Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

God at all, and I was the agent of chaos in a way I’m only truly aware of now

steps zigzagging this way and that, and before zagging I keep bouncing off hedges at each zig. I have no idea where I’m going except it’s definitely down the hill. I’m surely not heading the way the limo came up, or toward the beach cove where I started, and I don’t know when I become aware Monica is gone or that there’s some heavy breathing behind me from one of Armand’s gorillas right on my tail. I keep thinking I’m smaller so I should be able to outrun him but he keeps coming. It’s funny how even when you’re running in blind panic through the dark, a bit like when you’re swimming in a lake, your brain goes on furiously thinking anyway, what can I do and how can I get away from this person, what will make him stop. What will make him just give up. I just keep running down the hill toward what I know has to be — somewhere in front of me — the water, wondering where on the lake I’m going to wind up and how far I can swim. I remember how hard I swam that first night I came to the Chateau X and almost not making it, and I really don’t want to have to go back in the water again.

We reach a small glen that’s all white and lit up under the moon, me and the one still chasing me, and I know the white of my corset makes me very easy to see, a little bouncing white moonbeam. He doesn’t have a gun does he, I think to myself. I think to myself if suddenly the sound of his breathing stops then I’ll fall to the ground and into the grass of the glen because that might mean he’s stopped running long enough to take out his gun and shoot. I glance over my shoulder which is a mistake because it slows me down, and he’s still right there behind me and it’s the man who originally came out to the Chateau grotto in the powerboat and drove me up in the limo.

I’ve gotten all the way ’cross the clearing when his breathing behind me does stop, I don’t hear him anymore, I hear nothing except this loud crack and think oh jeez he is shooting!

here in the birth canal of the lake, suspended in this moment between chaos

And stupidly instead of falling in the grass like I planned I just sort of stop and turn and look, expecting to see him there on the other side of the glen aiming at me — but he’s not there, at least not that I can see at first, then there’s something lying in the grass like a big wounded buffalo or bear and it’s him, and I hear him moan. I have no idea what brought him down but I start to turn and run into the trees to the south when a hand reaches up out of the grass and takes hold of my wrist and pulls me down.

It clasps my mouth and I don’t make a sound. I’m not sure when I know it’s him, whether it’s when I turn and actually see him or if something just tells me. But I swear something in Kale’s eyes, they light up like I’ve never seen in any person — in the night you think they’re fireflies darting above the grass. We’re hunkered down in the grass and his head moves slowly from side to side while the rest of him doesn’t move at all, almost like his head sort of swivels on his neck and then it stops and his ears pick up the sound of something.

I can’t hear anything. “Heart beat,” he says.

I can’t hear anything. I can’t see anything. He still holds my wrist in his hand and I don’t move at all. And then out of the trees on the northern side of the clearing where I’ve just come from are two more of Armand’s boys, stopping long enough to check out their fallen pal and then turn our direction.

I look at my wrist. It’s free, though I never felt him let me go. He’s gone from where he was right next to me in the grass, and I think I hear something move through the night before me but it’s the sound of the wind, I think it’s the sound of the wind. I don’t know what it’s the sound of. But Armand’s other henchmen are heading toward me in the grass when there’s another loud crack like I heard just a few moments ago, and then one goes down like the first one and then another crack and then the other

and God, a point-misser on this matter I must admit, arriving in Tokyo already

one. There are two more cracks and then no movement in the grass at all, the three men just lying there when I finally stick my head up to look ’cross the glen in the moonlight. I look and there are just the three of them lying there motionless in the grass — and then right in front of me there’s the momentary glow of those eyes like fireflies in the grass and Kale, almost like he’s taken form out of nothing, he comes to me as though gliding, not making a sound, not the rustling of grass or anything. With one hand he’s holding one of the oars from his boat, none the worse for wear for having leveled three men as far as I can see, with the other hand he pulls me to follow.

I follow him down through the trees of the hillside beneath us and to a cove different from the one where he left me off a few hours ago. I don’t recognize it at all, I have no idea where we are — it will turn out we’re about five miles of shoreline west of where I last saw either Kale or the lake. “Talk about being in the right place at the right time,” I say stupidly when I see the boat in the water. As though, you know, it’s a complete coincidence he happens to be there. As though it’s a complete accident that, at this moment, he happens to be in this one cove out of a thousand. As though some instinct I’ll never understand hasn’t led him here, as though he’s not followed the sound of my heart from the moment I left him.

I’m freezing out on the lake as he rows us south and then east. I want to go back to the Chateau but he’s not taking me there and I don’t argue. I freeze all the way out to the island where he takes me, the top of one of those old West Hollywood hotels rising from the water where he’s set up a little nook between the stairs and a rooftop storeroom of dead telephone lines and elevator cables. There are some mattresses and blankets that have been lying ’round more years than I want to think about, and a little place where someone built a fire once. “I get the feeling you’ve

pregnant but not yet knowing I carried inside me a question that I asked once

done this before,” I finally say about half an hour into thawing out. To the northeast I can see lights I’m pretty sure are the Chateau. I worry about the Mistress, I don’t like having left her alone. I’m angry at myself about the whole evening.

He sleeps next to me. If he had wanted to get in under the blankets with me I would have let him, as long as he kept his hands to himself. I think he doesn’t want to put me in the position of saying yes or no, you see? He wants to take the decision out of my hands, into his, so there will be no question of the night being anything other than what it is. And I’m relieved and looking back perhaps I should have told him it was all right to get under the blankets with me, but I don’t because I’m not sure he’ll take it the right way and I’m too tired to want to think about it — but you see I think he knows that too so that’s why he doesn’t ask. And it moves me about him, that he wants to spare me having to be in control of anything for that moment when I don’t want to be in control of anything, I want to give up all control and be able to trust it’s going to be all right, I want to be able to trust him, to trust the night will pass without event or misunderstanding and I’ll wake the next morning and he’ll already be awake walking ’round the edge of the island looking out at whatever, and I get up and start looking ’round too, wrapping the blanket ’round me because there I am still in my corset and stockings which are pretty trashed from the night before, but there’s nothing else to wear till I get back to the Chateau. I’m stumbling ’round the rooftop in the gray morning sun checking it out and trying to get warm, and there I have another distinct memory of something from before: of sleeping on another rooftop somewhere like this one, beneath an enormous sky.