Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  He has a toy he calls Monkeyman, a small plastic gorilla in a red spaceman suit and space helmet that he takes into the bath, to bed, on the bus, clutching it in his hand at all times. Sometimes hours go by and I see Kirk has had Monkeyman in his hand the whole time, has never let go of it even once, has never set it down anywhere for a second, has never even stuck it in his pocket. There’s even a song that goes with Monkeyman, an old rock and roll song from before I was born that we heard on the radio with a woman singing spacemonkey, it goes, sign of the time. At night Kirk clutches Monkeyman in his sleep like it’s this talisman-thing, and only after sleep has come over him does his hand slowly open and let go.

  Then in the middle of the night he wakes and realizes he doesn’t have the monkey. He starts crying and I have to look through all the bedding and under the crib and around the floor. Or sometimes in the night if Kirk has a bad dream and I go get him from his crib and take him into my bed in the other room, he ’ll still be holding on to it, and I’ll hear this plop on the floor behind me as I’m carrying him from one room to the next and I’ll know he’s dropped it, and I go back and find it so I’ll have it to give to him when he wakes up wondering where it is. Not long ago Kirk named the red monkey Kirk, except when he says it, it comes out Kulk.

  I read him this book called I Am a Little Monkey. There’s one part where the mommy monkey cleans the little monkey by picking the bugs off him like monkeys do, and every time I get to that part I pinch him all over like I’m picking the bugs off him. Now whenever I get to that part of the book Kirk scampers to the other side of my bed with Kulk to get away, knowing what’s coming. Are you a monkey? I say and he says, “No I’m not a monkey!” Are you a boy? and he answers, “Yes I’m a boy!” except last time. Last time I said, Are you a boy? and he said, “No please!” and puzzled I said then what are you? and he answered

  I’m a Bright Light. What are the odds? I mean: ever, you know? what are the odds. Whole populations unleashed in a stream of semen, whole Indias exploding in my womb … so what are the odds what kind of kid you ’ll wind up with? How many millions of sperm are there in the white whisper of a cock, and if one happens to meet up with the waiting egg, it’s one kind of kid, and if another, then it’s another. Conceive at ten o’clock and you get a psycho. Conceive at 10:01 and you get a Bright Light.

  He calls any darkness “night-time.” Goes into a dark room, it’s “night-time,” checks the apartment for pockets of night-time everywhere, peering into closets declaring “night-time” then moving onto the next. He goes through my desk, pulling open each drawer and gazing into it one after the other. Night-time, night-time. Watching over his shoulder and pondering Kulk’s silhouette on the wall behind him, he says, “God made Kulk,” dancing it in his fingers in front of my eyes for a while before adding, “but He made his shadow first.”

  Since the lake, there’s been an epidemic of dying houses all over town … Doc sees all of them. Consumptive houses, malaria houses, alzheimer houses, heart-attack houses. Houses with tumors growing out of the attic or the bedroom windows or the family rooms. Dying faster than Doc can pronounce them terminal, and you see it mostly when the sun goes down and there are black patches in the hills and skyline where once were lights … an urbanological mourning, a city bound and gagged in the black memorial armbands of lightless windows and doors.

  One late afternoon, out on the shores of Laurel Cove where it first appeared, not far from where we saw the owls the afternoon at the fair, I was walking with Kirk holding his hand, and we heard music coming out of the lake. First it was only a shred of a melody and then there was another, two melodies interweaving, and then suddenly there was a flood of them, an outburst so loud Kirk put his hands over his ears. The music was accompanied by a light, first a small glowing string and then another, and then a mass of them, each melody snaking its way outward from a place in the lake just above its source, until the whole lake was shimmering with light and music, melody-snakes wiggling their way out into the city. I kept looking around to see if anyone else was out there to hear it and see it like we did, but we were alone for a minute, like everyone in the city had vanished. And although at first I thought it was the sound of all the songs of dying buildings escaping from the walls that held them, all the female voices that Doc always heard, it was more like they were coming from deep under the water. Like they had broken through from whatever was on the other side of that hole at the bottom from where the lake had come.

  When I was a kid back on the little island where I grew up in the Sacramento delta, the sound of the radio was the sound of tourists who came and left, sound of freedom and desertion … all the strangers who could come to the little Chinese ghost town where I was a prisoner and then leave on the ferry the next day. Sometimes Kirk and I find a song on the radio that we sing together, there was one by this chick band from the late Nineties, guitars going off like terrorist bombs and girls singing dum dum da dee dee dum dum da dum doo! All the little babies go, Oh! oh! I want to! and for some reason this one underground station played it a lot for a couple weeks, and every time at the chorus Kirk and I would jump up from the bed and shout at each other, “All the little babies go, Oh! oh! I want to!”

  Like me when I was a kid, Kirk used to never cry, he only started lately. I think somehow he got it in his head the music is the sound of freedom and desertion and that I’m going to disappear. I go in the next room and he gets it in his head I’ll never come back. Suddenly he’s wailing for me, and it ’s just lately I’ve realized that, as much as anything else, his call of “Mama?” in the middle of the night is nothing more or less than to make certain I’m still here, that I haven’t vanished from his life. I don’t know where he got this idea he would be left all alone in the world. I wrack my brain trying to figure what I might have done that made him think this, but I can’t think of anything, and I wonder if it’s like his premature empathy—a sense that, sooner or later, everything goes away.

