Our Ecstatic Days

~ ~ ~

Every passing day, the edge of the water rots a little more the front porch of her little house, until one morning she expects to find she’s finally been swept away. Every honeymoon twilight, across the house’s threshold the lake is carried by its lesbian groom the moon, with a bridal train of small dead animals, palm fronds ripped from their trees, the trash of the recently submerged: pages of paperbacks, gin bottles, old tickets from the drowned Cathode Flower nightclub that used to be right below her on the Sunset Strip, at the foot of a hillside now under water. Step out her front door at dawn into the puddles that seep up through the decking, sunlight from the lake’s surface cutting a gash across her eyes, and she sees the glub glub glub of rising bubbles, and wonders from what sinking building or body.

Six months ago the lake finally stopped rising. This was what everyone had been waiting for, once it became clear the lake wasn’t going to stop until it reached the ocean. Once that became clear, there was no reason not to wish the lake would just get it over with, so everyone could stop moving to higher ground. It feels to her like the foundation of the house gives way a little more every night, and it wakes her in the dark, when the dream doesn’t.

~ ~ ~

Then in the days between nights’ dreams, the visions come, often just after the sun sets. Through the hinge where day hangs on to night, the visions come up with the bubbles from the lake’s bottom. She sits on the porch of her little house and stares at the top of the Hotel Hamblin to the southeast, that roof where sometimes at fall of dark she took him in her arms to look at the lights of faraway windows, when clouds were flying igloos and the night-robots reigned. She’s vaguely aware of the boats that drift by, the way the people in them look at her and mutter to each other.

About half the top floor of the Hamblin is still above water. Once she thought about taking the silver gondola out there but couldn’t really see the point, unless it was one of the two or three hundred occasions she considered slipping into the water for good, the way she should have that evening five years ago when, out on the center of the lake, she lowered herself from the gondola. So then why keep moving to higher land at all? Let some watery night take her. Night after night, hour after hour, moment after moment she sees his smile, hears his voice from the other bedroom that used to call Mama where are you? Five years, two months, sixteen days since she heard him say the last words she heard him say: and when she came up for air, swimming desperately up up up until she finally broke the surface of the water to gasp back her life at the very last possible second, the devastating emptiness of the gondola left her to curse for the rest of her life that last second God gave her just so that she might hear those words over and over

yes please

You Sick Fuck. Having had Your little joke with Abraham, hissing Your little amusement in his ear and finding what cowards fathers are when he didn’t spit in Your face, when he didn’t clutch his son close to him and say I ’ll go to hell first … when for all his supposed righteousness he couldn’t even be a man when it came to protecting his child, then You moved onto mothers didn’t You, because mothers were more your match, beginning with Mary. Now that was fun. Tortured her boy in the grisliest most twisted way possible before her very eyes and then had the sadistic wit to call it The Salvation of the World: so what I want to know is, was that the forbidden iconography of the divine psyche, or just the Male Wangle of all male wangles? God tries to hurt my kid, He has to go through me first. God tells me what He told Abraham, then He isn’t any god that means anything to me, He isn’t any god I owe anything. I kill anyone who tries to hurt my kid, any man, any woman, any god, any lake.

She’s dreamed it so often, sometimes she’s almost not certain it really happened. She breaks the lake’s surface gasping, grabs the side of the gondola, and her soul implodes at the horror of its emptiness; for a minute she stares into the bottom of the gondola like he must be there and she just isn’t seeing him. Like there’s some place he could be hiding. But it’s as if he was never there at all. She dives beneath the water again, thrashing around as if to catch him on his way to the bottom — but there’s no one to catch, and she rises to grab the gondola once more and look frantically around her. It’s only then she hears something, and looks up.

~ ~ ~

Looks up and sees him in the distance, high in the sky. Hears his voice as it gets farther away

Mama where are you?

like he would call from his crib

Mama come back

and the owl that has him in its clutches actually seems to falter a bit, confused by the burden and sound, finding Kirk bigger and noisier than the usual prey. Sometimes in her dream Kirk plummets to earth, and she wakes to a black room with the taste of no please on her lips.

One morning about six months ago she got up from the toilet to stare down at the blood in the bowl. She was so fascinated by the pattern that she sat on the bathroom floor studying it, circling to see it from every angle. Next month the same pattern and the month after that, and it’s been the same every month since. She keeps trying to decipher this menstrual rorschach; slit between her legs is the stigmata of the full moon from which her womb telegraphs a message. A month or so back she even tried copying it down on paper before it dissolved into streaks down the white porcelain. Sometimes she lies in bed at night and sees the pattern in the dark above her, and watches baffled for hours until its mystery lulls her back to sleep.

Lately, in a city where sooner or later any kind of cult behavior becomes a fashion statement, everyone wears the blue of the lake, all the colored parasols of five years ago having given way to blue from the neck down. Everyone camouflages herself and slips alongside the water like a spy of the shoreline, disguised as a splash. Blue hat, blue shirt, coat blue except for dark shadows rippling across the buttons like riptides, or flashes of white on the thigh of the pants like the glare of the sun on the water’s surface. When she rows her silver gondola on the lake wearing a brilliant red dress, the lake around her suddenly clears of all other boats, taking cover, as if she’s an incoming fireball from space. As if she’s a drop of blood — but is she the lake bleeding, or blood rained from the sky? She can see it in everyone’s eyes, the red provocation of her, the defiant affront of her red to the blue of the lake, daring it to rise higher and seep deeper into the land.

If the lake sends back my boy, I’ll wear whatever it wants, the blue garb of its Order, I’ll wear blue until the day I die. If it wants I’ll wear nothing and dip my naked body into its blue embrace whenever it wants me, lie nude in my silver gondola and drift wherever it drifts me. If the lake will just send me back my boy.

~ ~ ~

Until then, the only thing blue about her is her name….

