Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

Lately, the last week or so Kirk’s cries of “Mama” in the night have turned into wails of “Mama where are you?” desperate, wracked, forlorn. His insecurity has found a wider vocabulary … does he really not know where I am? Does he really suppose I’m not right beyond his door? “Mama, come back,” as if he’s already learned how a little boy’s cries can go unanswered forever, as if he’s known it from the beginning, from before the beginning, insisting like his still unborn twin sister I’m not going anywhere, as the sac of the womb around him burst. In the mornings he ’ll be calling from his room, and I get up from bed and go to his door and knock playfully: “It’s me,” he answers. In case I’m not certain. In case I might think it’s some other kid who’s taken his place, who I might mistake for my own.

  I’ve been having this dream. In the dream I look out the window and the lake approaches like a swarm, and I close all the windows, pull the shades, lock the door, and there’s the rumble of music, the loudest watersong ever, it grows and soon invades us, seeps into the apartment, comes in under the door and through the cracks in the window … and then everything explodes. Everything explodes with water and I would expect to be swept under myself; but I’m not, it’s taunting me. Roars in on a black wave, the lake, and roars right past me, dismissive of me, wanting me to watch, wanting me to see it take him. And I watch. And it takes him.

  I notice now that when Kirk talks, he uses his hands, like the night Parker “talked” in his sleep. Did he immediately grasp within the strange patterns of Parker’s hands their secret language, and become fluent? He sleeps in my lap and his hair smells like tall dry grass, I put my face in it and breathe it and listen to the coyotes in the distant dark hills. Stubborn stoic Kirk, won’t be shamed or cajoled into emotion. I see him self-consciously suppress his small smile that gets more and more rare, as if having already learned to find his joy suspect. With every passing day I worry he retreats farther into his three-year-old heart even as he talks more and more with his hands … but then in the dark, just as I think he’s about to fall asleep, suddenly he clutches my arm and won’t let go, both of his arms around mine, an outburst of need under the cover of darkness. After a while there’s that body-shudder of him tumbling into sleep, and then I whisper in his ear

  your mama loves you

  even if he’s asleep and doesn ’t hear, because even if he doesn ’t hear, I figure he hears. I whisper it in his ear and figure it makes its way to his brain, and some day years from now when he needs it, it will float up to the surface of his memory and open itself like a time capsule, with the message he especially needs most at that moment. And he ’ll find, to his surprise, he heard it after all.

  Now that the lake has reached the hotel, some things seem urgent in a way I don’t really understand. There have been no more letters from my correspondent. Once Kirk put the pieces of the photo together, he didn ’t mix them up anymore but now sits on the floor silently looking at the tiny figure of the man in the Square. If just once more I had seen the other Kristin’s light in her window, I wouldn’t have involved Doc at all, and I don’t know whether it’s that Doc is so wise that nothing surprises her or that incredulity just isn’t in her repertoire of responses … but when I showed her the photo, she didn’t say anything. She just looked at it a long time, at one point lifting a finger like she might touch it and glean something, before pulling back her hand like it was too sacred. When she finally spoke, it wasn’t until we were out on the lake, halfway to the deserted building, after I begged her to sail out there with me. “Are you certain which window is hers?” was all she said, and of course I wasn’t certain at all, I just thought we would figure it out when we got there.

  I had talked her into going out there with me, and the whole way I kept watching the lake to see if maybe the Hamblin manager had sent the zedcops after us to retrieve his gondola, or if Kirk was still watching our journey across the Big Agua from the Hamblin roof with Valerie and Parker. I hoped he had stopped crying. There aren’t many people out on the lake anymore…. As it’s gotten bigger, it seems to have lost its charm. There have been accidents, people who sailed out and haven’t been seen again. Soon I had to take over at the oars when the lake was too deep for the pole. It took us a little more than half an hour to get to the abandoned apartment building that was once just a ten-minute walk away, and then we had to sail around it to dock the gondola somewhere it wouldn’t drift off. Finally we sailed in through the building’s garage, now flooded with only a few feet between the water and the ceiling. There were stairs where once had been a furnace room. We were able to get out where the water met the stairs and drag the gondola up the steps.

