He feels something so unknown to him that he’s incapable of identifying it as emotional panic. He gazes around for the right disk but he knows better, he knows there is no other disk, that this is the disk he played last night and left in the player. He also knows that the song he’s hearing now is the one he returned to the Vault last night when his passenger with the hand was inside the Chateau, and that yesterday’s song has somehow replaced last night’s, and that this is difficult to understand even for a boy who has an owl’s sight for invisible music. In the tower of the Chateau X to the north, wearing her silk robe, she stops brewing her tea and cocks her head; she’s been up all night crying and drinking, sitting at her divan before the dying fire, staring at the red monkey perched above the hearth, and now, almost beyond the capacity for confusion, she hears it. She goes to the window and stares out over the lake to the south. On a clear blue day when there’s no wind off the hills to separate the music from her, she can hear it. She thinks to go back down to the Vault and doublecheck whether the song she found returned to the archive last night is still there. But she doesn’t.
In a water-craft a couple of miles to the east, speeding toward Hamblin Island, Tapshaw says to Wang, “Do you hear that?”
Over the roar of the boat, the song is almost indistinguishable. It may be, as Wang tries to reason, amid the vertigo that buffets him now on the watery sky of the lake
looking for a pleasure-slave although he wouldn’t put it in that fashion, and as
spanning out all around him, that this is his mind playing another trick on him; but sometime in the last twelve hours he’s come to realize that because something is a trick of the mind doesn’t mean it’s not real. That the real of the remembered is no less profound than the real of the perceived. This morning, when Tapshaw asked him what Wang found out in the mysterious hours that have lately come to accompany full moons and mysterious songs, thinking a moment Wang answered, “We’re surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” Now he looks at the Hamblin in the distance and his ears and mind try to filter out the sound of the boat for the sound of the song, but then he doesn’t hear it anymore and isn’t altogether certain he did in the first place. As well, however, he isn’t altogether certain he didn’t.
Kuul sees the approaching boat far away. Quickly he gathers together the old woman in order to put her in the rowboat, but intuitively rethinks this and decides instead on the gondola. Maybe he just can’t imagine leaving the gondola behind. Maybe the old woman can’t imagine it either. As he carefully helps her down into the gondola from the top of the hotel fire escape, he sees she’s still smiling as when she woke, having known as she did sometime in the night that they would be taking this journey. Actually she’s already taking it. Actually, in her mind Doc is on it now, at this moment, and has been on it for some time; making her a bed in the bottom of the gondola and laying her there as comfortably as he can, with the pole Kuul pushes them off from the island and around its corner, heading northeast toward the lake’s source. Gleaming glass-white in the sunlight, the boat might almost be seen from a castle tower or, high above, a daylocked owl frantically in search of the night that’s set sail without him.
In her mind, Doc has been on this journey a long time. The exact hour of its beginning is nameless but certainly she’s been riding this silver gondola since that afternoon years before when
I was at the end of my rope I went to live with him in his house in the
Kristin sailed her out to a hotel not far from the Hamblin to read its walls and diagnose its mysteries. In the world outside Doc’s mind it’s been thirteen years but on this particular journey that sort of measure of time is meaningless and besides, the lake is drowning in itself, going back down its drain, and memory is moving backwards. Consumptive houses, malaria houses, alzheimer houses, heart-attack houses, houses with tumors growing out the attic or the bedroom windows or the family rooms … Doc knew them all once, healed them all or consoled them when they couldn’t be healed, back when she was in the business of being strong, back when she was in the business of being indomitable. In a city congenitally incapable of a tragic sense, she was the ultimate citizen: she had come to Los Angeles expressly to leave all sense of tragedy behind. In her new scheme of things she had made sure there was no such thing as tragedy anymore, there were only life’s processes and passages, in which loss was only another fact.
~ ~ ~
She had never before diagnosed a house or room or building dying of sorrow. Dying not of physical dissolution or even a fatigue of body and spirit as triggered by sorrow, but of sorrow itself. She had made herself believe sorrow beyond its logical self-exhaustion was an illusion, a collapse of fortitude on the part of the afflicted, a failure to surmount. This changed the afternoon Kristin sailed her out to the flooded hotel, where the two of them wandered through the abandoned apartment with its books and animé posters and the same famous photo on the wall that Kristin
Hollywood Hills according to the terms of the agreement always nude which I
had on hers.
There in the walls Doc heard the song of the sorrow that can’t be surmounted or endured, the sorrow that life’s processes can’t process, that its passages can’t pass away. She’s been in the gondola ever since. She lies in the bottom staring at the black sea of the sky rolling by overhead, white waves of clouds; fleeing — for the second time in her life ’ sorrow’s song, she escaped the hotel in the silver gondola but then, in the years after, couldn’t escape the gondola itself. Unable to escape the gondola itself, sometime in the night that began thirteen years ago or a thousand, she set sail back to the sorrow because she needs to face it again before she herself passes away, although why and what she’ll do when she finds it she has no idea. It isn’t a matter of conquering anything. She now knows this sorrow is beyond conquest. She’s reconciled herself to her tragic sense she thought she left behind when she came to Los Angeles; it isn’t a matter of understanding anything; the whole point of this sorrow is how its song is beyond human understanding. The whole point is how pretending to understand is conceit, presumption, hubris that calls itself insight.
So there’s no human or rational reason for Doc to face this sorrow again, but she has to or feel her existence will have been one of cowardice, stupidity, cruelty that calls itself compassion. As she lies in the bottom of the gondola in the night of her mind, with the cool night breeze blowing in her face, the lake is much bigger, a vast ocean aswirl, because even here in her mind the lake is going down its drain. For a long time the young man who takes care of her has been rowing them toward the center of a black whirlpool, having left his owls far behind on land. He has amber green eyes and once light hair that’s darkened with adolescence; he doesn’t really look much like his mother. As they near the whirlpool they feel the churning of the black water broken by
didn’t care about even if the world’s never been as casual about my nakedness
white foam. Bubbles rise at the center of the whirlpool — and finally the gondola’s passengers feel themselves caught in the current of the vortex and begin the long journey down to the whirlpool’s center.
Pulling in the oars, gripping the sides of the boat, the boy guides them down the whirlstream as the sunken city of Los Angeles flows by behind the dark-glass curtains of the lake that rise around them — sunken palm trees and boulevards until, in the distance, at the center of the whirlpool she sees the Hotel of the Thirteen Losses. It’s nothing like the hotels she’s seen before in L.A., nothing like the one she visited with Lulu, it’s much bigger, extending as far as she can see with glistening ebony walls, huge deserted atriums, grand forsaken lobbies; it looms larger as the gondola speeds through the big open doors