Our Ecstatic Days (31 page)

Will they make a saint of her? Lulu wonders, collapsed back into her pillow and red dreams. Will they all come out and gather on the mesas surrounding the electric desert, revering the place where she went up in smoke, Saint Barbrasita of the Loud Light? Wherever she is now, on the Other Side of the cracked sky,does she wonder to herself, What have I done? What mad love made me abandon him, in order that I might believe I could save him from all the vagaries of life? Does she find herself burned into some place between chaos and God, neither within reach? Does she sing to herself
if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me
when it’s a higher light jagged like a knife she meant to take

first dream I believed that the small flicker of light I saw on the other side of

up into her womb and snuff out? Wherever she is now in the Other Desert, staring around in bewilderment in a place where the same storm seethes and everything is the same except that her child is gone, missing him she doesn’t even know what to call him.

For a while, all she knew she remembered was red. Here’s Lulu’s lie: that she would not die on the lake. It’s now been so long since that day when some other naked version of her left to sail back where she left her small son in that silver gondola that she can’t be certain anymore it really happened at all. She can’t be certain it wasn’t a dream or hallucination, she can’t be certain of anything she ever did or didn’t do, she can’t be certain of her own life except: the one thing she knows for certain was ever real is him
—that
she knows—and she also knows she wouldn’t die anywhere else but on that lake even if she could, as if she could leave her heart behind and forget where it was and then, having lost it, forget there ever was a heart. So as the lake stopped draining, because it would wait to die with its mistress, so the Mistress in return has laid suspended on the edge of death four hundred days waiting for the lake to die: Well no kidding, Lulu says to herself in her fever. Who’s the point-misser now. She waits for the lake, the lake waits for her. But now in the first vision she’s had in a long time, like those she used to have going back to her very earliest, when she would sit on her bathroom floor reading the patterns of her periods in the porcelain toilet, now as if she’s conducting one final ceremony and as if a melody-snake has wound its way up out of the desert from the ashen place where the lightning took Barbrasita, Lulu has a new epiphany.

In it she runs after Barbrasita to stop her, into the wind and the

the darkness, on the other side of unconsciousness, was the very dream itself,

rain. As she almost catches her, the girl stops and turns and the lightning rips the sky in two and, inside the radiance that Barbrasita becomes, the red that’s been the only thing Lulu could remember finally takes form: and she sees him standing there in the Chateau lair with the small red toy monkey in his hand, wondering how it is he’s been abandoned again. First confronted by this vision, she can’t face the question of whether she left the
toy behind accidentally or, so to speak, accidentally on purpose, but once the memory of red takes the form of the red monkey, then in this ozone between living and dying, for the first time since motherhood, Lulu fights to live …

… and opens her eyes, and he’s gone. Opens her eyes and she lies in her bed in the pueblo and, outside, after four hundred days, the lightning has finally subsided. It flashes just enough that the snow falling glitters like glass—but that isn’t what she notices. What she notices is the bird beyond the window of her room, in the high black branches of a charred tree, very calmly unperturbed by the falling ice, as though the tree’s surrounding wisps might actually shelter it. “Look,” she says.

Rocking in a chair at the foot of the bed, resting with a brown baby in her arms, Bronte opens her eyes at the sound of Lulu’s voice, a little astonished. “Hello,” she brings herself to say.

“Look,” Lulu says again, weakly raising her arm to point through the window, and Bronte turns to look.

It takes a moment for Brontë’s eyes to communicate the color of the bluejay to her mind, or perhaps it’s the other way around: “It’s not a trick of the light, is it,” says Brontë. “That is, it’s not really just some strange shade of green and gray mixed together.

which I approached across some limbo between consciousness and sleep, and

It’s really blue?”

“All color is a trick of the light,” Lulu explains.

After a moment, “It’s New Year’s.”

“Really?”

“Day before yesterday, actually.”

Lulu looks at the baby in Brontë’s arms. “How long since …?”

“Five weeks.”

“Five weeks?”

“You would come to just long enough for me to get some soup in you. You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“Some part of you must have wanted to stick around awhile.”

“Have you named him?”

“Not yet,” Brontë sighs, shaking her head. “Want to hold him?”