  After Kirk was a year old, the lake had gotten big enough there was a fog off the water in the mornings and evenings that climbed the Hollywood moors and wound through the city. A big chunk of the hills broke off and tumbled down into the lake and onto its shore, including a huge rock as big as a house that landed near where Kirk and I would blow bubbles. Of course I couldn ’t get it out of my head, what might have happened if we had been there when this monster rock came crashing down. I’m haunted by such possibilities hour on the hour. Kirk always likes to throw rocks in the lake so I told him to go throw this one. He looked at it with suspicion, then surmounting his doubt went over and put his hands on the towering rock and pushed with all his might while I laughed. “Too big,” he finally announced solemnly, his spirit far bigger than the rest of him, far bigger than I.

  I’m not a religious person but after Kirk was born I started praying. Every night, “Dear God do whatever you want to me but don’t let anything bad happen to my boy.” I think about all the stuff I’ve done, running way from “home”—such as it was, my drunken uncle who ran the town bar—the lies I told, guys I fucked in their sleep to suck out their dreams with my thighs and carry them off splashing inside me. I tally it all up and it occurs to me if God wants to punish me then my prayers have given him a pretty good hint how to go about it. And now God’s just one more Predator out there I have to protect my kid from.

  Around the time Kirk was eighteen months old, the city finally sent some divers down into the lake to try and figure out what was in the hole at the bottom. This got a lot of attention, half the city there watching the divers in their black wetsuits slip over the side of the boat and disappear and then come back up. Every time they came back up there seemed to be much conferring back and forth with various officials on the boat. Everyone figured there would be some kind of press conference or announcement at the end. But there was no announcement, instead everyone on the boat immediately hurried to their cars and drove off—pretty quickly it seemed to me. Since then, no city officials come t
o the lake anymore, but for a week or so afterward everyone else who had been at the lake would stand staring at the water, like some answer would come floating up any minute….

  I don’t know so much about science or higher math, but in the more complicated equations I always assume there must be a wildness factor somewhere … or maybe that’s what math tries to avoid. I guess maybe math and science are about factoring out the chaos not factoring it in, determining a definite value for everything. Math and science don’t allow for the possibility of true chaos, only for an unknown order that calls itself chaos. I mean, if that butterfly flapping his wings in South America twenty years ago really did cause the toaster to burn my English muffin this morning, that isn ’t randomness, that’s cause-and-effect of a truly cosmic kind, the exact opposite of chaos.

  My kid has his own way with numbers, his own mathematics. “How many bites of that cereal have you had?” I ask him, trying to get him to eat his breakfast, and his eyes narrow in that thoughtful calculating way they do: “Forty,” he answers. He doesn ’t even know what forty is. You have not had forty bites, I say, and he thinks some more and says, “Seven.” You’ve eaten seven bites? I ask, dubious, and he thinks some more very carefully before announcing, “Twenty-one.” The three-year-old poet in him likes the sound of forty and seven and twenty-one, and adds and subtracts them accordingly, dividing night-robots in the hills by the size of the moon, adding the number of day-robots in the cage of the sun squared, figuring the wondrous equations of his little existence.

  He’s the chaos factor in the equation of my existence, the thing that makes true the math of my days. For a while it made me nuts, his havoc, and then it finally occurred to me that like chaos in science, Kirk’s chaos is an unknown order, his havoc a rearrangement of the world in a way that marks his entrances into it and his exits from it. Like I’ve done since I was a kid myself, on the wall of our apartment I tack articles about things that fascinate me and pictures of things that inspire me, and I tacked up the little pieces of the photo that my correspondent was sending his lover, the other Kristin across the lake, trying to assemble them into the whole, not knowing how many more fragments might be to come. The morning I got what turned out to be the last letter, Kirk took all the pieces off the wall and stuck them back in different places, completely upsetting my very meticulous efforts. I screamed at him about it for ten minutes. Then, feeling shitty, I dressed him and we grabbed the bus to the San Vicente Bridge, and crossed to the other side and walked over to the lake, hand in hand, and sat on a small beach below the hills where I fell asleep in the sun, I don’t know how long …

  I woke with a start. Woke in complete panic that I had dozed off with Kirk sitting there in the sand six fatal feet from the water. But there he was just hunkered down in the sand by the water in that way he sits sometimes, not on his butt but in a crouch, studying the view in front of him, and only when my brain assured itself he was OK did I realize he was peeling one page after another from my Proust and throwing them in the lake, and I almost started screaming at him again. Instead I walked over and just sat with him, our feet in the water, the two of us together watching the pages of the book float out, little paper boats with sails made of reverie.

