Our Ecstatic Days (6 page)

The lake is coming for my kid.
In my heart,
I once wrote,
he opens the door to this vast terrain of fear.
But now I know it’s a lake not a terrain, and that it’s my fear made manifest that’s coming for him.
Sometimes I’m paralyzed by my love for him….
In the last few hours, between dream and dawn, like a thought cast adrift waiting for me to rescue it, I’ve come to know in no way I can explain that it doesn’t matter where we go, it doesn’t matter how far we try to get away, the lake will keep coming for him and that I can’t be paralyzed anymore. Down in the hole of the lake, down in the opening of the birth canal where the world broke its water, lurks my son’s doom and I must stop it. I have to shake myself loose of the love that holds me down, and find inside me the love that will save him. I have to go to war with the womb of the century that would reclaim him. Hand in hand, Kirk and I make our way downstairs to Valerie and Parker’s room and they’re gone, door standing open and crib hastily ransacked, the water only a few feet below their window.

Around noon the power goes out in the rest of the hotel. I know now that Kirk and I are the last light burning in the window for some other mom to see from some other window in the future. When the hotel manager’s deserted silver gondola washes up on the stairs just below our floor, I know it’s a sign.

In my heart my boy opens the floodgate to a vast sea of fear; but I must close that gate. I despise myself when I look at him at the other end of the gondola, without even a life jacket, precarious on the lake beneath us … I despise the danger I subject him to now, the danger I’ve given birth to that laps at our boat. His hair shines in the sun above, and I’m amazed to see him hold his toy monkey Kulk in its redspacesuit and space helmet. You found it, I say, and he just nods. Looking east I’m not certain anymore how far the lake goes, although in the distance I still see Wilshire office complexes. Nobody else is on the lake. But where did you find it? I say and Kirk says, Under my pillow. But I looked there, I say, I looked there a hundred times. The afternoon passes, we sail through the labyrinth of old Hollywood buildings that
rise from the black water like the heads of granite fetuses the world has miscarried. Out in deeper water the black of the lake frames Kirk’s head, his bright light. Scraps of wood from the disintegrating Chateau X harbor drift by. Of course it seems my wildman has no fear at all. For a minute I reassure myself that from his three-year-old perspective this all seems impossibly cool. As we follow the hills around to the northeast, the lake is still shallow enough I can push us most of the way with the pole … I want to push the pole please, Kirk says. He starts to stand in the gondola to take the pole and I explode with terror: Sit down! I scream at him, and he starts to cry.

He cries, and as he cries his hands start to move, start to talk the language of hands he learned from Parker. For a while I just sit there at my end of the boat, then gingerly move to him, to pull him to me for a minute and hold him. The way his fingers keep talking in the air, the way he clutches me, I know he’s more afraid than I thought. Sorry wildman, I whisper in his ear over and over sorry and I almost turn the boat back to the peninsula … but I know what I know, and I must do what I must do.

La-la please, Mama his frightened whisper matching mine, conspiratorial in our fear.

and by four-thirty we circle around the bend at Laurel Canyon and push our way up the watery ravine where we once watched city divers swim to the bottom of the lake

and the sound of loons echoes around us in the growing fog even as the lake’s songs have gone silent. On the banks of the lake in the wind we can see flapping the tents from the abandoned fair where one afternoon we saw up close the owl that hears human heartbeats, and where another afternoon we saw and heard the melody-snakes from the lake’s source. By now the lake has taken
most of the fairgrounds. In a long dark row the empty tents billow and collapse, black mouths blowing out over the water.

We reach the lake’s center. The hole at the bottom is somewhere right below us.

Listen to me wildman I say as calmly as possible, lowering myself over the side of the gondola into the water. He’s puzzled.

He blinks at me in the twilight. Please don’t cry, it will break my heart. I’m already starting to shiver, and I don’t want him to see that. My teeth chatter, and I don’t want him to hear that….

Why?

So it can’t hurt you anymore

… don’t ask why …

do you understand?

… there isn’t time for your whys. He nods, like he’s actually figured it out.

Who’s the boss here, wildman. It’s a minute before he answers quietly

Silently he watches me. He doesn’t cry. He looks around us at the lake and at the sky above him in that preternatural way of his.

Night-time

he says.

He blinks.

Yes, please.

I look around me, and for a minute the chill of the water passes. My eyes drink in everything, they’re thirsty like they know something I don’t…. the twilight is the kind of blue you see maybe once in a lifetime, maybe once. In the wind I hear the murmur of the fluttering tents on the lakeshore, and I know I have only minutes before the sky fills with owls that can hear his heart
and suddenly she can hear his heart herself, its steady thump in the murmur of the tents near the water. She reaches over and takes Kirk’s hand in her own and presses it, and before he can cry or try and grab her, she takes as deep a breath as she can, and down into the lake she slips.

He watches his mother disappear. Another presence whispers in his ear and instinctively his head turns, like an owl, to gaze at the shore, where he sees another young woman, not more than eighteen or nineteen years old, watching him. Kneeling at the lake’s edge, she’s like a sprite with long straight gold hair almost to her waist, and when she sees that he notices her, she raises her hand to wave. The little boy waves back.

Sinking, Kristin can still hear his heart. Looking up through the water one last time, she can see him leaning over the edge of the silver gondola peering down at her with his red monkey in hand, his head a shimmery sphere floating above the lake, like the parasols of autumn.