… the writer who lived down the hall of the Hamblin having left her with Lulu Blu….

… and afterward she couldn’t tell for certain when she stopped being Kristin; maybe it was that very moment she came up for air and saw the empty gondola. But now she’s taken refuge in Lulu. She’s fled from any Kristin who would leave her three-yearold son out in the middle of a lake because she had this insane idea she had to stop the lake from taking him. She fled to Lulu because she believed Kristin should have sunk back down to the bottom where she belonged, and left to someone with better wings the task of flying after that owl. So it was a kind of debased suicide, abandoning Kristin for Lulu, and now she sits on her porch at the water’s edge in her red dress staring out over the lake while blue citizens drift by in their blue boats and whisper among themselves The Madwoman in Red, whose son was abducted by owls.

When a woman becomes a mother, she develops this new instinct for danger. She develops this instinct for every possible disaster that awaits her child around every corner. Lulu, once called Kristin, doesn’t know if five years ago her danger-instinct failed or overwhelmed all reason so that she led her son to danger instead of from it, so that everything she did to protect him only endangered him. Little amorphous lumps of human clay, that’s what she once thought babies were; but then she found there were things about her child that had nothing to do with her, things that were his own from the beginning, from the minute he was born, perhaps from before he was born, perhaps from before he was conceived, although there was no point getting into that since no one knows anyway. Anyway, she realized, that’s when you’re stuck with the Soul. That’s when your child becomes inescapable evidence of the cosmos, a membrane-map of the spirit, that’s when God becomes a Piercing Hope or Dark Suspicion or both. Because there’s nothing a mother fears more than the chaos of the world.

And then danger has won.

~ ~ ~

Then danger has won. Then fear takes a form. Detaches itself from all the things she was afraid of, the reasonable things and the stupid, and becomes its own thing, bigger than either the reasonable things or the stupid things. Grows in the pregnant heart until it’s born; and then she stops being a person, then she becomes fear’s walking womb.

Then her fear is bigger than her motherhood. Fear has metamorphosed into the danger it feared

and it’s called a lake.

Absently she listens to the radio all the time now, the radio she listened to all the time with her son when the lake came because the music was the one thing the lake, alive with its own music, couldn’t or wouldn’t drown. She sits on the porch of her house while the people sail by looking at her, and she listens for a song she and Kirk sang together

all the little babies go, Oh! oh! I want to!

while sometimes the snakes of music swarming the lake coil through her house. They wind along wooden beams, pythons of melancholy English verse from before she was born, and Debussy melodies but only if Debussy had been a bossa nova guitarist in a heroin haze, brooding aquatic chamber quartets rising in the background like autumn glimpsed for the first time on the horizon of midsummer. Boas — gorgeous and dangerous — of static bursts and swoons of strings drape themselves along her window sill and slither through her house like women’s voices, dusky, jazz-depraved, desperate.

The first time the lake sends her a vision, Lulu is sitting on her porch at dusk and feels a swell in the lake beneath her. It slowly rises from the water before her, a huge bubble. She gets up from the chair and walks to the edge of the porch and, as she watches, the bubble bursts to reveal a man in his forties with black hair and black beard and startling electric blue eyes, a man whose name she never knew. She lived with him when she first came to L. A. as a teenager nine years before, a kind of sexual serf servicing him when, after being abandoned by his pregnant Asian-American wife, he wasn’t crashing around in a secret room at the bottom of his house where he worked day and drunken night on a huge blue calendar that completely reordered history according to the chronology and logic of apocalypse. Even now she looks back on that time dispassionately, having grown up with a practical view of her own sensuality and surviving then by whatever means she could — until one night he disappeared. She wasn’t altogether certain he was even the father until Kirk was born, another candidate having been a doltish Japanese boy who jumped her one afternoon in the rain out in the Black Clock time-capsule cemetery on the west side of town, now under water, before out of the blue a lightning bolt literally left him lying next to her on the grass, life only in his erection. In the early months of her pregnancy, and particularly on the night she believed she miscarried her twins only for them to somehow become manifest again in an inexplicable resurrection, she felt Kirk and Bronte glow inside her as if with electricity — so when Kirk was born, she wouldn’t have been shocked if he had been half Asian. Now as Kirk’s father rises from the lake in Lulu’s vision, it’s only long enough for him to reach out to her, not as if asking her to save him but as if beseeching her to understand or even forgive him; and at that moment, for the first time in the eight years since she last saw him, although she’s often suspected it, she knows he’s dead.

Her house is drenched with the evidence of visions. She wakes in the morning to puddles by the bed, in the hallway, just inside the front door, and knows other visions came to her in the night when she was asleep. Her next vision is of her other self. Another twilight and again the lake bubbles, and again Lulu rises from her chair but not going so near the water, and from out of the lake’s fountain emerges Kristin. This other self swims to the edge of the porch and, reaching up and grabbing hold of the post, looks at Lulu for a full minute with the lake glistening on her skin and her hair hanging in her face, before she sinks back into the water without a breath. She comes again three nights later. This woman Kristin who looks just like Lulu, who is just like Lulu, who is the woman Lulu was before she became Lulu, swims up from the bottom of the lake and breaks the surface of Lulu’s nights. Lulu wakes from her bed just long enough to sit up and catch sight of Kristin flitting around the corner of the bedroom door, before Lulu falls back to sleep; but then the next night Lulu wakes right before dawn and Kristin is sitting in the corner of the dark bedroom, naked and wet, and she says, Why did you leave me?

“I couldn’t stand to be you anymore,” Lulu answers, “couldn’t stand to be Kristin … you left him in the fucking boat in the middle of the lake. Why did you do that, or … why did we do that … leave him there like that?”

Doesn’t matter anymore why, Kristin answers in the corner. There’s some serious point-missing going on here if you don’t know that by now.

“I don’t care about you or me anymore,” Lulu says.

Me neither.

