Our Ecstatic Days (27 page)

“Where are we going?” Sara finally says almost snappishly, Sara who never snaps, Sara of the endless empathy but no true sympathy. Sara who believes that, beyond the point of logical self-exhaustion, sorrow is only an illusion, a collapse of fortitude on the part of the afflicted.

“I want to go up,” the girl answers.

“Up?”

“To the top.”

when a girl dreams all the possibilities of her life in a way she ’ll never do

The older woman looks up. “At this time of night?”

For a moment the prospect seems a salvation to the girl. For a moment the girl is convinced their relationship will survive if Sara just comes with her. Sometimes a moment presents an unexpected, inexplicable test; the girl says, with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, “I know someone who can take us.”

“Who?”

“This man I know.”

“This man you know? What man you know?”

No, the girl thinks, this isn’t the way the conversation is supposed to go. “Someone I’ve been doing some work for at the library. I told you about him.”

“No….”

“I
did,”
the girl says, almost furious now.

Sara doesn’t answer for a moment. That means she remembers. “I didn’t know you and this man were such friends,” she says with something almost resembling envy; has Sara ever sounded jealous? Is this a positive sign, or the last straw? As though lost in thought, there in the square the older woman begins to walk in small circles, each taking her off somewhere between the fountain and the buildings beyond. “Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name,” the girl says, “Sara, the men are the ones with the penises, remember? Not my sort, and he’s way older than I am—” and stops herself but too late. In the dark Sara

again, and for that reason after he was born, back from Tokyo and living in the

doesn’t even raise her head to this, just laughs one of her quiet, superior little laughs. The girl has no idea what to say now, feels futile about everything. Actually she has no idea how old the man is, but he’s surely younger than Sara. Now the two women have managed to make their way to the edge of the square and Sara leans up against one of the massive walls.

They don’t talk for a while and now it’s all seeming impossible to the girl. She suppresses an urge to turn on her radio, knowing it will be taken as a sign she’s finished, when she’s surprised to hear Sara, looking up at the buildings—and in that voice one can sometimes barely hear, it seems so calm—ask, “He can take us up there?”

“Yes.”

“How far?”

“All the way.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“What, does he own it or something?”

Now the girl looks up, leaning back farther until it frightens her and she almost topples. “Really I don’t know that much about him. He’s someone who came into the library and asked me to run a search for him, and in return said he could take me up any time.” Beginning to inwardly fume, she insists, “I
know
I told you about him.”

Hotel Hamblin about the time the lake first appeared, part of me was actually

“Yes,” Sara admits quietly, “I remember. Well,” she says, “not the part about going up. Have you been up before?”

“Naturally not.”

“Well. You might have. It’s not like you couldn’t have.”

“Well, I haven’t. Have you?”

“I don’t know him, this is your secret friend.”

“He’s not a secret friend. I meant have you ever been up
before.”

“No.”

“So let’s go then,” the girl says hopefully.

“Where do we find this person?”

“Well—” and she has to confess he may not exactly have had this time of night in mind. She looks around. The fountain with the bronze frankenstein world in the middle is empty; she thinks of it as a frankenstein world because it looks like parts of two or three worlds stuck together. Now she tries to figure out where he told her and realizes the square is bigger than she expected and that finding him will be more daunting than she anticipated. “Let’s just go over—” and then notices Sara doing it again; it would be just like Sara, the girl thinks, to regard healing buildings as a step up from healing people.

Running her fingers along the wall, Sara has her ear pressed to it, listening.

glad for Kirk’s nightmares, part of me was glad for Kirk calling to me in the

Now that the girl thinks about it, the baby thing and the whole business of listening to sick buildings, they started about the same time. It’s a bit cracked isn’t it? she thinks. Sara who’s otherwise so supremely composed and logical—what’s it really about anyway? A melodramatic affectation to justify a pretentious profession that’s just highly lucrative listening at its most harmless and, at its most intrusive, a violation of the
psyche’s inner machinery some semanticist was on to something, the girl muses to herself, when she introduced to each other the words “the” and “rapist.” At this moment of crisis between them, the girl wonders if Sara is having a breakdown of some sort, if listening to women’s voices in walls is the first fracture in the imperturbable façade of a woman who’s made indominability an identity. Watching Sara now the younger woman is about to ask, Isn’t this the sort of thing they do on the West Coast? but says instead, “Don’t tell me
this
building is dying.”

