Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  if there’s a higher light,

  let it shine on me through the trees

  and she pulls up her dress

  ‘cause I know this sea

  wants to carry me

  it’s a sweet, sweet sound she sings

  for my release …

  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

  catch you next time Mama, but now I’ve got places to go, things to do….

  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

  you said Tyrone is a train—

  Yes Tyrone is a train, she answers, but the tugboat is named Tyrone too, and he’s sailing along the shore of the lake, and on the beach is a little boy named Kirk

  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….

  Tyrone the Tugboat! I want to sail away with you!

  Sometimes, when Lulu had almost forgotten Bronte was still there, her long unborn daughter would wake her: I’m still here. Lulu believes Bronte has come to sense that her twin brother has been gone awhile. She hopes that Bronte doesn’t hate her as Lulu has come to hate herself. But after Lulu separated herself from Kristin, she was stricken by the idea that she had cast her daughter into exile as well. Now Lulu lies in the dark and howls softly to her belly, waiting for an answer.

  A week after having the vision of Kierkegaard flying with the owls, Lulu sails out to Port Justine. From time to time she puts down the oars and unwraps the telescope, searching the sky for him. A western fog comes in from the sea through the Wilshire Straits to the west. Once Justine was a billboard on La Cienega Boulevard, advertising Justine herself, a big inflatable doll of a blonde who wasn’t famous for anything except being blonde and famous and bigger than anything in L.A. except her breasts, which were bigger than she was. There isn’t much of Justine left anymore, most of the billboard having floated away long ago. From one upper corner of the billboard, the top of her blonde hair still blows in the wind off the water.

  When Lulu casts her line at Port Justine and the Chinese dockhand pulls in her gondola, he takes her hand and she looks into his eyes and the first thing she thinks of aren’t the letters she got five years ago but her hometown where she grew up, where she was still Kristin … tiny Chinatown up in the Sacramento delta on the tiny island called Davenhall, where she was raised by her uncle in the town tavern and it was full of Chinese ghosts that the old Chinese women claimed they could see caught in the high branches of the island trees lining mainstreet … so Lulu has never seen a beautiful Chinese man before this moment, she didn’t know there were any….

  … so beautiful that for a minute it distracts her from why she’s come, which is to take her telescope and climb the rungs up alongside the billboard to the top, in order to get a better view of the distant horizon … it distracts her, the beauty of him. For a moment she betrays her quest to find her son for the distraction of the dockhand’s beauty and the flash of confusion across his eyes; and then she knows it’s him. That confusion gives him away and, who knows, maybe in turn something about her reminds him of his own Kristin—beautiful K—after all, even with all that labialjewel stuff, maybe something about Lulu is just enough like his own Kristin for them to have shared a name once, for their addresses to have been crossed once, for Lulu-when-she-wasKristin to have moved through the other’s apartment once and seen all the walls that were a little like her own, for her to have felt the presence of a lost child, like hers.

  Taking her hand as she steps onto the dock, he barely holds it. Rather her hand just rests in his; that’s when she notices it.

  She can’t help looking, because she thinks at first her eyes are playing a trick on her. Lodged in the middle of his hand is a piece of rounded glass, like a monocle, or the lens of the telescope she carries. As if she could lift his hand to the sky above her and look through it for her son. With the tips of his fingers holding hers, to her astonishment she can see right through the hand’s small window the dock at their feet, interrupted only by blood vessels woven through the glass like red strands. The hand is virtually useless, she realizes now; he does all the work of pulling in boats with the other one.<
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  He sees her looking at the glass hole in his hand and lets go of her. With his good hand he ties the silver gondola to the dock.

  Since the lake came, rising to the bottom of the billboard, Justine has spread out into a flotilla, a lily pad of small shops and food stands and a pay phone. A couple of petrol pumps offer the last chance for gas between the Hollywood Hills and the ghetto that’s taken over the top floors of the shopping center rising from the water like a massive gray whale half a mile away. He doesn’t say anything, tying her boat to the dock. “Can anyone climb up there?” and she starts to point at the last of Justine’s platinum locks when she loses her footing on the dockside bobbing violently from the evening tide; he catches her arm, and she would bet he thinks she did it on purpose.

