exactly explain, she thinks, what he’s doing operating elevators. Did you go to school in—? and then had stopped herself, checked her curiosity reflex, as much because she didn’t want to insult him. Japan? Korea? China? Thailand? can’t tell them apart, can you, she muses to herself. Well it’s true, you just can’t. The Emperor of Elevators, he’s musing to himself as he paces the rooftop not impatiently but aimlessly; he’s not yet become a man who never looks up.
To the contrary he’s a man who looks up as much as possible, who would look anywhere but ground level. East he can make out the lights of the harbor; from there his eyes follow the river north and count the bridges, contemplating the twinkling suture of the boroughs where, just at this moment, he can almost hear raven
miscarried him in Tokyo, waking and stumbling in terror through the dark to
navies surfacing from the floors of islamic oceans. Something about the night has already become familiar to him before he ever feels the tail-end of the gust, funneled hot memory brushing his face. And as he lifted his burning hand back in the Square twelve years ago to look through its new wound at the sky behind it, now he lifts the same hand not to feel the gust, since there are no nerve endings in the hand anymore to feel anything, not even so much to look at the night through the hand’s tiny window, but almost as though he expects that the lens in his palm will refract the gust and then burst into a vision, or as though perhaps the light of the moon above, shining down through the small round prism, will catch him in its spotlight. Or maybe even her. What it does cast is a moonbeam on the gust’s source—or maybe he would have shifted his gaze anyway, noting the vent in the low rectangular storage hut near the rooftop’s east edge.
By the time he reaches the vent, his mind feels about to explode.
The gust hasn’t subsided. In how many dreams in the last twelve years has he felt it blow across his face as it does now? Up here, he told her just a few minutes ago, you sleep above your dreams; so how is it his dreams have reached this altitude? How high do I have to go, he thinks to himself angrily, to rise above them once and for all? Once he wondered if this gust was an ally meaning to rescue him, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove him; but it’s really an anarchist without conviction either way, without interest in either rescue or attack. Once he stood his ground and the gust subsided, but now as he nears the vent it comes roaring out. Taking from his belt his ring of keys, he uses one to begin prying the vent loose around its rim, before he takes the vent cover in his one good hand and tears it from its space.
the toilet down the hall and making it just in time to see the glistening white
He peers inside.
He looks so deeply—although he can’t fit in his whole head as he did into the tank’s gun that morning twelve years ago—that when he hears the song, of course he thinks it’s coming from the other end of the dark to where the vent leads, from where and when he first heard it twelve years ago. Same strange distant Moorish drums, same dreamy Middle Eastern melody with the soft Spanish horns in the background, and the same woman’s voice of another century’s turn: excited, he turns to call to the girl who’s been trying to track down this very song, astonished that the song should happen to present itself at this very moment just as she happens to be here—only to realize the song isn’t coming from the vent at all but her radio. “But that’s it,” he says to her. What? she says sleepily, and he says, “That’s it,” pointing at the radio.
She looks at the radio a moment. “Are you sure?”
“That’s it.”
“Well that’s odd isn’t it,” she finally says. She listens awhile. “You’re sure.” She listens some more. “I don’t think this is that old a song.”
“Do you know it?”
“No but I think perhaps I’ve heard them play it before and I don’t think they would play an old song like this that often, if it was that old.” She says, “It doesn’t sound that old.”
“How can you tell?”
rain of my boy run from my body, and at that moment I thought of all the
“Well, I suppose I can’t,” she confesses. He turns back to the vent and from deep down out of the darkness feels as he did twelve years ago the same gust in his face; it smells of that same morning, the vent a tunnel to that very morning and that very place, at the other end of which is the portal of a gun barrel. This is when he realizes that, twelve years ago, what he actually heard was this very moment now, in this time and place, up here overlooking the world on this very night—that somewhere at the other end of this tunnel he’s there standing on the Square, his Other Self at an irrevocable moment, a young man of nineteen alone before the tanks with his head in the barrel of a gun, listening to a song coming from a girl’s radio twelve years and twelve thousand miles away. That what now blows through this tunnel is the Oblivion Wind back and forth across the shadowyears between the end of the Twentieth Century that morning, and this night—although he can’t imagine why this particular night, when nothing would seem to be happening of any importance at all.
