Steve Erickson: Our Ecstatic Days

The day was darkening into evening and she was seriously considering a dash to the hotel when instead, in a slight delirium, she opened her suitcase to pull out her father’s manuscript, carefully packed among the shoes and underwear. It wasn’t there. By now she wasn’t quite lucid enough to be sure whether this surprised her. She tried to think of when she last looked for the manuscript but, dazed by her time on the train, having lost track of exactly how long she had been traveling, she couldn’t remember seeing it since New York. Trying to think the situation through as rationally as possible, she was beginning to doze again when she was awakened by a lurch; as lightning fell, the train slowly began pulling away from the old hotel. Soon the storm was behind her and tiny houses glittered in the distance. Sagebrush blew south. Snow was on the far northern mountains.

The aisles of the train remained dark and empty. After being awake most of the night, watching the Mojave marshlands outside her window glisten in the light of the full moon, not until the early morning hours did she finally sleep. At dawn the train slowed again, finally pulling into what she now believed was indeed the end of the line. At the port of San Gabriel she tore into a sandwich and some fries, then waited for the afternoon ferry that sailed her further up the lake into Los Angeles; stretched out on a plastic bench on the lower deck, she actually slept. The ferry continued through the night and by dawn the next day pulled out onto the greater lake, which she found instantly familiar. Around

on, all I can do is keep swimming up, all I can do is swim on up and up to it, I

noon she reached Los Feliz. The abandoned observatory loomed in the dark hills above. Any number of men were happy to offer her a ride but she held out for another woman, an older psychotherapist who drove her along the serrated shoreline from canyon to canyon as her passenger tried to explain with some difficulty exactly where she needed to get to. On the winding dirt road through the hills it was nearly an hour to the mouth of Laurel Canyon, not far from where the end of Hollywood Boulevard had been when she left; given the transformation of the landscape she had to get her bearings quickly, her eyes searching for whatever reference points she could still recognize. Now she knew she had no more time. With nothing else to do but leave her bags there at the side of the road, she rushed down the southern knoll in the direction of where her old West Hollywood neighborhood had been, crashing through the thicket and searching for a path she somehow knew would be there. She could make out the lake through the trees. As she hurried down the banks to the lakeside, the sound of loons echoed around her in the growing fog; in the wind on the banks of the lake she could see flapping the tents from an abandoned fair. Empty tents billowed and collapsed in a long dark row, black mouths blowing out over the water. Reaching the

end of the path out of breath she emergedout onto the shore of the lake just in time to stop, look around and raise her hand to wave … and then to see Kristin

swim up up and up to finally break the surface of the water and, in a strangled gasp for air,

take hold of the boat … and for the moment Kristin doesn’t open her eyes. She feels the wood of the gondola in her arms, feels the evening air around her. The last bit of sun to the west splashes across one side of her face, throbs through the lid of one eye — and she won’t look. She keeps her eyes closed because, for that moment, as long as her eyes are closed, then, just as she clings to the very boat itself, she can cling to the possibility that he’s there.

For that moment she can believe he’s there inches from her; for that moment, there half in the water clutching the side of the gondola with her eyes closed, she fixes herself to the possibility of him. She can’t bear the possibility the gondola is empty. She can’t bear the possibility of opening her eyes and seeing nothing and no one before her, like the last time. As long as her eyes are closed, it’s possible he’s there now next to her, small head in the sun, sea-green eyes flecked with amber and the sanguine mouth of the mad monk: it’s possible. In the dark cathedral of her closed eyes, she summons her best prayer, promises her best promise, to never be paralyzed again by her love for him, to leap blindly into hope, to stride boldly the border between terror and beauty. She reconciles herself to the whim of God or chaos or both, she finds a way to just be, there in the heart of the most desperate and cruel of sure things: that sooner or later, one way or another, whether she departs this earth first or he does, a mother will lose her child and feel the most unbearable of losses; and that until then she has no choice but to accept his life and hers in all their possibilities. So now, there in the lake, clinging to the side of the gondola, she doesn’t want to open her eyes yet because it stops the moment at the fork of all the lives that can still be lived, with the helix of eternity glittering before her.

For this moment, in the dark of her eyes shut, she listens. For a sign if not a song; and then

feels a small hand on her wet hair, a small hot breath in her ear, and hears a small voice. “No Big Agua for Mama?” and she

pulls herself into the gondola, tumbling over the side and, lying in the bottom still gasping for air, feels his hand on her brow as if to calm her, as if she were a child having a bad dream. She pulls him to her as if to crush him into her. She pulls him so hard to her that he’s a little afraid and, besides, she’s getting him all wet. Slowly she sits up.

As she wipes the water from her eyes, he says, “Kulk,” and as she runs her fingers over his face, the boy points at the lake where he dropped the spacemonkey that floated to her a moment ago on the other side. She remembers now leaving the toy behind in the other gondola. “Kulk is OK,” she nods, “he has his own boat now.” Kirk thinks about this. Kristin picks up the oars as if she has the slightest idea where to go. “Wait,” Kirk says.

Somewhere in a century of rapture, a red wind rises off a midnight sea. Kirk points to the lake’s edge where the girl with long gold hair to her waist waves to them again; the two young women look at each other across the water. “Yes please,” the boy insists, ever the little dictator, and so, turning the boat in the other woman’s direction, Kristin rows to shore.