Our Ecstatic Days (36 page)

whether I’ll have the courage to open my eyes if I get there, because I won’t be

Nothing about the apartment was
particularly remarkable. She supposed it wasn’t really necessary for her to have come rather than just arranging for it all to be shipped back, but perhaps she just needed to actually see it; that was possible. Perhaps she just needed to see it for precisely all the ways she told herself she didn’t. Don’t suppose we would have needed to ship this, she said to herself, pulling a vodka bottle from the trash and wondering when he switched from tequila. Piled on the shelf were books and magazines and movie videos, tacked to the walls were notes and newspaper clippings. There was a photo of her from when she was fifteen, and one of her mother; that one was the most unbearable.

able to bear the possibility that the boat is empty again, like the last time I went

The photos leaned against the wall cocked at a slant, as though he had trouble deciding whether to turn them face up or down.

Over by the computer and printer was the unkempt stack of a manuscript curling at the corners. On the top page was the ringed mark of where he had set a glass; for a while she circled the
manuscript as though pretending she didn’t know it was there. But after she had surveyed everything else, it was all that was left

these are the memoirs of Banning Jainlight, failed novelist, dabbler in chaos and connoisseur of self-pity, dilettante in husbandry and misbegotten father….

and then for several hours, in the morning shadows of his apartment she sat reading. For most of it she didn’t cry at all. She felt she didn’t have the luxury of crying, at least until

and in the darkest moments, I’ve made my peace with the failure of my life by believing that, sometime in a future I’ll never see, I made a deal with God. This wasn’t a vision, it wasn’t a dream. It was an unshakeable notion that whatever good things might have ever been in my future, I made a deal with God trading all of them for the well-being of my little girl, because I knew that, however much I’ve ever wanted all those things, I would make that trade without hesitation or deliberation. I would exchange every moment of fulfillment and accomplishment, success, fame, glory just for her to be all right … my failure then became only the very small price I paid for God’s guarantee that my daughter would somehow be saved from the chaos of the world

until she got to that part, then she didn’t read anymore. She sat alone in the apartment the rest of the day. When she finally left, the manuscript was all she took with her, stuffed in a large padded envelope from a literary agency, in which something had been returned, perhaps the manuscript itself; at the hotel,

in the lake and returned to the gondola, I won’t be able to bear the possibility

in spite of how poorly she slept the night before, she constantly woke to passages from the manuscript in her head. Finally she got up from bed, called the airline, changed her reservation to an earlier flight, and carefully packed the manuscript in her suitcase among her clothes. Setting the room key on the hotel’s front desk, she left just a bit before daylight, waving down a cab that took her to the airport where she found that, despite having booked it just a
couple of hours before, there was no flight back to Los Angeles after all. For some reason she didn’t find this perplexing. Rather she calmly booked another flight for later that evening and returned to the hotel. The key was still at the front desk where she left it. When she went back to the airport that evening, again she found there was no flight to L.A., nor were any scheduled.

None? she said to the attendant at the ticket counter. She caught a taxi back into the city where the driver took her to Penn Station; a train was leaving for the West Coast the following afternoon. Due to a cancellation she was able to get a sleeper. She checked into the Hilton on Sixth Avenue where she ordered room service and took a hot bath and an over-the-counter pill to sleep; the next morning she phoned the front desk for a late checkout and watched cable movies on the TV. She checked out of the hotel and got another taxi to Penn Station, where she waited until it was time to board the train.

On the train she worked up the nerve to ask for a glass of wine, and although he had a knowing, suspicious look in his eyes, the porter brought her one without asking for verification of her age. A few hours later the train was in Washington, moving south through the night. When she woke in the morning and peered out her window, she was in Atlanta. She was becoming more aware of an undeterminable urgency, a feeling there was some rendezvous to keep at an appointed hour; it grew in her with every passing mile. At twilight the train crossed a very long bridge, pulling into

of opening my eyes and seeing nothing and no one before me but the awful

New Orleans at nightfall. She slept through Texas. The next morning she woke about two hundred miles west of Albuquerque outside what, in the flashing light of a storm, appeared to have once been an old railroad hotel; the porter was knocking on her door. This is where you change trains, miss, he announced.

No, she answered.

What?

No thank you, she corrected herself.

The porter blinked at her a few moments and disappeared. When he returned, the conductor was with him. We change trains here, miss, he told her, more authoritatively than the porter.

No, thank you, she said, I’ll wait. I would prefer not to get off the train.

The conductor and porter looked at each other and then disappeared, and the next fifteen minutes she was aware of various attendants whispering outside her door. When the porter didn’t return, she made her bed up into a seat and sat. After a while, the train suddenly shuddered and the lights went out. She dozed in her seat and when she woke the lights were still out and the train was still outside the old railroad hotel; she opened the compartment door and looked out into the aisle of the car. Neither the porter nor conductor was to be seen. She made her way down the aisle of the train and found the car empty; the next car was empty as well. She returned to her compartment and, when another hour or two passed, got up again and went exploring the dark deserted train looking for the concessions lounge in particular. Foraging for food, she found nothing. Returning to her compartment with an empty water bottle, she filled it with tap water from the restroom. Looking out the train at the old hotel there by the track, sometimes she thought she saw a flicker of light in one of its windows.

