Our Ecstatic Days (25 page)

He’s about as happy to see me as I am to see him. For a moment the boat just bobs on the water in the afternoon shadows of the grotto. “Cunt,” he finally says.

I let that one pass. “Look,” I say, “here’s the money back,” thrusting it in front of me with both hands.

“What do you mean?” he says.

“Here’s your money back. Tell your boss I’m sorry.”

Well what can I say. You’re not going to believe this, but—Turns out Armand doesn’t want his money back, and he’s not sent his boys out to beat me up or kill me or ransack the Chateau. Turns out he wants me to come back up to the house
and do the whole thing over again.
Without the other girls joining in this time but all the rest of it: the blindfold, the cuffs, the little red ball in his mouth—he
especially
liked the little red ball—the whole thing except we’ll do it in private or, if I feel safer, he’ll come out to the Chateau and send his bodyguards away and we’ll do it here, all night if I’m agreeable and he’ll pay me double what he paid the first time, up front. I have to wear the white lace corset and stockings, though. That’s the only stipulation.

Men! Fucking unbelievable, what? I just stand there with my mouth open and finally stammer I need a bit of time to think about it, because I don’t want to say yes and I’m afraid to say no. Back ’cross the lake goes the boat to Armand, from the grotto steps

missing from the world, and although I didn’t yet know it was growing inside

I watch it cross the lake, trying to think what I’m going to do. I don’t want to go back to that house, I tell the Mistress, but I don’t want these boys out at the Chateau either. There’s a lot I don’t tell the Mistress. I don’t tell her everything that happened that night in the hills because every time I see her now she just looks older, she seems to come out of her bedroom less and less, and to move more and more slowly—and I’m onto the business with the
lapsinthe. I’ve figured out what that’s about, to the extent it makes sense at all, she thinks one night she’s going to finally take one too many that’s going to put her over the edge once and for all, whatever the edge is. But I figure the last thing she needs to hear about is what happened that night at Armand’s, just so she can worry about me. I tell her a bit about Kale, not really so much except, you know, There’s this boy—because there’s not that much I know to tell, is there? except he’s strange and sort of sweet and he’s in love with me. Yes she whispers they all fall a little in love with you, and I say no, this boy’s
in love
with me. And what do you think about that, she asks, and I say well it’s not something I can reciprocate, is it (perhaps she’s checking for some weakness in my lesbian resolve), but he’s sweet I say and very strange and I don’t want to hurt him (I haven’t really told her how he saved my little pixie behind) and the last time I saw him, I saw it in his eyes, this hurt, and I just wanted to run because I had never seen a boy hurt like that over me, not like that. I thought I was happy making the men cry a bit, what with a good healthy thrashing that would get a few tears flowing and the blood moving—but not like that, and it shocked me. And the Mistress she says well then you know you should send him away. It’s only right. You should send him away. And I say, I know.

Then we’re quiet in front of the fire. What is it, I say, and she smiles thinly, It’s death, she says, “spreading through the baseboards and ceiling,” and I can’t really say what that last bit

me and my son was growing with it, still I somehow knew, and everywhere that

means but I guess I know anyway, and I suppose I’m not that surprised. But how? I ask, and she answers, It’s not always easy to say, sometimes it’s something unbearably sad you never recover from … sometimes when a woman dies, it’s an act of sacrifice.

One thing I know, though, she says after a few more moments. One thing I know—and she says it with more force
than I’ve heard her say anything—I know I don’t want to die on this lake.

I go to bed not long after that and, lying in bed and struggling to fall asleep, is it a Lapse I have, like everyone else on the lake used to have all the time when the lake was sinking? Or a dream? Or a dislodged memory. That night of the Freek Recherche lunatique, did I drink that shot after all and now I’m having a ’sinthe flashback? Whatever, there I am back on that night I first swam to the Chateau and the Mistress, back on that night I first came up out of the lake, back under the water not so much floating up to the surface but
expelled,
by something below me,
born,
out of some other life, the placenta of a previous consciousness trailing behind me as I make my way to the surface. Bits and pieces of whoever I was before, falling away from my naked body, and then bits and pieces of distant recollection falling away as I swim upward, flashes of a remembrance washed away in the cold of the lake, a horrific flash of rubble and fire and confusion and terror and chaos and of having been hurled through the opening of the lake in a full-force gale of ash and obliteration. Control and its loss assert themselves as the parameters of my new psyche, right there in the water. And somehow I know now, returning to this moment in my Lapse or dream or memory or whatever it is, that this passage is different for everyone isn’t it, that it’s a passage without time, a passage that might have taken me a moment or a hundred years, from somewhere that was a

