Our Ecstatic Days

~ ~ ~

Sometimes I’m paralyzed by my love for him. He calls me from his bed in the middle of the night and, you know, I can’t resist. It’s the way he calls, not sleepy or frightened or crying, but determined and aware and awake….

Mama? and I can hear the question mark so insistent it isn’t a question … it would break my heart not to answer.

In my heart he opens the door to this vast terrain of fear. It’s a fear stretching out beyond these young years of mine when mortality is supposed to be so inconceivable. How have mothers down through the ages survived their love for their kids? The thought of his mortality is abysmal to me….

One afternoon we were at the fair down by the lakeside, and a vendor had in captivity one of the owls that have invaded the city ever since the lake first appeared three years ago. She was explaining to some other mom’s kid how, far up in the sky, the owl can hear a human heartbeat, and even at that very minute I thought to myself this owl could hear Kirk’s little heart as I stood there holding him in my arms. Could it hear his heart when he was still inside me three years ago? Was that my first betrayal of my boy — his birth, exposing him to the peril of owls that hear heartbeats? Every night I wait for the sun to set before writing this, there it goes now, slipping down

behind the San Vicente Bridge that crosses the lake to the northwest, I see it from my window … sun goes down, sky goes dark, lake goes black, and owls swoop across the rising moon like leaves blown loose from some phantasmagoric tree twisting up out of the ground

and my voice rises from the crypt of my consciousness shaking words off like topsoil. Kirk and I are bonded by a cord of blood that runs from his heart to my thighs. Menstrual waves crash against the inner beach of my belly.

~ ~ ~

There was this song from before he was born, I heard it on a bus riding Pacific Coast Highway south, blacksea glittering in the sun like gun metal, he was tumbling around and around inside me like he did, thrashing in the cradle of me … and it came out of a small radio across the aisle a row behind me, an older man, college professor-type in a brown corduroy coat gazing out my side of the bus at the sea. It was hot through the window but I liked it after all those cold pregnant months in Tokyo…. I heard it just once, a strange little song with distant Moorish drums and a dreamy Middle Eastern melody and soft spanish horns in the back, and a woman singing in a turn-of-the-century voice … but not this century. Last century. Maybe all turn-of-the-century voices are the same, pure, floating, lost. Like it could as easily have been the voice of either 1920s Paris or bright shimmery twenty-first-century Reykjavik. Spanish horns hypnotized me, the singer’s voice transported me

if there’s a higher light let it shine on me … through the trees

and hearing it just that once, I never forgot it

’cause I know this sea wants to carry me it’s a sweet, sweet sound she sings for my release …

Later after the college professor got off the bus with his radio and the bus continued onward, I went on singing it to myself if there’s a higher light sang it to myself just as much not to forget it as anything, and inside me let it shine on me inside Kirk stopped thrashing, listening. I knew he was listening. Later, after he was born, I would ask if he remembered me singing it to him, and he said he did. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But I would sing it to him before going to sleep, by the window of our apartment, while the nightwind came in off the lake.

Started this journal in Tokyo, stopped when I thought I miscarried him, then started again after I got back to L.A. … that was around the time the lake first appeared, that mid-September three years ago after Kirk was born. Of course it was already there before that, before anyone realized it was ever going to turn into an actual lake, the center near where Hollywood Boulevard used to meet Laurel Canyon Boulevard, nothing more than a puddle the morning it first bubbled up, no one thinking anything about it until however long it was before it cut the canyon off from the rest of the city….

Since the city was in the middle of one of its usual droughts, a lake that appeared from nowhere and kept getting bigger ought to have been a little suspicious — but I guess that’s easy to say in retrospect. “What’s that old machinery out there in the water?” the writer down the hall asked me not that long ago, staring in the distance out his window, and I said, “Pumps from when they tried to drain it …”

As usual Kirk was busy demolishing the guy’s apartment, sitting over in the corner pulling the tape out of a video. “Hey!” I yelled. He stopped long enough to gauge whether this admonition was to be taken any more seriously than any of the others, before returning to the task at hand. “Hey!” I said again, “stop!”

Over by the window, the writer glanced at Kirk unfazed. “When did they try to drain it?”

“I guess when it didn’t, you know, just go away on its own … evaporate or whatever….” As I snatched Kirk up in my arms, he lunged for the video he had just disemboweled, squalling Mine! “No one had figured out yet it was filling up from a hole in the bottom…. Knock it off!”

“They ever figure out whether the water was coming from the sea?”

… no it wasn’t coming from the sea … by then, the edge of the lake had just reached south of Sunset Boulevard. A few weeks later it was almost all the way to Fountain Avenue, which meant it was only a couple of blocks from our old hotel here at the top of what’s now called the St Jim Peninsula, named after a very fancy hotel up on the Strip I can still see from my window. Kirk and I used to sit watching it during feeding right after he was born, lavender and magenta kliegs on the walls and the Ether Bar where young glam Hollywood drank tequila martinis. But as the lake overtook Sunset, you could see the kliegs go out and darkness move up floor by floor until it was all dead.

