Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

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 it’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. Eightdays 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

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 thelake 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—