Our Ecstatic Days (11 page)

Wang still sits on the cot, exhausted by his restless sleep. “So what is it?”

“Sir?”

“What did you wake me for?”

“Sir. Major Tapshaw reminds you it’s a full moon tonight, sir.”

“Tell him to send up the flare.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me a few minutes.”

“Sir.” The soldier leaves and for a while Wang sits on his cot looking at the blank square of wall where the picture was a few minutes ago. Tribulation II or Tribulation III … how can I be confused about such a thing? He gets up and moves to the desk and wakes the computer and turns the desk lamp off again; now there’s only the light from the computer. He takes off all his clothes and for a moment stands naked before the computer before he sits, inputting his password and opening the mail. He addresses a new message, staring at it as he composes in his head.

the birth canal of the lake then I have three visions there before me in the

With his one good hand, he
begins to type.

Wang looks over the message, considering the tone and double-checking the proper Upper/lower-case etiquette. He sends the message and waits to see if he receives an answer immediately, as sometimes he does, but after several minutes there’s still no response. He closes the program and dresses and pulls on his coat, and opens his door to the outer tunnel that leads above ground.

Outside his door in the tunnel, a guard snaps to attention. Like the soldier who just woke him, the guard wears the regulation lake-blue of the guerrilla insurgency as well as the blood-red beret. Hanging on the outside of the door is a picture identical to the one that was in his quarters a few minutes ago. “Guard,” he says.

“Sir,” says the guard.

“How long has this been here?” indicating the picture.

amniotic dark, or maybe more precisely two visions and a presence, with the

“Sir?”

“Hanging on this door. It wasn’t here when I came down a few hours ago: how long has it been here?”

“I couldn’t really say, sir.”

“You couldn’t really say? How long have you been standing here?”

“Sir, I came on duty at nineteen hundred hours, sir.”

“And was it here when you came on duty?”

“I don’t really remember, sir.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No, sir.”

“You don’t remember whether this was on this door right in front of you when you came on duty?”

“No, sir.”

“You’ve been staring at this door for almost two hours and you don’t remember if it was here?”

“Sir. Permission to speak.”

“Go ahead.”

“The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”

Wang’s shoulders slump in defeat. He grabs the top of the poster to rip it from the door but stops himself, and instead starts up the tunnel to the surface where he can hear the shelling in the distant night and the planes of the airlift coming and going.

Guards and soldiers snap to
attention as he passes. A dozen small fires dot the expanse of the campground, where guerrillas

first being of God Himself naked and erect, shackled and restrained,

who don’t have tents sleep on exposed cots or the ground. Major Tapshaw meets him at the end of the barricade. “It may,” Tapshaw says, “be any time now.”

“Transcriber?”

“Waiting for us.”

“You send up the flare?”

Tapshaw hesitates.

Wang says, “Do we have to have this discussion every time?”

When Tapshaw is angry his black face grows even darker and now in the night all Wang can see of him are his eyes. “I think it’s better,” Wang hears the tension in the major’s voice, “if one of the men takes you across the lake.”

“I know you do, because we have this discussion every time.”

Tapshaw turns and calls over his shoulder to a soldier who appears as though he’s been waiting. “Send up the flare,” Tapshaw tells him quietly. He turns back to Wang as Wang watches the guerrilla disappear toward the far rampart. “You knew you were going to wind up sending up the flare,” says Wang, “so why do we have to go through this?”

“I suppose I feel the need to keep making the same point.”

Together in the dark they start walking to the listening station. “I think by now I’ve gotten the point.”

“We don’t know anything about this boy. And he’s … slow.”

“We know he knows the lake better than anyone,” Wang answers, “that’s what we know.” The two men mount the steps of the barricade, and Wang barely glances up at the sky above him for the full moon he knows is there.

blindfolded and swaddled in latex, enslaved and cuffed around His wrists and

He’s a man who never
looks up. Over time, the acrophobia he developed in the last fifteen years has grown only more acute; as much as possible he lives on the latitude of his dreams.
He breaks into a sweat just climbing the barricade, less than twenty feet high. This is something he hasn’t told anyone; he can barely bring himself to look at the sky above him when in fact, once, in one of his aimless lives before this, he lived closer to the sky than the ground, as close to the sky as one can live without being on a mountain or in an airplane. “I hope this time,” Wang says, “we’re going to be able to hear something over the shelling.”

“We have a recorder with the transcriber.”

“I know but last time it took the recorder half the night to clean up the disk.”

“This transcriber is better than the last one. Maybe she’ll be able to catch parts of the transmission if the recorder doesn’t.” They reach the rampart where both the recorder and transcriber, waiting with recording equipment and a laptop, come to attention. “As you were,” Tapshaw says; from the station can be seen the distant lights of Baghdadville in the west and the abandoned downtown skyscrapers lit by searchlights to the northeast. The sky above Wang that he can’t bring himself to look at is illuminated by the flare, a star momentarily brighter than the flaming white moon. The entire L.A. bay lights up. As the flare fades and the sky becomes black again, Wang says to the transcriber, “Are we ready?” and she answers, her fingers at her keyboard; the recorder pulls at some cables. “How quickly can you clean this up and get it back to us?” Wang asks.

“Thirty minutes maybe,” the recorder answers. “Turn it on

ankles, red rubber ball-gag in His mouth and awaiting His humiliation, and

now,” Wang says, “so we get it all from the beginning.” They wait. A wind off the lake triggers a memory in Wang and he realizes it reminds him of the gust in his dream, blowing across the Square—and now the whole dream, which he had forgotten, returns to him. He’s thinking of the black water spreading across the Square when suddenly it comes from somewhere out over the lake, out of the night.

