Our Ecstatic Days (15 page)

Now the old woman’s mind wanders its own rooms from one to the next. Kuul has no idea who this woman is. He found her here left behind on Hamblin Island following its abandonment by the Order of the Red, and for a year now has cared for her, protecting her from the rains and the wind off the lake and bringing

began to realize over the years that in my nights I never dreamed, no dreams

her what food he can find. Round-luna has become a sign of bounty because he knows it means there will be a flare and he’ll row the man with the hand to the Chateau and there will be a basket of food. As the boy tears off pieces of the bread and slowly feeds it to the old woman, he likes to pretend she’s his mother and that he’s nursing her to health. He knows she isn’t his mother but
she doesn’t seem so very unlike who he imagines his mother might have been.

Touching it, slowly running his finger down its side, he knows this silver gondola was her boat. With his mother having slipped over the edge of this small altar and given herself to Big Agua for reasons he doesn’t understand and that he only remembers in bits and fragments, it just seems fitting then that he might think of this woman who takes shelter in this gondola now as a kind of mother for whom he’ll care. When he finishes feeding her the bread, he raises the wine to her mouth just enough so she won’t drink too quickly, feeds her a bit of fruit and cheese and then some more wine, and when she’s done and her eyes close to sleep, he lays his hand against the side of her face.

From her window on the top
floor of the Chateau X, Lulu watches in the light of the full moon the boat with the two men make its way back across the lake.

She feels the blood of her womb stir to the moon’s pull and backs away.
When I was pregnant sometimes at night I would

at all until finally as a teenager dreamstarved I would prowl the small town

open the window and expose my belly to the moonlight but now
thinking of her diminishing periods
I wonder if it cast a spell on me, laid some claim on what I carried inside me.
Among the moon, the sky, the lake, she doesn’t know who are her allies anymore, who are her enemies. Gazing out the window, mindlessly she sings to herself an old song.
‘Cause I know this sea
wants to carry me.
She turns from the window back to her lair, and her heart stops.

Wrapped in the blanket that she pulled over him while he was unconscious, the man she knows as zen-toy stands naked at the other end of the room, at the door of the dressing room and the transitional passage that leads outside. “I heard another song,” he says, “it sounded like you were singing.”

“Uh….” She tries to think what she said before … something about not ignoring the signs. “Yes,” is all she can manage now, and then he turns and opens the door and disappears. She does notice this time, as she didn’t when this same moment took place just a few minutes ago, that her fur-lined handcuffs still dangle from his wrist she forgot to set free.

She whirls around back to the window. She can still see the boat crossing the lake, with the figures of two men. She turns back to the dressing room door but no one is there. Her heart is thundering in her chest:
Have I just had an hallucination? Was it a ghost? Some strange synapse
in her mind by which something that just happened not fifteen minutes ago looped its way back into the present? She turns again to look at the boat from her window: is it a decoy, a trick, is this a plot to make her crazy … and if so, to what end? Now suddenly angry, purposefully she crosses the Lair to the dressing room door and flings it open to confront the ghost; but the room is empty. In two steps she’s crossed to the door on the other side and out into the entryway, which is also empty.

and its tourist hotel after sundown because I heard somewhere that men have

She crosses the entryway out onto the stone steps that lead down to the landing, but there’s no one there either, the boat having already departed just as she witnessed minutes ago from her window upstairs.

She makes her way down the stone steps to the granite walkway that circles the hotel’s grotto, to a small chamber she calls the Vault, its own door just a few feet above the lake and
unremarkable except for the large rusted brass ring of a doorknob. On the walkway she stops, swallows hard. “Hello!” she calls defiantly to someone lurking in the shadows; she takes one of the lanterns that overhangs the steps and holds it up in front of her to blast the shadows away … but no one’s there. She looks at the vault door and now makes her way to it along the narrow walkway above the water. Still holding the lantern she futilely inspects the brass ring as if there might be a telltale sign of someone’s entrance; she notices the glimmer at her feet of a melody-snake’s glistening residue. Casting the light of the lantern around her one more time, she sees something else on the side of the stone steps leading down to the landing: a fresh watermark, almost half a foot above the lake’s present level.

