Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  that thinks it miscarried me, up up and up to reclaim my place in its womb, and

  marshes growing closer, reaching the port at San Gabriel about the time he reached the sepulveda channel. He’s been hiding on shore for a day now, in the trees and watching the lights in the Chateau out on the water. He hears the barking of dogs grow nearer. Thus he’s figured his best moment of opportunity, and with aggregates of light and sound in his head he makes his move and slips into the lake. He swims to the Chateau grotto and, when he reaches its stone steps, lingers for a while in the water to rest, at the place where years ago he used to find food and wine in a basket. Having caught his breath, he climbs out of the water and up the steps, turning out the old lantern that hangs at the top by the door. Either someone, he thinks, will have seen me, or will notice the light is out; in any case he doesn’t have long.

  He opens the door and slides into the dark of the entryway. He waits for a moment then walks quietly in through the outer transitional chamber into what was once the ceremony room, then her sleeping quarters, then goes through another door and he’s in the Lair’s shadows.

  Brontë sits on the divan before the hearth where a fire burns. He notices she’s cut her hair and that maybe it’s darkened just a bit, not quite as brilliant gold as it was. Not yet having seen him, she gets up and crosses the Lair holding something in her arms; then Kale realizes itvs a baby. He’s baffled for an instant, then nods to himself oh that’s why she left then. Guess some man changed her mind after all. In the kitchen on the other side of the Lair she heats some milk; he’s stood there almost a full five minutes before—crossing back the way she went, steadying the bottle in the baby’s mouth—she looks up, astounded for a moment before she decides she’s not, really. He looks at the baby’s brown hair and eyes. He thinks maybe the dogs outside have gotten louder.

  far above me I see it, I see it as I dreamed it, and maybe the lake sees it too in

  “You shouldn’t have come,” she finally blurts, “they’ll find you.” She shakes her head. “I’m not worth it.”

  Over Bronte’s shoulder, through a door ajar, is a glimpse of someone lying in a darkened room. He says, “It isn’t you I’ve come to see.”

  its own dream of me, that flicker of light in the dark, up up and up and

  2031

  maybe the lake believes as I did that night that the flicker is the dream itself,

  growing closer and larger, a small flash on the far horizon, up up and up and

  Someone in the doorway. Who’s there. Another slave come for his discipline? no I don’t do that anymore. Who is it then … Brontë? Do I hear lightning? we haven’t heard the lightning for a while now … are we back at the lake? yes in the Chateau, I’m Listen to these walls and tell me what they sing: I know what they sing. They sing goodbye. They sing goodbye to me. They sing goodbye to all of us and the bedlam of our ecstatic days. They’re in such a hurry, the voices in the walls … I’ve hung on, well, it’s been awhile now, I won’t pretend to know how long but it’s been awhile. Long enough to leave Zed and return … but I may hang on for a while longer, you watch. So keep your songs to yourself

  maybe I’m the first dream the lake has ever had, as Kirk was the first dream I

  until it’s time. I may have one or two memories left. I may have one or two things to remember … so keep your songs to yourself until then. I may yet have some particularly poignant recollection that’s particularly unbearable … like the way I used to see other children with their small open faces and couldn’t stand it … so there are more memories I’m certain. More to torment me before I go…. If there’s a higher light and I’m still waiting. I’m still waiting for it to shine on me. Who’s in the doorway, come here. Whoever you are, come closer to the candle so I can see. Don’t mind the singing walls. Come closer closer closer … who is it. Let me look at you, let me take a…. Well well, if it isn’t. Well well, what do you know. After all this time. Finally worked up the nerve did you. Come for your discipline, have you. Here you are. Come for your humiliation: oh we must think of something special for you. Come for something special I’m sure so we must think of something special, for the ultimate slave, the ultimate submissive. The ultimate humiliation. Something far grander than the banal sadisms. Something that could lay so low someone so high … let Me think. I’ll think of something. I never pissed on anyone in My illustrious career but I must say it’s hard to think of something more appropriate for the likes of you: I think I could work up some piss for the likes of you. I’ve never made anyone bleed other than Myself of course but I must say it seems fitting now. So much blood the rest of us have bled for you over the years, a little bleeding back on your part hardly seems unfair, hardly seems asking so much. Did I say you could look at Me? you don’t look at Me until I tell you to look at Me, do you understand? your discipline begins now, your training begins here, at My feet, you don’t regard Me until I tell you. you don’t stir until I say stir, you don’t exist until I say you exist, you don’t