Lulu has a pang at the sight of him. “His mother: she chose you.”

“No,” Brontë argues, “I was just the one who happened to be there, that’s all.” She doesn’t mention the night she and Barbrasita slept together. “Who else was she going to give him to? Wanda I suppose, but….”

it was like the flicker of a gunshot in the distance, a small flash on the far

“She chose you,” Lulu insists, as vehemently as her weakness allows, “with boobs like those, she figured you were the woman for the job.”

“Well aren’t you feeling better,” Brontë says. “They’re not exactly baby-ready.”

“Tell him that. Put a bottle between them and he’ll never know the difference.”

“He’ll just grow up to be another breast-blinded man like his father.”

“He’ll grow up to be that anyway. The male wangie at its most basic.”

“Hold him while I go get you some soup,” and Bronte gets up and gives the baby to Lulu. While she’s gone Lulu barely brings herself to look in the little boy’s brown eyes. She holds him pretending he isn’t there. She hears his gurgles pretending she doesn’t; the soft brown of his hair, she pretends she doesn’t feel that. The small hand that waves in the air for her finger, she pretends she doesn’t see it. She pretends she’s not thinking of names. Brontë comes back and sets the baby in his cradle nearby and feeds the other woman some soup, then when she’s finished she lies in the bed next to Lulu and picks up the little boy as he starts to cry. Bronte pretends she’s sick and fucking tired of crying babies. She pretends it was the unluckiest day of her life when Barbrasita pushed this child in her arms and ran out into the storm. What I get for seducing her, she thinks. She looks at the baby in her arms who’s stopped crying. “Why does he make me afraid?”

horizon, until I finally identified the sound coming from it as crying, and when

“Because there’s nothing a mother fears more,” Lulu says closing her eyes, “than the chaos of the world.” Before she sleeps, she looks once more to see if the bluejay is still in the black tree outside; together, the two women on the bed watch it with the baby asleep between them. “Brontë….”

“I know.”

“I have to go back.”

Jeez, Brontë wonders, you don’t suppose Armand is still chained up in that dungeon, do you? “I know.”

It’s the fur. There’s something about it that makes his flesh crawl. He would vastly prefer the cold hard metal of regular handcuffs cutting into his skin. With every twist of his body, with every struggle against his   constraints, then the more the fur of   
2018 (2004-2089)
   the cuffs softly caresses his wrists.   A wave of disgust washes over him. There’s something depraved about it; it’s like a strange animal, mutated and hermaphrodite, curling between Tapshaw’s hands. Oh God don’t even…. He actually thinks he’s going to throw up. “Can’t you use rope or something?” he says.

“I don’t have rope,” the other man says. “I thought you would find those comfortable.”

I finally reached it I saw it was a baby sitting on the ground waiting for

For a moment Tapshaw stops struggling. “You’re a sick….” I’m definitely going to throw up, he thinks, drenched in sweat; another long moment goes by before the feeling subsides. “You’ve taken leave of your senses,” he croaks. Sitting on the other side of the room, Wang considers this: That’s it, he thinks. He turns it over in his head, deliberating it in all its meaning:
I’ve
taken leave of my senses.
Regaining his composure, Tapshaw growls, “You don’t even know how to use that.”

“Uh,” Wang says, studying the gun in his hand, “I point it at you and a bullet comes out and hurts you?”

“How in God’s name you ever became the hero of a revolution, I’ll never understand.”

“Well, I’ll admit it was from staring into guns rather than firing them.” Wang gets up from the chair and walks to the window. “Anyway I never said I was a hero. And is that what this is, a ‘revolution’?” Leaning in the sill, he’s noticed lately the sky is less and less blue. In the nearby hills, the observatory above Los Feliz glows in the sun like a skull. “I thought this was a ‘crusade,’ and I’m the mystic—I who don’t have a mystic bone in my body—divining messages that come singing out of the sky or floating up in boats in the form of children’s toys. Which is really more a crusade-thing than a revolution-thing. What sort is this anyway?”

Tapshaw snorts in contempt.

