Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

He’s the chaos factor in the equation of my existence, the thing that makes true the math of my days. For a while it made me nuts, his havoc, and then it finally occurred to me that like chaos in science, Kirk’s chaos is an unknown order, his havoc a rearrangement of the world in a way that marks his entrances into it and his exits from it. Like I’ve done since I was a kid myself, on the wall of our apartment I tack articles about things that fascinate me and pictures of things that inspire me, and I tacked up the little pieces of the photo that my correspondent was sending his lover, the other Kristin across the lake, trying to assemble them into the whole, not knowing how many more fragments might be to come. The morning I got what turned out to be the last letter, Kirk took all the pieces off the wall and stuck them back in different places, completely upsetting my very meticulous efforts. I screamed at him about it for ten minutes. Then, feeling shitty, I dressed him and we grabbed the bus to the San Vicente Bridge, and crossed to the other side and walked over to the lake, hand in hand, and sat on a small beach below the hills where I fell asleep in the sun, I don’t know how long …

I woke with a start. Woke in complete panic that I had dozed off with Kirk sitting there in the sand six fatal feet from the water. But there he was just hunkered down in the sand by the water in that way he sits sometimes, not on his butt but in a crouch, studying the view in front of him, and only when my brain assured itself he was OK did I realize he was peeling one page after another from my Proust and throwing them in the lake, and I almost started screaming at him again. Instead I walked over and just sat with him, our feet in the water, the two of us together watching the pages of the book float out, little paper boats with sails made of reverie.

K, beautiful betrayer, begins the last letter, Mao of my desire, killer of my trust. Were I to have foreseen this silence from you all those years ago in that murderous moment that made me so anonymously famous, then I could have stood up to nothing, rather I would have accepted the chains of the passionless, the defeated, the tyrannized, the hopeless…. What do you suppose I saw in the barrel of that gun rolling toward me if not your face? What do you suppose made me brave? What do you suppose was the mouth of freedom I longed to kiss if not yours? Do you really think I did it just to thrill the world? In that last moment before I slipped into the confessional of history, forever pulling its curtain closed behind my innocence, before I dropped through the century so as to make my way to you over the years, I heard in my ears the melody of your sixteen-year-old dreams — something ageless and haunted by however many voices have hummed it — and which on that morning drowned out every scream of danger: I peered in the hole of the gun before me and saw your legs open to me; and so leaned forward to taste your promise there. Stepped to the right so there could be no eluding my fate, stepped to the left so there could be no eluding your whisper of love, clutching in my fist your yellow dress that the world took for a banner of freedom. Begged for destiny to flatten me against the Square beneath my feet. Begged for the explosion of the gun in whose smoke was written the way you belonged to me…. Bitch. Whore. History’s fucking tourist. Why don’t you write me? How can you not write me? How can you not answer! With the passage of time have I become merely quaint, as my photo recedes into the world’s nostalgia? Please … love me and I will redeem the ways I have become passé. Love me and I will service you night and day on the tiananmen of our appetites. Love me and in a moment I will ruthlessly trade the word freedom on the tip of my tongue for the opiate drop of your release. Love me and I will take on the lake for you, I will take on the world for you, again….

Enclosed with the letter were the two last pieces of the photo, one small round orb of black, one small orb of white — the eyes of his portrait, each a different color. But when I put all the other pieces on the wall in some semblance of what I had before Kirk scrambled them that morning, and then added the two eyes, his face still didn’t come together except as a crazy abstraction. I kept rearranging the pieces, this way and that. Sometimes they formed a cracked vase, sometimes a cloud passing before the moon, sometimes a flower floating above the sea, each of the images somehow off, straining for a cohesion the pieces didn’t believe, until I fell asleep again and woke to find once more that Kirk had taken all the pieces down and put them back in his own way. He was adding the two eyes just about the time I opened my own.

Except they weren’t eyes. One was the hole of the barrel of a gun on a military tank, sitting on a flat paved open space. Behind it was a second tank, with a third behind that and a fourth behind that. The other was the back of the dark head of the tiny man standing ramrod straight in front of the tanks, arms at his sides, holding in one hand a pale cloth.

A pretty famous picture, I guess, from not that long ago in the last century. But I was very little at the time so it wasn’t something I knew all that much about, and I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that I had put so much time and energy into coming up with only a man blocking a line of tanks, in the same way that, over the years, the man himself had become bitter about having dared and risked so much, only so now love could forsake him.

Later that same night afterI went to sleep, I was awakened by music. When I stuck my head out the window, I saw that Zed Lake, onxy in the moonlight, was singing, all these tunes snaking in and out of each other, a whole time of tunes, a century of them, old ones and ones I had never heard before, songs that had escaped from the other side, glowing and slithering through the water. I knew if I had been down at the water’s edge I could have reached in and touched one, and that musical notes would have glittered on my fingertips like tiny stars.

The melody-snakes were gone when Kirk woke crying an hour later, looking for Kulk his red monkeyman. Exhausted, I went into his room and shook out all the bedsheets, lowered myself on my hands and knees to look for it. “Well where did you last have it?” I said, even though I had seen him holding it like he always did, one hand a fist as I was shoving it through the sleeve of his pajamas. We looked all over the apartment, high and low. I say we but it was really me looking and Kirk directing me. “There under the couch please,” he would suggest very helpfully, “maybe behind the door.” Pointing here and there, reclined on his chair like it was a throne, he just needed a slave to fan him and drop grapes in his mouth.

When and how did he make me so fucking tender, that’s what I want to know. It wasn’t when he was inside me, I remember when he was inside me. He just took me over at some point. And don’t tell me all moms are like this, because that couldn’t be further from the point. It couldn’t be further. I mean certainly I always figured I would be an OK mom, taking care of him and so on … but when did he get to me? Tenderness. That’s a new one. I don’t think I like it, no not much. I don’t think so. I want to be a tough chick again.

A few nights ago the lake reached the Hamblin, and we woke the next morning to find the water up the steps of the eastern entrance. Surveying the lake from our window, Kirk quietly announced, “The water-robots are here.” Then the next morning the wolf that’s been living in the building paddled through the door into the flooded first floor from somewhere outside and then paddled back out, frantically looking for a place to beach himself. Bobbing in the lake outside the hotel was a silver gondola that shone in the sunlight like a bullet … it belongs to the hotel manager, he’s prepared I guess. Yesterday morning water filled the first-floor corridor and the gondola drifted up and down the hall. Down the hall in Jainlight’s apartment, the TV reception flickers in and out … later in the day when Kirk and I knocked, he wasn’t there. Inside, the TV was on, piles of pages by the computer, stacks of videos on the floor, tequila bottles, everything in its usual dishevelment. But he was nowhere to be seen.