Our Ecstatic Days

~ ~ ~

will save him, continuing down with bits of everyone I’ve ever been falling

away from me, down down down down in what I know is my own passage, as

~ ~ ~

In his sleep, the dome of his eyelids is red, like the bloody red sky of L.A. that he remembers from nine years ago, and he hears the song like he heard it that day in the Square twenty-eight years ago.

In his dream, which he has often, he’s standing there in the Square again, although it’s not clear to him whether he’s nineteen again, as he was then, or in his late forties, as he is now. He clutches her yellow dress in his hand—K, beautiful betrayer—and watches the tank roll toward him. Even looking at the famous photograph that thrilled the world, one still couldn’t know how big that tank really was.

though it’s unique to me as the same passage would be unique to someone

~ ~ ~

But when he stood there in the Square that day twenty-eight years ago, watching it come closer, it rolled toward him like a huge metallic wave, followed by another behind it, and another behind that and another behind that.

Now in his dream the tank rolls toward him more like a giant stainless-steel egg, with another behind it. The rolling of the eggs always nauseates him; once he lurched from the dream running for the latrine, vomiting in the outer tunnel. Just as it was twenty-eight years ago, in the dream he knows that somewhere, along with the rest of the world, she’s watching. Somewhere she’s watching, was what he thought to himself on that June day, and in his dream he thinks it to himself now; and knowing this, he can die, because he’s not just dying for the freedom of man, he’s dying for the tyranny of love. Kristin, he whispers into the barrel of the tank’s gun as though it’s the opening between her legs and he’s her slave again, whispering her name that curls up into her body like smoke.

In his dream, standing in the Square as the tanks roll toward him like great eggs, he hears the song as he heard it that morning. Hears it drift out from what he reasoned at the time must be, beneath the red sky, some unknown window.

else, the same but different, a passage without time, that might take a minute

~ ~ ~

For a moment in his dream he’s distracted. As he did that morning, he searches for it, a melody he would hear again only once, years later.

A gust rises on the Square as mysterious as the song, as though to blow the song away, as though to blow him out of the way of the tanks: Is the gust, he wondered at the time, an ally meaning to rescue me, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove me? before he learned it was really an anarchist without conviction. He stands his ground. The tank tries to go around him, he moves to block it. The tank moves again, so does he. Was it only six minutes, as a newsmagazine reported? Of course it seemed much longer. There in the Square he’s ecstatic in his terror: Try to deny me now, he says to her, as I defy the world. As happened then, he hears the melody and in his dream is just beginning to remember its source, leaning into the large gun barrel of the tank before him, when there is out of the corner of his vision a blinding flash of something, and he raises his hand to shield his eyes. At some point in the dream he sees her appear at the far end of the Square that’s empty except for him and the tanks, a distant figure crossing the Square toward him.

~ ~ ~

He knows it isn’t his Kristin. Rather, as she grows in the distance it’s the Mistress; in his dream he vaguely knows she doesn’t belong here, that she’s out of time. She’s dressed as

or a hundred years depending on the one being born through it, from

always, in stockings and garters and heels and a small chain belt around her waist, but the attire is more an assertion of power than a suggestion of seduction. In one hand she carries the chain leash she keeps for him, in the other her black riding crop. She has shoulder-length sandy hair; she isn’t beautiful but commanding. She doesn’t offer her sensuality but marshals it. As she strides toward him across the Square, her eyes locked on him never averted, not alluring but imperious, a spreading pool of black water precedes her like an honor guard. As she grows closer, the pool spreads faster and wider, seeping across the Square until it’s a wet black mirror tinged with red, reflecting the sky above.

There’s a cracking sound. Is it the explosion of guns, or red thunder announcing a red rain? Not the marxist red of the State…. A seed in the uterus of history to be washed away in the flow of the womb’s rejection, he recognizes it rather as the dark rust-red of his Kristin’s blood on their thighs after they have made love during her period. There’s another round of explosions

and he wakes and

in the dark, as he lies on his cot, someone pounds on his door.

He sits up from the cot, holds his face in his hands. “Sir?” comes a voice from the other side of the door; Wang fumbles for the small lamp on a nearby desk. “Sir?” comes the voice again. When he turns on the light he sees the picture looming over him as always, it’s everywhere, on every wall up and down the front line; a flash of rage comes over him. I took that down, he thinks to himself. Someone put it back up. In my own quarters.

The men draw inspiration from it, one of his officers explained not long ago. Well I don’t draw inspiration from it, Wang had answered. They can paper the entire front with it if they want but he doesn’t understand why they have to hang it in his

somewhere that was a minute ago or a hundred years ago, a passage from my

own quarters. He sees quite enough of it everywhere he goes, every headquarters, every outpost, every barracks — raised over the battlefields like the towering banners the Party used to hoist of its leaders back in his home country so I don’t see why I have to look at it in my own quarters. Back in his home country they would have called this a “cult of personality.”

No wonder I dream every night.

The pounding on the door continues. “Come in,” Wang says.

The soldier comes in. “Sir,” he says.

“Why is that on my wall?” Wang says.

“Sir?”

“Why is that on my wall.” Wang points at the picture. “I took it down. Someone came into my quarters and put it back up after I took it down.”

The young guerrilla looks at the enlarged photo. “The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”

“My own quarters.”

“Yes, sir. The men—”

“Yes I’ve heard how the men are inspired by it but I’m not inspired by it. Why don’t you put up something that inspires me?”

The soldier, a kid, not much older than Wang in the photo, seems flummoxed. “Uh … what would that be, sir?”

He tried to get them to stop calling him “sir” since he’s not an officer and in fact has no ranking at all, but that only seemed to cause more chaos among the ranks. “What’s your name?”

“Parsons, sir.”

“Parsons, let me ask you something.”

“Sir.”

“How do you know it’s me?”

“Sir?”

“I said how do you know it’s me,” Wang points at the

own unique chaos maybe to my own unique god, and as I slip on down through

poster. “It’s almost thirty years old, this picture, blown up about a hundred times its original size … that man”—pointing at the lone figure before the tanks—“is a blur … he could be anybody. So how do you know it’s me?” This is perverse, Wang thinks. Such questions just undermine the resolve of Tribulation III … is it Tribulation III now, he asks himself, or still Tribulation II? “Never mind,” he says, his face in his hands again. “Please take it down.”

The young soldier takes down the picture. He rolls it up and puts it under his arm.

Wang still sits on the cot, exhausted by his restless sleep. “So what is it?”

“Sir?”

“What did you wake me for?”

“Sir. Major Tapshaw reminds you it’s a full moon tonight, sir.”

“Tell him to send up the flare.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me a few minutes.”

“Sir.” The soldier leaves and for a while Wang sits on his cot looking at the blank square of wall where the picture was a few minutes ago. Tribulation II or Tribulation III … how can I be confused about such a thing? He gets up and moves to the desk and wakes the computer and turns the desk lamp off again; now there’s only the light from the computer. He takes off all his clothes and for a moment stands naked before the computer before he sits, inputting his password and opening the mail. He addresses a new message, staring at it as he composes in his head.

the birth canal of the lake then I have three visions there before me in the

~ ~ ~

With his one good hand, he begins to type.

To: MistressL@aquamail.com

From: FalseMartyr@4june89.net

my Mistress,

Your devoted possession requests the honor of subjecting himself to Your Cruel Pleasure on this night. Abjectly apologize for the short notice and duly expect to feel Your Exquisite Discipline for the impertinence, i await an answer, unworthy as ever of my humiliation, and remain Your

zen-toy

Wang looks over the message, considering the tone and double-checking the proper Upper/lower-case etiquette. He sends the message and waits to see if he receives an answer immediately, as sometimes he does, but after several minutes there’s still no response. He closes the program and dresses and pulls on his coat, and opens his door to the outer tunnel that leads above ground.

Outside his door in the tunnel, a guard snaps to attention. Like the soldier who just woke him, the guard wears the regulation lake-blue of the guerrilla insurgency as well as the blood-red beret. Hanging on the outside of the door is a picture identical to the one that was in his quarters a few minutes ago. “Guard,” he says.

“Sir,” says the guard.

“How long has this been here?” indicating the picture.

amniotic dark, or maybe more precisely two visions and a presence, with the

“Sir?”

“Hanging on this door. It wasn’t here when I came down a few hours ago: how long has it been here?”

“I couldn’t really say, sir.”

“You couldn’t really say? How long have you been standing here?”

“Sir, I came on duty at nineteen hundred hours, sir.”

“And was it here when you came on duty?”

“I don’t really remember, sir.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No, sir.”

“You don’t remember whether this was on this door right in front of you when you came on duty?”

“No, sir.”

“You’ve been staring at this door for almost two hours and you don’t remember if it was here?”

“Sir. Permission to speak.”

“Go ahead.”

“The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”

Wang’s shoulders slump in defeat. He grabs the top of the poster to rip it from the door but stops himself, and instead starts up the tunnel to the surface where he can hear the shelling in the distant night and the planes of the airlift coming and going.

~ ~ ~

Guards and soldiers snap to attention as he passes. A dozen small fires dot the expanse of the campground, where guerrillas

first being of God Himself naked and erect, shackled and restrained,

who don’t have tents sleep on exposed cots or the ground. Major Tapshaw meets him at the end of the barricade. “It may,” Tapshaw says, “be any time now.”

“Transcriber?”

“Waiting for us.”

“You send up the flare?”

Tapshaw hesitates.

Wang says, “Do we have to have this discussion every time?”

When Tapshaw is angry his black face grows even darker and now in the night all Wang can see of him are his eyes. “I think it’s better,” Wang hears the tension in the major’s voice, “if one of the men takes you across the lake.”

“I know you do, because we have this discussion every time.”

Tapshaw turns and calls over his shoulder to a soldier who appears as though he’s been waiting. “Send up the flare,” Tapshaw tells him quietly. He turns back to Wang as Wang watches the guerrilla disappear toward the far rampart. “You knew you were going to wind up sending up the flare,” says Wang, “so why do we have to go through this?”

“I suppose I feel the need to keep making the same point.”

Together in the dark they start walking to the listening station. “I think by now I’ve gotten the point.”

“We don’t know anything about this boy. And he’s … slow.”

“We know he knows the lake better than anyone,” Wang answers, “that’s what we know.” The two men mount the steps of the barricade, and Wang barely glances up at the sky above him for the full moon he knows is there.

blindfolded and swaddled in latex, enslaved and cuffed around His wrists and

~ ~ ~

He’s a man who never looks up. Over time, the acrophobia he developed in the last fifteen years has grown only more acute; as much as possible he lives on the latitude of his dreams. He breaks into a sweat just climbing the barricade, less than twenty feet high. This is something he hasn’t told anyone; he can barely bring himself to look at the sky above him when in fact, once, in one of his aimless lives before this, he lived closer to the sky than the ground, as close to the sky as one can live without being on a mountain or in an airplane. “I hope this time,” Wang says, “we’re going to be able to hear something over the shelling.”

“We have a recorder with the transcriber.”

“I know but last time it took the recorder half the night to clean up the disk.”

“This transcriber is better than the last one. Maybe she’ll be able to catch parts of the transmission if the recorder doesn’t.” They reach the rampart where both the recorder and transcriber, waiting with recording equipment and a laptop, come to attention. “As you were,” Tapshaw says; from the station can be seen the distant lights of Baghdadville in the west and the abandoned downtown skyscrapers lit by searchlights to the northeast. The sky above Wang that he can’t bring himself to look at is illuminated by the flare, a star momentarily brighter than the flaming white moon. The entire L.A. bay lights up. As the flare fades and the sky becomes black again, Wang says to the transcriber, “Are we ready?” and she answers, her fingers at her keyboard; the recorder pulls at some cables. “How quickly can you clean this up and get it back to us?” Wang asks.

