Our Ecstatic Days

~ ~ ~

at all except when I would whisper in his ear as he slept how ridiculous he

was, how absurd he was, what with slavegirls having gone out with the

~ ~ ~

These are the memoirs of Lulu Blu, otherwise known as Mistress Lulu, the Dominatrix-Oracle of the Lake, Queen of the Zed Night, once called Kristin.

I still live in the tower of the Chateau X, I’ve been here almost seventeen years. I never leave anymore. Minions bring food and wine, leave it on the stone steps that disappear into the water … sometimes a client-submissive pays in supplies rather than cash, which doesn’t count for much these days. I’m in retirement. Once my subjects numbered in the scores but now Brontë brings in the business…. After the Unrest moved north ten years ago and as I got older, my services as both Domme and seer

Twentieth Century, and I went on living there with him then until he simply

were in less demand, except for the occasional businessman who flew in from Bangkok, Tokyo, New Delhi, but now they come for Brontë who takes them into the dungeon downstairs where I hear the wet echo of the lashing up through the vents. Not too hard now girl I think to myself when she lets loose a particularly sharp crack of the whip.

She’s a natural.

She’s a natural but you might ask, What kind of life is this for a mother to give a girl? Has my own life become such I can connect even to the people I care about only through the means and devices of domination? Dark falls as I write this, sitting by the terrace just inside the walls … a week ago the moon was full but tonight with the fog everything is black, none of the lake’s usual lights…. Ever since the water level finally dropped enough to expose the rooftops of the old Strip’s long-sunken shops and clubs, night-torches have burned from them forming a winding watery corridor — but there are no torches tonight, no glow or its accompanying music from the lunatiques in the canyons just over the near north hills…. Lately for the first time I can remember, waves have been crashing the Chateau’s sides, I don’t remember when it began, the crashing of waves sometime in the past months, I just woke one night to the lake pounding the Chateau and at first I thought it was an earthquake, or explosion. Waves have been crashing like an ocean shoreline, the lake has become an angry sea, furious at something and I believe it’s me. Is this fury the despair of old age, rage of midlife, the cynicism of young adulthood? is the lake only in its adolescence and this is its rebellion? All these years I wondered if she was my sister or lover or bride … has the lake in fact been my daughter, intent on getting my attention?

A memoir I call this but that’s a misnomer, truly I choose to remember as little as possible. I think as little as possible of my

vanished overnight after I discovered behind the locked door on the bottom

past, and with every night’s dose of lapsinthe greater than the night before, my mind becomes more resistant to its effects until soon I’ll overdose on memory or amnesia. Every night that my life sheds is one less to get through, one less link in the chain that leashes my heart like that leashing a slave’s collar. Each night one more dose until finally I just slip over the line. Four months ago Brontë found me in the transitional chamber slumped on the floor, face brushing the place where — eleven years ago? twelve — I found his little monkey. My life has been cruel enough to give me every now and then the hope or reassurance of some new clarity, once a decade or so before snatching it away … hope on a leash like a slave like my heart … but since that night eleven years ago I’ve slipped toward an ending not simply out of despair but rather as a flight to freedom, of course. But not a cry for help. Please. Maybe Brontë tells herself I’m crying for help. She called it in on the wireless and the ambulance-boat came with a pump so my belly might be as empty as the rest of me….

Not a cry for help … in a way it’s just the opposite. The only way of taking control over my life: by taunting it, flirting with an ending … the only way to place life at the end of a lash as I’ve so placed over the years everything and everyone I would have submit to me — after first coming to L.A. an orphan three decades ago and serving as the sexual serf of a man I never really knew or understood, out of which came the only thing in my life I ever truly loved so huge … at which point I had a mother’s fear of the world’s chaos; and nothing is as afraid as that. Is it so bad, to have wanted control when I never had it before? with men not so unlike the one who fathered my son, who themselves just wanted to give up all control for a few hours? Yes of course I’ve asked myself — cracking the riding crop across their asses (they never touch me) — asked myself whether in fact I was resisting their fantasies or fulfilling them. But at that point, when domination is a kind of

floor the huge blue calendar he had made that circled its room and covered

submission and submission a kind of domination, it all gets a little complicated.

In any event I had found some reconciliation with my life … until the night I found the monkey. Found the little toy monkey and suddenly could only wonder if it had all been a hoax I perpetrated on myself, that vision-dream-hallucination I had of going back back back down the hole of the lake, down down down to where I came from a quarter of a century ago now, down down down through the hole to the Other Lake to see if he’s still there in the boat, still waiting for me, still in the moment where I left him. And in fact if it was all just a vision, a dream, an hallucination, if in fact it was all just a hoax I played on myself, I can only wonder how it is I so easily accepted such a delusion, so easily abandoned my search for him in this life, on this lake, to take control, to put at the end of my lash, under the crack of my whip, my despair. Because despair, I think I heard someone say once, isn’t a grief of the heart, but the soul.

And then I wondered if he was still out there, and has been all along. On this lake, in these hills, a man now, wondering why I never came to find him….

I would chain myself to my bed and let the lake take me some night as it rises, if it were rising. But the lake hasn’t risen for a long time. For ten years it slowly but surely sank and then suddenly stopped a year ago last spring, in remission, putting off death just a while longer. Waiting for something to happen, before it dies.

I know what it’s waiting for.

People have stopped trying to understand the lake. They accept that the lake has its own logic, stranger and bigger than the rationale of tides, geology. Before even the geologists knew, those who live with the lake knew the sinking had stopped, because the Lapses stopped … those who live with the lake felt stop, for the

every wall and blotted out every window and flowed over onto the floor and

duration of its remission, the draining of time. Felt stop, in its pause before death, the way that every day after tomorrow was answered by another day before yesterday. Felt stop the pendulum of memory swinging ever wider as the lake drained … they knew because time stopped going backwards, because everything that’s been about the lake and of the lake finally stopped vanishing overnight into the literal fog of memory … people, events, philosophies, meanings … one night about six or seven years ago even the color blue vanished, no one has seen it since. Now the lake is green or gray or black … now somewhere out there over the water beyond the hedge of fog lurks zero-year, or zed-year. My own Lapses ended last year in a cluster … I woke one morning to

find myself lying not

in my bed in the Chateau but the Santa Monica hospital just a few weeks after returning from Tokyo, when I was seventeen. I was seventeen again, it was eleven-thirty at night again, the thirty-first of December again of that year, under the white explosion of delivery room lights overhead, the doctor and nurse having the same argument I remember them having over my labor that night a little less than twenty-eight years ago, about millennial arithmetic, between the calculations of my dilations and the dwindling minutes of my contractions. I looked into the white lights above me, pain shot through me … I was startled to be back at this moment again but not amazed of course, since this kind of thing had been happening for a while now … what are you doing talking about, the nurse was saying to the doctor in exasperation, “if it’s tonight, or tomorrow, then what was all that hoopla a year ago about?”

“It wasn’t about anything,” the doctor was saying, “that’s what I’m explaining to you. It was about a lot of people getting it wrong, is what it was about.”

“All those people celebrating all over the world?” said the

ceiling and completely reordered history to the chronology and logic of

nurse. “All those fireworks over the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, or whatever….”

Excuse me, I muttered.

“… everyone got it wrong but you, that’s what you’re saying?”

“Zero isn’t the number before one,” the doctor lectured smugly, “zero isn’t a number at all. In the case of the calendar, zero is ten, and ten comes after nine.”

“Thank you, I think I know ten comes after nine.”

“This is a ten-year,” the doctor checked his watch, then looked at a clock on the wall, “in another hour and a half it will be a one-year, and that’s the true beginning of it.”

What’s happening? I can remember saying all those years ago, when I was first here, in this moment, managing to say it between the pain. But this time excuse me

and the doctor stared at me

but it’s all metaphor anyway

as if I was a huge talking pea-pod about to split

it’s all random anyway I went on a conceit, based on the birth of a religious philosopher who wasn’t even born in the Year One but probably the Year Minus-Four or sometime around then, so it’s silly to get hung up on the math of the thing when everyone else has accepted the symbolism of it

and in a dream the doctor might have accepted such an exchange from a young girl in labor, but since this wasn’t a dream, since the currents of memory and time unleashed over the years by the sinking of the lake in fact had carried me back to this actual moment, the doctor stared at me in astonishment. I think the nurse was too confused to feel vindicated. In the meantime I realized I was about to deliver him again, my boy … would I stop it,

apocalypse, with its dates not sequential like an ordinary calendar but

if I could? If I could, would I choose never to have had him at all, if it would undo the next twenty-eight years? Of course not. Not even a little, not for a minute. I looked at the doctor. Please deliver them both this time.

“What?”

There are two … there’s a girl. Deliver them both this time.

He looked at the nurse, the nurse looked at him. The next contraction came and when it subsided I wanted to say, Cut me open this time, to get both of them … but truthfully I don’t know whether I managed it. When the pain of the contraction passed I was suddenly so exhausted, I felt all the forty-some years of my present, even returned as I was by the Lapse to my seventeen-year-old past … and I think I must have dozed a little because I opened my eyes just in time to hear the voices of the doctor and nurse fade, to hear fading in the hall of the hospital on the way to the delivery room the happy-new-years and the doctor’s lone, stubborn Happy New Millennium — you’re a year late, someone says; I’m not, he says, zero isn’t the number before one, zero is … — to see the walls of the hallway fade back to the walls of the Chateau. Cut them out I tried to whisper before the lake carried me back to the present.

