Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

What’s happening? I can remember saying all those years ago, when I was first here, in this moment, managing to say it between the pain. But this time excuse me

  and the doctor stared at me

  but it’s all metaphor anyway

  as if I was a huge talking pea-pod about to split

  it’s all random anyway I went on a conceit, based on the birth of a religious philosopher who wasn’t even born in the Year One but probably the Year Minus-Four or sometime around then, so it’s silly to get hung up on the math of the thing when everyone else has accepted the symbolism of it

  and in a dream the doctor might have accepted such an exchange from a young girl in labor, but since this wasn’t a dream, since the currents of memory and time unleashed over the years by the sinking of the lake in fact had carried me back to this actual moment, the doctor stared at me in astonishment. I think the nurse was too confused to feel vindicated. In the meantime I realized I was about to deliver him again, my boy … would I stop it,

  apocalypse, with its dates not sequential like an ordinary calendar but

  if I could? If I could, would I choose never to have had him at all, if it would undo the next twenty-eight years? Of course not. Not even a little, not for a minute. I looked at the doctor. Please deliver them both this time.

  “What?”

  There are two … there’s a girl. Deliver them both this time.

  He looked at the nurse, the nurse looked at him. The next contraction came and when it subsided I wanted to say, Cut me open this time, to get both of them … but truthfully I don’t know whether I managed it. When the pain of the contraction passed I was suddenly so exhausted, I felt all the forty-some years of my present, even returned as I was by the Lapse to my seventeen-year-old past … and I think I must have dozed a little because I opened my eyes just in time to hear the voices of the doctor and nurse fade, to hear fading in the hall of the hospital on the way to the delivery room the happy-new-years and the doctor’s lone, stubborn Happy New Millennium—you’re a year late, someone says; I’m not, he says, zero isn’t the number before one, zero is …—to see the walls of the hallway fade back to the walls of the Chateau. Cut them out I tried to whisper before the lake carried me back to the present.

  The last of the Lapses was just a few days after that … carried me back to a week and half before he was born … I was walking, pregnant to burst, along Santa Monica Boulevard, past little Italian eateries, xerox stores, travel agencies, mailbox rentals, gay fetish shops, video outlets, cappuccino stands, cars driving by, all of it as vivid as can be, in every last detail, I was singing to him in my head our little song that I had just heard for the first time a week or so before, riding a bus on Pacific Coast Highway if there’s a higher light remember this one Kirk? almost forgetting it’s all gone now, all long submerged. Then I was walking up Crescent

  freefloating, far removed dates overlapping in some cases, consecutive dates

  Heights toward Sunset Boulevard, looking at the old Hollywood apartments with their turrets, trees, realizing soon they would all be under water. It was as if I was wandering aimlessly, although of course I know it wasn’t aimless. If it were aimless the lake and this Lapse wouldn’t have brought me back to it, since it’s the personally momentous remembrances the Lapses resurrect, it’s the major harbors dotting the shore of life’s recollection where memory docks as it’s carried back in the lake’s vortex…. I crossed Sunset and kept walking up Crescent Heights, an awful long way for a pregnant girl due to give birth any minute … and then at some point I stopped, there where Crescent Heights became Laurel Canyon Boulevard … stopped at someone’s lawn and looked down at my feet and there, at the tip of my toes, it was. Nothing more than a small black puddle, not more than a few inches across. There it was, long before it seemed to just suddenly appear that September morning nine months later: chaos: there it was and I stared at it, could almost see it grow as I watched, until it was almost a foot across, and I tried to bend over to look, to peer into it and see into its source but I was so huge I couldn’t. I couldn’t bend over, all I could do was just stand there and watch it get a little bigger with every passing second, almost imperceptibly. I was standing in the very birth of the lake as it spread around my feet. And I turned and started walking away as fast as I could, looking over my shoulder as if it would follow me, which in a way it did and

  then I blinked and

  the Lapse was over, and I was back on my Chateau terrace staring out at black war almost as far as I could see. In the distance was the war ship that sailed into L.A. Bay ten years ago and dropped anchor and hasn’t moved since or shown a single sign of life … there on the terrace I lay my hands on my belly to feel its vacancy. The next night I scored from one of my last clients some

  separated by the length of the room in other cases, with apparently senseless

  of the lapsinthe that’s been going around and took the first dose of the sepia-colored evilixir, adding another every night after that….

