Our Ecstatic Days (16 page)

She gently lays the other healing
hand on the welt on his shoulder that she left earlier that evening with her riding crop. It’s all right, he says in the dream, I don’t want you to hold anything back. But….

But? she says.

San Francisco with a pair of psychotic lesbian lovers I learned in the nick of

But what do the broadcasts mean? he says.

What? she asks, confused.

Why do you do it? Why the broadcasts? What are they for?

Why do
I
do it? she says. I thought it was you. Me?

Yes.

You thought it was me?

Yes.

He shakes his head. It’s not you?

No.

Then …? as Wang wakes suddenly in his quarters, lying on his cot in the dark. Opens his eyes, knowing that in just seconds there will be a pounding on the door.

He fumbles for the lamp on the nearby desk. Sitting on the edge of the cot he holds his face in his hands and waits; barely before the first knock has finished he says, “Come in,” and there’s a hesitant moment before the soldier enters.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Parsons.”

The soldier is disconcerted. “Uh, yes, sir,” he finally says, “that’s correct, sir.”

“What?”

“That’s my name, sir.”

“I know it’s your name.”

“Sir?”

“You told me earlier this evening.”

“Uh, with your permission, sir.”

“Yes?”

“That couldn’t have been me. Sir.”

“Parsons …” Wang says.

time meant to murder me in my sleep, finally arriving in Los Angeles where

“I mean, we’ve never spoken, sir.”

“I want you to find something to get this off.” Wang holds up his hand.

The young soldier is flummoxed, first by the glass in Wang’s hand and then the Mistress’ fur-lined cuff that still dangles from his wrist. “Sir. We’ll get someone to file it off.”

“I don’t want to file it off. Find a master key of some sort.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wang stares straight ahead of him in the dark. “Who put that up?” he says after a moment, quietly.

“Sir?”

On the wall in front of him, where there was a blank space when he went to sleep after returning from the Chateau X, looms the inevitable image. “I said,” Wang can barely spit it out between his teeth, “who put that up. Who came into my own quarters while I was sleeping and put that back up.”

“Sir?”

“Did you put that up?” He’s barely raising his voice.

“Me, sir?”

Wang slowly rises from the cot. “Parsons.” He’s so silently furious he can’t quite think what to say. “Take it down,” he finally tells the soldier.

“The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”

“If I see it up there again, I’ll have you arrested for insubordination,” although he doesn’t really have the authority to do that.

“Sir?” Parsons says, and a couple of miles away, out in the western darkness of the lake on the hotel-island called Hamblin, Kuul listens to a song and begins to cry. Having pulled a blanket up around the sleeping old woman and eaten some of the bread and cheese and fruit from the Chateau X, having made his way in the light of the full moon around to the storage space that holds all the

after a week of living and sleeping on the streets from Hollywood to Century

hotel’s long dead phone and power lines, as well as an old sound system the Order of the Red left behind with everything else, he’s pulled a disk from his shirt, flipped off the switch to the outside speakers, and put the disk in the carrier tray.

When he presses the play button, he begins to cry and doesn’t know why. But since he was a small child, music has been the sound of freedom and desertion, and although he’s barely
conscious of remembering this particular song, inside him it opens up a door
—if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me—
that closes again before he can go through. As when he chose this song from the Chateau’s archives in the first place, for reasons as mysterious to him as most choices, fingers just running along the walls of the Vault until they stopped, he hears music in silence like an owl sees in the dark; it’s an instinct that’s become a little more than human by now; too human for him to understand is the instinct that makes him cry now when he hears this song:
‘Cause I know this sea wants to carry me / in a sweet sweet sound she sings / for my release.
He can almost hear her singing it somewhere that feels close but also like another life, a life that feels at once gone forever and at the same time just beyond the bend of the lake or maybe on the next lake over, wherever such a lake might be. Although he can barely remember her, the sound of this song makes him wrack his brain to try and figure out, as he’s tried before, what he did when he was three that was so terrible it would make her leave him.

