Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

therefore as well no longer be sure to which gondola I’ve returned either,

waiting for, to hear me beg? then i’m begging You. i’m begging You now. Please come take me … please i’m begging. The walls can sing now, it’s time for their song, i don’t know what more i can do than beg You. i’m begging then, i’m pleading. Come on then, please. Yes please. Come on. Please. Please. Please.

Someone in the doorway. Not yet fifty years old but ancient in her grief she rises up on her elbows to try and see in the dark, falls back, eyes wandering the ceiling looking for the way out of her life. In the dark she hears his footsteps, waits for some explosion of final pain or deliverance or both, not really bracing for it because she doesn’t have the strength to brace; and when a hand falls on her forehead to calm her, as if she were a child having a bad dream and talking in her sleep with her fingers, it takes her a moment to think to herself maybe it’s not God after all, maybe it’s someone else.

In her bed, she turns to the shadow beside her and, reaching out, puts her own hand in his hair, and remembers from long ago a smell of tall dry grass. At first it catches in her throat but she finds the will to ask it anyway: “But who is it,” she murmurs in the dark, “are you …?”

“I’m Nothing,” says a voice she knows, that she knows she knows, transformed by all the years though it is, “a Bright Light.”

or whether there truly is another gondola, or ever was, or whether there was

ever even Another Side at all except in my red hysteria, or whether I truly

swim from personal chaos to collective god or from personal god to collective

chaos, or whether they’re the same chaos, the same god, the same lake, the

The night before ithappened, she had a dream about her father. She was crossing a square in the dark, making her way past a huge fountain through concentric rings of symmetrically staggered stone benches. Hovering over the fountain was a bronze world patched up from the pieces of other shattered worlds. Particularly since it was dark she didn’t recognize him at first, as though he was only the ghost of someone she was supposed to have known; when he said, so quietly and invisibly in the dark it almost could have been the fountain speaking, “The Age of Chaos is here,” she woke thinking, What, it’s just arriving now?

same empty gondola I left just a minute ago, and I don’t know but that as I rise

At first she didn’t eventhink to call him. They had been estranged for several years anyway; the last time they had talked was right after her mother’s death, although she would get cards from him along with the occasional, tentative e-mail she never answered.

Even that day, she picked up the phone and put it down several times before dialing. Then naturally the call wouldn’t go through and in a way she was relieved. But it nagged at her, the feeling she had, and grew stronger in the months since her dream, until it became something much more than a distraction from her studies and her confused deliberations over her sexuality and everything else going on in her life; it got to the point when everything reminded her of her dream and this feeling about it for no reason she could figure: walking her West Hollywood neighborhood, passing the classic old movie-star apartments with their turrets, the little Italian eateries and xerox stores and travel agencies and mailbox rentals and gay fetish shops and video outlets and cappuccino stands, and especially the sight of the Century City towers when she took the bus down Santa Monica Boulevard to the university. Over the next six months she might have expected to have more dreams about him, or perhaps the same dream over and over, each elaborating on the previous; but instead she stopped dreaming altogether. Instead she woke from each night as though it was a void, as though she had slipped into the night’s very womb, dark, still, swaddled in the unseen and unlistened; this she found more ominous.

up to break the surface of the water whether, even if I make it, even if I get

Even the winter twilight when shefinally found herself in a cab heading down Hollywood Boulevard as it made its way through traffic before finally turning south on La Cienega, after it had been all she could do just to decide to go, she still resisted the temptation to ponder the true nature of her feelings about him.

Deep down, she really wasn’t so sure her resistance was completely about anger. If she was honest with herself, she wasn’t even sure most of it was about anger. When she discovered at the airport that she had left her ticket back at the old hotel where she lived, she was relieved, like when her phone calls wouldn’t go through those first few days; she thought perhaps random accident was letting her off the hook. But she knew it wasn’t random accident. In her mind she could see the ticket in plain sight on her bookshelf: she had “forgotten” it accidentally on purpose, naturally, which was a bit pathetic, since it was an electronic ticket and she didn’t need the hard copy anyway. Checking in and making her way through all the new security, in her seat on the plane she finally resigned herself to the trip. It was a red-eye, so she was glad she had cashed in the miles for an upgrade.

Arriving at dawn, she took a cab into the city. It was too early to check into her hotel room, so she left her bags behind the front desk and took a walk outside. But it was too early and cold for walking too, and she was exhausted, upgrade or no. She gave herself permission not to have to deal with anything today. She lingered in the hotel coffee shop eating a muffin and drinking tea and reading the newspaper; at eleven, after she had been waiting three hours, she was able to get into her room, although going to

there, even if my lungs don’t burst first not even having taken a gulp of air

sleep now didn’t seem a good idea. She spent the rest of the day reading and watching the news cable, looking out the window — she had a nice view of the science museum across the street and the park only half a block east — passing the hours before she decided it was late enough for her to order room service. The dinner was all right but she didn’t like the way the waiter looked at her. Afterward she pushed the tray out into the hall, called housekeeping to let them know it was there, then took a hot bath. By now she was almost too tired and — she had to confess — emotionally wrought as well, and it took her awhile to get to sleep.

She woke the next morning indread. Trying to read the morning Times she was entirely unsettled; she dressed and, as she left the hotel, turned to the park rather than flagging a cab. She spent

before my descent, I don’t know whether I’ll have the courage, I don’t know

several hours walking in the park then went to a restaurant and had for lunch something she forgot even as she was eating it. Then she went back to the room. She couldn’t even bring herself to go to a museum or movie; instead she lay in bed stunned by the afternoon. By around five o’clock, when it was too late to do today what she had come for, she was furious with herself. She didn’t sleep all night, and by morning was both exhausted and wired. She skipped breakfast, skipped the newspaper, dressed and went downstairs and caught a cab heading downtown.

Thinking she was too early and she should kill some time walking around, she made the mistake of having the taxi drop her off on Seventh Avenue where the streets of the West Village got all crazy like in L.A., shooting off in diagonals. When she finally found the address, she looked for the manager among the names posted outside, buzzed him and they had a garbled conversation over the intercom in which she tried to explain who she was; finally he let her in, more out of frustration than anything else. Inside, he was standing in his office doorway. When he saw her, he brightened a bit like men always did. “Yes?” he said.