  Out on the water I had started to tell Doc everything about the letters I had been getting, but she raised her hand to stop me, like too much information would only prejudice a diagnosis. Truthfully I’m not certain we ever would have known which was K’s room if not for … well, if it hadn ’t been obvious. I had only seen the light in her window in the dark from a distance, when it isn’t that easy to count windows or floors, and from far away outside a building you think that you can kind of guess where something is, and then you get inside and it isn’t so clear. We kept going through one deserted room after another trying to find it before late afternoon turned to twilight, and then we found it and even Doc was impressed for once.

  It was my room, or a version of it. Articles tacked to the walls if not the same articles, books on the shelves with a lot of the same titles as mine, same Proust and Kierkegaard and Dickinson and the Brontes except now mildewed, mixed in with a lot of books in what I guess was Chinese, there was the same photo—except not in pieces—of her lover as a young student standing before the tanks. There was a child’s bedroom except it was that of an older child, about ten with a small bed instead of a crib, anime posters instead of small plastic monkeys … and no sooner do we step into the room than Doc staggers a little from the dirge in her ears, catching herself against the door with one hand and holding her forehead with the other.

  From up over the hills in the far west come the first wave of owls, still far away enough that their shadows on my back skitter up my spine like small black spiders. Reflexively I turn to face the sun through the window, squinting for sight of them and looking to my own building on the other side of the lake, hoping Valerie has scurried Kirk to safety. For a while Doc seems frozen where she stands. With a kind of hesitation I’ve never seen in her, she lays her hands on the walls and moves through the apartment slowly, from the far doorway that already darkens with night into the part of it blood-red with sunset, like she’s melting into the decomposed smear of the dead day, hands spreading out away from her until it’s like she’s scorched to the wall, face burned in the plaster.

  She doesn’t make any sound at all for a minute. Then I hear this cry—at first I think it’s coming from the room itself—and she drops to the floor. The grief on her face is … it’s like her face is trying to catch up to it, eyes and mouth so stricken they’re incapable of tears or sound, and, well, I just wish I didn’t see it. God only knows what terrible song she heard coming out of that room, and I just wish I hadn’t seen it, because some last shred of trust in me shatters when I see her fall apart like this, some small capacity for faith I didn’t even know I still had, until this moment when I know I don’t have it anymore. Doc the quietly indomitable, who tends to sick and dying houses with the kind of resolve where strength trumps sympathy every time, lies at my feet waiting for whatever she’s sensed in this room to recede just far enough away that she can finally lower all her defenses against it and break down.

  Just standing there I don’t know whether I feel more terrified or betrayed, because this isn’t my role with Doc, to comfort her. It’s her role to comfort me, and I can’t even bring myself to go near her. All I can do is crouch on the floor studying her from somewhere near the new sea level, the best I can offer is eye contact, if she wants it. She never tells me what the walls sing. She never tells me what she heard in th
e yawn of the floor beneath her. What’s the matter with you! is all I can finally scream at her out on the lake, after waiting almost an hour in that room for Doc to get herself together or for the other Kristin to show, which we both know isn’t going to happen, until finally it starts to get dark enough that I know we have to get back to the gondola if we ’re going to find our way back through the garage and across the water. “ Why are you acting like this? it ’s just another dead building …!” I’m hysterical with disillusion. The whole trip back across the water she doesn’t look at me at all, sitting in the gondola staring straight ahead in this blank way until all I can say is, I depended on you, to be better and stronger and braver and wiser than I can ever be … and then before the final fall of dark she looks straight at me, the mouth once younger than the rest of her now old, the eyes once older now ancient.

