She circles where he kneels and strikes him once with the riding crop. Then she takes the chain leash in her hand and attaches one end to his collar locking it and the other to the chain belt that hangs around her waist just above her garters and stockings. She has a pair of fur-lined handcuffs, and after she’s pulled him to his feet and cuffed his hands, she turns and strides across the Lair pulling her behind him; for an hour or so he carries out her commands at the end of the leash. After a while she reclines on a leather divan before the hearth and has him massage the muscles of her calves and lower back, striking him with the riding crop when his fingers become impertinent or she feels he’s enjoying it too much. At some point she blindfolds him. When an hour has passed she uncuffs him and has him lie face down on the floor where — as always in these sessions — he believes he can hear singing in the walls of the Chateau an ancient city of women, actresses and singers and models and publicists and playmates and escorts and personal secretaries and drug connections and investment bankers and systems analysts and marketing vice-presidents and studio heads-of-productions and strippers from
as though we might be lovers, as though we might be wives to each other,
the Cathode Flower nightclub down the boulevard who stayed within these walls back when this was a famous hotel and left behind whispers and arguments and moans of rendezvous and seduction and merger. The Mistress repositions Wang’s hands behind him and cuffs him again and beats him with the riding crop in time to the sound of the lake lapping against the walls of the Chateau outside her window. Whose zen-toy are you? she asks between blows, and he answers, my Mistress’. What is the one and only reason you exist? she says and he says, To please and amuse my Mistress. After a while she pulls him to his knees by the fur-lined cuffs around his wrists and has him kneel before her on the divan. She pours over her thighs a sepia-colored liqueur and pulls him to her by his black Chinese hair; still blindfolded he licks the liquor from her thighs and when she feels he takes too much pleasure in this she beats him with the riding crop some more. When he’s drunk one thigh dry she moves his mouth to the other. Tasting her thighs and the liqueur, he’s transported. Drugged by the liquor and her thighs he falls into a trance, lost, floating above a black lake like a red cloud, a sepia rain on his tongue, and although he murmurs my Mistress, my Mistress in the groan of his climax, it’s the name of Kristin, the last woman before Lulu with whom — many years ago — he shared any sort of sensual moment, that fills his mind.
~ ~ ~
Spent, he sleeps naked on her floor. She covers him with a blanket but doesn’t remove the collar or cuffs.
as though mistress and slave, as though mother and daughter, and then
Through the white groan of his climax, he’s tumbled into a memory as potent as a vision, more than a dream. In it he can feel the movement of a train he’s on, he can smell the grass from the passing Midwest farms outside his window as he smelled it once before, he can touch the flyer he holds in his hand just as he held it then. He’s back in his past; he looks around him, momentarily confounded as to how he’s returned here. It’s years ago again, on the train that took him from the New York of chaos, where God lay in ashes, to L.A., the last city of the modern imagination, where even God and chaos could be reimagined.
In this vision on this train, it’s midnight, the final days of summer. In Wang’s mind his K hovers before him—labial jewel, riverine rapture—waiting for him in the dark distant west, in the unknown future, except back here now on this train where past and present coincide, he knows the future. He already knows he’ll get to L.A. and not find her, he already knows he’ll write all those letters she’ll coldly ignore. The train car rattles. He likes the horizontalism of the train, the way it proceeds between ground and sky belonging to neither, although in his vision he isn’t sure whether this is something he actually felt before, years ago when this first happened, or something he’s only aware of now. He looks at the flyer and remembers the strange wonder he felt the first time he looked at it on this same train in this same moment: HAVE YOU SEEN ME? it reads like thousands of them then; the face on the flyer is his. His name isn’t on it because no one knew his name: “I’m an Asian-American man last seen …” although actually he’s not American. He wonders who had the flyer for him made — someone who doesn’t know his name but remembered him, someone who isn’t also one of the missing, as are most of those with whom he had a passing acquaintance.
There was another woman.
all the commotion of visions stops as still as time has stopped here in this place
In this memory-vision, as he considers the flyer he holds, awash in a guilt he’s held at bay for many years now, he thinks about her don’t think about her though he had met her only three times don’t think about her she was no more than eighteen years old maybe nineteen, tiny, spritelike with long straight gold hair that hung almost to her waist. He never knew her name. Somewhere behind him he’s sure there’s a flyer for her as well, and tries to convince himself she’s somewhere sitting staring at her flyer in the same strange, almost amused fascination with which, on this train, he stares at his. But he doesn’t really believe it.
In China they would have found me by now. Even riding the train, some part of his brain can still hear the lake beyond the terrace of the Chateau X, just as he feels — from the Lair’s hearth near where he sleeps — the heat of the fire that lights up the train car bright red. And then he hears it, the song he first heard that morning in the Square almost three decades before and only once since, hears it and is astonished she’s singing it, his Mistress. It’s the Mistress’ voice and he wonders how she knows this song. He’s trying to make out the words but recognizes the melody immediately, and as he listens a rivulet of red runs down the aisle of the train that he knows is menstrual blood, and forms a pattern.
In another chamber of her lair in the Chateau X that Wang has never seen, as he sleeps naked before the fire by the divan beneath the blanket with which she covered him, the dominatrix-oracle now studies the pattern on a parchment on the floor before her. As she tosses the soaked tampon into a nearby toilet and waits for the pattern to dry, she gazes for a moment at the pulsating full moon that the bathroom window so perfectly frames, then returns to the pattern and for a brief moment considers the thing that’s crossed her mind that she doesn’t want to consider, which is the recent ebb of her monthly flow: Your childbearing years are numbered rolls across her mind. Since
and in the silvery bubble of the birth passage I feel myself caught up in the
she’s had no thought of having another child, the pain of it might make no sense except that it has to do not with any child to come but the one to whom she said goodbye so long ago. The irrevocability of her body’s recent monthly messages is more profound than she wants to interpret. In order not to think about it, she puts the disk that zen-toy brought her on the chamber’s sound system. She already knows what she’ll hear. Spacemonkey sign of the time, she murmurs to herself and turns back to the pattern of drying blood on the parchment, and lowers the lights and waits until the glow of the melody-snake’s head rises from the black shadows of the floor.
On the train he sees it too. As her monthly blood forms its pattern in the aisle of the train and begins to dry, there beneath the car’s dank light with midnight outside, the song he’s been listening to in his Mistress’ voice fades, desperate as he is to make it stay, and from the other end of the car he sees slither the luminous melody-snake along the lines of its lyric humans are running, lavender room, hovering liquid, move over moon into the menstrual red lattice; its tongue flickers. At this point in the climax’s vision, Wang wants to flee. At this point he would forsake both love and heroism. The snake is drawn further into the pattern and becomes stuck in the blood, melody coiling and uncoiling hovering liquid move over moon moveovermoon moveovermoonmoveovermoonmoveovermoon struggling until it dies in awful exhaustion, tongue protruding limply from the slit of its mouth, as spent as Wang who shivers with sweat.