Our Ecstatic Days (19 page)

And then I wondered if he was still out there, and has been all along. On
this
lake, in
these
hills, a man now, wondering why I never came to find him….

I would chain myself to my bed and let the lake take me some night as it rises, if it were rising. But the lake hasn’t risen for a long time. For ten years it slowly but surely sank and then suddenly stopped a year ago last spring, in remission, putting off death just a while longer. Waiting for something to happen, before it dies.

I know what it’s waiting for.

People have stopped trying to understand the lake. They accept that the lake has its own logic, stranger and bigger than the rationale of tides, geology. Before even the geologists knew, those who live with the lake knew the sinking had stopped, because the Lapses stopped … those who live with the lake felt stop, for the

every wall and blotted out every window and flowed over onto the floor and

duration of its remission, the draining of time. Felt stop, in its pause before death, the way that every day after tomorrow was answered by another day before yesterday. Felt stop the pendulum of memory swinging ever wider as the lake drained … they knew because time stopped going backwards, because everything that’s been
about
the lake and
of
the lake finally stopped vanishing overnight into the literal fog of memory … people, events,
philosophies, meanings … one night about six or seven years ago even the color blue vanished, no one has seen it since. Now the lake is green or gray or black … now somewhere out there over the water beyond the hedge of fog lurks zero-year, or zed-year. My own Lapses ended last year in a cluster … I woke one morning to

find myself lying not

in my bed in the Chateau but the Santa Monica hospital just a few weeks after returning from Tokyo, when I was seventeen. I was seventeen again, it was eleven-thirty at night again, the thirty-first of December again of that year, under the white explosion of delivery room lights overhead, the doctor and nurse having the same argument I remember them having over my labor that night a little less than twenty-eight years ago, about millennial arithmetic, between the calculations of my dilations and the dwindling minutes of my contractions. I looked into the white lights above me, pain shot through me … I was startled to be back at this moment again but not amazed of course, since this kind of thing had been happening for a while now … what are you doing talking about, the nurse was saying to the doctor in exasperation, “if it’s tonight, or tomorrow, then what was all that hoopla a year ago about?”

“It wasn’t about anything,” the doctor was saying, “that’s what I’m explaining to you. It was about a lot of people getting it wrong, is what it was about.”

“All those people celebrating all over the world?” said the

ceiling and completely reordered history to the chronology and logic of

nurse. “All those fireworks over the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, or whatever….”

Excuse me, I muttered.

“… everyone got it wrong but you, that’s what you’re saying?”

“Zero isn’t the number before one,” the doctor lectured smugly, “zero isn’t a number at all. In the case of the calendar, zero is ten, and ten comes after nine.”

“Thank you, I think I know ten comes after nine.”

“This is a ten-year,” the doctor checked his watch, then looked at a clock on the wall, “in another hour and a half it will be a one-year, and that’s the
true
beginning of it.”

What’s happening? I can remember saying all those years ago, when I was first here, in this moment, managing to say it between the pain. But this time
excuse me

and the doctor stared at me

but it’s all metaphor anyway

as if I was a huge talking pea-pod about to split

it’s all random anyway
I went on
a conceit, based on the birth of a religious philosopher who wasn’t even born in the Year One but probably the Year Minus-Four or sometime around then, so it’s silly to get hung up on the math of the thing when everyone else has accepted the symbolism of it

and in a dream the doctor might have accepted such an exchange from a young girl in labor, but since this wasn’t a dream, since the currents of memory and time unleashed over the years by the sinking of the lake in fact had carried me back to this actual moment, the doctor stared at me in astonishment. I think the nurse was too confused to feel vindicated. In the meantime I realized I was about to deliver him again, my boy … would I stop it,

apocalypse, with its dates not sequential like an ordinary calendar but

if I could? If I could, would I choose never to have had him at all, if it would undo the next twenty-eight years? Of course not. Not even a little, not for a minute. I looked at the doctor.
Please deliver them both this time.

“What?”

There are two … there’s a girl. Deliver them both this time.