He sits slumped against the wall until it finishes. He doesn’t think he can listen to it again. He knows there will be no more broadcasts, which were an accident in the first place when he discovered the sound system on the island a year before and was half way through playing something when he realized the speakers outside were on too, blaring so loudly everyone within two or three miles could hear. After that the music just became

City to Baghdadville on the beach I responded to a personals ad from a

part of a full-moon ritual that has no particular meaning at all, at least none he knows of. He rises from the floor where he’s been sitting and walks out onto the Hamblin rooftop and takes solace in the moon that floats at the end of a chain of utterly random events like a balloon at the end of a string; like letting go of a balloon, he would like to watch the moon float away for nothing but the sake of watching it float away. He hears the bombs and fly-overs in the
distance and wakes the next morning with the song he doesn’t want to listen to anymore still in his head, and the sky a brilliant blue, more and more rare in the Age of the Lake. Sitting up in her gondola as though it’s a chariot is the old woman. She actually has a small smile on her lips as though she’s expecting something to happen. Off to the edge of the Hamblin, Kuul pulls up from out of the cold lake a bottle of milk tied to some twine, and as he’s pulling up the bottle he’s struck by the wet trail of the water down the hotel wall: sometime in the night, the lake fell.

He’s thinking about this and still hearing the song in his head while he brings the milk over to the woman and pours her a cup. She’s still smiling and he smiles back at her but the song is still in his head and soon he can’t resist anymore, and he goes back into the little makeshift broadcasting booth and stares at the disk player awhile before submitting to the impulse. He doublechecks to make sure the outside speakers are off

then, reconsidering—he lets go of the chain, up behind the blue sky the moon begins to rise—flicks the speakers back on, and turns up the volume.

Hesitating again, he presses the play button.

It doesn’t start anything like he remembers from last night. Does it start like this? he wonders when the vocal begins

“Humans are running, lavender room …”

No….

“Hovering liquid, move over moon …” No, that’s not

middle-age man who had been abandoned by his pregnant Asian wife and was

right. “For my spacemonkey….” He stops the disk then presses the play button again, as if that will correct the error, then stops it again. He ejects the disk. He picks it up and looks at it, turns it over as if that will reveal an answer, turns it over and over and over and over. He puts it back in the player and plays it again, then stops and ejects it again.

He feels something so unknown to him that he’s incapable of identifying it as emotional panic. He gazes around for the right disk but he knows better, he knows there is no other disk, that this is the disk he played last night and left in the player. He also knows that the song he’s hearing now is the one he returned to the Vault last night when his passenger with the hand was inside the Chateau, and that yesterday’s song has somehow replaced last night’s, and that this is difficult to understand even for a boy who has an owl’s sight for invisible music. In the tower of the Chateau X to the north, wearing her silk robe, she stops brewing her tea and cocks her head; she’s been up all night crying and drinking, sitting at her divan before the dying fire, staring at the red monkey perched above the hearth, and now, almost beyond the capacity for confusion, she hears it. She goes to the window and stares out over the lake to the south. On a clear blue day when there’s no wind off the hills to separate the music from her, she can hear it. She thinks to go back down to the Vault and doublecheck whether the song she found returned to the archive last night is still there. But she doesn’t.

In a water-craft a couple of miles to the east, speeding toward Hamblin Island, Tapshaw says to Wang, “Do you hear that?”

Over the roar of the boat, the song is almost indistinguishable. It may be, as Wang tries to reason, amid the vertigo that buffets him now on the watery sky of the lake

looking for a pleasure-slave although he wouldn’t put it in that fashion, and as

spanning out all around him, that this is his mind playing another trick on him; but sometime in the last twelve hours he’s come to realize that because something is a trick of the mind doesn’t mean it’s not real. That the real of the remembered is no less profound than the real of the perceived. This morning, when Tapshaw asked him what Wang found out in the mysterious hours that have lately come to accompany full moons and mysterious songs, thinking a
moment Wang answered, “We’re surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” Now he looks at the Hamblin in the distance and his ears and mind try to filter out the sound of the boat for the sound of the song, but then he doesn’t hear it anymore and isn’t altogether certain he did in the first place. As well, however, he isn’t altogether certain he didn’t.

