moment here in the birth canal of the lake, as I know so many things, happened
does nag at me a bit, I do wonder, but not so much. To wonder too much about it, after all, wouldn’t be starting fresh, would it?
The Chateau, there’s the main room and what I come to call the ceremony room when I begin working it, where I usually sleep except the nights I sleep on the divan out before the fire listening to the sound of the lake and the feeling of the night air coming through the terrace doors — or in the dungeon downstairs. Since it’s below water the dungeon is cool all the time, in the hot months it’s lovely and I sleep down there listening to the radio like the Mistress says she used to when she was ’round my age living in Tokyo — a pirate station broadcasts from a boat out in the lake. It probably makes sense to keep my private space and my working space separate but cool as it is in the dungeon I’m all the more inspired to put something into the discipline, without getting carried away naturally, then if I work up a bit of sweat I can stop and cool off, watch the beads of the lake form on the dungeon walls while the submissive writhes a bit in his shackles. Another good reason for the blindfold, you see — besides the sensory deprivation he can’t see when you’re taking a breather, and he gets all excited the way men do wondering what’s going on, when all you’re really doing is just sitting there enjoying the cool and listening to the currents of the lake against the outer walls. Any one of these days — I’ll tell the client now and then — any minute these walls aren’t going to hold and that lake it’s going to come crashing in. I tell him this and then leave him there by himself awhile chained and naked in the dark thinking about what I said and, you know, listening for the walls to start cracking. During these little recesses the Mistress and I, we have a cup of tea out on the terrace for ten or fifteen minutes and laugh at the sound of the clanking of chains coming up from below through the vents. What a bad girl you are, the Mistress says. Sometimes when I go back, without even being able to touch himself he’s gotten off just from
to be the very date when, three years old, I stood on the shore of that island
the terror, so don’t tell me the boys don’t like it in their own way. When I mention this to the Mistress in some amazement, she already knows all about it: the male-wangie is a thing of mystery, she just smiles.
But jeez life is lovely in these early days before the business with the Mistress’ lapsinthe. I don’t go ashore for three months after that first night, very contented in the Chateau, standing on the terrace sucking those slices of lemon like I love and dropping the yellow peels in the water below. At first, because I know nothing about the Mistress, to me she’s just an eccentric lonely lady; I haven’t heard the stories about the dominatrix-oracle business or the Saint Kristin stories, which I don’t understand anyway or what they actually have to do with the Mistress, but I see the people camped out on the hillside hour after hour and day after day and week after week watching the Chateau as though expecting a sign. Sure it’s not something the Mistress ever says much about. That is, early on it’s a bit obvious she was in the trade given the shackles on the walls downstairs and then I come on the tool box with the ankle cuffs and fur-lined handcuffs and riding crops and ball-gags and violet wands. I find this tiny collar I think is for a cat or something. Well it’s a collar all right but not for any cat. So I ask her right out and she tells me right out, though I see this look in her eye a moment like she’s trying to decide. She tells me right out and I just say no way. Not really. Really? And here I thought she would be shocked by my liking girls! I’m fascinated from the first. I go right past offense and never even skirt revulsion. Something in my true nature takes to it. Not to pain, I never want to inflict real pain and never have, beyond a good healthy whack in the balls, naturally. The Mistress says she never inflicted real pain either or meant to anyway; if she struck harder than she intended and left so much as a bruise or welt she felt bad, and there was never a drop of blood once — other
with my uncle and gazed on that strange woman across the river, now here in
than her own, when she did the oracle business — in all the years she did it. It’s about the power isn’t it, and not even so much power over someone else as the power over your own life, and that’s what I like too, that power, I take to it right from the first and you can make of that whatever you want. I can tell you for a fact that as far as I know no one’s ever gotten hurt, so you make of it what you want. You can spend your whole life, the Mistress says to me one time, making peace with your own true nature.
“What?”
“Something,” she says, “someone once said to me,” and it’s the strangest thing when she says it, I’m not even sure what it means but it unnerves me some because I know I’ve heard it before, that very thing, back before I came up out of the lake, like the thing about sleeping the sleep of the dead. But if domination was about the power of it for her, if it was the Mistress’ true nature just to take command of her life then how is it four months ago I’m calling up an ambulance-boat on the wireless to come pump out her stomach? Unless that’s her way of taking control of her life for good. So it’s a complicated thing, one’s true nature, isn’t it. Sometime long ago something happened to her, something beyond her control, something she’s not been able to escape from or explain to herself in any way that she’s ever actually believed for any length of time, something that won’t heal. Something no act or ritual of domination has been able to get her through no matter how hard she’s tried. Something. I’ve come to learn things about her life but not that. I think awhile after I first come to the Chateau perhaps it’s better for her, it’s like she regained something, but then — I’m happy to be a daughter to her if that’s what she needs. Why not. And one afternoon a few months after I’ve been here I say as much and I can tell right away it’s the wrong thing to say, I can tell from this look on her face. This shattered look. Perhaps
the birth canal of the lake I know this and maybe should be astounded by it if
it’s the casual way I say it, like it doesn’t mean anything either way. Now that I think about it, it’s after that she begins to slip away, except for times we embrace for whatever reason, and I can feel the way she holds onto me that she’s trying to come back, come back from wherever she’s slipping to.
There was a man once, that much I know. That I’ve figured out. And for a time I thought, well then that’s it isn’t it, a man. He may even have been a client. I’ve never asked, perhaps I’m not the inquisitive sort. Perhaps I have an overly developed male-sense of privacy — that is, for a female. But whoever he was she’s not seen him for a long time. Awhile, though, I thought that’s what it was.
Now I don’t think so.
As for the lake, well for sure there’s something between the Mistress and the lake. She stands on the terrace must be hours every day and she and the lake stare each other down. The Mistress, she thinks I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I do. I’ve figured it out. The Mistress thinks the lake is waiting for her to die before it sinks any further, and I’m not going to be the one to say she’s wrong. God’s little joke on the male gender, that’s what the Mistress says I am, and after a while it becomes clear that her god is full of such jokes, and so sometimes I wonder if the lake is God’s joke on her or she’s God’s joke on the lake. It’s almost six months later I hear the Saint Kristin legend, by then I’ve finally left the Chateau for an afternoon now and then, going to Port Justine for supplies and that’s when I hear, when I’m out among the locals, how the Mistress is Saint Kristin’s twin or Saint Kristin returned from the dead or something, I hear it but don’t make much sense of it and I don’t think anyone else makes sense of it or even really wants to. Four months ago when I call the ambulance-boat, well there’s a commotion then on the hillsides, people skittering back and forth like forest animals smelling