Our Ecstatic Days (14 page)

plexiglas that, almost thirty years ago now, a surgeon in the Chinese underground inserted to try and save the hand, threading the blood vessels through it even as he was unable to preserve tendon and muscle. Now in his sleep he feels the Mistress gently run her own fingers up and down the forearm that is distinctly thinner in comparison to the forearm of the other, good hand.

He opens his eyes.

She kneels beside him. The train is gone. He looks around, remembers he’s lying on the floor of the Chateau X; she’s blown out some of the candles so the Lair is darker than before. She kneels beside him no longer in garters or stockings but a black silk robe with a pattern of jade-tinted vines that wrap themselves around her. She helps lift him from the floor to the divan; naked he pulls the blanket closer to him, shuddering. She raises a cup of water to his mouth, then a glass of hot brandy. “Are you OK?” she says.

He nods. For a moment the two of them say nothing. She watches him but he can’t quite look at her, feeling exposed and vulnerable as he always does after these sessions, until finally he says, “This time was especially….”

“I know,” she says. “You saw it, then?”

“Yes.” He sits up, a bit revived, and she repeats the administration of water and brandy. Over on a low coffee table is the parchment she’s brought in from the other chamber, now dry, a dark brown-red map with the death streak of the melody-snake, the echo of it just barely audible; she brings it to him. They study the menstrual I-Ching together. “Do you know the song?” he asks.

“New York punk-blues, apocalyptic subgenre,” she says, “late 1970s. ’79, ’78.”

“What’s the ‘lavender room’?” he asks.

“That’s not the important part.”

“The ‘church chimes’?”

small Chinatown on the small island in the delta where I grew up, raised by my

Lulu reaches over, pulls the blanket away from off his shoulder and touches a small forming welt. “I struck you too hard.”

“I didn’t notice. Truly.” He looks at her now. “You know I want you to hold back nothing.”

When they look at each other like this, it’s very difficult for her to believe he doesn’t remember that time out at Port Justine,
when he was working as a dock hand and secured her gondola. She had convinced herself that afternoon they connected in some way, particularly when, in a kind of paralysis, he watched as she climbed the billboard. At their first session more than a year ago she almost said something but didn’t, since that kind of acknowledgement implicitly threatens an arrangement based on anonymity and discretion. As time passed, however, she understood that he doesn’t remember her at all and it angered her, and she used and channeled that anger in her training of him:
This
she thinks to herself, touching the welt
is that anger. It’s unprofessional
she chastises herself.
Anger is a betrayal of an implicit understanding of the relationship; it renders personal what’s supposed to be impersonal, the objectivity of the relationship being that which both heightens the senses and clears the mind.
Yet at this point in their relationship it’s difficult to maintain the impersonal; she pulls her fingers back from the wound, returning to the interpretation of the parchment. “Something is happening to the lake,” she says.

“It’s draining,” he tells her.

He’s surprised at the way the blood seems to run from her face. “What do you mean?” she says.

“I mean it’s going back. Back wherever it came from.”

“Here,” she points to a small bright nexus on the parchment, where the last flicker of the melody-snake’s tongue lapped its final drop of blood, “is the event vortex. I say ‘event’

drunken uncle in the town tavern where I never knew my mother, the closest

but that doesn’t necessarily mean an event in the sense of an occurrence, it may mean the revelation of something that’s already existed a long time, that will manifest its existence in a way never perceived or comprehended before. Maybe something very obvious, something we’ve thought of in one form that in fact takes another….” She shrugs. “This is vague, I know….”

He’s never heard her sound so … uncertain before. It unnerves him. “I have to take something back with me … something that can mean the difference between victory and defeat….”

“You’re not understanding, zen-toy,” the Mistress says.
“This”—
pointing at the nexus—“renders your victories and defeats insignificant.” Oh yes, Wang thinks to himself, that’s what I’ll tell them: whether we win or lose is insignificant. “You already know these answers, zen-toy. You already know these questions.”

“What do you mean?” he says.

She studies him hard. His confusion sounds genuine, and she wonders if she’s wrong in her suspicions; she gambles. “Who’s broadcasting these messages?”