“Thirty minutes maybe,” the recorder answers. “Turn it on

ankles, red rubber ball-gag in His mouth and awaiting His humiliation, and

now,” Wang says, “so we get it all from the beginning.” They wait. A wind off the lake triggers a memory in Wang and he realizes it reminds him of the gust in his dream, blowing across the Square — and now the whole dream, which he had forgotten, returns to him. He’s thinking of the black water spreading across the Square when suddenly it comes from somewhere out over the lake, out of the night.

~ ~ ~

The shelling actually stops, as though the bombs are listening too. An occasional plane from Occupied Albuquerque flies by overhead.

The broadcast isn’t that loud and doesn’t sound that far away, maybe no more than several miles. It’s over in a few minutes. For about ten seconds everything remains silent, then the shelling begins again. “You get it?” Wang says to the recorder and transcriber.

“As best I could,” the young woman transcribing says, apologetic, “I didn’t understand some of it….”

“It’s all right,” Wang says, “that’s what he’s for,” nodding at the recorder.

“I think I can get you a pretty clean copy,” says the recorder.

“Make an extra one,” Tapshaw tells them. “I want you both in Strategy as soon as you’re ready.”

He and Wang make their way back down the rampart. “Thirty minutes, Major?” Wang says, heading to his quarters; Tapshaw stops in his tracks. “Are we going to argue about the boy again?”

“Something else,” says Tapshaw.

“What?”

“We can talk about it in Strategy too.” Tapshaw has a funny look.

the second vision being of the Chinese man whose love letters to another

“All right. When they bring us the transmission.”

“I’m bringing in our geologist too.”

Our geologist? thinks Wang. “All right,” and he turns and heads back down the tunnel to his quarters. The same guard is at his door and the picture is still there, but Wang is relieved to note as he enters his quarters that the blank square of wall where he had the other picture taken down is still blank. He goes quickly to the desk to the computer and fills in the password, but there’s still no answer to his message; he takes off his coat and lies back down on the cot, determined not to fall asleep. He’s beginning to doze, however, when the computer wakes him. “Message,” the cybervoice calmly announces. Wang sits up and looks at the time on the computer and realizes he’s due in the strategy room; first he checks the message box.

To: FalseMartyr@4june89.net

From: MistressL@aquamail.com

zen-toy,

Come at 1.

your Mistress

Wang looks at his watch. It’s almost 10:30. He’ll need to leave by 11:30 to safely make it across the lake in time, assuming his boatman responds to the flare, and Wang can never be sure about that until he actually appears. He smiles ruefully: If that boy ever doesn’t show, I’ll never live it down with Tapshaw. Wang deletes from the computer mailbox both the new message and his own that he sent earlier, turns off the account and the computer, pulls on his

woman named Kristin I intercepted by chance five years ago, who I then saw

coat and walks from his quarters, guard snapping to attention as he leaves. This time he heads down the tunnel in the other direction, deeper underground.

Wang reaches yet another tunnel that leads to a door where two guards part for him to pass, one of them opening the door for him. Inside, seven men and the female transcriber rise from their seats around the table as he enters. He’s a little surprised; this is at least two more people than he expected. There are a couple of other officers besides Tapshaw plus an unfamiliar face that Wang assumes is the geologist, plus the cryptographer who always attends the post-broadcast sessions. Including the transcriber and the recorder, all of them sit around an egg-shaped table. Wang takes his seat and Tapshaw nods at the recorder who puts a disk on the sound system at the end of the room.

As the disk begins to play, Tapshaw hands another disk to Wang, who slips it in his coat pocket. The sound of the earlier broadcast is reproduced with new clarity; when it’s finished the nine sit around the table pondering. “Do you want to hear it again?” Tapshaw finally asks. “All right,” answers Wang, for no reason at all. The song begins again, very martial and anthemic Blood on the T. V., ten o ’clock news. /Souls are invaded, heart in a groove. / Beatin’ and beatin’ so outta time. / What’s the mad matter with the church chimes? “What’s the matter with the what?” one of the officers says; there’s the same perplexed silence as the song continues. “Church chimes,” the transcriber finally answers, although she seems less than certain.

Humans are running, lavender room.

Hoverin’ liquid, move over moon for my space monkey. Sign of the time-time

The song ends and after several speechless moments the cryptographer finally suggests, “It seems clear the ‘church chimes’

working the docks out at Port Justine with the small round monocle in his hand

are the key.”

“What about the lavender room?” the young transcriber asks, immediately mortified by her temerity. Several of the men around the table glare at her. “Well it’s a good question,” Wang says, then asks her, “Do you have a hard copy?” and the grateful young woman hands him a copy of the transcription. He begins to rise from his seat and everyone else begins to rise with him when Tapshaw says, “There’s something else.”

“Oh yes.”

“The other matter I mentioned.”

“Yes.” Wang looks at his watch; it’s almost eleven. “It can’t wait?”

“If you don’t mind. Particularly given this transmission.”

“All right.”

Everyone sits again. “This is Professor Stafford,” Tapshaw says.

“Professor.”

“Sir.” Stafford the geologist momentarily hesitates. “I’ll try to be as brief as possible.”

“I would appreciate it.”

“One night,” he begins, “about nine years ago, there was … a strange geological disturbance in the area.”

“I was under the impression the whole last sixteen years had been a strange geological disturbance.”

“Well, yes sir,” the geologist says, “but this was unique even by recent standards.”

“You don’t have to call me sir.” Sometimes he can’t help it

“Uh,” the geologist looks around at the others, confused, “OK. As you know, after the lake first began to appear — as you say, sixteen years ago — within those first few years it rose very

through which could be seen the lake, who watched me climb the billboard

quickly, completely flooding most of the basin and some of the outlying valleys. After that, over the next five years or so the lake rose more slowly.”

“May I interrupt?” Wang asks.

“Of course.”

“Am I correct no one’s ever established the reason for the lake in the first place?”

“No, sir. I mean, that’s correct, sir.”

Sighing heavily, Wang continues. “Or where it comes from.”

“Well, we know where it comes from.”

“The hole in the bottom.”

“Yes.”

“But beyond that, no one’s ever established why a hole appeared in the city and a lake came up through it.”

“That’s correct.”

“All right.”

“One night nine years ago, the lake rose three feet — there feet and two inches by precise calculations — and feel again to exactly the level it had been, all within a matter of minutes. No one has ever accounted for it.”

Wang pointedly looks at his watch and back at the professor.

“Then for eight years,” the geologist continues, “up until fourteen months ago, the lake didn’t move at all. Not so much as an inch. By what we’ve been able to determine it didn’t rise or fall, it maintained exactly its same level — there weren’t even the usual signs of water evaporation, seepage, displacement by natural erosion of the shoreline, any of the things that would account for the normal life of a lake.”

“Well, it wouldn’t seem to be your normal sort of lake.”

“No, sir.”

where I might lie in the red wind and gaze on a sky menstruating in tandem

“You said up until fourteen months ago.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What happened fourteen months ago?”

“The lake began to drain.”

“It began to drain?”

“Yes.”

Wang scratches his neck. “Do lakes drain?”

“Not like this. It’s not your normal sort of lake, sir.”

“I think I just said that.”

“Yes, sir. They don’t drain like this one is draining,” the geologist goes on. “This one is draining the way it rose.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s going back where it came from.”

“But we don’t know where it came from.”

“Well, no.”

“So…?”

“I mean it’s returning to its source,” the geologist explains.

“The source?”

“I mean it’s going back down the hole.”

Silence around the table. Wang finally says, “Back down the hole.”

“Yes.”

“And this began fourteen months ago.”

“That’s correct.”

“This is Wilson,” Tapshaw indicates another officer on his right, “in intelligence. Our operation up in Oxnard sent him down a few days ago at my request.”

“Really?” says Wang. “Did you and I talk about this?”

“No.”

“You requested this transfer on your own initiative?”

“‘On my own initiative’?” the officer says, standing. “Yes, I certainly did.”

with my own blood, and the third vision being the strange presence of a young

“Well then,” Wang says after a moment.

Everyone is tense. “Wilson,” Tapshaw finally continues, “has a particular sort of expertise, having to do with theological cult phenomenology, that I thought—”

“Theological what?” Before the other man can answer Wang says, “Never mind. Go on.”

“Sir,” Wilson the theological cult phenomenologist begins, “have you heard of the Order of the Red?”

“Some sort of theological cult phenomenon?” says Wang.

“A religion,” nods Wilson, “of several hundred followers. They set up their church nine or ten years ago out on one of the old hotel-islands in the West Hollywood part of the lagoon and then seem to have dispersed, moving inland fourteen months ago.”

“Just as the lake started going down. That’s what you’re getting at, right?”

“And I should add, sir, before anyone knew the lake was draining, sir.”

“I have a feeling,” Wang says to Tapshaw, “you’re going to point out this was also about the time the broadcasts began.”

Tapshaw holds a small bundle wrapped in leather. He opens it and places a small object in the middle of the table.

~ ~ ~

For a while everyone sitting around the table stares at it. Something about the moment strikes Wang as absurd but he reminds himself that, more and more, he has that reaction to

woman about my own age, tiny with long straight gold hair almost to her

everything. When he reaches for the object, he’s aware of the way the other people at the table surreptitiously regard his other hand, so that when the young transcriber works up the nerve to ask, “What is it?” for a moment everyone is shocked before realizing she’s referring to the object Wang holds up to her.

“A religious icon,” Tapshaw answers after a moment.

“It looks like a toy,” she says.

“Is it a monkey?” someone says.

“In a red space suit,” says Wang.

“To try and make a long story short—” Wilson begins.

“It’s a little late for that, but go ahead.”

“—the founders of the Order of the Red claimed to have had a vision, which they called the Epiphany of Saint Kristin, nine years ago on the morning after the lake rose and fell those several feet, during the inexplicable geological event that Professor Stafford referred to.”

For a moment Wang is stunned. “Saint Kristin?” he finally says.

“Accounts have it that a disturbed young woman took a boat out to the place above the lake’s source, slipped into the water and never resurfaced. Her body was never recovered. Hundreds of people saw this. It was a highly unusual day, given the phenomenon of the previous night regarding the level of the lake, as well as other meteorological occurrences.”

“What meteorological occurrences?” says the geologist.

“People’s recollection of that day,” the intelligence officer continues, “is vivid. Everyone remembers the strange winds and a great deal of volatile storm activity, and, uh …” He stops for a moment. “That the sky was red.”

“Her name was Kristin?” says Wang.

“The young woman reportedly sailed a silver boat almost

waist, there in the passage right beside me but going the other way, being born

two miles along the Hollywood shoreline. Even on an overcast day, people high in the hills saw the boat on the water. Those following her from the shoreline — and there seem to have been hundreds — are consistent in their observations, such as the fact she wasn’t wearing anything. We don’t know much else about her except her name, that she was in approximately her mid-twenties, that there was nothing particularly remarkable about her except that she lived in the hills in a small house which she allegedly set on fire the night before.”

“You don’t think that’s remarkable?”

“There’s speculation that whatever it was that happened with the lake on that particular night triggered this woman’s final collapse into some sort of dementia that led to her suicide. Apparently she was already something of a local oddity, referred to by the other people of the area as the Madwoman of the Lake, the Madwoman in Red, that sort of thing, given her refusal to conform to the blue attire of the other residents. Regional legend has it that, some years before, she abandoned her small son out on the lake at the same place she drowned herself on this particular day, setting him adrift in the same silver boat in which she returned on the day of her own death.”

“If she set him adrift in the same boat,” Wang says, “how did she still have it?”

“That’s a good question,” the intelligence officer admits. “It’s a little confused.”

“So a religion sprang up around this crazy woman?” asks another officer. No one at the table says anything until Wang, still studying the toy monkey in his hand — Tribulation II, or III? — says, “Well, no cult was ever inspired by anyone who was normal,” wondering if he himself is the exception that proves the rule.