  ever had, and now of course as I rise up up and up to break the surface of the

  do anything or say anything until I tell you. Nothing about you is yours anymore, everything about you is Mine. Everything you feel, if you feel anything, everything you think, or think you think. Get on your knees. Lick the stone of the floor. Let Me put around your neck this collar of thorns, around your neck, you remember thorns don’t you. you’re familiar with thorns, you in particular, you of anyone, you most of all. No one’s ever done thorns like you, right? Don’t mind the blood. What’s a little blood. Don’t mind the flow from your neck now. What’s a little flow from the jugular. Here’s a leash for your collar, woven from the flesh of children, stained and soaked in lapsinthe, to remind you who you belong to. Tell Me, because I’ve never been straight on this: which is it that’s always best proved your existence? That you give children? or that you take them away? I think you and I made a bargain once but it’s occurred to Me lately I’ve never seen a bit of evidence you ever kept your end. I think I kept My end. Yes I believe so. I think I did. I think I did and then some. If it was our bargain that I would give up all the happiness of a mother in order to save My son from the chaos of the world, well then I have to say I think I kept My end. First you sent him to make Me so tender. Then you drove Me mad with it. So now lick the drops of your blood that fall on the stone beneath your knees, lick it, lick it. Lick it up. Lick lick lick. Suck it out of the pores of the stone. Did I say look up? Did I say to? There! that’s for looking up without permission. I’m the god here and you’re the woman this time, don’t think you aren’t. Don’t think the god-cock means anything within these walls, you’re the woman and w(W)e’re going to prove it soon enough don’t you worry, turd, sack of divine shit you. Here let’s see what you think of the point of My high-heel in your side, what do you think of that. How do you feel about that. Here’s another good kick for you, and another. Roll

  water, I can see, I know that the silver flash above me is the gondola waiting,

  over so I might consider grinding your balls to dust under My heel. Get up. Get up! What a stupid slave! There! that’s for being such a stupid slave. There and there and there. Now get up. you’re not even amusing now. you’re not even a diversion. Come here now, w(W)e’re going down to the dungeon. Come on or I’ll yank you down. W(w)e’re going down now. Get up off the floor, you disgust Me, come over here. Put this shackle around your foot and lock it. Now the other. Now one wrist, now the other. There. That’s more like it. It’s so you. Here, your collar’s loose, let’s tighten it, there. Pale is such a nice color on you. Raise your arms now: there. Slip the cuffs that bind your wrists up over this hook above your head. There. Now w(W)e swaddle you in latex, start at your head and leave just enough exposed that you might barely breathe, wrap you tight so you see nothing, wrap you tight so you hear little but the muffled moan of the world coming up behind you, the world you’ve made moan for so long. So that every sense is bound, deprived �
� wrap you from head to your feet leaving the almighty god-ass exposed bare for the sake of the lash of course, crank up the hook a little and hang you from your cuffs and hoist you until your toes barely touch the floor: there. So that when I flog you, you’ll spin in the air like a black cocoon, twirling above all the dead bluejays covering the dungeon floor around you. Let the god-toy try to imagine, for only a moment, what it might be like to spend eternity suspended in the Uncertain, as the rest of us have … and while you consider that, I think it will entertain Me to whip you for a while—there and there and there—before w(W)e get to the good part I mean, the best part where w(W)e make you a woman. As best you can through the latex, listen to the lake outside the walls, listen while you can before it dies. Hear the lake? or is it the blood pounding in your ears from the blows of My crop and the crown of thorns around your throat. OK then.