The question stuns him, given his own suspicions. Instantly and instinctively he analyzes the tone of it: is this a confession on her part? A challenge, a test? Is it just a moment of disingenuousness, when in fact this woman has always seemed anything but disingenuous? “You tell me,” he replies, and the moment of truth collapses between them, each thinking the other has failed it.

Disappointed, she says, “Drink some more water,” and raises the cup to him. Disappointed, he takes it and drinks. They don’t say anything for a while. “When does your boat return?”

“I don’t know. He may be there now.”

I ever came being one day when I was three years old and stood at the edge

“What do you tell them about why you come here?”

“I don’t tell them anything. They don’t know anything about you.”

“They don’t ask.”

“They ask all the time. They wonder all the time. But it’s part of my … mystique. I suppose, that I don’t have to answer such questions.”

“But they do know you come here.”

“They don’t know where I go. The boatman who brings me isn’t one of them. One of the locals….”

“That seems even more dangerous.”

Wang stands up from the divan, a bit shaky, but steadies himself. “I’ve taken the liberty of offering him your hospitality, so that he might wait in the outer entryway.”

“That would be OK.”

“Thank you. He doesn’t seem to want to anyway. It’s very kind of you to leave him food and drink.” Wang hesitates a moment. “I’ll dress now.” He staggers a bit toward the dressing room and turns; once he goes through this door, he’s not to see her again until next time, so he says, “There was another song,” still a little dazed.

“What?”

“Another song. Other than this one—” indicating the parchment with the blood. “It sounded like you were singing.”

“You’re surrounded by signs,” she answers. “Ignore none of them.”

He nods and enters the dark dressing room. He pulls on his clothes and coat, and exits the other door of the transitional chamber into the entryway, and then through the outer door into the bracing cool air that blows off the lake into the open Chateau grotto. Slowly he moves down the stone steps to find the boy with the boat waiting for him.

of the dock in a blue dress holding my uncle’s hand, patiently watching the

For a while, on the way back, he’s oblivious to everything: the night, the searchlights, the Chateau behind him, the bombs in the distance, the sound of the airlift, the boy in the boat—oblivious to everything including, he finally notices, how the glass hand that has no feeling still wears the fur-lined handcuffs she put on him, the other cuff dangling empty. Wang begins to think about what he’s going to tell Tapshaw and the others; he wonders if she’s
becoming less certain of her interpretations or if the very notion of meaning approaches critical mass, beyond which is the void. He can’t tell whether this evening undermines or reinforces a theory he’s had for a while now. He’s not exactly sure when he first formed this theory, although he remembers it was during one of their sessions near the end, when the white moment always seems to open up like an orifice.

If this theory is correct, that in fact she’s the one who’s transmitting the broadcasts, then it raises many questions, and so he’s always been careful not to reveal too much. He’s never actually explained to her who he is, although he knows she understands he’s a man of “mystique” as he put it, of power and position, as are most of her clients who from time to time need to shed power and position and control. He’s never told her of his past and she’s never pried, which he’s always taken to be part of her professionalism, a demonstration of her discretion and respect for his privacy; if anything, sometimes her lack of inquisitiveness gives him the feeling in fact there’s nothing about him she doesn’t already somehow know. He might even believe she knows him better than he knows himself, if one can live his life at odds with his own true nature. For a so-called rationalist he certainly has a lot of dreams and visions, not to mention the mystic menstrual prophecies of L.A.’s most famous bondage queen—so if she’s the one broadcasting the messages, then for whom or what is she a medium? Between Wang and whom does she serve as translator

island ferry cross the river to a woman on the far other side who then didn’t

and interpreter? And then suddenly out in that darkest part of the water, somewhere close to its source, he remembers how pale she went when he told her that Zed is dying, and gets it in his head that, as he is her slave for the few hours they spend together, she is the lake’s.