“At any rate,” Wilson says, pointing at the toy monkey,

into the lake that I’ve left behind me, expelled from the rubble and fire and

“on the morning the woman took the boat out to the spot on the lake above the source, every eyewitness has her sitting there for several moments staring at the water. Some say she appears to have been praying, but since no one was close enough to hear, we don’t really know. Many of those watching that morning report seeing her reach into the water and take something from it. It may have been what you have there in your hand”—indicating the toy monkey—“but we don’t really know that either. Accounts of those who saw her disembark from the shore don’t mention her taking anything with her, and recall the boat as empty except for the oars and pole. No one remembers seeing her take anything from the water as she sailed along the shoreline, but of course it’s possible she did and everyone just missed it. When she lowered herself into the water above the source and didn’t reemerge, others sailed out to retrieve the silver boat and found in it only the toy.”

Tapshaw turns to Wang. “I think the question now is what tonight’s broadcast means in relation to this.”

“I don’t understand what bearing,” says the officer who asked how it was religions spring up around psychotic young women, “any of this has on the Crusade.” This reminds Wang that it’s always good to include in such meetings one or two people with no imagination whatsoever; they ask the very obvious questions that force everyone to not overlook the obvious.

“Yes,” Wang answers, rising from the table as everyone else stands, “I’ll leave you all to ponder that very thing.” He picks up the little red monkey from the table. “I’ll take my icon with me,” pressing it to his forehead, “and ruminate upon its mystical properties. Or play with it in my bath.” Only the young female transcriber laughs; this sort of humor just confounds everyone else.

Wang smiles at her conspiratorially. He’s had to teach himself that too much irony just makes everyone nervous. He slips the monkey in his pocket with the extra disk of the night’s

confusion and terror and chaos of the new age’s single greatest moment of

broadcast, and one of the guards opens the door for him as Wang hurries from the room up the tunnel; finally breaking into a trot, he can hear in his head the chaotic discussion that’s no doubt exploded in his wake. He looks at his watch and thinks to himself, Be there. Emerging from under ground into the night and the ever-present sound of shelling, he heads for the dock down the dark embankment outside the barricades of the Tribulation compound. He glances over his shoulder to make sure Tapshaw isn’t following. Be there. If i’m a little late, my Mistress will punish me, he thinks with a small thrill; but he can’t be too late, or not show up at all, without jeopardizing the relationship altogether.

At the top of the embankment, at the top of the wooden steps leading down to the dock, a guard allows Wang to pass on recognition, but an officer — undoubtedly alerted by Tapshaw — presents himself as Wang starts down the steps. “Sir,” the officer says to him, but Wang doesn’t stop. “I can have one of the men accompany you, sir,” calls the officer. Resolutely Wang continues down the steps toward the lake; when he reaches the bottom, stepping out on the wharf he sees no one. Then the boatman is there. As always he says nothing, greeting Wang only with silence, maybe a nod although it’s difficult to be sure in the dark; even in the moonlight — and these assignations, like the broadcasts that trigger them, always take place during a full moon — Wang can never completely make him out, but the boy can’t be any older than seventeen or eighteen, maybe younger.

Like Tapshaw and the others, Wang takes the boy’s lack of verbal communication for a kind of dimwittedness. But if the boy is slow then he’s the lake’s idiot savant, a master of its strange currents that recently have gotten only stranger, gliding the boat among Zed’s dark zones that have gotten only darker, avoiding the full moon’s exposure and thus the notice of enemy search parties in the nearby hills.

horror, hurled through the birth canal of the lake in a full-force gale of ash

~ ~ ~

Then it occurs to Wang. Of course the currents have gotten stranger and the dark zones darker: the lake is draining. Immediately the young boatman pushes the vessel out into the water with one of the oars, then at his end of the boat begins to row.

Wang watches him. The lake is draining, he almost blurts to the boy but stops himself.

More and more everything strikes him as absurd. He wonders if this is because he’s fundamentally still a rationalist in a rational universe that renders the absurdities more salient, or because he’s changing into an absurdist. He thinks about his dream, his defiant stand for freedom before the eyes of the world and the way in which love is bondage, the way one happily trades freedom for it. He thinks about the woman who drowned herself and wonders what she did it to be free of, what she did it to be bound to. What bearing has it on the Crusade? one of the officers asked, not an unreasonable question if for sixteen years you’ve ignored how the lake has had a life of its own, how from the beginning the lake has manifested its own psyche, altering the surrounding psychotopography. There wouldn’t even be a Tribulation II or III if not for the lake because — although he can’t remember why — he’s quite certain that if not for the lake, there would never have been a Tribulation I or II. Well. It’s the business of soldiers, thinks Wang, to pay attention to trees rather than forests. Distracted by forests, they can’t be expected to tend to the trees.

He both warns and reassures himself the woman who

and obliteration, hurled through the opening of the lake by an Oblivion Wind,

drowned couldn’t have been his Kristin. While she did have a son — by another man, it was the thing that had torn them apart, as well as all his unanswered letters after he finally came to L.A. for her — they said this woman had been in her mid-twenties, and his Kristin would have been well into her thirties at the time; and although he can’t quite place it, he vaguely remembers having himself seen a young woman in a brilliant red dress and flashing silver gondola sailing the lake. He’s troubled by the morass of emotions he feels at this moment: relief, sorrow, grief, guilt … is this the only way he’s to be free of her ghost? for, dead or not, she’s been a ghost to him all these years anyway, for the way she’s haunted him. Navigating from one dark zone of the lake to the next, never breaching the radius of moonlight that floats on the water, the boy at the other end of the boat rows so silently and invisibly it’s easy for Wang to feel as though he’s the sole passenger of a boat that sails itself. He pulls his coat up around his neck as the wind casts in his face a light spray, and as he makes his way toward the black silhouette of the hills under the full moon, he hears the lake’s strange melodies. Glancing over the side of the boat he can see just under the water the glowing snakes that slither alongside; sometimes he can almost make out lyrics, instrumentation, musical bridges, pop hooks. As the lake drains, Wang wonders if the music will diminish or grow stronger. He wonders at what point the lake will finally become an inexorable whirlpool.

Of course he remembers the red sky, color of blood, as vividly as he dreams of it. Everyone who was in L.A. then remembers it, even a man who never looks up. For a moment he’s aware the boy has stopped rowing; in this place the lake is blacker than ever, the air around them so black not even the light of a full moon penetrates it. Not even the melody-snakes glow, assuming they still accompany the boat at all, not even the hills can be seen

control and its loss asserting themselves as the parameters of her new psyche

although now they’re close. At this moment Wang realizes they’re at the place of the lake right above the source; directly below, at this moment, the lake rushes back to wherever it came from.

At the other end of the boat, the boy says, “Night-time.”

“Uh, yes,” is all Wang can think to answer, “it’s night time, yes.” The boy has stopped rowing. In the dark they drift. Is he lost? wonders Wang in consternation. But this has happened before. Suddenly Wang hears what at first he thinks is the hooting of an owl, so close it’s as though the owl is in the boat with them — but Wang remembers this from before as well, and that it’s not an owl, it’s the boy. The boy hoots again and then somewhere overhead the boy is answered, the night hooting back; the boy responds and then the night responds in a chorus that trails across the sky, and the boy picks up the oars and begins to row, following the sound above. In a while, as though the darkness is a fog, it parts and the spires of the flooded Chateau X suddenly appear not more than thirty or forty feet away, and the boat is surrounded by a swarm of the illuminated snakes as though the lake’s on fire, a faint maelstrom of music and it shocks Wang, the largest swarm of them he’s ever seen.

Something he’s never thought of before occurs to him now. His mind tries to hold onto it as the boy rows them to the usual docking point around the back of the Chateau, in the grotto formed by what was originally several of the Chateau’s suites, where the walls have been either deliberately knocked out or washed away by the lake. A lantern hangs over the outer archway and another shines in the distance off to the right, at the top of the stone steps that lead to a door at what was once the hotel’s top floor. To the left, at the end of a granite walkway around the edge of the grotto several feet above the water, is another door with a large rusted brass ring for a doorknob; below the walkway near this door is another mass of snakes as though a star has fallen there, lighting up

just as they do for me, passing so close to me that the two of us almost brush

the water from beneath. Again a moment of elusive comprehension shoots across Wang’s mind while, as always, the boy docks in the dark, at the bottom of the steps that once served as a hotel stairway. As always, sitting on the bottom step is a large basket with bread, fruit, cheese and an uncorked bottle of wine, all wrapped in a cloth.

Wang climbs out of the boat and takes the basket and turns to the boy. “Why don’t you come inside,” he says, “you can wait in the entryway. I’m sure it would be all right,” although he isn’t sure at all. The boy doesn’t answer. “You’ll be dry and warm and you can eat and drink there.” But there’s no answer and so Wang places the basket for the young boatman in the boat. “It may be a couple of hours,” he says and then, “uh,” unable to stop himself, “do you know, uh … is it Tribulation II, or III?”

“No,” the boy answers in the dark, if it’s an answer at all. At the top of the steps a door opens and light comes through and the boy ducks away, pushing the boat off from the makeshift landing; Wang can hear the lapping of the water from the boy’s oars in the dark. Wang turns up the steps. No one is in the open lit door; when he reaches the top of the steps, stepping through the door, no one is in the entryway. Off to the left of the entryway is another single door. He goes into the dressing room behind it and takes off his clothes. There’s a sink and mirror, and on the counter next to the sink a red studded collar. The dressing room serves as a transitional passage to the next chamber, and after Wang places the collar around his neck — always with some difficulty given his one useless hand — before he exits through the other door he closes his eyes and, as much as possible, pushes everything from his mind. He makes a point of never looking in the mirror, particularly after he’s put on the collar. He realizes he’s late tonight and can’t take too much time to clear his thoughts; before

each other as though we might be sisters, I find myself thinking at this minute,

going through the other door he hastily takes from the pocket of his coat, hanging on a hook, the disk of the evening’s broadcast along with five one-hundred dollar bills. He doesn’t notice that the toy monkey falls from the coat pocket to the small throw-rug at his feet.

Now on the other side of this door he’s in the Mistress’ lair. Candles burn. There’s an end table by the wall where he knows to leave the disk and the money, there’s a step up into the training space where he knows to wait, kneeling attentive and naked except for the red collar, before the large hearth of the Lair where a fire burns. Several minutes pass before he hears the steps of her high heels, “zen-toy,” he finally hears her, “you’re late.”

“i’m sorry, Mistress.”

She circles where he kneels and strikes him once with the riding crop. Then she takes the chain leash in her hand and attaches one end to his collar locking it and the other to the chain belt that hangs around her waist just above her garters and stockings. She has a pair of fur-lined handcuffs, and after she’s pulled him to his feet and cuffed his hands, she turns and strides across the Lair pulling her behind him; for an hour or so he carries out her commands at the end of the leash. After a while she reclines on a leather divan before the hearth and has him massage the muscles of her calves and lower back, striking him with the riding crop when his fingers become impertinent or she feels he’s enjoying it too much. At some point she blindfolds him. When an hour has passed she uncuffs him and has him lie face down on the floor where — as always in these sessions — he believes he can hear singing in the walls of the Chateau an ancient city of women, actresses and singers and models and publicists and playmates and escorts and personal secretaries and drug connections and investment bankers and systems analysts and marketing vice-presidents and studio heads-of-productions and strippers from

as though we might be lovers, as though we might be wives to each other,

the Cathode Flower nightclub down the boulevard who stayed within these walls back when this was a famous hotel and left behind whispers and arguments and moans of rendezvous and seduction and merger. The Mistress repositions Wang’s hands behind him and cuffs him again and beats him with the riding crop in time to the sound of the lake lapping against the walls of the Chateau outside her window. Whose zen-toy are you? she asks between blows, and he answers, my Mistress’. What is the one and only reason you exist? she says and he says, To please and amuse my Mistress. After a while she pulls him to his knees by the fur-lined cuffs around his wrists and has him kneel before her on the divan. She pours over her thighs a sepia-colored liqueur and pulls him to her by his black Chinese hair; still blindfolded he licks the liquor from her thighs and when she feels he takes too much pleasure in this she beats him with the riding crop some more. When he’s drunk one thigh dry she moves his mouth to the other. Tasting her thighs and the liqueur, he’s transported. Drugged by the liquor and her thighs he falls into a trance, lost, floating above a black lake like a red cloud, a sepia rain on his tongue, and although he murmurs my Mistress, my Mistress in the groan of his climax, it’s the name of Kristin, the last woman before Lulu with whom — many years ago — he shared any sort of sensual moment, that fills his mind.