He looked at the nurse, the nurse looked at him. The next contraction came and when it subsided I wanted to say, Cut me open this time, to get both of them … but truthfully I don’t know whether I managed it. When the pain of the contraction passed I was suddenly so exhausted, I felt all the forty-some years of my present, even returned as I was by the Lapse to my seventeen-year-old past … and I think I must have dozed a little because I opened my eyes just in time to hear the voices of the doctor and nurse fade, to hear fading in the hall of the hospital on the way to the delivery room the happy-new-years and the doctor’s lone, stubborn Happy New Millennium—you’re a year late, someone says; I’m not, he says, zero isn’t the number before one, zero is …—to see the walls of the hallway fade back to the walls of the Chateau.
Cut them out
I tried to whisper before the lake carried me back to the present.

The last of the Lapses was just a few days after that … carried me back to a week and half before he was born … I was walking, pregnant to burst, along Santa Monica Boulevard, past little Italian eateries, xerox stores, travel agencies, mailbox rentals, gay fetish shops, video outlets, cappuccino stands, cars driving by, all of it as vivid as can be, in every last detail, I was singing to him in my head our little song that I had just heard for the first time a week or so before, riding a bus on Pacific Coast Highway
if there’s
a higher light remember this one Kirk? almost forgetting it’s all gone now, all long submerged. Then I was walking up Crescent

freefloating, far removed dates overlapping in some cases, consecutive dates

Heights toward Sunset Boulevard, looking at the old Hollywood apartments with their turrets, trees, realizing soon they would all be under water. It was as if I was wandering aimlessly, although of course I know it wasn’t aimless. If it were aimless the lake and this Lapse wouldn’t have brought me back to it, since it’s the personally momentous remembrances the Lapses resurrect, it’s the major harbors dotting the shore of life’s recollection where
memory docks as it’s carried back in the lake’s vortex…. I crossed Sunset and kept walking up Crescent Heights, an awful long way for a pregnant girl due to give birth any minute … and then at some point I stopped, there where Crescent Heights became Laurel Canyon Boulevard … stopped at someone’s lawn and looked down at my feet and there, at the tip of my toes, it was. Nothing more than a small black puddle, not more than a few inches across. There it was, long before it seemed to just suddenly appear that September morning nine months later: chaos: there it was and I stared at it, could almost see it grow as I watched, until it was almost a foot across, and I tried to bend over to look, to peer into it and see into its source but I was so huge I couldn’t. I couldn’t bend over, all I could do was just stand there and watch it get a little bigger with every passing second, almost imperceptibly. I was standing in the very birth of the lake as it spread around my feet. And I turned and started walking away as fast as I could, looking over my shoulder as if it would follow me, which in a way it did and

then I blinked and

the Lapse was over, and I was back on my Chateau terrace staring out at black war almost as far as I could see. In the distance was the war ship that sailed into L.A. Bay ten years ago and dropped anchor and hasn’t moved since or shown a single sign of life … there on the terrace I lay my hands on my belly to feel its vacancy. The next night I scored from one of my last clients some

separated by the length of the room in other cases, with apparently senseless

of the lapsinthe that’s been going around and took the first dose of the sepia-colored evilixir, adding another every night after that….

Sometimes, hovering in the ether between existence and non, I talk to him. Don’t know whether it’s the lapsinthe talking … but I know it’s him right away although now he would be in his late-twenties … there he is sitting beside me saying
Mama don’t die
and maybe that’s what pulls me back. Sometimes we
talk about all the things I would have told him if I had had the chance, sometimes we have no idea what to talk about at all but it doesn’t matter, we might talk of death or God … does anyone ever care so much about the notion of God, whatever she actually thinks about it, as when she has a child? Isn’t it when you have a child that you really need to understand the whole business of God, the whole business of death and the soul? People get to the end of their lives and say they’re not afraid of death … but even in the course of my many tentative suicides I’m afraid to death. To not be at least a little afraid of death you have to have no imagination whatsoever. It isn’t a matter of pain, pain doesn’t frighten me, of course it’s the prospect of nothingness, into which will pass not only one’s own life but everyone else’s as I’ve known it. What I feel for my boy will pass into nothingness, and it’s intolerable: My love for you will not die with me, I promise or plead, or fume at him in our conversations … but the question in his eyes remains: and I see it. I read it. Will she abandon me again? it says.

