Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

He calls any darkness “night-time.” Goes into a dark room, it’s “night-time,” checks the apartment for pockets of night-time everywhere, peering into closets declaring “night-time” then moving onto the next. He goes through my desk, pulling open each drawer and gazing into it one after the other. Night-time, night-time. Watching over his shoulder and pondering Kulk’s silhouette on the wall behind him, he says, “God made Kulk,” dancing it in his fingers in front of my eyes for a while before adding, “but He made his shadow first.”

Since the lake, there’s been an epidemic of dying houses all over town … Doc sees all of them. Consumptive houses, malaria houses, alzheimer houses, heart-attack houses. Houses with tumors growing out of the attic or the bedroom windows or the family rooms. Dying faster than Doc can pronounce them terminal, and you see it mostly when the sun goes down and there are black patches in the hills and skyline where once were lights … an urbanological mourning, a city bound and gagged in the black memorial armbands of lightless windows and doors.

One late afternoon, out on the shores of Laurel Cove where it first appeared, not far from where we saw the owls the afternoon at the fair, I was walking with Kirk holding his hand, and we heard music coming out of the lake. First it was only a shred of a melody and then there was another, two melodies interweaving, and then suddenly there was a flood of them, an outburst so loud Kirk put his hands over his ears. The music was accompanied by a light, first a small glowing string and then another, and then a mass of them, each melody snaking its way outward from a place in the lake just above its source, until the whole lake was shimmering with light and music, melody-snakes wiggling their way out into the city. I kept looking around to see if anyone else was out there to hear it and see it like we did, but we were alone for a minute, like everyone in the city had vanished. And although at first I thought it was the sound of all the songs of dying buildings escaping from the walls that held them, all the female voices that Doc always heard, it was more like they were coming from deep under the water. Like they had broken through from whatever was on the other side of that hole at the bottom from where the lake had come.

When I was a kid back on the little island where I grew up in the Sacramento delta, the sound of the radio was the sound of tourists who came and left, sound of freedom and desertion … all the strangers who could come to the little Chinese ghost town where I was a prisoner and then leave on the ferry the next day. Sometimes Kirk and I find a song on the radio that we sing together, there was one by this chick band from the late Nineties, guitars going off like terrorist bombs and girls singing dum dum da dee dee dum dum da dum doo! All the little babies go, Oh! oh! I want to! and for some reason this one underground station played it a lot for a couple weeks, and every time at the chorus Kirk and I would jump up from the bed and shout at each other, “All the little babies go, Oh! oh! I want to!”

Like me when I was a kid, Kirk used to never cry, he only started lately. I think somehow he got it in his head the music is the sound of freedom and desertion and that I’m going to disappear. I go in the next room and he gets it in his head I’ll never come back. Suddenly he’s wailing for me, and it ’s just lately I’ve realized that, as much as anything else, his call of “Mama?” in the middle of the night is nothing more or less than to make certain I’m still here, that I haven’t vanished from his life. I don’t know where he got this idea he would be left all alone in the world. I wrack my brain trying to figure what I might have done that made him think this, but I can’t think of anything, and I wonder if it’s like his premature empathy — a sense that, sooner or later, everything goes away.

After Kirk was a year old, the lake had gotten big enough there was a fog off the water in the mornings and evenings that climbed the Hollywood moors and wound through the city. A big chunk of the hills broke off and tumbled down into the lake and onto its shore, including a huge rock as big as a house that landed near where Kirk and I would blow bubbles. Of course I couldn ’t get it out of my head, what might have happened if we had been there when this monster rock came crashing down. I’m haunted by such possibilities hour on the hour. Kirk always likes to throw rocks in the lake so I told him to go throw this one. He looked at it with suspicion, then surmounting his doubt went over and put his hands on the towering rock and pushed with all his might while I laughed. “Too big,” he finally announced solemnly, his spirit far bigger than the rest of him, far bigger than I.

I’m not a religious person but after Kirk was born I started praying. Every night, “Dear God do whatever you want to me but don’t let anything bad happen to my boy.” I think about all the stuff I’ve done, running way from “home”—such as it was, my drunken uncle who ran the town bar — the lies I told, guys I fucked in their sleep to suck out their dreams with my thighs and carry them off splashing inside me. I tally it all up and it occurs to me if God wants to punish me then my prayers have given him a pretty good hint how to go about it. And now God’s just one more Predator out there I have to protect my kid from.

Around the time Kirk was eighteen months old, the city finally sent some divers down into the lake to try and figure out what was in the hole at the bottom. This got a lot of attention, half the city there watching the divers in their black wetsuits slip over the side of the boat and disappear and then come back up. Every time they came back up there seemed to be much conferring back and forth with various officials on the boat. Everyone figured there would be some kind of press conference or announcement at the end. But there was no announcement, instead everyone on the boat immediately hurried to their cars and drove off — pretty quickly it seemed to me. Since then, no city officials come to the lake anymore, but for a week or so afterward everyone else who had been at the lake would stand staring at the water, like some answer would come floating up any minute….

I don’t know so much about science or higher math, but in the more complicated equations I always assume there must be a wildness factor somewhere … or maybe that’s what math tries to avoid. I guess maybe math and science are about factoring out the chaos not factoring it in, determining a definite value for everything. Math and science don’t allow for the possibility of true chaos, only for an unknown order that calls itself chaos. I mean, if that butterfly flapping his wings in South America twenty years ago really did cause the toaster to burn my English muffin this morning, that isn ’t randomness, that’s cause-and-effect of a truly cosmic kind, the exact opposite of chaos.

My kid has his own way with numbers, his own mathematics. “How many bites of that cereal have you had?” I ask him, trying to get him to eat his breakfast, and his eyes narrow in that thoughtful calculating way they do: “Forty,” he answers. He doesn ’t even know what forty is. You have not had forty bites, I say, and he thinks some more and says, “Seven.” You’ve eaten seven bites? I ask, dubious, and he thinks some more very carefully before announcing, “Twenty-one.” The three-year-old poet in him likes the sound of forty and seven and twenty-one, and adds and subtracts them accordingly, dividing night-robots in the hills by the size of the moon, adding the number of day-robots in the cage of the sun squared, figuring the wondrous equations of his little existence.