The last of the Lapses was just a few days after that … carried me back to a week and half before he was born … I was walking, pregnant to burst, along Santa Monica Boulevard, past little Italian eateries, xerox stores, travel agencies, mailbox rentals, gay fetish shops, video outlets, cappuccino stands, cars driving by, all of it as vivid as can be, in every last detail, I was singing to him in my head our little song that I had just heard for the first time a week or so before, riding a bus on Pacific Coast Highway if there’s a higher light remember this one Kirk? almost forgetting it’s all gone now, all long submerged. Then I was walking up Crescent

freefloating, far removed dates overlapping in some cases, consecutive dates

Heights toward Sunset Boulevard, looking at the old Hollywood apartments with their turrets, trees, realizing soon they would all be under water. It was as if I was wandering aimlessly, although of course I know it wasn’t aimless. If it were aimless the lake and this Lapse wouldn’t have brought me back to it, since it’s the personally momentous remembrances the Lapses resurrect, it’s the major harbors dotting the shore of life’s recollection where memory docks as it’s carried back in the lake’s vortex…. I crossed Sunset and kept walking up Crescent Heights, an awful long way for a pregnant girl due to give birth any minute … and then at some point I stopped, there where Crescent Heights became Laurel Canyon Boulevard … stopped at someone’s lawn and looked down at my feet and there, at the tip of my toes, it was. Nothing more than a small black puddle, not more than a few inches across. There it was, long before it seemed to just suddenly appear that September morning nine months later: chaos: there it was and I stared at it, could almost see it grow as I watched, until it was almost a foot across, and I tried to bend over to look, to peer into it and see into its source but I was so huge I couldn’t. I couldn’t bend over, all I could do was just stand there and watch it get a little bigger with every passing second, almost imperceptibly. I was standing in the very birth of the lake as it spread around my feet. And I turned and started walking away as fast as I could, looking over my shoulder as if it would follow me, which in a way it did and

then I blinked and

the Lapse was over, and I was back on my Chateau terrace staring out at black war almost as far as I could see. In the distance was the war ship that sailed into L.A. Bay ten years ago and dropped anchor and hasn’t moved since or shown a single sign of life … there on the terrace I lay my hands on my belly to feel its vacancy. The next night I scored from one of my last clients some

separated by the length of the room in other cases, with apparently senseless

of the lapsinthe that’s been going around and took the first dose of the sepia-colored evilixir, adding another every night after that….

Sometimes, hovering in the ether between existence and non, I talk to him. Don’t know whether it’s the lapsinthe talking … but I know it’s him right away although now he would be in his late-twenties … there he is sitting beside me saying Mama don’t die and maybe that’s what pulls me back. Sometimes we talk about all the things I would have told him if I had had the chance, sometimes we have no idea what to talk about at all but it doesn’t matter, we might talk of death or God … does anyone ever care so much about the notion of God, whatever she actually thinks about it, as when she has a child? Isn’t it when you have a child that you really need to understand the whole business of God, the whole business of death and the soul? People get to the end of their lives and say they’re not afraid of death … but even in the course of my many tentative suicides I’m afraid to death. To not be at least a little afraid of death you have to have no imagination whatsoever. It isn’t a matter of pain, pain doesn’t frighten me, of course it’s the prospect of nothingness, into which will pass not only one’s own life but everyone else’s as I’ve known it. What I feel for my boy will pass into nothingness, and it’s intolerable: My love for you will not die with me, I promise or plead, or fume at him in our conversations … but the question in his eyes remains: and I see it. I read it. Will she abandon me again? it says.

I know him right away, all these years later, in these moments when we talk near death’s beach. All these years haven’t changed the immediately identifiable beauty of him. All these years haven’t altered the memory of how beautiful he was … but they’ve left me to wonder a terrible thing, which is whether I would have loved him quite so much if he hadn’t been so beautiful. I calculate absurd impossible hypotheses, transferring his soul to the body and face of some little boy not so beautiful, then try to

timelines running from top to bottom leading him to the inescapable

measure the love, testing my heart. Did my own mother not love me because I wasn’t beautiful? of course I hope I see his beauty through the prism of love rather than love him through the prism of beauty, but how can I be certain? Kirk? I say to him from where I lie in this ether on the edge of life Kirk I reach to him, and there flashes some small confusion across his face as if he almost knows his own name but not quite; but not quite knowing, he reaches back anyway. Night-time he answers … our fingers brush….

Morning now, after writing all night … air raid siren. Has to be a test, right? they ought to announce when they’re going to have a test … all the gulls over the water scatter and swirl at the sound. Walk out onto my terrace, listen to the siren, watch the birds…. OK now: very slowly, very casually, as inconspicuously as possible, turn to look and see if they’re there…. yes. Fuck. Why don’t they go away? Why don’t they leave me alone? The hillsides behind the Chateau encamped with all the people … are there fewer? Maybe there are fewer. Maybe they’re starting to go away, maybe they’re starting to give up on their lost Saint Kristin of the Lake, I thought the cult went the way of the first Lapse years ago … but the legend persists. “I’m not her!” I even called to some of them months ago when they sailed out here on a small flotilla, prostrated before the Chateau in their boats. Kristin wasn’t a saint, I wanted to tell them, she was only a mom, the other me I sent back to undo the thing she and I did years ago, when we abandoned our son on the lake….

… remember in my delirium thinking when they pumped me out, Did they pump out my little girl? forgetting for a minute. Forgetting first how Kristin sailed away with my daughter in her belly, when she took the boat back all those years ago, forgetting then how over the years the blood began to slow between my legs its patterns fading, dark red webs of each month becoming more

conclusion that sometime in the century, among its madmen of all kinds,

unwoven until only a small red spider was left. Forgetting then how, in the month I finally didn’t menstruate at all, she appeared out of the lake … I watched her … was sitting on the terrace staring out over the water under the massive full moon and there in the far distance above the lake’s source, above that very place I once stepped pregnant in a strange black puddle, was a ripple, someone surfacing from nowhere, looking around and swimming toward me in the moonlight. I just sat and watched her swim toward me.

As she got closer I stood up from where I had been sitting and peered over the terrace down into the water … I could hear her now in the dark below me gasping for breath, knew she was in danger of drowning from exhaustion. In the blaze of the moon I could barely see her frantically grasping for a place to hold onto the Chateau wall … ever since the color blue vanished into one of the Lapses, the nights are so much darker, even when the moon shines. “Swim around!” I called, trying to direct her to the port on the other side, and then everything went quiet, and I thought she had gone under. “Hello?” There was no answer. “Hello!” I ran from the terrace to the other side of the old hotel, out through the transitional chamber to the entryway, out onto the stone steps near the Vault by the water … I couldn’t see anyone. “Hello?” I stood there five minutes calling, the grotto empty … and then a face came floating up to the steps like a jellyfish, barely above the surface, and I ran down the steps and fished her out. For a while she just lay there naked on the steps long gold hair splayed around her head. I kept trying to help her up but for a while she didn’t want to get up, she just wanted to lie there, so I went back into the chamber and got a blanket and came back and lay it over her, tucking it beneath her until I could coax her in.

That night she slept in the room where I used to do my readings, the I–Ching of melody-snake slithering across menstrual

among its irrational horrors, that sometime in the last century modern

blood. I laid her out on a mat, dressed in a tattered black silk robe with jade vines crawling up her body. She slept soundly … but it took me a while, to fall asleep I mean, tossing and turning … and then I woke with a start.

I sat up from my bed in the dark.

Sat listening to the dark for a contradiction, and heard none. Got up from my bed and pulled on a robe and stumbled through the outer room, over to the other room where she slept. Suddenly I just knew, I don’t know why. Suddenly it was just obvious.

“Brontë?” I said to the dark, in the doorway. When she didn’t answer, I said it again. “Brontë?”

“Yes,” a small voice answers.

Lulu Blu, otherwise known as Mistress Lulu, the Dominatrix-Oracle of the Lake, Queen of the Zed Night, once called Kristin, staggers where she stands, clutching her robe to her, still staring into the dark where the girl lies. “It’s you,” Lulu finally chokes; there’s silence and Lulu says it again—“It’s you”—and then hears from out of the dark, “Yes, I … I’m tired….” Lulu nods, still standing in the doorway. “Sorry,” the girl’s voice says in the dark, “I just need to sleep,” and Lulu keeps nodding, “thank you for taking me in …” the girl’s voice in the dark barely finishes; and Lulu turns to the outer room and goes to sit on the divan before the dead fireplace. She sits for a long time before she goes back out onto the terrace, staring out in the distance at that place in the water where Kristin vanished years ago and where Brontë emerged a few hours ago. She gets cold and returns to the fireplace where she wishes there was a fire, but she’s too tired and rattled to build one. She’s curled up there in the divan the next morning when she wakes and sees the girl out on the terrace.

Everything in Lulu aches as she stands, pulls her robe closer to her. Brontë on the terrace, long straight gold hair almost down to her waist, is still wearing the old black silk robe with jade

apocalypse had outgrown God, and after he tried in his own craziness to make

vines. Lulu watches her awhile before the girl notices. “Are you hungry?” asks the woman.

“Yes, please,” the girl answers. She looks about nineteen, which is how long it’s been since Lulu waved goodbye to Kristin in the boat and Kristin disappeared into the lake. Brontë walks in from the terrace out of the sunlight while Lulu suppresses an impulse to reach out and run a finger along her face and touch her shimmery golden hair; as though she senses this, Brontë pulls back from the other woman, feeling examined: Is she my daughter, Lulu wonders, or Kristin’s, or is there a difference? Did I conceive her and Kristin deliver her, as we both carried her for all those years? Conceived with Kirk, is she his twin? Delivered years after him, is she his younger sister? Is she his half-sister, both of them of the same father but of two mothers, who used to be one?