I went then I went as the bearer of chaos, with everything coming apart around

moment or a hundred years ago, and that whatever was on the other side of the hole at the bottom of the lake is different for each of us, that whatever it is this birth-passage brought me from was not necessarily where anyone else comes from, or where anyone else would go to if she were to try and go back, if it were even possible to go back. This particular passage through the opening of the lake, from wherever I came, it was my own, my unique
journey from a unique place and moment, and more than that, from my own personal moment of unique chaos, whatever that was, for unique reasons having to do uniquely with me, beyond all control. And that’s all I understand about it other than that somewhere in my rise to the surface I have a vision of the Mistress or someone much like her, swimming right past me except going the other way.

I also have a vision of Kale I don’t understand: chaos’ son. Or perhaps it is that I’m chaos’ daughter. And it’s not till finally the Lapse finishes that I sleep, my sound sleep from which no one and nothing can stir me, the sleep of the dead….

These are the memoirs of Brontë Blu, dungeon-mistress of the Chateau X, white avenging angel of the Hollywood Hills, God’s little joke on the male gender.

The afternoon before, Kale watches the powerboat with Armand’s men heading for the Chateau. Sitting in his own boat under the eaves of the shoreline trees, he takes his oar in hand ready again to go to Her rescue; he waits because he doesn’t want to interject himself too soon and agitate the situation unnecessarily. When he sees Armand’s boat leave, he begins rowing hurriedly toward the grotto and gets there in time to see Her disappearing back into the Chateau through the door at the top of the steps; for a while there on the lake he waits, watches, to assure himself everything is all right before he starts back out to the Hamblin. Halfway to the Hamblin he turns to look back at the Chateau and

me, upheaval and confusion in my path, radios going haywire and subways

see if perhaps She has come out onto the terrace to wave to him, but She doesn’t appear and he realizes he doesn’t want to go to the Hamblin, that now it only reminds him of Her. So he turns west and makes his way along the shoreline. The boat drifts awhile and he finally beaches it about a mile from the Chateau, at yet another small cove where some of the trees are still black from a fire almost a quarter of a century before. The lake there seems blacker
too. he gets out of the boat into the black water and pulls it up onto shore and ties it to one of the black trees.

kale lies on the ground and stares up through the black leaves at the gray afternoon sky and has a childhood memory of when it used to be blue, he doesn’t know that what he feels in his chest is the deflowering of a virgin heart, because until not so long ago it was as much the heart of an owl as a man. he doesn’t want to think about Her but he cannot, i cannot
not
think about Her. i lie awhile then get back in the boat and go back out to the place in the water where i can see the light where She lives, i wait for Her to come out and see me and wave to me and call, i would sleep next to Her and not touch Her but just watch Her while She sleeps if She said to, i would touch Her long gold hair only if She said, i cannot
not
think of Her gold hair. Why can i not
not
think of Her smile, i would be Her slave all the time, Her best true slave i who have led armadas of owls, i who have multiplied and divided tides and winds, i who Big Agua has never ruled. Slave to no one and nothing else, i try to remember out on the water in my boat what it was not to have known Her. i wish it could be that way again but i don’t wish it. i want to not remember Her but i don’t want it. i want to have never known Her but i don’t want it. i want to forget Her but i don’t, i would rather die about Her than live past Her. What does it mean that i feel this, i must be sick some way. Divide the times i think of Her by the gold strands of Her hair, multiply that by the light of Her mouth—but i can’t figure the

breaking down and glass buildings shattering and cherry blossoms from the

numbers of it. It’s math i don’t know. Why does it hurt me to have known Her. Why can i no longer hear the sound of my own heartbeat, or any heart on the water but Hers. If i was a girl would She want me then.

i cry for Her like a girl please, isn’t that enough.