  He waves at the billboard. Be my guest. Off his glass hand flashes a glint of the silver sun.

  Lulu sticks the telescope under her arm and, clutching the rope rail, follows the footbridge that rocks and sways with the water. When she gets to the more stable scaffolding of the billboard itself, she looks back to see him still watching her. She sticks the telescope in back of her red dress where it ties and starts up the side of the billboard, and at some point looks down and the height frightens her a moment; she almost loses her grip. As far as she can tell, he doesn’t flinch. But he’s still watching when she gets to the top, both fascinated and hesitant, as if he’s a man who never looks up but can’t help himself now.

  At the top of Justine, at the eye of the city’s panorama, with the flooded skyscrapers of Wilshire Boulevard rising to the south and the mansion-islands of West Hollywood and Hancock Park to the north and east, and the domes of Baghdadville to the west, the wind is much stronger. There isn’t really all that much to hang on to, just a narrow walkway running the length of the billboard with a small handrail—and as Lulu turns to where the fog comes in from the sea, now lit red by the setting sun meeting the red lake in a bloody swirl, there splashed across the horizon she sees it, the same dark red advertisement of her subconscious she’s seen the first morning of every monthly cycle, hovering over the city. Far above the lake, for a third time she nearly loses her balance and, below, the man watching her lurches forward slightly, arms slightly outstretched as if he actually would try to catch her.

  Overwhelmed by the menstrual vortex of water and fog, rocked by the red wind trying to rip her from the billboard where she clings to the flimsy rail of the walkway, she suddenly flashes back on the moment five years ago when she reached the hole at the lake’s bottom, with the silver gondola above her head where Kirk was being kidnapped by an owl. She remembers that she was already wondering how she was going to get back up to the surface before her lungs burst; she was trying not to panic. She could feel the pull of a riptide and the push of a current, the hole drawing her in and turning her back, and even now she’s not really certain whether going into the hole was her idea or its idea; but she distinctly remembers the loss of control and that then she did panic: the opening didn’t seem nearly big enough. But she slipped through suddenly in a dilated rush, and on the other side she was … she was … back in the lake. She had swum down into the hole and, on the other side, found herself coming back up out of the hole, swimming up toward the gondola.

  At the time, and all the time since, she thought she must have just gotten confused. She assumed she just got turned around, what with currents and tides coming and going. But now up here on top of Justine, hanging on to the rail in this red wind, with her blood splattered across the sky, she suddenly knows something she didn’t until now: that she wasn’t confused. That she wasn’t turned around. That she was pulled through the opening from one lake into another just like it, just like it in every way, every way except one, and that one difference was that on this other lake, there was another silver gondola just like on the first lake—except that this was a gondola without her son.

  In the thrall of the wind and the red sky, there at the top of the billboard she feels hysteria lapping at her mind, first a small swell then rocking her harder and harder: suddenly she understands that the vision of the boy and the owls given to her by the lake has led her here to this vantage point at this place in this moment beneath this sky so that, beneath the red heavens above, she could have this revelation of another lake and, on it, her son, still waiting there even now. Understanding this with more clarity than she’s ever understood anything, she feels the coming hysteria and an irresistible urgency to get off the billboard; but when she moves to climb down, the red wind threatens to blow her off, and finally all she can do is lie flat and wait. Lying flat on her back, she slips off her red dress and ties herself to the rail with it, although this is more instinctive than any kind of cool collected action: she’s in a trance because, lying there flat on her back staring up at the sky and the wind, all she can think is that back through that hole at the bottom of the lake, back on the other side of that opening, on the Other Lake she left behind five years ago, her wildman is still there sitting in the gondola looking around, still trying to be brave, still waiting for his mother to come back. He’s been waiting what’s been five years on this side of the hole, on this lake, although who knows how long it’s been on his side, five minutes or five seconds; but he sits there now waiting as it gets darker and darker, calling “Mama?” and gazing over the gondola’s side. The more Lulu thinks about this up there on top of the billboard, the more she knows it to be true. Lying there in the wind beneath the endometrial sky, hysteria finally begins to recede. But the realization of what happened five years ago doesn’t recede with it.

