Our Ecstatic Days (35 page)

over so I might consider grinding your balls to dust under My heel. Get up. Get up! What a stupid slave! There! that’s for being such a stupid slave. There and there and there. Now get up. you’re not even amusing now. you’re not even a diversion. Come here now, w(W)e’re going down to the dungeon. Come on or I’ll yank you down. W(w)e’re going down now. Get up off the floor, you disgust Me, come over here. Put this shackle around your foot
and lock it. Now the other. Now one wrist, now the other. There. That’s more like it. It’s so you. Here, your collar’s loose, let’s tighten it, there. Pale is such a nice color on you. Raise your arms now: there. Slip the cuffs that bind your wrists up over this hook above your head. There. Now w(W)e swaddle you in latex, start at your head and leave just enough exposed that you might barely breathe, wrap you tight so you see nothing, wrap you tight so you hear little but the muffled moan of the world coming up behind you, the world you’ve made moan for so long. So that every sense is bound, deprived … wrap you from head to your feet leaving the almighty god-ass exposed bare for the sake of the lash of course, crank up the hook a little and hang you from your cuffs and hoist you until your toes barely touch the floor: there. So that when I flog you, you’ll spin in the air like a black cocoon, twirling above all the dead bluejays covering the dungeon floor around you. Let the god-toy try to imagine, for only a moment, what it might be like to spend eternity suspended in the Uncertain, as the rest of us have … and while you consider that, I think it will entertain Me to whip you for a while—there and there and there—before w(W)e get to the good part I mean, the best part where w(W)e make you a woman. As best you can through the latex, listen to the lake outside the walls, listen while you can before it dies. Hear the lake? or is it the blood pounding in your ears from the blows of My crop and the crown of thorns around your throat. OK then.

but since I’ve gotten confused in my way and can no longer be sure to which

That’s enough. That’s enough of that, you’ve become tedious, as you’ve always been tedious in your fashion. Let’s lower you from the ceiling and feminize you now, make a woman of you now. No I’m not going to cut it off: please. It’s so trite. I was many things in My life but not trite. It’s rather an unimpressive specimen anyway if I may say so, for supposedly being the Ultimate Specimen. No let’s lower you from the ceiling and slip
the cuffs off the hook while I dig something out of the old tool chest here … get back down on your knees, you’ll get used to it. The rest of us have. The rest of us got very used to it a long time ago. Tell us, what’s it like from the other angle? How is it gazing up for a change?
Don’t look at Me.
Did I say you could look at Me? I asked what it was like, I didn’t tell you to
do
it … what a
very stupid slave …
I guess it’s all just a little unfamiliar for you though. I guess it takes some getting used to. Well tell Us about it. Yes tell Us all about it. Where’s My evidence? is what I want to know, that you ever kept your end of the bargain. Where’s the evidence except a vision or two. Was that supposed to satisfy Me, a vision or two? where’s the evidence. That he was ever OK. That he was ever safe. That he was even loved, maybe. That he wasn’t so painfully lonely in the night. That’s what I want to know, I who gave him up. I who haven’t gone a day without seeing his small face, hearing his small voice, every little thing he said, polite little dictator with all his whys and answers to the chaos of the world. Oh here’s what I was looking for. A little large but appropriate I would think for a god-toy, suitable I think for the ultimate slave, here it is … then bend over. Bend over now. Bend over and put your face in the ground. Arch your back and open yourself behind. A little large but you know, this is what it is to be a woman in your world. This is what it is. This is what it’s always been. There. What do you think of that. How do you feel about that. What

