Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

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 hadalmost 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, becauseshe 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.

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.