She’s petite, spritelike. She can’t be five feet tall, a wraith except for breasts that, on her frame, verge on the absurd. How did such a little girl get such breasts? the mother thinks, not from me. Not classically beautiful, thinks Lulu, but much prettier than I ever was … did she get that from her father? She doesn’t look anything like him — he had jetblack hair — but then Kirk didn’t either. Am I doomed to strangers for children? Are all of them to be more of the lake than of me?

Lulu cooks some eggs while Brontë sits at the kitchen table. The younger woman doesn’t say anything or seem particularly curious about the older woman, more wary than anything although suspicion doesn’t agree with her: “Nice place,” she finally allows at some point, to say something.

“I’ve lived here almost twenty years,” Lulu explains. “It was a hotel once.”

“Oh.”

“Before the lake. Movie stars and musicians stayed here. It was famous.”

me part of the calendar, a moving date unto myself, a date he had determined

The younger woman realizes she’s stumbled irrevocably into a conversation. “Were you here before the lake?” she finally asks.

She doesn’t know who I am, Lulu thinks, trying to consider this in all its aspects. Or rather: I don’t know what she knows: does she know what she knows? Just as well she doesn’t know me as Mistress Lulu … but then does she know I’m her mother? Did she really return to me by sheer accident? “What’s your name?”

The younger woman flushes, narrows her eyes. After a moment she says, “You know.”

“Tell me.”

“You know. You said it last night.”

“Tell me.”

After a moment the girl says, “Brontë.”

Lulu turns back to the eggs on the oven. “Yes, I was here before the lake. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Have you been here long?”

Brontë seems to meditate on the question. “No,” she finally answers.

“Visiting?”

“Yeah.”

Don’t pry so much, Lulu tells herself now, you’re prying. What were you doing in the water last night? “Family or friends here?” She puts the eggs on the table in front of the girl who begins devouring them. “Boyfriend?”

“No boyfriends,” Brontë says emphatically between bites. She’s sucking on slices of lemon, one after another, until it makes Lulu’s mouth sour to watch her.

“You don’t like boys?”

Well, not in that way, the girl thinks to herself. I like them

through his arcane and unhinged calculations but the meaning of which

all right, but not in that way. Actually I’m into girls — and I almost say it, as much for the shock value, you know? Because actually at this point I’m a bit afraid of this woman cooking me breakfast, whoever she is. I’m trying to act cool and it’s true about the girls but if I were to say it, it would only be to try and perhaps intimidate her back a bit, though as I’ll find out soon enough that’s hardly the sort of thing that would. Intimidate her, that is. So I don’t say it, and the way she keeps checking out my chest just makes me think all the more perhaps I shouldn’t say it, because at this point I still can’t tell about her, here I am out in this old hotel out in the middle of this lake stuck here for the moment and also, to be honest, not all that ready to leave, it seems a pretty mega place really, a terrace you can walk out and see a big part of the bay, water stretching far out to sea in the west, hills curving ’round to the north and that big battleship or whatever it is out in the distance, the one tall building that’s not gone under. It’s all something to see isn’t it and I’ll never get tired of it, so already I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind so much not having to leave right away.

Even from the first the Mistress, she seems a bit off, I must say, as much as I come to love her. Naturally later I understand some of it a bit better, later clients they’ll tell me there was a time not so many years ago she was the most powerful woman in the territory with an army of submissives, and then there’s all the religious business going on ’round her, but I don’t know what her story is this first morning except she’s called me a name I’m not really sure is mine and she’s checking out my chest, which I’m selfconscious about anyway. So they’re a bit big. If I was taller they wouldn’t seem so big. It’s not really they’re so big it’s that the rest of me is small. My chest and height I’m selfconscious about. If it was up to me I’d like to take a bit off the front and put it on top.

Later when I get to know her better and realize it’s a

remained an infuriating and impossible mystery to him and everyone else, and

mother thing with her not a lover thing, I tell her about being into women and she laughs and calls me God’s little joke on the male gender. Perhaps so. The boys they do check me out and want to be with me and we all know what that’s about, and I don’t think it’s taken me much of my life to figure that out. It’s funny what I sort of remember from before and what I don’t. As time goes by, some things come back to me but they’re just isolated pictures in my head of a city street though not this city, a thousand shops, a thousand cars and lights and towering buildings — but it’s all another lifetime. I still remember things about myself like being selfconscious, I have this sort of sense of who I am even if I don’t remember the name, and for a while I confess it scares me, it seems important doesn’t it, but honestly? I don’t know that it’s so important, if you think about it. Perhaps my name really is Brontë, it’s not as though it’s impossible. That night the Mistress pulled me out of the water, brought me in, gave me a place to sleep, I felt so strange about everything and awhile there in the water at the end I seriously thought I was about to drown. And when you seriously think you’re about to drown, all the little chambers of your mind become one big room, all the walls between things that happened long ago and not so long ago, things you’ve felt badly about perhaps or things you’re sorry you didn’t get to do I suppose, all the walls come down and memory, it becomes this big open mezzanine, to the extent you’re actually thinking any of that at all as you’re trying to keep from drowning. Except at that moment, when all the little chambers of my mind opened up and all the walls came down, I couldn’t see a thing, though at the time I wasn’t conscious of much other than trying to stay alive. I was looking at what was revealed in that moment, and nothing was revealed. The big open mezzanine of what I remembered from my life was just dark and empty.

So I was sort of — I’m sure when I first get here I’m a bit

which I couldn’t be expected to remember but which I know at this very

hysterical, I’m sure I’m in some sort of shock. At first I don’t know where I am or how I got here and I’m exhausted and scared, and lying in that strange dark room that used to be the Mistress’ ceremony chamber, how do I know it’s not my name when she calls me that? I still don’t know. Later I actually read the books and I’m not sure which she named me after but I like Emily the best, the one about the girl who drives the boy crazy and then even when she dies she goes on driving him crazy, yes I like her best.

So I know at once the Mistress she’s a bit off but I also decide she’s probably all right too, and it becomes obvious it’s a mother thing. She says something a couple of times that, when I think about it, seems a bit odd, we’ll be talking about the business, the clients and what not, and she says in self-reproach, “What kind of life is it, for a mother to leave to her daughter?” Later after I’ve been here awhile and when I think she knows I won’t get too put off by it, that’s when she tells me how those first nights after I arrived at the Chateau she would come into the chamber while I slept on the mat, sitting and watching and even talking to me. I had no idea. I never heard anything but then I’m a very sound sleeper. I was talking to you, she’ll say, but you were sleeping the sleep of the dead, and perhaps that’s the first real memory I have of before, I can remember someone else saying that. Because that’s exactly what I sleep all right, the sleep of the dead. And if the Mistress isn’t in any hurry for me to leave then I’m not in any hurry to go, not back out there into the lake I came from. I love the Chateau, feel safe here, protected from the lake and after awhile I feel protected by the lake, from the world. I surely don’t feel any great urge to go back and find out things about my life or my past or wherever I came from, to the contrary there’s something a bit lovely about the feeling of starting fresh. What happened before that would make me feel I want to start fresh? Well all right that

moment here in the birth canal of the lake, as I know so many things, happened

does nag at me a bit, I do wonder, but not so much. To wonder too much about it, after all, wouldn’t be starting fresh, would it?

The Chateau, there’s the main room and what I come to call the ceremony room when I begin working it, where I usually sleep except the nights I sleep on the divan out before the fire listening to the sound of the lake and the feeling of the night air coming through the terrace doors — or in the dungeon downstairs. Since it’s below water the dungeon is cool all the time, in the hot months it’s lovely and I sleep down there listening to the radio like the Mistress says she used to when she was ’round my age living in Tokyo — a pirate station broadcasts from a boat out in the lake. It probably makes sense to keep my private space and my working space separate but cool as it is in the dungeon I’m all the more inspired to put something into the discipline, without getting carried away naturally, then if I work up a bit of sweat I can stop and cool off, watch the beads of the lake form on the dungeon walls while the submissive writhes a bit in his shackles. Another good reason for the blindfold, you see — besides the sensory deprivation he can’t see when you’re taking a breather, and he gets all excited the way men do wondering what’s going on, when all you’re really doing is just sitting there enjoying the cool and listening to the currents of the lake against the outer walls. Any one of these days — I’ll tell the client now and then — any minute these walls aren’t going to hold and that lake it’s going to come crashing in. I tell him this and then leave him there by himself awhile chained and naked in the dark thinking about what I said and, you know, listening for the walls to start cracking. During these little recesses the Mistress and I, we have a cup of tea out on the terrace for ten or fifteen minutes and laugh at the sound of the clanking of chains coming up from below through the vents. What a bad girl you are, the Mistress says. Sometimes when I go back, without even being able to touch himself he’s gotten off just from

to be the very date when, three years old, I stood on the shore of that island

the terror, so don’t tell me the boys don’t like it in their own way. When I mention this to the Mistress in some amazement, she already knows all about it: the male-wangie is a thing of mystery, she just smiles.

