Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

three-year-old could only find as baffling as it was devastating, after which I

haunted. The boy who now calls himself Kuul, a name half the language of childhood-memory and half the language of owl, has never believed the Hamblin either holy or haunted; he returned here a year ago only by some instinct he doesn’t understand. Having seen the city and lake from any number of high vantage points over the course of his young life, he finds the perspective from the top of the Hamblin only a variation on that view. If it ever reminds him of when his mother brought him up here to the rooftop as a toddler, it’s only for a moment more brief than his mind can grasp or wants to.

When he reaches the square brick island, he sidles the boat up to the top of what used to be the hotel’s fire escape. He ties the boat and takes from it the basket of bread and fruit and cheese and wine left for him at the Chateau X. Luna completely lights up the Hamblin and he makes his way easily around the door that used to lead to the stairway inside the hotel, now completely submerged except for the top. Tucked away in an alcove formed by the rooftop door and an adjacent storage space that used to house all the hotel phone lines is an old silver gondola that stands upright like a small altar; propped up inside, resting against an assembled mass of old blankets, pillows and bits of old mattress, is a woman now somewhere in her early sixties but who seems much older. Once her eyes were older than her face but her face has caught up. Once her smile was younger but it’s raced to the edge of death before the rest of her. The hair that Kuul’s mother once saw as lost between the auburn of yesterday and the silver of tomorrow has long since found its way to a white amnesiascape.

Now the old woman’s mind wanders its own rooms from one to the next. Kuul has no idea who this woman is. He found her here left behind on Hamblin Island following its abandonment by the Order of the Red, and for a year now has cared for her, protecting her from the rains and the wind off the lake and bringing

began to realize over the years that in my nights I never dreamed, no dreams

her what food he can find. Round-luna has become a sign of bounty because he knows it means there will be a flare and he’ll row the man with the hand to the Chateau and there will be a basket of food. As the boy tears off pieces of the bread and slowly feeds it to the old woman, he likes to pretend she’s his mother and that he’s nursing her to health. He knows she isn’t his mother but she doesn’t seem so very unlike who he imagines his mother might have been.

Touching it, slowly running his finger down its side, he knows this silver gondola was her boat. With his mother having slipped over the edge of this small altar and given herself to Big Agua for reasons he doesn’t understand and that he only remembers in bits and fragments, it just seems fitting then that he might think of this woman who takes shelter in this gondola now as a kind of mother for whom he’ll care. When he finishes feeding her the bread, he raises the wine to her mouth just enough so she won’t drink too quickly, feeds her a bit of fruit and cheese and then some more wine, and when she’s done and her eyes close to sleep, he lays his hand against the side of her face.

From her window on the topfloor of the Chateau X, Lulu watches in the light of the full moon the boat with the two men make its way back across the lake.

She feels the blood of her womb stir to the moon’s pull and backs away. When I was pregnant sometimes at night I would

at all until finally as a teenager dreamstarved I would prowl the small town

open the window and expose my belly to the moonlight but now thinking of her diminishing periods I wonder if it cast a spell on me, laid some claim on what I carried inside me. Among the moon, the sky, the lake, she doesn’t know who are her allies anymore, who are her enemies. Gazing out the window, mindlessly she sings to herself an old song. ‘Cause I know this sea wants to carry me. She turns from the window back to her lair, and her heart stops.

Wrapped in the blanket that she pulled over him while he was unconscious, the man she knows as zen-toy stands naked at the other end of the room, at the door of the dressing room and the transitional passage that leads outside. “I heard another song,” he says, “it sounded like you were singing.”

“Uh….” She tries to think what she said before … something about not ignoring the signs. “Yes,” is all she can manage now, and then he turns and opens the door and disappears. She does notice this time, as she didn’t when this same moment took place just a few minutes ago, that her fur-lined handcuffs still dangle from his wrist she forgot to set free.

She whirls around back to the window. She can still see the boat crossing the lake, with the figures of two men. She turns back to the dressing room door but no one is there. Her heart is thundering in her chest: Have I just had an hallucination? Was it a ghost? Some strange synapse in her mind by which something that just happened not fifteen minutes ago looped its way back into the present? She turns again to look at the boat from her window: is it a decoy, a trick, is this a plot to make her crazy … and if so, to what end? Now suddenly angry, purposefully she crosses the Lair to the dressing room door and flings it open to confront the ghost; but the room is empty. In two steps she’s crossed to the door on the other side and out into the entryway, which is also empty.

and its tourist hotel after sundown because I heard somewhere that men have

She crosses the entryway out onto the stone steps that lead down to the landing, but there’s no one there either, the boat having already departed just as she witnessed minutes ago from her window upstairs.

She makes her way down the stone steps to the granite walkway that circles the hotel’s grotto, to a small chamber she calls the Vault, its own door just a few feet above the lake and unremarkable except for the large rusted brass ring of a doorknob. On the walkway she stops, swallows hard. “Hello!” she calls defiantly to someone lurking in the shadows; she takes one of the lanterns that overhangs the steps and holds it up in front of her to blast the shadows away … but no one’s there. She looks at the vault door and now makes her way to it along the narrow walkway above the water. Still holding the lantern she futilely inspects the brass ring as if there might be a telltale sign of someone’s entrance; she notices the glimmer at her feet of a melody-snake’s glistening residue. Casting the light of the lantern around her one more time, she sees something else on the side of the stone steps leading down to the landing: a fresh watermark, almost half a foot above the lake’s present level.

She throws open the vault door.

She shoves the lantern out in front of her into the dark of the Vault. But the Vault is empty except for gleaming traces across the floor of a nocturnal tune that’s slithered away. Once again she looks out on the landing to convince herself no one is there, then turns and goes back into the Vault among its shelves of disks from all the melody-snakes she’s charmed and captured over the years.

By now an archive of several thousand fills the Vault’s three small walls. Reading by lantern she finds in its place, where it’s been missing the past month, the plastic case with a spine where long ago she printed SPACEMONKEY;damp, with drops of

erections when they dream and so I thought if I fucked enough of them in their

the lake smeared across its cover, clearly it’s been returned just in the past few hours, maybe the past few minutes. Months ago she discovered the Vault was being raided and that every full moon, after one of zen-toy’s sessions, a disk was missing which, a full moon later, would then reappear. To test her theory, last month she pored over the collection to find exactly which one it would be tonight; sometimes she thinks she can almost hear the broadcast herself, south of the wind that comes down off the Hollywood moors. At best it’s a distant sonic smudge in the air. If it’s now obvious to her that zen-toy himself is behind the mysterious monthly broadcasts, she still doesn’t understand why he would confiscate a disk, presumably on his previous visit, have it broadcast and then — replacing the original — bring a copy to her for the explanation and meaning of a song he himself chose. Was it a random selection, made by a man whom she knows in other matters is incapable of even considering the possibility of random chance? This conspiracy isn’t just circular, it’s labyrinthine. That it should have been this particular song only unnerves her all the more.