Our Ecstatic Days (28 page)

inherited it from my own mother who couldn ’t even cross the river to come see

smoke beyond and, three thousand miles beyond that, the woman he loves.

For a wild impetuous moment, a man who’s spent half a life meditating the laws of impulse only to reject them thinks about phoning her. It’s not too late, three-hour time difference—but he’s just not ready yet, he tells himself, not having communicated
with her for a while other than in letters. So he can’t just pick up the phone and call thoughtlessly unless, of course, thoughtlessly is in fact exactly the way he should call, the only way he’ll ever bring himself to call. Not ready yet, no. Since there’s no changing the fact of her child then there’s only changing the sense of betrayal
—beautiful betrayer, killer of my trust—
something he thought he got over long ago, something he thought he let go of long ago, only to wake each morning and find it still in his grip or perhaps, more precisely, to find he’s still in its grip. Maybe if you can’t get over it then it’s just not going to get gotten over. It’s been six years now since the boy was born, with the father long out of the picture—he was barely in it except to make a son, which somehow only made her infidelity worse—so you just ought to get over it and if you can’t then it’s not going to get gotten over because she can’t undo it and you can’t expect she would if she could, it’s her child after all.

But not
our
child. And he should have been.

He turns to look another direction, anywhere but west. The girl turns her radio on low, tries to find the right soundtrack for a darkling world before her; but perhaps the only soundtrack that’s right is silence. She settles into the base of the transmission mast. She never asked why the song was so important because it wasn’t her business and’ getting right down to it, she doesn’t really care.

me, because the very first dream I ever had in my life wasn’t until that night I

With most women, she tells herself, curiosity is an unchecked reflex; perhaps I’m not the inquisitive sort. Perhaps I have an overly developed male sense of privacy—that is, for a female. Perhaps that’s why it’s women not men who have babies, because as a gender women are predisposed not only to not value privacy so much but to unconsciously abhor it like nature does a vacuum,
because it’s women who are capable of that generous voluntarily surrender of profound privacy, the privacy of the body, the privacy of the heart.

I have nowhere to go tonight, it suddenly occurs to her. She watches the Asian man pacing the rooftop and then changes the station on the radio again: Are you a musicologist? she asked when he first showed up at the library, and he said no and then sometime later in the conversation revealed he had been a mathematics student in college before “history had its way with me,” by which she assumed he meant he became a history student instead—which doesn’t exactly explain, she thinks, what he’s doing operating elevators. Did you go to school in—? and then had stopped herself, checked her curiosity reflex, as much because she didn’t want to insult him. Japan? Korea? China? Thailand? can’t tell them apart, can you, she muses to herself. Well it’s true, you just can’t. The Emperor of Elevators, he’s musing to himself as he paces the rooftop not impatiently but aimlessly; he’s not yet become a man who never looks up.

To the contrary he’s a man who looks up as much as possible, who would look anywhere but ground level. East he can make out the lights of the harbor; from there his eyes follow the river north and count the bridges, contemplating the twinkling suture of the boroughs where, just at this moment, he can almost hear raven

miscarried him in Tokyo, waking and stumbling in terror through the dark to

navies surfacing from the floors of islamic oceans. Something about the night has already become familiar to him before he ever feels the tail-end of the gust, funneled hot memory brushing his face. And as he lifted his burning hand back in the Square twelve years ago to look through its new wound at the sky behind it, now he lifts the same hand not to feel the gust, since there are no nerve endings in the hand anymore to feel anything, not even so much to
look at the night through the hand’s tiny window, but almost as though he expects that the lens in his palm will refract the gust and then burst into a vision, or as though perhaps the light of the moon above, shining down through the small round prism, will catch him in its spotlight. Or maybe even her. What it does cast is a moonbeam on the gust’s source—or maybe he would have shifted his gaze anyway, noting the vent in the low rectangular storage hut near the rooftop’s east edge.

By the time he reaches the vent, his mind feels about to explode.