  but since I’ve gotten confused in my way and can no longer be sure to which

  That’s enough. That’s enough of that, you’ve become tedious, as you’ve always been tedious in your fashion. Let’s lower you from the ceiling and feminize you now, make a woman of you now. No I’m not going to cut it off: please. It’s so trite. I was many things in My life but not trite. It’s rather an unimpressive specimen anyway if I may say so, for supposedly being the Ultimate Specimen. No let’s lower you from the ceiling and slip the cuffs off the hook while I dig something out of the old tool chest here … get back down on your knees, you’ll get used to it. The rest of us have. The rest of us got very used to it a long time ago. Tell us, what’s it like from the other angle? How is it gazing up for a change? Don’t look at Me. Did I say you could look at Me? I asked what it was like, I didn’t tell you to do it … what a very stupid slave … I guess it’s all just a little unfamiliar for you though. I guess it takes some getting used to. Well tell Us about it. Yes tell Us all about it. Where’s My evidence? is what I want to know, that you ever kept your end of the bargain. Where’s the evidence except a vision or two. Was that supposed to satisfy Me, a vision or two? where’s the evidence. That he was ever OK. That he was ever safe. That he was even loved, maybe. That he wasn’t so painfully lonely in the night. That’s what I want to know, I who gave him up. I who haven’t gone a day without seeing his small face, hearing his small voice, every little thing he said, polite little dictator with all his whys and answers to the chaos of the world. Oh here’s what I was looking for. A little large but appropriate I would think for a god-toy, suitable I think for the ultimate slave, here it is … then bend over. Bend over now. Bend over and put your face in the ground. Arch your back and open yourself behind. A little large but you know, this is what it is to be a woman in your world. This is what it is. This is what it’s always been. There. What do you think of that. How do you feel about that. What

  lake I’ve returned, then swimming up up and up to break the surface I can

  ridiculous female could ever have suggested God is a woman. What ludicrous bitch could ever have thought the viciousness of God anything but male. Are you God for the way you give us children, or the way you take them from us? that’s what I still want to know. Here, a little deeper I think. Here, here, here, yes. What’s the matter. Yes. Here, you don’t like it so much? Here, yes. This is for, you know, all of them. Isaac and the carpenter kid and all the eldest sons of an Egyptian night, and, well, for the little wildman too. For him too. Here then. Here! and … I … here, and … oh. Oh I…. No. No I swore to myself I wouldn’t, no. I swore to myself I wouldn’t let you. Swore to myself you would never make me cry like this again … but You have. Swore You never would but You have … oh no. Oh no. Let me die now. What are You waiting for. Let me die now. Let this dream be over now. i’ve only been waiting for it since the moment i lost him. Since that moment i … since that moment i returned to the boat and he was gone; so let me go now, so i can hope on just the merest of chances there is somewhere else Over There where he’s waiting right now, waiting for me, and i’ll hold him to me again, pull him to me, smash his soft hair in my hands and press his small eyelids to my lips. Let me go. There’s nothing here for me anymore, no other delusion to make me believe in my own life anymore, if only for a minute: no Domination or submission to give me purpose: no method for going on. i don’t care about Your subservience or Domination, i don’t care about Your humiliation or Glory. This is the ritual no mother can win, when God gives a mother her child just so she might go mad with love for him. There’s nothing here anymore so i want to go now. You there in the doorway, come and take me then. What are You waiting for. Come on then. Come here. Come on. Please. Please i beg You. i’m begging You. Is that what You want, is that what You’ve been

  therefore as well no longer be sure to which gondola I’ve returned either,

  waiting for, to hear me beg? then i’m begging You. i’m begging You now. Please come take me … please i’m begging. The walls can sing now, it’s time for their song, i don’t know what more i can do than beg You. i’m begging then, i’m pleading. Come on then, please. Yes please. Come on. Please. Please. Please.

