She rows to the spot; she dreads it; these are the watery coordinates of her loss and shame, and now her failure of nerve. She fears she can’t go through with this and so hopes this vision is madness, that down through the dark water there is no Other Lake on the Other Side attached to this one by a common birth canal. She drifts on the spot, pulling up the oars, and sings in a cracked, unconvinced voice
if there’s a higher light
hearing the hypnotizing Spanish horns in her head—and for a moment she stops to lean her tired self over the side of the gondola and put her ear as close to the water’s surface as the gondola will allow.
She listens for his voice.
Listens for him calling from the Other Lake on the Other Side. For a while she almost convinces herself she hears nothing, and is appalled how momentarily relieved she is, as if she would rather not have to go through whatever she has to go through to have him back; and then, confronted with her relief and guilt, and confronted with his loss all over again, she feels a despair more unnamable than she’s ever felt at any moment in these five years, which she wouldn’t have thought possible. Leaning over the side of the gondola, her face very close to the water so that the ends of her hair are wet, she begins to cry, tears dropping onto the surface of the lake until
Mama?
unmistakably. Oh dear God she says to herself, and then hears it again
Mama?
and she recoils from the lake. She stares at the black water his Mama? floating up through the dark water toward the surface like a fish. She can see it down below silvery and fluttery light, with the scales of a child’s sobbing. With the waver of his voice the word flashes in and out of view; when she lunges her hand down into the lake she feels his call brush against her fingertips before slipping away. She calls back. For a moment it sticks in her throat
Kirk?
and then she watches it fall from her mouth and sink into the lake, blue and porcelain and breathless. There’s a moment’s silence before he answers, with that question mark so insistent it’s not a question
Mama?
and then she begins rowing away. This is her great failure of nerve. Maybe it’s that she can’t bring herself to believe. Maybe it’s that she’s afraid reaching him is beyond her … and that’s unbearable, because she’s always been convinced she would do anything for him. She’s always been convinced she would hurl herself off any towering building, before any roaring airplane, in any harm’s way for him. When he was born, every instinct of self-interest seemed to give way to an instinct she never knew she had before she had him: the love of something bigger than the love of one’s own life; and now in this moment she’s failed that love.
She begins rowing very quickly from the spot, one Mama? after another floating up to the surface of the lake behind her, a school of his cries desperately swimming after her. Glancing over her shoulder she can see them. She begins weeping in a hysteria that keeps time with her rowing, until she’s rounded the bend of the Chateau X and can’t see the spot anymore behind her. She cries all the way back across the lake to her house.
That night her uterus explodes in a tantrum of blood. Hunched over the toilet she feels the presence of Kristin, her other self whom she so rejected for abandoning their son: Lulu Blu, she hears Kristin whisper from the hallway, you’re no better. Worse, actually, she goes on, I left him in the gondola that night because I was afraid for him. Now he waits on the Other Side (the century’s uterus exploding in a tantrum of water) and you leave him there again, afraid for yourself. Lulu sobs no, her womb answers a red yes, she crawls back to the mattress to paint the dreams mapped there with the scarlet of her thighs.
Once not long after Kirk was born, back when she was still Kristin, she offered God a deal. Whatever good things might be in her future, she would trade them all just for her boy to be all right. She would trade them all. She would trade every minute of happiness, every minute of fulfillment, every minute of accomplishment, all those minutes for his well-being. And then when she lost him, she thought it was God answering, No. God had it in for her, and He had gotten back at her through a helpless child, Sniveling Coward that He had always been, the Neighborhood Bully who pulls the wings off angels simply to prove He can.
And then this notion occurred to her, she didn’t know why. This notion occurred to her; she thought what if in fact she and God had make this deal—but sometime in the future? At some point in the years to come that she doesn’t know, that she never can have foreseen, because it’s a future that’s never going to come to pass, what if God took her up on her deal and in fact they’re now living out the bargain? She has been stripped of happiness, stripped of fulfillment, stripped of whatever it is she might have accomplished, so that she might be guilty, lonely, haunted by the woman she once was who now despises her: but her boy lives. Her boy waits at this very minute on another lake not so different from this one, afraid, confused, but still alive.
In her sleep she smells smoke, feels the heat.
In her sleep another song-serpent—did she leave the radio on?—hisses in from the past. In her sleep it crawls through the front door, and somewhere in the front room catches fire. Maybe because some part of her brain knows that a dream rarely has a scent (she smells the smoke) and rarely a touch (she feels the heat), she wakes. She sits up in bed slowly at first, then startled to complete consciousness by the smoke that begins to choke her. Seeing the fire, she sees herself as others have seen her, in her arrogant red dress against the blue of the lake, a red flame floating on the water. By then the fire is in the hallway where Kristin stood whispering to her a few hours before. For what seems to her an absurdly long moment, she sits on her red dreamsoaked mattress looking at the flames just beyond the door, then shakes herself from her inertia and leaps to the floor, only to realize it’s too late.