lake I’ve returned, then swimming up up and up to break the surface I can

ridiculous female could ever have suggested God is a woman. What ludicrous bitch could ever have thought the viciousness of God anything but male. Are you God for the way you give us children, or the way you take them from us? that’s what I still want to know. Here, a little deeper I think. Here, here, here, yes. What’s the matter. Yes. Here, you don’t like it so much? Here, yes. This is for, you know, all of them. Isaac and the carpenter
kid and all the eldest sons of an Egyptian night, and, well, for the little wildman too. For him too. Here then. Here! and … I … here, and … oh. Oh I…. No. No I swore to myself I wouldn’t, no. I swore to myself I wouldn’t let you. Swore to myself you would never make me cry like this again … but You have. Swore You never would but You have … oh no. Oh no. Let me die now. What are You waiting for. Let me die now. Let this dream be over now. i’ve only been waiting for it since the moment i lost him. Since that moment i … since that moment i returned to the boat and he was gone; so let me go now, so i can hope on just the merest of chances there
is
somewhere else Over There where he’s waiting right now, waiting for me, and i’ll hold him to me again, pull him to me, smash his soft hair in my hands and press his small eyelids to my lips. Let me go. There’s nothing here for me anymore, no other delusion to make me believe in my own life anymore, if only for a minute: no Domination or submission to give me purpose: no method for going on. i don’t care about Your subservience or Domination, i don’t care about Your humiliation or Glory. This is the ritual no mother can win, when God gives a mother her child just so she might go mad with love for him. There’s nothing here anymore so i want to go now. You there in the doorway, come and take me then. What are You waiting for. Come on then. Come here. Come on. Please. Please i beg You. i’m begging You. Is that what You want, is that what You’ve been

therefore as well no longer be sure to which gondola I’ve returned either,

waiting for, to hear me beg? then i’m begging You. i’m begging You now. Please come take me … please i’m begging. The walls can sing now, it’s time for their song, i don’t know what more i can do than beg You. i’m begging then, i’m pleading. Come on then, please. Yes please. Come on. Please. Please. Please.

Someone in the doorway. Not yet fifty years old but ancient in her grief she rises up on her elbows to try and see in the dark,
falls back, eyes wandering the ceiling looking for the way out of her life. In the dark she hears his footsteps, waits for some explosion of final pain or deliverance or both, not really bracing for it because she doesn’t have the strength to brace; and when a hand falls on her forehead to calm her, as if she were a child having a bad dream and talking in her sleep with her fingers, it takes her a moment to think to herself maybe it’s not God after all, maybe it’s someone else.

In her bed, she turns to the shadow beside her and, reaching out, puts her own hand in his hair, and remembers from long ago a smell of tall dry grass. At first it catches in her throat but she finds the will to ask it anyway: “But who is it,” she murmurs in the dark, “are you …?”

“I’m Nothing,” says a voice she knows, that she knows she knows, transformed by all the years though it is, “a Bright Light.”

or whether there truly is another gondola, or ever was, or whether there was

ever even Another Side at all except in my red hysteria, or whether I truly

swim from personal chaos to collective god or from personal god to collective

chaos, or whether they’re the same chaos, the same god, the same lake, the

The night before it
happened, she had a dream about her father. She was crossing a square in the dark, making her way past a huge fountain through concentric rings of symmetrically staggered stone benches. Hovering over the fountain was a bronze world patched up from the pieces of other shattered worlds. Particularly since it was dark she didn’t recognize him at first, as though he was only the ghost of someone she was supposed to have known; when he said, so quietly and invisibly in the dark it almost could have been the fountain speaking, “The Age of Chaos is here,” she woke thinking, What, it’s just arriving now?

same empty gondola I left just a minute ago, and I don’t know but that as I rise

At first she didn’t even
think to call him. They had been estranged for several years anyway; the last time they had talked was right after her mother’s death, although she would get cards
from him along with the occasional, tentative e-mail she never answered.