The gust hasn’t subsided. In how many dreams in the last twelve years has he felt it blow across his face as it does now? Up here, he told her just a few minutes ago, you sleep above your dreams; so how is it his dreams have reached this altitude? How high do I have to go, he thinks to himself angrily, to rise above them once and for all? Once he wondered if this gust was an ally meaning to rescue him, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove him; but it’s really an anarchist without conviction either way, without interest in either rescue or attack. Once he stood his ground and the gust subsided, but now as he nears the vent it comes roaring out. Taking from his belt his ring of keys, he uses one to begin prying the vent loose around its rim, before he takes the vent cover in his one good hand and tears it from its space.

the toilet down the hall and making it just in time to see the glistening white

He peers inside.

He looks so deeply—although he can’t fit in his whole head as he did into the tank’s gun that morning twelve years ago—that when he hears the song, of course he thinks it’s coming from the other end of the dark to where the vent leads, from where and when he first heard it twelve years ago. Same strange distant
Moorish drums, same dreamy Middle Eastern melody with the soft Spanish horns in the background, and the same woman’s voice of another century’s turn: excited, he turns to call to the girl who’s been trying to track down this very song, astonished that the song should happen to present itself at this very moment just as she happens to be here—only to realize the song isn’t coming from the vent at all but her radio. “But that’s it,” he says to her. What? she says sleepily, and he says, “That’s it,” pointing at the radio.

She looks at the radio a moment. “Are you sure?”

“That’s
it.”

“Well that’s odd isn’t it,” she finally says. She listens awhile. “You’re sure.” She listens some more. “I don’t think this is that old a song.”

“Do you know it?”

“No but I think perhaps I’ve heard them play it before and I don’t think they would play an old song like this that often, if it was that old.” She says, “It doesn’t sound that old.”

“How can you tell?”

rain of my boy run from my body, and at that moment I thought of all the

“Well, I suppose I can’t,” she confesses. He turns back to the vent and from deep down out of the darkness feels as he did twelve years ago the same gust in his face; it smells of that same morning, the vent a tunnel to that very morning and that very place, at the other end of which is the portal of a gun barrel. This is when he realizes that, twelve years ago, what he actually heard was
this
very moment now, in
this
time and place, up here overlooking the
world on this very night—that somewhere at the other end of this tunnel he’s there standing on the Square, his Other Self at an irrevocable moment, a young man of nineteen alone before the tanks with his head in the barrel of a gun, listening to a song coming from a girl’s radio twelve years and twelve thousand miles away. That what now blows through this tunnel is the Oblivion Wind back and forth across the shadowyears between the end of the Twentieth Century that morning, and this night—although he can’t imagine why this particular night, when nothing would seem to be happening of any importance at all.

He turns to see her lying there on his bedding, gold hair around her head ablaze in the ovulating moon. He walks over to her; she dozes at his feet. He has this distracted impulse to lie next to her, only because he’s suddenly so tired, but of course she would only take it wrong. If she could see him now, he wonders if he would appear to her as he feels: a man caught mid-transport. Uh, he whispers, we should go down now I think, but she doesn’t answer and he just nods in the dark and mumbles I’ll come back for you in the morning then, and turns to the dank light of the elevator, doors closing on his bewildered face. Briefly her eyes flutter to the sound of the closing doors, having somewhere in her semiconsciousness heard him speak, and now she answers from her sleep, But I have no place to go. She stumbles up from the bedding because she has to pee, and stripping off her jeans she

nights after I first learned he was inside me that I had stood in windows

half-registers the tsunamic vista of dawn’s armada in a far enflamed east. Then she slides back into the sleeping bag on the mattress at the base of the throbbing antenna above her.

In her head she keeps seeing Sara listening to that wall down below. One of the last conscious thoughts she has is that her lifè has veered wildly out of control lately and she likes to be in
control, even if it means assuming the well-defined role of slightly subservient daughter, its definitions threatened only by her role of lover. But Sara is gone now or perhaps, she thinks at the end, I’m the one who’s gone. Not long before the crash of morning light she sleeps the sleep of the dead, as Sara always put it, and dreams of her own birth, her mind ticking down all her memories like the last hours of summer.