She throws open the vault door.

She shoves the lantern out in front of her into the dark of the Vault. But the Vault is empty except for gleaming traces across the floor of a nocturnal tune that’s slithered away. Once again she looks out on the landing to convince herself no one is there, then turns and goes back into the Vault among its shelves of disks from all the melody-snakes she’s charmed and captured over the years.

By now an archive of several thousand fills the Vault’s three small walls. Reading by lantern she finds in its place, where it’s been missing the past month, the plastic case with a spine where long ago she printed
SPACEMONKEY;
damp, with drops of

erections when they dream and so I thought if I fucked enough of them in their

the lake smeared across its cover, clearly it’s been returned just in the past few hours, maybe the past few minutes. Months ago she discovered the Vault was being raided and that every full moon, after one of zen-toy’s sessions, a disk was missing which, a full moon later, would then reappear. To test her theory, last month she pored over the collection to find exactly which one it would be tonight; sometimes she thinks she can almost hear the broadcast
herself, south of the wind that comes down off the Hollywood moors. At best it’s a distant sonic smudge in the air. If it’s now obvious to her that zen-toy himself is behind the mysterious monthly broadcasts, she still doesn’t understand why he would confiscate a disk, presumably on his previous visit, have it broadcast and then—replacing the original—bring a copy to her for the explanation and meaning of a song he himself chose. Was it a random selection, made by a man whom she knows in other matters is incapable of even considering the possibility of random chance? This conspiracy isn’t just circular, it’s labyrinthine. That it should have been this particular song only unnerves her all the more.

Now, the
SPACEMONKEY
disk having been returned tonight as expected, she pores over the archive again looking for an interruption in their order, for a slot where a disk should be but is missing, which will tell her what the next one will be on the next full moon. When she finds it, her heart stops for the second time in less than half an hour, and for a moment she wonders if, like when zen-toy reappeared in the door of the dressing room repeating the same words he had spoken upon his earlier departure only a few minutes before, the space where the song should be is a ghost.

Not that one.

She says it out loud, “No not that one,” and begins looking at all the other disks that come right before and after, thinking it’s just been misfiled. But it hasn’t been misfiled, there’s an empty

sleep I might take away with me a dream splashing in my womb, and yet when

slot where it’s supposed to be:
that
one; then she wonders if she herself took it and left it somewhere and has forgotten. She wonders if she discarded it unconsciously, in the same way she unconsciously was singing it to herself only half an hour before. She wonders if she cast it to the lake where, on breaking the surface, it turned back into a snake that quickly escaped to the water’s lower depths where it came from. But she knows
she hasn’t discarded it. She remembers too well the decision she made to keep it in the first place, because at the time she couldn’t bring herself to discard it as surely as she couldn’t bring herself to hear it.

I’m stirred in a way I don’t want to be. Inside I feel I’m not in control the way I’m supposed to be
and now anger becomes a sense of betrayal:
he’s supposed to submit to me, and now he’s found a way to be master of events, master of my emotions.
She thinks of nine years ago out at Port Justine when he tied her gondola there, the almost arrogant, almost untouchable way he took her hand when she stepped out onto the floating dock.
This can’t be coincidence that now, of all of them, this one is missing, particularly right after the last one.

She has no idea at this moment that tonight she’s far from finished with surprise and coincidence, if that’s what it truly is, with the most shattering to come. Her sense of betrayal flares in part because she believes its indignation may protect her from feelings she thought sailed away in a silver gondola nine years ago. Betrayal propels her from the Vault out onto the granite walkway that leads around the crescent edge of the Chateau’s grotto to the stone steps she climbs; in the entryway she closes the outer door behind her then enters the transitional dressing room that would lead her immediately to the Lair beyond if she wasn’t at this moment stopped in her tracks by the sight, there on the rug at her feet, of the little red monkey she walked right past before.