  Sometimes, hovering in the ether between existence and non, I talk to him. Don’t know whether it’s the lapsinthe talking … but I know it’s him right away although now he would be in his late-twenties … there he is sitting beside me saying Mama don’t die and maybe that’s what pulls me back. Sometimes we talk about all the things I would have told him if I had had the chance, sometimes we have no idea what to talk about at all but it doesn’t matter, we might talk of death or God … does anyone ever care so much about the notion of God, whatever she actually thinks about it, as when she has a child? Isn’t it when you have a child that you really need to understand the whole business of God, the whole business of death and the soul? People get to the end of their lives and say they’re not afraid of death … but even in the course of my many tentative suicides I’m afraid to death. To not be at least a little afraid of death you have to have no imagination whatsoever. It isn’t a matter of pain, pain doesn’t frighten me, of course it’s the prospect of nothingness, into which will pass not only one’s own life but everyone else’s as I’ve known it. What I feel for my boy will pass into nothingness, and it’s intolerable: My love for you will not die with me, I promise or plead, or fume at him in our conversations … but the question in his eyes remains: and I see it. I read it. Will she abandon me again? it says.

  I know him right away, all these years later, in these moments when we talk near death’s beach. All these years haven’t changed the immediately identifiable beauty of him. All these years haven’t altered the memory of how beautiful he was … but they’ve left me to wonder a terrible thing, which is whether I would have loved him quite so much if he hadn’t been so beautiful. I calculate absurd impossible hypotheses, transferring his soul to the body and face of some little boy not so beautiful, then try to

  timelines running from top to bottom leading him to the inescapable

  measure the love, testing my heart. Did my own mother not love me because I wasn’t beautiful? of course I hope I see his beauty through the prism of love rather than love him through the prism of beauty, but how can I be certain? Kirk? I say to him from where I lie in this ether on the edge of life Kirk I reach to him, and there flashes some small confusion across his face as if he almost knows his own name but not quite; but not quite knowing, he reaches back anyway. Night-time he answers … our fingers brush….

  Morning now, after writing all night … air raid siren. Has to be a test, right? they ought to announce when they’re going to have a test … all the gulls over the water scatter and swirl at the sound. Walk out onto my terrace, listen to the siren, watch the birds…. OK now: very slowly, very casually, as inconspicuously as possible, turn to look and see if they’re there…. yes. Fuck. Why don’t they go away? Why don’t they leave me alone? The hillsides behind the Chateau encamped with all the people … are there fewer? Maybe there are fewer. Maybe they’re starting to go away, maybe they’re starting to give up on their lost Saint Kristin of the Lake, I thought the cult went the way of
the first Lapse years ago … but the legend persists. “I’m not her!” I even called to some of them months ago when they sailed out here on a small flotilla, prostrated before the Chateau in their boats. Kristin wasn’t a saint, I wanted to tell them, she was only a mom, the other me I sent back to undo the thing she and I did years ago, when we abandoned our son on the lake….

  … remember in my delirium thinking when they pumped me out, Did they pump out my little girl? forgetting for a minute. Forgetting first how Kristin sailed away with my daughter in her belly, when she took the boat back all those years ago, forgetting then how over the years the blood began to slow between my legs its patterns fading, dark red webs of each month becoming more

  conclusion that sometime in the century, among its madmen of all kinds,

  unwoven until only a small red spider was left. Forgetting then how, in the month I finally didn’t menstruate at all, she appeared out of the lake … I watched her … was sitting on the terrace staring out over the water under the massive full moon and there in the far distance above the lake’s source, above that very place I once stepped pregnant in a strange black puddle, was a ripple, someone surfacing from nowhere, looking around and swimming toward me in the moonlight. I just sat and watched her swim toward me.