For as long as they both have been here, Wang and the lake have lived in mutual denial, each barely acknowledging the other.
Once he might have supposed the lake could be a source of comfort to him, for the way it raised the latitude and shortened the longitude of everything: a tower becomes much smaller when half of it is underwater. The lake leveled everything for a man who never looks up, and in fact coincided neatly with his new fear since, not so long before he came to Los Angeles, back on the east coast he had been not a man afraid to look up but, to the contrary, a man who lived in the sky, riding floating boxes. Ironically, once it was the sky that offered him solace from ground-level—to be precise the ground level of city squares; ironically, once it was the ground he fled, until the day the sky betrayed him and came crashing down. When that happened he became a man caught in limbo between the sky and the ground, someone who lives looking only straight ahead in a state of hovering, for which a lake should have been perfect. But as both the mirror of the sky above and the window of the ground below, the lake became the worst of all: liquid ground, liquid sky: lake zero.

The lake is coming for me, he used to write in his letters to Kristin from the city’s southern shore. The truth is he’s never stopped thinking that. The truth is he thinks it even now, if he allows himself to. The lake is coming for me, to expose me for the fraud I am. There’s a certain contradiction in his thinking about both the chaos he rejects and the higher order he believes is mathematically untenable: Is the lake God, he sometimes asks himself, is the lake chaos? He’s never believed in God or chaos,

board the boat but rather shook her head, turned and vanished, something a

he thinks chaos is as religious a concept as God and that God is about as scientific as chaos—but sometimes he wonders. Sometimes he thinks that when he was a mathematics student his professors did their work better than he wants to believe, successfully having imprinted on his subconscious the conviction that everything is empirical after all. He always liked to think he departed from such teachings when, as a young rebel, he embraced
the heresies of freedom and desire and redemption in their most truly heretical form, not as calculations of sociology or biology or some quantifiable philosophical value system but as entities unto themselves; but he’s pushed from his mind, more times into the thousands than he can count, like he’s pushed away every thought of the lake, every question of whether it’s really possible to believe in freedom, desire or redemption if you don’t believe in chaos or God—if not both, then one or the other.
The lake is coming for me.
He ignores it even as he’s in the middle of it, even as his boat cuts through its water, the way one tries to ignore an old lover who’s standing very conspicuously on the other side of a room just entered.

When his boat reaches the guerrilla encampment on the southern edge of the lake, Wang is surprised to note on the pylon of the dock, in the light of the full moon, the watermark of the lake from just a few hours ago when he disembarked for the Chateau. Clearly the lake has already gone down several inches. No sooner has Wang cleared the boat than the boy pushes off again, rowing back out with determination. Above him the moon erupts, a lava of light pouring from the white mouth of the cosmos’ black volcano; no longer darting among the dark zones, the boy heads northwest in a straight line making remarkable time, until after a while he can see his hotel-island in the distance. He slows down as he nears the island, on his guard for marauders and pirates and stray cultists who still circle grounds they can’t decide are holy or

three-year-old could only find as baffling as it was devastating, after which I

haunted. The boy who now calls himself Kuul, a name half the language of childhood-memory and half the language of owl, has never believed the Hamblin either holy or haunted; he returned here a year ago only by some instinct he doesn’t understand. Having seen the city and lake from any number of high vantage points over the course of his young life, he finds the perspective from the top of the Hamblin only a variation on that view. If it
ever reminds him of when his mother brought him up here to the rooftop as a toddler, it’s only for a moment more brief than his mind can grasp or wants to.

When he reaches the square brick island, he sidles the boat up to the top of what used to be the hotel’s fire escape. He ties the boat and takes from it the basket of bread and fruit and cheese and wine left for him at the Chateau X. Luna completely lights up the Hamblin and he makes his way easily around the door that used to lead to the stairway inside the hotel, now completely submerged except for the top. Tucked away in an alcove formed by the rooftop door and an adjacent storage space that used to house all the hotel phone lines is an old silver gondola that stands upright like a small altar; propped up inside, resting against an assembled mass of old blankets, pillows and bits of old mattress, is a woman now somewhere in her early sixties but who seems much older. Once her eyes were older than her face but her face has caught up. Once her smile was younger but it’s raced to the edge of death before the rest of her. The hair that Kuul’s mother once saw as lost between the auburn of yesterday and the silver of tomorrow has long since found its way to a white amnesiascape.