Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

Just standing there I don’t know whether I feel more terrified or betrayed, because this isn’t my role with Doc, to comfort her. It’s her role to comfort me, and I can’t even bring myself to go near her. All I can do is crouch on the floor studying her from somewhere near the new sea level, the best I can offer is eye contact, if she wants it. She never tells me what the walls sing. She never tells me what she heard in the yawn of the floor beneath her. What’s the matter with you! is all I can finally scream at her out on the lake, after waiting almost an hour in that room for Doc to get herself together or for the other Kristin to show, which we both know isn’t going to happen, until finally it starts to get dark enough that I know we have to get back to the gondola if we ’re going to find our way back through the garage and across the water. “ Why are you acting like this? it ’s just another dead building …!” I’m hysterical with disillusion. The whole trip back across the water she doesn’t look at me at all, sitting in the gondola staring straight ahead in this blank way until all I can say is, I depended on you, to be better and stronger and braver and wiser than I can ever be … and then before the final fall of dark she looks straight at me, the mouth once younger than the rest of her now old, the eyes once older now ancient.

Are you a monkey?

No!

Are you a boy?

No!

Are you a Bright Light!

No!

No? and my heart sinks. Then what are you? … and with great glee….

I’m Nothing!

he cries, clapping his hands together.

I’m lying naked on theLaurel banks. In reality there are no such banks anymore, they’re long since underwater but in my dream there’s no lake just the banks where I lie at war with my womb….

… it grows dark. We’re well into the hour of the owls. From out of the trees behind me I hear him come, I close my eyes and wait, feel his hands on my feet and feel him lower himself to my thighs. He puts his tongue inside me. Mao of my desire, killer of my trust: I feel his words make their way up inside me. At the moment of the most unwilling orgasm I’ve ever had, I grab him by his black Chinese hair and my water breaks — am I pregnant? — and the torrent that pours from me sweeps in its path the Chevron at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights (in reality now long gone), rushes down the street and ebbs for a minute before streaming down the Strip. The force of it tears him from me. Last I see him he’s caught in the racing flood somewhere down the boulevard, trying to keep his head above the water as his arms flail frantically to grab on to something. I laugh out loud at the sight of it. Then in the last gush here comes Bronte, finally ready to emerge, and I reach to catch her as she leaves me but, slick with afterbirth, she slips from my hands, caught in an undertow that burps her up once at Zed’s center before pulling her back down….

I wake. I bolt upright. Because my thighs are soaked, for a minute I’m confused, certain I’ve given birth to the lake. I can still smell the dream. My heart pounds with fear. I lunge at the white waves of the bed before me to catch my daughter I’ve ejected so cruelly, all before my consciousness understands it was a dream — but I can still smell the dream. I catch my breath in the dark to wonder what’s wrong, and look out the window by my bed and, in the light of the moon, see the ripples of the lake below me. Then I realize I haven’t heard Kierkegaard’s Mama where are you, his Mama come back, and I stumble through the apartment from my bed to his.

An amniotic fog fills the room. I can barely see him through it. The smell of birth and the lake is overpowering. I move through the vapor to his crib where he sleeps too soundly, and pick him up … he barely stirs. In his sleep his hand grasps for Kulk his missing spacemonkey, and his face glistens from the fog off the lake. I take him from his room and close his door behind me. I take him to my bed and put him on the pillow next to mine where he goes on sleeping. I place my body like a barrier between him and the window with the lake beyond it. I watch the center of the lake waiting, my heart still pounds from my dream — but now it isn’t a dream:

the lake is coming for him.

When I wake this morning,the hotel is quiet. There are no sounds in the hall, or in the rooms above or below me. Kirk still sleeps on the pillow … almost always he wakes before I do. I lean over him, inches from his face, and listen to his breathing, watch his chest rise and fall. I get up from the bed only kind of remembering at the last second to pull on a robe … the world’s never been as casual about my nakedness as I am. I walk out in the hall and down to the writer’s room, my ear at the door listening for the sound of old movies or even the tapping on the computer of him working. But I don’t hear anything.

It’s still early enough that the hall lights are on except, I notice, in the east end of the hotel, and I realize this part of the building has finally lost power. I go back to my room and Kirk still sleeps on the pillow, and leaning back out the window I see the black waters of the lake have already pushed past our hotel. The lake extends north to the hills, just a sliver of the top of the peninsula still dry land.

The lake is coming for my kid. In my heart, I once wrote, he opens the door to this vast terrain of fear. But now I know it’s a lake not a terrain, and that it’s my fear made manifest that’s coming for him. Sometimes I’m paralyzed by my love for him…. In the last few hours, between dream and dawn, like a thought cast adrift waiting for me to rescue it, I’ve come to know in no way I can explain that it doesn’t matter where we go, it doesn’t matter how far we try to get away, the lake will keep coming for him and that I can’t be paralyzed anymore. Down in the hole of the lake, down in the opening of the birth canal where the world broke its water, lurks my son’s doom and I must stop it. I have to shake myself loose of the love that holds me down, and find inside me the love that will save him. I have to go to war with the womb of the century that would reclaim him. Hand in hand, Kirk and I make our way downstairs to Valerie and Parker’s room and they’re gone, door standing open and crib hastily ransacked, the water only a few feet below their window.

Around noon the power goes out in the rest of the hotel. I know now that Kirk and I are the last light burning in the window for some other mom to see from some other window in the future. When the hotel manager’s deserted silver gondola washes up on the stairs just below our floor, I know it’s a sign.

In my heart my boy opens the floodgate to a vast sea of fear; but I must close that gate. I despise myself when I look at him at the other end of the gondola, without even a life jacket, precarious on the lake beneath us … I despise the danger I subject him to now, the danger I’ve given birth to that laps at our boat. His hair shines in the sun above, and I’m amazed to see him hold his toy monkey Kulk in its redspacesuit and space helmet. You found it, I say, and he just nods. Looking east I’m not certain anymore how far the lake goes, although in the distance I still see Wilshire office complexes. Nobody else is on the lake. But where did you find it? I say and Kirk says, Under my pillow. But I looked there, I say, I looked there a hundred times. The afternoon passes, we sail through the labyrinth of old Hollywood buildings that rise from the black water like the heads of granite fetuses the world has miscarried. Out in deeper water the black of the lake frames Kirk’s head, his bright light. Scraps of wood from the disintegrating Chateau X harbor drift by. Of course it seems my wildman has no fear at all. For a minute I reassure myself that from his three-year-old perspective this all seems impossibly cool. As we follow the hills around to the northeast, the lake is still shallow enough I can push us most of the way with the pole … I want to push the pole please, Kirk says. He starts to stand in the gondola to take the pole and I explode with terror: Sit down! I scream at him, and he starts to cry.