  K, beautiful betrayer, begins the last letter, Mao of my desire, killer of my trust. Were I to have foreseen this silence from you all those years ago in that murderous moment that made me so anonymously famous, then I could have stood up to nothing, rather I would have accepted the chains of the passionless, the defeated, the tyrannized, the hopeless…. What do you suppose I saw in the barrel of that gun rolling toward me if not your face? What do you suppose made me brave? What do you suppose was the mouth of freedom I longed to kiss if not yours? Do you really think I did it just to thrill the world? In that last moment before I slipped into the confessional of history, forever pulling its curtain closed behind my innocence, before I dropped through the century so as to make my way to you over the years, I heard in my ears the melody of your sixteen-year-old dreams—something ageless and haunted by however many voices have hummed it—and which on that morning drowned out every scream of danger: I peered in the hole of the gun before me and saw your legs open to me; and so leaned forward to taste your promise there. Stepped to the right so there could be no eluding my fate, stepped to the left so there could be no eluding your whisper of love, clutching in my fist your yellow dress that the world took for a banner of freedom. Begged for destiny to flatten me against the Square beneath my feet. Begged for the explosion of the gun in whose smoke was written the way you belonged to me…. Bitch. Whore. History’s fucking tourist. Why don’t you write me? How can you not write me? How can you not answer! With the passage of time have I become merely quaint, as my photo recedes into the world’s nostalgia? Please … love me and I will redeem the ways I have become passé. Love me and I will service you night and day on the tiananmen of our appetites. Love me and in a moment I will ruthlessly trade the word freedom on the tip of my tongue for the opiate drop of your release. Love me and I will take on the lake for you, I will take on the world for you, again….

  Enclosed with the letter were the two last pieces of the photo, one small round orb of black, one small orb of white—the eyes of his portrait, each a different color. But when I put all the other pieces on the wall in some semblance of what I had before Kirk scrambled them that morning, and then added the two eyes, his face still didn’t come together except as a crazy abstraction. I kept rearranging the pieces, this way and that. Sometimes they formed a cracked vase, sometimes a cloud passing before the moon, sometimes a flower floating above the sea, each of the images somehow off, straining for a cohesion the pieces didn’t believe, until I fell asleep again and woke to find once more that Kirk had taken all the pieces down and put them back in his own way. He was adding the two eyes just about the time I opened my own.

  Except they weren’t eyes. One was the hole of the barrel of a gun on a military tank, sitting on a flat paved open space. Behind it was a second tank, with a third behind that and a fourth behind that. The other was the back of the dark head of the tiny man standing ramrod straight in front of the tanks, arms at his sides, holding in one hand a pale cloth.

  A pretty famous picture, I guess, from not that long ago in the last century. But I was very little at the time so it wasn’t something I knew all that much about, and I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that I had put so much time and energy into coming up with only a man blocking a line of tanks, in the same way that, over the years, the man himself had become bitter about having dared and risked so much, only so now love could forsake him.

  Later that same night after I went to sleep, I was awakened by music. When I stuck my head out the window, I saw that Zed Lake, onxy in the moonlight, was singing, all these tunes snaking in and out of each other, a whole time of tunes, a century of them, old ones and ones I had never heard before, songs that had escaped from the other side, glowing and slithering through the water. I knew if I had been down at the water’s edge I could have reached in and touched one, and that musical notes would have glittered on my fingertips like tiny stars.

  The melody-snakes were gone when Kirk woke crying an hour later, looking for Kulk his red monkeyman. Exhausted, I went into his room and shook out all the bedsheets, lowered myself on my hands and knees to look for it. “Well where did you last have it?” I said, even though I had seen him holding it like he always did, one hand a fist as I was shoving it through the sleeve of his pajamas. We looked all over the apartment, high and low. I say we but it was really me looking and Kirk directing me. “There under the couch please,” he would suggest very helpfully, “maybe behind the door.” Pointing here and there, reclined on his chair like it was a throne, he just needed a slave to fan him and drop grapes in his mouth.

  When and how did he make me so fucking tender, that’s what I want to know. It wasn’t when he was inside me, I remember when he was inside me. He just took me over at some point. And don’t tell
me all moms are like this, because that couldn’t be further from the point. It couldn’t be further. I mean certainly I always figured I would be an OK mom, taking care of him and so on … but when did he get to me? Tenderness. That’s a new one. I don’t think I like it, no not much. I don’t think so. I want to be a tough chick again.

  A few nights ago the lake reached the Hamblin, and we woke the next morning to find the water up the steps of the eastern entrance. Surveying the lake from our window, Kirk quietly announced, “The water-robots are here.” Then the next morning the wolf that’s been living in the building paddled through the door into the flooded first floor from somewhere outside and then paddled back out, frantically looking for a place to beach himself. Bobbing in the lake outside the hotel was a silver gondola that shone in the sunlight like a bullet … it belongs to the hotel manager, he’s prepared I guess. Yesterday morning water filled the first-floor corridor and the gondola drifted up and down the hall. Down the hall in Jainlight’s apartment, the TV reception flickers in and out … later in the day when Kirk and I knocked, he wasn’t there. Inside, the TV was on, piles of pages by the computer, stacks of videos on the floor, tequila bottles, everything in its usual dishevelment. But he was nowhere to be seen.