Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

“Uh,” Wang says, studying the gun in his hand, “I point it at you and a bullet comes out and hurts you?”

“How in God’s name you ever became the hero of a revolution, I’ll never understand.”

“Well, I’ll admit it was from staring into guns rather than firing them.” Wang gets up from the chair and walks to the window. “Anyway I never said I was a hero. And is that what this is, a ‘revolution’?” Leaning in the sill, he’s noticed lately the sky is less and less blue. In the nearby hills, the observatory above Los Feliz glows in the sun like a skull. “I thought this was a ‘crusade,’ and I’m the mystic — I who don’t have a mystic bone in my body — divining messages that come singing out of the sky or floating up in boats in the form of children’s toys. Which is really more a crusade-thing than a revolution-thing. What sort is this anyway?”

Tapshaw snorts in contempt.

“Oh, all right,” Wang shrugs, “it’s a nine-millimeter. You see? I’m not as hopeless as both of us like to suppose.”

me, and he stopped crying and looked up at me blinking, and now in the

“It’s an old nine-millimeter that will probably….” Tapshaw stops a moment for the nausea to pass, “… that will probably blow up in your hand when you fire it.”

“Yes, well,” Wang goes back to the chair where he was sitting, staring at the captive man on the floor, “there’s one way to find that out, isn’t there.”

“These things are going to make me puke,” the bound officer gasps, swallowing frantically.

“Tapshaw,” … Wang answers gently and not completely without sympathy, “if you’ll permit me: that may say just a little more about you than it does about anything else. Anyway the handcuffs are all I have and they’re not coming off, not for a while anyway. So if I were you, I would calm down.”

After a moment Tapshaw says, “Where are we?”

“Actually,” Wang sets the gun down on the old table next to him, “I used to live here.” He gazes around the tiny one-room wooden house. “When I first came to Los Angeles, this part of the city wasn’t even under water.” He gets back up and returns to the window. “There was a park over there,” he nods, “right down those banks, at what used to be the corner of Alvarado and Sixth. A nice park once, I think I heard, back in the earlier part of the last century, 1930s, ’40s. I got here at the end of’1, from … well, by way of that proverbial slow boat from China but in a roundabout fashion, let’s put it like that. I would sit here at this same window at a table a lot like this one and smell the Mexican bread baking, I could never figure out where exactly, and …” In the northwest, the sky is definitely less blue than it used to be. “… write letters, lots of letters.” He says, “Each right

memory-stream of the lake’s birth canal, remembering it so distinctly, I can

after the other. Hadn’t mailed one before I started the next.”

“In code, no doubt,” says Tapshaw, leaning back against the wall taking deep breaths, “to the other side you were spying for.” “Yes, that’s right,” Wang snaps impatiently, “that’s the way we top agents send all our secret messages — by the postal service. Now you’re just being irrational. This was seventeen years ago, remember such a time? Before there was another side for me to spy for, if in fact I were spying for anyone, now or then or ever.” He sighs, paces back to the chair. For a while neither of them says anything. “You know,” Wang finally decides to try again, “you can believe what you want of me. You will anyway. And when your men catch up with us, as I know they’re bound to, persuasion brought to bear will undoubtedly get me to say exactly whatever it is our superiors — well, your superiors — want said. But right now, before the truth becomes so opportunistic, I’m telling you two things, assuming the truth means anything to you at all. The first is this. I promise you, I absolutely guarantee you, that most of what we call, oh, history, happens for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with why we think it happens. The second is, that kid had nothing to do with anything. You want to tell yourself I’m whatever it is you want to believe I am, go ahead. But all that boy ever did was row me in that boat.” He runs his hand through his hair. “He was barely verbal.”

“Yes, well maybe he was a little more verbal than you know,” and of course now, unwittingly, Tapshaw has revealed he’s not really so sure about Wang’s complicity after all. Both men realize this as

tell it was obviously him, I can see it so obviously in a way I couldn’t then

soon as Tapshaw says it but Wang lets it go because it’s a little beside the point, and also because part of him has always suspected the same about the boatman — not that he was part of any plot, which is absurd, but that maybe he wasn’t exactly the idiot savant of the lake he pretended to be. “Are you going to tell me he wasn’t broadcasting those messages?” Tapshaw says.

“I’m telling you,” Wang answers evenly, “they were meaningless,” which to Tapshaw, Wang understands, is the most dangerous prospect of all, the most subversive of all possibilities, the possibility that polemicists and ideologues, political spokesmen and militarists alike reject down to their core, not to mention rationalists: yes, Wang ruefully reminds himself, let’s not forget rationalists. “I’ll tell you what,” he says to the other man. Tapshaw glares up at him from the floor. “I’ll let you go,” Wang nods, “if you can answer one question.”

“I’m not playing your games.”

“Tribulation II, or III?”

“What?”

“Tribulation II or III. That shouldn’t be so hard. Haven’t you been keeping track? Haven’t you been able to tell when one ends and one begins, and then when the next ends and the one after that begins? You answer that and I’ll unlock those cuffs right now.”

Unconsciously Tapshaw begins chewing his lip. Wang can practically see the gears turning in his head.

because I didn’t really know him then, now I can see it’s Kirk with flashes of

“Come on, III or IV? Or, wait a minute, I said II or III didn’t I?” Wang taps the gun on the table next to him. “Well, we’ll throw in IV too. Give you more choices, more chances to get it right.”

Tapshaw exhales. “III.”

“Wrong.”

The other man’s shoulders sink in defeat. A moment of silence passes before Tapshaw finally thinks to ask, “How do you know?”

“Actually,” Wang says, “I don’t. But apparently, neither do you.”

“Then it was a trick question,” Tapshaw says.

“You’re really not getting the gist of this, are you.”

“What do you care about that kid anyway?”

Another trick question, Wang thinks, because he doesn’t know the answer, just as he doesn’t actually know for a fact what the young boatman was involved with or wasn’t, it’s just intuition — a little late in my life for intuition, Wang muses. A little late for instinct. That’s what bondage queens are for, instinct. There’s no mathematics for intuition, even for someone who was a student of mathematics once, but then mathematics isn’t always necessarily the language of reason and sense; you can stick numbers after anything, including a tribulation or two or three, and pretend everything adds up. He doesn’t really know for a fact, moreover, that what he’s told Tapshaw is true, that what the boy was broadcasting those nights from out on Hamblin Island was truly meaningless. The broadcasts didn’t mean anything to Tapshaw or Wang, or maybe even the boy, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t