“What?”
“Another song. Other than this one—” indicating the parchment with the blood. “It sounded like you were singing.”
“You’re surrounded by signs,” she answers. “Ignore none of them.”
He nods and enters the dark dressing room. He pulls on his clothes and coat, and exits the other door of the transitional chamber into the entryway, and then through the outer door into the bracing cool air that blows off the lake into the open Chateau grotto. Slowly he moves down the stone steps to find the boy with the boat waiting for him.
of the dock in a blue dress holding my uncle’s hand, patiently watching the
For a while, on the way back, he’s oblivious to everything: the night, the searchlights, the Chateau behind him, the bombs in the distance, the sound of the airlift, the boy in the boat — oblivious to everything including, he finally notices, how the glass hand that has no feeling still wears the fur-lined handcuffs she put on him, the other cuff dangling empty. Wang begins to think about what he’s going to tell Tapshaw and the others; he wonders if she’s becoming less certain of her interpretations or if the very notion of meaning approaches critical mass, beyond which is the void. He can’t tell whether this evening undermines or reinforces a theory he’s had for a while now. He’s not exactly sure when he first formed this theory, although he remembers it was during one of their sessions near the end, when the white moment always seems to open up like an orifice.
If this theory is correct, that in fact she’s the one who’s transmitting the broadcasts, then it raises many questions, and so he’s always been careful not to reveal too much. He’s never actually explained to her who he is, although he knows she understands he’s a man of “mystique” as he put it, of power and position, as are most of her clients who from time to time need to shed power and position and control. He’s never told her of his past and she’s never pried, which he’s always taken to be part of her professionalism, a demonstration of her discretion and respect for his privacy; if anything, sometimes her lack of inquisitiveness gives him the feeling in fact there’s nothing about him she doesn’t already somehow know. He might even believe she knows him better than he knows himself, if one can live his life at odds with his own true nature. For a so-called rationalist he certainly has a lot of dreams and visions, not to mention the mystic menstrual prophecies of L.A.’s most famous bondage queen — so if she’s the one broadcasting the messages, then for whom or what is she a medium? Between Wang and whom does she serve as translator
island ferry cross the river to a woman on the far other side who then didn’t
and interpreter? And then suddenly out in that darkest part of the water, somewhere close to its source, he remembers how pale she went when he told her that Zed is dying, and gets it in his head that, as he is her slave for the few hours they spend together, she is the lake’s.
For as long as they both have been here, Wang and the lake have lived in mutual denial, each barely acknowledging the other. Once he might have supposed the lake could be a source of comfort to him, for the way it raised the latitude and shortened the longitude of everything: a tower becomes much smaller when half of it is underwater. The lake leveled everything for a man who never looks up, and in fact coincided neatly with his new fear since, not so long before he came to Los Angeles, back on the east coast he had been not a man afraid to look up but, to the contrary, a man who lived in the sky, riding floating boxes. Ironically, once it was the sky that offered him solace from ground-level — to be precise the ground level of city squares; ironically, once it was the ground he fled, until the day the sky betrayed him and came crashing down. When that happened he became a man caught in limbo between the sky and the ground, someone who lives looking only straight ahead in a state of hovering, for which a lake should have been perfect. But as both the mirror of the sky above and the window of the ground below, the lake became the worst of alclass="underline" liquid ground, liquid sky: lake zero.
The lake is coming for me, he used to write in his letters to Kristin from the city’s southern shore. The truth is he’s never stopped thinking that. The truth is he thinks it even now, if he allows himself to. The lake is coming for me, to expose me for the fraud I am. There’s a certain contradiction in his thinking about both the chaos he rejects and the higher order he believes is mathematically untenable: Is the lake God, he sometimes asks himself, is the lake chaos? He’s never believed in God or chaos,
board the boat but rather shook her head, turned and vanished, something a
he thinks chaos is as religious a concept as God and that God is about as scientific as chaos — but sometimes he wonders. Sometimes he thinks that when he was a mathematics student his professors did their work better than he wants to believe, successfully having imprinted on his subconscious the conviction that everything is empirical after all. He always liked to think he departed from such teachings when, as a young rebel, he embraced the heresies of freedom and desire and redemption in their most truly heretical form, not as calculations of sociology or biology or some quantifiable philosophical value system but as entities unto themselves; but he’s pushed from his mind, more times into the thousands than he can count, like he’s pushed away every thought of the lake, every question of whether it’s really possible to believe in freedom, desire or redemption if you don’t believe in chaos or God — if not both, then one or the other. The lake is coming for me. He ignores it even as he’s in the middle of it, even as his boat cuts through its water, the way one tries to ignore an old lover who’s standing very conspicuously on the other side of a room just entered.
When his boat reaches the guerrilla encampment on the southern edge of the lake, Wang is surprised to note on the pylon of the dock, in the light of the full moon, the watermark of the lake from just a few hours ago when he disembarked for the Chateau. Clearly the lake has already gone down several inches. No sooner has Wang cleared the boat than the boy pushes off again, rowing back out with determination. Above him the moon erupts, a lava of light pouring from the white mouth of the cosmos’ black volcano; no longer darting among the dark zones, the boy heads northwest in a straight line making remarkable time, until after a while he can see his hotel-island in the distance. He slows down as he nears the island, on his guard for marauders and pirates and stray cultists who still circle grounds they can’t decide are holy or
three-year-old could only find as baffling as it was devastating, after which I
haunted. The boy who now calls himself Kuul, a name half the language of childhood-memory and half the language of owl, has never believed the Hamblin either holy or haunted; he returned here a year ago only by some instinct he doesn’t understand. Having seen the city and lake from any number of high vantage points over the course of his young life, he finds the perspective from the top of the Hamblin only a variation on that view. If it ever reminds him of when his mother brought him up here to the rooftop as a toddler, it’s only for a moment more brief than his mind can grasp or wants to.
When he reaches the square brick island, he sidles the boat up to the top of what used to be the hotel’s fire escape. He ties the boat and takes from it the basket of bread and fruit and cheese and wine left for him at the Chateau X. Luna completely lights up the Hamblin and he makes his way easily around the door that used to lead to the stairway inside the hotel, now completely submerged except for the top. Tucked away in an alcove formed by the rooftop door and an adjacent storage space that used to house all the hotel phone lines is an old silver gondola that stands upright like a small altar; propped up inside, resting against an assembled mass of old blankets, pillows and bits of old mattress, is a woman now somewhere in her early sixties but who seems much older. Once her eyes were older than her face but her face has caught up. Once her smile was younger but it’s raced to the edge of death before the rest of her. The hair that Kuul’s mother once saw as lost between the auburn of yesterday and the silver of tomorrow has long since found its way to a white amnesiascape.