But jeez life is lovely in these early days before the business with the Mistress’ lapsinthe. I don’t go ashore for three months after that first night, very contented in the Chateau, standing on the terrace sucking those slices of lemon like I love and dropping the yellow peels in the water below. At first, because I know nothing about the Mistress, to me she’s just an eccentric lonely lady; I haven’t heard the stories about the dominatrix-oracle business or the Saint Kristin stories, which I don’t understand anyway or what they actually have to do with the Mistress, but I see the people camped out on the hillside hour after hour and day after day and week after week watching the Chateau as though expecting a sign. Sure it’s not something the Mistress ever says much about. That is, early on it’s a bit obvious she was in the trade given the shackles on the walls downstairs and then I come on the tool box with the ankle cuffs and fur-lined handcuffs and riding crops and ball-gags and violet wands. I find this tiny collar I think is for a cat or something. Well it’s a collar all right but not for any cat. So I ask her right out and she tells me right out, though I see this look in her eye a moment like she’s trying to decide. She tells me right out and I just say no way. Not really. Really? And here I thought she would be shocked by my liking girls! I’m fascinated from the first. I go right past offense and never even skirt revulsion. Something in my true nature takes to it. Not to pain, I never want to inflict real pain and never have, beyond a good healthy whack in the balls, naturally. The Mistress says she never inflicted real pain either or meant to anyway; if she struck harder than she intended and left so much as a bruise or welt she felt bad, and there was never a drop of blood once — other

with my uncle and gazed on that strange woman across the river, now here in

than her own, when she did the oracle business — in all the years she did it. It’s about the power isn’t it, and not even so much power over someone else as the power over your own life, and that’s what I like too, that power, I take to it right from the first and you can make of that whatever you want. I can tell you for a fact that as far as I know no one’s ever gotten hurt, so you make of it what you want. You can spend your whole life, the Mistress says to me one time, making peace with your own true nature.

“What?”

“Something,” she says, “someone once said to me,” and it’s the strangest thing when she says it, I’m not even sure what it means but it unnerves me some because I know I’ve heard it before, that very thing, back before I came up out of the lake, like the thing about sleeping the sleep of the dead. But if domination was about the power of it for her, if it was the Mistress’ true nature just to take command of her life then how is it four months ago I’m calling up an ambulance-boat on the wireless to come pump out her stomach? Unless that’s her way of taking control of her life for good. So it’s a complicated thing, one’s true nature, isn’t it. Sometime long ago something happened to her, something beyond her control, something she’s not been able to escape from or explain to herself in any way that she’s ever actually believed for any length of time, something that won’t heal. Something no act or ritual of domination has been able to get her through no matter how hard she’s tried. Something. I’ve come to learn things about her life but not that. I think awhile after I first come to the Chateau perhaps it’s better for her, it’s like she regained something, but then — I’m happy to be a daughter to her if that’s what she needs. Why not. And one afternoon a few months after I’ve been here I say as much and I can tell right away it’s the wrong thing to say, I can tell from this look on her face. This shattered look. Perhaps

the birth canal of the lake I know this and maybe should be astounded by it if

it’s the casual way I say it, like it doesn’t mean anything either way. Now that I think about it, it’s after that she begins to slip away, except for times we embrace for whatever reason, and I can feel the way she holds onto me that she’s trying to come back, come back from wherever she’s slipping to.

There was a man once, that much I know. That I’ve figured out. And for a time I thought, well then that’s it isn’t it, a man. He may even have been a client. I’ve never asked, perhaps I’m not the inquisitive sort. Perhaps I have an overly developed male-sense of privacy — that is, for a female. But whoever he was she’s not seen him for a long time. Awhile, though, I thought that’s what it was.

Now I don’t think so.

As for the lake, well for sure there’s something between the Mistress and the lake. She stands on the terrace must be hours every day and she and the lake stare each other down. The Mistress, she thinks I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I do. I’ve figured it out. The Mistress thinks the lake is waiting for her to die before it sinks any further, and I’m not going to be the one to say she’s wrong. God’s little joke on the male gender, that’s what the Mistress says I am, and after a while it becomes clear that her god is full of such jokes, and so sometimes I wonder if the lake is God’s joke on her or she’s God’s joke on the lake. It’s almost six months later I hear the Saint Kristin legend, by then I’ve finally left the Chateau for an afternoon now and then, going to Port Justine for supplies and that’s when I hear, when I’m out among the locals, how the Mistress is Saint Kristin’s twin or Saint Kristin returned from the dead or something, I hear it but don’t make much sense of it and I don’t think anyone else makes sense of it or even really wants to. Four months ago when I call the ambulance-boat, well there’s a commotion then on the hillsides, people skittering back and forth like forest animals smelling

here anything was astounding or, maybe more precisely, if there was nothing

smoke. You might think a pathetic botched suicide attempt would sort of snuff the legend, what? but instead the offerings just start coming more than ever, the stone steps of the grotto laden with bread and cheese and fruit and drinking water. While the Mistress sleeps I go out on the terrace to see boats bobbing on the lake below, people standing in them staring up in anxious anticipation. She’s all right, I tell them, go home. They don’t move awhile. They’re still suspicious of me, perhaps more than ever, still not sure whether I’m priestess, temptress, judas, magdalene.

After a while they drift back to shore. Return to their vigil. That same afternoon I go out to the back grotto behind the Chateau to find a lone man in a boat leaving on the steps an offering of flowers. Not much good for anything, flowers, I think, but he lays them up and down the stone stairs. The tide will just take most of them, I tell him.

He looks up. He’s in his mid- maybe late-twenties. That afternoon he looks up at me and his jaw drops a bit, and I see that expression I’ve seen before and think, Oh I’m about to become God’s little joke again. But he’s pretty for a boy, I’ll say that for him, eyes the color of the lake and hair like owl feathers. I see him again about a week later, one twilight all by himself on the lake in his boat — what, does he live in that boat? I wonder. He’s all by himself drifting out there watching the Chateau like they all watch it, except that where all the rest of them are waiting for the Mistress, I know he’s waiting for me. We just look at each other and don’t wave or anything, just look at each other till I go back inside, but there are more flowers on the steps the next morning except for the ones the lake has stolen, a trail of garlands leading back to him I’m sure. Then I see him a lot over the next week or so and don’t pay much attention, never wave or say anything, thinking I shouldn’t encourage him too much. I like the notion of men under my spell, I confess, it’s the whole point of what I do,

that was not astounding, and I can’t help wondering how my life might have

but if I’m to be God’s little joke then I don’t want it to be any crueler than the sport of it calls for. And then I don’t see him at all awhile, perhaps another week, and then he’s there one night on the grotto steps again not with flowers, not delivering anything except himself. He’s there as a client.

By now I’ve really got the business going. Twenty or thirty steady regulars, more than I can handle really, and then all the semi’s who drop in and out of the picture, and new ones showing up fairly often and a lot of them come back. From the short time I’ve been here already it seems to me nothing in L.A. ever quite fits any sort of real pattern anyway, and this sort of work is volatile by nature; sometimes when the fighting up north gets worse or there’s especially ominous news from back east you can almost predict an upturn in traffic, men wanting to explore their dark sides before the end. More often than not these are men of some power or influence, men in control of others, men in positions of responsibility who long to be free for an hour or two of power, control, responsibility, free of themselves — men who want to turn power and control and the Self over to someone else. Perhaps they feel guilty about the way they fuck over other people all the time and want to be fucked over by me in return as a sort of penance — every client is different isn’t he. Some have lives they need to escape from and others have no lives at all, that is no lives of emotional connection or intimacy, and they’re the problem-ones because then they want me to be their life, and I can’t, can I. I just can’t. Those are the ones who start hounding me till I have to cut them loose. You probably think they’re all creeps and losers in which case you would be in for the surprise of your life, I won’t say most of them are nice normal men because, take it from me, there are no nice normal men — nice perhaps but not normal. But some of them are actually a bit sweet — sad and messed up yes but a bit sweet and like I told the Mistress that very first day it’s not

been different had I known, how far I might have gone with him to unlock the

like I don’t like men, sometimes they actually can be easier to deal with than women because everything’s so straightforward in terms of what they want. So don’t get the idea I do this because I hate men. Perhaps back somewhere in my mystery past before I came up out of the lake I was a cliche, you know, the molested daughter or whatever — but I just don’t think so. So before I take on a client we’ll usually talk awhile and I’ll try to figure out what his story is and why he’s there and whether what he wants is something I can give him, and I make it clear then that there are things I don’t do and I don’t need to go into those here, just things that cross my own line of dignity if not the client’s. There’s humiliation and then there’s humiliation. Like I said before, there’s a line drawn on the discipline I’ll inflict, because while it’s all very amusing to blindfold and harness a naked man by his ankles and wrists and beat him awhile, it’s not like I’m a sadist or something. Erotoasphyxiation, electrocution, cattle prods, I don’t go in for any of that. It’s all about limits isn’t it, the ones you test and the ones you observe. There’s a code word the client and I agree on that he’ll say if things are going farther than he wants or he changes his mind about something, something besides “no” or “stop” because in such situations people say no or stop all the time without meaning it. For a while I was coming up with a different word for each client but that became confusing and I was always afraid I might forget, though I imagine I would have remembered when I heard it, but anyway now I have a one-code-fits-all policy and the word is zed.

But no one’s said it yet.

There’s no sex. Not with me, anyway. Do you get that? I’m not a hooker. The need and situation may be sexual to the client and I understand that in the submissive’s own weird way I’m an object of sexual interest. At the end of the session, before releasing him, if he’s been obedient and I feel he’s done well in his

riddle of how every life is a millennium unto itself, of how the single smallest

training, I’ll give him permission to pleasure himself if he chooses. But that’s up to him, he does it without any help at all from me, though if he wants to do it in front of me I may allow him, depending. A female client, she’s different, to the extent I’ve had any and can really tell. I confess I wouldn’t mind more female clients. For a while I was a bit surprised I didn’t have more but that was me being naive, women just aren’t wired that way are they. Someone else will have to explain that, I can’t. Perhaps for women submission has been such a fact of life for so long that they don’t have the luxury of making a game of it. I’ve had two female submissives but I’m not sure they count, the first was part of a couple, she and I performing for her man and while I think perhaps she liked it more than he did or more than he wanted her to, she wasn’t really my type; the second wasn’t really one client but several thousand, the all-female Freek Recherche that’s the most famous of the movable lunatiques that take place clandestinely night to night in one canyon or the other ’round here. Which in a strange way doesn’t count either. By then I had a reputation and while I usually don’t like doing outcall I confess I was flattered that they came looking for me, a couple of the women putting on the fete sailing out to the Chateau and offering me the job. It would be an honor, one says to me — how do you resist that? Flattery or not I’m not sure I could have anyway.

