Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

Now, the SPACEMONKEYdisk having been returned tonight as expected, she pores over the archive again looking for an interruption in their order, for a slot where a disk should be but is missing, which will tell her what the next one will be on the next full moon. When she finds it, her heart stops for the second time in less than half an hour, and for a moment she wonders if, like when zen-toy reappeared in the door of the dressing room repeating the same words he had spoken upon his earlier departure only a few minutes before, the space where the song should be is a ghost.

Not that one.

She says it out loud, “No not that one,” and begins looking at all the other disks that come right before and after, thinking it’s just been misfiled. But it hasn’t been misfiled, there’s an empty

sleep I might take away with me a dream splashing in my womb, and yet when

slot where it’s supposed to be: that one; then she wonders if she herself took it and left it somewhere and has forgotten. She wonders if she discarded it unconsciously, in the same way she unconsciously was singing it to herself only half an hour before. She wonders if she cast it to the lake where, on breaking the surface, it turned back into a snake that quickly escaped to the water’s lower depths where it came from. But she knows she hasn’t discarded it. She remembers too well the decision she made to keep it in the first place, because at the time she couldn’t bring herself to discard it as surely as she couldn’t bring herself to hear it.

I’m stirred in a way I don’t want to be. Inside I feel I’m not in control the way I’m supposed to be and now anger becomes a sense of betrayal: he’s supposed to submit to me, and now he’s found a way to be master of events, master of my emotions. She thinks of nine years ago out at Port Justine when he tied her gondola there, the almost arrogant, almost untouchable way he took her hand when she stepped out onto the floating dock. This can’t be coincidence that now, of all of them, this one is missing, particularly right after the last one.

She has no idea at this moment that tonight she’s far from finished with surprise and coincidence, if that’s what it truly is, with the most shattering to come. Her sense of betrayal flares in part because she believes its indignation may protect her from feelings she thought sailed away in a silver gondola nine years ago. Betrayal propels her from the Vault out onto the granite walkway that leads around the crescent edge of the Chateau’s grotto to the stone steps she climbs; in the entryway she closes the outer door behind her then enters the transitional dressing room that would lead her immediately to the Lair beyond if she wasn’t at this moment stopped in her tracks by the sight, there on the rug at her feet, of the little red monkey she walked right past before.

I still didn’t dream then, not yet eighteen years old I finally left the small town

The sob bubbles up from her throat before she can swallow it. Although Kristin may have plucked it from the lake and left it in the gondola when she returned to the lake’s source nine years ago, the incarnation of her called Lulu who was left behind and bid farewell to Kristin from the lakeshore that morning after the fire hasn’t seen the monkey since the day fourteen years ago she left Kirk, in order to save him from being swept away by the breaking water of a pregnant malevolent century; she recognizes it instantly. She falls to her knees. Gently she picks up the toy as if it’s a small body, and all promises are broken now, all bargains unmade: the bargain with God, with whom she made a pact somewhere in an abdicated future to give up her son if it meant sparing him some fate that hadn’t yet come to pass; the bargain with the lake, who spared her from the flames of guilt that consumed her house if she would agree to live with the waves of guilt that flooded her past; and especially the bargain with her Other Self to whom she waved goodbye when she watched Kristin set out naked in the gondola to go back to the Other Lake. All these promises, all these bargains, made so she could live in some kind of truce and endure the only loss in human life that simply can’t be endured, for all the ways one might find to go on functioning. Now her heart is broken again down to the bone of the soul. The lake is dying, returning to where it came, an irony too bitter to even be mere irony, since it means all of her efforts of years before to stop the lake were unnecessary and everything that effort cost her was pointless; she clutches the monkey to her as if it’s him. She sees him before her with his sun-lit head and amber-flecked sea-green eyes and the sanguine mad-monk mouth, and pulls him to her and begs for another vision that will make her mad too, begs to be trapped in a mad vision of him and never sane again.

traveling for a while in the company of a millennial religious cult that I

In his sleep, the domeof his eyelids is strewn with stars. Disoriented, he looks around for the Square, and a moment passes before he remembers.

No not here. Better the Square than here — but he is here, an immense rooftop spread out before him on top of the world, just inches beneath the night. A quadrant of the world lies in moonlight before him. He can see the curve of the earth in a white shimmering arc against the black of space. It’s a dream he never has because he’s struck a deal with his subconscious to never raise this memory although, now that he thinks of it, he wonders what his end of the bargain was ever supposed to be. Nonetheless this is his unconsciousness’ betrayal: better the Square. In the dream he looks not for Kristin but a young woman he met only three times and who he’s put out of his mind ever since one dazed night years ago back east: The Emperor of Elevators, he murmurs in his sleep, feeling the tail-end of a familiar gust blowing from a vent in a low rectangular storage hut near the rooftop’s edge. He wonders if this gust is an ally meaning to rescue him, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove him, before he remembers it’s an anarchist without conviction.

In his dream he crosses the building rooftop to the vent and looks deep into it. Mistress my Mistress, he whispers and hears the song and feels the gust of the Oblivion Wind in his face; and when he pulls his face away, the vent has become the gun barrel of the

learned in the nick of time meant to sacrifice me on New Year’s Eve, then to

tank and he’s back in the Square with the tanks rolling toward him like great eggs. He looks up and the sky is bloody red again; standing his ground, the gust dies. The tank tries to go around him, he moves to block it, and when the tank moves again so would he, to block it again, if he weren’t transfixed by the song. From out of the corner of his eye, he sees a blinding flash of something and raises his hand to shield his eyes, and a moment later he’s aware of the hot pain in his hand, his hand burning, the small explosion in the palm where one’s fortune is told. He looks up at his hand quizzically to see a bit of red wedged in the middle, and thinking at first it’s blood, he realizes he’s seeing through the new hole a spot of the red sky beyond.

He hears the song, the gust rises again, and she appears at the far end of the Square that’s otherwise empty but for him and the tanks, a figure walking across the Square toward him. The Mistress isn’t dressed in her stockings and heels but in her black silk robe, vines the color of jade climbing up her body and binding her. When she reaches Wang, she holds a cool cloth in her hand and mops his brow.