Next day i wait again for Her sign, there is no sign. Next day and the next and next, and then one day i take the boat out to
Her steps and Her door and knock, i wait in the boat for Her sign, there’s no sign, i go back and knock on the door again. She doesn’t come and i wait longer before i go inside.

i’ve never been inside in the day before, i think i should take off my clothes like night-time and so i go through the rooms without my clothes and think when i see Her i’ll get down at Her feet, through each door i think She’ll be there and i’ll get down at Her feet. But She isn’t there. She isn’t there and standing in the afternoon sunlight in the middle of the empty lair he realizes she’s gone. Realizes she’s gone not just for an hour, not just for a single sun or moon, not just for a single room but gone with who was here with her; clothes are gone as well, there’s that feeling of place when it’s been abandoned, and it’s the feeling of his existence because he’s been abandoned too.

Not for the first time.

He goes out onto the terrace of the Chateau and says, more to himself at first, where are You. He barely knows what it is, his own crying. He tells himself he hates her now but knows he doesn’t. Standing there on the terrace, over the sound of the lake he listens for her heart, but wherever it is now, it’s too far away. Standing there on the terrace, looking out over the lake listening, it occurs to him for the first time they’re all gone too, the disciples. The faithful who for years worshipped at the waterline of the Chateau X are gone and it occurs to him that in fact now that he thinks about it, he hasn’t seen them for a while; and that’s when he

trees set loose in a special panic, and the question What’s missing from the

knows for certain she isn’t coming back.

Turning his back on the lake he walks back into the Chateau from the terrace and through the main lair, back out through the transitional chambers into the grotto where he edges along the small stone walkway that circles the water leading to an old door with a brass ring for a knob that he used to know very well. He finds the door slightly ajar and opens it and steps
in, gazing over the shelves that once held in captivity thousands of melodies from a thousand snakes expired in menstrual blood, but now the shelves are empty as if ransacked although the webs in the corners indicate the Vault was already vacated long ago, the songs having escaped of their own accord or having been set free by someone who couldn’t stand to keep them anymore.

He thinks maybe he might find one in particular but when he doesn’t he leaves the Vault and, one more time, goes back up into the Lair to stand gazing around him in a daze, seeing nothing for a moment until, blinked clear of tears, his eyes lock on the mantle above the hearth. He walks over to the hearth: i don’t remember this he thinks—but it had always been night-time before, his eyes cast down in subjugation. Be a man who never looks up and you’re likely to miss something.

i don’t remember this here. He holds the toy monkey in his hand then goes back out through the transitional chamber into the entryway, back out onto the stone steps of the grotto to his boat. Still naked he begins to row back out onto the lake, and rows for a while east by southeast then veering slightly northward from the single coordinate drawn above him by the line of a collapsed skytram from many years before. After a while he comes to the place. This is the place he’s rowed by and past and over many times as though it meant nothing to him, as though it held no recollection of anything at all for him; but that was night-time and this is day, and maybe he’s known all along anyway. All along

world? calling up to me from that womb of mine that already predated me, that

he’s known, ignoring this place as if it couldn’t hurt his heart, but now everything hurts his heart, and he rows here and stops and stares down into the water, leaning over the boat and putting his face as close to the water as he can without capsizing, wondering if god lives down there and might explain something to him at long last. Out on the wide open lake at the place, above the spot, without her, abandoned again and his heart feeling not only what
it’s never felt but all the things it’s felt but denied, breaking beyond what he can stand, he believes he’s drifted into the fourteenth room of the Hotel of Thirteen Losses. When god doesn’t talk to him from beneath the water Kale finally begins to row back along the shoreline he followed the last time he saw her disappearing into the Chateau doorway. He’s stopped crying, rowing relentlessly until he reaches the black cove of burned trees and black water where he climbs out of the boat and lies where he lay before, with the red monkey in his hand on the black Zed shore.