inside me that question was beginning to grow into its own answer, What was
satisfy them though I don’t believe that at all. My only concern now is that no harm comes to the Mistress. I’ve almost convinced myself it’s all been forgotten when yesterday afternoon I finally hear the approaching sound of the motor of the powerboat, and get the money and go out the back, down the stone steps into the grotto. The boat approaches and it’s my friend who drove me in the limo and chased me into the glen — on his forehead he has the scar of a pretty good gash where Kale leveled him with the oar.
He’s about as happy to see me as I am to see him. For a moment the boat just bobs on the water in the afternoon shadows of the grotto. “Cunt,” he finally says.
I let that one pass. “Look,” I say, “here’s the money back,” thrusting it in front of me with both hands.
“What do you mean?” he says.
“Here’s your money back. Tell your boss I’m sorry.”
Well what can I say. You’re not going to believe this, but — Turns out Armand doesn’t want his money back, and he’s not sent his boys out to beat me up or kill me or ransack the Chateau. Turns out he wants me to come back up to the house and do the whole thing over again. Without the other girls joining in this time but all the rest of it: the blindfold, the cuffs, the little red ball in his mouth — he especially liked the little red ball — the whole thing except we’ll do it in private or, if I feel safer, he’ll come out to the Chateau and send his bodyguards away and we’ll do it here, all night if I’m agreeable and he’ll pay me double what he paid the first time, up front. I have to wear the white lace corset and stockings, though. That’s the only stipulation.
Men! Fucking unbelievable, what? I just stand there with my mouth open and finally stammer I need a bit of time to think about it, because I don’t want to say yes and I’m afraid to say no. Back ’cross the lake goes the boat to Armand, from the grotto steps
missing from the world, and although I didn’t yet know it was growing inside
I watch it cross the lake, trying to think what I’m going to do. I don’t want to go back to that house, I tell the Mistress, but I don’t want these boys out at the Chateau either. There’s a lot I don’t tell the Mistress. I don’t tell her everything that happened that night in the hills because every time I see her now she just looks older, she seems to come out of her bedroom less and less, and to move more and more slowly — and I’m onto the business with the lapsinthe. I’ve figured out what that’s about, to the extent it makes sense at all, she thinks one night she’s going to finally take one too many that’s going to put her over the edge once and for all, whatever the edge is. But I figure the last thing she needs to hear about is what happened that night at Armand’s, just so she can worry about me. I tell her a bit about Kale, not really so much except, you know, There’s this boy — because there’s not that much I know to tell, is there? except he’s strange and sort of sweet and he’s in love with me. Yes she whispers they all fall a little in love with you, and I say no, this boy’s in love with me. And what do you think about that, she asks, and I say well it’s not something I can reciprocate, is it (perhaps she’s checking for some weakness in my lesbian resolve), but he’s sweet I say and very strange and I don’t want to hurt him (I haven’t really told her how he saved my little pixie behind) and the last time I saw him, I saw it in his eyes, this hurt, and I just wanted to run because I had never seen a boy hurt like that over me, not like that. I thought I was happy making the men cry a bit, what with a good healthy thrashing that would get a few tears flowing and the blood moving — but not like that, and it shocked me. And the Mistress she says well then you know you should send him away. It’s only right. You should send him away. And I say, I know.
Then we’re quiet in front of the fire. What is it, I say, and she smiles thinly, It’s death, she says, “spreading through the baseboards and ceiling,” and I can’t really say what that last bit
me and my son was growing with it, still I somehow knew, and everywhere that
means but I guess I know anyway, and I suppose I’m not that surprised. But how? I ask, and she answers, It’s not always easy to say, sometimes it’s something unbearably sad you never recover from … sometimes when a woman dies, it’s an act of sacrifice.
One thing I know, though, she says after a few more moments. One thing I know — and she says it with more force than I’ve heard her say anything — I know I don’t want to die on this lake.
I go to bed not long after that and, lying in bed and struggling to fall asleep, is it a Lapse I have, like everyone else on the lake used to have all the time when the lake was sinking? Or a dream? Or a dislodged memory. That night of the Freek Recherche lunatique, did I drink that shot after all and now I’m having a ’sinthe flashback? Whatever, there I am back on that night I first swam to the Chateau and the Mistress, back on that night I first came up out of the lake, back under the water not so much floating up to the surface but expelled, by something below me, born, out of some other life, the placenta of a previous consciousness trailing behind me as I make my way to the surface. Bits and pieces of whoever I was before, falling away from my naked body, and then bits and pieces of distant recollection falling away as I swim upward, flashes of a remembrance washed away in the cold of the lake, a horrific flash of rubble and fire and confusion and terror and chaos and of having been hurled through the opening of the lake in a full-force gale of ash and obliteration. Control and its loss assert themselves as the parameters of my new psyche, right there in the water. And somehow I know now, returning to this moment in my Lapse or dream or memory or whatever it is, that this passage is different for everyone isn’t it, that it’s a passage without time, a passage that might have taken me a moment or a hundred years, from somewhere that was a
I went then I went as the bearer of chaos, with everything coming apart around
moment or a hundred years ago, and that whatever was on the other side of the hole at the bottom of the lake is different for each of us, that whatever it is this birth-passage brought me from was not necessarily where anyone else comes from, or where anyone else would go to if she were to try and go back, if it were even possible to go back. This particular passage through the opening of the lake, from wherever I came, it was my own, my unique journey from a unique place and moment, and more than that, from my own personal moment of unique chaos, whatever that was, for unique reasons having to do uniquely with me, beyond all control. And that’s all I understand about it other than that somewhere in my rise to the surface I have a vision of the Mistress or someone much like her, swimming right past me except going the other way.
I also have a vision of Kale I don’t understand: chaos’ son. Or perhaps it is that I’m chaos’ daughter. And it’s not till finally the Lapse finishes that I sleep, my sound sleep from which no one and nothing can stir me, the sleep of the dead….
These are the memoirs of Brontë Blu, dungeon-mistress of the Chateau X, white avenging angel of the Hollywood Hills, God’s little joke on the male gender.
The afternoon before, Kale watches the powerboat with Armand’s men heading for the Chateau. Sitting in his own boat under the eaves of the shoreline trees, he takes his oar in hand ready again to go to Her rescue; he waits because he doesn’t want to interject himself too soon and agitate the situation unnecessarily. When he sees Armand’s boat leave, he begins rowing hurriedly toward the grotto and gets there in time to see Her disappearing back into the Chateau through the door at the top of the steps; for a while there on the lake he waits, watches, to assure himself everything is all right before he starts back out to the Hamblin. Halfway to the Hamblin he turns to look back at the Chateau and