I still didn’t dream then, not yet eighteen years old I finally left the small town

The sob bubbles up from her throat before she can swallow it. Although Kristin may have plucked it from the lake and left it in the gondola when she returned to the lake’s source nine years ago, the incarnation of her called Lulu who was left behind and bid farewell to Kristin from the lakeshore that morning after the fire hasn’t seen the monkey since the day fourteen years ago she left Kirk, in order to save him from being swept away by the breaking
water of a pregnant malevolent century; she recognizes it instantly. She falls to her knees. Gently she picks up the toy as if it’s a small body, and all promises are broken now, all bargains unmade: the bargain with God, with whom she made a pact somewhere in an abdicated future to give up her son if it meant sparing him some fate that hadn’t yet come to pass; the bargain with the lake, who spared her from the flames of guilt that consumed her house if she would agree to live with the waves of guilt that flooded her past; and especially the bargain with her Other Self to whom she waved goodbye when she watched Kristin set out naked in the gondola to go back to the Other Lake. All these promises, all these bargains, made so she could live in some kind of truce and endure the only loss in human life that simply can’t be endured, for all the ways one might find to go on functioning. Now her heart is broken again down to the bone of the soul.
The lake is dying, returning to where it came,
an irony too bitter to even be mere irony, since it means all of her efforts of years before to stop the lake were unnecessary and everything that effort cost her was pointless; she clutches the monkey to her as if it’s
him.
She sees him before her with his sun-lit head and amber-flecked sea-green eyes and the sanguine mad-monk mouth, and pulls him to her and begs for another vision that will make her mad too, begs to be trapped in a mad vision of him and never sane again.

traveling for a while in the company of a millennial religious cult that I

In his sleep, the dome
of his eyelids is strewn with stars. Disoriented, he looks around for the Square, and a moment passes before he remembers.

No not here. Better the Square than here—but he is here, an immense rooftop spread out before him on top of the world, just inches beneath the night. A quadrant of the world lies in moonlight before him. He can see the curve of the earth in a white shimmering arc against the black of space. It’s a dream he never has because he’s struck a deal with his subconscious to never raise this memory although, now that he thinks of it, he wonders what his end of the bargain was ever supposed to be. Nonetheless this is his unconsciousness’ betrayal:
better the Square.
In the dream he looks not for Kristin but a young woman he met only three times and who he’s put out of his mind ever since one dazed night years ago back east: The Emperor of Elevators, he murmurs in his sleep, feeling the tail-end of a familiar gust blowing from a vent in a low rectangular storage hut near the rooftop’s edge. He wonders if this gust is an ally meaning to rescue him, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove him, before he remembers it’s an anarchist without conviction.

In his dream he crosses the building rooftop to the vent and looks deep into it. Mistress my Mistress, he whispers and hears the song and feels the gust of the Oblivion Wind in his face; and when he pulls his face away, the vent has become the gun barrel of the

learned in the nick of time meant to sacrifice me on New Year’s Eve, then to

tank and he’s back in the Square with the tanks rolling toward him like great eggs. He looks up and the sky is bloody red again; standing his ground, the gust dies. The tank tries to go around him, he moves to block it, and when the tank moves again so would he, to block it again, if he weren’t transfixed by the song. From out of the corner of his eye, he sees a blinding flash of something and
raises his hand to shield his eyes, and a moment later he’s aware of the hot pain in his hand, his hand burning, the small explosion in the palm where one’s fortune is told. He looks up at his hand quizzically to see a bit of red wedged in the middle, and thinking at first it’s blood, he realizes he’s seeing through the new hole a spot of the red sky beyond.

He hears the song, the gust rises again, and she appears at the far end of the Square that’s otherwise empty but for him and the tanks, a figure walking across the Square toward him. The Mistress isn’t dressed in her stockings and heels but in her black silk robe, vines the color of jade climbing up her body and binding her. When she reaches Wang, she holds a cool cloth in her hand and mops his brow.