“Oh, all right,” Wang shrugs, “it’s a nine-millimeter. You see? I’m not as hopeless as both of us like to suppose.”

me, and he stopped crying and looked up at me blinking, and now in the

“It’s an
old
nine-millimeter that will probably….” Tapshaw stops a moment for the nausea to pass, “… that will probably blow up in your hand when you fire it.”

“Yes, well,” Wang goes back to the chair where he was sitting, staring at the captive man on the floor, “there’s one way to find that out, isn’t there.”

“These things are going to make me puke,” the bound officer gasps, swallowing frantically.

“Tapshaw,” … Wang answers gently and not completely without sympathy, “if you’ll permit me: that may say just a little more about you than it does about anything else. Anyway the handcuffs are all I have and they’re not coming off, not for a while anyway. So if I were you, I would calm down.”

After a moment Tapshaw says, “Where are we?”

“Actually,” Wang sets the gun down on the old table next to him, “I used to live here.” He gazes around the tiny one-room wooden house. “When I first came to Los Angeles, this part of the city wasn’t even under water.” He gets back up and returns to the window. “There was a park over there,” he nods, “right down those banks, at what used to be the corner of Alvarado and Sixth. A nice park once, I think I heard, back in the earlier part of the last century, 1930s, ’40s. I got here at the end of’1, from … well, by way of that proverbial slow boat from China but in a roundabout fashion, let’s put it like that. I would sit here at this same window at a table a lot like this one and smell the Mexican bread baking, I could never figure out where exactly, and …” In the northwest, the sky is definitely less blue than it used to be. “… write letters, lots of letters.” He says, “Each right

memory-stream of the lake’s birth canal, remembering it so distinctly, I can

after the other. Hadn’t mailed one before I started the next.”

“In code, no doubt,” says Tapshaw, leaning back against the wall taking deep breaths, “to the other side you were spying for.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Wang snaps impatiently, “that’s the way we top agents send all our secret messages—by the postal service. Now you’re just being
irrational.
This was seventeen years ago, remember such a time? Before there
was
another side for me to spy for, if in fact I
were
spying for anyone, now or then or ever.” He sighs, paces back to the chair. For a while neither of them says anything. “You know,” Wang finally decides to try again, “you can believe what you want of me. You will anyway. And when your men catch up with us, as I know they’re bound to, persuasion brought to bear will undoubtedly get me to say exactly whatever it is our superiors—well,
your
superiors—want said. But right now, before the truth becomes so opportunistic, I’m telling you two things, assuming the truth means anything to you at all. The first is this. I promise you, I absolutely guarantee you, that most of what we call, oh, history, happens for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with why we think it happens. The second is, that kid had nothing to do with anything. You want to tell yourself I’m whatever it is you want to believe I am, go ahead. But all that boy ever did was row me in that boat.” He runs his hand through his hair. “He was barely verbal.”

“Yes, well maybe he was a little more verbal than you know,” and of course now, unwittingly, Tapshaw has revealed he’s not really so sure about Wang’s complicity after all. Both men realize this as

tell it was obviously him, I can see it so obviously in a way I couldn’t then

soon as Tapshaw says it but Wang lets it go because it’s a little beside the point, and also because part of him has always suspected the same about the boatman—not that he was part of any plot, which is absurd, but that maybe he wasn’t exactly the idiot savant of the lake he pretended to be. “Are you going to tell me he wasn’t broadcasting those messages?” Tapshaw says.

“I’m telling you,” Wang answers evenly, “they were meaningless,” which to Tapshaw, Wang understands, is the most dangerous prospect of all, the most subversive of all possibilities, the possibility that polemicists and ideologues, political spokesmen and militarists alike reject down to their core, not to mention rationalists: yes, Wang ruefully reminds himself, let’s not forget rationalists. “I’ll tell you what,” he says to the other man. Tapshaw glares up at him from the floor. “I’ll let you go,” Wang nods, “if you can answer one question.”

“I’m not playing your games.”

“Tribulation II, or III?”

“What?”

“Tribulation II or III. That shouldn’t be so hard. Haven’t you been keeping track? Haven’t you been able to tell when one ends and one begins, and then when the next ends and the one after that begins? You answer that and I’ll unlock those cuffs right now.”