~ ~ ~

Spent, he sleeps naked on her floor. She covers him with a blanket but doesn’t remove the collar or cuffs.

as though mistress and slave, as though mother and daughter, and then

Through the white groan of his climax, he’s tumbled into a memory as potent as a vision, more than a dream. In it he can feel the movement of a train he’s on, he can smell the grass from the passing Midwest farms outside his window as he smelled it once before, he can touch the flyer he holds in his hand just as he held it then. He’s back in his past; he looks around him, momentarily confounded as to how he’s returned here. It’s years ago again, on the train that took him from the New York of chaos, where God lay in ashes, to L.A., the last city of the modern imagination, where even God and chaos could be reimagined.

In this vision on this train, it’s midnight, the final days of summer. In Wang’s mind his K hovers before him—labial jewel, riverine rapture—waiting for him in the dark distant west, in the unknown future, except back here now on this train where past and present coincide, he knows the future. He already knows he’ll get to L.A. and not find her, he already knows he’ll write all those letters she’ll coldly ignore. The train car rattles. He likes the horizontalism of the train, the way it proceeds between ground and sky belonging to neither, although in his vision he isn’t sure whether this is something he actually felt before, years ago when this first happened, or something he’s only aware of now. He looks at the flyer and remembers the strange wonder he felt the first time he looked at it on this same train in this same moment: HAVE YOU SEEN ME? it reads like thousands of them then; the face on the flyer is his. His name isn’t on it because no one knew his name: “I’m an Asian-American man last seen …” although actually he’s not American. He wonders who had the flyer for him made — someone who doesn’t know his name but remembered him, someone who isn’t also one of the missing, as are most of those with whom he had a passing acquaintance.

There was another woman.

all the commotion of visions stops as still as time has stopped here in this place

In this memory-vision, as he considers the flyer he holds, awash in a guilt he’s held at bay for many years now, he thinks about her don’t think about her though he had met her only three times don’t think about her she was no more than eighteen years old maybe nineteen, tiny, spritelike with long straight gold hair that hung almost to her waist. He never knew her name. Somewhere behind him he’s sure there’s a flyer for her as well, and tries to convince himself she’s somewhere sitting staring at her flyer in the same strange, almost amused fascination with which, on this train, he stares at his. But he doesn’t really believe it.

In China they would have found me by now. Even riding the train, some part of his brain can still hear the lake beyond the terrace of the Chateau X, just as he feels — from the Lair’s hearth near where he sleeps — the heat of the fire that lights up the train car bright red. And then he hears it, the song he first heard that morning in the Square almost three decades before and only once since, hears it and is astonished she’s singing it, his Mistress. It’s the Mistress’ voice and he wonders how she knows this song. He’s trying to make out the words but recognizes the melody immediately, and as he listens a rivulet of red runs down the aisle of the train that he knows is menstrual blood, and forms a pattern.

In another chamber of her lair in the Chateau X that Wang has never seen, as he sleeps naked before the fire by the divan beneath the blanket with which she covered him, the dominatrix-oracle now studies the pattern on a parchment on the floor before her. As she tosses the soaked tampon into a nearby toilet and waits for the pattern to dry, she gazes for a moment at the pulsating full moon that the bathroom window so perfectly frames, then returns to the pattern and for a brief moment considers the thing that’s crossed her mind that she doesn’t want to consider, which is the recent ebb of her monthly flow: Your childbearing years are numbered rolls across her mind. Since

and in the silvery bubble of the birth passage I feel myself caught up in the

she’s had no thought of having another child, the pain of it might make no sense except that it has to do not with any child to come but the one to whom she said goodbye so long ago. The irrevocability of her body’s recent monthly messages is more profound than she wants to interpret. In order not to think about it, she puts the disk that zen-toy brought her on the chamber’s sound system. She already knows what she’ll hear. Spacemonkey sign of the time, she murmurs to herself and turns back to the pattern of drying blood on the parchment, and lowers the lights and waits until the glow of the melody-snake’s head rises from the black shadows of the floor.

On the train he sees it too. As her monthly blood forms its pattern in the aisle of the train and begins to dry, there beneath the car’s dank light with midnight outside, the song he’s been listening to in his Mistress’ voice fades, desperate as he is to make it stay, and from the other end of the car he sees slither the luminous melody-snake along the lines of its lyric humans are running, lavender room, hovering liquid, move over moon into the menstrual red lattice; its tongue flickers. At this point in the climax’s vision, Wang wants to flee. At this point he would forsake both love and heroism. The snake is drawn further into the pattern and becomes stuck in the blood, melody coiling and uncoiling hovering liquid move over moon moveovermoon moveovermoonmoveovermoonmoveovermoon struggling until it dies in awful exhaustion, tongue protruding limply from the slit of its mouth, as spent as Wang who shivers with sweat.

In his sleep he feels her tender hand on his brow. He feels a cool cloth across his face. A moment later he feels one of his wrists come free of the fur-lined handcuffs and his neck come free of the red-studded collar, and the blanket pulled up around him. He feels her take his other hand that’s still cuffed; in his sleep he’s vaguely aware of her running her finger over the rounded piece of

memory-stream of my own life and begin to drift in it, first returned to the

plexiglas that, almost thirty years ago now, a surgeon in the Chinese underground inserted to try and save the hand, threading the blood vessels through it even as he was unable to preserve tendon and muscle. Now in his sleep he feels the Mistress gently run her own fingers up and down the forearm that is distinctly thinner in comparison to the forearm of the other, good hand.

He opens his eyes.

She kneels beside him. The train is gone. He looks around, remembers he’s lying on the floor of the Chateau X; she’s blown out some of the candles so the Lair is darker than before. She kneels beside him no longer in garters or stockings but a black silk robe with a pattern of jade-tinted vines that wrap themselves around her. She helps lift him from the floor to the divan; naked he pulls the blanket closer to him, shuddering. She raises a cup of water to his mouth, then a glass of hot brandy. “Are you OK?” she says.

He nods. For a moment the two of them say nothing. She watches him but he can’t quite look at her, feeling exposed and vulnerable as he always does after these sessions, until finally he says, “This time was especially….”

“I know,” she says. “You saw it, then?”

“Yes.” He sits up, a bit revived, and she repeats the administration of water and brandy. Over on a low coffee table is the parchment she’s brought in from the other chamber, now dry, a dark brown-red map with the death streak of the melody-snake, the echo of it just barely audible; she brings it to him. They study the menstrual I–Ching together. “Do you know the song?” he asks.

“New York punk-blues, apocalyptic subgenre,” she says, “late 1970s. ’79, ’78.”

“What’s the ‘lavender room’?” he asks.

“That’s not the important part.”

“The ‘church chimes’?”

small Chinatown on the small island in the delta where I grew up, raised by my

Lulu reaches over, pulls the blanket away from off his shoulder and touches a small forming welt. “I struck you too hard.”

“I didn’t notice. Truly.” He looks at her now. “You know I want you to hold back nothing.”

When they look at each other like this, it’s very difficult for her to believe he doesn’t remember that time out at Port Justine, when he was working as a dock hand and secured her gondola. She had convinced herself that afternoon they connected in some way, particularly when, in a kind of paralysis, he watched as she climbed the billboard. At their first session more than a year ago she almost said something but didn’t, since that kind of acknowledgement implicitly threatens an arrangement based on anonymity and discretion. As time passed, however, she understood that he doesn’t remember her at all and it angered her, and she used and channeled that anger in her training of him: This she thinks to herself, touching the welt is that anger. It’s unprofessional she chastises herself. Anger is a betrayal of an implicit understanding of the relationship; it renders personal what’s supposed to be impersonal, the objectivity of the relationship being that which both heightens the senses and clears the mind. Yet at this point in their relationship it’s difficult to maintain the impersonal; she pulls her fingers back from the wound, returning to the interpretation of the parchment. “Something is happening to the lake,” she says.

“It’s draining,” he tells her.

He’s surprised at the way the blood seems to run from her face. “What do you mean?” she says.

“I mean it’s going back. Back wherever it came from.”

“Here,” she points to a small bright nexus on the parchment, where the last flicker of the melody-snake’s tongue lapped its final drop of blood, “is the event vortex. I say ‘event’

drunken uncle in the town tavern where I never knew my mother, the closest

but that doesn’t necessarily mean an event in the sense of an occurrence, it may mean the revelation of something that’s already existed a long time, that will manifest its existence in a way never perceived or comprehended before. Maybe something very obvious, something we’ve thought of in one form that in fact takes another….” She shrugs. “This is vague, I know….”

He’s never heard her sound so … uncertain before. It unnerves him. “I have to take something back with me … something that can mean the difference between victory and defeat….”

“You’re not understanding, zen-toy,” the Mistress says. “This”—pointing at the nexus—“renders your victories and defeats insignificant.” Oh yes, Wang thinks to himself, that’s what I’ll tell them: whether we win or lose is insignificant. “You already know these answers, zen-toy. You already know these questions.”

“What do you mean?” he says.

She studies him hard. His confusion sounds genuine, and she wonders if she’s wrong in her suspicions; she gambles. “Who’s broadcasting these messages?”

The question stuns him, given his own suspicions. Instantly and instinctively he analyzes the tone of it: is this a confession on her part? A challenge, a test? Is it just a moment of disingenuousness, when in fact this woman has always seemed anything but disingenuous? “You tell me,” he replies, and the moment of truth collapses between them, each thinking the other has failed it.

Disappointed, she says, “Drink some more water,” and raises the cup to him. Disappointed, he takes it and drinks. They don’t say anything for a while. “When does your boat return?”

“I don’t know. He may be there now.”

I ever came being one day when I was three years old and stood at the edge

“What do you tell them about why you come here?”

“I don’t tell them anything. They don’t know anything about you.”

“They don’t ask.”

“They ask all the time. They wonder all the time. But it’s part of my … mystique. I suppose, that I don’t have to answer such questions.”

“But they do know you come here.”

“They don’t know where I go. The boatman who brings me isn’t one of them. One of the locals….”

“That seems even more dangerous.”

Wang stands up from the divan, a bit shaky, but steadies himself. “I’ve taken the liberty of offering him your hospitality, so that he might wait in the outer entryway.”

“That would be OK.”

“Thank you. He doesn’t seem to want to anyway. It’s very kind of you to leave him food and drink.” Wang hesitates a moment. “I’ll dress now.” He staggers a bit toward the dressing room and turns; once he goes through this door, he’s not to see her again until next time, so he says, “There was another song,” still a little dazed.

“What?”

“Another song. Other than this one—” indicating the parchment with the blood. “It sounded like you were singing.”

“You’re surrounded by signs,” she answers. “Ignore none of them.”

He nods and enters the dark dressing room. He pulls on his clothes and coat, and exits the other door of the transitional chamber into the entryway, and then through the outer door into the bracing cool air that blows off the lake into the open Chateau grotto. Slowly he moves down the stone steps to find the boy with the boat waiting for him.

of the dock in a blue dress holding my uncle’s hand, patiently watching the

For a while, on the way back, he’s oblivious to everything: the night, the searchlights, the Chateau behind him, the bombs in the distance, the sound of the airlift, the boy in the boat — oblivious to everything including, he finally notices, how the glass hand that has no feeling still wears the fur-lined handcuffs she put on him, the other cuff dangling empty. Wang begins to think about what he’s going to tell Tapshaw and the others; he wonders if she’s becoming less certain of her interpretations or if the very notion of meaning approaches critical mass, beyond which is the void. He can’t tell whether this evening undermines or reinforces a theory he’s had for a while now. He’s not exactly sure when he first formed this theory, although he remembers it was during one of their sessions near the end, when the white moment always seems to open up like an orifice.