  Someone in the doorway. Not yet fifty years old but ancient in her grief she rises up on her elbows to try and see in the dark, falls back, eyes wandering the ceiling looking for the way out of her life. In the dark she hears his footsteps, waits for some explosion of final pain or deliverance or both, not really bracing for it because she doesn’t have the strength to brace; and when a hand falls on her forehead to calm her, as if she were a child having a bad dream and talking in her sleep with her fingers, it takes her a moment to think to herself maybe it’s not God after all, maybe it’s someone else.

  In her bed, she turns to the shadow beside her and, reaching out, puts her own hand in his hair, and remembers from long ago a smell of tall dry grass. At first it catches in her throat but she finds the will to ask it anyway: “But who is it,” she murmurs in the dark, “are you …?”

  “I’m Nothing,” says a voice she knows, that she knows she knows, transformed by all the years though it is, “a Bright Light.”

  or whether there truly is another gondola, or ever was, or whether there was

  ever even Another Side at all except in my red hysteria, or whether I truly

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  swim from personal chaos to collective god or from personal god to collective

  chaos, or whether they’re the same chaos, the same god, the same lake, the

  The night before it happened, she had a dream about her father. She was crossing a square in the dark, making her way past a huge fountain through concentric rings of symmetrically staggered stone benches. Hovering over the fountain was a bronze world patched up from the pieces of other shattered worlds. Particularly since it was dark she didn’t recognize him at first, as though he was only the ghost of someone she was supposed to have known; when he said, so quietly and invisibly in the dark it almost could have been the fountain speaking, “The Age of Chaos is here,” she woke thinking, What, it’s just arriving now?

  same empty gondola I left just a minute ago, and I don’t know but that as I rise

  At first she didn’t even think to call him. They had been estranged for several years anyway; the last time they had talked was right after her mother’s death, although she would get cards from him along with the occasional, tentative e-mail she never answered.

  Even that day, she picked up the phone and put it down several times before dialing. Then naturally the call wouldn’t go through and in a way she was relieved. But it nagged at her, the feeling she had, and grew stronger in the months since her dream, until it became something much more than a distraction from her studies and her confused deliberations over her sexuality and everything else going on in her life; it got to the point when everything reminded her of her dream and this feeling about it for no reason she could figure: walking her West Hollywood neighborhood, passing the classic old movie-star apartments with their turrets, the little Italian eateries and xerox stores and travel agencies and mailbox renta
ls and gay fetish shops and video outlets and cappuccino stands, and especially the sight of the Century City towers when she took the bus down Santa Monica Boulevard to the university. Over the next six months she might have expected to have more dreams about him, or perhaps the same dream over and over, each elaborating on the previous; but instead she stopped dreaming altogether. Instead she woke from each night as though it was a void, as though she had slipped into the night’s very womb, dark, still, swaddled in the unseen and unlistened; this she found more ominous.

  up to break the surface of the water whether, even if I make it, even if I get

  Even the winter twilight when she finally found herself in a cab heading down Hollywood Boulevard as it made its way through traffic before finally turning south on La Cienega, after it had been all she could do just to decide to go, she still resisted the temptation to ponder the true nature of her feelings about him.

  Deep down, she really wasn’t so sure her resistance was completely about anger. If she was honest with herself, she wasn’t even sure most of it was about anger. When she discovered at the airport that she had left her ticket back at the old hotel where she lived, she was relieved, like when her phone calls wouldn’t go through those first few days; she thought perhaps random accident was letting her off the hook. But she knew it wasn’t random accident. In her mind she could see the ticket in plain sight on her bookshelf: she had “forgotten” it accidentally on purpose, naturally, which was a bit pathetic, since it was an electronic ticket and she didn’t need the hard copy anyway. Checking in and making her way through all the new security, in her seat on the plane she finally resigned herself to the trip. It was a red-eye, so she was glad she had cashed in the miles for an upgrade.