Kuul sees the approaching boat far away. Quickly he gathers together the old woman in order to put her in the rowboat, but intuitively rethinks this and decides instead on the gondola. Maybe he just can’t imagine leaving the gondola behind. Maybe the old woman can’t imagine it either. As he carefully helps her down into the gondola from the top of the hotel fire escape, he sees she’s still smiling as when she woke, having known as she did sometime in the night that they would be taking this journey. Actually she’s already taking it. Actually, in her mind Doc is on it now, at this moment, and has been on it for some time; making her a bed in the bottom of the gondola and laying her there as comfortably as he can, with the pole Kuul pushes them off from the island and around its corner, heading northeast toward the lake’s source. Gleaming glass-white in the sunlight, the boat might almost be seen from a castle tower or, high above, a daylocked owl frantically in search of the night that’s set sail without him.

In her mind, Doc has been on this journey a long time. The exact hour of its beginning is nameless but certainly she’s been riding this silver gondola since that afternoon years before when

I was at the end of my rope I went to live with him in his house in the

Kristin sailed her out to a hotel not far from the Hamblin to read its walls and diagnose its mysteries. In the world outside Doc’s mind it’s been thirteen years but on this particular journey that sort of measure of time is meaningless and besides, the lake is drowning in itself, going back down its drain, and memory is moving backwards. Consumptive houses, malaria houses, alzheimer houses, heart-attack houses, houses with tumors growing out the
attic or the bedroom windows or the family rooms … Doc knew them all once, healed them all or consoled them when they couldn’t be healed, back when she was in the business of being strong, back when she was in the business of being indomitable. In a city congenitally incapable of a tragic sense, she was the ultimate citizen: she had come to Los Angeles expressly to leave all sense of tragedy behind. In her new scheme of things she had made sure there was no such thing as tragedy anymore, there were only life’s processes and passages, in which loss was only another fact.

She had never before diagnosed a
house or room or building dying of sorrow. Dying not of physical dissolution or even a fatigue of body and spirit as triggered by sorrow, but of sorrow itself. She had made herself believe sorrow beyond its logical self-exhaustion was an illusion, a collapse of fortitude on the part of the afflicted, a failure to surmount. This changed the afternoon Kristin sailed her out to the flooded hotel, where the two of them wandered through the abandoned apartment with its books and animé posters and the same famous photo on the wall that Kristin

Hollywood Hills according to the terms of the agreement always nude which I

had on hers.

There in the walls Doc heard the song of the sorrow that can’t be surmounted or endured, the sorrow that life’s processes can’t process, that its passages can’t pass away. She’s been in the gondola ever since. She lies in the bottom staring at the black sea of the sky rolling by overhead, white waves of clouds; fleeing—for
the second time in her life ’ sorrow’s song, she escaped the hotel in the silver gondola but then, in the years after, couldn’t escape the gondola itself. Unable to escape the gondola itself, sometime in the night that began thirteen years ago or a thousand, she set sail back to the sorrow because she needs to face it again before she herself passes away, although why and what she’ll do when she finds it she has no idea. It isn’t a matter of conquering anything. She now knows this sorrow is beyond conquest. She’s reconciled herself to her tragic sense she thought she left behind when she came to Los Angeles; it isn’t a matter of understanding anything; the whole point of this sorrow is how its song is beyond human understanding. The whole point is how pretending to understand is conceit, presumption, hubris that calls itself insight.

So there’s no human or rational reason for Doc to face this sorrow again, but she has to or feel her existence will have been one of cowardice, stupidity, cruelty that calls itself compassion. As she lies in the bottom of the gondola in the night of her mind, with the cool night breeze blowing in her face, the lake is much bigger, a vast ocean aswirl, because even here in her mind the lake is going down its drain. For a long time the young man who takes care of her has been rowing them toward the center of a black whirlpool, having left his owls far behind on land. He has amber green eyes and once light hair that’s darkened with adolescence; he doesn’t really look much like his mother. As they near the whirlpool they feel the churning of the black water broken by