If this theory is correct, that in fact she’s the one who’s transmitting the broadcasts, then it raises many questions, and so he’s always been careful not to reveal too much. He’s never actually explained to her who he is, although he knows she understands he’s a man of “mystique” as he put it, of power and position, as are most of her clients who from time to time need to shed power and position and control. He’s never told her of his past and she’s never pried, which he’s always taken to be part of her professionalism, a demonstration of her discretion and respect for his privacy; if anything, sometimes her lack of inquisitiveness gives him the feeling in fact there’s nothing about him she doesn’t already somehow know. He might even believe she knows him better than he knows himself, if one can live his life at odds with his own true nature. For a so-called rationalist he certainly has a lot of dreams and visions, not to mention the mystic menstrual prophecies of L.A.’s most famous bondage queen — so if she’s the one broadcasting the messages, then for whom or what is she a medium? Between Wang and whom does she serve as translator

island ferry cross the river to a woman on the far other side who then didn’t

and interpreter? And then suddenly out in that darkest part of the water, somewhere close to its source, he remembers how pale she went when he told her that Zed is dying, and gets it in his head that, as he is her slave for the few hours they spend together, she is the lake’s.

For as long as they both have been here, Wang and the lake have lived in mutual denial, each barely acknowledging the other. Once he might have supposed the lake could be a source of comfort to him, for the way it raised the latitude and shortened the longitude of everything: a tower becomes much smaller when half of it is underwater. The lake leveled everything for a man who never looks up, and in fact coincided neatly with his new fear since, not so long before he came to Los Angeles, back on the east coast he had been not a man afraid to look up but, to the contrary, a man who lived in the sky, riding floating boxes. Ironically, once it was the sky that offered him solace from ground-level — to be precise the ground level of city squares; ironically, once it was the ground he fled, until the day the sky betrayed him and came crashing down. When that happened he became a man caught in limbo between the sky and the ground, someone who lives looking only straight ahead in a state of hovering, for which a lake should have been perfect. But as both the mirror of the sky above and the window of the ground below, the lake became the worst of all: liquid ground, liquid sky: lake zero.

The lake is coming for me, he used to write in his letters to Kristin from the city’s southern shore. The truth is he’s never stopped thinking that. The truth is he thinks it even now, if he allows himself to. The lake is coming for me, to expose me for the fraud I am. There’s a certain contradiction in his thinking about both the chaos he rejects and the higher order he believes is mathematically untenable: Is the lake God, he sometimes asks himself, is the lake chaos? He’s never believed in God or chaos,

board the boat but rather shook her head, turned and vanished, something a

he thinks chaos is as religious a concept as God and that God is about as scientific as chaos — but sometimes he wonders. Sometimes he thinks that when he was a mathematics student his professors did their work better than he wants to believe, successfully having imprinted on his subconscious the conviction that everything is empirical after all. He always liked to think he departed from such teachings when, as a young rebel, he embraced the heresies of freedom and desire and redemption in their most truly heretical form, not as calculations of sociology or biology or some quantifiable philosophical value system but as entities unto themselves; but he’s pushed from his mind, more times into the thousands than he can count, like he’s pushed away every thought of the lake, every question of whether it’s really possible to believe in freedom, desire or redemption if you don’t believe in chaos or God — if not both, then one or the other. The lake is coming for me. He ignores it even as he’s in the middle of it, even as his boat cuts through its water, the way one tries to ignore an old lover who’s standing very conspicuously on the other side of a room just entered.

When his boat reaches the guerrilla encampment on the southern edge of the lake, Wang is surprised to note on the pylon of the dock, in the light of the full moon, the watermark of the lake from just a few hours ago when he disembarked for the Chateau. Clearly the lake has already gone down several inches. No sooner has Wang cleared the boat than the boy pushes off again, rowing back out with determination. Above him the moon erupts, a lava of light pouring from the white mouth of the cosmos’ black volcano; no longer darting among the dark zones, the boy heads northwest in a straight line making remarkable time, until after a while he can see his hotel-island in the distance. He slows down as he nears the island, on his guard for marauders and pirates and stray cultists who still circle grounds they can’t decide are holy or

three-year-old could only find as baffling as it was devastating, after which I

haunted. The boy who now calls himself Kuul, a name half the language of childhood-memory and half the language of owl, has never believed the Hamblin either holy or haunted; he returned here a year ago only by some instinct he doesn’t understand. Having seen the city and lake from any number of high vantage points over the course of his young life, he finds the perspective from the top of the Hamblin only a variation on that view. If it ever reminds him of when his mother brought him up here to the rooftop as a toddler, it’s only for a moment more brief than his mind can grasp or wants to.

When he reaches the square brick island, he sidles the boat up to the top of what used to be the hotel’s fire escape. He ties the boat and takes from it the basket of bread and fruit and cheese and wine left for him at the Chateau X. Luna completely lights up the Hamblin and he makes his way easily around the door that used to lead to the stairway inside the hotel, now completely submerged except for the top. Tucked away in an alcove formed by the rooftop door and an adjacent storage space that used to house all the hotel phone lines is an old silver gondola that stands upright like a small altar; propped up inside, resting against an assembled mass of old blankets, pillows and bits of old mattress, is a woman now somewhere in her early sixties but who seems much older. Once her eyes were older than her face but her face has caught up. Once her smile was younger but it’s raced to the edge of death before the rest of her. The hair that Kuul’s mother once saw as lost between the auburn of yesterday and the silver of tomorrow has long since found its way to a white amnesiascape.

Now the old woman’s mind wanders its own rooms from one to the next. Kuul has no idea who this woman is. He found her here left behind on Hamblin Island following its abandonment by the Order of the Red, and for a year now has cared for her, protecting her from the rains and the wind off the lake and bringing

began to realize over the years that in my nights I never dreamed, no dreams

her what food he can find. Round-luna has become a sign of bounty because he knows it means there will be a flare and he’ll row the man with the hand to the Chateau and there will be a basket of food. As the boy tears off pieces of the bread and slowly feeds it to the old woman, he likes to pretend she’s his mother and that he’s nursing her to health. He knows she isn’t his mother but she doesn’t seem so very unlike who he imagines his mother might have been.

Touching it, slowly running his finger down its side, he knows this silver gondola was her boat. With his mother having slipped over the edge of this small altar and given herself to Big Agua for reasons he doesn’t understand and that he only remembers in bits and fragments, it just seems fitting then that he might think of this woman who takes shelter in this gondola now as a kind of mother for whom he’ll care. When he finishes feeding her the bread, he raises the wine to her mouth just enough so she won’t drink too quickly, feeds her a bit of fruit and cheese and then some more wine, and when she’s done and her eyes close to sleep, he lays his hand against the side of her face.

~ ~ ~

From her window on the top floor of the Chateau X, Lulu watches in the light of the full moon the boat with the two men make its way back across the lake.

She feels the blood of her womb stir to the moon’s pull and backs away. When I was pregnant sometimes at night I would

at all until finally as a teenager dreamstarved I would prowl the small town

open the window and expose my belly to the moonlight but now thinking of her diminishing periods I wonder if it cast a spell on me, laid some claim on what I carried inside me. Among the moon, the sky, the lake, she doesn’t know who are her allies anymore, who are her enemies. Gazing out the window, mindlessly she sings to herself an old song. ‘Cause I know this sea wants to carry me. She turns from the window back to her lair, and her heart stops.

Wrapped in the blanket that she pulled over him while he was unconscious, the man she knows as zen-toy stands naked at the other end of the room, at the door of the dressing room and the transitional passage that leads outside. “I heard another song,” he says, “it sounded like you were singing.”

“Uh….” She tries to think what she said before … something about not ignoring the signs. “Yes,” is all she can manage now, and then he turns and opens the door and disappears. She does notice this time, as she didn’t when this same moment took place just a few minutes ago, that her fur-lined handcuffs still dangle from his wrist she forgot to set free.

She whirls around back to the window. She can still see the boat crossing the lake, with the figures of two men. She turns back to the dressing room door but no one is there. Her heart is thundering in her chest: Have I just had an hallucination? Was it a ghost? Some strange synapse in her mind by which something that just happened not fifteen minutes ago looped its way back into the present? She turns again to look at the boat from her window: is it a decoy, a trick, is this a plot to make her crazy … and if so, to what end? Now suddenly angry, purposefully she crosses the Lair to the dressing room door and flings it open to confront the ghost; but the room is empty. In two steps she’s crossed to the door on the other side and out into the entryway, which is also empty.

and its tourist hotel after sundown because I heard somewhere that men have

She crosses the entryway out onto the stone steps that lead down to the landing, but there’s no one there either, the boat having already departed just as she witnessed minutes ago from her window upstairs.

She makes her way down the stone steps to the granite walkway that circles the hotel’s grotto, to a small chamber she calls the Vault, its own door just a few feet above the lake and unremarkable except for the large rusted brass ring of a doorknob. On the walkway she stops, swallows hard. “Hello!” she calls defiantly to someone lurking in the shadows; she takes one of the lanterns that overhangs the steps and holds it up in front of her to blast the shadows away … but no one’s there. She looks at the vault door and now makes her way to it along the narrow walkway above the water. Still holding the lantern she futilely inspects the brass ring as if there might be a telltale sign of someone’s entrance; she notices the glimmer at her feet of a melody-snake’s glistening residue. Casting the light of the lantern around her one more time, she sees something else on the side of the stone steps leading down to the landing: a fresh watermark, almost half a foot above the lake’s present level.

She throws open the vault door.

She shoves the lantern out in front of her into the dark of the Vault. But the Vault is empty except for gleaming traces across the floor of a nocturnal tune that’s slithered away. Once again she looks out on the landing to convince herself no one is there, then turns and goes back into the Vault among its shelves of disks from all the melody-snakes she’s charmed and captured over the years.

By now an archive of several thousand fills the Vault’s three small walls. Reading by lantern she finds in its place, where it’s been missing the past month, the plastic case with a spine where long ago she printed SPACEMONKEY; damp, with drops of

erections when they dream and so I thought if I fucked enough of them in their

the lake smeared across its cover, clearly it’s been returned just in the past few hours, maybe the past few minutes. Months ago she discovered the Vault was being raided and that every full moon, after one of zen-toy’s sessions, a disk was missing which, a full moon later, would then reappear. To test her theory, last month she pored over the collection to find exactly which one it would be tonight; sometimes she thinks she can almost hear the broadcast herself, south of the wind that comes down off the Hollywood moors. At best it’s a distant sonic smudge in the air. If it’s now obvious to her that zen-toy himself is behind the mysterious monthly broadcasts, she still doesn’t understand why he would confiscate a disk, presumably on his previous visit, have it broadcast and then — replacing the original — bring a copy to her for the explanation and meaning of a song he himself chose. Was it a random selection, made by a man whom she knows in other matters is incapable of even considering the possibility of random chance? This conspiracy isn’t just circular, it’s labyrinthine. That it should have been this particular song only unnerves her all the more.

Now, the SPACEMONKEY disk having been returned tonight as expected, she pores over the archive again looking for an interruption in their order, for a slot where a disk should be but is missing, which will tell her what the next one will be on the next full moon. When she finds it, her heart stops for the second time in less than half an hour, and for a moment she wonders if, like when zen-toy reappeared in the door of the dressing room repeating the same words he had spoken upon his earlier departure only a few minutes before, the space where the song should be is a ghost.

Not that one.

