Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

… remember in my delirium thinking when they pumped me out, Did they pump out my little girl? forgetting for a minute. Forgetting first how Kristin sailed away with my daughter in her belly, when she took the boat back all those years ago, forgetting then how over the years the blood began to slow between my legs its patterns fading, dark red webs of each month becoming more

conclusion that sometime in the century, among its madmen of all kinds,

unwoven until only a small red spider was left. Forgetting then how, in the month I finally didn’t menstruate at all, she appeared out of the lake … I watched her … was sitting on the terrace staring out over the water under the massive full moon and there in the far distance above the lake’s source, above that very place I once stepped pregnant in a strange black puddle, was a ripple, someone surfacing from nowhere, looking around and swimming toward me in the moonlight. I just sat and watched her swim toward me.

As she got closer I stood up from where I had been sitting and peered over the terrace down into the water … I could hear her now in the dark below me gasping for breath, knew she was in danger of drowning from exhaustion. In the blaze of the moon I could barely see her frantically grasping for a place to hold onto the Chateau wall … ever since the color blue vanished into one of the Lapses, the nights are so much darker, even when the moon shines. “Swim around!” I called, trying to direct her to the port on the other side, and then everything went quiet, and I thought she had gone under. “Hello?” There was no answer. “Hello!” I ran from the terrace to the other side of the old hotel, out through the transitional chamber to the entryway, out onto the stone steps near the Vault by the water … I couldn’t see anyone. “Hello?” I stood there five minutes calling, the grotto empty … and then a face came floating up to the steps like a jellyfish, barely above the surface, and I ran down the steps and fished her out. For a while she just lay there naked on the steps long gold hair splayed around her head. I kept trying to help her up but for a while she didn’t want to get up, she just wanted to lie there, so I went back into the chamber and got a blanket and came back and lay it over her, tucking it beneath her until I could coax her in.

That night she slept in the room where I used to do my readings, the I–Ching of melody-snake slithering across menstrual

among its irrational horrors, that sometime in the last century modern

blood. I laid her out on a mat, dressed in a tattered black silk robe with jade vines crawling up her body. She slept soundly … but it took me a while, to fall asleep I mean, tossing and turning … and then I woke with a start.

I sat up from my bed in the dark.

Sat listening to the dark for a contradiction, and heard none. Got up from my bed and pulled on a robe and stumbled through the outer room, over to the other room where she slept. Suddenly I just knew, I don’t know why. Suddenly it was just obvious.

“Brontë?” I said to the dark, in the doorway. When she didn’t answer, I said it again. “Brontë?”

“Yes,” a small voice answers.

Lulu Blu, otherwise known as Mistress Lulu, the Dominatrix-Oracle of the Lake, Queen of the Zed Night, once called Kristin, staggers where she stands, clutching her robe to her, still staring into the dark where the girl lies. “It’s you,” Lulu finally chokes; there’s silence and Lulu says it again—“It’s you”— and then hears from out of the dark, “Yes, I … I’m tired….” Lulu nods, still standing in the doorway. “Sorry,” the girl’s voice says in the dark, “I just need to sleep,” and Lulu keeps nodding, “thank you for taking me in …” the girl’s voice in the dark barely finishes; and Lulu turns to the outer room and goes to sit on the divan before the dead fireplace. She sits for a long time before she goes back out onto the terrace, staring out in the distance at that place in the water where Kristin vanished years ago and where Brontë emerged a few hours ago. She gets cold and returns to the fireplace where she wishes there was a fire, but she’s too tired and rattled to build one. She’s curled up there in the divan the next morning when she wakes and sees the girl out on the terrace.

Everything in Lulu aches as she stands, pulls her robe closer to her. Brontë on the terrace, long straight gold hair almost down to her waist, is still wearing the old black silk robe with jade

apocalypse had outgrown God, and after he tried in his own craziness to make

vines. Lulu watches her awhile before the girl notices. “Are you hungry?” asks the woman.

“Yes, please,” the girl answers. She looks about nineteen, which is how long it’s been since Lulu waved goodbye to Kristin in the boat and Kristin disappeared into the lake. Brontë walks in from the terrace out of the sunlight while Lulu suppresses an impulse to reach out and run a finger along her face and touch her shimmery golden hair; as though she senses this, Brontë pulls back from the other woman, feeling examined: Is she my daughter, Lulu wonders, or Kristin’s, or is there a difference? Did I conceive her and Kristin deliver her, as we both carried her for all those years? Conceived with Kirk, is she his twin? Delivered years after him, is she his younger sister? Is she his half-sister, both of them of the same father but of two mothers, who used to be one?

She’s petite, spritelike. She can’t be five feet tall, a wraith except for breasts that, on her frame, verge on the absurd. How did such a little girl get such breasts? the mother thinks, not from me. Not classically beautiful, thinks Lulu, but much prettier than I ever was … did she get that from her father? She doesn’t look anything like him — he had jetblack hair — but then Kirk didn’t either. Am I doomed to strangers for children? Are all of them to be more of the lake than of me?

Lulu cooks some eggs while Brontë sits at the kitchen table. The younger woman doesn’t say anything or seem particularly curious about the older woman, more wary than anything although suspicion doesn’t agree with her: “Nice place,” she finally allows at some point, to say something.

“I’ve lived here almost twenty years,” Lulu explains. “It was a hotel once.”

“Oh.”

“Before the lake. Movie stars and musicians stayed here. It was famous.”

me part of the calendar, a moving date unto myself, a date he had determined

The younger woman realizes she’s stumbled irrevocably into a conversation. “Were you here before the lake?” she finally asks.

She doesn’t know who I am, Lulu thinks, trying to consider this in all its aspects. Or rather: I don’t know what she knows: does she know what she knows? Just as well she doesn’t know me as Mistress Lulu … but then does she know I’m her mother? Did she really return to me by sheer accident? “What’s your name?”

The younger woman flushes, narrows her eyes. After a moment she says, “You know.”

“Tell me.”

“You know. You said it last night.”

“Tell me.”

After a moment the girl says, “Brontë.”

Lulu turns back to the eggs on the oven. “Yes, I was here before the lake. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Have you been here long?”

Brontë seems to meditate on the question. “No,” she finally answers.

“Visiting?”

“Yeah.”

Don’t pry so much, Lulu tells herself now, you’re prying. What were you doing in the water last night? “Family or friends here?” She puts the eggs on the table in front of the girl who begins devouring them. “Boyfriend?”

“No boyfriends,” Brontë says emphatically between bites. She’s sucking on slices of lemon, one after another, until it makes Lulu’s mouth sour to watch her.