  As she got closer I stood up from where I had been sitting and peered over the terrace down into the water … I could hear her now in the dark below me gasping for breath, knew she was in danger of drowning from exhaustion. In the blaze of the moon I could barely see her frantically grasping for a place to hold onto the Chateau wall … ever since the color blue vanished into one of the Lapses, the nights are so much darker, even when the moon shines. “Swim around!” I called, trying to direct her to the port on the other side, and then everything went quiet, and I thought she had gone under. “Hello?” There was no answer. “Hello!” I ran from the terrace to the other side of the old hotel, out through the transitional chamber to the entryway, out onto the stone steps near the Vault by the water … I couldn’t see anyone. “Hello?” I stood there five minutes calling, the grotto empty … and then a face came floating up to the steps like a jellyfish, barely above the surface, and I ran down the steps and fished her out. For a while she just lay there naked on the steps long gold hair splayed around her head. I kept trying to help her up but for a while she didn’t want to get up, she just wanted to lie there, so I went back into the chamber and got a blanket and came back and lay it over her, tucking it beneath her until I could coax her in.

  That night she slept in the room where I used to do my readings, the I-Ching of melody-snake slithering across menstrual

  among its irrational horrors, that sometime in the last century modern

  blood. I laid her out on a mat, dressed in a tattered black silk robe with jade vines crawling up her body. She slept soundly … but it took me a while, to fall asleep I mean, tossing and turning … and then I woke with a start.

  I sat up from my bed in the dark.

  Sat listening to the dark for a contradiction, and heard none. Got up from my bed and pulled on a robe and stumbled through the outer room, over to the other room where she slept. Suddenly I just knew, I don’t know why. Suddenly it was just obvious.

  “Brontë?” I said to the dark, in the doorway. When she didn’t answer, I said it again. “Brontë?”

  “Yes,” a small voice answers.

  Lulu Blu, otherwise known as Mistress Lulu, the Dominatrix-Oracle of the Lake, Queen of the Zed Night, once called Kristin, staggers where she stands, clutching her robe to her, still staring into the dark where the girl lies. “It’s you,” Lulu finally chokes; there’s silence and Lulu says it again—“It’s you”—and then hears from out of the dark, “Yes, I … I’m tired….” Lulu nods, still standing in the doorway. “Sorry,” the girl’s voice says in the dark, “I just need to sleep,” and Lulu keeps nodding, “thank you for taking me in …” the girl’s voice in the dark barely finishes; and Lulu turns to the outer room and goes to sit on the divan before the dead fireplace. She sits for a long time before she goes back out onto the terrace, staring out in the distance at that place in the water where Kristin vanished years ago and where Brontë emerged a few hours ago. She gets cold and returns to the fireplace where she wishes there was a fire, but she’s too tired and rattled to build one. She’s curled up there in the divan the next morning when she wakes and sees the girl out on the terrace.

  Everything in Lulu aches as she stands, pulls her robe closer to her. Brontë on the terrace, long straight gold hair almost down to her waist, is still wearing the old black silk robe with jade

  apocalypse had outgrown God, and after he tried in his own craziness to make

  vines. Lulu watches her awhile before the girl notices. “Are you hungry?” asks the woman.

  “Yes, please,” the girl answers. She looks about nineteen, which is how long it’s been since Lulu waved goodbye to Kristin in the boat and Kristin disappeared into the lake. Brontë walks in from the terrace out of the sunlight while Lulu suppresses an impulse to reach out and run a finger along her face and touch her shimmery golden hair; as though she senses this, Brontë pulls back from the other woman, feeling examined: Is she my daughter, Lulu wonders, or Kristin’s, or is there a difference? Did I conceive her and Kristin deliver her, as we both carried her for all those years? Conceived with Kirk, is she his twin? Delivered years after him, is she his younger sister? Is she his half-sister, both of them of the same father but of two mothers, who used to be one?