Doc says it would have gone anyway of its own volition. Rotted by decadence from the bottom up … as close as I’ve ever heard her come to sounding judgmental about anything, and the only time I’ve ever heard her sound almost glad to see a building die. In the old rundown hotel here where Kirk and I live, some on the first floor have already started moving out. Sometime in that first year, when the city would send boats out to the center of the lake, sending divers down to figure out where the lake was coming from, they referred to it in the newspaper and on the radio as “lake zero”—as in, you know, ground zero. And then at some point it got shortened to Lake Z or, sometimes, Lake Zed.

~ ~ ~

You’ll spend your whole life,” Doc said when I told her this dream I had, “making peace with your own true nature …”

… whatever that means. In the dream I was on the banks of what was once Laurel Avenue, near the old 1930s apartment where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived when he was writing movies … I was lying there hypnotically fixed on the center of the lake….

Lying there in my dream I was suddenly aware of my own womb predating me. Aware of my womb being older than I … down inside I could hear historical rumors little spasms of collective memory rippling outward up to my lungs and down to my thighs … it infuriated me. It seemed so typical … after all, do men’s dicks predate them? In my dream I rejected it, this part of me that was my son’s first home … and then in a surge of guilt I rejected him. And then realized, in the dream, he wasn’t there. I sprang up from where I was, looking around frantically, from the water in front of me to the trees on the banks behind me … and opened my eyes to find myself sitting up in my bed, in the grip of this maternal dread I can’t ignore….

I never dreamed at all the first seventeen/eighteen years of my life … slipping into the womb of the night every time I slept … dark, still, swaddled in the unseen, the unlistened. Waking every morning knowing I had tumbled down this wormhole of the unconscious into some void, feeling a little more nuts every morning I woke like I spent the night drifting in the black, farther and farther from the mothership of who I am, barely twinkling stars of all my impulses all around me. Feeling even when I was awake that I was really still out there, floating…. Crazy, when I was young, just to have any dream at all, and doing some crazy crazy things in the night to find one. But I never dreamed until that night in Tokyo that I lost him, electric icicle of him melting out of me between my legs onto my fingertips. Then he was back later that morning, I felt his return, my little unborn man who himself had been cut loose in space the night before, drifting far away until somehow, in a burst of embryonic will, he swam back through the tide of Nada in a cosmic breaststroke….

… and since then I dream all the time. Almost never remember the dreams but I know they were there the night before, I can feel them like I felt him that morning he was conceived again inside me, good dreams, bad dreams, mostly dreams that aren’t so certain of themselves. My kind of dreams, in other words.

I used to be fucking fearless, you should know that about me. None of this terror I have all the time now means anything if you don’t know that. Ran away from home at sixteen, traveling with this weird religious-suicide cult for a while, moving down to L.A. and getting into all kinds of situations just blindly, sometimes out of desperation but sometimes because I didn’t have enough sense to be afraid. Lived by wits and recklessness. Went to Tokyo the same way…. I was the most fearless person I’ve ever known. Not a better one and definitely not a smarter one, but … not only didn’t I know there was all that fear behind that door in myself I didn’t know there was a door. Everything was about me … and then you have a kid and not only isn ’t everything about you anymore, in some way too hard to explain, it never was….

No doubt about it my Kierkegaard’s my little wildman. Runs around the apartment naked with his flapdoodle sticking straight out and his treasured balloons flying along behind him, one string in each hand…. Before I had him I had this idea babies were amorphous lumps of human clay that take distinct shape only over time. But he was half-wildman half-zenbaby right out of the chute … before, actually. The weeks after I got back from Tokyo where I worked for a year as a memory girl in Kabuki-cho

we would go down to the lake which at that time was still small enough you could walk around all of it in ten minutes except the part cut off by the Hollywood Hills, and

we would sit watching the water and, other than when I would sing to him … if there’s a higher light, let it shine … it was the only time he settled down inside me, mesmerized by the lake beyond my belly. First days after he was born, when the lake started spreading west down what was then the Strip, we would watch it together from the window of our room while he lay in my arms, and I would think he was asleep and then I would look to see his eyes open and calm, gazing at the lake and — I swear — smiling.

Big Agua he started calling it when he turned two, having picked up the baby-spanish I don’t know where, same place he learned to call the moon luna….

The lake was starting to get a lot of attention then, sightseers coming and going, city officials and geological experts standing around scratching their heads. The first year everyone was kind of enchanted by it, however much disruption it caused schedules and traffic and bus lines. That’s when the gondolas and rowboats came out, sailing in and out of the red light that poured over the hills like a tide of fire bursting the levee of the sun. Charred palms stitched the horizon. A makeshift harbor was built over by the flooded Chateau X hotel. Parasols were in fashion that autumn, women walking the lakeshore with them, twirling them from their boats so on Saturdays this panorama of spinning colored spheres floated above the surface of the lake and in its reflection…. Balloons! Kirk would point when he saw the parasols. While I lay on the grass reading, he would blow bubbles from a bubblewand I bought him … so we blew bubbles together, watching them float to the grass where those that didn’t pop would settle like dew. He would smash them with his foot. “Smash the bubbles!” I would cry, and he would smash them, “Pap,” and then I felt funny, it seemed wrong to encourage him to smash something as delicate as a bubble

pap, pap, pap he would go. One afternoon he blew a particularly large bubble and said out of nowhere, “This one’s for my daddy,” and it caught my breath … he had never mentioned his father before

this one’s for my daddy and the bubble slowly tumbled down through the air before us like a little spinning glass world, and when it landed, it didn’t pop and he didn’t smash it but watched it there on the grass for a long time until it finally popped on its own….

