This was the night I found out something interesting about myself. After all the days and weeks and months of wondering about my past, of wondering who I was before I came up out of the lake, this was when I found out perhaps I don’t really want to know. The night of the Freek Recherche the two women come back for me and sail me over to shore and drive me in a beat-up thirty-year-old Jag through the pass in the hills to Nichols Canyon and I think I’ll remember till the day I die the sight of all those women there by Nichols Pond that looked like it was on fire from
human experience like losing a child can be a universe of meaning unto
the melody-snakes imported and dumped in, flashing and singing. How did they get all those snakes? Where did all those women come from? I didn’t know there were that many women still in L.A., they had to have traveled from all the far reaches of the lagoon thousands of them, a vast memory-carnival of women dancing to the music of the snakes and drinking lapsinthe like there’s no yesterday. My job is to stand on this little platform and crack my whip at the girls dancing ’round me as well as the blindfolded man fastened naked to the spinning wheel behind me ’sinthed out of his mind voluntarily or not — I don’t know and don’t want to — erection subject to the whims of centrifuge and the object of much collective amusement. At some point in all this someone presses into my hand a shot of ’sinthe and instead of drinking it down right away I stand there looking at the shot glass in my hand thinking about it and considering whether to drink it — that is, do I want to remember, after all? Face to face with the prospect of actually knowing what came before, I balk. What if it’s something terrible? What if there’s a very good reason I’m not remembering? So I just set it there on the small table next to me trying to decide, and it’s very distracting. In a lot of ways it’s the best time I’ve ever had, the best time of my life, well the best I know of anyway, cracking the whip and dancing with the women like I’m Queen of the Zed Night like they used to call the Mistress, all of them worshipping me and cheering and wanting to touch me as I stand over them on the platform and getting paid for it on top of it, what can be better, except the whole time all I can think about is whether to drink that little shot of the sepia-colored liqueur.
The strange thing now is, I don’t remember whether I drank it or not. Don’t remember, I just look at the glass in my hand at one point as dawn’s coming up over the hills and the medicine is gone — did I drink it, spill it, try to seduce some woman with it? I swear I don’t remember. Perhaps that in itself means I must have
itself, how far I might have gone with him rather than, through a strange
drunk it — is that one of the side effects, not even remembering you’ve taken it? I suppose I should ask someone sometime, next time the Freek Recherche or another of the big-time lunatiques passes through.
It’s been a decent business and it’s allowed me to repay the Mistress and help support our lives in the Chateau. Sometimes the client he offers to pay in bottles of the “evilixir” but I don’t accept, I don’t want it in the Chateau with the Mistress or perhaps I don’t want it ’round for my own reasons, so usually he pays in cash and sometimes foodstuffs and material, transportation coupons which in this town are preferable, or something I can trade at Port Justine or the outpost over in Los Feliz. At first some clients they come expecting the oracular aspects of the sessions as the Mistress used to perform them but by now the word is out I’m not Mistress Lulu but Mistress Brontë, and instead of fortune-telling what they get from me are long gold hair and colossal boobs. Now when there’s an appointment the Mistress retreats behind her own closed doors. She knows most of the clients would find her presence more disruptive than welcoming, and those who might actually want her there, well, that would be a whole other kink we’re not into. The Mistress is already about to retire the night the young boatman who brought the flowers appears at the grotto door of the Chateau with not nearly enough cash for a session — though who knows where he got what he had: It’s not enough, I say looking at the currency in his cupped hands in the light of the doorway lantern. He ponders the money and closes one fist over the pitiful bills and coins too proud to say anything. “Oh come in then,” I say impatiently and pull him into the entryway, closing the outer door behind him, “wait here.”
It’s all completely irregular, I never just take a client on like that, there’s a process, an interview like I said before, nothing spur-of-the-moment. I leave him in the entryway. I go through the
chance-meeting with a Japanese boy who robbed graves at the time-capsule
transitional chamber that leads to the room where I sleep, and from there into the outer room where the fire roars. The Mistress, she’s standing on the terrace like she often does, as though always looking for someone — Lu, I say. She turns and I say, “I’ve got one out in the entryway.”
“Tonight?”
“I know. I’ll send him off. He doesn’t have enough to pay anyway.”
She nods and I’m about to leave when she says, “It’s all right, I’m going to bed,” and she comes in from the terrace moving very slowly, she seems suddenly old, “I mean if you want to send him away …” shrugging “… but not on my account.”
“Come here,” I take her arm helping her. “Are you all right?” helping her into the back bedroom. I haven’t seen her look so old. I think she’s in her forties and on this night she seems twenty years older. “Lu?”
“I’m all right.” She lies on the bed.
I sit on the bed beside her and we lock eyes. “None of the ’sinthe tonight,” I say. She shrugs again, a small smile, and while I sit there on the bed close to a quarter hour holding her hand, waiting for her to go to sleep, my eyes search the room for the little sepia-colored bottles. When I think she’s finally fallen asleep and I let go of her hand, she murmurs something. “What?” I lean my ear to her mouth, and when I still can’t make it out, I ask again. “What kind of life?” she whispers.
“Shhh.”
“For a mother to give a daughter,” she says.
“Go to sleep.”
“What if I was your mother?” she whispers.
“You are.”
She smiles for a moment and then shuts her eyes again,
cemetery now under water on the west side of town, winding up in Tokyo that
“Your client….”
“Gone by now,” I kiss her forehead — but in fact he’s still there when I turn off the light by her bed and go back into the outer room and through the ceremony room and the transitional chamber to the entryway. “You’re still here,” I say and he just looks at me and I say, “Do you talk?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what I do?”
“I think.”
“All right. Do you know what I don’t do?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well we’re not going to have sex. Do you understand that?”
He seems to consider this a moment and nods.
“I’m not a prostitute, do you understand?”
He nods. He sticks out the fistful of bills.
“Next time — if there is a next time — you have to bring more than that, and you can’t pay in flowers either.” I take the cash and take him by the empty hand. “What’s your name?”