“All I care about is him.” In the dark, she starts to cry.

Then go find him, Kristin says.

“I don’t know,” really crying.

Look, Kristin says, pointing to the front door that Lulu can see from the bedroom, and Lulu gets up and goes out onto the porch, and the lake is black and still and the light of the sun is just starting to pale the sky a dark dawn-blue over the east hills, and Lulu turns to stare back into the house where Kristin was a minute ago, but then she hears the lake bubbling again, although she’s never had a vision at dawn, and Lulu stares into the water black with sunrise and hears from its bubble a small faraway sound and takes the telescope that hangs from the beam of the porch and looks through it down into the bubble into the funnel of the lake and what she sees in the reflection of the barely paling sky makes her pull away as if the telescope is enchanted and she doesn’t trust what it shows her.

At first she thinks it’s an airplane, which in itself is startling because there haven’t been any airplanes in the skies of L.A. for a long time. But when she squints she sees it’s not an airplane rather it’s something very little, flying deep down in the sky of the bubble. She looks back into the telescope.

II Duce, bigger now of course than when she last saw him five years ago, pointing this way and that, talking with his arms and hands, conducting his higher mathematics and dividing night-robots by day-robots, directing the aging owl that still holds him in its talons. A battalion of owls wearily follows. Go this way, go that way! happily snapping orders at them, go up, go down! with great delight while the owls appear to be, oh, a little beleaguered maybe? to her untrained eye, of course … what does she know from beleaguered owls? But as if they’re thinking maybe this is a classic case of having bitten off more than they can chew, although she supposes just letting go of him is out of the question, against an owl’s owlish nature.

She doesn’t hear her Kierkegaard saying “please” either, she notices that right off. What happened to his manners I taught him, is all she can think.

~ ~ ~

Eight days she waits. Eight days she waits for another vision. Eight days she sits by the lake hour after hour, more passing boats muttering at the spectacle of her. Eight days she waits, heart slowly sinking at the idea that it was only a new dream, worse than the old. Eight days she barely moves from the porch, staring at the lake when she’s not searching the skies with her telescope.

On the sixth day, as she waits she hears it, for the first and only time since she first heard it riding the bus on a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway that doesn’t exist anymore. A DJ from one of the pirate radio ships broadcasting out on the lake plays it, and Lulu is a little surprised at how exactly she’s remembered it, when she might have done almost anything to forget it: a snake of subtle Spanish horns playing a vaguely Middle Eastern melody

if there’s a higher light,

let it shine on me through the trees

and she pulls up her dress

‘cause I know this sea

wants to carry me

it’s a sweet, sweet sound she sings

for my release …

and bares her thigh to it, inviting its lunge.

One night at dusk before the sun falls, the final vision comes. A black globe of water rises from the lake’s surface just as the moon chases the sun into the west. “Kirk!” she calls to the bubble and in its wet wound there he is again far away, same black dot as he was the night five years ago when she saw him carried off, but distinct, unmistakable, calmly issuing directives to his chagrinned feathered squadron. Somewhere inside the periscope of the lake, for one fleeting moment she watches him fly away once more, and can almost see him waving back to her or maybe calling to her in the language of hands

catch you next time Mama, but now I’ve got places to go, things to do….

Even when she lived in Tokyo, when the signs were everywhere, she never understood how she was the agent of chaos. Later she would tell herself Kirk was the chaos factor in her life because, pregnant with him, she would walk the streets of Tokyo and around her everything went berserk: radios went haywire, subways broke down, glass buildings shattered. Had she been as self-aware as she thought she was, she might have noted how it was that on her return to Los Angeles a lake appeared. In the early months of the new century, it was she who embodied the chaos of the coming age. Her child would only be chaos’ son.

~ ~ ~

And now she sits by the lake in a state of truce. She’s not certain she can actually say the lake delivered him back to her, but a deal is a deal, so she takes off her clothes and gives herself to the lake, lowers herself in the lake’s waters for a while and gives the lake a chance to have her way with Lulu in the moonlight.

But Zed is too weary of all her brides, and soon Lulu climbs back up on the porch, goes inside the house and gets under the covers of her bed and in the dark tells her boy a story, the first in five years; she makes it up as she goes along, as she used to. There was a little train named Tyrone that rode through hills and across deserts and past houses and towns and over bridges until it reached the end of its track where there was a cloud raining, and just beyond the raining cloud was a rainbow. And for a long time Tyrone was afraid to go through the rainbow to the other side where there was no track he could see, and every day he would try to work up the courage until one day he finally did. He went through the rainbow and on the other side was a tunnel, and the rainbow became a train track, with rails of green and yellow, and tracks of orange and purple. And in the meantime there was a little tugboat named Tyrone, sailing along the shore of a huge lake….

But

Kirk interrupts in the dark, finger poised in correction

you said Tyrone is a train—

Yes Tyrone is a train, she answers, but the tugboat is named Tyrone too, and he’s sailing along the shore of the lake, and on the beach is a little boy named Kirk

and she expects him to say, That’s my name, but he doesn’t, accepting this as if it makes complete sense, eyes blinking in the light of the moon off the lake beyond the bedroom window.

The boy named Kirk waves to Tyrone the Tugboat. Tyrone the Tugboat! he calls, I want to sail away with you, so Tyrone the Tugboat sails over to the beach and the boy named Kirk climbs in, and they sail out onto the lake and down the Venice Channel where the canals used to be, down to the marina where the harbor used to be, out to sea. They sail past other boats, past tropical islands, with fish and dolphins and squid swimming alongside, following a faraway cloud in the sky, and just when they reach the cloud it bursts into rain, and just beyond the rain is a rainbow, and Tyrone the Tugboat is afraid to sail into the rainbow because he doesn’t know what’s on the other side. But Kirk the boy gives Tyrone the courage to go on, and they sail into the rainbow and on the other side is a cave in the ocean, and inside the ocean-cave the rainbow turns into a river, with currents of green and yellow, and tides of orange and purple. They follow the rainbow river until it becomes a rainbow track, where Tyrone the Tugboat becomes Tyrone the Train, and Tyrone the Train carries the boy named Kirk deeper into the cave until finally they come out the other side of a tunnel, and together they travel over bridges and past towns and houses and across the desert and through the hills until they reach the end of the track at the shore of a huge lake, where the little boy named Kirk gets out of Tyrone the Train and runs down onto the beach just in time to see Tyrone the Tugboat sailing by; and the boy waves to Tyrone the Tugboat and calls….