  She’s petite, spritelike. She can’t be five feet tall, a wraith except for breasts that, on her frame, verge on the absurd. How did such a little girl get such breasts? the mother thinks, not from me. Not classically beautiful, thinks Lulu, but much prettier than I ever was … did she get that from her father? She doesn’t look anything like him—he had jetblack hair—but then Kirk didn’t either. Am I doomed to strangers for children? Are all of them to be more of the lake than of me?

  Lulu cooks some eggs while Brontë sits at the kitchen table. The younger woman doesn’t say anything or seem particularly curious about the older woman, more wary than anything although suspicion doesn’t agree with her: “Nice place,” she finally allows at some point, to say something.

  “I’ve lived here almost twenty years,” Lulu explains. “It was a hotel once.”

  “Oh.”

  “Before the lake. Movie stars and musicians stayed here. It was famous.”

  me part of the calendar, a moving date unto myself, a date he had determined

  The younger woman realizes she’s stumbled irrevocably into a conversation. “Were you here before the lake?” she finally asks.

  She doesn’t know who I am, Lulu thinks, trying to consider this in all its aspects. Or rather: I don’t know what she knows: does she know what she knows? Just as well she doesn’t know me as Mistress Lulu … but then does she know I’m her mother? Did she really return to me by sheer accident? “What’s your name?”

  The younger woman flushes, narrows her eyes. After a moment she says, “You know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You know. You said it last night.”

  “Tell me.”

  After a moment the girl says, “Brontë.”

  Lulu turns back to the eggs on the oven. “Yes, I was here before the lake. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Have you been here long?”

  Brontë seems to meditate on the question. “No,” she finally answers.

  “Visiting?”

  “Yeah.”

  Don’t pry so much, Lulu tells herself now, you’re prying. What were you doing in the water last night? “Family or friends here?” She puts the eggs on the table in front of the girl who begins devouring them. “Boyfriend?”

  “No boyfriends,” Brontë says emphatically between bites. She’s sucking on slices of lemon, one after another, until it makes Lulu’s mouth sour to watch her.

  “You don’t like b
oys?”

  Well, not in that way, the girl thinks to herself. I like them

  through his arcane and unhinged calculations but the meaning of which

  all right, but not in that way. Actually I’m into girls—and I almost say it, as much for the shock value, you know? Because actually at this point I’m a bit afraid of this woman cooking me breakfast, whoever she is. I’m trying to act cool and it’s true about the girls but if I were to say it, it would only be to try and perhaps intimidate her back a bit, though as I’ll find out soon enough that’s hardly the sort of thing that would. Intimidate her, that is. So I don’t say it, and the way she keeps checking out my chest just makes me think all the more perhaps I shouldn’t say it, because at this point I still can’t tell about her, here I am out in this old hotel out in the middle of this lake stuck here for the moment and also, to be honest, not all that ready to leave, it seems a pretty mega place really, a terrace you can walk out and see a big part of the bay, water stretching far out to sea in the west, hills curving ’round to the north and that big battleship or whatever it is out in the distance, the one tall building that’s not gone under. It’s all something to see isn’t it and I’ll never get tired of it, so already I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind so much not having to leave right away.

  Even from the first the Mistress, she seems a bit off, I must say, as much as I come to love her. Naturally later I understand some of it a bit better, later clients they’ll tell me there was a time not so many years ago she was the most powerful woman in the territory with an army of submissives, and then there’s all the religious business going on ’round her, but I don’t know what her story is this first morning except she’s called me a name I’m not really sure is mine and she’s checking out my chest, which I’m selfconscious about anyway. So they’re a bit big. If I was taller they wouldn’t seem so big. It’s not really they’re so big it’s that the rest of me is small. My chest and height I’m selfconscious about. If it was up to me I’d like to take a bit off the front and put it on top.