  That night the red storm blows across the lake while she stands on her front porch staring east to where she left her son in the gondola five years ago, promising she would be right back. She waits for the storm to pass but it blows all night and, watching, she lashes herself to the porch with sheets from her bed as she lashed herself to Justine that afternoon with her dress; she can’t bear to abandon him again. She’s torn between two sons, the one she’s seen flying with the owls and the one down beyond the uterus of the lake on the other side, in the gondola still waiting for her.

  In the morning she wakes chilled and soaked, still bound to the porch and having slept through the rain in a blizzard of dreams, she who used to never dream. She can’t be certain whether the fever that wracks her is the fever of dreams or the fever of rains, and she finally undoes all the wet saturated knots of the sheets to stumble into the house and fall on the bed. The last time she was this cold was the night five years ago she lowered herself from the gondola into the lake; and as she takes off all her wet clothes and wraps her nude body in several blankets and sleeps again, in her sleep she sees him, still waiting for her in the gondola, calling to her

  Mama?

  and she wakes to a bed drenched in fever. She smells the dreams like wet ash on the mattress. She sniffs the mattress up and down from the foot of the bed to the head and sometimes catches a whiff of the lake at the juncture where the fresh water meets the sea, sometimes a whiff of the wet wood of oars, and there at the mattress’northeastern quadrant is the smell of him. It’s there. She had forgotten how he smelled but now, this afternoon, in the sweat of her dreams she remembers, because the wet stain of memory is there on the mattress. The mattress has become a map of her dreams and their remorse, longing, rage, desolation. For the rest of the afternoon she lies naked on the bed with her head in that one spot, one side of her face to the mattress so she can smell him, and when she falls asleep yet again, the smell of him is all she dreams. She wakes to a call

  Mama?

  and hears it so distinctly that for a moment she believes he’s there in the house. She believes he’s fallen asleep in his bed in another room and that he calls out to her like he used to back at the Hamblin. She sits up with a start in the dark and listens, but the call doesn’t come again until she falls back to sleep.

  Her fever has passed but it’s exhausted her. She lays back down but every time she falls asleep on the map of
dreams she wakes to his call, until even in her fatigue there’s nothing she can do but pull on some clothes, stumble out to the porch of the house, loosen the line of the gondola and get in slowly, wearily pushing herself with the pole east along the coastline of the Hollywood Hills to that place on the lake she last went five years ago. Although it’s not much more than a mile from where she lives, she’s avoided this part of the lake all these years and dreads it now.

  The shoreline has changed a little since then, the lake having risen farther down what was once the Strip, now submerged. Rowing along the Hollywood cliffs she sees newly abandoned patches of the hills, empty houses and what were once chic little lanes that now disappear into water. Several members of a tribe of nomads, identifiable by their lack of either blue attire or Lulu’s subversive red, run alongside the water following the gondola for a while before they give up and turn back. Around a bend in the coast she sees the spires of the old Chateau X hotel; as dusk falls she can see lit candles darting in the castle’s top windows. From the top of the hill above the Chateau the sky tram erected just a few years ago launches itself out over the water, the Nichols Canyon Line that runs to the Fairfax station in the east and then to the Old Cahuenga station beyond; plunging south into the lake in the distance is the Port Justine Line that was begun but never finished. Not far from the coast there still bobs on the lake’s surface the remnants of the sky tram shuttle that plummeted into the water ten months ago when the line broke, drowning nine people including two children. Forty-five minutes later the terrain becomes familiar to her in the twilight, minus the empty fair tents she so distinctly remembers as blowing on the Laurel Canyon beaches that evening that now seems like it was just a month ago, a week, an hour.