Tyrone the Tugboat! I want to sail away with you!

~ ~ ~

Sometimes, when Lulu had almost forgotten Bronte was still there, her long unborn daughter would wake her: I’m still here. Lulu believes Bronte has come to sense that her twin brother has been gone awhile. She hopes that Bronte doesn’t hate her as Lulu has come to hate herself. But after Lulu separated herself from Kristin, she was stricken by the idea that she had cast her daughter into exile as well. Now Lulu lies in the dark and howls softly to her belly, waiting for an answer.

A week after having the vision of Kierkegaard flying with the owls, Lulu sails out to Port Justine. From time to time she puts down the oars and unwraps the telescope, searching the sky for him. A western fog comes in from the sea through the Wilshire Straits to the west. Once Justine was a billboard on La Cienega Boulevard, advertising Justine herself, a big inflatable doll of a blonde who wasn’t famous for anything except being blonde and famous and bigger than anything in L.A. except her breasts, which were bigger than she was. There isn’t much of Justine left anymore, most of the billboard having floated away long ago. From one upper corner of the billboard, the top of her blonde hair still blows in the wind off the water.

When Lulu casts her line at Port Justine and the Chinese dockhand pulls in her gondola, he takes her hand and she looks into his eyes and the first thing she thinks of aren’t the letters she got five years ago but her hometown where she grew up, where she was still Kristin … tiny Chinatown up in the Sacramento delta on the tiny island called Davenhall, where she was raised by her uncle in the town tavern and it was full of Chinese ghosts that the old Chinese women claimed they could see caught in the high branches of the island trees lining mainstreet … so Lulu has never seen a beautiful Chinese man before this moment, she didn’t know there were any….

… so beautiful that for a minute it distracts her from why she’s come, which is to take her telescope and climb the rungs up alongside the billboard to the top, in order to get a better view of the distant horizon … it distracts her, the beauty of him. For a moment she betrays her quest to find her son for the distraction of the dockhand’s beauty and the flash of confusion across his eyes; and then she knows it’s him. That confusion gives him away and, who knows, maybe in turn something about her reminds him of his own Kristin—beautiful K—after all, even with all that labialjewel stuff, maybe something about Lulu is just enough like his own Kristin for them to have shared a name once, for their addresses to have been crossed once, for Lulu-when-she-wasKristin to have moved through the other’s apartment once and seen all the walls that were a little like her own, for her to have felt the presence of a lost child, like hers.

Taking her hand as she steps onto the dock, he barely holds it. Rather her hand just rests in his; that’s when she notices it.

~ ~ ~

She can’t help looking, because she thinks at first her eyes are playing a trick on her. Lodged in the middle of his hand is a piece of rounded glass, like a monocle, or the lens of the telescope she carries. As if she could lift his hand to the sky above her and look through it for her son. With the tips of his fingers holding hers, to her astonishment she can see right through the hand’s small window the dock at their feet, interrupted only by blood vessels woven through the glass like red strands. The hand is virtually useless, she realizes now; he does all the work of pulling in boats with the other one.

He sees her looking at the glass hole in his hand and lets go of her. With his good hand he ties the silver gondola to the dock.

Since the lake came, rising to the bottom of the billboard, Justine has spread out into a flotilla, a lily pad of small shops and food stands and a pay phone. A couple of petrol pumps offer the last chance for gas between the Hollywood Hills and the ghetto that’s taken over the top floors of the shopping center rising from the water like a massive gray whale half a mile away. He doesn’t say anything, tying her boat to the dock. “Can anyone climb up there?” and she starts to point at the last of Justine’s platinum locks when she loses her footing on the dockside bobbing violently from the evening tide; he catches her arm, and she would bet he thinks she did it on purpose.

He waves at the billboard. Be my guest. Off his glass hand flashes a glint of the silver sun.

Lulu sticks the telescope under her arm and, clutching the rope rail, follows the footbridge that rocks and sways with the water. When she gets to the more stable scaffolding of the billboard itself, she looks back to see him still watching her. She sticks the telescope in back of her red dress where it ties and starts up the side of the billboard, and at some point looks down and the height frightens her a moment; she almost loses her grip. As far as she can tell, he doesn’t flinch. But he’s still watching when she gets to the top, both fascinated and hesitant, as if he’s a man who never looks up but can’t help himself now.

At the top of Justine, at the eye of the city’s panorama, with the flooded skyscrapers of Wilshire Boulevard rising to the south and the mansion-islands of West Hollywood and Hancock Park to the north and east, and the domes of Baghdadville to the west, the wind is much stronger. There isn’t really all that much to hang on to, just a narrow walkway running the length of the billboard with a small handrail — and as Lulu turns to where the fog comes in from the sea, now lit red by the setting sun meeting the red lake in a bloody swirl, there splashed across the horizon she sees it, the same dark red advertisement of her subconscious she’s seen the first morning of every monthly cycle, hovering over the city. Far above the lake, for a third time she nearly loses her balance and, below, the man watching her lurches forward slightly, arms slightly outstretched as if he actually would try to catch her.