This was the night I found out something interesting about myself. After all the days and weeks and months of wondering about my past, of wondering who I was before I came up out of the lake, this was when I found out perhaps I don’t really want to know. The night of the Freek Recherche the two women come back for me and sail me over to shore and drive me in a beat-up thirty-year-old Jag through the pass in the hills to Nichols Canyon and I think I’ll remember till the day I die the sight of all those women there by Nichols Pond that looked like it was on fire from

human experience like losing a child can be a universe of meaning unto

the melody-snakes imported and dumped in, flashing and singing. How did they get all those snakes? Where did all those women come from? I didn’t know there were that many women still in L.A., they had to have traveled from all the far reaches of the lagoon thousands of them, a vast memory-carnival of women dancing to the music of the snakes and drinking lapsinthe like there’s no yesterday. My job is to stand on this little platform and crack my whip at the girls dancing ’round me as well as the blindfolded man fastened naked to the spinning wheel behind me ’sinthed out of his mind voluntarily or not — I don’t know and don’t want to — erection subject to the whims of centrifuge and the object of much collective amusement. At some point in all this someone presses into my hand a shot of ’sinthe and instead of drinking it down right away I stand there looking at the shot glass in my hand thinking about it and considering whether to drink it — that is, do I want to remember, after all? Face to face with the prospect of actually knowing what came before, I balk. What if it’s something terrible? What if there’s a very good reason I’m not remembering? So I just set it there on the small table next to me trying to decide, and it’s very distracting. In a lot of ways it’s the best time I’ve ever had, the best time of my life, well the best I know of anyway, cracking the whip and dancing with the women like I’m Queen of the Zed Night like they used to call the Mistress, all of them worshipping me and cheering and wanting to touch me as I stand over them on the platform and getting paid for it on top of it, what can be better, except the whole time all I can think about is whether to drink that little shot of the sepia-colored liqueur.

The strange thing now is, I don’t remember whether I drank it or not. Don’t remember, I just look at the glass in my hand at one point as dawn’s coming up over the hills and the medicine is gone — did I drink it, spill it, try to seduce some woman with it? I swear I don’t remember. Perhaps that in itself means I must have

itself, how far I might have gone with him rather than, through a strange

drunk it — is that one of the side effects, not even remembering you’ve taken it? I suppose I should ask someone sometime, next time the Freek Recherche or another of the big-time lunatiques passes through.

It’s been a decent business and it’s allowed me to repay the Mistress and help support our lives in the Chateau. Sometimes the client he offers to pay in bottles of the “evilixir” but I don’t accept, I don’t want it in the Chateau with the Mistress or perhaps I don’t want it ’round for my own reasons, so usually he pays in cash and sometimes foodstuffs and material, transportation coupons which in this town are preferable, or something I can trade at Port Justine or the outpost over in Los Feliz. At first some clients they come expecting the oracular aspects of the sessions as the Mistress used to perform them but by now the word is out I’m not Mistress Lulu but Mistress Brontë, and instead of fortune-telling what they get from me are long gold hair and colossal boobs. Now when there’s an appointment the Mistress retreats behind her own closed doors. She knows most of the clients would find her presence more disruptive than welcoming, and those who might actually want her there, well, that would be a whole other kink we’re not into. The Mistress is already about to retire the night the young boatman who brought the flowers appears at the grotto door of the Chateau with not nearly enough cash for a session — though who knows where he got what he had: It’s not enough, I say looking at the currency in his cupped hands in the light of the doorway lantern. He ponders the money and closes one fist over the pitiful bills and coins too proud to say anything. “Oh come in then,” I say impatiently and pull him into the entryway, closing the outer door behind him, “wait here.”

It’s all completely irregular, I never just take a client on like that, there’s a process, an interview like I said before, nothing spur-of-the-moment. I leave him in the entryway. I go through the

chance-meeting with a Japanese boy who robbed graves at the time-capsule

transitional chamber that leads to the room where I sleep, and from there into the outer room where the fire roars. The Mistress, she’s standing on the terrace like she often does, as though always looking for someone — Lu, I say. She turns and I say, “I’ve got one out in the entryway.”

“Tonight?”

“I know. I’ll send him off. He doesn’t have enough to pay anyway.”

She nods and I’m about to leave when she says, “It’s all right, I’m going to bed,” and she comes in from the terrace moving very slowly, she seems suddenly old, “I mean if you want to send him away …” shrugging “… but not on my account.”

“Come here,” I take her arm helping her. “Are you all right?” helping her into the back bedroom. I haven’t seen her look so old. I think she’s in her forties and on this night she seems twenty years older. “Lu?”

“I’m all right.” She lies on the bed.

I sit on the bed beside her and we lock eyes. “None of the ’sinthe tonight,” I say. She shrugs again, a small smile, and while I sit there on the bed close to a quarter hour holding her hand, waiting for her to go to sleep, my eyes search the room for the little sepia-colored bottles. When I think she’s finally fallen asleep and I let go of her hand, she murmurs something. “What?” I lean my ear to her mouth, and when I still can’t make it out, I ask again. “What kind of life?” she whispers.

“Shhh.”

“For a mother to give a daughter,” she says.

“Go to sleep.”

“What if I was your mother?” she whispers.

“You are.”

She smiles for a moment and then shuts her eyes again,

cemetery now under water on the west side of town, winding up in Tokyo that

“Your client….”

“Gone by now,” I kiss her forehead — but in fact he’s still there when I turn off the light by her bed and go back into the outer room and through the ceremony room and the transitional chamber to the entryway. “You’re still here,” I say and he just looks at me and I say, “Do you talk?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what I do?”

“I think.”

“All right. Do you know what I don’t do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well we’re not going to have sex. Do you understand that?”

He seems to consider this a moment and nods.

“I’m not a prostitute, do you understand?”

He nods. He sticks out the fistful of bills.

“Next time — if there is a next time — you have to bring more than that, and you can’t pay in flowers either.” I take the cash and take him by the empty hand. “What’s your name?”

“Kale,” he says.

“Come here then.” I take him into the dressing room. “Take off all your clothes”—and he begins to pull the white shirt off over his head so I stop him—“wait till I finish with your instructions. Take off all your clothes and hang them here on the door”—I point at the hook on the door—“and then go through this door and you’ll be in a room where you’ll see another open door, and go through that door. Are you paying attention?”

“Yes.”

“Did I give you permission to look at Me?”

“No.”

“‘No, Mistress Brontë.’”

“No, Mistress Brontë.”

mirror-city of L.A. where east and west are smeared and where I eventually

“Go through the open door you see and you’ll be in a large room with a fire. In the middle of the room will be a black circular rug. Kneel on the rug and wait for Me. When you see Me, lower your face in the rug till I instruct you otherwise.” Usually this is all prearranged with the client. The grotto door would be left unlocked and the inner doors open at the appointed hour so that the client, he doesn’t see me at all till he’s in the main room awaiting my entrance and command. That way a strictly defined relationship exists from the first, I’m already in my role as Dominant and he’s already in his as submissive before his training begins. I leave Kale in the dressing room, take my apparel from the ceremony chamber and go into the outer room which I make dark except for some burning candles. Then I change into the black leather garter-belt and stockings and heels and the red silk robe I was given by another client to replace the old black robe the Mistress gave me my first night at the Chateau, and I take the riding crop and wait out on the terrace.

When I fit him with a collar and ask him what his favorite color is, he says blue and I strike him lightly ’cross the face. “Is the kale-toy being impertinent?” I say, “you know there’s no blue anymore,” choosing a velvet purple collar for him. From the outset he’s the most compliant stoic sort I’ve ever had, while at the same time being the least truly submissive. This unspoken defiance comes into his eyes even while he’s doing everything I tell him. The more compliant his body is, the more his spirit is somehow beyond enslavement. Drifting outside himself the way he seems to, there’s no self to be humiliated. During that first session I keep asking him if he feels humiliated and he says no, and a week later when he shows up again, still holding out in his cupped hands the cash that’s not enough, I don’t know why I don’t just tell him it’s insufficient and make him leave — it would be a very legitimate reason not to see him. But somehow it feels like a

worked as a memory girl in the revolving memory hotels of Kabuki-cho amid

defeat, and so instead during the second session I change strategies, applying a more rigorous discipline; but when I ask again if he’s humiliated he says no, and though I strike him ’cross his back when he says it, I know it’s true, he’s not. I beat him harder than I’ve ever beaten a client, till I have to stop myself. Are you humiliated now, slave kale? I say, and he keeps saying no no no, and he’s not. It’s obvious it’s not his true nature to be either submissive or dominant. He’s one of those rare few whose true nature is to neither follow nor lead — more like a woman in that way, I should say. Or perhaps I mean more like me.

Which means what attracts him isn’t the idea of submission, which is what attracts the others. I’m what attracts him, so I know from the first there’s a potential problem. Really I don’t want to encourage him. I know he’s here for the wrong reason, I know he’s taken with me, and if I didn’t know before, sure I know it the night he sails me to shore when I get another outcall, after the one I did for the Freek Recherche, up at one of the houses on the Hollywood Peninsula. It’s my biggest offer ever and something tells me from the start to stay away from it — these very unpleasant sorts in a powerboat show up in the Chateau grotto one afternoon with a handful of cash and I’m not keen on the looks of them. But though cash isn’t the easiest currency to deal in ’round here anymore, well it’s a lot of cash, and they want me to come up that night to some house on the peninsula owned I guess by whoever sent his messenger boys with the proposition: There’s going to be a party, they say. I say to this one guy in the powerboat, I’m not a hooker.

