I’ll be gone just a minute.
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.
I love you, Kirk.
Mama come back?
Right back.
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.
2009
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.
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 i
t’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
Our Ecstatic Days Page 5