Overwhelmed by the menstrual vortex of water and fog, rocked by the red wind trying to rip her from the billboard where she clings to the flimsy rail of the walkway, she suddenly flashes back on the moment five years ago when she reached the hole at the lake’s bottom, with the silver gondola above her head where Kirk was being kidnapped by an owl. She remembers that she was already wondering how she was going to get back up to the surface before her lungs burst; she was trying not to panic. She could feel the pull of a riptide and the push of a current, the hole drawing her in and turning her back, and even now she’s not really certain whether going into the hole was her idea or its idea; but she distinctly remembers the loss of control and that then she did panic: the opening didn’t seem nearly big enough. But she slipped through suddenly in a dilated rush, and on the other side she was … she was … back in the lake. She had swum down into the hole and, on the other side, found herself coming back up out of the hole, swimming up toward the gondola.

At the time, and all the time since, she thought she must have just gotten confused. She assumed she just got turned around, what with currents and tides coming and going. But now up here on top of Justine, hanging on to the rail in this red wind, with her blood splattered across the sky, she suddenly knows something she didn’t until now: that she wasn’t confused. That she wasn’t turned around. That she was pulled through the opening from one lake into another just like it, just like it in every way, every way except one, and that one difference was that on this other lake, there was another silver gondola just like on the first lake — except that this was a gondola without her son.

In the thrall of the wind and the red sky, there at the top of the billboard she feels hysteria lapping at her mind, first a small swell then rocking her harder and harder: suddenly she understands that the vision of the boy and the owls given to her by the lake has led her here to this vantage point at this place in this moment beneath this sky so that, beneath the red heavens above, she could have this revelation of another lake and, on it, her son, still waiting there even now. Understanding this with more clarity than she’s ever understood anything, she feels the coming hysteria and an irresistible urgency to get off the billboard; but when she moves to climb down, the red wind threatens to blow her off, and finally all she can do is lie flat and wait. Lying flat on her back, she slips off her red dress and ties herself to the rail with it, although this is more instinctive than any kind of cool collected action: she’s in a trance because, lying there flat on her back staring up at the sky and the wind, all she can think is that back through that hole at the bottom of the lake, back on the other side of that opening, on the Other Lake she left behind five years ago, her wildman is still there sitting in the gondola looking around, still trying to be brave, still waiting for his mother to come back. He’s been waiting what’s been five years on this side of the hole, on this lake, although who knows how long it’s been on his side, five minutes or five seconds; but he sits there now waiting as it gets darker and darker, calling “Mama?” and gazing over the gondola’s side. The more Lulu thinks about this up there on top of the billboard, the more she knows it to be true. Lying there in the wind beneath the endometrial sky, hysteria finally begins to recede. But the realization of what happened five years ago doesn’t recede with it.

~ ~ ~

That night the red storm blows across the lake while she stands on her front porch staring east to where she left her son in the gondola five years ago, promising she would be right back. She waits for the storm to pass but it blows all night and, watching, she lashes herself to the porch with sheets from her bed as she lashed herself to Justine that afternoon with her dress; she can’t bear to abandon him again. She’s torn between two sons, the one she’s seen flying with the owls and the one down beyond the uterus of the lake on the other side, in the gondola still waiting for her.

In the morning she wakes chilled and soaked, still bound to the porch and having slept through the rain in a blizzard of dreams, she who used to never dream. She can’t be certain whether the fever that wracks her is the fever of dreams or the fever of rains, and she finally undoes all the wet saturated knots of the sheets to stumble into the house and fall on the bed. The last time she was this cold was the night five years ago she lowered herself from the gondola into the lake; and as she takes off all her wet clothes and wraps her nude body in several blankets and sleeps again, in her sleep she sees him, still waiting for her in the gondola, calling to her

Mama?

and she wakes to a bed drenched in fever. She smells the dreams like wet ash on the mattress. She sniffs the mattress up and down from the foot of the bed to the head and sometimes catches a whiff of the lake at the juncture where the fresh water meets the sea, sometimes a whiff of the wet wood of oars, and there at the mattress’northeastern quadrant is the smell of him. It’s there. She had forgotten how he smelled but now, this afternoon, in the sweat of her dreams she remembers, because the wet stain of memory is there on the mattress. The mattress has become a map of her dreams and their remorse, longing, rage, desolation. For the rest of the afternoon she lies naked on the bed with her head in that one spot, one side of her face to the mattress so she can smell him, and when she falls asleep yet again, the smell of him is all she dreams. She wakes to a call

Mama?

and hears it so distinctly that for a moment she believes he’s there in the house. She believes he’s fallen asleep in his bed in another room and that he calls out to her like he used to back at the Hamblin. She sits up with a start in the dark and listens, but the call doesn’t come again until she falls back to sleep.

Her fever has passed but it’s exhausted her. She lays back down but every time she falls asleep on the map of dreams she wakes to his call, until even in her fatigue there’s nothing she can do but pull on some clothes, stumble out to the porch of the house, loosen the line of the gondola and get in slowly, wearily pushing herself with the pole east along the coastline of the Hollywood Hills to that place on the lake she last went five years ago. Although it’s not much more than a mile from where she lives, she’s avoided this part of the lake all these years and dreads it now.

The shoreline has changed a little since then, the lake having risen farther down what was once the Strip, now submerged. Rowing along the Hollywood cliffs she sees newly abandoned patches of the hills, empty houses and what were once chic little lanes that now disappear into water. Several members of a tribe of nomads, identifiable by their lack of either blue attire or Lulu’s subversive red, run alongside the water following the gondola for a while before they give up and turn back. Around a bend in the coast she sees the spires of the old Chateau X hotel; as dusk falls she can see lit candles darting in the castle’s top windows. From the top of the hill above the Chateau the sky tram erected just a few years ago launches itself out over the water, the Nichols Canyon Line that runs to the Fairfax station in the east and then to the Old Cahuenga station beyond; plunging south into the lake in the distance is the Port Justine Line that was begun but never finished. Not far from the coast there still bobs on the lake’s surface the remnants of the sky tram shuttle that plummeted into the water ten months ago when the line broke, drowning nine people including two children. Forty-five minutes later the terrain becomes familiar to her in the twilight, minus the empty fair tents she so distinctly remembers as blowing on the Laurel Canyon beaches that evening that now seems like it was just a month ago, a week, an hour.

