Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

As she pushes the gondola by pole along the edge of the lake, people run alongside. The farther she sails, the bigger the crowd becomes, mesmerized by the spectacle of the nude woman with the pole guiding her silver gondola. After a while Kristin pushes herself beneath the inverted arc of the fallen line of the sky tram, then around the bend where the Chateau X rises up out of the water. Off to her right in the southwest she can see the Hotel Hamblin. She feels calm unlike the afternoon before when she took this same trip. Accompanying her are the melody-snakes loosed last night from her house by the fire; now homeless they slither alongside the gondola as the growing throng of observers run alongside on land. She can hear them as they brush past her, women’s voices in the lake crossing her path as if daring her to cut them in two in her image, and then there’s a school of them, all the voices she’s heard for five years, some she didn’t even know were singing to her, now slipping back and forth across her path darting across her passage as if to either clear the way or stop her, because they can’t stand to lose her, not to the lake that’s now her sister or lover or mother. Beneath the hemorrhaging sky, the snakes just beneath the water’s surface reflect red strings of blood.

The crowd on land grows. Stragglers along the shore are caught up by the others following her, until by the time she rounds the Chateau and approaches the lake’s origin there appear to be several hundred onlookers, including people who before now have never heard of the Madwoman of the Lake. No one calls or heckles, everyone is quiet. Soon Kristin puts down the pole and takes the oars to row, and as she approaches the spot she drops the oars and allows herself to drift to it, as if trusting the boat’s precision more than her own. The melody-snakes that have followed her relentlessly for the last quarter of a mile have stopped at an unseen but unbreachable border, out of earshot of the past, muted into invisibility by the lake’s hush. Kristin peers over the side of the boat. Zed is blacker and emptier than it’s ever been. Kristin looks up for a moment at the shore of the northern Laurel Bay which is now lined with people. No one calls to stop her. In the red glare from water and sky she can just make out some people holding their hands over their eyes. It’s perfectly quiet, not a voice or a song to be heard and

Wildman?

she says, leaning over the gondola. She doesn’t shout it, she lets it fall from her mouth and watches it sink. It vanishes into the pitch black of the lake and she waits. Seconds pass. A minute. Another minute and another, and then, in the pitch black where she watched her question disappear, she sees the approach of its answer. Slowly it grows before her eyes, floating up to her until it breaks the surface

Mama

and she scoops it up in her hands. She cups it in her hands and sits in the gondola looking at it, as if it’s a prayer and the gondola is a floating pew. She splashes her face with it and feels his voice run down her cheeks. For a moment she covers her eyes. She feels his voice dry on her face. She looks back down into the lake and now deep in the black water she sees something else, slowly floating up to her, another answer; and she reaches into the water and takes it as it breaks the surface.

In these five years she’s forgotten all about it. It’s a small plastic monkey in a red spacesuit with a space helmet. She thinks about that last day in the gondola five years ago, Kirk clutching in his hand the monkey he named after himself; she remembers slipping into the water and hearing his heartbeat under the water, and looking up through the water and seeing him peer over the edge of the gondola, still holding the monkeyman he called Kulk in his fingers. She remembers now the terrible emptiness of the gondola when she returned to the water’s surface a minute later, the way there had been no sign of him at all, and now she looks at the toy monkey that’s come floating up to her out of the lake and says

I’m coming

and slips her naked body, pink with the light of the red sky, over the gondola’s side. As she slips beneath the water she thinks maybe she hears someone on the shore finally break the silence of the lake and shout out No! but she isn’t certain about that, that may be in my own head. Because I also hear if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me but I look around for some sign of the melody bolder than the others, having dared to swim into this forbidden zone of the lake but I don’t see it, so the song must be in my head too … all the songs and all the No’s are in my head. I sink. I don’t swim to the hole below, I let it pull me. I didn ’t even get a good gulp of air first, I’m calm in my chest and my descent, and feel the peace that maybe comes with drowning, once the panic is over … I don’t know why I don’t panic. I look up and see the gondola above me like I saw it above me the last time I went this way, five years ago, but this time without his small head looking over the side. As I sink there rise around me the small canyon houses that went under when the lake first appeared, I can see below me the sidewalks that once lined the boulevard below me too, and around me the neighborhood where I walked years ago pregnant not much more than a week from labor, drawn here as I’m drawn now, only to find at my feet a black puddle where now is the dark hole I can see through the water’s murk, coming up at me, the opening of the lake’s birth canal, here it comes. Here it comes. Too small it would seem for anyone to slip through, and yet I

slip through anyway, drawn beyond any resistance, pushed through in a new

birth, when domination is submission and submission is domination, shaking

myself loose of the love that held me down so as to find inside me the love that

will save him, continuing down with bits of everyone I’ve ever been falling

away from me, down down down down in what I know is my own passage, as

In his sleep, the domeof his eyelids is red, like the bloody red sky of L.A. that he remembers from nine years ago, and he hears the song like he heard it that day in the Square twenty-eight years ago.

In his dream, which he has often, he’s standing there in the Square again, although it’s not clear to him whether he’s nineteen again, as he was then, or in his late forties, as he is now. He clutches her yellow dress in his hand —K, beautiful betrayer— and watches the tank roll toward him. Even looking at the famous photograph that thrilled the world, one still couldn’t know how big that tank really was.

though it’s unique to me as the same passage would be unique to someone

But when he stood there inthe Square that day twenty-eight years ago, watching it come closer, it rolled toward him like a huge metallic wave, followed by another behind it, and another behind that and another behind that.

Now in his dream the tank rolls toward him more like a giant stainless-steel egg, with another behind it. The rolling of the eggs always nauseates him; once he lurched from the dream running for the latrine, vomiting in the outer tunnel. Just as it was twenty-eight years ago, in the dream he knows that somewhere, along with the rest of the world, she’s watching. Somewhere she’s watching, was what he thought to himself on that June day, and in his dream he thinks it to himself now; and knowing this, he can die, because he’s not just dying for the freedom of man, he’s dying for the tyranny of love. Kristin, he whispers into the barrel of the tank’s gun as though it’s the opening between her legs and he’s her slave again, whispering her name that curls up into her body like smoke.