Did she leave a candle burning? Did someone sail by and toss in a torch, because it was time to burn the heretic Madwoman in Red from the hills? What’s that phenomenon, she thinks to herself, where people burst into flames? The house spontaneously combusts, its fuse lit at the end that curls into a house’s subconscious. Was the house committing suicide in a symphony of self-immolation—an act of protest, like a Buddhist monk? She can imagine nothing to be protested unless, of course, it’s her presence. Unless, of course, the house means to burn away the human mark of its disgrace.
She’s beset by more responses than she can sort through in the moments the fire allows her. Somewhere in the ember-blizzard of these responses is calm; she feels it somewhere beyond the heat, before the calm is finally interrupted by a now rather ragged instinct for self-preservation, which itself transforms to panic. The daze of her sleep finally succumbs to adrenaline. She goes to the window of her bedroom only for the sill to fracture into flame, and then the curtains go up; she leaps back from them. The inferno drops to the floor on a parachute of fire, then the floor goes up in flames. Then the bed goes up. Now smoke drops her to her knees. For a thoughtless moment she reaches to one of the bed’s blankets, itself engulfed, so as to cover herself, before she drops it and retreats. But there’s nowhere to retreat.
Perhaps it’s this that accounts for it. Perhaps it’s her abject helplessness, perhaps it’s that she finally has nowhere to go and so surrenders to the End. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with her, perhaps it’s a fluke of nature
but the lake begins to rise
after having not risen at all in months. It now rises very suddenly and visibly, by inches.
At first she thinks the house must be sinking. As if somewhere nearby a dam burst; but there is no dam; it’s a tide as mysterious as the intricate flow of her womb that manifested itself to her in the sky over Port Justine the afternoon before. Perhaps the lake comes so that it might claim Lulu before the fire can—so it has nothing to do with rescue, everything to do with possessiveness … but for whatever reason, the lake comes up over the edge of the front porch, comes through the front door into the front room, comes into
the hallway of ghosts and into the bedroom and rises up around her feet then her ankles lapping at the flaming walls around her. It brings with it a spray, Lulu’s private rain. It’s now her private lake, beneath her private sky.
The lake that was her enemy. The lake that was my fear. The lake that was the afterbirth of her dreams. The lake that preyed on my son. Now comes as ally, confessor, co-conspirator, savior.
It stops about the time it gets to her waist.
She doesn’t move, partly caught in the shock between the heat of the fire that’s given way to the cold of the water. She keeps throwing water in her face to get the stinging of the smoke out of her eyes; she doesn’t move, as if not to tempt either the lake or the house of ashes around her, until a wall suddenly gives way behind her, falling away; and she sees the lake has dropped to her thighs.
It likes her thighs and stays awhile.
Peering off in the dark where the wall has collapsed, she sees bobbing flashlights on the hillside that abutted what once was her house, and she finally dares to move toward the dark, walking up out of the water onto the new beach.
“You all right?” she hears a stranger ask in the dark, some guy she recognizes as living on the hillside above her, with his son at his elbow, only a few years older than Kirk would be now. His flashlight shines in her face until she shields her eyes with her arm. Beyond him she can now make out others on the embankment in the dark, watching: “What happened?” someone says to someone else nearby, as a woman comes up to Lulu and wraps a blanket around her. “You should get out of those clothes,” the stranger with the boy suggests, and is startled when Lulu, in a daze, drops her red dress from her body to the ground; she pulls the blanket around her and stands shivering for a while.
“You have anywhere to go?” the woman who gave her the blanket asks in the dark.
Lulu stands naked in her blanket shivering. She’s dazed enough she doesn’t register the question at first, but studies the wreckage and looks for the gondola to see if it survived. Does she have anywhere to go? the same woman asks someone else; and in the dark Lulu sees, floating silver among the black remnants of the house, the gondola. Yes, she says. I have somewhere to go.
There’s no convincing any of them, she knows, that she’s not who she’s always been in their eyes, the Madwoman in Red, even if she’s now dropped her red dress to the mud of the new shore and stands naked in the blanket. The world’s never been as casual about my nakedness as I am. When she turns to go back into the lake, a couple of people try to stop her—the woman who brought her the blanket, the man with his son—assuming she’s in some kind of shock; as calmly as possible she explains she’s quite coherent but has to retrieve the gondola. It’s imperative she save the gondola. They help her pull the gondola up onto the new embankment and tie it to a tree.
They think I started the fire, she realizes, they think I meant to go up in flames with the house. Later, when they want to take her to a shelter out in the Valley, she says no I’m staying near the water, and when she looks at the lake, the lake looks back. Are we sisters now? Lover and lover, wife and wife, wife and mistress, mistress and slave? The lake, she’s still thinking to herself hours later, sleeping on the living room floor of the woman with the blanket, saved me tonight … for what? Does it have a conscience? I thought it came for my son five years ago … did it really take me instead, and I’m just now realizing it? Lying in the dark she tries to remember now as clearly as she can what happened five years ago when she sank down through the water, Kirk’s gondola above her head, but I can’t. Is it the same lake at all? Or was the lake that came for my son the twin sister of the lake whose shores I’ve known the five years since, the lake that saved me tonight? This lake she rises from the floor in the dark of the stranger’s living room and walks to the window, staring out at the night and the glitter of moonlight on the water in the distance where her house was this lake that covets me and Lulu somehow resists the almost overpowering compulsion to run outside the house right now and down the banks to the gondola.