Every passing day, the
edge of the water rots a little more the front porch of her little house, until one morning she expects to find she’s finally been swept away. Every honeymoon twilight, across the house’s threshold the lake is carried by its lesbian groom the moon, with a bridal train of small dead animals, palm fronds ripped from their trees, the trash of the recently submerged: pages of paperbacks, gin bottles, old tickets from the drowned Cathode Flower nightclub that used to be right below her on the Sunset Strip, at the foot of a hillside now under water. Step out her front door at dawn into the puddles that seep up through the decking, sunlight from the lake’s surface cutting a gash across her eyes, and she sees the glub glub glub of rising bubbles, and wonders from what sinking building or body.

Six months ago the lake finally stopped rising. This was what everyone had been waiting for, once it became clear the lake wasn’t going to stop until it reached the ocean. Once that became clear, there was no reason not to wish the lake would just get it over with, so everyone could stop moving to higher ground. It feels to her like the foundation of the house gives way a little more every night, and it wakes her in the dark, when the dream doesn’t.

Then in the days between
nights’ dreams, the visions come, often just after the sun sets. Through the hinge where day hangs on to night, the visions come up with the bubbles from the lake’s bottom. She sits on the porch of her little house and stares at the top of the Hotel Hamblin to the southeast, that roof where sometimes at fall of dark she took him in her arms to look at the lights of faraway windows, when clouds were flying igloos and the night-robots reigned. She’s vaguely aware of the boats that drift by, the way the people in them look at her and mutter to each other.

About half the top floor of the Hamblin is still above water. Once she thought about taking the silver gondola out there but couldn’t really see the point, unless it was one of the two or three hundred occasions she considered slipping into the water for good, the way she should have that evening five years ago when, out on the center of the lake, she lowered herself from the gondola. So then why keep moving to higher land at all? Let some watery night take her. Night after night, hour after hour, moment after moment she sees his smile, hears his voice from the other bedroom that used to call
Mama where are you?
Five years, two months,
sixteen days since she heard him say the last words she heard him say: and when she came up for air, swimming desperately up up up until she finally broke the surface of the water to gasp back her life at the very last possible second, the devastating emptiness of the gondola left her to curse for the rest of her life that last second God gave her just so that she might hear those words over and over

yes please

You Sick Fuck. Having had Your little joke with Abraham, hissing Your little amusement in his ear and finding what cowards fathers are when he didn’t spit in Your face, when he didn’t clutch his son close to him and say I ’ll go to hell first … when for all his supposed righteousness he couldn’t even be a man when it came to protecting his child, then You moved onto mothers didn’t You, because mothers were more your match, beginning with Mary. Now that was fun. Tortured her boy in the grisliest most twisted way possible before her very eyes and then had the sadistic wit to call it The Salvation of the World: so what I want to know is, was that the forbidden iconography of the divine psyche, or just the Male Wangle of all male wangles? God tries to hurt my kid, He has to go through me first. God tells me what He told Abraham, then He isn’t any god that means anything to me, He isn’t any god I owe anything. I kill anyone who tries to hurt my kid, any man, any woman, any god, any lake.

She’s dreamed it so often, sometimes she’s almost not certain it really happened. She breaks the lake’s surface gasping, grabs the side of the gondola, and her soul implodes at the horror of its emptiness; for a minute she stares into the bottom of the gondola like he must be there and she just isn’t seeing him. Like there’s some place he could be hiding. But it’s as if he was never there at all. She dives beneath the water again, thrashing around as if to catch him on his way to the bottom—but there’s no one to catch, and she rises to grab the gondola once more and look frantically around her. It’s only then she hears something, and looks up.

Looks up and sees him in
the distance, high in the sky. Hears his voice as it gets farther away

Mama where are you?

like he would call from his crib

Mama come back

and the owl that has him in its clutches actually seems to falter a bit, confused by the burden and sound, finding Kirk bigger and noisier than the usual prey. Sometimes in her dream Kirk plummets to earth, and she wakes to a black room with the taste of
no please
on her lips.

One morning about six months ago she got up from the toilet to stare down at the blood in the bowl. She was so fascinated by the pattern that she sat on the bathroom floor studying it, circling to see it from every angle. Next month the same pattern and the month after that, and it’s been the same every month since. She keeps trying to decipher this menstrual rorschach; slit between her legs is the stigmata of the full moon from which her womb telegraphs a message. A month or so back she even tried copying it down on paper before it dissolved into streaks down the white porcelain. Sometimes she lies in bed at night and sees the pattern
in the dark above her, and watches baffled for hours until its mystery lulls her back to sleep.

Lately, in a city where sooner or later any kind of cult behavior becomes a fashion statement, everyone wears the blue of the lake, all the colored parasols of five years ago having given way to blue from the neck down. Everyone camouflages herself and slips alongside the water like a spy of the shoreline, disguised as a splash. Blue hat, blue shirt, coat blue except for dark shadows rippling across the buttons like riptides, or flashes of white on the thigh of the pants like the glare of the sun on the water’s surface. When she rows her silver gondola on the lake wearing a brilliant red dress, the lake around her suddenly clears of all other boats, taking cover, as if she’s an incoming fireball from space. As if she’s a drop of blood—but is she the lake bleeding, or blood rained from the sky? She can see it in everyone’s eyes, the red provocation of her, the defiant affront of her red to the blue of the lake, daring it to rise higher and seep deeper into the land.