My kid’s beautiful. What else is a mom going to say, right? except that my kid really is beautiful … the minute he was born they held him up for me to look at slackjawed, stupefied — me, not him…. “This child is beautiful,” the nurse assured me the next day in some wonder, and I had finally come out of my fog enough to crack, “Yeah, but you tell all the moms that,” and she glanced quickly over both shoulders to see whatever other mother might be listening in the bed next to mine before she whispered back, “Well, yes, I do. But this child is beautiful” … and so he is. Which he certainly didn’t get from his mother or father, so go figure. He’s a throwback to someone I can’t even begin to know, never having known either my own mother or father…. Don’t know where he got the hair that shines brilliant in the sun or the sea-green eyes flecked with amber, or the sanguine mouth of a mad monk. People’s attraction to him is remarkable … when he was younger I would push him in the stroller around the lake and people would gawk like there was something slightly supernatural about him, and not just little old grandmothers either. “Hey, cute kid, man!” some tattooed skinhead sociopath would interrupt his mayhem long enough to stop and exclaim.

It worries me he’s this beautiful … not only that some stranger could try to snatch him away, but also for how life might let him get away with too much, given how he’s a wily schemer too, already determined to run the show, musical in his self-assured insubordination. “Nooooooooo please,” he demurs my commands in a lilting singsong voice. Silent defiance comes into his eyes, there isn’t even the slightest submission in him. At the age of three he gives orders all the time, “Do this please! do that please!”—a very polite dictator. “La-la!” he orders at night when I’m putting him to sleep, II Duce’s way of telling me he wants me to sing to him. “More la-la please!” means Keep singing. “Bigger la-la please!” means, Sing louder.

Who’s the boss here, wildman? I ask, and he narrows his eyes for a minute looking in mine, calculating the question, before he points at me and says with a big smile

You are because he knows, you see, he’s already figured out that’s the right answer, even if he doesn’t believe it for two seconds….

… but I decided he might turn out OK one afternoon he was playing with Valerie’s kid Parker, the only other child in the hotel, about eight months younger than Kirk — black, deaf and mute, and Valerie is another single mom who works a tedious job answering telephones for the city, so sometimes to help her out I’ll take Parker for a few hours if I’m free. On weekends she and I and the two kids go down to the lake where they play together … and this one afternoon I saw it … Valerie saw it too….

It wasn’t a big deal. Kirk and Parker each sat in their folding chairs with balloons we had gotten them tied to their wrists, Kirk a yellow one and Parker a blue one, and Parker pulled the string on his only to watch it float up and out over the water … it was a minute before he realized it wasn’t coming back. Then he tried to cry, which was much more terrible than any actual little-kid cry because it was a cry no one could hear … he was wracked by the futility of cries he can’t voice and balloons that don’t return. No matter how much Valerie tried to comfort him, he was inconsolable, until Kirk got up from his chair, walked over, pulled the string of his own balloon from his wrist and handed it to Parker. Parker took the balloon and stopped crying.

Maybe other three-year-olds do things like this all the time, what do I know? but I was under the distinct impression that empathy was something we don’t learn until five or six. For a while neither Valerie nor I said anything. Kirk went back to his chair and sat down and watched the lake….

I used to be a notorious smart-ass … well, notorious to myself anyway. Always with the smart answer … but I’m not that smart anymore. There’s no great revelation in having a kid … you think you’re going to be transformed, you’ll somehow become a more substantial human being … but there’s no change in me I can tell other than all the new ways I’ve become afraid. I can’t tell that parenthood has made me a whit wiser or less trivial, or older except in the ways I’m not ready to be older….

… all I know is the meaning of myself begins and ends with my boy, where I didn’t know there even was a meaning before. All I know is he’s the shore of the lake of my life where before maybe I knew there was a lake out there somewhere but had no clue where. It doesn’t mean there’s nothing of me. There’s always been a me there, I know that. But it means he’s the single lit lantern on the road to Me, dangling from the branch of experience that overhangs my night of doubt.

These are the memoirs of Kristin Blumenthal, L.A. single mom, former Kabuki-cho memory girl. In July I’ll be twenty-two.

~ ~ ~

When I returned to L.A. from Tokyo before he was born, I went to see an obstetrician for a sonogram, and they looked at the screen a long time and finally said, “There’s two.” Two?

“Yes.”

Twins?

“Uh … yes. We think.”

You think?

“Yes.”

Or: there was one … and a female shadow. The shadow of resurrection? Burned into my womb like bombs over Japan burning shadows into walls? So on his birthday out came Kirk and we all waited for the other, waited and waited, doctors and nurses peering up into me and looking at each other and kind of shrugging like, Well, where is she? What’s she waiting for, trumpets? “I guess we’ll settle for one,” the doctor finally announced jauntily, when she didn’t appear.

