Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

“Then strip.”

Slowly he begins taking off his shirt, still looking at everyone ’round him. When he gets off the shirt, he looks at the bodyguards and says, “I want them to leave.”

the hail of dying blossoms, yesterday and today and tomorrow are clearly

“That’s up to you,” I say. He snaps his fingers at the bodyguards and motions them to the front door; they look at each other and then begin filing out, one by one. “Lock the door, slave armand,” I say.

He nods. “Sure,” he mumbles, and I give him another good crack ’cross his back.

“‘Yes, Mistress Brontë.’”

“Sure, Mistress Brontë,” he corrects himself and goes to the door and locks it.

“Now take off the rest of your clothes. I’m not going to say it again.” He takes off the rest of his clothes except for his undershorts, and then he takes off the undershorts. Now he’s standing naked in the middle of the room. The other guests are squinting at him as though they’re hallucinating. “Take this,” I say and hand him one of the pairs of cuffs, “put it on your left wrist and lock it shut.”

“Uh, You’ve got the key, right?” he says, and I snap the crop so hard and loud against the arm of the sofa next to me that he and everyone else in the room jumps. Armand, he puts on the left handcuff. I give him one of the blindfolds. “Put this on.” Quietly he puts the blindfold on over his eyes. I wave a hand in front of his covered eyes and then, taking the empty cuff in my fingers, pull him toward the bookcases. I slip the cuffs through the handles on a pair of the latticed bookcase doors and then put his right wrist in the empty cuff and lock it; he’s now chained to the wall. “Hmm,” says Armand. From the sofa I take one of the ball-gags. “Open your mouth,” I say, and when he does I strap the red rubber ball in it. “Mmwrnf,” he says.

The other guests, particularly the two males, are enthralled. “Hey, what about us,” one of them says.

Men. Can they be more stupid? Is there anything they won’t do to get naked with a woman? I snap the crop against

delineated by the explosion of trees, I arriving there not only in a blizzard of

Armand’s bare butt and say to the one who spoke, “Crawl, slave,” and the man gets down from the sofa and crawls to me. The third one, feeling left out, he gets down and crawls over too. “Beg Mistress Brontë to give two miserable slugs like you the honor of being Her slaves.”

“Please, Mistress Brontë,” they whimper, “allow us be Your slaves.”

“Unworthy as you are.”

“Unworthy as we are.”

“Strip,” I say, and they can’t get their clothes off fast enough. Out of my bag come two more pairs of handcuffs and two more blindfolds; soon each of them is chained to two more pairs of bookcase doors like Armand, the three of them lined up next to each other. “Thank You, Mistress Brontë,” one says. “Be quiet,” I say and strap a ball in his mouth, and then one in the other man’s.

Looking back on it, this is where I made my mistake. Having taken control of the situation, I should have assessed things and figured out how I might now get past the bodyguards outside the front door, but instead I get carried away. It’s Monica, I know that — I’m infatuated. I’m even turned on by her silly little endearments that from a man I would despise. There’s something about the audacity of her, the way her desires are all right there on the surface, just like they would be with a man, and the way one of those desires is me. There for a moment not only do I have under my control these three halfwits who have willingly chained themselves naked to a wall but, in a way, Monica too, sitting there on the sofa looking at me as though she’s having a religious vision. The other women haven’t been this excited since puberty. I walk ’round slapping the men with the crop and telling them how pitiful their erections are and how women just laugh at them all the time, and Monica sitting on the sofa watching all this finally can’t stand it anymore and gets up. She comes over next to me as close as she

blossoms but atomized time, in a land still traumatized by the confession half a

can, holding a finger to her lips as though to say shhhh not a sound: “May I?” she whispers softly in my ear, her warm breath against my neck, and that’s when I do what I shouldn’t do. It’s just utterly unprofessional — I’m supposed to be in charge. Instead I give Monica the crop.

She looks at it deliciously, licks her lips, then lets into Armand with a blow I think will bring down the ceiling.

“Rnngswft!” says Armand.

“Oh,” Monica coos, “this is too good.”

The other women on the sofa burst into laughter and start clapping. “Uhm,” I start to say, but Monica’s not near finished. She begins giving Armand the thrashing of all time, sort of chortling at first but then laughing more and more with every thwap ’cross Armand’s backside till she’s so convulsed with laughter she can barely hit him at all. Armand is practically climbing the wall. “Here, here!” cries one of the other women, jumping to her feet, “let me,” and rips the crop from Monica’s hands. In the meantime another girl goes for the whip I’ve taken from my bag and another for a paddle, and pretty soon they’re all wailing away and I’m Spartanatrix leading chicks in revolt against the Empire. Rage, humiliation, all the times they’ve been used and treated like dirt, it’s all coming out now isn’t it, whips and paddles and crops flying while the naked men chained to the wall are in a sort of seizure, twisting and struggling at their cuffs and making all sorts of sounds. “Now girls,” I try to calm them down, but there’s no calming them down, I was in control but now the whole thing’s out of control till the Persian girl, the one who was taken out of the room earlier and who we all heard crying, stops and looks at the paddle in her hand and, finding it not nearly lethal enough, gazes ’round the room till her eye falls on the iron poker next to the fire place.

She throws down the paddle. She crosses the living room

century before by the emperor whose people believed was God that he wasn’t

and grabs the poker from the fireplace and is coming back with it for the man who did whatever he did to her, and I say, “Oh, hey, wait,” and even Monica comes to her senses, “No no no,” she laughs, holding the Persian girl back, “no no no no,” restraining her but still laughing. Meanwhile the bodyguards outside are now banging on the front door, “What’s going on in there,” while Monica and I, we’re trying to hold back the girl with the poker and the other women are still flailing away, beating the naked bodies of the groaning men to a rather glowing pink. The bodyguards are banging on the door and it’s clear they’re going to break it down any second. “I have to get out of here,” I say to Monica, grabbing the poker from the other girl’s hand and I’ve just enough presence of mind to take from my bag the keys to the handcuffs when Monica says, “This way.” Turns out the whole back wall of the house with the floor-to-ceiling windows can be moved like a sliding glass door though not any too easily, and we’re squeezing through the opening into the dark back yard where the pool is when I hear the front door come crashing down behind me. I hear the other women screaming in flight, some of them pushing at me from behind, all of us scattering out into the night and into the hills with Armand’s boys behind us.

I kick off my heels and throw the keys to the handcuffs out somewhere into the dark ’round me, and follow Monica who’s running past the leaf-covered pool to a small wooden gate you would have to know about to find. The gate doesn’t really open the whole way and we have to squeeze through like we squeezed through the sliding wall of the house, and there I am in my corset and stockings splinters catching on the lace, pushing through and feeling glad for once I’m little. Except for the fact I think she’s part cat, I don’t know how Monica gets through. Past the gate are steps down the hill, and at one point I trip and tumble down the steps and pick myself up and keep running down the path with the