She rows to the spot; she dreads it; these are the watery coordinates of her loss and shame, and now her failure of nerve. She fears she can’t go through with this and so hopes this vision is madness, that down through the dark water there is no Other Lake on the Other Side attached to this one by a common birth canal. She drifts on the spot, pulling up the oars, and sings in a cracked, unconvinced voice

if there’s a higher light

hearing the hypnotizing Spanish horns in her head — and for a moment she stops to lean her tired self over the side of the gondola and put her ear as close to the water’s surface as the gondola will allow.

She listens for his voice.

Listens for him calling from the Other Lake on the Other Side. For a while she almost convinces herself she hears nothing, and is appalled how momentarily relieved she is, as if she would rather not have to go through whatever she has to go through to have him back; and then, confronted with her relief and guilt, and confronted with his loss all over again, she feels a despair more unnamable than she’s ever felt at any moment in these five years, which she wouldn’t have thought possible. Leaning over the side of the gondola, her face very close to the water so that the ends of her hair are wet, she begins to cry, tears dropping onto the surface of the lake until

Mama?

unmistakably. Oh dear God she says to herself, and then hears it again

Mama?

and she recoils from the lake. She stares at the black water his Mama? floating up through the dark water toward the surface like a fish. She can see it down below silvery and fluttery light, with the scales of a child’s sobbing. With the waver of his voice the word flashes in and out of view; when she lunges her hand down into the lake she feels his call brush against her fingertips before slipping away. She calls back. For a moment it sticks in her throat

Kirk?

and then she watches it fall from her mouth and sink into the lake, blue and porcelain and breathless. There’s a moment’s silence before he answers, with that question mark so insistent it’s not a question

Mama?

and then she begins rowing away. This is her great failure of nerve. Maybe it’s that she can’t bring herself to believe. Maybe it’s that she’s afraid reaching him is beyond her … and that’s unbearable, because she’s always been convinced she would do anything for him. She’s always been convinced she would hurl herself off any towering building, before any roaring airplane, in any harm’s way for him. When he was born, every instinct of self-interest seemed to give way to an instinct she never knew she had before she had him: the love of something bigger than the love of one’s own life; and now in this moment she’s failed that love.

She begins rowing very quickly from the spot, one Mama? after another floating up to the surface of the lake behind her, a school of his cries desperately swimming after her. Glancing over her shoulder she can see them. She begins weeping in a hysteria that keeps time with her rowing, until she’s rounded the bend of the Chateau X and can’t see the spot anymore behind her. She cries all the way back across the lake to her house.

~ ~ ~

That night her uterus explodes in a tantrum of blood. Hunched over the toilet she feels the presence of Kristin, her other self whom she so rejected for abandoning their son: Lulu Blu, she hears Kristin whisper from the hallway, you’re no better. Worse, actually, she goes on, I left him in the gondola that night because I was afraid for him. Now he waits on the Other Side (the century’s uterus exploding in a tantrum of water) and you leave him there again, afraid for yourself. Lulu sobs no, her womb answers a red yes, she crawls back to the mattress to paint the dreams mapped there with the scarlet of her thighs.

Once not long after Kirk was born, back when she was still Kristin, she offered God a deal. Whatever good things might be in her future, she would trade them all just for her boy to be all right. She would trade them all. She would trade every minute of happiness, every minute of fulfillment, every minute of accomplishment, all those minutes for his well-being. And then when she lost him, she thought it was God answering, No. God had it in for her, and He had gotten back at her through a helpless child, Sniveling Coward that He had always been, the Neighborhood Bully who pulls the wings off angels simply to prove He can.

And then this notion occurred to her, she didn’t know why. This notion occurred to her; she thought what if in fact she and God had make this deal — but sometime in the future? At some point in the years to come that she doesn’t know, that she never can have foreseen, because it’s a future that’s never going to come to pass, what if God took her up on her deal and in fact they’re now living out the bargain? She has been stripped of happiness, stripped of fulfillment, stripped of whatever it is she might have accomplished, so that she might be guilty, lonely, haunted by the woman she once was who now despises her: but her boy lives. Her boy waits at this very minute on another lake not so different from this one, afraid, confused, but still alive.

In her sleep she smells smoke, feels the heat.

In her sleep another song-serpent — did she leave the radio on? — hisses in from the past. In her sleep it crawls through the front door, and somewhere in the front room catches fire. Maybe because some part of her brain knows that a dream rarely has a scent (she smells the smoke) and rarely a touch (she feels the heat), she wakes. She sits up in bed slowly at first, then startled to complete consciousness by the smoke that begins to choke her. Seeing the fire, she sees herself as others have seen her, in her arrogant red dress against the blue of the lake, a red flame floating on the water. By then the fire is in the hallway where Kristin stood whispering to her a few hours before. For what seems to her an absurdly long moment, she sits on her red dreamsoaked mattress looking at the flames just beyond the door, then shakes herself from her inertia and leaps to the floor, only to realize it’s too late.

Did she leave a candle burning? Did someone sail by and toss in a torch, because it was time to burn the heretic Madwoman in Red from the hills? What’s that phenomenon, she thinks to herself, where people burst into flames? The house spontaneously combusts, its fuse lit at the end that curls into a house’s subconscious. Was the house committing suicide in a symphony of self-immolation — an act of protest, like a Buddhist monk? She can imagine nothing to be protested unless, of course, it’s her presence. Unless, of course, the house means to burn away the human mark of its disgrace.

