Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

The strange thing now is, I don’t remember whether I drank it or not. Don’t remember, I just look at the glass in my hand at one point as dawn’s coming up over the hills and the medicine is gone — did I drink it, spill it, try to seduce some woman with it? I swear I don’t remember. Perhaps that in itself means I must have

itself, how far I might have gone with him rather than, through a strange

drunk it — is that one of the side effects, not even remembering you’ve taken it? I suppose I should ask someone sometime, next time the Freek Recherche or another of the big-time lunatiques passes through.

It’s been a decent business and it’s allowed me to repay the Mistress and help support our lives in the Chateau. Sometimes the client he offers to pay in bottles of the “evilixir” but I don’t accept, I don’t want it in the Chateau with the Mistress or perhaps I don’t want it ’round for my own reasons, so usually he pays in cash and sometimes foodstuffs and material, transportation coupons which in this town are preferable, or something I can trade at Port Justine or the outpost over in Los Feliz. At first some clients they come expecting the oracular aspects of the sessions as the Mistress used to perform them but by now the word is out I’m not Mistress Lulu but Mistress Brontë, and instead of fortune-telling what they get from me are long gold hair and colossal boobs. Now when there’s an appointment the Mistress retreats behind her own closed doors. She knows most of the clients would find her presence more disruptive than welcoming, and those who might actually want her there, well, that would be a whole other kink we’re not into. The Mistress is already about to retire the night the young boatman who brought the flowers appears at the grotto door of the Chateau with not nearly enough cash for a session — though who knows where he got what he had: It’s not enough, I say looking at the currency in his cupped hands in the light of the doorway lantern. He ponders the money and closes one fist over the pitiful bills and coins too proud to say anything. “Oh come in then,” I say impatiently and pull him into the entryway, closing the outer door behind him, “wait here.”

It’s all completely irregular, I never just take a client on like that, there’s a process, an interview like I said before, nothing spur-of-the-moment. I leave him in the entryway. I go through the

chance-meeting with a Japanese boy who robbed graves at the time-capsule

transitional chamber that leads to the room where I sleep, and from there into the outer room where the fire roars. The Mistress, she’s standing on the terrace like she often does, as though always looking for someone — Lu, I say. She turns and I say, “I’ve got one out in the entryway.”

“Tonight?”

“I know. I’ll send him off. He doesn’t have enough to pay anyway.”

She nods and I’m about to leave when she says, “It’s all right, I’m going to bed,” and she comes in from the terrace moving very slowly, she seems suddenly old, “I mean if you want to send him away …” shrugging “… but not on my account.”

“Come here,” I take her arm helping her. “Are you all right?” helping her into the back bedroom. I haven’t seen her look so old. I think she’s in her forties and on this night she seems twenty years older. “Lu?”

“I’m all right.” She lies on the bed.

I sit on the bed beside her and we lock eyes. “None of the ’sinthe tonight,” I say. She shrugs again, a small smile, and while I sit there on the bed close to a quarter hour holding her hand, waiting for her to go to sleep, my eyes search the room for the little sepia-colored bottles. When I think she’s finally fallen asleep and I let go of her hand, she murmurs something. “What?” I lean my ear to her mouth, and when I still can’t make it out, I ask again. “What kind of life?” she whispers.

“Shhh.”

“For a mother to give a daughter,” she says.

“Go to sleep.”

“What if I was your mother?” she whispers.

“You are.”

She smiles for a moment and then shuts her eyes again,

cemetery now under water on the west side of town, winding up in Tokyo that

“Your client….”

“Gone by now,” I kiss her forehead — but in fact he’s still there when I turn off the light by her bed and go back into the outer room and through the ceremony room and the transitional chamber to the entryway. “You’re still here,” I say and he just looks at me and I say, “Do you talk?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what I do?”

“I think.”

“All right. Do you know what I don’t do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well we’re not going to have sex. Do you understand that?”

He seems to consider this a moment and nods.

“I’m not a prostitute, do you understand?”

He nods. He sticks out the fistful of bills.

“Next time — if there is a next time — you have to bring more than that, and you can’t pay in flowers either.” I take the cash and take him by the empty hand. “What’s your name?”

“Kale,” he says.

“Come here then.” I take him into the dressing room. “Take off all your clothes”—and he begins to pull the white shirt off over his head so I stop him—“wait till I finish with your instructions. Take off all your clothes and hang them here on the door”—I point at the hook on the door—“and then go through this door and you’ll be in a room where you’ll see another open door, and go through that door. Are you paying attention?”

“Yes.”

“Did I give you permission to look at Me?”

“No.”

“‘No, Mistress Brontë.’”

“No, Mistress Brontë.”

mirror-city of L.A. where east and west are smeared and where I eventually

“Go through the open door you see and you’ll be in a large room with a fire. In the middle of the room will be a black circular rug. Kneel on the rug and wait for Me. When you see Me, lower your face in the rug till I instruct you otherwise.” Usually this is all prearranged with the client. The grotto door would be left unlocked and the inner doors open at the appointed hour so that the client, he doesn’t see me at all till he’s in the main room awaiting my entrance and command. That way a strictly defined relationship exists from the first, I’m already in my role as Dominant and he’s already in his as submissive before his training begins. I leave Kale in the dressing room, take my apparel from the ceremony chamber and go into the outer room which I make dark except for some burning candles. Then I change into the black leather garter-belt and stockings and heels and the red silk robe I was given by another client to replace the old black robe the Mistress gave me my first night at the Chateau, and I take the riding crop and wait out on the terrace.

When I fit him with a collar and ask him what his favorite color is, he says blue and I strike him lightly ’cross the face. “Is the kale-toy being impertinent?” I say, “you know there’s no blue anymore,” choosing a velvet purple collar for him. From the outset he’s the most compliant stoic sort I’ve ever had, while at the same time being the least truly submissive. This unspoken defiance comes into his eyes even while he’s doing everything I tell him. The more compliant his body is, the more his spirit is somehow beyond enslavement. Drifting outside himself the way he seems to, there’s no self to be humiliated. During that first session I keep asking him if he feels humiliated and he says no, and a week later when he shows up again, still holding out in his cupped hands the cash that’s not enough, I don’t know why I don’t just tell him it’s insufficient and make him leave — it would be a very legitimate reason not to see him. But somehow it feels like a