Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

A memoir I call this but that’s a misnomer, truly I choose to remember as little as possible. I think as little as possible of my

vanished overnight after I discovered behind the locked door on the bottom

past, and with every night’s dose of lapsinthe greater than the night before, my mind becomes more resistant to its effects until soon I’ll overdose on memory or amnesia. Every night that my life sheds is one less to get through, one less link in the chain that leashes my heart like that leashing a slave’s collar. Each night one more dose until finally I just slip over the line. Four months ago Brontë found me in the transitional chamber slumped on the floor, face brushing the place where — eleven years ago? twelve — I found his little monkey. My life has been cruel enough to give me every now and then the hope or reassurance of some new clarity, once a decade or so before snatching it away … hope on a leash like a slave like my heart … but since that night eleven years ago I’ve slipped toward an ending not simply out of despair but rather as a flight to freedom, of course. But not a cry for help. Please. Maybe Brontë tells herself I’m crying for help. She called it in on the wireless and the ambulance-boat came with a pump so my belly might be as empty as the rest of me….

Not a cry for help … in a way it’s just the opposite. The only way of taking control over my life: by taunting it, flirting with an ending … the only way to place life at the end of a lash as I’ve so placed over the years everything and everyone I would have submit to me — after first coming to L.A. an orphan three decades ago and serving as the sexual serf of a man I never really knew or understood, out of which came the only thing in my life I ever truly loved so huge … at which point I had a mother’s fear of the world’s chaos; and nothing is as afraid as that. Is it so bad, to have wanted control when I never had it before? with men not so unlike the one who fathered my son, who themselves just wanted to give up all control for a few hours? Yes of course I’ve asked myself — cracking the riding crop across their asses (they never touch me) — asked myself whether in fact I was resisting their fantasies or fulfilling them. But at that point, when domination is a kind of

floor the huge blue calendar he had made that circled its room and covered

submission and submission a kind of domination, it all gets a little complicated.

In any event I had found some reconciliation with my life … until the night I found the monkey. Found the little toy monkey and suddenly could only wonder if it had all been a hoax I perpetrated on myself, that vision-dream-hallucination I had of going back back back down the hole of the lake, down down down to where I came from a quarter of a century ago now, down down down through the hole to the Other Lake to see if he’s still there in the boat, still waiting for me, still in the moment where I left him. And in fact if it was all just a vision, a dream, an hallucination, if in fact it was all just a hoax I played on myself, I can only wonder how it is I so easily accepted such a delusion, so easily abandoned my search for him in this life, on this lake, to take control, to put at the end of my lash, under the crack of my whip, my despair. Because despair, I think I heard someone say once, isn’t a grief of the heart, but the soul.

And then I wondered if he was still out there, and has been all along. On this lake, in these hills, a man now, wondering why I never came to find him….

I would chain myself to my bed and let the lake take me some night as it rises, if it were rising. But the lake hasn’t risen for a long time. For ten years it slowly but surely sank and then suddenly stopped a year ago last spring, in remission, putting off death just a while longer. Waiting for something to happen, before it dies.

I know what it’s waiting for.

People have stopped trying to understand the lake. They accept that the lake has its own logic, stranger and bigger than the rationale of tides, geology. Before even the geologists knew, those who live with the lake knew the sinking had stopped, because the Lapses stopped … those who live with the lake felt stop, for the

every wall and blotted out every window and flowed over onto the floor and

duration of its remission, the draining of time. Felt stop, in its pause before death, the way that every day after tomorrow was answered by another day before yesterday. Felt stop the pendulum of memory swinging ever wider as the lake drained … they knew because time stopped going backwards, because everything that’s been about the lake and of the lake finally stopped vanishing overnight into the literal fog of memory … people, events, philosophies, meanings … one night about six or seven years ago even the color blue vanished, no one has seen it since. Now the lake is green or gray or black … now somewhere out there over the water beyond the hedge of fog lurks zero-year, or zed-year. My own Lapses ended last year in a cluster … I woke one morning to

find myself lying not

in my bed in the Chateau but the Santa Monica hospital just a few weeks after returning from Tokyo, when I was seventeen. I was seventeen again, it was eleven-thirty at night again, the thirty-first of December again of that year, under the white explosion of delivery room lights overhead, the doctor and nurse having the same argument I remember them having over my labor that night a little less than twenty-eight years ago, about millennial arithmetic, between the calculations of my dilations and the dwindling minutes of my contractions. I looked into the white lights above me, pain shot through me … I was startled to be back at this moment again but not amazed of course, since this kind of thing had been happening for a while now … what are you doing talking about, the nurse was saying to the doctor in exasperation, “if it’s tonight, or tomorrow, then what was all that hoopla a year ago about?”

“It wasn’t about anything,” the doctor was saying, “that’s what I’m explaining to you. It was about a lot of people getting it wrong, is what it was about.”

“All those people celebrating all over the world?” said the

ceiling and completely reordered history to the chronology and logic of

nurse. “All those fireworks over the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, or whatever….”

Excuse me, I muttered.

“… everyone got it wrong but you, that’s what you’re saying?”

“Zero isn’t the number before one,” the doctor lectured smugly, “zero isn’t a number at all. In the case of the calendar, zero is ten, and ten comes after nine.”

“Thank you, I think I know ten comes after nine.”

“This is a ten-year,” the doctor checked his watch, then looked at a clock on the wall, “in another hour and a half it will be a one-year, and that’s the true beginning of it.”

What’s happening? I can remember saying all those years ago, when I was first here, in this moment, managing to say it between the pain. But this time excuse me

and the doctor stared at me

but it’s all metaphor anyway

as if I was a huge talking pea-pod about to split

it’s all random anyway I went on a conceit, based on the birth of a religious philosopher who wasn’t even born in the Year One but probably the Year Minus-Four or sometime around then, so it’s silly to get hung up on the math of the thing when everyone else has accepted the symbolism of it

and in a dream the doctor might have accepted such an exchange from a young girl in labor, but since this wasn’t a dream, since the currents of memory and time unleashed over the years by the sinking of the lake in fact had carried me back to this actual moment, the doctor stared at me in astonishment. I think the nurse was too confused to feel vindicated. In the meantime I realized I was about to deliver him again, my boy … would I stop it,