“It’s OK,” he says flatly.

What sort of answer is that? “Do you understand,” I say again, “that I do not have sex for money?”

“It all right,” he says, còunting out there on the grotto steps more cash than I’ve ever seen, and so, really, it’s my own fault

its surrounding bars and brothels and strip joints and massage parlors and

isn’t it, looking back on it. I know that. All my intuition is saying no don’t do this, here I’m trying to explain the situation, what I do and what I don’t, and they’re just giving out with this vague it’s all right it’s OK — but I’m dazzled by the money, and perhaps I’ve gotten over-confident about being able to take care of myself. So that night at the agreed hour I sail out to the cove behind the Chateau where a car is waiting to take me up to the house, and Kale, he’s the one who takes me.

In the boat he doesn’t say anything, not that he ever says anything anyway. But he can tell from my bag of tricks I have with me and the way I’m dressed under my long green cloak that I’m working. It’s dusk and the light’s fading and halfway from the Chateau to the cove a fog drifts in and as the fog gets heavier a car onshore begins flashing its lights that get hazier and hazier. Are you sulking? I finally say to him and regret it right away, it’s a question that instantly makes us more familiar than I want to be. What? he says and by now I’ve already learned with Kale what? might mean anything. What? might mean I didn’t hear you, it might mean I heard you but I didn’t understand you, it might mean I understood you but I don’t know why you would ask that question, it might mean I understand why you’re asking but I don’t want to answer. Somehow all the things that what? might mean coming from anyone else, with Kale it’s just multiplied, because he’s this boy that you just don’t know at all, he’s unknowable and I don’t think it’s just me. I realize, moments from shore, that in this boat our roles are reversed, what with him navigating — my most compliant but least submissive client in control and me, the woman in control, at his mercy though who knows whether he thinks of it like that since there’s no telling what he thinks even when it’s the other way ’round. Other than the one thing about him I know that I keep trying to ignore, that he’s totally taken with me, there’s not

porn shops, in a city of no order where streets have no names or addresses of

any telling about Kale about anything at all. Walking up the shore to the car I find myself turning ’round to look over my shoulder at him back at the lake behind me, another concession to some strange connection or familiarity I’m not too happy about. I find myself turning ’round to look at him behind me — and he’s not looking at me at all. He’s pushing the boat away from the shore with the oar and, for a moment, panic wells up in me, I feel stranded, I want to call him to come back and take me back to the Chateau. But I fight it and go on.

The car is one of those old stretch limos from the turn of the century. In the back is a bar with crystal bottles of the lovely-looking sepia liqueur, and suspended from the ceiling of the limo there’s a little television turned to probably the only channel that can still pick up a satellite signal, from some station out beyond the Mojave. I haven’t seen a television since I swam up out of the lake but I know what it is anyway and while I have no idea what’s going on — a man and woman are arguing — I can’t help watching with fascination as the car winds up the mountain road to the house. I have no idea where we’re going or how far but I’m in the car a good fifteen minutes. Beyond the dark limo windows, one old abandoned mansion after another rolls by dark and hulking, sometimes I see a light go out in one window or another where squatters hide from the headlights of the car. When we get to the house where the party is, it’s buried in black palms and cypresses and darkness, walls invisible in the night and the only thing I can see is a small glowing rectangle in the distance, a yellow doorway in the night, and we get out of the limo and I can see the driver is the man in the powerboat who gave me all the cash that afternoon. Roughly he takes me by the elbow and directs me to the door.

The house, it doesn’t seem all that impressive inside, not that much bigger than the Lair — the light is dim as though to hide

any sequence that makes sense in space, rather it’s a sequence of time,

general dilapidation. The grime of the walls, the carpets. It must be seventy, eighty years old, from the middle of the last century, the left wall of the open living room lined with bookshelves with latticed doors but no books, and in the right wall of the living room a hearth that’s not burned a fire in years though some wood is stacked on one side of the fireplace and on the other side is a poker and instruments for stirring embers, cleaning ashes. ’Cross the room from where I stand windows run from the ceiling to the floor and past those I can make out in the moonlight a pool no one has swum in a long time because in the moonlight I can see the surface of the pool covered with leaves, and past the pool is a mega view of the lake and all L.A.’s islands, not that you can really see the lake itself in the dark. But in a way that’s the impressive thing, the panorama of islands all glittery in a way I’ve never seen L.A. You can almost get a sense of the whole of the thing, of the city and lagoon, the way you never do in L.A.

Inside the house there are about a dozen guests not including the gorillas hired to stand in front of the doors with their arms crossed, like the ones in the powerboat who came to see me that afternoon. Of the dozen there are three men and the rest are women, and I’m relieved to see other women here but they all look at me with bored suspicion. By now naturally I know this is some sort of mistake and the only question is how big it is and how I’m going to get myself out of it. One of the men comes up to me, this fiftyish Eurotrash sort who’s apparently the host, not bad looking but not pleasant either. “You’re the one from the Chateau,” he says.

“That’s right,” I murmur.

He turns to the others, the men and all the women reclining on sofas, and says, “This is the one from the Chateau,” and it’s hard to tell just how interesting they find this. There’s almost no conversation between anyone, music in the background so faint

structures numbered by their age and memories, and commuters ride the

it’s as though no one really wants to hear it but someone thinks it’s obligatory, everyone is drinking and I can see on the table disheveled traces of a white powder that got used up hours ago. If they all got stuck in this moment forty years ago, no one has had the desire or energy to get out of it. “Have a drink,” says the host, and one of the women appears at his side with a drink for me.

“No, thank you,” I say — another rule. Believe me I’m as happy as anyone to have a bit of wine or whisky now and then and I could use one given the situation, but it’s a rule, you don’t drink on the job especially given the situation. You just lose control of things which naturally is exactly why the man is trying to get you to have a drink. “Have one,” he demands.

“Not,” I say, “when I’m working.”

“Who says you’re working.”

“You did. You paid me, remember?”

“Exactly. I’m paying you and now I want you to drink.” He shoves the drink at me and I take it with the hand that’s not holding my bag of playthings. The gorgeous woman next to him, she watches me, half smiles, raises an eyebrow, she’s tall — though every woman seems tall to me — five-eight, five-nine, long and sleek looking, her hair black and there’s something exotic about her eyes, some mega-combination of Scandinavian and Mediterranean. Her name is Monica. “Mmmmmmmm she’s delightful isn’t she,” purrs Monica running her eyes up and down me as though the long green coat conceals nothing, “boobalicious little pixie,” she says, “are they real?”

“They’re the realest thing in this room,” I say looking ’round me, and she laughs and takes me by the arm that’s holding the bag and leads me to the sofa. Truth be told, at this moment I’m happy enough to go with her, because the host he gives me the creeps and now watching us walk away he has this slightly

subways in a neverending loop and cabbies wander pell-mell spiraling

flummoxed look like I’ve just slipped from his clutches for the moment and that’s bought me some time. Also, well, truth be told again Monica is as close to being my fantasy woman as I’ve met, she looks exactly like I would want to look if I could look anyway I wanted to, long and dark and sleek like a sexy cat. We sit on the sofa awhile and Monica asks me this and that about who I am and where I’ve come from and about my past, and when I don’t know the answer I make up something. Sometimes she puts her hand on my thigh. Taking a whiff of my drink to make sure it’s not ’sinthe, pretty soon I’m aware of having drunk a bit more Scotch than I planned, but I’m still sober enough to know it’s time to slow down, and Monica puts her hand under my long green cloak and runs it over my breast in this lazy sort of way like it’s no more or less diverting than anything else and I have the feeling she could be as much into me as she’s ever been into anything if she ever saw the point of having to decide one way or the other. Every so often I think she’s going to fall asleep. “I would offer you some candy,” she nods at the white residue on the coffee table in front of us, “but they’ve used it all. The pigs.” She talks in this slow sensual way like she might be drunk or drugged except that she doesn’t otherwise act drunk or drugged. Depravity becomes her.

This goes on at least a good hour perhaps longer, nothing much changing in the room or the cast of characters except when someone disappears a while and then returns. At one point one of the men takes one of the women, a Persian, by the hand and leads her off though it must not be that far away, anyone can hear it going on on the other side of the wall, anyone can hear her crying, then he comes back in alone and when she returns, a few minutes after him, her eyes look deader than they did before. I’ve stopped drinking, just raising the Scotch to my lips now and then to make a show of it. My hope is the whole evening will eventually just get mired in its own ennui long enough for me to slip away, though

boulevards and people drive freeways in search of phantom exits and where in

I have no idea how I’m going to get down the mountain or back to the Chateau. I’m very aware the host is looking at me and I’m trying not to look back. Finally he’s standing in front of us. He waits for Monica and me to look up at him and when we don’t he gives out with this hoarse bark. “Dance.”

“Sorry?” I say.

“Get up and dance.”

“I’m not a dancer.”

“Take off your clothes.”

“I’m not a stripper. You should have hired a stripper.”

“I paid you a lot of fucking money.”

“I explained to your men what I do and what I don’t.”

“Do you want to make it with her?” he says, pointing at Monica. “You can make it with her and we’ll watch.”

“Oh Armand,” laughs Monica in that not-quite-intoxicated way of hers, “why don’t you just let her do whatever it is she does? If you just wanted some little trollop to strip or dance or bang,” waving her arm at the other women, none of whom protests, “you wouldn’t have had to hire her, would you? She’s an artist isn’t she. She’s a professional. Like you said, you paid her a lot of money so why don’t you just let her do whatever it is she does and see what happens.”

Dully Armand reflects on this awhile and says, “All right.”