He turns to see her lying there on his bedding, gold hair around her head ablaze in the ovulating moon. He walks over to her; she dozes at his feet. He has this distracted impulse to lie next to her, only because he’s suddenly so tired, but of course she would only take it wrong. If she could see him now, he wonders if he would appear to her as he feels: a man caught mid-transport. Uh, he whispers, we should go down now I think, but she doesn’t answer and he just nods in the dark and mumbles I’ll come back for you in the morning then, and turns to the dank light of the elevator, doors closing on his bewildered face. Briefly her eyes flutter to the sound of the closing doors, having somewhere in her semiconsciousness heard him speak, and now she answers from her sleep, But I have no place to go. She stumbles up from the bedding because she has to pee, and stripping off her jeans she
nights after I first learned he was inside me that I had stood in windows
half-registers the tsunamic vista of dawn’s armada in a far enflamed east. Then she slides back into the sleeping bag on the mattress at the base of the throbbing antenna above her.
In her head she keeps seeing Sara listening to that wall down below. One of the last conscious thoughts she has is that her lifè has veered wildly out of control lately and she likes to be in control, even if it means assuming the well-defined role of slightly subservient daughter, its definitions threatened only by her role of lover. But Sara is gone now or perhaps, she thinks at the end, I’m the one who’s gone. Not long before the crash of morning light she sleeps t
he sleep of the dead, as Sara always put it, and dreams of her own birth, her mind ticking down all her memories like the last hours of summer.
Two women on a train. Their destination is the end of a lie, although they don’t yet know it’s a lie. The older woman has truly convinced herself that in her last days she wants to get as far from the lake as she can, that she’ll die free of it at last; and thus the 2029-2031 younger woman arranged for them to leave the Chateau X in the dead of night by boat, although not sailed by the young man who loved her so unrequitedly and to whom she couldn’t bear to explain she was leaving. Rather the two other women Brontë met months earlier from the Freek Recherche lunatique drove her and the Mistress along the serrated shoreline in a beat-up thirty-year-old
exposing my pregnant belly to the city and the outside world in order to try
Jag that barely had room for them to the port at Los Feliz, with its abandoned observatory looming in the hills above.
From there, over the course of twenty-two slow hours a ferry sailed the two women further inland to San Gabriel. Lulu is sick. On the ferry deck bundled in a large coat and scarf and swathed in the gray of the wind, black late-autumn countryside and the solar casbahs of outer zedberia passing by and white waves on the lake like the veils of a hundred drowned brides, she seemed to Brontë only intermittently conscious of the journey. On the train now Brontë reproaches herself for bringing Lulu. But it’s too late, they can’t go back; they’re traveling on Armand’s money and, at that moment, Armand is shackled blindfolded and naked in the Chateau dungeon with the little red ball in his mouth, delirious far beyond any thrilling contemplation of the cracking of the walls around him and the lake beyond, delirious even beyond wondering when his Mistress Bronte is going to return. His henchmen wait in a limo on shore. In thirty-six hours it will begin to cross the narrow landfill of their minds that perhaps something’s amiss, at which point they’ll begin calling a cell phone that lies on the stone dungeon floor two wicked inches beyond the farthest expanse of Armand’s chains. Sometimes Armand can hear the footsteps of his Mistress in the Lair upstairs, or so he supposes. What he actually hears are the steps of another man searching the Chateau for one woman he knows of, and another he won’t admit to himself he knows of.
By early morning Brontë and Lulu reached San Gabriel port. They missed by twenty minutes a train that comes through only once a night, when it’s on time at all, and winds up in Chicago. Unsure how stupid she could count on Armand’s boys to be, or how far they might come to find her once they retrieved their boss, Brontë didn’t much care for the idea of sitting around the station
and prepare him for its chaos, and in that minute there in the toilet when I was
another twenty-four hours. In the small waiting room of the terminal, she found a kid who just put his girlfriend on the train, eating a sandwich out of a vending machine; she offered him one of Armand’s hundred-dollar bills if he would drive them to the next station and beat the train there doing it. Is she all right? the kid said looking at Lulu, chewing his sandwich in deep thought. She’s sick, Brontë answered. I need to get her on that train. Forty-five minutes later the three were careening through the San Berdoo badlands into the rising morning sun. Slipping in and out of an ecstasy of sunlight through the windows, trying to remember the color blue, in her mind Lulu added greens to grays to see if they made blue together.
All she knows she remembers is red. Two hours after having left San Gabriel, they beat the train to the Barstow station by ten minutes. After moving Lulu slowly up the stairs of the train and down the aisle to a seat, Brontë was bringing up the luggage as the train pulled out; the conductor came by and sold her two tickets. In the concessions lounge several cars down, Brontë buys water, a sandwich, fruit salad from a can. She’s alarmed when Lulu won’t eat. Lulu surfaces consciousness long enough to look out the window and say, Where are we? Seven or eight other passengers are scattered throughout the car; a couple of other women several seats up whisper between them. You have to eat something, Brontë insists, tearing off some more bread. “Where’s the lake?” says Lulu.