She says it out loud, “No not that one,” and begins looking at all the other disks that come right before and after, thinking it’s just been misfiled. But it hasn’t been misfiled, there’s an empty

sleep I might take away with me a dream splashing in my womb, and yet when

slot where it’s supposed to be: that one; then she wonders if she herself took it and left it somewhere and has forgotten. She wonders if she discarded it unconsciously, in the same way she unconsciously was singing it to herself only half an hour before. She wonders if she cast it to the lake where, on breaking the surface, it turned back into a snake that quickly escaped to the water’s lower depths where it came from. But she knows she hasn’t discarded it. She remembers too well the decision she made to keep it in the first place, because at the time she couldn’t bring herself to discard it as surely as she couldn’t bring herself to hear it.

I’m stirred in a way I don’t want to be. Inside I feel I’m not in control the way I’m supposed to be and now anger becomes a sense of betrayal: he’s supposed to submit to me, and now he’s found a way to be master of events, master of my emotions. She thinks of nine years ago out at Port Justine when he tied her gondola there, the almost arrogant, almost untouchable way he took her hand when she stepped out onto the floating dock. This can’t be coincidence that now, of all of them, this one is missing, particularly right after the last one.

She has no idea at this moment that tonight she’s far from finished with surprise and coincidence, if that’s what it truly is, with the most shattering to come. Her sense of betrayal flares in part because she believes its indignation may protect her from feelings she thought sailed away in a silver gondola nine years ago. Betrayal propels her from the Vault out onto the granite walkway that leads around the crescent edge of the Chateau’s grotto to the stone steps she climbs; in the entryway she closes the outer door behind her then enters the transitional dressing room that would lead her immediately to the Lair beyond if she wasn’t at this moment stopped in her tracks by the sight, there on the rug at her feet, of the little red monkey she walked right past before.

I still didn’t dream then, not yet eighteen years old I finally left the small town

The sob bubbles up from her throat before she can swallow it. Although Kristin may have plucked it from the lake and left it in the gondola when she returned to the lake’s source nine years ago, the incarnation of her called Lulu who was left behind and bid farewell to Kristin from the lakeshore that morning after the fire hasn’t seen the monkey since the day fourteen years ago she left Kirk, in order to save him from being swept away by the breaking water of a pregnant malevolent century; she recognizes it instantly. She falls to her knees. Gently she picks up the toy as if it’s a small body, and all promises are broken now, all bargains unmade: the bargain with God, with whom she made a pact somewhere in an abdicated future to give up her son if it meant sparing him some fate that hadn’t yet come to pass; the bargain with the lake, who spared her from the flames of guilt that consumed her house if she would agree to live with the waves of guilt that flooded her past; and especially the bargain with her Other Self to whom she waved goodbye when she watched Kristin set out naked in the gondola to go back to the Other Lake. All these promises, all these bargains, made so she could live in some kind of truce and endure the only loss in human life that simply can’t be endured, for all the ways one might find to go on functioning. Now her heart is broken again down to the bone of the soul. The lake is dying, returning to where it came, an irony too bitter to even be mere irony, since it means all of her efforts of years before to stop the lake were unnecessary and everything that effort cost her was pointless; she clutches the monkey to her as if it’s him. She sees him before her with his sun-lit head and amber-flecked sea-green eyes and the sanguine mad-monk mouth, and pulls him to her and begs for another vision that will make her mad too, begs to be trapped in a mad vision of him and never sane again.

traveling for a while in the company of a millennial religious cult that I

~ ~ ~

In his sleep, the dome of his eyelids is strewn with stars. Disoriented, he looks around for the Square, and a moment passes before he remembers.

No not here. Better the Square than here — but he is here, an immense rooftop spread out before him on top of the world, just inches beneath the night. A quadrant of the world lies in moonlight before him. He can see the curve of the earth in a white shimmering arc against the black of space. It’s a dream he never has because he’s struck a deal with his subconscious to never raise this memory although, now that he thinks of it, he wonders what his end of the bargain was ever supposed to be. Nonetheless this is his unconsciousness’ betrayal: better the Square. In the dream he looks not for Kristin but a young woman he met only three times and who he’s put out of his mind ever since one dazed night years ago back east: The Emperor of Elevators, he murmurs in his sleep, feeling the tail-end of a familiar gust blowing from a vent in a low rectangular storage hut near the rooftop’s edge. He wonders if this gust is an ally meaning to rescue him, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove him, before he remembers it’s an anarchist without conviction.

In his dream he crosses the building rooftop to the vent and looks deep into it. Mistress my Mistress, he whispers and hears the song and feels the gust of the Oblivion Wind in his face; and when he pulls his face away, the vent has become the gun barrel of the

learned in the nick of time meant to sacrifice me on New Year’s Eve, then to

tank and he’s back in the Square with the tanks rolling toward him like great eggs. He looks up and the sky is bloody red again; standing his ground, the gust dies. The tank tries to go around him, he moves to block it, and when the tank moves again so would he, to block it again, if he weren’t transfixed by the song. From out of the corner of his eye, he sees a blinding flash of something and raises his hand to shield his eyes, and a moment later he’s aware of the hot pain in his hand, his hand burning, the small explosion in the palm where one’s fortune is told. He looks up at his hand quizzically to see a bit of red wedged in the middle, and thinking at first it’s blood, he realizes he’s seeing through the new hole a spot of the red sky beyond.

He hears the song, the gust rises again, and she appears at the far end of the Square that’s otherwise empty but for him and the tanks, a figure walking across the Square toward him. The Mistress isn’t dressed in her stockings and heels but in her black silk robe, vines the color of jade climbing up her body and binding her. When she reaches Wang, she holds a cool cloth in her hand and mops his brow.

~ ~ ~

She gently lays the other healing hand on the welt on his shoulder that she left earlier that evening with her riding crop. It’s all right, he says in the dream, I don’t want you to hold anything back. But….

But? she says.

San Francisco with a pair of psychotic lesbian lovers I learned in the nick of

But what do the broadcasts mean? he says.

What? she asks, confused.

Why do you do it? Why the broadcasts? What are they for?

Why do I do it? she says. I thought it was you. Me?

Yes.

You thought it was me?

Yes.

He shakes his head. It’s not you?

No.

Then …? as Wang wakes suddenly in his quarters, lying on his cot in the dark. Opens his eyes, knowing that in just seconds there will be a pounding on the door.

He fumbles for the lamp on the nearby desk. Sitting on the edge of the cot he holds his face in his hands and waits; barely before the first knock has finished he says, “Come in,” and there’s a hesitant moment before the soldier enters.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Parsons.”

The soldier is disconcerted. “Uh, yes, sir,” he finally says, “that’s correct, sir.”

“What?”

“That’s my name, sir.”

“I know it’s your name.”

“Sir?”

“You told me earlier this evening.”

“Uh, with your permission, sir.”

“Yes?”

“That couldn’t have been me. Sir.”

“Parsons …” Wang says.

time meant to murder me in my sleep, finally arriving in Los Angeles where

“I mean, we’ve never spoken, sir.”

“I want you to find something to get this off.” Wang holds up his hand.

The young soldier is flummoxed, first by the glass in Wang’s hand and then the Mistress’ fur-lined cuff that still dangles from his wrist. “Sir. We’ll get someone to file it off.”

“I don’t want to file it off. Find a master key of some sort.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wang stares straight ahead of him in the dark. “Who put that up?” he says after a moment, quietly.

“Sir?”

On the wall in front of him, where there was a blank space when he went to sleep after returning from the Chateau X, looms the inevitable image. “I said,” Wang can barely spit it out between his teeth, “who put that up. Who came into my own quarters while I was sleeping and put that back up.”

“Sir?”

“Did you put that up?” He’s barely raising his voice.

“Me, sir?”

Wang slowly rises from the cot. “Parsons.” He’s so silently furious he can’t quite think what to say. “Take it down,” he finally tells the soldier.

“The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”

“If I see it up there again, I’ll have you arrested for insubordination,” although he doesn’t really have the authority to do that.

“Sir?” Parsons says, and a couple of miles away, out in the western darkness of the lake on the hotel-island called Hamblin, Kuul listens to a song and begins to cry. Having pulled a blanket up around the sleeping old woman and eaten some of the bread and cheese and fruit from the Chateau X, having made his way in the light of the full moon around to the storage space that holds all the

after a week of living and sleeping on the streets from Hollywood to Century

hotel’s long dead phone and power lines, as well as an old sound system the Order of the Red left behind with everything else, he’s pulled a disk from his shirt, flipped off the switch to the outside speakers, and put the disk in the carrier tray.

When he presses the play button, he begins to cry and doesn’t know why. But since he was a small child, music has been the sound of freedom and desertion, and although he’s barely conscious of remembering this particular song, inside him it opens up a door—if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me—that closes again before he can go through. As when he chose this song from the Chateau’s archives in the first place, for reasons as mysterious to him as most choices, fingers just running along the walls of the Vault until they stopped, he hears music in silence like an owl sees in the dark; it’s an instinct that’s become a little more than human by now; too human for him to understand is the instinct that makes him cry now when he hears this song: ‘Cause I know this sea wants to carry me / in a sweet sweet sound she sings / for my release. He can almost hear her singing it somewhere that feels close but also like another life, a life that feels at once gone forever and at the same time just beyond the bend of the lake or maybe on the next lake over, wherever such a lake might be. Although he can barely remember her, the sound of this song makes him wrack his brain to try and figure out, as he’s tried before, what he did when he was three that was so terrible it would make her leave him.

He sits slumped against the wall until it finishes. He doesn’t think he can listen to it again. He knows there will be no more broadcasts, which were an accident in the first place when he discovered the sound system on the island a year before and was half way through playing something when he realized the speakers outside were on too, blaring so loudly everyone within two or three miles could hear. After that the music just became

City to Baghdadville on the beach I responded to a personals ad from a

part of a full-moon ritual that has no particular meaning at all, at least none he knows of. He rises from the floor where he’s been sitting and walks out onto the Hamblin rooftop and takes solace in the moon that floats at the end of a chain of utterly random events like a balloon at the end of a string; like letting go of a balloon, he would like to watch the moon float away for nothing but the sake of watching it float away. He hears the bombs and fly-overs in the distance and wakes the next morning with the song he doesn’t want to listen to anymore still in his head, and the sky a brilliant blue, more and more rare in the Age of the Lake. Sitting up in her gondola as though it’s a chariot is the old woman. She actually has a small smile on her lips as though she’s expecting something to happen. Off to the edge of the Hamblin, Kuul pulls up from out of the cold lake a bottle of milk tied to some twine, and as he’s pulling up the bottle he’s struck by the wet trail of the water down the hotel wall: sometime in the night, the lake fell.

He’s thinking about this and still hearing the song in his head while he brings the milk over to the woman and pours her a cup. She’s still smiling and he smiles back at her but the song is still in his head and soon he can’t resist anymore, and he goes back into the little makeshift broadcasting booth and stares at the disk player awhile before submitting to the impulse. He doublechecks to make sure the outside speakers are off

then, reconsidering — he lets go of the chain, up behind the blue sky the moon begins to rise — flicks the speakers back on, and turns up the volume.

Hesitating again, he presses the play button.

It doesn’t start anything like he remembers from last night. Does it start like this? he wonders when the vocal begins

“Humans are running, lavender room …”

No….

“Hovering liquid, move over moon …” No, that’s not

middle-age man who had been abandoned by his pregnant Asian wife and was

right. “For my spacemonkey….” He stops the disk then presses the play button again, as if that will correct the error, then stops it again. He ejects the disk. He picks it up and looks at it, turns it over as if that will reveal an answer, turns it over and over and over and over. He puts it back in the player and plays it again, then stops and ejects it again.