She slept in her compartment that night and woke the next morning to find she was still outside the hotel. Ravenous and

emptiness, like the last time, and now in this new fear all I can do then is go

finally frightened, still she didn’t get off the train. She was convinced that as soon as she stepped off to see if there was food in the hotel, the train would depart. By now she had gone up and down the length of the train looking for anything that might have been left behind by someone, a candy bar or part of a sandwich. In the afternoon she began to feel faint.

The day was darkening into evening and she was seriously considering a dash to the hotel when instead, in a slight delirium, she opened her suitcase to pull out her father’s manuscript, carefully packed among the shoes and underwear. It wasn’t there. By now she wasn’t quite lucid enough to be sure whether this surprised her. She tried to think of when she last looked for the manuscript but, dazed by her time on the train, having lost track of exactly how long she had been traveling, she couldn’t remember seeing it since New York. Trying to think the situation through as rationally as possible, she was beginning to doze again when she was awakened by a lurch; as lightning fell, the train slowly began pulling away from the old hotel. Soon the storm was behind her and tiny houses glittered in the distance. Sagebrush blew south. Snow was on the far northern mountains.

The aisles of the train remained dark and empty. After being awake most of the night, watching the Mojave marshlands outside her window glisten in the light of the full moon, not until the early morning hours did she finally sleep. At dawn the train slowed again, finally pulling into what she now believed was indeed the end of the line. At the port of San Gabriel she tore into a sandwich and some fries, then waited for the afternoon ferry that sailed her further up the lake into Los Angeles; stretched out on a plastic bench on the lower deck, she actually slept. The ferry continued through the night and by dawn the next day pulled out onto the greater lake, which she found instantly familiar. Around

on, all I can do is keep swimming up, all I can do is swim on up and up to it, I

noon she reached Los Feliz. The abandoned observatory loomed in the dark hills above. Any number of men were happy to offer her a ride but she held out for another woman, an older psychotherapist who drove her along the serrated shoreline from canyon to canyon as her passenger tried to explain with some difficulty exactly where she needed to get to. On the winding dirt road through the hills it was nearly an hour to the mouth of Laurel
Canyon, not far from where the end of Hollywood Boulevard had been when she left; given the transformation of the landscape she had to get her bearings quickly, her eyes searching for whatever reference points she could still recognize. Now she knew she had no more time. With nothing else to do but leave her bags there at the side of the road, she rushed down the southern knoll in the direction of where her old West Hollywood neighborhood had been, crashing through the thicket and searching for a path she somehow knew would be there. She could make out the lake through the trees. As she hurried down the banks to the lakeside, the sound of loons echoed around her in the growing fog; in the wind on the banks of the lake she could see flapping the tents from an abandoned fair. Empty tents billowed and collapsed in a long dark row, black mouths blowing out over the water. Reaching the

swim up up and up to finally
break the surface of the water and, in a strangled gasp for air,

take hold of the boat … and for the moment Kristin doesn’t open her eyes. She feels the wood of the gondola in her arms, feels the evening air around her. The last bit of sun to the west splashes across one side of her face, throbs through the lid of one eye—and she won’t look. She keeps her eyes closed because, for that moment, as long as her eyes are closed, then, just as she clings to the very boat itself, she can cling to the possibility that he’s there.

For that moment she can believe he’s there inches from her; for that moment, there half in the water clutching the side of the gondola with her eyes closed, she fixes herself to the possibility of him. She can’t bear the possibility the gondola is empty. She can’t bear the possibility of opening her eyes and seeing nothing and no one before her, like the last time. As long as her eyes are closed, it’s possible he’s there now next to her, small head in the sun, sea-green eyes flecked with amber and the sanguine mouth of the mad monk: it’s possible. In the dark cathedral of her closed eyes, she summons her best prayer, promises her best promise, to never be paralyzed again by her love for him, to leap blindly into hope, to stride boldly the border between terror and beauty. She reconciles herself to the whim of God or chaos or both, she finds a way to just be, there in the heart of the most desperate and cruel of sure things: that sooner or later, one way or another, whether she departs this earth first or he does, a mother will lose her child and feel the most unbearable of losses; and that until then she has no choice but to accept his life and hers in all their possibilities. So now, there in the lake, clinging to the side of the gondola, she doesn’t want to open her eyes yet because it stops the moment at the fork of all the lives that can still be lived, with the helix of eternity glittering before her.

For this moment, in the dark of her eyes shut, she listens. For a sign if not a song; and then

feels a small hand on her wet hair, a small hot breath in her ear, and hears a small voice. “No Big Agua for Mama?” and she

pulls herself into the gondola, tumbling over the side and, lying in the bottom still gasping for air, feels his hand on her brow as if to calm her, as if she were a child having a bad dream. She pulls him to her as if to crush him into her. She pulls him so hard to her that he’s a little afraid and, besides, she’s getting him all wet. Slowly she sits up.

As she wipes the water from her eyes, he says, “Kulk,” and as she runs her fingers over his face, the boy points at the lake where he dropped the spacemonkey that floated to her a moment ago on the other side. She remembers now leaving the toy behind in the other gondola. “Kulk is OK,” she nods, “he has his own boat now.” Kirk thinks about this. Kristin picks up the oars as if she has the slightest idea where to go. “Wait,” Kirk says.

Somewhere in a century of rapture, a red wind rises off a midnight sea. Kirk points to the lake’s edge where the girl with long gold hair to her waist waves to them again; the two young women look at each other across the water. “Yes please,” the boy insists, ever the little dictator, and so, turning the boat in the other woman’s direction, Kristin rows to shore.