Our Ecstatic Days (7 page)

If the lake sends back my boy, I’ll wear whatever it wants, the blue garb of its Order, I’ll wear blue until the day I die. If it wants I’ll wear nothing and dip my naked body into its blue embrace whenever it wants me, lie nude in my silver gondola and drift wherever it drifts me. If the lake will just send me back my boy.

Until then, the only thing blue
about her is her name….

… the writer who lived down the hall of the Hamblin having left her with Lulu Blu….

… and afterward she couldn’t tell for certain when she stopped being Kristin; maybe it was that very moment she came up for air and saw the empty gondola. But now she’s taken refuge in Lulu. She’s fled from any Kristin who would leave her three-yearold son out in the middle of a lake because she had this insane idea she had to stop the lake from taking him. She fled to Lulu because she believed Kristin should have sunk back down to the bottom where she belonged, and left to someone with better wings the task of flying after that owl. So it was a kind of debased suicide, abandoning Kristin for Lulu, and now she sits on her porch at the water’s edge in her red dress staring out over the lake while blue citizens drift by in their blue boats and whisper among themselves
The Madwoman in Red, whose son was abducted by owls.

When a woman becomes a mother, she develops this new instinct for danger. She develops this instinct for every possible disaster that awaits her child around every corner. Lulu, once called Kristin, doesn’t know if five years ago her danger-instinct
failed or overwhelmed all reason so that she led her son to danger instead of from it, so that everything she did to protect him only endangered him. Little amorphous lumps of human clay, that’s what she once thought babies were; but then she found there were things about her child that had nothing to do with her, things that were his own from the beginning, from the minute he was born, perhaps from before he was born, perhaps from before he was conceived, although there was no point getting into that since no one knows anyway. Anyway, she realized, that’s when you’re stuck with the Soul. That’s when your child becomes inescapable evidence of the cosmos, a membrane-map of the spirit, that’s when God becomes a Piercing Hope or Dark Suspicion or both. Because there’s nothing a mother fears more than the chaos of the world.

And then danger has won.

Then danger has won. Then
fear takes a form. Detaches itself from all the things she was afraid of, the reasonable things and the stupid, and becomes its own thing, bigger than either the
reasonable things or the stupid things. Grows in the pregnant heart until it’s born; and then she stops being a person, then she becomes fear’s walking womb.

Then her fear is bigger than her motherhood. Fear has metamorphosed into the danger it feared

and it’s called a lake.

Absently she listens to the radio all the time now, the radio she listened to all the time with her son when the lake came because the music was the one thing the lake, alive with its own music, couldn’t or wouldn’t drown. She sits on the porch of her house while the people sail by looking at her, and she listens for a song she and Kirk sang together

all the little babies go, Oh! oh! I want to!

while sometimes the snakes of music swarming the lake coil through her house. They wind along wooden beams, pythons of melancholy English verse from before she was born, and Debussy melodies but only if Debussy had been a bossa nova guitarist in a heroin haze, brooding aquatic chamber quartets rising in the background like autumn glimpsed for the first time on the horizon of midsummer. Boas—gorgeous and dangerous—of static bursts and swoons of strings drape themselves along her window sill and slither through her house like women’s voices, dusky, jazz-depraved, desperate.

The first time the lake sends her a vision, Lulu is sitting on her porch at dusk and feels a swell in the lake beneath her. It slowly rises from the water before her, a huge bubble. She gets up from the chair and walks to the edge of the porch and, as she watches, the bubble bursts to reveal a man in his forties with black hair and black beard and startling electric blue eyes, a man whose name she never knew. She lived with him when she first came to L. A. as a teenager nine years before, a kind of sexual serf servicing him when, after being abandoned by his pregnant Asian-American wife, he wasn’t crashing around in a secret room at the bottom of his house where he worked day and drunken night on a huge blue calendar that completely reordered history according to the
chronology and logic of apocalypse. Even now she looks back on that time dispassionately, having grown up with a practical view of her own sensuality and surviving then by whatever means she could—until one night he disappeared. She wasn’t altogether certain he was even the father until Kirk was born, another candidate having been a doltish Japanese boy who jumped her one afternoon in the rain out in the Black Clock time-capsule cemetery on the west side of town, now under water, before out of the blue a lightning bolt literally left him lying next to her on the grass, life only in his erection. In the early months of her pregnancy, and particularly on the night she believed she miscarried her twins only for them to somehow become manifest again in an inexplicable resurrection, she felt Kirk and Bronte glow inside her as if with electricity—so when Kirk was born, she wouldn’t have been shocked if he had been half Asian. Now as Kirk’s father rises from the lake in Lulu’s vision, it’s only long enough for him to reach out to her, not as if asking her to save him but as if beseeching her to understand or even forgive him; and at that moment, for the first time in the eight years since she last saw him, although she’s often suspected it, she knows he’s dead.