  Are you a monkey?

  No!

  Are you a boy?

  No!

  Are you a Bright Light!

  No!

  No? and my heart sinks. Then what are you? … and with great glee….

  I’m Nothing!

  he cries, clapping his hands together.

  I’m lying naked on the Laurel banks. In reality there are no such banks anymore, they’re long since underwater but in my dream there’s no lake just the banks where I lie at war with my womb….

  … it grows dark. We’re well into the hour of the owls. From out of the trees behind me I hear him come, I close my eyes and wait, feel his hands on my feet and feel him lower himself to my thighs. He puts his tongue inside me. Mao of my desire, killer of my trust: I feel his words make their way up inside me. At the moment of the most unwilling orgasm I’ve ever had, I grab him by his black Chinese hair and my water breaks—am I pregnant?—and the torrent that pours from me sweeps in its path the Chevron at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights (in reality now long gone), rushes down the street and ebbs for a minute before streaming down the Strip. The force of it tears him from me. Last I see him he’s caught in the racing flood somewhere down the boulevard, trying to keep his head above the water as his arms flail frantically to grab on to something. I laugh out loud at the sight of it. Then in the last gush here comes Bronte, finally ready to emerge, and I reach to catch her as she leaves me but, slick with afterbirth, she slips from my hands, caught in an undertow that burps her up once at Zed’s center before pulling her back down….

  I wake. I bolt upright. Because my thighs are soaked, for a minute I’m confused, certain I’ve given birth to the lake. I can still smell the dream. My heart pounds with fear. I lunge at the white waves of the bed before me to catch my daughter I’ve ejected so cruelly, all before my consciousness understands it was a dream—but I can still smell the dream. I catch my breath in the dark to wonder what’s wrong, and look out the window by my bed and, in the light of the moon, see the ripples of the lake below me. Then I realize I haven’t heard Kierkegaard’s Mama where are you, his Mama come back, and I stumble through the apartment from my bed to his.

  An amniotic fog fills the room. I can barely see him through it. The smell of birth and the lake is overpowering. I move through the vapor to his crib where he sleeps too soundly, and pick him up … he barely stirs. In his sleep his hand grasps for Kulk his missing spacemonkey, and his face glistens from the fog off the lake. I take him from his room and close his door behind me. I take him to my bed and put him on the pillow next to mine where he goes on sleeping. I place my body like a barrier between him and the window with the lake beyond it. I watch the center of the lake waiting, my heart still pounds from my dream—but now it isn’t a dream:

  the lake is coming for him.

  When I wake this morning, the hotel is quiet. There are no sounds in the hall, or in the rooms above or below me. Kirk still sleeps on the pillow … almost always he wakes before I do. I lean over him, inches from his face, and listen to his breathing, watch his chest rise and fall. I get up from the bed only kind of remembering at the last second to pull on a robe … the world’s never been as casual about my nakedness as I am. I walk out in the hall and down to the writer’s room, my ear at the door listening for the sound of old movies or even the tapping on the computer of him working. But I don’t hear anything.

  It’s still early enough that the hall lights are on except, I notice, in the east end of the hotel, and I realize this part of the building has finally lost power. I go back to my room and Kirk still sleeps on the pillow, and leaning back out the window I see the black waters of the lake have already pushed past our hotel. The lake extends north to the hills, just a sliver of the top of the peninsula still dry land.

  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.

  If there’s a higher light let it shine on me

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

  ’cause I know this sea wants to carry me

  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.

  Mama in Big Agua? Yes, Mama’s going in the Big Agua for a minute. Just for a minute, do you understand?

  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

  You are.

  You have to sit here in the boat very still. Very, very still. You have to sit here and wait for me to come back, you can’t move at all or else you could fall in—

  No Big Agua for me.

  No, no Big Agua for you. So you sit very still, OK?

  Yes.

  And I ’ll be right back for you. OK?

  Yes please.