back to her, the Suite of Lost Memory, yes … and out into the mezzanine, bobbing above its flooded marble floors in the whirlpool’s current, where it all comes back to her and she counts the losses to herself: home, fortune, livelihood, love, faith, dignity, the soul, health, parent, freedom, life, memory … that’s twelve. Feebly she holds up her fingers and counts them again, and wonders where in their voyage they missed a room. Bobbing there in the water, puzzled she can hear the song clearly, the song that was coming from none of the three suites, and lies there listening—“Can you hear it?” she cries out to the boy — when the boy picks up the oars and begins to row, and rows them to the far end of the mezzanine and the small single pantry door, or perhaps it’s a
charisma or beauty, and so in order to survive I traded on my nakedness and
simple door to a janitor’s closet, that earlier they not so much ignored as dismissed. And as they grow closer to the door, the song becomes louder. As they reach the plain unadorned door it’s so distinct now it frightens her, and she’s about to cry out to the boy and tell him to stop when he takes the door knob in his hand and opens it. Out of it roars a music that’s more than pain, more than anguish, more than desolation, more than sorrow, more than grief. Out of it roars the greatest of all losses, the loss that can’t be endured. It’s not a loss that one truly survives let alone surmounts, it’s not a loss that one out-exists let alone outlives; it’s the loss that breaks your heart and it never mends. It never mends. It calls into question everything, so that it entails in some way all the other losses: home is lost; fortune and livelihood have no more meaning; love not only has no more meaning but becomes a kind of emotional treason; faith becomes a kind of spiritual treason; dignity becomes a joke; the soul is forever in the terminal grip of a psychic cancer; health is an affront; the loss of a parent is the perverse twin of this loss, like the reflection in the mirror of a funhouse; freedom is a curse; life is torture. Memory is worst of all. From the doorway of this tiny closet or pantry one would almost gladly flee, if possible, to the Suite of Lost Memory or, failing to reach that, perhaps even the Suite of Lost Life. This is the Unendurable Loss because it involves the one thing that one loves more than one’s own life; and no meaning that one strives to give her own life, however great or good, can ever truly compensate for what’s been lost, will ever be truly convincing in any scheme of things that in the heart of hearts one believes. This loss is the essence of the universe’s impossibility, it’s the one thing for which a benevolent God never has a persuasive answer, and which a malevolent God holds over the head of humanity. Although she wants the boy to row far away from this door as fast as he can, in the wave of music that roars out of the tiny closet
his needs, which bound him more than they bound me, particularly since many
Doc, weeping, takes hold of the sides of the gondola and summons all her strength and courage to rise from the bottom so she can look inside and face it at last. Inside the closet is nothing but a hole, the birth canal down through which rushes the lake back to wherever it came, and inside this hole Doc sees a vision of a young Asian boy maybe ten or twelve years old, unknown to her, growing up among his animé posters in the apartment Doc visited with Kristin that one afternoon thirteen years ago, suddenly swept under by the lake and reaching for a hand too far from him, and Doc can hear the mother crying for him frantic, disbelieving, but the boy descends; and out of the hole in his place Doc sees rise the Unendurable Loss like a bubble of black air
this is the loss of one’s child
~ ~ ~
At some point past Coldwater Canyon, gliding westward into the lengthening shadows of the hills, Kuul looks down at her lying in the bottom of the gondola and knows she’s gone.
He’s never seen death in a person before, only in owls, but the stillness is the same; it’s not like sleep. The small smile she had on her face for a moment isn’t there anymore. The cheeks of her face are wet — from the lake, he supposes; or some
times he was really too drunk to do anything anyway except lie in the throes of
astonishing dream maybe? He’s close enough to shore that now he uses the pole to push the boat into the mist off Beverly Glen, trying to think what he’ll do with her. Don’t people put their dead in the ground? Or do they burn them? Do they eat them? But he has nothing with which to dig out the ground except his hands, or to start a fire, which doesn’t seem a good idea anyway, and the owls leave their dead where they die, which seems more sensible than anything else. So beaching the gondola on the banks of the glen, he steps out into the mud and turns and pushes the silver boat with the old woman’s body back into the water and watches it disappear back into the mist, floating back out into the western part of the lake where it will eventually become caught in the current that leads to the sea.
Except now, of course, he has no boat anymore. He’ll have to get another. He looks around him at the trees and the rising hillside throttled with fog, and calls to the owls for direction. When he receives no answer, he calls again. He still receives no answer and, in his head, divides the number of shadows by the minutes of twilight, arriving for the first time in his life at the sum of zero. He begins to make his way up the hillside. For an hour as he makes his way up the hillside he calls again and again to the owls, and again and again receives no answer until he finally understands that, having crossed the experiential threshold of human death, he’s now on his own.
his terrible headaches muttering his wife’s name and dreaming of his unborn
daughter as I rubbed his head for him, the two of us almost never conversing
2028
~ ~ ~
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?