Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

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 ina 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