Her house is drenched with the evidence of visions. She wakes in the morning to puddles by the bed, in the hallway, just inside the front door, and knows other visions came to her in the night when she was asleep. Her next vision is of her other self. Another twilight and again the lake bubbles, and again Lulu rises from her chair but not going so near the water, and from out of the lake’s fountain emerges Kristin. This other self swims to the edge of the porch and, reaching up and grabbing hold of the post, looks at Lulu for a full minute with the lake glistening on her skin and her hair hanging in her face, before she sinks back into the water without a breath. She comes again three nights later. This woman Kristin who looks just like Lulu, who is just like Lulu, who is the woman Lulu was before she became Lulu, swims up from the bottom of the lake and breaks the surface of Lulu’s nights. Lulu wakes from her bed just long enough to sit up and catch sight of
Kristin flitting around the corner of the bedroom door, before Lulu falls back to sleep; but then the next night Lulu wakes right before dawn and Kristin is sitting in the corner of the dark bedroom, naked and wet, and she says, Why did you leave me?

“I couldn’t stand to be you anymore,” Lulu answers, “couldn’t stand to be Kristin
… you left him in the fucking boat in the middle of the lake.
Why did you do that, or … why did
we
do that … leave him there like that?”

Doesn’t matter anymore why, Kristin answers in the corner. There’s some serious point-missing going on here if you don’t know that by now.

“I don’t care about you or me anymore,” Lulu says.

Me neither.

“All I care about is him.” In the dark, she starts to cry.

Then go find him, Kristin says.

“I don’t know,” really crying.

Look, Kristin says, pointing to the front door that Lulu can see from the bedroom, and Lulu gets up and goes out onto the porch, and the lake is black and still and the light of the sun is just starting to pale the sky a dark dawn-blue over the east hills, and Lulu turns to stare back into the house where Kristin was a minute ago, but then she hears the lake bubbling again, although she’s never had a vision at dawn, and Lulu stares into the water black with sunrise and hears from its bubble a small faraway sound and takes the telescope that hangs from the beam of the porch and looks through it down into the bubble into the funnel of the lake and what she sees in the reflection of the barely paling sky makes her pull away as if the telescope is enchanted and she doesn’t trust what it shows her.

At first she thinks it’s an airplane, which in itself is startling because there haven’t been any airplanes in the skies of L.A. for a long time. But when she squints she sees it’s not an airplane rather it’s something very little, flying deep down in the sky of the bubble. She looks back into the telescope.

II Duce, bigger now of course than when she last saw him five years ago, pointing this way and that, talking with his arms and hands, conducting his higher mathematics and dividing night-robots by day-robots, directing the aging owl that still holds him in its talons. A battalion of owls wearily follows. Go this way, go that way! happily snapping orders at them, go up, go down! with great delight while the owls appear to be, oh, a little beleaguered maybe? to her untrained eye, of course … what does she know from beleaguered owls? But as if they’re thinking maybe this is a classic case of having bitten off more than they can chew, although she supposes just letting go of him is out of the question, against an owl’s owlish nature.

She doesn’t hear her Kierkegaard saying “please” either, she notices that right off. What happened to his manners I taught him, is all she can think.

Eight days she waits. Eight
days she waits for another vision. Eight days she sits by the lake hour after hour, more passing boats muttering at the spectacle of her. Eight days she waits, heart
slowly sinking at the idea that it was only a new dream, worse than the old. Eight days she barely moves from the porch, staring at the lake when she’s not searching the skies with her telescope.