“At least drink some water.”
Lulu takes a sip of the water Brontë gives her. “Where’s the lake.”
“Behind us. We’re going to Chicago.” Chicago? Lulu asks; for
losing him all I could do was hate myself for not having taken him back to the
however much it means to either of them, Brontë might as well have said China. All Lulu knows she remembers is red. In her mind she’s been on this journey a long time, with its rails of green and yellow and its tracks of orange and purple (Tyrone the Train! I want to ride away with you …) as they rumble through the Mojave marshlands. After nearly forty-eight hours without sleep, Brontë sleeps until the train jolts her awake and pitches her upward; she’s momentarily disoriented, and for an instant she thinks Lulu is dead. Jeez, she cries softly touching the woman’s cheek, to which Lulu opens her eyes and turns to look at her. By this time they’ve been on the train all day. It seems to be moving slower and slower, crossing landscape more and more barren although, looking out the other side of the train, Brontë notes snow on far northern mountains. Every ten or fifteen minutes a tiny house glitters in the distance. Twilight falls in blueless magenta; a spreading red sky from the west is scratched with livid vapor trails, like God trying to claw his way in. Plutonium sagebrush blows south.
Lulu mutters in her sleep. Brontë gives her more water, trying again without success to get her to eat; then the younger woman dozes again and the next time she wakes, the train has stopped completely. In the night outside their window, symmetrically staggered in concentric circles around them and stretching out for miles like battlefield bunkers, single abandoned railway cars are lit by the lightning of a desert storm. The lightning is so fierce that the flash of it across Lulu’s face, as well as the tremendous thunder that follows almost immediately, wakes her as well. Brontë sits up looking around them. No one else is on the train except, at the far end, the conductor in his own seat; when he sees his last passengers have awakened, he saunters up the aisle.
silence of a dreamless delta, while at the same time I also believed it was
Pueblo d’Elektrik, he announces idly.
“Is this Chicago?” asks Brontë.
“Pueblo d’Elektrik. Last stop.”
“I thought this train goes to Chicago.”
“You have to transfer here. Nothing between here and Occupied Albuquerque and that’s another two hundred miles.”
“When does the Chicago train come through?”
“You’ll have to check with the station.” He leans down to look out the windows on the other side of the train. “Couple of days, I think. Station may be closed for the night.”
“A couple of days?”
“Might be open in the morning,” he says, “you can find out then. In the meantime you can probably get a room here at the pueblo. Yes,” he laughs at something he finds extremely funny, “you probably can. Yes,” he goes on laughing, “I would think so.” Brontë helps the older woman to her feet and moves her down the aisle. Down the stairs and off the train, she scurries Lulu to the shelter of an outside corridor that links the station to the railroad hotel next door, then moves the bags as the conductor watches. With Lulu and the baggage huddled against a wall, the younger woman darts from one dark window of the pueblo to the next, trying to see in. She finds a door and raps loudly; the rain and lightning and thunder grow. The conductor still watches from the top of the car as the train pulls out, heading down the track. Brontë has almost decided to break one of the windows when a light
because he was starved of his own umbilical dreams that the glistening yolk of
comes on and a freckled man with cropped red hair opens the door. We need a room, Brontë says.
In the shadow of the light behind him, the man with the red hair considers this. “It’s late”
“Yes, well, please explain that to the train that left
us here,” Brontë snaps, pointing down the track. The man squints at the train disappearing in the distance. He seems to find the situation confounding until a particularly vicious crack of lightning catches his attention. He opens the door and Brontë hustles Lulu inside and brings in the bags. At the front desk she pays the man a deposit and the man gives the young woman a key to a room upstairs at the farthest end even though, as Brontë will learn, all the downstairs rooms are empty and there’s no other guest in the hotel except one whose light seeps out beneath the door three down from theirs. Slowly Brontë moves Lulu up the stairs, then hauls up the bags one by one as the hotel manager watches. She’s gotten the last suitcase up to the landing at the top in time to see an Indian girl a year or two younger knocking quietly on the door of the other occupied room; the light goes out and the door opens, and the girl glances over her shoulder at Brontë before slipping in through an electric white rip in the dark.
From their room in this section of the pueblo that juts out from the top floor, Brontë can see in almost every direction a molten desert bubbling with silver racket and tumbling from the navajo plateaus to the north. Outside the western window a grove of incinerated trees struggles skyward in black webs, and surrounding rings of single railway cars divert the storm from trains that slither through the countryside. The light and clamor are so relentless that all
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