Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

to be the very date when, three years old, I stood on the shore of that island

the terror, so don’t tell me the boys don’t like it in their own way. When I mention this to the Mistress in some amazement, she already knows all about it: the male-wangie is a thing of mystery, she just smiles.

But jeez life is lovely in these early days before the business with the Mistress’ lapsinthe. I don’t go ashore for three months after that first night, very contented in the Chateau, standing on the terrace sucking those slices of lemon like I love and dropping the yellow peels in the water below. At first, because I know nothing about the Mistress, to me she’s just an eccentric lonely lady; I haven’t heard the stories about the dominatrix-oracle business or the Saint Kristin stories, which I don’t understand anyway or what they actually have to do with the Mistress, but I see the people camped out on the hillside hour after hour and day after day and week after week watching the Chateau as though expecting a sign. Sure it’s not something the Mistress ever says much about. That is, early on it’s a bit obvious she was in the trade given the shackles on the walls downstairs and then I come on the tool box with the ankle cuffs and fur-lined handcuffs and riding crops and ball-gags and violet wands. I find this tiny collar I think is for a cat or something. Well it’s a collar all right but not for any cat. So I ask her right out and she tells me right out, though I see this look in her eye a moment like she’s trying to decide. She tells me right out and I just say no way. Not really. Really? And here I thought she would be shocked by my liking girls! I’m fascinated from the first. I go right past offense and never even skirt revulsion. Something in my true nature takes to it. Not to pain, I never want to inflict real pain and never have, beyond a good healthy whack in the balls, naturally. The Mistress says she never inflicted real pain either or meant to anyway; if she struck harder than she intended and left so much as a bruise or welt she felt bad, and there was never a drop of blood once — other

with my uncle and gazed on that strange woman across the river, now here in

than her own, when she did the oracle business — in all the years she did it. It’s about the power isn’t it, and not even so much power over someone else as the power over your own life, and that’s what I like too, that power, I take to it right from the first and you can make of that whatever you want. I can tell you for a fact that as far as I know no one’s ever gotten hurt, so you make of it what you want. You can spend your whole life, the Mistress says to me one time, making peace with your own true nature.

“What?”

“Something,” she says, “someone once said to me,” and it’s the strangest thing when she says it, I’m not even sure what it means but it unnerves me some because I know I’ve heard it before, that very thing, back before I came up out of the lake, like the thing about sleeping the sleep of the dead. But if domination was about the power of it for her, if it was the Mistress’ true nature just to take command of her life then how is it four months ago I’m calling up an ambulance-boat on the wireless to come pump out her stomach? Unless that’s her way of taking control of her life for good. So it’s a complicated thing, one’s true nature, isn’t it. Sometime long ago something happened to her, something beyond her control, something she’s not been able to escape from or explain to herself in any way that she’s ever actually believed for any length of time, something that won’t heal. Something no act or ritual of domination has been able to get her through no matter how hard she’s tried. Something. I’ve come to learn things about her life but not that. I think awhile after I first come to the Chateau perhaps it’s better for her, it’s like she regained something, but then — I’m happy to be a daughter to her if that’s what she needs. Why not. And one afternoon a few months after I’ve been here I say as much and I can tell right away it’s the wrong thing to say, I can tell from this look on her face. This shattered look. Perhaps

the birth canal of the lake I know this and maybe should be astounded by it if

it’s the casual way I say it, like it doesn’t mean anything either way. Now that I think about it, it’s after that she begins to slip away, except for times we embrace for whatever reason, and I can feel the way she holds onto me that she’s trying to come back, come back from wherever she’s slipping to.

There was a man once, that much I know. That I’ve figured out. And for a time I thought, well then that’s it isn’t it, a man. He may even have been a client. I’ve never asked, perhaps I’m not the inquisitive sort. Perhaps I have an overly developed male-sense of privacy — that is, for a female. But whoever he was she’s not seen him for a long time. Awhile, though, I thought that’s what it was.

Now I don’t think so.

As for the lake, well for sure there’s something between the Mistress and the lake. She stands on the terrace must be hours every day and she and the lake stare each other down. The Mistress, she thinks I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I do. I’ve figured it out. The Mistress thinks the lake is waiting for her to die before it sinks any further, and I’m not going to be the one to say she’s wrong. God’s little joke on the male gender, that’s what the Mistress says I am, and after a while it becomes clear that her god is full of such jokes, and so sometimes I wonder if the lake is God’s joke on her or she’s God’s joke on the lake. It’s almost six months later I hear the Saint Kristin legend, by then I’ve finally left the Chateau for an afternoon now and then, going to Port Justine for supplies and that’s when I hear, when I’m out among the locals, how the Mistress is Saint Kristin’s twin or Saint Kristin returned from the dead or something, I hear it but don’t make much sense of it and I don’t think anyone else makes sense of it or even really wants to. Four months ago when I call the ambulance-boat, well there’s a commotion then on the hillsides, people skittering back and forth like forest animals smelling

here anything was astounding or, maybe more precisely, if there was nothing

smoke. You might think a pathetic botched suicide attempt would sort of snuff the legend, what? but instead the offerings just start coming more than ever, the stone steps of the grotto laden with bread and cheese and fruit and drinking water. While the Mistress sleeps I go out on the terrace to see boats bobbing on the lake below, people standing in them staring up in anxious anticipation. She’s all right, I tell them, go home. They don’t move awhile. They’re still suspicious of me, perhaps more than ever, still not sure whether I’m priestess, temptress, judas, magdalene.

After a while they drift back to shore. Return to their vigil. That same afternoon I go out to the back grotto behind the Chateau to find a lone man in a boat leaving on the steps an offering of flowers. Not much good for anything, flowers, I think, but he lays them up and down the stone stairs. The tide will just take most of them, I tell him.

He looks up. He’s in his mid- maybe late-twenties. That afternoon he looks up at me and his jaw drops a bit, and I see that expression I’ve seen before and think, Oh I’m about to become God’s little joke again. But he’s pretty for a boy, I’ll say that for him, eyes the color of the lake and hair like owl feathers. I see him again about a week later, one twilight all by himself on the lake in his boat — what, does he live in that boat? I wonder. He’s all by himself drifting out there watching the Chateau like they all watch it, except that where all the rest of them are waiting for the Mistress, I know he’s waiting for me. We just look at each other and don’t wave or anything, just look at each other till I go back inside, but there are more flowers on the steps the next morning except for the ones the lake has stolen, a trail of garlands leading back to him I’m sure. Then I see him a lot over the next week or so and don’t pay much attention, never wave or say anything, thinking I shouldn’t encourage him too much. I like the notion of men under my spell, I confess, it’s the whole point of what I do,