On the sixth day, as she waits she hears it, for the first and only time since she first heard it riding the bus on a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway that doesn’t exist anymore. A DJ from one of the pirate radio ships broadcasting out on the lake plays it, and Lulu is a little surprised at how exactly she’s remembered it, when she might have done almost anything to forget it: a snake of subtle Spanish horns playing a vaguely Middle Eastern melody

and she pulls up her dress

and bares her thigh to it, inviting its lunge.

One night at dusk before the sun falls, the final vision comes. A black globe of water rises from the lake’s surface just as the moon chases the sun into the west. “Kirk!” she calls to the bubble and in its wet wound there he is again far away, same black dot as he was the night five years ago when she saw him carried off, but distinct, unmistakable, calmly issuing directives to his chagrinned feathered squadron. Somewhere inside the periscope of the lake, for one fleeting moment she watches him fly away once more, and can almost see him waving back to her or maybe calling to her in the language of hands

Even when she lived in Tokyo, when the signs were everywhere, she never understood how she was the agent of chaos. Later she would tell herself Kirk was the chaos factor in her life because, pregnant with him, she would walk the streets of Tokyo and
around her everything went berserk: radios went haywire, subways broke down, glass buildings shattered. Had she been as self-aware as she thought she was, she might have noted how it was that on her return to Los Angeles a lake appeared. In the early months of the new century, it was she who embodied the chaos of the coming age. Her child would only be chaos’ son.

And now she sits by the
lake in a state of truce. She’s not certain she can actually say the lake delivered him back to her, but a deal is a deal, so she takes off her clothes and gives herself to the lake, lowers herself in the lake’s waters for a while and gives the lake a chance to have her way with Lulu in the moonlight.

But Zed is too weary of all her brides, and soon Lulu climbs back up on the porch, goes inside the house and gets under the covers of her bed and in the dark tells her boy a story, the first in five years; she makes it up as she goes along, as she used to. There was a little train named Tyrone that rode through hills and across deserts and past houses and towns and over bridges until it reached the end of its track where there was a cloud raining, and just beyond the raining cloud was a rainbow. And for a long time
Tyrone was afraid to go through the rainbow to the other side where there was no track he could see, and every day he would try to work up the courage until one day he finally did. He went through the rainbow and on the other side was a tunnel, and the rainbow became a train track, with rails of green and yellow, and tracks of orange and purple. And in the meantime there was a little tugboat named Tyrone, sailing along the shore of a huge lake….

But

Kirk interrupts in the dark, finger poised in correction

and she expects him to say, That’s
my
name, but he doesn’t, accepting this as if it makes complete sense, eyes blinking in the light of the moon off the lake beyond the bedroom window.

The boy named Kirk waves to Tyrone the Tugboat.
Tyrone the Tugboat!
he calls,
I want to sail away with you,
so Tyrone the Tugboat sails over to the beach and the boy named Kirk climbs in, and they sail out onto the lake and down the Venice Channel where the canals used to be, down to the marina where the harbor used to be, out to sea. They sail past other boats, past tropical islands, with fish and dolphins and squid swimming alongside, following a faraway cloud in the sky, and just when they reach the cloud it bursts into rain, and just beyond the rain is a rainbow, and Tyrone the Tugboat is afraid to sail into the rainbow because he doesn’t know what’s on the other side. But Kirk the boy gives Tyrone the courage to go on, and they sail into the rainbow and on the other side is a cave in the ocean, and inside the ocean-cave the rainbow turns into a river, with currents of green and yellow, and tides of orange and purple. They follow the rainbow river until it becomes a rainbow track, where Tyrone the Tugboat becomes Tyrone the Train, and Tyrone the Train carries the boy named Kirk deeper into the cave until finally they come out the other side of a tunnel, and
together they travel over bridges and past towns and houses and across the desert and through the hills until they reach the end of the track at the shore of a huge lake, where the little boy named Kirk gets out of Tyrone the Train and runs down onto the beach just in time to see Tyrone the Tugboat sailing by; and the boy waves to Tyrone the Tugboat and calls….