But ever since, not all the time but now and then, I feel her there inside me, Kirk’s little sister Bronte. Is she being willful? Is she just shy? Does she know something the rest of us don’t, and is taking refuge? She tumbles around inside me at night until she hears me thinking about her, and then rests in a way Kirk never rested, listening, considering options, waiting for her moment….

Over the last few months, more and more people have moved out of the first floor of the Hotel Hamblin where I rent a room for Kirk and myself on a more or less permanent basis, until there’s no one down there but the manager and a nomadic halfdog halfwolfthat wanders in and out of the hotel scrounging for something to eat. As the lake gets bigger, the power starts going out in parts of the city, you can tell that the lights in the faraway windows on the other side are lanterns and candles from their pinpoint flickering in the wind off the water, like fireflies hovering against the black hills of the distant shore. Soon the city started rewriting all the addresses. Without over-explaining it here, each new address has two parts, one fixing its place on the lake’s perimeter and the other its distance from the lake’s center … for instance the Hamblin is PSW47/VI80, which means it’s 470 yards west of the southernmost point on the lake’s edge, and 1,800 yards from the center … and of course as these addresses get bigger, they render the earlier addresses obsolete. PSW47/V170 doesn’t exist anymore, it’s now under water. L.A. is a city of drowning addresses.

At first people wondered: if the P was for “perimeter” and the SW for “southwest,” then what was “V” for? If the V part of the address was the distance from the center of the lake, why wasn’t it a “C” address, or M for “middle” or B for “bull’s-eye”? It turned out that V was for “vortex,” and when that got out, everyone kind of freaked. A rather poor choice of words, vortex … leave it to a bureaucrat to get poetic at exactly the wrong moment. Vortex sounds like a drain. It gives the impression not only something’s coming up from the hole at the bottom of the lake, but something’s going down too….

Not that long ago I got a letter addressed to Kristin B, and I assumed it was for me until I opened it, My beautiful K it began and right then and there I knew he had the wrong girl, labial jewel, riverine rapture and so on and so forth in that vein, for the first few letters anyway, until they became more bitter, ecstasy replaced by bile as one letter after another went unanswered. Soon the letters started coming every day, each more furious and desperate than the last, and each enclosing a small piece of an old photo which I stuck to our hotel wall with the other pieces, waiting for the complete portrait to fall into place….

Of course as each letter became more tormented, it occurred to me to write and put him out of his misery. I felt guiltier and guiltier reading them … I mean, I had no excuses after the first one. After the first one it was pretty obvious the letters weren’t for me. But there was no return address and I guess it never occurred to him they might-be going to the wrong person, and soon it became pretty obvious to me he’s what I’ve always called a point-misser. Everyone misses the point now and then but some people are just born missing the point. It never occurred to him there might be any other possible reason his labial jewel wasn’t answering. His desire was so grand and uncompromising he would rather assume she was rejecting him than that something as banal as the incompetence of the postal service could be at fault. Some part of him wanted to judge her monstrously, some part of him wanted to be a martyr for cunnilingus instead of a prisoner of chance.

There was something else about the letters, something clandestine, subterranean: The lake, he finally wrote in one, is coming for me, and the second I read it, I saw him somewhere out there in the city barricaded away, building an ark maybe. In China they would have found me by now. I don’t know how long it was, at least fifteen or twenty letters, before I finally noticed they weren’t actually addressed to PSW47/V180, but VI70.

When I saw this, I grabbed up Kirk — at the moment busy trying to demolish my carefully constructed jigsaw of little pieces of the correspondent’s photo attached to the wall — and ran up the stairs to the Hamblin rooftop, where a panoramic view of the lake stretches all the way from Hollywood in the east to the San Vicente Bridge in the west. There out in the water, about a thousand yards away on a more or less straight line from us to the center of the lake, rose an old abandoned apartment building like my own … and I knew right away it was PSW47/V170 where she lived, waiting for his letters to come floating up to her window in bottles, maybe. It was dusk, light failing at our backs, and only after Kirk and I stood there a while watching the black of the water meet the black of the hills beyond, darkness slowly swallowing up VI70 in the distance, did a light flicker in one of its faraway windows, clear as could be since every other window was dark. And just like I knew that was her address, when that light appeared I knew it was her, and she was still out there, waiting for him.

~ ~ ~

When I can leave Kirk with Valerie here in the hotel a few hours, I cobble together what jobs I can, including the one with Doc and the one for the writer down the hall….

… desperate over-the-hill novelist who checked in for a few days in order to finish this screenplay he saw as his last best chance to salvage a career … he wound up staying a week and then two and then a month and now he’s been here almost a year. The screenplay never gets finished and meanwhile his wife and daughter who live on the other side of the city come see him like relatives visiting an inmate. The little girl is about Kirk’s age, long gold hair, and sometimes when the reunion is over and there’s this tearful clutching between the writer and his wife, the little girl stands in the hallway staring at Kirk and he stares back at her. Two little kids, little boy and little girl, just stand there staring at each other wordlessly, they don’t play, they don’t fight. During these times I stay as inconspicuous as possible because I don’t want Mrs. Over-the-Hill-Novelist to get the wrong idea. “I miss my little girl,” he whispers later. Since it would seem he can check out of the hotel anytime he wants and go home, it’s hard to figure.