But she’s never seen a look like this on Sara’s face before, the look she has now, not ever. It actually frightens the girl, makes her back away from the other woman; and she realizes one of the things she’s loved Sara for is the promise that she’ll never have on her face a look like this. Sara answers, something in her voice, “Let’s go home.”

The girl finds it in herself to insist, “I’m going up.”

Sara steps toward her in the dark. “Let’s go home,” she says again, a tension in her voice the girl has never heard. Backing away from the wall, Sara looks up: “Come home with me now,” like a mother—and the younger woman can’t stand it. No more mothers, she thinks, I’m done with mothers and that includes ever being one;

night from his crib Mama? as though he feared I was the thing missing from

and she turns where she stands, “I’m going up,” and clutching her radio weaves her way through the concentric rings of symmetrically staggered stone benches surrounding the enormous fountain. I’m going up she keeps telling herself, listening for the other woman’s footsteps behind her and, when she doesn’t hear them, almost turning to look. But there’s no point to it. I’m not going back. Either Sara is still back there at the wall waiting for
me or she’s gone, but either way—The girl sees the dark form of someone sitting at the edge of the fountain in the waning light of a moon that’s halfway between menstruation and fertility; at first she thinks perhaps it’s him. “I want to go up,” she says before realizing it’s a stranger to whom her instinctive response is the same as always, pulling her coat closer to cover and protect herself. A stranger: the ghost of someone she’s supposed to have known, she thinks, when he says so quietly and invisibly in the dark it could almost be the fountain speaking, “The Age of Chaos is here.”

Jeez, it
is
getting to be like the West Coast ’round this place. “What?” she says but doesn’t wait for him to repeat it; now she does turn back to look, but Sara is gone. Unsettled, the girl stumbles off into the shadows of the square: It was ridiculous to think I might just wander ’round and run into him; I had no idea it was so big. Probably it was never a serious offer anyway, a polite gesture of thanks to a young researcher in the uptown university library who agreed to help in a wild goose chase. Probably he was just hitting on me?—even if a girl develops an instinct for such a thing and, instinctively, she doesn’t think so. Now it all appears so preposterous, doesn’t it. So it seems something of a miracle when, there in the other building’s outer lights, he says, “Hello,” just as she’s practically broken into a frightened sprint. “Oh,” she says.

his world, as though his very life might grow into the answer to the question I

“Are you all right?”

She gazes over her shoulder at the fountain behind her. “I, uh … I’m a bit surprised I found you.”

“I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I know. It’s late. Impulse. Spontaneous and all.”

He’s a man who’s spent half a life meditating on the laws of impulse, only to reject them. “Did you want to go up?” he says.

“Can we? Still?”

He says nothing but motions her to follow. They circle around the corner of the building to a side door he opens with a key from a ring of more keys than she’s ever seen; closing the door behind them, he turns on a light in a concrete stairwell and they make their way through two more doors until they’re inside crossing the dim lobby. He stops for a moment, mulling.

She almost asks, Is something wrong? and then, I’m sorry, it’s so late, this is an imposition—but really her thoughts already have returned to Sara. In her head she keeps seeing Sara listening to that wall outside, then Sara gone and the wall empty. On the other side of the lobby, at a row of elevators, the man unlocks one. Looking around at all the flags she absently wonders how he knows which key goes to which elevator; she says, Do you live here? and he says, In the elevator? and she answers, No—and then realizes Oh, it’s a joke. He makes jokes. I keep a little room

