Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

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, sheknows, 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 stretchesacross 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.