I know him right away, all these years later, in these moments when we talk near death’s beach. All these years haven’t changed the immediately identifiable beauty of him. All these years haven’t altered the memory of how beautiful he was … but they’ve left me to wonder a terrible thing, which is whether I would have loved him quite so much if he hadn’t been so beautiful. I calculate absurd impossible hypotheses, transferring his soul to the body and face of some little boy not so beautiful, then try to

timelines running from top to bottom leading him to the inescapable

measure the love, testing my heart. Did my own mother not love me because I wasn’t beautiful? of course I hope I see his beauty through the prism of love rather than love him through the prism of beauty, but how can I be certain? Kirk? I say to him from where I lie in this ether on the edge of life
Kirk
I reach to him, and there flashes some small confusion across his face as if he almost knows
his own name but not quite; but not quite knowing, he reaches back anyway.
Night-time
he answers … our fingers brush….

Morning now, after writing all night … air raid siren. Has to be a test, right? they ought to announce when they’re going to have a test … all the gulls over the water scatter and swirl at the sound. Walk out onto my terrace, listen to the siren, watch the birds…. OK now: very slowly, very casually, as inconspicuously as possible, turn to look and see if they’re there…. yes. Fuck. Why don’t they go away? Why don’t they leave me alone? The hillsides behind the Chateau encamped with all the people … are there fewer? Maybe there are fewer. Maybe they’re starting to go away, maybe they’re starting to give up on their lost Saint Kristin of the Lake, I thought the cult went the way of the first Lapse years ago … but the legend persists. “I’m not her!” I even called to some of them months ago when they sailed out here on a small flotilla, prostrated before the Chateau in their boats. Kristin wasn’t a saint, I wanted to tell them, she was only a mom, the other me I sent back to undo the thing she and I did years ago, when we abandoned our son on the lake….

… remember in my delirium thinking when they pumped me out, Did they pump out my little girl? forgetting for a minute. Forgetting first how Kristin sailed away with my daughter in her belly, when she took the boat back all those years ago, forgetting then how over the years the blood began to slow between my legs its patterns fading, dark red webs of each month becoming more

conclusion that sometime in the century, among its madmen of all kinds,

unwoven until only a small red spider was left. Forgetting then how, in the month I finally didn’t menstruate at all, she appeared out of the lake … I watched her … was sitting on the terrace staring out over the water under the massive full moon and there in the far distance above the lake’s source, above that very place I once stepped pregnant in a strange black puddle, was a ripple, someone surfacing from nowhere, looking around and swimming
toward me in the moonlight. I just sat and watched her swim toward me.

As she got closer I stood up from where I had been sitting and peered over the terrace down into the water … I could hear her now in the dark below me gasping for breath, knew she was in danger of drowning from exhaustion. In the blaze of the moon I could barely see her frantically grasping for a place to hold onto the Chateau wall … ever since the color blue vanished into one of the Lapses, the nights are so much darker, even when the moon shines. “Swim around!” I called, trying to direct her to the port on the other side, and then everything went quiet, and I thought she had gone under. “Hello?” There was no answer. “Hello!” I ran from the terrace to the other side of the old hotel, out through the transitional chamber to the entryway, out onto the stone steps near the Vault by the water … I couldn’t see anyone. “Hello?” I stood there five minutes calling, the grotto empty … and then a face came floating up to the steps like a jellyfish, barely above the surface, and I ran down the steps and fished her out. For a while she just lay there naked on the steps long gold hair splayed around her head. I kept trying to help her up but for a while she didn’t want to get up, she just wanted to lie there, so I went back into the chamber and got a blanket and came back and lay it over her, tucking it beneath her until I could coax her in.