Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

worked as a memory girl in the revolving memory hotels of Kabuki-cho amid

defeat, and so instead during the second session I change strategies, applying a more rigorous discipline; but when I ask again if he’s humiliated he says no, and though I strike him ’cross his back when he says it, I know it’s true, he’s not. I beat him harder than I’ve ever beaten a client, till I have to stop myself. Are you humiliated now, slave kale? I say, and he keeps saying no no no, and he’s not. It’s obvious it’s not his true nature to be either submissive or dominant. He’s one of those rare few whose true nature is to neither follow nor lead — more like a woman in that way, I should say. Or perhaps I mean more like me.

Which means what attracts him isn’t the idea of submission, which is what attracts the others. I’m what attracts him, so I know from the first there’s a potential problem. Really I don’t want to encourage him. I know he’s here for the wrong reason, I know he’s taken with me, and if I didn’t know before, sure I know it the night he sails me to shore when I get another outcall, after the one I did for the Freek Recherche, up at one of the houses on the Hollywood Peninsula. It’s my biggest offer ever and something tells me from the start to stay away from it — these very unpleasant sorts in a powerboat show up in the Chateau grotto one afternoon with a handful of cash and I’m not keen on the looks of them. But though cash isn’t the easiest currency to deal in ’round here anymore, well it’s a lot of cash, and they want me to come up that night to some house on the peninsula owned I guess by whoever sent his messenger boys with the proposition: There’s going to be a party, they say. I say to this one guy in the powerboat, I’m not a hooker.

“It’s OK,” he says flatly.

What sort of answer is that? “Do you understand,” I say again, “that I do not have sex for money?”

“It all right,” he says, còunting out there on the grotto steps more cash than I’ve ever seen, and so, really, it’s my own fault

its surrounding bars and brothels and strip joints and massage parlors and

isn’t it, looking back on it. I know that. All my intuition is saying no don’t do this, here I’m trying to explain the situation, what I do and what I don’t, and they’re just giving out with this vague it’s all right it’s OK — but I’m dazzled by the money, and perhaps I’ve gotten over-confident about being able to take care of myself. So that night at the agreed hour I sail out to the cove behind the Chateau where a car is waiting to take me up to the house, and Kale, he’s the one who takes me.

In the boat he doesn’t say anything, not that he ever says anything anyway. But he can tell from my bag of tricks I have with me and the way I’m dressed under my long green cloak that I’m working. It’s dusk and the light’s fading and halfway from the Chateau to the cove a fog drifts in and as the fog gets heavier a car onshore begins flashing its lights that get hazier and hazier. Are you sulking? I finally say to him and regret it right away, it’s a question that instantly makes us more familiar than I want to be. What? he says and by now I’ve already learned with Kale what? might mean anything. What? might mean I didn’t hear you, it might mean I heard you but I didn’t understand you, it might mean I understood you but I don’t know why you would ask that question, it might mean I understand why you’re asking but I don’t want to answer. Somehow all the things that what? might mean coming from anyone else, with Kale it’s just multiplied, because he’s this boy that you just don’t know at all, he’s unknowable and I don’t think it’s just me. I realize, moments from shore, that in this boat our roles are reversed, what with him navigating — my most compliant but least submissive client in control and me, the woman in control, at his mercy though who knows whether he thinks of it like that since there’s no telling what he thinks even when it’s the other way ’round. Other than the one thing about him I know that I keep trying to ignore, that he’s totally taken with me, there’s not

porn shops, in a city of no order where streets have no names or addresses of

any telling about Kale about anything at all. Walking up the shore to the car I find myself turning ’round to look over my shoulder at him back at the lake behind me, another concession to some strange connection or familiarity I’m not too happy about. I find myself turning ’round to look at him behind me — and he’s not looking at me at all. He’s pushing the boat away from the shore with the oar and, for a moment, panic wells up in me, I feel stranded, I want to call him to come back and take me back to the Chateau. But I fight it and go on.

The car is one of those old stretch limos from the turn of the century. In the back is a bar with crystal bottles of the lovely-looking sepia liqueur, and suspended from the ceiling of the limo there’s a little television turned to probably the only channel that can still pick up a satellite signal, from some station out beyond the Mojave. I haven’t seen a television since I swam up out of the lake but I know what it is anyway and while I have no idea what’s going on — a man and woman are arguing — I can’t help watching with fascination as the car winds up the mountain road to the house. I have no idea where we’re going or how far but I’m in the car a good fifteen minutes. Beyond the dark limo windows, one old abandoned mansion after another rolls by dark and hulking, sometimes I see a light go out in one window or another where squatters hide from the headlights of the car. When we get to the house where the party is, it’s buried in black palms and cypresses and darkness, walls invisible in the night and the only thing I can see is a small glowing rectangle in the distance, a yellow doorway in the night, and we get out of the limo and I can see the driver is the man in the powerboat who gave me all the cash that afternoon. Roughly he takes me by the elbow and directs me to the door.

The house, it doesn’t seem all that impressive inside, not that much bigger than the Lair — the light is dim as though to hide

any sequence that makes sense in space, rather it’s a sequence of time,

general dilapidation. The grime of the walls, the carpets. It must be seventy, eighty years old, from the middle of the last century, the left wall of the open living room lined with bookshelves with latticed doors but no books, and in the right wall of the living room a hearth that’s not burned a fire in years though some wood is stacked on one side of the fireplace and on the other side is a poker and instruments for stirring embers, cleaning ashes. ’Cross the room from where I stand windows run from the ceiling to the floor and past those I can make out in the moonlight a pool no one has swum in a long time because in the moonlight I can see the surface of the pool covered with leaves, and past the pool is a mega view of the lake and all L.A.’s islands, not that you can really see the lake itself in the dark. But in a way that’s the impressive thing, the panorama of islands all glittery in a way I’ve never seen L.A. You can almost get a sense of the whole of the thing, of the city and lagoon, the way you never do in L.A.

Inside the house there are about a dozen guests not including the gorillas hired to stand in front of the doors with their arms crossed, like the ones in the powerboat who came to see me that afternoon. Of the dozen there are three men and the rest are women, and I’m relieved to see other women here but they all look at me with bored suspicion. By now naturally I know this is some sort of mistake and the only question is how big it is and how I’m going to get myself out of it. One of the men comes up to me, this fiftyish Eurotrash sort who’s apparently the host, not bad looking but not pleasant either. “You’re the one from the Chateau,” he says.