But? she says.
San Francisco with a pair of psychotic lesbian lovers I learned in the nick of
But what do the broadcasts mean? he says.
What? she asks, confused.
Why do you do it? Why the broadcasts? What are they for?
Why do I do it? she says. I thought it was you. Me?
Yes.
You thought it was me?
Yes.
He shakes his head. It’s not you?
No.
Then …? as Wang wakes suddenly in his quarters, lying on his cot in the dark. Opens his eyes, knowing that in just seconds there will be a pounding on the door.
He fumbles for the lamp on the nearby desk. Sitting on the edge of the cot he holds his face in his hands and waits; barely before the first knock has finished he says, “Come in,” and there’s a hesitant moment before the soldier enters.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Parsons.”
The soldier is disconcerted. “Uh, yes, sir,” he finally says, “that’s correct, sir.”
“What?”
“That’s my name, sir.”
“I know it’s your name.”
“Sir?”
“You told me earlier this evening.”
“Uh, with your permission, sir.”
“Yes?”
“That couldn’t have been me. Sir.”
“Parsons …” Wang says.
time meant to murder me in my sleep, finally arriving in Los Angeles where
“I mean, we’ve never spoken, sir.”
“I want you to find something to get this off.” Wang holds up his hand.
The young soldier is flummoxed, first by the glass in Wang’s hand and then the Mistress’ fur-lined cuff that still dangles from his wrist. “Sir. We’ll get someone to file it off.”
“I don’t want to file it off. Find a master key of some sort.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wang stares straight ahead of him in the dark. “Who put that up?” he says after a moment, quietly.
“Sir?”
On the wall in front of him, where there was a blank space when he went to sleep after returning from the Chateau X, looms the inevitable image. “I said,” Wang can barely spit it out between his teeth, “who put that up. Who came into my own quarters while I was sleeping and put that back up.”
“Sir?”
“Did you put that up?” He’s barely raising his voice.
“Me, sir?”
Wang slowly rises from the cot. “Parsons.” He’s so silently furious he can’t quite think what to say. “Take it down,” he finally tells the soldier.
“The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”
“If I see it up there again, I’ll have you arrested for insubordination,” although he doesn’t really have the authority to do that.
“Sir?” Parsons says, and a couple of miles away, out in the western darkness of the lake on the hotel-island called Hamblin, Kuul listens to a song and begins to cry. Having pulled a blanket up around the sleeping old woman and eaten some of the bread and cheese and fruit from the Chateau X, having made his way in the light of the full moon around to the storage space that holds all the
after a week of living and sleeping on the streets from Hollywood to Century
hotel’s long dead phone and power lines, as well as an old sound system the Order of the Red left behind with everything else, he’s pulled a disk from his shirt, flipped off the switch to the outside speakers, and put the disk in the carrier tray.
When he presses the play button, he begins to cry and doesn’t know why. But since he was a small child, music has been the sound of freedom and desertion, and although he’s barely conscious of remembering this particular song, inside him it opens up a door—if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me—that closes again before he can go through. As when he chose this song from the Chateau’s archives in the first place, for reasons as mysterious to him as most choices, fingers just running along the walls of the Vault until they stopped, he hears music in silence like an owl sees in the dark; it’s an instinct that’s become a little more than human by now; too human for him to understand is the instinct that makes him cry now when he hears this song: ‘Cause I know this sea wants to carry me / in a sweet sweet sound she sings / for my release. He can almost hear her singing it somewhere that feels close but also like another life, a life that feels at once gone forever and at the same time just beyond the bend of the lake or maybe on the next lake over, wherever such a lake might be. Although he can barely remember her, the sound of this song makes him wrack his brain to try and figure out, as he’s tried before, what he did when he was three that was so terrible it would make her leave him.
He sits slumped against the wall until it finishes. He doesn’t think he can listen to it again. He knows there will be no more broadcasts, which were an accident in the first place when he discovered the sound system on the island a year before and was half way through playing something when he realized the speakers outside were on too, blaring so loudly everyone within two or three miles could hear. After that the music just became
City to Baghdadville on the beach I responded to a personals ad from a
part of a full-moon ritual that has no particular meaning at all, at least none he knows of. He rises from the floor where he’s been sitting and walks out onto the Hamblin rooftop and takes solace in the moon that floats at the end of a chain of utterly random events like a balloon at the end of a string; like letting go of a balloon, he would like to watch the moon float away for nothing but the sake of watching it float away. He hears the bombs and fly-overs in the distance and wakes the next morning with the song he doesn’t want to listen to anymore still in his head, and the sky a brilliant blue, more and more rare in the Age of the Lake. Sitting up in her gondola as though it’s a chariot is the old woman. She actually has a small smile on her lips as though she’s expecting something to happen. Off to the edge of the Hamblin, Kuul pulls up from out of the cold lake a bottle of milk tied to some twine, and as he’s pulling up the bottle he’s struck by the wet trail of the water down the hotel walclass="underline" sometime in the night, the lake fell.
He’s thinking about this and still hearing the song in his head while he brings the milk over to the woman and pours her a cup. She’s still smiling and he smiles back at her but the song is still in his head and soon he can’t resist anymore, and he goes back into the little makeshift broadcasting booth and stares at the disk player awhile before submitting to the impulse. He doublechecks to make sure the outside speakers are off
then, reconsidering — he lets go of the chain, up behind the blue sky the moon begins to rise — flicks the speakers back on, and turns up the volume.
Hesitating again, he presses the play button.
It doesn’t start anything like he remembers from last night. Does it start like this? he wonders when the vocal begins
“Humans are running, lavender room …”
No….
“Hovering liquid, move over moon …” No, that’s not
middle-age man who had been abandoned by his pregnant Asian wife and was
right. “For my spacemonkey….” He stops the disk then presses the play button again, as if that will correct the error, then stops it again. He ejects the disk. He picks it up and looks at it, turns it over as if that will reveal an answer, turns it over and over and over and over. He puts it back in the player and plays it again, then stops and ejects it again.