She’s beset by more responses than she can sort through in the moments the fire allows her. Somewhere in the ember-blizzard of these responses is calm; she feels it somewhere beyond the heat, before the calm is finally interrupted by a now rather ragged instinct for self-preservation, which itself transforms to panic. The daze of her sleep finally succumbs to adrenaline. She goes to the window of her bedroom only for the sill to fracture into flame, and then the curtains go up; she leaps back from them. The inferno drops to the floor on a parachute of fire, then the floor goes up in flames. Then the bed goes up. Now smoke drops her to her knees. For a thoughtless moment she reaches to one of the bed’s blankets, itself engulfed, so as to cover herself, before she drops it and retreats. But there’s nowhere to retreat.

Perhaps it’s this that accounts for it. Perhaps it’s her abject helplessness, perhaps it’s that she finally has nowhere to go and so surrenders to the End. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with her, perhaps it’s a fluke of nature

but the lake begins to rise

after having not risen at all in months. It now rises very suddenly and visibly, by inches.

At first she thinks the house must be sinking. As if somewhere nearby a dam burst; but there is no dam; it’s a tide as mysterious as the intricate flow of her womb that manifested itself to her in the sky over Port Justine the afternoon before. Perhaps the lake comes so that it might claim Lulu before the fire can — so it has nothing to do with rescue, everything to do with possessiveness … but for whatever reason, the lake comes up over the edge of the front porch, comes through the front door into the front room, comes into the hallway of ghosts and into the bedroom and rises up around her feet then her ankles lapping at the flaming walls around her. It brings with it a spray, Lulu’s private rain. It’s now her private lake, beneath her private sky.

The lake that was her enemy. The lake that was my fear. The lake that was the afterbirth of her dreams. The lake that preyed on my son. Now comes as ally, confessor, co-conspirator, savior.

It stops about the time it gets to her waist.

She doesn’t move, partly caught in the shock between the heat of the fire that’s given way to the cold of the water. She keeps throwing water in her face to get the stinging of the smoke out of her eyes; she doesn’t move, as if not to tempt either the lake or the house of ashes around her, until a wall suddenly gives way behind her, falling away; and she sees the lake has dropped to her thighs.

It likes her thighs and stays awhile.

Peering off in the dark where the wall has collapsed, she sees bobbing flashlights on the hillside that abutted what once was her house, and she finally dares to move toward the dark, walking up out of the water onto the new beach.

“You all right?” she hears a stranger ask in the dark, some guy she recognizes as living on the hillside above her, with his son at his elbow, only a few years older than Kirk would be now. His flashlight shines in her face until she shields her eyes with her arm. Beyond him she can now make out others on the embankment in the dark, watching: “What happened?” someone says to someone else nearby, as a woman comes up to Lulu and wraps a blanket around her. “You should get out of those clothes,” the stranger with the boy suggests, and is startled when Lulu, in a daze, drops her red dress from her body to the ground; she pulls the blanket around her and stands shivering for a while.

“You have anywhere to go?” the woman who gave her the blanket asks in the dark.

Lulu stands naked in her blanket shivering. She’s dazed enough she doesn’t register the question at first, but studies the wreckage and looks for the gondola to see if it survived. Does she have anywhere to go? the same woman asks someone else; and in the dark Lulu sees, floating silver among the black remnants of the house, the gondola. Yes, she says. I have somewhere to go.

~ ~ ~

There’s no convincing any of them, she knows, that she’s not who she’s always been in their eyes, the Madwoman in Red, even if she’s now dropped her red dress to the mud of the new shore and stands naked in the blanket. The world’s never been as casual about my nakedness as I am. When she turns to go back into the lake, a couple of people try to stop her — the woman who brought her the blanket, the man with his son — assuming she’s in some kind of shock; as calmly as possible she explains she’s quite coherent but has to retrieve the gondola. It’s imperative she save the gondola. They help her pull the gondola up onto the new embankment and tie it to a tree.

They think I started the fire, she realizes, they think I meant to go up in flames with the house. Later, when they want to take her to a shelter out in the Valley, she says no I’m staying near the water, and when she looks at the lake, the lake looks back. Are we sisters now? Lover and lover, wife and wife, wife and mistress, mistress and slave? The lake, she’s still thinking to herself hours later, sleeping on the living room floor of the woman with the blanket, saved me tonight … for what? Does it have a conscience? I thought it came for my son five years ago … did it really take me instead, and I’m just now realizing it? Lying in the dark she tries to remember now as clearly as she can what happened five years ago when she sank down through the water, Kirk’s gondola above her head, but I can’t. Is it the same lake at all? Or was the lake that came for my son the twin sister of the lake whose shores I’ve known the five years since, the lake that saved me tonight? This lake she rises from the floor in the dark of the stranger’s living room and walks to the window, staring out at the night and the glitter of moonlight on the water in the distance where her house was this lake that covets me and Lulu somehow resists the almost overpowering compulsion to run outside the house right now and down the banks to the gondola.

For a moment she’s overwhelmed. She grabs the windowsill to steady herself because she almost comprehends the huge unmeasurable love of it, the lake’s sacrifice in saving her so that it could then give her up. Saving me so I could have one more chance … and go back. She whispers in the dark through the window, You would do that for me? You would give me up so I could go back? You would do that because you love me that much, and therefore you know what it’s like for me to love my son that much? You would do that for him, because you know what he means to me?

For a moment there’s nothing but silence, and then in the night the lake answers.

She has the almost overpowering compulsion to rush to the gondola even in the dark; and realizes that in part it’s because she’s afraid if she waits then she’ll fail herself again, and fail her son again as she did the afternoon before. But as soon as that realization comes, it passes: she knows she won’t fail again. And knowing that, she returns to her place on the floor and, against the hard wood beneath her, finally sleeps.

~ ~ ~

In her sleep, the red sky stretches across the dome of her inner lids.