Day after day, night after night, he sits in his room gazing morosely at his blank computer screen drinking tequila and watching old movies stacked up in the corner. He stares out his window at the growing lake and talks about missing his little girl, and he never answers except to a secret knock, while bellmen slip notes under his door wondering when he’s going to check out. I’ve read some of his script and maybe I’m wrong but I’ve begun thinking the main character, a chick punk singer, sounds a little like me. It isn’t the best movie but I’m certain there have been worse. I think his big problem is he hasn’t the slightest idea how to write women characters, but he looks completely baffled when you try and tell him this. “What do you mean?” he says.

“What do I mean? I mean every female character is a stripper or porn star or sex slave.”

He’s thunderstruck. “Are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure.”

He ponders this a while more. “What about Tara Spectaculara?”

“Tara Spectaculara? The amazonian motorcycle mistress with the huge tits? The one in the black leather jacket that’s … how did you put it?”—flipping through the script—“…‘unzipped so far it threatens the space-time continuum’?”

“Uh,” he’s thinking furiously, “well, these characters,” he finally clears his throat, “are just, uh, you know … they’re just the … forbidden iconography of the male psyche….”

“Oh, well then. In that case. ‘Forbidden iconography of the male psyche,’ that’s OK then. Stupid me, I thought this Tara was just your basic male wangle.”

“Male what?”

“Wangle.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Yes you do.” Talk about a point-misser! This guy is a serial point-misser. Anyway he got this idea of passing me off as the writer of the script, that’s the way his mind works, and an even better example of how his mind works is he’s saddled me with the nom de plume “Lulu Blu,” who apparently was some kind of woman pornographer back in the Eighties — which you would think kind of proves my whole argument. He’s convinced Hollywood isn’t going to have any interest in failed literary-type novelists, better if a script filled with male wangies about motorcycle mistresses and rocker babes, submitted to guy-studio-execs with their own male-wangies, is written by a twenty-two-year-oldpunkette who would be expected to have special credibility on the subject of motorcycle mistresses and rocker babes since undoubtedly I live with a harem of them and we all have sex together all the time, which of course is the biggest male wangie of all. So for a while one of my jobs has been to run around town sitting sullenly in Century City offices listening to why I’m being turned down — which is to say why he’s being turned down — and I guess I have to admit on some level I must find this guy just pathetic enough to feel bad for him, since I keep doing it even though it’s obviously never going to pay me anything, my five percent of the script contingent on someone actually buying it….

I don’t know much about the movie business but it seems obvious to me they have a problem. “Looks like you have a problem,” I mumble to this one studio guy in his office one afternoon with the lake sloshing through the doorway. Throughout the whole floor they’ve set up little footbridges from this desk to that, and after a while the ultimate status power-move by a ruthless studio boss isn’t the lunchtime blowjob by the personal assistant of either gender but rather commanding an associate producer to swim to his suite on the double rather than walk the little planks now reserved for the elite of a Hollywood that no longer exists. “This?” the executive sneers, “this isn’t a problem. Are you kidding? Sound—now that was a problem. Cinemascope. Television. We survived all that,” this guy, maybe five years older than I tops, shakes his finger at me, “long before your time. What’s this? A little fucking water,” contemptuously waving his hand at the tide lapping at the ankles of the anxious secretary in the corner.

At the beginning, the lake was banked on the north side of the Strip, but then the dam there broke and the water cut most of the city in two, and before they built the San Vicente Bridge all the east-west bus routes had to detour down to Venice Boulevard before turning back up the peninsula formed by the La Cienega and Crescent rivers. It screwed up my other part-time job and the couple of times I was late I could tell Doc was annoyed, which was mortifying given she’s a fount of patience, one of those people you never want to let down. Truth is I’ve never quite figured out what I contribute to her work except to take the patient’s various atmospheric readings and hand her whatever instruments she needs. Last time I think her irritation was aggravated by the fact that the diagnosis hadn’t gone so well and she was breaking the news to the habitants just as I got there, breathless from having run the half mile from the bus.

“It’s dying,” she had just told them … they were still standing on the front lawn arm in arm, looking at the terminal house stunned. I think because there’s something so calm and deep about Doc, people find this kind of bluntness easier to accept … there’s a manner about even her most ominous prognosis that says both: This is the way it is; and I’m sorry. The habitants can tell she feels for them and I can tell it too, watching her move through the sick house from room to room in a bubble of stillness, running her fingers along the walls and the doorframes and the windowsills, pressing the side of her face against the plaster listening. When she does this, her lined face glows with the flash of both twilight and dawn at the same time … OK, I’m getting carried away. OK, you can tell I’m a little in love with her. Her eyes older than her face and her smile younger, her hair lost between the auburn of yesterday and the silver of tomorrow, serenity woven in the air around her like a glistening web. Truth is, this job isn’t much more lucrative than trying to peddle Jainlight’s script for him, but I do it because I covet my time with her. Sometimes at night, I dream she’s my mom I never knew.

