Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

finding it reassuring, even finding I felt profoundly secure to spend my

now to the end of her search. She knows that behind one of these three double-doors is the suite of the most unendurable loss of all, the loss she felt that day with Kristin in the other woman’s apartment. She assumes such a room and such a loss must be at once splendid and terrible. They sail through the first set of double doors into the Suite of Lost Freedom. She might expect this suite to look like a dungeon, chains hanging from the walls, shackles close to the floor, mechanisms of torture in place of a bed or chair. She would expect no windows. In fact the suite is well-appointed. It’s comfortable. It’s secure: the lock is on the inside of the doors, not outside. The Suite of Lost Freedom has a huge bed and love seat, and a window opens from an alcove through which blows a fresh breeze. A grand light fixture hangs from the ceiling which makes the room very bright, even happy. It not only doesn’t seem such a terrible room, it’s an inviting room. There’s maid service, room service. Someone could very well choose to live here, particularly with someone else; behind the bed there’s a secret panel although it must not be very secret if Doc knows it’s there, and from the Suite of Lost Freedom to the Room of Lost Love there’s a secret passage; many of the hotel’s guests spend a lot of time wandering back and forth in this passage. In fact the room is filled with secret panels and secret passages to other rooms of loss, to which this suite seems eminently preferable. It isn’t until Doc and the boy sit floating in the gondola for some time that she notices something: the.walls are closing in. Almost imperceptibly the suite is growing

existence entirely within the walls of a space I never saw from the outside,

smaller. Then she notices something else: the light above is growing dimmer. Almost imperceptibly the room grows darker. In the early moments of the suite becoming smaller and darker, the guest still has the capacity, with a word and the will, to stop the walls, to turn back up the light, if that’s what she wants to do. It’s almost impossible to say at exactly what point this suite goes from being a room where one would choose to live to a room that one must escape at all cost; and to that end, even when the room has become very small and dark, the far window still glows slightly, so that even as the walls become so close as to crush anyone between them, the possibility of escape, however increasingly difficult, remains, and may even become a distant promise that gives life a meaning it never had before. For all these reasons, because there are times when the Suite of Lost Freedom is hospitable, even apparently civilized, where one’s stay is content, even apparently fulfilling, and because even when the suite is at its least human, when one is desperately trying to hold back the walls with her hands, there’s still a faint hope of escape, and it seems clear to Doc that this isn’t the most unendurable of losses, that it can be not only endured in its smallest measure but reversed at its greatest extreme, that it’s a loss that can bring out the best and noblest and most inspiring in people, even to the point where they would choose over the Suite of Lost Freedom the very next suite over, to which Doc’s gondola now sails, back out into the great mezzanine and then slowly and with more difficulty

existing as a kind of erotic furniture, of which I took a functional view having

through the next set of double-doors into the Suite of Lost Life. Well, Doc thinks to herself, certainly this has to be the most unendurable loss; what loss could be greater than the loss of one’s life? Isn’t, she thinks to herself, every other loss in life measured against this one? Isn’t every other loss ultimately endured in order to avoid this one? The gondola sails into the middle of the Suite of Lost Life — which suddenly vanishes: the walls, the ceiling, the floors all gone in the blink of an eye, leaving the gondola suspended in a void of black. Then the suite suddenly reappears, as a rounded blue chamber. Of all the suites this is the most capricious in form and nature; and as with the Suite of Lost Freedom and its secret passage to the Room of Lost Love, populated by nomads wandering between the two, the Suite of Lost Life is riddled with secret passages to other rooms in the hotel such as the Ballroom of Lost Faith or the Ballroom of the Lost Soul, all with their own wandering exiles. Whereas Doc could feel in the other rooms the presence of hurt, walls faintly throbbing with pain, here in the Suite of Lost Life there’s nothing to be felt at all except, when the suite assumes the incarnation of the blue chamber, a kind of peace. And Doc realizes that in fact the loss of one’s life isn’t the most unendurable of losses, that in fact whether life’s end is a blue chamber or black void, there’s nothing to be endured at all — that in some ways this suite shouldn’t even be in the Hotel of Thirteen Losses, that the loss of one’s life is really endured by others, who are guests of the hotel in other rooms, such as the Room of the Lost Parent or the Room of the Lost Mate.

already decided in those young years of mine that life was a matter of trading

So this then leaves to Doc and her pursuit of the unendurable loss only one remaining possibility, and that’s the final suite next to this one; and so the silver gondola sails back out into the grand mezzanine toward the final set of double-doors. Doc braces herself. Lying in the bottom of the gondola, remembering that afternoon in the apartment of the other hotel with Kristin, she becomes afraid as the boy rows them through the last set of double-doors into a suite of nothing but doors, each with a mirror, much like the mirrors of the Three Ballrooms, except that, as the gondola passes, each mirror loses its reflection and turns into a window, with strange faces on the other side peering in. This is the Suite of Lost Memory. Beyond the doors with the mirrors that turn into windows are corridors that run to every single other room in the hotel, because the Suite of Lost Memory may also be the Suite of the Lost Self, although that remains to be known. It’s uncertain, what with corridors running to the Ballroom of Lost Dignity or the Suite of Lost Freedom, what constitutes the self, and what of the self still exists when self-consciousness is gone. This is why the Suite of Lost Memory and the Ballroom of the Lost Soul aren’t the same room although they might seem the same to those outside the windows gazing in. And it’s partly because of this unanswerable mystery that Doc, braced for the great wave of anguish she expected from this final suite, realizes this isn’t the most unendurable loss either, that it’s a kind of death, in some ways more profound than the body’s death, and as a kind of death

on one’s most valuable commodity whether it be intelligence, strength, talent,

it’s something to be endured not by the one who has lost her memory but by those around her who watch her recede into life’s horizon in the gondola of amnesia. Now Doc is perplexed. Lying in the bottom of the gondola adrift in this last suite, having taken this long voyage on the lake of her mind down to the Hotel of Thirteen Losses at the bottom of the whirlpool so as to face what she couldn’t face all those years before, she tries to remember all the suites and all the ballrooms and all the guest rooms and sitting rooms she’s been through but can’t, and then realizes of course she can’t remember because, after all, she’s in the Suite of Lost … well, now she can’t even remember what suite she’s in, but she still has enough presence of mind to lift her arm and point the way out. For a moment the boy can’t remember the way, but circling the windowed doors around the perimeter of the room he finally finds the exit and rows them out of … now it comes