For a moment she’s overwhelmed. She grabs the windowsill to steady herself because she almost comprehends the huge unmeasurable love of it, the lake’s sacrifice in saving her so that it could then give her up. Saving me so I could have one more chance … and go back. She whispers in the dark through the window, You would do that for me? You would give me up so I could go back? You would do that because you love me that much, and therefore you know what it’s like for me to love my son that much? You would do that for him, because you know what he means to me?
For a moment there’s nothing but silence, and then in the night the lake answers.
She has the almost overpowering compulsion to rush to the gondola even in the dark; and realizes that in part it’s because she’s afraid if she waits then she’ll fail herself again, and fail her son again as she did the afternoon before. But as soon as that realization comes, it passes: she knows she won’t fail again. And knowing that, she returns to her place on the floor and, against the hard wood beneath her, finally sleeps.
In her sleep, the red sky stretches across the dome of her inner lids.
When she opens her eyes, she hears voices from outside the window. She turns on her side and pushes herself up from the floor, walks to the window and looks out; the sky is ablaze with blood. All along the road, down the embankment that leads to the lake, people stand in their blue clothes looking up at the clotted clouds. She looks herself for only a minute, looks around the house for her red dress and finds it nowhere: so she steps naked from the front door and walks down the hill to the water, astounded witnesses diverted from the astounding sky by the astounding woman who passes.
As she passes, someone reaches out to her as if to help or stop her. But she isn’t stopped. A crowd at the beach parts for her as she moves through them to the tree where the gondola is tied. She unties the gondola from the tree and, holding the rope in her hand, looks at the sky again to assess the storm. She pushes the gondola out in the water and gets in, and takes the pole.
The last vision the lake shows her is a vision of herself again, except she’s changed places with it. This time rising from the lake and stepping from the black atrium of an underwater geyser, among the cinders of her house that still float on the lake’s surface like slivers of ice from a black arctic, is Lulu; that’s when the naked woman in the gondola knows she’s Kristin again. She continues to watch as the vision of Lulu slowly recedes in the distance, getting smaller and smaller with all the other people on the shore that now gets farther and farther away. Lulu raises her hand in farewell and Kristin nods in farewell back, continuing to push herself out into the water with the pole.
As she pushes the gondola by pole along the edge of the lake, people run alongside. The farther she sails, the bigger the crowd becomes, mesmerized by the spectacle of the nude woman with the pole guiding her silver gondola. After a while Kristin pushes herself beneath the inverted arc of the fallen line of the sky tram, then around the bend where the Chateau X rises up out of the water. Off to her right in the southwest she can see the Hotel Hamblin. She feels calm unlike the afternoon before when she took this same trip. Accompanying her are the melody-snakes loosed last night from her house by the fire; now homeless they slither alongside the gondola as the growing throng of observers run alongside on land. She can hear them as they brush past her, women’s voices in the lake crossing her path as if daring her to cut them in two in her image, and then there’s a school of them, all the voices she’s heard for five years, some she didn’t even know were singing to her, now slipping back and forth across her path darting across her passage as if to either clear the way or stop her, because they can’t stand to lose her, not to the lake that’s now her sister or lover or mother. Beneath the hemorrhaging sky, the snakes just beneath the water’s surface reflect red strings of blood.
The crowd on land grows. Stragglers along the shore are caught up by the others following her, until by the time she rounds the Chatea
u and approaches the lake’s origin there appear to be several hundred onlookers, including people who before now have never heard of the Madwoman of the Lake. No one calls or heckles, everyone is quiet. Soon Kristin puts down the pole and takes the oars to row, and as she approaches the spot she drops the oars and allows herself to drift to it, as if trusting the boat’s precision more than her own. The melody-snakes that have followed her relentlessly for the last quarter of a mile have stopped at an unseen but unbreachable border, out of earshot of the past, muted into invisibility by the lake’s hush. Kristin peers over the side of the boat. Zed is blacker and emptier than it’s ever been. Kristin looks up for a moment at the shore of the northern Laurel Bay which is now lined with people. No one calls to stop her. In the red glare from water and sky she can just make out some people holding their hands over their eyes. It’s perfectly quiet, not a voice or a song to be heard and
Wildman?
she says, leaning over the gondola. She doesn’t shout it, she lets it fall from her mouth and watches it sink. It vanishes into the pitch black of the lake and she waits. Seconds pass. A minute. Another minute and another, and then, in the pitch black where she watched her question disappear, she sees the approach of its answer. Slowly it grows before her eyes, floating up to her until it breaks the surface
Mama
and she scoops it up in her hands. She cups it in her hands and sits in the gondola looking at it, as if it’s a prayer and the gondola is a floating pew. She splashes her face with it and feels his voice run down her cheeks. For a moment she covers her eyes. She feels his voice dry on her face. She looks back down into the lake and now deep in the black water she sees something else, slowly floating up to her, another answer; and she reaches into the water and takes it as it breaks the surface.
Our Ecstatic Days Page 7
