Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

Lately, the last week or so Kirk’s cries of “Mama” in the night have turned into wails of “Mama where are you?” desperate, wracked, forlorn. His insecurity has found a wider vocabulary … does he really not know where I am? Does he really suppose I’m not right beyond his door? “Mama, come back,” as if he’s already learned how a little boy’s cries can go unanswered forever, as if he’s known it from the beginning, from before the beginning, insisting like his still unborn twin sister I’m not going anywhere, as the sac of the womb around him burst. In the mornings he ’ll be calling from his room, and I get up from bed and go to his door and knock playfully: “It’s me,” he answers. In case I’m not certain. In case I might think it’s some other kid who’s taken his place, who I might mistake for my own.

I’ve been having this dream. In the dream I look out the window and the lake approaches like a swarm, and I close all the windows, pull the shades, lock the door, and there’s the rumble of music, the loudest watersong ever, it grows and soon invades us, seeps into the apartment, comes in under the door and through the cracks in the window … and then everything explodes. Everything explodes with water and I would expect to be swept under myself; but I’m not, it’s taunting me. Roars in on a black wave, the lake, and roars right past me, dismissive of me, wanting me to watch, wanting me to see it take him. And I watch. And it takes him.

I notice now that when Kirk talks, he uses his hands, like the night Parker “talked” in his sleep. Did he immediately grasp within the strange patterns of Parker’s hands their secret language, and become fluent? He sleeps in my lap and his hair smells like tall dry grass, I put my face in it and breathe it and listen to the coyotes in the distant dark hills. Stubborn stoic Kirk, won’t be shamed or cajoled into emotion. I see him self-consciously suppress his small smile that gets more and more rare, as if having already learned to find his joy suspect. With every passing day I worry he retreats farther into his three-year-old heart even as he talks more and more with his hands … but then in the dark, just as I think he’s about to fall asleep, suddenly he clutches my arm and won’t let go, both of his arms around mine, an outburst of need under the cover of darkness. After a while there’s that body-shudder of him tumbling into sleep, and then I whisper in his ear

your mama loves you

even if he’s asleep and doesn ’t hear, because even if he doesn ’t hear, I figure he hears. I whisper it in his ear and figure it makes its way to his brain, and some day years from now when he needs it, it will float up to the surface of his memory and open itself like a time capsule, with the message he especially needs most at that moment. And he ’ll find, to his surprise, he heard it after all.

Now that the lake has reached the hotel, some things seem urgent in a way I don’t really understand. There have been no more letters from my correspondent. Once Kirk put the pieces of the photo together, he didn ’t mix them up anymore but now sits on the floor silently looking at the tiny figure of the man in the Square. If just once more I had seen the other Kristin’s light in her window, I wouldn’t have involved Doc at all, and I don’t know whether it’s that Doc is so wise that nothing surprises her or that incredulity just isn’t in her repertoire of responses … but when I showed her the photo, she didn’t say anything. She just looked at it a long time, at one point lifting a finger like she might touch it and glean something, before pulling back her hand like it was too sacred. When she finally spoke, it wasn’t until we were out on the lake, halfway to the deserted building, after I begged her to sail out there with me. “Are you certain which window is hers?” was all she said, and of course I wasn’t certain at all, I just thought we would figure it out when we got there.

I had talked her into going out there with me, and the whole way I kept watching the lake to see if maybe the Hamblin manager had sent the zedcops after us to retrieve his gondola, or if Kirk was still watching our journey across the Big Agua from the Hamblin roof with Valerie and Parker. I hoped he had stopped crying. There aren’t many people out on the lake anymore…. As it’s gotten bigger, it seems to have lost its charm. There have been accidents, people who sailed out and haven’t been seen again. Soon I had to take over at the oars when the lake was too deep for the pole. It took us a little more than half an hour to get to the abandoned apartment building that was once just a ten-minute walk away, and then we had to sail around it to dock the gondola somewhere it wouldn’t drift off. Finally we sailed in through the building’s garage, now flooded with only a few feet between the water and the ceiling. There were stairs where once had been a furnace room. We were able to get out where the water met the stairs and drag the gondola up the steps.

Out on the water I had started to tell Doc everything about the letters I had been getting, but she raised her hand to stop me, like too much information would only prejudice a diagnosis. Truthfully I’m not certain we ever would have known which was K’s room if not for … well, if it hadn ’t been obvious. I had only seen the light in her window in the dark from a distance, when it isn’t that easy to count windows or floors, and from far away outside a building you think that you can kind of guess where something is, and then you get inside and it isn’t so clear. We kept going through one deserted room after another trying to find it before late afternoon turned to twilight, and then we found it and even Doc was impressed for once.

It was my room, or a version of it. Articles tacked to the walls if not the same articles, books on the shelves with a lot of the same titles as mine, same Proust and Kierkegaard and Dickinson and the Brontes except now mildewed, mixed in with a lot of books in what I guess was Chinese, there was the same photo — except not in pieces — of her lover as a young student standing before the tanks. There was a child’s bedroom except it was that of an older child, about ten with a small bed instead of a crib, anime posters instead of small plastic monkeys … and no sooner do we step into the room than Doc staggers a little from the dirge in her ears, catching herself against the door with one hand and holding her forehead with the other.

From up over the hills in the far west come the first wave of owls, still far away enough that their shadows on my back skitter up my spine like small black spiders. Reflexively I turn to face the sun through the window, squinting for sight of them and looking to my own building on the other side of the lake, hoping Valerie has scurried Kirk to safety. For a while Doc seems frozen where she stands. With a kind of hesitation I’ve never seen in her, she lays her hands on the walls and moves through the apartment slowly, from the far doorway that already darkens with night into the part of it blood-red with sunset, like she’s melting into the decomposed smear of the dead day, hands spreading out away from her until it’s like she’s scorched to the wall, face burned in the plaster.

She doesn’t make any sound at all for a minute. Then I hear this cry — at first I think it’s coming from the room itself — and she drops to the floor. The grief on her face is … it’s like her face is trying to catch up to it, eyes and mouth so stricken they’re incapable of tears or sound, and, well, I just wish I didn’t see it. God only knows what terrible song she heard coming out of that room, and I just wish I hadn’t seen it, because some last shred of trust in me shatters when I see her fall apart like this, some small capacity for faith I didn’t even know I still had, until this moment when I know I don’t have it anymore. Doc the quietly indomitable, who tends to sick and dying houses with the kind of resolve where strength trumps sympathy every time, lies at my feet waiting for whatever she’s sensed in this room to recede just far enough away that she can finally lower all her defenses against it and break down.