“Where?” I say.

“Here.”

“Here?” looking ’round at the others.

“Here.” So I stand and open my bag and take out half a dozen candles and some matches, and go ’round the room setting the candles here and there and lighting them, then turn off the one or two lamps so everything is candlelit, then take off my cloak and that surely makes an impression, everyone sort of flickers to life for a second at the sight of the white stockings and white lace

Ueno Park the trees shed their cherry blossoms and, for only a rare moment in

corset, the white being my own recent touch, a departure of sorts from the Domme’s traditional black. I open the bag and out come several pairs of the fur-lined cuffs and the crop and whip and paddle and several blindfolds and ball-gags and all of this really gets their attention. “Strip,” I tell Armand.

“What?”

I smack him ’cross the face with the riding crop. It’s not a hard smack or anything, because like I’ve said I’m not into the heavy corporal stuff, but it’s probably fair to say no one’s done anything like this to him in a long time because now the party is definitely alert. They couldn’t be more alert if I turned a fire hose on them. Armand’s henchmen in particular standing by the doors, they look back and forth at each other like they don’t know what they’re supposed to do, and me, I figure playing this out, taking control of the situation in a way true to my nature, is my only real shot at perhaps getting out of a fix. “Are you sure you want to do this here, or elsewhere?” I say to him.

“Oh, here, by all means,” Monica insists from the sofa.

“Yes, here,” says someone else.

“Uh,” Armand looks ’round, “all right, I guess.”

I strike him with the crop ’cross the face again and now the bodyguards look at each other in consternation, “you’ll address Me as Mistress Brontë.”

Bewildered, Armand nods. “Yes, right.” I strike him a third time; a bit too dull to know exactly how he feels about it, he puts his hand to his face and rubs his cheek. “Right, Mistress Brontë,” he says.

“Then strip.”

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

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

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

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

“‘Yes, Mistress Brontë.’”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Unworthy as you are.”

“Unworthy as we are.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Rnngswft!” says Armand.

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

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

She throws down the paddle. She crosses the living room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in the little gutted room with the elevator cables I turn and he’s standing there in the doorway blocking it. For a second all my defenses go up the way they do when a woman is cornered

as a little girl, running one afternoon into my uncle’s bar and crying out

and a man is blocking her way out. All my defenses go up and suddenly he looks crestfallen, he’s seen it in my face, seen the way I got a bit afraid of him, the way I hate him just a bit after everything he’s done, after the way he’s slept next to me and hasn’t even tried to get under the blanket with me; for me to suddenly get wary and afraid of him, well, I can see how it hurts him. As though he would ever do anything to me. As though he would ever threaten me in any way. He’s hurt by my collapse of trust in this moment and something else, I know there’s something else, I knew from the first night he came to me. “Sorry,” I half murmur, half snap, and that comes off a bit defensive too.

He nods. He backs out of the doorway to let me by.

In the doorway I take his face between my hands. “I’m sorry,” I say again, gentler.

He nods again.

“Jeez,” I say, “what is it Kale. Are you in love with me, is that it? Do you just want to fuck me, is that all this is about?”

“Those are two different questions,” he answers.

“Why,” taken aback, “that’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever heard you say.” I take his hand and pull him down in the doorway and we sit together our legs entwined. I reach out from beneath my blanket and take his hands in mine and hold them. It’s not like that with me and boys, I try to explain. I know a man always thinks he can change a girl like me if he only gets the chance but that’s not going to happen. Really, at this moment I’m not trying to be a bitch, if anything I’m sort of begging him to understand. You’re pretty though, I’ll give you that, I say to him looking at his water-green eyes that light up in the night and putting my hand in his brown feathery hair that smells like tall dry grass — but it’s more than that. Somehow I feel it’s more than that. Later, back at the Chateau and lying in my own bed, I think about how it’s more than that. Part of me thinks well I can’t see

What’s missing from the world? and years later from L.A. to Tokyo there

him any more, because it just torments him, but the other part of me isn’t sure I can stay away, because there’s a connection for sure. Not like we’re lovers but … something else.

Over the next couple of weeks I go out with him again to the island called the Hamblin because it’s truly mega out there even if there’s no blue anymore, even under the gray sky and looking out over the gray water, and also because of that connection. Because I can’t help wanting to spend time with him. But after a few times I know I can’t anymore, that it means too much to him to be with me and it hurts him too much not to make love to me. Like the first night out on the Hamblin he never imposes himself on me in any way except one time standing next to him looking out at the lake I put my arm in his as the wind comes up and then he puts his arm ’round me and his fingers brush my breast ever so slightly like it’s an accident — boys will be boys, eh? One night he comes to the Chateau with some food and money to be my slave again but we’re somehow too far past that scene anymore, and there in the Lair before the fire he tries to tell me, I know what he’s trying to say and I’m thinking oh no don’t, don’t say it, and he can’t, it catches in his throat or he can’t come up with the words or something, and he starts talking with his hands. His eyes coming at me fixed, relentless, he starts talking in this sort of sign language, his hands making these urgent elaborate pictures in the air, and he becomes more and more frustrated, his eyes closed tight, hands darting in front of him faster and faster till finally I just take them in my own, “Hey, hey,” to try and calm him. He relaxes and his hands rest in mine and he opens his eyes and just looks at me.

I wait for Armand and his boys to show up. I figure it’s a matter of time, that they’re not going to let that night go unanswered for, so I gather up all the cash they paid me and keep it handy on the off-chance that somehow returning the money will

inside me that question was beginning to grow into its own answer, What was

satisfy them though I don’t believe that at all. My only concern now is that no harm comes to the Mistress. I’ve almost convinced myself it’s all been forgotten when yesterday afternoon I finally hear the approaching sound of the motor of the powerboat, and get the money and go out the back, down the stone steps into the grotto. The boat approaches and it’s my friend who drove me in the limo and chased me into the glen — on his forehead he has the scar of a pretty good gash where Kale leveled him with the oar.

He’s about as happy to see me as I am to see him. For a moment the boat just bobs on the water in the afternoon shadows of the grotto. “Cunt,” he finally says.

I let that one pass. “Look,” I say, “here’s the money back,” thrusting it in front of me with both hands.

“What do you mean?” he says.

“Here’s your money back. Tell your boss I’m sorry.”

Well what can I say. You’re not going to believe this, but — Turns out Armand doesn’t want his money back, and he’s not sent his boys out to beat me up or kill me or ransack the Chateau. Turns out he wants me to come back up to the house and do the whole thing over again. Without the other girls joining in this time but all the rest of it: the blindfold, the cuffs, the little red ball in his mouth — he especially liked the little red ball — the whole thing except we’ll do it in private or, if I feel safer, he’ll come out to the Chateau and send his bodyguards away and we’ll do it here, all night if I’m agreeable and he’ll pay me double what he paid the first time, up front. I have to wear the white lace corset and stockings, though. That’s the only stipulation.

Men! Fucking unbelievable, what? I just stand there with my mouth open and finally stammer I need a bit of time to think about it, because I don’t want to say yes and I’m afraid to say no. Back ’cross the lake goes the boat to Armand, from the grotto steps

missing from the world, and although I didn’t yet know it was growing inside

I watch it cross the lake, trying to think what I’m going to do. I don’t want to go back to that house, I tell the Mistress, but I don’t want these boys out at the Chateau either. There’s a lot I don’t tell the Mistress. I don’t tell her everything that happened that night in the hills because every time I see her now she just looks older, she seems to come out of her bedroom less and less, and to move more and more slowly — and I’m onto the business with the lapsinthe. I’ve figured out what that’s about, to the extent it makes sense at all, she thinks one night she’s going to finally take one too many that’s going to put her over the edge once and for all, whatever the edge is. But I figure the last thing she needs to hear about is what happened that night at Armand’s, just so she can worry about me. I tell her a bit about Kale, not really so much except, you know, There’s this boy — because there’s not that much I know to tell, is there? except he’s strange and sort of sweet and he’s in love with me. Yes she whispers they all fall a little in love with you, and I say no, this boy’s in love with me. And what do you think about that, she asks, and I say well it’s not something I can reciprocate, is it (perhaps she’s checking for some weakness in my lesbian resolve), but he’s sweet I say and very strange and I don’t want to hurt him (I haven’t really told her how he saved my little pixie behind) and the last time I saw him, I saw it in his eyes, this hurt, and I just wanted to run because I had never seen a boy hurt like that over me, not like that. I thought I was happy making the men cry a bit, what with a good healthy thrashing that would get a few tears flowing and the blood moving — but not like that, and it shocked me. And the Mistress she says well then you know you should send him away. It’s only right. You should send him away. And I say, I know.

Then we’re quiet in front of the fire. What is it, I say, and she smiles thinly, It’s death, she says, “spreading through the baseboards and ceiling,” and I can’t really say what that last bit

me and my son was growing with it, still I somehow knew, and everywhere that

means but I guess I know anyway, and I suppose I’m not that surprised. But how? I ask, and she answers, It’s not always easy to say, sometimes it’s something unbearably sad you never recover from … sometimes when a woman dies, it’s an act of sacrifice.

One thing I know, though, she says after a few more moments. One thing I know — and she says it with more force than I’ve heard her say anything — I know I don’t want to die on this lake.