He feels something so unknown to him that he’s incapable of identifying it as emotional panic. He gazes around for the right disk but he knows better, he knows there is no other disk, that this is the disk he played last night and left in the player. He also knows that the song he’s hearing now is the one he returned to the Vault last night when his passenger with the hand was inside the Chateau, and that yesterday’s song has somehow replaced last night’s, and that this is difficult to understand even for a boy who has an owl’s sight for invisible music. In the tower of the Chateau X to the north, wearing her silk robe, she stops brewing her tea and cocks her head; she’s been up all night crying and drinking, sitting at her divan before the dying fire, staring at the red monkey perched above the hearth, and now, almost beyond the capacity for confusion, she hears it. She goes to the window and stares out over the lake to the south. On a clear blue day when there’s no wind off the hills to separate the music from her, she can hear it. She thinks to go back down to the Vault and doublecheck whether the song she found returned to the archive last night is still there. But she doesn’t.

In a water-craft a couple of miles to the east, speeding toward Hamblin Island, Tapshaw says to Wang, “Do you hear that?”

Over the roar of the boat, the song is almost indistinguishable. It may be, as Wang tries to reason, amid the vertigo that buffets him now on the watery sky of the lake

looking for a pleasure-slave although he wouldn’t put it in that fashion, and as

spanning out all around him, that this is his mind playing another trick on him; but sometime in the last twelve hours he’s come to realize that because something is a trick of the mind doesn’t mean it’s not real. That the real of the remembered is no less profound than the real of the perceived. This morning, when Tapshaw asked him what Wang found out in the mysterious hours that have lately come to accompany full moons and mysterious songs, thinking a moment Wang answered, “We’re surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” Now he looks at the Hamblin in the distance and his ears and mind try to filter out the sound of the boat for the sound of the song, but then he doesn’t hear it anymore and isn’t altogether certain he did in the first place. As well, however, he isn’t altogether certain he didn’t.

Kuul sees the approaching boat far away. Quickly he gathers together the old woman in order to put her in the rowboat, but intuitively rethinks this and decides instead on the gondola. Maybe he just can’t imagine leaving the gondola behind. Maybe the old woman can’t imagine it either. As he carefully helps her down into the gondola from the top of the hotel fire escape, he sees she’s still smiling as when she woke, having known as she did sometime in the night that they would be taking this journey. Actually she’s already taking it. Actually, in her mind Doc is on it now, at this moment, and has been on it for some time; making her a bed in the bottom of the gondola and laying her there as comfortably as he can, with the pole Kuul pushes them off from the island and around its corner, heading northeast toward the lake’s source. Gleaming glass-white in the sunlight, the boat might almost be seen from a castle tower or, high above, a daylocked owl frantically in search of the night that’s set sail without him.

In her mind, Doc has been on this journey a long time. The exact hour of its beginning is nameless but certainly she’s been riding this silver gondola since that afternoon years before when

I was at the end of my rope I went to live with him in his house in the

Kristin sailed her out to a hotel not far from the Hamblin to read its walls and diagnose its mysteries. In the world outside Doc’s mind it’s been thirteen years but on this particular journey that sort of measure of time is meaningless and besides, the lake is drowning in itself, going back down its drain, and memory is moving backwards. Consumptive houses, malaria houses, alzheimer houses, heart-attack houses, houses with tumors growing out the attic or the bedroom windows or the family rooms … Doc knew them all once, healed them all or consoled them when they couldn’t be healed, back when she was in the business of being strong, back when she was in the business of being indomitable. In a city congenitally incapable of a tragic sense, she was the ultimate citizen: she had come to Los Angeles expressly to leave all sense of tragedy behind. In her new scheme of things she had made sure there was no such thing as tragedy anymore, there were only life’s processes and passages, in which loss was only another fact.

~ ~ ~

She had never before diagnosed a house or room or building dying of sorrow. Dying not of physical dissolution or even a fatigue of body and spirit as triggered by sorrow, but of sorrow itself. She had made herself believe sorrow beyond its logical self-exhaustion was an illusion, a collapse of fortitude on the part of the afflicted, a failure to surmount. This changed the afternoon Kristin sailed her out to the flooded hotel, where the two of them wandered through the abandoned apartment with its books and animé posters and the same famous photo on the wall that Kristin

Hollywood Hills according to the terms of the agreement always nude which I

had on hers.

There in the walls Doc heard the song of the sorrow that can’t be surmounted or endured, the sorrow that life’s processes can’t process, that its passages can’t pass away. She’s been in the gondola ever since. She lies in the bottom staring at the black sea of the sky rolling by overhead, white waves of clouds; fleeing — for the second time in her life ’ sorrow’s song, she escaped the hotel in the silver gondola but then, in the years after, couldn’t escape the gondola itself. Unable to escape the gondola itself, sometime in the night that began thirteen years ago or a thousand, she set sail back to the sorrow because she needs to face it again before she herself passes away, although why and what she’ll do when she finds it she has no idea. It isn’t a matter of conquering anything. She now knows this sorrow is beyond conquest. She’s reconciled herself to her tragic sense she thought she left behind when she came to Los Angeles; it isn’t a matter of understanding anything; the whole point of this sorrow is how its song is beyond human understanding. The whole point is how pretending to understand is conceit, presumption, hubris that calls itself insight.

So there’s no human or rational reason for Doc to face this sorrow again, but she has to or feel her existence will have been one of cowardice, stupidity, cruelty that calls itself compassion. As she lies in the bottom of the gondola in the night of her mind, with the cool night breeze blowing in her face, the lake is much bigger, a vast ocean aswirl, because even here in her mind the lake is going down its drain. For a long time the young man who takes care of her has been rowing them toward the center of a black whirlpool, having left his owls far behind on land. He has amber green eyes and once light hair that’s darkened with adolescence; he doesn’t really look much like his mother. As they near the whirlpool they feel the churning of the black water broken by

didn’t care about even if the world’s never been as casual about my nakedness

white foam. Bubbles rise at the center of the whirlpool — and finally the gondola’s passengers feel themselves caught in the current of the vortex and begin the long journey down to the whirlpool’s center.

Pulling in the oars, gripping the sides of the boat, the boy guides them down the whirlstream as the sunken city of Los Angeles flows by behind the dark-glass curtains of the lake that rise around them — sunken palm trees and boulevards until, in the distance, at the center of the whirlpool she sees the Hotel of the Thirteen Losses. It’s nothing like the hotels she’s seen before in L.A., nothing like the one she visited with Lulu, it’s much bigger, extending as far as she can see with glistening ebony walls, huge deserted atriums, grand forsaken lobbies; it looms larger as the gondola speeds through the big open doors

into the foyer, up cascading stairways and down the long blue corridors into the first room which is the Room of the Lost Home. This is an unostentatious room. It’s plain, almost barren except for purely functional furniture; but as the silver gondola slowly glides through, Doc and the boy will note — as they’ll note with the twelve other rooms to come — how from different perspectives the room takes on a different appearance. In the natural course of things, loss of home is the easiest to bear, particularly if it’s the voluntary loss that comes with growing up. Only from the far corner of the room

as I, wandering nakedly aimlessly up and down the stairs of the house that was

does the room’s loneliness give way to desolation and then terror, not only the walls and beams of the room but all light and warmth falling away, when the loss is an act of catastrophe or when the room suddenly opens up into the adjoining room that is the Room of Lost Livelihood. This includes a small sitting room of Lost Fortune, not as impressive as the Room of Lost Livelihood that’s more spacious because it must encompass the loss of not only past fortune but prospective fortune as well. The sitting room of Lost Fortune, however, does have a nice big window for jumping purposes. The Room of Lost Livelihood is plush with overstuffed sofas and high-armed chairs to remind those who pass through of a graciousness of living they’ll never attain. From the gondola Doc notes, however, that there’s nothing practical about this room, there aren’t even bare necessities, just promises that shimmer enticingly before disappearing, like the vanishing walls and light and warmth of the Room of the Lost Home.

These are the first and last rooms that will manifest themselves so materially, as is this corridor down which the gondola now sails. As terrible as

stacked against the hillside, smelling through the open windows the nearby

these rooms can be, their dim e n s i ons remain very concrete; from here on, the rooms into which Doc and the boy sail in their gondola have no truly fixed dimensions. Their terror is, in varying degrees, as profound as it sometimes is illusory. The most shape-changing of all is the Room of Lost Love. Here in the Hotel of Thirteen Losses this is the most chameleon of rooms. It reflects more the nature of the guest passing through than the nature of the loss itself, because this loss has no true nature of its own. This room is a bombardment of hallucinations, which isn’t to say the hallucinations aren’t truly devastating, because they’re revelations of the self, a rave of the id: when Doc first sails into this room it’s nothing but a massive fireplace, with a roaring fire; suddenly the fire is gone and the hearth

eucalyptus and smoke, standing for hours in the large windows overlooking a

becomes the cold slab of a grave. The Room of Lost Love is never stationary. It isn’t to be found in any one permanent location of the hotel; it moves from floor to floor, from the beginning of one hallway to the end of another, from the penthouse to the basement. As the gondola sails through, the room may tend to settle, its mercurial torments exhausted; when one has sailed far and deep enough into the room’s recesses, it may lose all ephemerality and transform to a different space altogether that’s both the same room but a different room, which is the Room of the Lost Mate, utterly uninhabitable for some and a way station of sorts for others. As the gondola leaves the Room of Lost Love, it remains to be seen whether it will sail out the same door it sailed in or an altogether different exit. Something melancholy grips Doc on her voyage through this room, and she realizes that this is the only loss that someone might envy if she’s never known it; there is, then, perfectly contained within the Room of Lost Love another room with no walls at all that’s the Room of the Loss of Lost Love — the loss of never having had the experience of losing love. Leaving the Room of Lost Love, Doc’s gondola sails into a huge ballroom or, in fact, three ballrooms that are conjoined as one. These are the Ballroom of Lost Faith, the Ballroom of Lost Dignity and the Ballroom of the Lost Soul. It would be difficult to tell where one finishes and one starts; the conjoined ballrooms are mirrored from one end to the other and the chandeliers that hang from

strange city I didn’t know and the panorama of strange little houses and

the ballroom ceiling glitter not only in the mirrors and the mirrors’ reflections of each other but off the water and off Doc’s silver gondola, so that the cumulative light is blinding. Thus all perceptions are refracted, dazzled, suspect. What seems to be lost faith may be a failure of will or nerve. What seems to be lost dignity may be wounded pride or ego. And at the far end of the ballroom, where tides flow in from all other rooms of the hotel and collide, and it’s all the boy can do to right the gondola’s course, it’s often impossible to know which transgressions of behavior, integrity and conscience will drag the soul down into the undertow of the irredeemable.

So from out of the Three Ball rooms, Doc’s silver gondola is drawn into two small, tran si tion al rooms linked together that, from here, provide the only passage on to the rest of the hotel.

The first transitional room is the Room of Lost Youth and the second is the Room of the Lost Parent. Because both are rooms in which the traveler learns her earliest,

strange little trees and strange little cars driving up strange winding streetlit

most significant lessons in mortality, at first they appear to Doc to be the same. In both, all the furniture has been covered with sheets as on moving day — but the sheets are black rather than white, and gauzy and transparent, so the outline of the furniture beneath them can always be seen. There are two differences between the rooms: in the Room of Lost Youth there’s a crack in the corner of one wall through which a gale blows, disheveling the sheets on the furniture so that sometimes the Room of Lost Youth might take the form of the Room of Lost Health, for instance, or the Room of Lost Promise — which is to say one might enter the Room of Lost Youth early in life or late, age isn’t a factor, no one checks for identification at the door. It’s the same with the Room of the Lost Parent, which may also be either one of the first or last rooms in

roads that seemed to drop off in midair, not finding it so disconcerting, even

the hotel one passes through; it’s even possible to be born in the Room of the Lost Parent. The other difference between the two rooms is that in the Room of Lost Youth, a pillar stands in the center from floor to ceiling, while in the Room of the Lost Parent the pillar is gone, although its shadow remains both night and day cast by no apparent light across the length of the room and always leaving the exit on the other side in darkness. But there is a navigable exit, after all; a guest adjusts to her stay in these rooms and sooner or later leaves, the losses endured if always felt.