had carried inside me, part of me was glad he was having his nightmares of

with a cot, he explains, although I’m not supposed to, “they don’t know,” nodding at the omnipresent
they
outside. Seeing him for the third time, after twice at the library, she finally notices he’s good looking. More attuned as she is to the looks of women, she finds the phenomenon of lovely men interesting in the abstract—something she sometimes notices even before straight women, who often are distrustful of and on their guard against lovely men.
She has the luxury of being awed by such men; she makes a conscious effort not to look at his hand. How many are there? she asks, and he says what? and she says elevators, and he says a couple hundred, more or less, between the two buildings, counting the freight lifts; he’s not exactly sure. The Emperor of Elevators, she says, and when he doesn’t immediately respond is mortified: was that a slur? she wonders. Is it the Japanese or Chinese who have an emperor?

She’s not sure which he is anyway. She’s thinking frantically when he nods, “The Emperor of Elevators,” with that slight smile; he seems genuinely amused. “It’s an aversion to ground-level,” he elaborates. In the elevator she’s warm in her light coat and almost takes it off, and checks herself: a self-conscious pair we would be, she thinks, me trying not to look at his hand and him trying not to look at my tits; but she does free from her coat her long gold hair that’s been tucked under. “You should be a pilot,” she suggests.

“That would be an aversion to gravity,” he answers, “which is different.” Staring at the ascending numbers above the doors, he says firmly, “The square outside, for instance: I don’t like it.” After they’ve gone seventy or so floors, changing elevators on one of the sky lobbies, she says, “I’m sorry I haven’t had any luck finding what you’re looking for.”

the lake or lost monkeys, because it meant at least he was dreaming and

“It’s all right,” he answers. “I didn’t give you much to work with.”

“I’ve done a search on everything before and up through June ’89, for anything with ‘higher light’ or, in case you misunderstood, ‘higher life.’ You’re sure none of the ones I’ve found is—”

“I’m afraid not.”

“It’s not some sort of hymn, or gospel—”

“No.”

“But you would know if you heard it, right?”

“Yes, I would,” although over the years he’s become not so certain.

“They need to develop a software,” she jokes, “where you can hum it into the computer.”

“I doubt it would help. I’m not much of a singer.” The elevator stops and the doors open. They step out and, overwhelmed, she almost faints: Mega, she mutters to herself, tottering a bit where she stands and reaching for the wall beside her, almost dropping the radio. Before her a quadrant of the world lies in moonlight; she’s convinced she can see the curve of the earth in a white shimmering arc against the black of space. The river far below to the west glitters, and a lunar gale howls somewhere in the night sky beneath them. Looming overhead is a towering transmission mast three or four hundred feet high. “Sorry,” he says, “I should have prepared you. Actually,” he says, “no one ever comes to the

therefore I knew he hadn’t inherited his dreamlessness from me as I must have

top of this one, except for workmen or … that’s why we used the service lift.” About ten feet from them is some bedding, a mattress and a sleeping bag. “Sometimes I even sleep up here when conditions allow. A night like tonight,” looking around him, “you, uh, sleep above your dreams.”

“Is that good?”

“Depends on the dreams.” Thinking a moment, “In my case, it’s good.”

“I’m not going to get blown off, am I?” she says, beginning to walk around a bit, wandering the roof and circling the spire that glows above them. He doesn’t say anything for a while, lets her just walk around in the moonlight as he watches. He’s not in any great rush to take her back down and she’s not in a rush to leave. He’s aware she’s chosen not to ask too much about what he does or how he lives or, for instance, why the song for which he came to her for help is so important; as the rationalist he likes to think he is, generally unconvinced by the existence of intangibles, he probably couldn’t explain, even if he wanted to, his theory that if he could locate and fasten down in some way more permanent than the humming in his head, if he could take apart and reassemble the melody that’s been haunting him for twelve years, inside could be found (since all music is mathematic) the helix of freedom and desire, transcendence and oblivion, even (if he believed in either) god and chaos. And that this would explain his life and the great event that transfixed the world, and its secret the world never knew and that he knows but doesn’t understand. Now being up here with this girl makes him look around anew at what he’s seen many times. His gaze settles on the west river and the blasted gardens of