Even that day, she picked up the phone and put it down several times before dialing. Then naturally the call wouldn’t go through and in a way she was relieved. But it nagged at her, the feeling she had, and grew stronger in the months since her dream, until it became something much more than a distraction from her studies and her confused deliberations over her sexuality and everything else going on in her life; it got to the point when everything reminded her of her dream and this feeling about it for no reason she could figure: walking her West Hollywood neighborhood, passing the classic old movie-star apartments with their turrets, the little Italian eateries and xerox stores and travel agencies and mailbox rentals and gay fetish shops and video outlets and cappuccino stands, and especially the sight of the Century City towers when she took the bus down Santa Monica Boulevard to the university. Over the next six months she might have expected to have more dreams about him, or perhaps the same dream over and over, each elaborating on the previous; but instead she stopped dreaming altogether. Instead she woke from each night as though it was a void, as though she had slipped into the night’s very womb, dark, still, swaddled in the unseen and unlistened; this she found more ominous.

up to break the surface of the water whether, even if I make it, even if I get

Even the winter twilight when she
finally found herself in a cab heading down Hollywood Boulevard as it made its way through
traffic before finally turning south on La Cienega, after it had been all she could do just to decide to go, she still resisted the temptation to ponder the true nature of her feelings about him.

Deep down, she really wasn’t so sure her resistance was completely about anger. If she was honest with herself, she wasn’t even sure most of it was about anger. When she discovered at the airport that she had left her ticket back at the old hotel where she lived, she was relieved, like when her phone calls wouldn’t go through those first few days; she thought perhaps random accident was letting her off the hook. But she knew it wasn’t random accident. In her mind she could see the ticket in plain sight on her bookshelf: she had “forgotten” it accidentally on purpose, naturally, which was a bit pathetic, since it was an electronic ticket and she didn’t need the hard copy anyway. Checking in and making her way through all the new security, in her seat on the plane she finally resigned herself to the trip. It was a red-eye, so she was glad she had cashed in the miles for an upgrade.

Arriving at dawn, she took a cab into the city. It was too early to check into her hotel room, so she left her bags behind the front desk and took a walk outside. But it was too early and cold for walking too, and she was exhausted, upgrade or no. She gave herself permission not to have to deal with anything today. She lingered in the hotel coffee shop eating a muffin and drinking tea and reading the newspaper; at eleven, after she had been waiting three hours, she was able to get into her room, although going to

there, even if my lungs don’t burst first not even having taken a gulp of air

sleep now didn’t seem a good idea. She spent the rest of the day reading and watching the news cable, looking out the window—she had a nice view of the science museum across the street and the park only half a block east—passing the hours before she decided it was late enough for her to order room service. The dinner was all right but she didn’t like the way the waiter looked at her. Afterward she pushed the tray out into the hall, called
housekeeping to let them know it was there, then took a hot bath. By now she was almost too tired and—she had to confess—emotionally wrought as well, and it took her awhile to get to sleep.

She woke the next morning in
dread. Trying to read the morning Times she was entirely unsettled; she dressed and, as she left the hotel, turned to the park rather than flagging a cab. She spent

before my descent, I don’t know whether I’ll have the courage, I don’t know

several hours walking in the park then went to a restaurant and had for lunch something she forgot even as she was eating it. Then she went back to the room. She couldn’t even bring herself to go to a museum or movie; instead she lay in bed stunned by the afternoon. By around five o’clock, when it was too late to do today what she had come for, she was furious with herself. She didn’t
sleep all night, and by morning was both exhausted and wired. She skipped breakfast, skipped the newspaper, dressed and went downstairs and caught a cab heading downtown.

Thinking she was too early and she should kill some time walking around, she made the mistake of having the taxi drop her off on Seventh Avenue where the streets of the West Village got all crazy like in L.A., shooting off in diagonals. When she finally found the address, she looked for the manager among the names posted outside, buzzed him and they had a garbled conversation over the intercom in which she tried to explain who she was; finally he let her in, more out of frustration than anything else. Inside, he was standing in his office doorway . When he saw her, he brightened a bit like men always did. “Yes?” he said.

“We spoke last week,” she said, “remember? About my father. I called you from Los Angeles.”

The realization sinking in, he nodded somberly and motioned her to follow. They climbed the stairs; at one point he turned to look at her over his shoulder as though to say something, but whatever it was may not have seemed sufficient, and instead he said nothing. On the third floor he unlocked a door and opened it for her. For a moment they just stood together silently in the hallway before she went on in ahead. The manager watched as the young woman roamed the empty apartment and then, again as though he was going to say something, left her.