Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

and in the silvery bubble of the birth passage I feel myself caught up in the

she’s had no thought of having another child, the pain of it might make no sense except that it has to do not with any child to come but the one to whom she said goodbye so long ago. The irrevocability of her body’s recent monthly messages is more profound than she wants to interpret. In order not to think about it, she puts the disk that zen-toy brought her on the chamber’s sound system. She already knows what she’ll hear. Spacemonkey sign of the time, she murmurs to herself and turns back to the pattern of drying blood on the parchment, and lowers the lights and waits until the glow of the melody-snake’s head rises from the black shadows of the floor.

On the train he sees it too. As her monthly blood forms its pattern in the aisle of the train and begins to dry, there beneath the car’s dank light with midnight outside, the song he’s been listening to in his Mistress’ voice fades, desperate as he is to make it stay, and from the other end of the car he sees slither the luminous melody-snake along the lines of its lyric humans are running, lavender room, hovering liquid, move over moon into the menstrual red lattice; its tongue flickers. At this point in the climax’s vision, Wang wants to flee. At this point he would forsake both love and heroism. The snake is drawn further into the pattern and becomes stuck in the blood, melody coiling and uncoiling hovering liquid move over moon moveovermoon moveovermoonmoveovermoonmoveovermoon struggling until it dies in awful exhaustion, tongue protruding limply from the slit of its mouth, as spent as Wang who shivers with sweat.

In his sleep he feels her tender hand on his brow. He feels a cool cloth across his face. A moment later he feels one of his wrists come free of the fur-lined handcuffs and his neck come free of the red-studded collar, and the blanket pulled up around him. He feels her take his other hand that’s still cuffed; in his sleep he’s vaguely aware of her running her finger over the rounded piece of

memory-stream of my own life and begin to drift in it, first returned to the

plexiglas that, almost thirty years ago now, a surgeon in the Chinese underground inserted to try and save the hand, threading the blood vessels through it even as he was unable to preserve tendon and muscle. Now in his sleep he feels the Mistress gently run her own fingers up and down the forearm that is distinctly thinner in comparison to the forearm of the other, good hand.

He opens his eyes.

She kneels beside him. The train is gone. He looks around, remembers he’s lying on the floor of the Chateau X; she’s blown out some of the candles so the Lair is darker than before. She kneels beside him no longer in garters or stockings but a black silk robe with a pattern of jade-tinted vines that wrap themselves around her. She helps lift him from the floor to the divan; naked he pulls the blanket closer to him, shuddering. She raises a cup of water to his mouth, then a glass of hot brandy. “Are you OK?” she says.

He nods. For a moment the two of them say nothing. She watches him but he can’t quite look at her, feeling exposed and vulnerable as he always does after these sessions, until finally he says, “This time was especially….”

“I know,” she says. “You saw it, then?”

“Yes.” He sits up, a bit revived, and she repeats the administration of water and brandy. Over on a low coffee table is the parchment she’s brought in from the other chamber, now dry, a dark brown-red map with the death streak of the melody-snake, the echo of it just barely audible; she brings it to him. They study the menstrual I–Ching together. “Do you know the song?” he asks.

“New York punk-blues, apocalyptic subgenre,” she says, “late 1970s. ’79, ’78.”

“What’s the ‘lavender room’?” he asks.

“That’s not the important part.”

“The ‘church chimes’?”

small Chinatown on the small island in the delta where I grew up, raised by my

Lulu reaches over, pulls the blanket away from off his shoulder and touches a small forming welt. “I struck you too hard.”

“I didn’t notice. Truly.” He looks at her now. “You know I want you to hold back nothing.”

When they look at each other like this, it’s very difficult for her to believe he doesn’t remember that time out at Port Justine, when he was working as a dock hand and secured her gondola. She had convinced herself that afternoon they connected in some way, particularly when, in a kind of paralysis, he watched as she climbed the billboard. At their first session more than a year ago she almost said something but didn’t, since that kind of acknowledgement implicitly threatens an arrangement based on anonymity and discretion. As time passed, however, she understood that he doesn’t remember her at all and it angered her, and she used and channeled that anger in her training of him: This she thinks to herself, touching the welt is that anger. It’s unprofessional she chastises herself. Anger is a betrayal of an implicit understanding of the relationship; it renders personal what’s supposed to be impersonal, the objectivity of the relationship being that which both heightens the senses and clears the mind. Yet at this point in their relationship it’s difficult to maintain the impersonal; she pulls her fingers back from the wound, returning to the interpretation of the parchment. “Something is happening to the lake,” she says.

“It’s draining,” he tells her.

He’s surprised at the way the blood seems to run from her face. “What do you mean?” she says.

“I mean it’s going back. Back wherever it came from.”

“Here,” she points to a small bright nexus on the parchment, where the last flicker of the melody-snake’s tongue lapped its final drop of blood, “is the event vortex. I say ‘event’

drunken uncle in the town tavern where I never knew my mother, the closest

but that doesn’t necessarily mean an event in the sense of an occurrence, it may mean the revelation of something that’s already existed a long time, that will manifest its existence in a way never perceived or comprehended before. Maybe something very obvious, something we’ve thought of in one form that in fact takes another….” She shrugs. “This is vague, I know….”

He’s never heard her sound so … uncertain before. It unnerves him. “I have to take something back with me … something that can mean the difference between victory and defeat….”

“You’re not understanding, zen-toy,” the Mistress says. “This”— pointing at the nexus—“renders your victories and defeats insignificant.” Oh yes, Wang thinks to himself, that’s what I’ll tell them: whether we win or lose is insignificant. “You already know these answers, zen-toy. You already know these questions.”

“What do you mean?” he says.

She studies him hard. His confusion sounds genuine, and she wonders if she’s wrong in her suspicions; she gambles. “Who’s broadcasting these messages?”

The question stuns him, given his own suspicions. Instantly and instinctively he analyzes the tone of it: is this a confession on her part? A challenge, a test? Is it just a moment of disingenuousness, when in fact this woman has always seemed anything but disingenuous? “You tell me,” he replies, and the moment of truth collapses between them, each thinking the other has failed it.

Disappointed, she says, “Drink some more water,” and raises the cup to him. Disappointed, he takes it and drinks. They don’t say anything for a while. “When does your boat return?”

“I don’t know. He may be there now.”