When she opens her eyes, she hears voices from outside the window. She turns on her side and pushes herself up from the floor, walks to the window and looks out; the sky is ablaze with blood. All along the road, down the embankment that leads to the lake, people stand in their blue clothes looking up at the clotted clouds. She looks herself for only a minute, looks around the house for her red dress and finds it nowhere: so she steps naked from the front door and walks down the hill to the water, astounded witnesses diverted from the astounding sky by the astounding woman who passes.

As she passes, someone reaches out to her as if to help or stop her. But she isn’t stopped. A crowd at the beach parts for her as she moves through them to the tree where the gondola is tied. She unties the gondola from the tree and, holding the rope in her hand, looks at the sky again to assess the storm. She pushes the gondola out in the water and gets in, and takes the pole.

The last vision the lake shows her is a vision of herself again, except she’s changed places with it. This time rising from the lake and stepping from the black atrium of an underwater geyser, among the cinders of her house that still float on the lake’s surface like slivers of ice from a black arctic, is Lulu; that’s when the naked woman in the gondola knows she’s Kristin again. She continues to watch as the vision of Lulu slowly recedes in the distance, getting smaller and smaller with all the other people on the shore that now gets farther and farther away. Lulu raises her hand in farewell and Kristin nods in farewell back, continuing to push herself out into the water with the pole.

As she pushes the gondola by pole along the edge of the lake, people run alongside. The farther she sails, the bigger the crowd becomes, mesmerized by the spectacle of the nude woman with the pole guiding her silver gondola. After a while Kristin pushes herself beneath the inverted arc of the fallen line of the sky tram, then around the bend where the Chateau X rises up out of the water. Off to her right in the southwest she can see the Hotel Hamblin. She feels calm unlike the afternoon before when she took this same trip. Accompanying her are the melody-snakes loosed last night from her house by the fire; now homeless they slither alongside the gondola as the growing throng of observers run alongside on land. She can hear them as they brush past her, women’s voices in the lake crossing her path as if daring her to cut them in two in her image, and then there’s a school of them, all the voices she’s heard for five years, some she didn’t even know were singing to her, now slipping back and forth across her path darting across her passage as if to either clear the way or stop her, because they can’t stand to lose her, not to the lake that’s now her sister or lover or mother. Beneath the hemorrhaging sky, the snakes just beneath the water’s surface reflect red strings of blood.

The crowd on land grows. Stragglers along the shore are caught up by the others following her, until by the time she rounds the Chateau and approaches the lake’s origin there appear to be several hundred onlookers, including people who before now have never heard of the Madwoman of the Lake. No one calls or heckles, everyone is quiet. Soon Kristin puts down the pole and takes the oars to row, and as she approaches the spot she drops the oars and allows herself to drift to it, as if trusting the boat’s precision more than her own. The melody-snakes that have followed her relentlessly for the last quarter of a mile have stopped at an unseen but unbreachable border, out of earshot of the past, muted into invisibility by the lake’s hush. Kristin peers over the side of the boat. Zed is blacker and emptier than it’s ever been. Kristin looks up for a moment at the shore of the northern Laurel Bay which is now lined with people. No one calls to stop her. In the red glare from water and sky she can just make out some people holding their hands over their eyes. It’s perfectly quiet, not a voice or a song to be heard and

Wildman?

she says, leaning over the gondola. She doesn’t shout it, she lets it fall from her mouth and watches it sink. It vanishes into the pitch black of the lake and she waits. Seconds pass. A minute. Another minute and another, and then, in the pitch black where she watched her question disappear, she sees the approach of its answer. Slowly it grows before her eyes, floating up to her until it breaks the surface

Mama

and she scoops it up in her hands. She cups it in her hands and sits in the gondola looking at it, as if it’s a prayer and the gondola is a floating pew. She splashes her face with it and feels his voice run down her cheeks. For a moment she covers her eyes. She feels his voice dry on her face. She looks back down into the lake and now deep in the black water she sees something else, slowly floating up to her, another answer; and she reaches into the water and takes it as it breaks the surface.

In these five years she’s forgotten all about it. It’s a small plastic monkey in a red spacesuit with a space helmet. She thinks about that last day in the gondola five years ago, Kirk clutching in his hand the monkey he named after himself; she remembers slipping into the water and hearing his heartbeat under the water, and looking up through the water and seeing him peer over the edge of the gondola, still holding the monkeyman he called Kulk in his fingers. She remembers now the terrible emptiness of the gondola when she returned to the water’s surface a minute later, the way there had been no sign of him at all, and now she looks at the toy monkey that’s come floating up to her out of the lake and says

I’m coming

and slips her naked body, pink with the light of the red sky, over the gondola’s side. As she slips beneath the water she thinks maybe she hears someone on the shore finally break the silence of the lake and shout out No! but she isn’t certain about that, that may be in my own head. Because I also hear if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me but I look around for some sign of the melody bolder than the others, having dared to swim into this forbidden zone of the lake but I don’t see it, so the song must be in my head too … all the songs and all the No’s are in my head. I sink. I don’t swim to the hole below, I let it pull me. I didn ’t even get a good gulp of air first, I’m calm in my chest and my descent, and feel the peace that maybe comes with drowning, once the panic is over … I don’t know why I don’t panic. I look up and see the gondola above me like I saw it above me the last time I went this way, five years ago, but this time without his small head looking over the side. As I sink there rise around me the small canyon houses that went under when the lake first appeared, I can see below me the sidewalks that once lined the boulevard below me too, and around me the neighborhood where I walked years ago pregnant not much more than a week from labor, drawn here as I’m drawn now, only to find at my feet a black puddle where now is the dark hole I can see through the water’s murk, coming up at me, the opening of the lake’s birth canal, here it comes. Here it comes. Too small it would seem for anyone to slip through, and yet I

slip through anyway, drawn beyond any resistance, pushed through in a new

birth, when domination is submission and submission is domination, shaking

myself loose of the love that held me down so as to find inside me the love that