Having sailed through these transitional rooms, then Doc’s gondola emerges in the hotel’s lavish mezzanine. All this time, sailing through the Hotel of Thirteen Losses, Doc and the boy navigating the boat have followed a very distant melody made only more obscure by the oceanic symphony that plays it. Doc recognizes it. Even faint as it is she can barely stand to hear it again, even as she knows that it’s for this melody she’s come here. Now in the hotel’s lavish mezzanine the song is louder; other than a single small door at the far end of the mezzanine that leads to either some sort of closet or pantry, before the gondola are three sets of double-doors to three separate suites and Doc knows it’s from one of these suites the song comes. She knows she’s closer

finding it reassuring, even finding I felt profoundly secure to spend my

now to the end of her search. She knows that behind one of these three double-doors is the suite of the most unendurable loss of all, the loss she felt that day with Kristin in the other woman’s apartment. She assumes such a room and such a loss must be at once splendid and terrible. They sail through the first set of double doors into the Suite of Lost Freedom. She might expect this suite to look like a dungeon, chains hanging from the walls, shackles close to the floor, mechanisms of torture in place of a bed or chair. She would expect no windows. In fact the suite is well-appointed. It’s comfortable. It’s secure: the lock is on the inside of the doors, not outside. The Suite of Lost Freedom has a huge bed and love seat, and a window opens from an alcove through which blows a fresh breeze. A grand light fixture hangs from the ceiling which makes the room very bright, even happy. It not only doesn’t seem such a terrible room, it’s an inviting room. There’s maid service, room service. Someone could very well choose to live here, particularly with someone else; behind the bed there’s a secret panel although it must not be very secret if Doc knows it’s there, and from the Suite of Lost Freedom to the Room of Lost Love there’s a secret passage; many of the hotel’s guests spend a lot of time wandering back and forth in this passage. In fact the room is filled with secret panels and secret passages to other rooms of loss, to which this suite seems eminently preferable. It isn’t until Doc and the boy sit floating in the gondola for some time that she notices something: the.walls are closing in. Almost imperceptibly the suite is growing

existence entirely within the walls of a space I never saw from the outside,

smaller. Then she notices something else: the light above is growing dimmer. Almost imperceptibly the room grows darker. In the early moments of the suite becoming smaller and darker, the guest still has the capacity, with a word and the will, to stop the walls, to turn back up the light, if that’s what she wants to do. It’s almost impossible to say at exactly what point this suite goes from being a room where one would choose to live to a room that one must escape at all cost; and to that end, even when the room has become very small and dark, the far window still glows slightly, so that even as the walls become so close as to crush anyone between them, the possibility of escape, however increasingly difficult, remains, and may even become a distant promise that gives life a meaning it never had before. For all these reasons, because there are times when the Suite of Lost Freedom is hospitable, even apparently civilized, where one’s stay is content, even apparently fulfilling, and because even when the suite is at its least human, when one is desperately trying to hold back the walls with her hands, there’s still a faint hope of escape, and it seems clear to Doc that this isn’t the most unendurable of losses, that it can be not only endured in its smallest measure but reversed at its greatest extreme, that it’s a loss that can bring out the best and noblest and most inspiring in people, even to the point where they would choose over the Suite of Lost Freedom the very next suite over, to which Doc’s gondola now sails, back out into the great mezzanine and then slowly and with more difficulty

existing as a kind of erotic furniture, of which I took a functional view having

through the next set of double-doors into the Suite of Lost Life. Well, Doc thinks to herself, certainly this has to be the most unendurable loss; what loss could be greater than the loss of one’s life? Isn’t, she thinks to herself, every other loss in life measured against this one? Isn’t every other loss ultimately endured in order to avoid this one? The gondola sails into the middle of the Suite of Lost Life — which suddenly vanishes: the walls, the ceiling, the floors all gone in the blink of an eye, leaving the gondola suspended in a void of black. Then the suite suddenly reappears, as a rounded blue chamber. Of all the suites this is the most capricious in form and nature; and as with the Suite of Lost Freedom and its secret passage to the Room of Lost Love, populated by nomads wandering between the two, the Suite of Lost Life is riddled with secret passages to other rooms in the hotel such as the Ballroom of Lost Faith or the Ballroom of the Lost Soul, all with their own wandering exiles. Whereas Doc could feel in the other rooms the presence of hurt, walls faintly throbbing with pain, here in the Suite of Lost Life there’s nothing to be felt at all except, when the suite assumes the incarnation of the blue chamber, a kind of peace. And Doc realizes that in fact the loss of one’s life isn’t the most unendurable of losses, that in fact whether life’s end is a blue chamber or black void, there’s nothing to be endured at all — that in some ways this suite shouldn’t even be in the Hotel of Thirteen Losses, that the loss of one’s life is really endured by others, who are guests of the hotel in other rooms, such as the Room of the Lost Parent or the Room of the Lost Mate.

already decided in those young years of mine that life was a matter of trading

So this then leaves to Doc and her pursuit of the unendurable loss only one remaining possibility, and that’s the final suite next to this one; and so the silver gondola sails back out into the grand mezzanine toward the final set of double-doors. Doc braces herself. Lying in the bottom of the gondola, remembering that afternoon in the apartment of the other hotel with Kristin, she becomes afraid as the boy rows them through the last set of double-doors into a suite of nothing but doors, each with a mirror, much like the mirrors of the Three Ballrooms, except that, as the gondola passes, each mirror loses its reflection and turns into a window, with strange faces on the other side peering in. This is the Suite of Lost Memory. Beyond the doors with the mirrors that turn into windows are corridors that run to every single other room in the hotel, because the Suite of Lost Memory may also be the Suite of the Lost Self, although that remains to be known. It’s uncertain, what with corridors running to the Ballroom of Lost Dignity or the Suite of Lost Freedom, what constitutes the self, and what of the self still exists when self-consciousness is gone. This is why the Suite of Lost Memory and the Ballroom of the Lost Soul aren’t the same room although they might seem the same to those outside the windows gazing in. And it’s partly because of this unanswerable mystery that Doc, braced for the great wave of anguish she expected from this final suite, realizes this isn’t the most unendurable loss either, that it’s a kind of death, in some ways more profound than the body’s death, and as a kind of death

on one’s most valuable commodity whether it be intelligence, strength, talent,

it’s something to be endured not by the one who has lost her memory but by those around her who watch her recede into life’s horizon in the gondola of amnesia. Now Doc is perplexed. Lying in the bottom of the gondola adrift in this last suite, having taken this long voyage on the lake of her mind down to the Hotel of Thirteen Losses at the bottom of the whirlpool so as to face what she couldn’t face all those years before, she tries to remember all the suites and all the ballrooms and all the guest rooms and sitting rooms she’s been through but can’t, and then realizes of course she can’t remember because, after all, she’s in the Suite of Lost … well, now she can’t even remember what suite she’s in, but she still has enough presence of mind to lift her arm and point the way out. For a moment the boy can’t remember the way, but circling the windowed doors around the perimeter of the room he finally finds the exit and rows them out of … now it comes

back to her, the Suite of Lost Memory, yes … and out into the mezzanine, bobbing above its flooded marble floors in the whirlpool’s current, where it all comes back to her and she counts the losses to herself: home, fortune, livelihood, love, faith, dignity, the soul, health, parent, freedom, life, memory … that’s twelve. Feebly she holds up her fingers and counts them again, and wonders where in their voyage they missed a room. Bobbing there in the water, puzzled she can hear the song clearly, the song that was coming from none of the three suites, and lies there listening—“Can you hear it?” she cries out to the boy — when the boy picks up the oars and begins to row, and rows them to the far end of the mezzanine and the small single pantry door, or perhaps it’s a

charisma or beauty, and so in order to survive I traded on my nakedness and

simple door to a janitor’s closet, that earlier they not so much ignored as dismissed. And as they grow closer to the door, the song becomes louder. As they reach the plain unadorned door it’s so distinct now it frightens her, and she’s about to cry out to the boy and tell him to stop when he takes the door knob in his hand and opens it. Out of it roars a music that’s more than pain, more than anguish, more than desolation, more than sorrow, more than grief. Out of it roars the greatest of all losses, the loss that can’t be endured. It’s not a loss that one truly survives let alone surmounts, it’s not a loss that one out-exists let alone outlives; it’s the loss that breaks your heart and it never mends. It never mends. It calls into question everything, so that it entails in some way all the other losses: home is lost; fortune and livelihood have no more meaning; love not only has no more meaning but becomes a kind of emotional treason; faith becomes a kind of spiritual treason; dignity becomes a joke; the soul is forever in the terminal grip of a psychic cancer; health is an affront; the loss of a parent is the perverse twin of this loss, like the reflection in the mirror of a funhouse; freedom is a curse; life is torture. Memory is worst of all. From the doorway of this tiny closet or pantry one would almost gladly flee, if possible, to the Suite of Lost Memory or, failing to reach that, perhaps even the Suite of Lost Life. This is the Unendurable Loss because it involves the one thing that one loves more than one’s own life; and no meaning that one strives to give her own life, however great or good, can ever truly compensate for what’s been lost, will ever be truly convincing in any scheme of things that in the heart of hearts one believes. This loss is the essence of the universe’s impossibility, it’s the one thing for which a benevolent God never has a persuasive answer, and which a malevolent God holds over the head of humanity. Although she wants the boy to row far away from this door as fast as he can, in the wave of music that roars out of the tiny closet

his needs, which bound him more than they bound me, particularly since many

Doc, weeping, takes hold of the sides of the gondola and summons all her strength and courage to rise from the bottom so she can look inside and face it at last. Inside the closet is nothing but a hole, the birth canal down through which rushes the lake back to wherever it came, and inside this hole Doc sees a vision of a young Asian boy maybe ten or twelve years old, unknown to her, growing up among his animé posters in the apartment Doc visited with Kristin that one afternoon thirteen years ago, suddenly swept under by the lake and reaching for a hand too far from him, and Doc can hear the mother crying for him frantic, disbelieving, but the boy descends; and out of the hole in his place Doc sees rise the Unendurable Loss like a bubble of black air

this is the loss of one’s child

~ ~ ~

At some point past Coldwater Canyon, gliding westward into the lengthening shadows of the hills, Kuul looks down at her lying in the bottom of the gondola and knows she’s gone.

He’s never seen death in a person before, only in owls, but the stillness is the same; it’s not like sleep. The small smile she had on her face for a moment isn’t there anymore. The cheeks of her face are wet — from the lake, he supposes; or some

times he was really too drunk to do anything anyway except lie in the throes of

astonishing dream maybe? He’s close enough to shore that now he uses the pole to push the boat into the mist off Beverly Glen, trying to think what he’ll do with her. Don’t people put their dead in the ground? Or do they burn them? Do they eat them? But he has nothing with which to dig out the ground except his hands, or to start a fire, which doesn’t seem a good idea anyway, and the owls leave their dead where they die, which seems more sensible than anything else. So beaching the gondola on the banks of the glen, he steps out into the mud and turns and pushes the silver boat with the old woman’s body back into the water and watches it disappear back into the mist, floating back out into the western part of the lake where it will eventually become caught in the current that leads to the sea.

Except now, of course, he has no boat anymore. He’ll have to get another. He looks around him at the trees and the rising hillside throttled with fog, and calls to the owls for direction. When he receives no answer, he calls again. He still receives no answer and, in his head, divides the number of shadows by the minutes of twilight, arriving for the first time in his life at the sum of zero. He begins to make his way up the hillside. For an hour as he makes his way up the hillside he calls again and again to the owls, and again and again receives no answer until he finally understands that, having crossed the experiential threshold of human death, he’s now on his own.

his terrible headaches muttering his wife’s name and dreaming of his unborn

daughter as I rubbed his head for him, the two of us almost never conversing