I go to bed not long after that and, lying in bed and struggling to fall asleep, is it a Lapse I have, like everyone else on the lake used to have all the time when the lake was sinking? Or a dream? Or a dislodged memory. That night of the Freek Recherche lunatique, did I drink that shot after all and now I’m having a ’sinthe flashback? Whatever, there I am back on that night I first swam to the Chateau and the Mistress, back on that night I first came up out of the lake, back under the water not so much floating up to the surface but expelled, by something below me, born, out of some other life, the placenta of a previous consciousness trailing behind me as I make my way to the surface. Bits and pieces of whoever I was before, falling away from my naked body, and then bits and pieces of distant recollection falling away as I swim upward, flashes of a remembrance washed away in the cold of the lake, a horrific flash of rubble and fire and confusion and terror and chaos and of having been hurled through the opening of the lake in a full-force gale of ash and obliteration. Control and its loss assert themselves as the parameters of my new psyche, right there in the water. And somehow I know now, returning to this moment in my Lapse or dream or memory or whatever it is, that this passage is different for everyone isn’t it, that it’s a passage without time, a passage that might have taken me a moment or a hundred years, from somewhere that was a

I went then I went as the bearer of chaos, with everything coming apart around

moment or a hundred years ago, and that whatever was on the other side of the hole at the bottom of the lake is different for each of us, that whatever it is this birth-passage brought me from was not necessarily where anyone else comes from, or where anyone else would go to if she were to try and go back, if it were even possible to go back. This particular passage through the opening of the lake, from wherever I came, it was my own, my unique journey from a unique place and moment, and more than that, from my own personal moment of unique chaos, whatever that was, for unique reasons having to do uniquely with me, beyond all control. And that’s all I understand about it other than that somewhere in my rise to the surface I have a vision of the Mistress or someone much like her, swimming right past me except going the other way.

I also have a vision of Kale I don’t understand: chaos’ son. Or perhaps it is that I’m chaos’ daughter. And it’s not till finally the Lapse finishes that I sleep, my sound sleep from which no one and nothing can stir me, the sleep of the dead….

These are the memoirs of Brontë Blu, dungeon-mistress of the Chateau X, white avenging angel of the Hollywood Hills, God’s little joke on the male gender.

The afternoon before, Kale watches the powerboat with Armand’s men heading for the Chateau. Sitting in his own boat under the eaves of the shoreline trees, he takes his oar in hand ready again to go to Her rescue; he waits because he doesn’t want to interject himself too soon and agitate the situation unnecessarily. When he sees Armand’s boat leave, he begins rowing hurriedly toward the grotto and gets there in time to see Her disappearing back into the Chateau through the door at the top of the steps; for a while there on the lake he waits, watches, to assure himself everything is all right before he starts back out to the Hamblin. Halfway to the Hamblin he turns to look back at the Chateau and

me, upheaval and confusion in my path, radios going haywire and subways

see if perhaps She has come out onto the terrace to wave to him, but She doesn’t appear and he realizes he doesn’t want to go to the Hamblin, that now it only reminds him of Her. So he turns west and makes his way along the shoreline. The boat drifts awhile and he finally beaches it about a mile from the Chateau, at yet another small cove where some of the trees are still black from a fire almost a quarter of a century before. The lake there seems blacker too. he gets out of the boat into the black water and pulls it up onto shore and ties it to one of the black trees.

kale lies on the ground and stares up through the black leaves at the gray afternoon sky and has a childhood memory of when it used to be blue, he doesn’t know that what he feels in his chest is the deflowering of a virgin heart, because until not so long ago it was as much the heart of an owl as a man. he doesn’t want to think about Her but he cannot, i cannot not think about Her. i lie awhile then get back in the boat and go back out to the place in the water where i can see the light where She lives, i wait for Her to come out and see me and wave to me and call, i would sleep next to Her and not touch Her but just watch Her while She sleeps if She said to, i would touch Her long gold hair only if She said, i cannot not think of Her gold hair. Why can i not not think of Her smile, i would be Her slave all the time, Her best true slave i who have led armadas of owls, i who have multiplied and divided tides and winds, i who Big Agua has never ruled. Slave to no one and nothing else, i try to remember out on the water in my boat what it was not to have known Her. i wish it could be that way again but i don’t wish it. i want to not remember Her but i don’t want it. i want to have never known Her but i don’t want it. i want to forget Her but i don’t, i would rather die about Her than live past Her. What does it mean that i feel this, i must be sick some way. Divide the times i think of Her by the gold strands of Her hair, multiply that by the light of Her mouth — but i can’t figure the

breaking down and glass buildings shattering and cherry blossoms from the

numbers of it. It’s math i don’t know. Why does it hurt me to have known Her. Why can i no longer hear the sound of my own heartbeat, or any heart on the water but Hers. If i was a girl would She want me then.

i cry for Her like a girl please, isn’t that enough.

Next day i wait again for Her sign, there is no sign. Next day and the next and next, and then one day i take the boat out to Her steps and Her door and knock, i wait in the boat for Her sign, there’s no sign, i go back and knock on the door again. She doesn’t come and i wait longer before i go inside.

i’ve never been inside in the day before, i think i should take off my clothes like night-time and so i go through the rooms without my clothes and think when i see Her i’ll get down at Her feet, through each door i think She’ll be there and i’ll get down at Her feet. But She isn’t there. She isn’t there and standing in the afternoon sunlight in the middle of the empty lair he realizes she’s gone. Realizes she’s gone not just for an hour, not just for a single sun or moon, not just for a single room but gone with who was here with her; clothes are gone as well, there’s that feeling of place when it’s been abandoned, and it’s the feeling of his existence because he’s been abandoned too.

Not for the first time.

He goes out onto the terrace of the Chateau and says, more to himself at first, where are You. He barely knows what it is, his own crying. He tells himself he hates her now but knows he doesn’t. Standing there on the terrace, over the sound of the lake he listens for her heart, but wherever it is now, it’s too far away. Standing there on the terrace, looking out over the lake listening, it occurs to him for the first time they’re all gone too, the disciples. The faithful who for years worshipped at the waterline of the Chateau X are gone and it occurs to him that in fact now that he thinks about it, he hasn’t seen them for a while; and that’s when he

trees set loose in a special panic, and the question What’s missing from the

knows for certain she isn’t coming back.

Turning his back on the lake he walks back into the Chateau from the terrace and through the main lair, back out through the transitional chambers into the grotto where he edges along the small stone walkway that circles the water leading to an old door with a brass ring for a knob that he used to know very well. He finds the door slightly ajar and opens it and steps in, gazing over the shelves that once held in captivity thousands of melodies from a thousand snakes expired in menstrual blood, but now the shelves are empty as if ransacked although the webs in the corners indicate the Vault was already vacated long ago, the songs having escaped of their own accord or having been set free by someone who couldn’t stand to keep them anymore.

He thinks maybe he might find one in particular but when he doesn’t he leaves the Vault and, one more time, goes back up into the Lair to stand gazing around him in a daze, seeing nothing for a moment until, blinked clear of tears, his eyes lock on the mantle above the hearth. He walks over to the hearth: i don’t remember this he thinks — but it had always been night-time before, his eyes cast down in subjugation. Be a man who never looks up and you’re likely to miss something.

i don’t remember this here. He holds the toy monkey in his hand then goes back out through the transitional chamber into the entryway, back out onto the stone steps of the grotto to his boat. Still naked he begins to row back out onto the lake, and rows for a while east by southeast then veering slightly northward from the single coordinate drawn above him by the line of a collapsed skytram from many years before. After a while he comes to the place. This is the place he’s rowed by and past and over many times as though it meant nothing to him, as though it held no recollection of anything at all for him; but that was night-time and this is day, and maybe he’s known all along anyway. All along

world? calling up to me from that womb of mine that already predated me, that

he’s known, ignoring this place as if it couldn’t hurt his heart, but now everything hurts his heart, and he rows here and stops and stares down into the water, leaning over the boat and putting his face as close to the water as he can without capsizing, wondering if god lives down there and might explain something to him at long last. Out on the wide open lake at the place, above the spot, without her, abandoned again and his heart feeling not only what it’s never felt but all the things it’s felt but denied, breaking beyond what he can stand, he believes he’s drifted into the fourteenth room of the Hotel of Thirteen Losses. When god doesn’t talk to him from beneath the water Kale finally begins to row back along the shoreline he followed the last time he saw her disappearing into the Chateau doorway. He’s stopped crying, rowing relentlessly until he reaches the black cove of burned trees and black water where he climbs out of the boat and lies where he lay before, with the red monkey in his hand on the black Zed shore.

This crucible of loss now only makes him realize how lonely he’s always been. It only makes him realize that although he might not have had a name for desolation it was there anyway. He’s now aware in a way he’s never been how he believes no one cares for him, and what it means to be this untouched by another human heart. He’s now aware in a way he’s never been how the deflowered heart has an altogether other kind of music, a music altogether different from the percussion of blood. He’s now aware in a way he’s never been of how seared into the retina of memory are the echoes of all the questions he never got to ask someone, all the great questions of life and love and death that begin to occur to you when you’re a small boy, maybe in the night just as you’re about to fall asleep; he’s now aware in a way he’s never been of how there was never anyone there to answer these questions for him. Feeling forsaken as he hasn’t felt since he was a small boy in

womb of mine already older than I was, the question calling up to me amid the

a silver boat, he’s about to slip off into the sleep of the void when, like a voice speaking out loud to him, like someone right there at his side, there floats up from somewhere deep in his mind something that was left there years ago, planted in his ear one night while he slept and having sunk deep into him, and now opened like a time capsule that was waiting for precisely this moment of loneliness to unlock it, there in the darkening hush of the trees

your mama loves you

and he sits straight up to it. Like someone right there at his side has whispered it. He sits straight up to it and it’s still there, the thing he just heard, it hasn’t disappeared like a dream. It hasn’t vanished into memory like one of the Lapses of the Lake. It’s still there in the air and, seeing it, his eyes light, like fireflies darting above the grass.

historical rumors and little spasms of collective memory ripping outward, and

at twilight I would look out toward Tokyo Bay from the window of the ryokan