The shelling actually stops, as
though the bombs are listening too. An occasional plane from Occupied Albuquerque flies by overhead.

The broadcast isn’t that loud and doesn’t sound that far away, maybe no more than several miles. It’s over in a few minutes. For about ten seconds everything remains silent, then the shelling begins again. “You get it?” Wang says to the recorder and transcriber.

“As best I could,” the young woman transcribing says, apologetic, “I didn’t understand some of it….”

“It’s all right,” Wang says, “that’s what he’s for,” nodding at the recorder.

“I think I can get you a pretty clean copy,” says the recorder.

“Make an extra one,” Tapshaw tells them. “I want you both in Strategy as soon as you’re ready.”

He and Wang make their way back down the rampart. “Thirty minutes, Major?” Wang says, heading to his quarters; Tapshaw stops in his tracks. “Are we going to argue about the boy again?”

“Something else,” says Tapshaw.

“What?”

“We can talk about it in Strategy too.” Tapshaw has a funny look.

the second vision being of the Chinese man whose love letters to another

“All right. When they bring us the transmission.”

“I’m bringing in our geologist too.”

Our geologist? thinks Wang. “All right,” and he turns and heads back down the tunnel to his quarters. The same guard is at his door and the picture is still there, but Wang is relieved to note as he enters his quarters that the blank square of wall where he had
the other picture taken down is still blank. He goes quickly to the desk to the computer and fills in the password, but there’s still no answer to his message; he takes off his coat and lies back down on the cot, determined not to fall asleep. He’s beginning to doze, however, when the computer wakes him. “Message,” the cybervoice calmly announces. Wang sits up and looks at the time on the computer and realizes he’s due in the strategy room; first he checks the message box.

Wang looks at his watch. It’s almost 10:30. He’ll need to leave by 11:30 to safely make it across the lake in time, assuming his boatman responds to the flare, and Wang can never be sure about that until he actually appears. He smiles ruefully: If that boy ever doesn’t show, I’ll never live it down with Tapshaw. Wang deletes from the computer mailbox both the new message and his own that he sent earlier, turns off the account and the computer, pulls on his

woman named Kristin I intercepted by chance five years ago, who I then saw

coat and walks from his quarters, guard snapping to attention as he leaves. This time he heads down the tunnel in the other direction, deeper underground.

Wang reaches yet another tunnel that leads to a door where two guards part for him to pass, one of them opening the door for him. Inside, seven men and the female transcriber rise from their seats around the table as he enters. He’s a little surprised; this is at
least two more people than he expected. There are a couple of other officers besides Tapshaw plus an unfamiliar face that Wang assumes is the geologist, plus the cryptographer who always attends the post-broadcast sessions. Including the transcriber and the recorder, all of them sit around an egg-shaped table. Wang takes his seat and Tapshaw nods at the recorder who puts a disk on the sound system at the end of the room.

As the disk begins to play, Tapshaw hands another disk to Wang, who slips it in his coat pocket. The sound of the earlier broadcast is reproduced with new clarity; when it’s finished the nine sit around the table pondering. “Do you want to hear it again?” Tapshaw finally asks. “All right,” answers Wang, for no reason at all. The song begins again, very martial and anthemic
Blood on the T. V., ten o ’clock news. /Souls are invaded, heart in a groove. / Beatin’ and beatin’ so outta time. / What’s the mad matter with the church chimes?
“What’s the matter with the what?” one of the officers says; there’s the same perplexed silence as the song continues. “Church chimes,” the transcriber finally answers, although she seems less than certain.

The song ends and after several speechless moments the cryptographer finally suggests, “It seems clear the ‘church chimes’

working the docks out at Port Justine with the small round monocle in his hand

are the key.”

“What about the lavender room?” the young transcriber asks, immediately mortified by her temerity. Several of the men around the table glare at her. “Well it’s a good question,” Wang says, then asks her, “Do you have a hard copy?” and the grateful young woman hands him a copy of the transcription. He begins to
rise from his seat and everyone else begins to rise with him when Tapshaw says, “There’s something else.”

“Oh yes.”

“The other matter I mentioned.”

“Yes.” Wang looks at his watch; it’s almost eleven. “It can’t wait?”

“If you don’t mind. Particularly given this transmission.”

“All right.”

Everyone sits again. “This is Professor Stafford,” Tapshaw says.

“Professor.”

“Sir.” Stafford the geologist momentarily hesitates. “I’ll try to be as brief as possible.”

“I would appreciate it.”

“One night,” he begins, “about nine years ago, there was … a strange geological disturbance in the area.”

“I was under the impression the whole last sixteen years had been a strange geological disturbance.”

“Well, yes sir,” the geologist says, “but this was unique even by recent standards.”

“You don’t have to call me sir.” Sometimes he can’t help it

“Uh,” the geologist looks around at the others, confused, “OK. As you know, after the lake first began to appear—as you say, sixteen years ago—within those first few years it rose very

through which could be seen the lake, who watched me climb the billboard

quickly, completely flooding most of the basin and some of the outlying valleys. After that, over the next five years or so the lake rose more slowly.”

“May I interrupt?” Wang asks.

“Of course.”

“Am I correct no one’s ever established the reason for the lake in the first place?”

“No, sir. I mean, that’s correct, sir.”

Sighing heavily, Wang continues. “Or where it comes from.”

“Well, we know where it comes from.”

“The hole in the bottom.”

“Yes.”

“But beyond that, no one’s ever established why a hole appeared in the city and a lake came up through it.”

“That’s correct.”

“All right.”

“One night nine years ago, the lake rose three feet—there feet and two inches by precise calculations—and feel again to exactly the level it had been, all within a matter of minutes. No one has ever accounted for it.”