Two women on a train. Their destination is the end of a lie, although they don’t yet know it’s a lie. The older woman has truly convinced herself that in her last days she wants to get as far from the lake as she can, that   she’ll die free of it at last; and thus the   
2029-2031
   younger woman arranged for them to leave   the Chateau X in the dead of night by boat, although not sailed by the young man who loved her so unrequitedly and to whom she couldn’t bear to explain she was leaving. Rather the two other women Brontë met months earlier from the Freek Recherche lunatique drove her and the Mistress along the serrated shoreline in a beat-up thirty-year-old

exposing my pregnant belly to the city and the outside world in order to try

Jag that barely had room for them to the port at Los Feliz, with its abandoned observatory looming in the hills above.

From there, over the course of twenty-two slow hours a ferry sailed the two women further inland to San Gabriel. Lulu is sick. On the ferry deck bundled in a large coat and scarf and swathed in the gray of the wind, black late-autumn countryside and the solar
casbahs of outer zedberia passing by and white waves on the lake like the veils of a hundred drowned brides, she seemed to Brontë only intermittently conscious of the journey. On the train now Brontë reproaches herself for bringing Lulu. But it’s too late, they can’t go back; they’re traveling on Armand’s money and, at that moment, Armand is shackled blindfolded and naked in the Chateau dungeon with the little red ball in his mouth, delirious far beyond any thrilling contemplation of the cracking of the walls around him and the lake beyond, delirious even beyond wondering when his Mistress Bronte is going to return. His henchmen wait in a limo on shore. In thirty-six hours it will begin to cross the narrow landfill of their minds that perhaps something’s amiss, at which point they’ll begin calling a cell phone that lies on the stone dungeon floor two wicked inches beyond the farthest expanse of Armand’s chains. Sometimes Armand can hear the footsteps of his Mistress in the Lair upstairs, or so he supposes. What he actually hears are the steps of another man searching the Chateau for one woman he knows of, and another he won’t admit to himself he knows of.

By early morning Brontë and Lulu reached San Gabriel port. They missed by twenty minutes a train that comes through only once a night, when it’s on time at all, and winds up in Chicago. Unsure how stupid she could count on Armand’s boys to be, or how far they might come to find her once they retrieved their boss, Brontë didn’t much care for the idea of sitting around the station

and prepare him for its chaos, and in that minute there in the toilet when I was

another twenty-four hours. In the small waiting room of the terminal, she found a kid who just put his girlfriend on the train, eating a sandwich out of a vending machine; she offered him one of Armand’s hundred-dollar bills if he would drive them to the next station and beat the train there doing it. Is she all right? the kid said looking at Lulu, chewing his sandwich in deep thought. She’s sick, Brontë answered. I need to get her on that train.
Forty-five minutes later the three were careening through the San Berdoo badlands into the rising morning sun. Slipping in and out of an ecstasy of sunlight through the windows, trying to remember the color blue, in her mind Lulu added greens to grays to see if they made blue together.

All she knows she remembers is red. Two hours after having left San Gabriel, they beat the train to the Barstow station by ten minutes. After moving Lulu slowly up the stairs of the train and down the aisle to a seat, Brontë was bringing up the luggage as the train pulled out; the conductor came by and sold her two tickets. In the concessions lounge several cars down, Brontë buys water, a sandwich, fruit salad from a can. She’s alarmed when Lulu won’t eat. Lulu surfaces consciousness long enough to look out the window and say, Where are we? Seven or eight other passengers are scattered throughout the car; a couple of other women several seats up whisper between them. You have to eat something, Brontë insists, tearing off some more bread. “Where’s the lake?” says Lulu.

“At least drink some water.”

Lulu takes a sip of the water Brontë gives her. “Where’s the lake.”

“Behind us. We’re going to Chicago.” Chicago? Lulu asks; for

losing him all I could do was hate myself for not having taken him back to the