There’s a sadness about Doc, something she brought with her when she came out to L.A. from New York a couple of years back, not long after the lake appeared. Or maybe it’s just from listening to all these sick buildings, however fatalistic she tries to be about it. She presses her face against the wall and closes her eyes, listening to the fading life of the house … I finally asked what it is she hears and that was when she told me about the music. Female voices singing, inside the walls, songs of … once I saw a tear run down her cheek. But, what makes a house die? I ask, and she shrugs, “Well,” in that voice you can sometimes barely make out, “as with people, it isn’t always easy to say. I just know it’s slipping away. I can hear it in the walls, it sings to me. I hear death spreading through the baseboards or in the ceilings, sometimes it’s just old age. Sometimes it’s something unbearably sad the house never recovers from, an untimely death, the end of a marriage, an act of violence, something only the house knows, something only the house has seen, a betrayal the house absorbs while shielding the habitants from it. Sometimes when a house dies, it’s an act of sacrifice.”

But what happens when the house can’t stand its secrets anymore? that’s what I want to know. What happens when the house starts telling the secrets back because it can’t bear to bear them. Maybe Jainlight down the hall can’t finish his script because the walls of the Hamblin constantly hum in his head the secrets of girlfriends and mistresses that producers and studio chiefs kept here back in the early part of the last century…. A few nights after Doc said this, Valerie was working a night shift and Parker was staying over, sleeping in Kirk’s room when I heard “Mama?” with that insistent question mark I can’t resist, emphatic as a period. There was something different about it this time, though, he was whispering it, and when it was obvious he wasn’t going to go back to sleep on his own, I went to him. He was standing in his crib in the dark, hair white in the moon through his window. “Mama,” he whispered again, and pointed at Parker lying in the crib Valerie brought up from their apartment.

Flailing in the air, Parker’s hands formed strange half-patterns while there twitched in his sleeping face a whimper he couldn’t say. Alarmed in his three-year-old way, Kirk reached up his arms to me and I picked him up and held him a while, but then after watching Parker a few more minutes he strained to get down, so I set him on the floor and together we continued to watch Parker’s hands fluttering in the air before him.

I finally realized Parker was dreaming. He was “talking” in his sleep. I looked around at the dark room, shadows throbbing with secrets of abandonment. Kirk stood there with his hand in mine “listening” to Parker’s dream of lost daddies, before he went to Parker and placed his palm on the younger boy’s brow. Immediately calmed by Kirk’s touch, Parker dropped his arms to his sides and slept.

~ ~ ~

For a while Kierkegaard howls on buses and in coffee shops, Owoooooh! like the coyotes we hear in the hills at night. Owoooooh, owoooooh over and over until it’s driving me nuts and I tell him to shut up with the howling already. But sometimes when I’m putting him to sleep, I howl with him very softly … he puts his ear against my tummy and listens to Bronte his sister still inside me and howls quietly to her, all our howls getting quieter until he howls himself to sleep.

He has his own way of seeing things, there’s no doubt about that, depending on whatever fantasia he lives in at the moment. Up on top of the Hamblin, as dark falls he explains how the clouds are flying igloos and the lights in the hills are the night-robots that come out when the day-robots go back in their cage in the sun. We ’re riding on the bus together looking out the window and I’m thinking about some meeting I’ve got that afternoon with a producer in my Lulu Blu incarnation and Kirk is driving me nuts with the howling and the endless questions he asks about this and that. It’s a strange overcast day and the sunlight is shining through the clouds in a strange way and, out of the blue, my three-year-old says, “It’s the face of God.”

He has a toy he calls Monkeyman, a small plastic gorilla in a red spaceman suit and space helmet that he takes into the bath, to bed, on the bus, clutching it in his hand at all times. Sometimes hours go by and I see Kirk has had Monkeyman in his hand the whole time, has never let go of it even once, has never set it down anywhere for a second, has never even stuck it in his pocket. There’s even a song that goes with Monkeyman, an old rock and roll song from before I was born that we heard on the radio with a woman singing spacemonkey, it goes, sign of the time. At night Kirk clutches Monkeyman in his sleep like it’s this talisman-thing, and only after sleep has come over him does his hand slowly open and let go.

Then in the middle of the night he wakes and realizes he doesn’t have the monkey. He starts crying and I have to look through all the bedding and under the crib and around the floor. Or sometimes in the night if Kirk has a bad dream and I go get him from his crib and take him into my bed in the other room, he ’ll still be holding on to it, and I’ll hear this plop on the floor behind me as I’m carrying him from one room to the next and I’ll know he’s dropped it, and I go back and find it so I’ll have it to give to him when he wakes up wondering where it is. Not long ago Kirk named the red monkey Kirk, except when he says it, it comes out Kulk.

I read him this book called I Am a Little Monkey. There’s one part where the mommy monkey cleans the little monkey by picking the bugs off him like monkeys do, and every time I get to that part I pinch him all over like I’m picking the bugs off him. Now whenever I get to that part of the book Kirk scampers to the other side of my bed with Kulk to get away, knowing what’s coming. Are you a monkey? I say and he says, “No I’m not a monkey!” Are you a boy? and he answers, “Yes I’m a boy!” except last time. Last time I said, Are you a boy? and he said, “No please!” and puzzled I said then what are you? and he answered

I’m a Bright Light. What are the odds? I mean: ever, you know? what are the odds. Whole populations unleashed in a stream of semen, whole Indias exploding in my womb … so what are the odds what kind of kid you ’ll wind up with? How many millions of sperm are there in the white whisper of a cock, and if one happens to meet up with the waiting egg, it’s one kind of kid, and if another, then it’s another. Conceive at ten o’clock and you get a psycho. Conceive at 10:01 and you get a Bright Light.

He calls any darkness “night-time.” Goes into a dark room, it’s “night-time,” checks the apartment for pockets of night-time everywhere, peering into closets declaring “night-time” then moving onto the next. He goes through my desk, pulling open each drawer and gazing into it one after the other. Night-time, night-time. Watching over his shoulder and pondering Kulk’s silhouette on the wall behind him, he says, “God made Kulk,” dancing it in his fingers in front of my eyes for a while before adding, “but He made his shadow first.”

Since the lake, there’s been an epidemic of dying houses all over town … Doc sees all of them. Consumptive houses, malaria houses, alzheimer houses, heart-attack houses. Houses with tumors growing out of the attic or the bedroom windows or the family rooms. Dying faster than Doc can pronounce them terminal, and you see it mostly when the sun goes down and there are black patches in the hills and skyline where once were lights … an urbanological mourning, a city bound and gagged in the black memorial armbands of lightless windows and doors.

One late afternoon, out on the shores of Laurel Cove where it first appeared, not far from where we saw the owls the afternoon at the fair, I was walking with Kirk holding his hand, and we heard music coming out of the lake. First it was only a shred of a melody and then there was another, two melodies interweaving, and then suddenly there was a flood of them, an outburst so loud Kirk put his hands over his ears. The music was accompanied by a light, first a small glowing string and then another, and then a mass of them, each melody snaking its way outward from a place in the lake just above its source, until the whole lake was shimmering with light and music, melody-snakes wiggling their way out into the city. I kept looking around to see if anyone else was out there to hear it and see it like we did, but we were alone for a minute, like everyone in the city had vanished. And although at first I thought it was the sound of all the songs of dying buildings escaping from the walls that held them, all the female voices that Doc always heard, it was more like they were coming from deep under the water. Like they had broken through from whatever was on the other side of that hole at the bottom from where the lake had come.

When I was a kid back on the little island where I grew up in the Sacramento delta, the sound of the radio was the sound of tourists who came and left, sound of freedom and desertion … all the strangers who could come to the little Chinese ghost town where I was a prisoner and then leave on the ferry the next day. Sometimes Kirk and I find a song on the radio that we sing together, there was one by this chick band from the late Nineties, guitars going off like terrorist bombs and girls singing dum dum da dee dee dum dum da dum doo! All the little babies go, Oh! oh! I want to! and for some reason this one underground station played it a lot for a couple weeks, and every time at the chorus Kirk and I would jump up from the bed and shout at each other, “All the little babies go, Oh! oh! I want to!”

Like me when I was a kid, Kirk used to never cry, he only started lately. I think somehow he got it in his head the music is the sound of freedom and desertion and that I’m going to disappear. I go in the next room and he gets it in his head I’ll never come back. Suddenly he’s wailing for me, and it ’s just lately I’ve realized that, as much as anything else, his call of “Mama?” in the middle of the night is nothing more or less than to make certain I’m still here, that I haven’t vanished from his life. I don’t know where he got this idea he would be left all alone in the world. I wrack my brain trying to figure what I might have done that made him think this, but I can’t think of anything, and I wonder if it’s like his premature empathy — a sense that, sooner or later, everything goes away.

After Kirk was a year old, the lake had gotten big enough there was a fog off the water in the mornings and evenings that climbed the Hollywood moors and wound through the city. A big chunk of the hills broke off and tumbled down into the lake and onto its shore, including a huge rock as big as a house that landed near where Kirk and I would blow bubbles. Of course I couldn ’t get it out of my head, what might have happened if we had been there when this monster rock came crashing down. I’m haunted by such possibilities hour on the hour. Kirk always likes to throw rocks in the lake so I told him to go throw this one. He looked at it with suspicion, then surmounting his doubt went over and put his hands on the towering rock and pushed with all his might while I laughed. “Too big,” he finally announced solemnly, his spirit far bigger than the rest of him, far bigger than I.

I’m not a religious person but after Kirk was born I started praying. Every night, “Dear God do whatever you want to me but don’t let anything bad happen to my boy.” I think about all the stuff I’ve done, running way from “home”—such as it was, my drunken uncle who ran the town bar — the lies I told, guys I fucked in their sleep to suck out their dreams with my thighs and carry them off splashing inside me. I tally it all up and it occurs to me if God wants to punish me then my prayers have given him a pretty good hint how to go about it. And now God’s just one more Predator out there I have to protect my kid from.

Around the time Kirk was eighteen months old, the city finally sent some divers down into the lake to try and figure out what was in the hole at the bottom. This got a lot of attention, half the city there watching the divers in their black wetsuits slip over the side of the boat and disappear and then come back up. Every time they came back up there seemed to be much conferring back and forth with various officials on the boat. Everyone figured there would be some kind of press conference or announcement at the end. But there was no announcement, instead everyone on the boat immediately hurried to their cars and drove off — pretty quickly it seemed to me. Since then, no city officials come to the lake anymore, but for a week or so afterward everyone else who had been at the lake would stand staring at the water, like some answer would come floating up any minute….

I don’t know so much about science or higher math, but in the more complicated equations I always assume there must be a wildness factor somewhere … or maybe that’s what math tries to avoid. I guess maybe math and science are about factoring out the chaos not factoring it in, determining a definite value for everything. Math and science don’t allow for the possibility of true chaos, only for an unknown order that calls itself chaos. I mean, if that butterfly flapping his wings in South America twenty years ago really did cause the toaster to burn my English muffin this morning, that isn ’t randomness, that’s cause-and-effect of a truly cosmic kind, the exact opposite of chaos.

My kid has his own way with numbers, his own mathematics. “How many bites of that cereal have you had?” I ask him, trying to get him to eat his breakfast, and his eyes narrow in that thoughtful calculating way they do: “Forty,” he answers. He doesn ’t even know what forty is. You have not had forty bites, I say, and he thinks some more and says, “Seven.” You’ve eaten seven bites? I ask, dubious, and he thinks some more very carefully before announcing, “Twenty-one.” The three-year-old poet in him likes the sound of forty and seven and twenty-one, and adds and subtracts them accordingly, dividing night-robots in the hills by the size of the moon, adding the number of day-robots in the cage of the sun squared, figuring the wondrous equations of his little existence.

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 after I 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.

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.

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 the Laurel 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.

He cries, and as he cries his hands start to move, start to talk the language of hands he learned from Parker. For a while I just sit there at my end of the boat, then gingerly move to him, to pull him to me for a minute and hold him. The way his fingers keep talking in the air, the way he clutches me, I know he’s more afraid than I thought. Sorry wildman, I whisper in his ear over and over sorry and I almost turn the boat back to the peninsula … but I know what I know, and I must do what I must do.

La-la please, Mama his frightened whisper matching mine, conspiratorial in our fear.

If there’s a higher light let it shine on me

and by four-thirty we circle around the bend at Laurel Canyon and push our way up the watery ravine where we once watched city divers swim to the bottom of the lake

’cause I know this sea wants to carry me

and the sound of loons echoes around us in the growing fog even as the lake’s songs have gone silent. On the banks of the lake in the wind we can see flapping the tents from the abandoned fair where one afternoon we saw up close the owl that hears human heartbeats, and where another afternoon we saw and heard the melody-snakes from the lake’s source. By now the lake has taken most of the fairgrounds. In a long dark row the empty tents billow and collapse, black mouths blowing out over the water.

We reach the lake’s center. The hole at the bottom is somewhere right below us.

Listen to me wildman I say as calmly as possible, lowering myself over the side of the gondola into the water. He’s puzzled.

Mama in Big Agua? Yes, Mama’s going in the Big Agua for a minute. Just for a minute, do you understand?

He blinks at me in the twilight. Please don’t cry, it will break my heart. I’m already starting to shiver, and I don’t want him to see that. My teeth chatter, and I don’t want him to hear that….

Why?

So it can’t hurt you anymore

… don’t ask why …

do you understand?

… there isn’t time for your whys. He nods, like he’s actually figured it out.

Who’s the boss here, wildman. It’s a minute before he answers quietly

You are.

You have to sit here in the boat very still. Very, very still. You have to sit here and wait for me to come back, you can’t move at all or else you could fall in—

No Big Agua for me.

No, no Big Agua for you. So you sit very still, OK?

Yes.

And I ’ll be right back for you. OK?

Yes please.

I’ll be gone just a minute.

Silently he watches me. He doesn’t cry. He looks around us at the lake and at the sky above him in that preternatural way of his.

Night-time

he says.

I love you, Kirk.

Mama come back?

Right back.

He blinks.

Yes, please.

I look around me, and for a minute the chill of the water passes. My eyes drink in everything, they’re thirsty like they know something I don’t…. the twilight is the kind of blue you see maybe once in a lifetime, maybe once. In the wind I hear the murmur of the fluttering tents on the lakeshore, and I know I have only minutes before the sky fills with owls that can hear his heart and suddenly she can hear his heart herself, its steady thump in the murmur of the tents near the water. She reaches over and takes Kirk’s hand in her own and presses it, and before he can cry or try and grab her, she takes as deep a breath as she can, and down into the lake she slips.

He watches his mother disappear. Another presence whispers in his ear and instinctively his head turns, like an owl, to gaze at the shore, where he sees another young woman, not more than eighteen or nineteen years old, watching him. Kneeling at the lake’s edge, she’s like a sprite with long straight gold hair almost to her waist, and when she sees that he notices her, she raises her hand to wave. The little boy waves back.

Sinking, Kristin can still hear his heart. Looking up through the water one last time, she can see him leaning over the edge of the silver gondola peering down at her with his red monkey in hand, his head a shimmery sphere floating above the lake, like the parasols of autumn.