Our Ecstatic Days

2001–2089

where I stayed when I first got to Japan and I would watch the pixilated black

waves rolling in and with them they brought that memory I had forgotten, of

He gets out late winter. He’s off on the exact day by thirty-some hours, which isn’t bad calculations. He made a decision when he went in to keep track of the days, because he knew it was the intention of his jailers to jettison his sense of time; they brought him in 2037 in a metal truck with no windows. The rumor is that the penitentiary is somewhere in the plains of the Montana-Saskatchewan annex. When he’s released, a metal truck takes him back to Seattle; they open the doors of the truck and the glitter of the afternoon sea is like glass in his eyes. He sits back in the truck until someone says, Move.

standing with my uncle as a little girl on the banks of the river and seeing the

They put him on a boat going down the coast to Los Angeles. For five days and fifteen hundred miles he doesn’t see anyone except a soldier here and there, like the guards at the Northwest-Mendocino border. The boat sails into L.A. mid-dusk, past the smoky moors of the Hollywood Peninsula, navigating the outlying swamps where the Hancock Park mansions loom in ruin, water rolling in and out of the porticoes. It crosses the rest of the lagoon into downtown, then up the main canal. Cale can see the smaller canals trickling off between the buildings that are black like the mansions behind him, and there’s a sound of bubbling music from the Chinese storefronts along the water. It comes out of the buildings, a distinct and different melody from each one; addresses on the doors are scratched and defaced, and there are no signs on the street corners anymore. Ask someone how to get to this place or that, and she’ll sing you the directions.

Two women on a train. Their destination is the end of an argument. They’ve been riding the argument all night since they got on the train originally and carelessly bound for … what? dinner? a movie … they almost can’t remember, they have been riding 2001 and changing trains so many hours now. Each knows something more is at risk in this particular argument on this particular evening than just its resolution, than one woman conceding to the other if only to placate the moment. This particular argument has always been just a little too profound to call merely a lovers’ quarrel.

woman on the other side, and it was only there in Tokyo staring out over the

To others riding the train with them, the two might appear to be mother and daughter. One of them is close to fifty, with a recently cropped mane of increasingly silvery hair and serenity woven in the air around her like a web; the other is barely a woman at all, nineteen years old. The older woman, who doesn’t like to think or speak of the age difference, has to acknowledge to herself that indeed it makes their argument more complicated. They’ve had some version of this argument many times now in the last several months, and this time each senses that they won’t, as in the past, just move on when it’s over. Or rather: they’ll move on, but without each other. Although the older woman seems the less agitated of the two, the less heated in her words, that’s more a function of maturity; in fact she feels more is at stake for her — but, you know, try telling the younger woman that. Thinking about it in the many silences that fall between each of the argument’s flare-ups, the older woman realizes that to the younger woman, with her entire future still ahead of her, the decision has consequences that much more resounding. So maybe, Sara admits to herself, it’s not so fair to say she has more at stake. I have too little time, the girl has too much. She admits this to herself but not out loud; admitting it out loud, she would lose everything.

They’ve just gotten on the subway line heading south. It’s become a ritual of this argument, in the way all arguments have rituals, that every time a cessation of hostilities coincides with a subway station, the women get off the train and change to another. At this point they’re not paying attention to which train or which station. Somehow as long as they keep moving — as opposed to going to a café somewhere and thrashing things out for good — perhaps some rubicon can avoid being crossed. Lately the younger woman has begun to feel things are out of control, a feeling she hates. She doesn’t want to bring up the age thing with Sara. It’s always been

water that I finally realized it had been my mother on the other side of that

a psychological obstacle for the couple to surmount, particularly for the older woman who’s that much more keenly aware, the younger realizes, of everything such a divide in years represents. By now the girl accepts there’s something maternal in her attraction to the older woman, and doesn’t understand why this is any less a basis for love or a romantic bond than anything else. Women are drawn to father figures all the time so why can’t I be drawn to a mother figure.

That this probably says something about her relationship with her real mother, the girl understands. Ironically it was this that brought her to Sara as a patient in the first place. Somehow, though, they never got into it in any of their sessions, and she’s trying to remember if she was always the one avoiding the topic or if, now that she thinks about it, it was Sara who avoided it, once the attraction became apparent. Rather quickly it seems, now that the girl thinks about it, they wound up talking more about Sara than her. “You’ll spend your whole life,” Sara said that first session, “making peace with your own true nature,” and every now and then Sara repeats it as though to imply she understands the girl’s nature better than the girl does. The girl still isn’t sure what it actually means, the business about one’s true nature, or whether it’s just something Sara says to sound superior. But at this moment it seems to her perhaps it says a lot more about Sara than about her.

True to the cliche about therapists, Sara’s past seems its own sort of mess when it’s not a blank altogether, and the girl realizes the divide in years is more remarkable for all the experience Sara never had. Whereas the girl’s first sexual encounter — with another girl — took place at eleven, Sara’s had been in her mid-twenties with an emotionally fetal man she wound up dating

river staring back at me, her shoulders sagging in defeat when she couldn’t

thirteen years, never marrying, never living together. After this relationship didn’t so much collapse as trail off into nothingness, with the man simply moving on to another job in another city, Sara’s next was with a woman, also a client like the girl, lasting eight months and then followed by a chasm of nearly ten years in which, as far as the girl can tell, Sara had no intimate human relations of any sort. So talk about spending your life making peace with your own nature. When you get right down to it, then, who’s really the senior partner here, the girl asks herself on the train now.

So as to establish some control in the relationship, the girl always made it a rule never to make the first move in these things. She broke the rule in Sara’s case, figuring it was the only way anything would ever happen. Now she wonders if this was a mistake. In any other situation she can’t help thinking a nineteen-year-old would never come on to a woman nearly thirty years older but perhaps that’s naïve; after all, nineteen-year-old girls come on to older men all the time. Within six months of their first doctor/patient session, the two moved in together. It’s been a year since, and was a lovely time up till the whole baby obsession that, the girl can pinpoint exactly, began one night four or five months ago. They went across town for dinner at the brownstone of another lesbian couple, who disclosed that without much luck they had been investigating ways of having a child. All the talk that evening of eggs going back and forth from one person to another boggled the girl’s mind so much it gave her a headache.

On the train now the girl feels trapped by how often and fervently she’s insisted to Sara the difference in age means nothing to her. Now, subway track rattling beneath them, that argument restrains her from giving voice to the fact that, in her view,

find the courage to face her small abandoned daughter who not so long

the daughter/mother nature of their relationship renders what Sara wants a bit bizarre. But is this really what troubles her most? the girl wonders. Leaving aside everything else — leaving aside even how it would be her body, after all, serving as laboratory, incubator, assembly line in the processing of some anonymous male sperm just so Sara’s long latent, now suddenly urgent maternal drive might be satisfied — what strange new dynamic would be loosed not only between them but within the girl herself? If, consciously or not, defined as such or not, on some level the girl plays the role of daughter in her relationship with Sara, then would a baby in some way be a grand-daughter? A sister to her own mother?

Like all those eggs being bandied about over dinner, this makes her head hurt. Perhaps she should get off the train. And naturally, she realizes, we keep talking about this baby as though it goes without saying it would be a girl: what if it’s a boy? Do we know how to raise a boy? Do I know how to raise a boy, if it should ever fall to me to do it alone given — muttered under the breath of her mind — how much older Sara is? Somehow the notion it could be a boy, it just makes the whole idea, monumental to begin with, that much more overwhelming, although the younger woman has to confess there’s something irresistible about someday reminding the young teenage barbarian, fumbling with girls in car seats to heavy metal on the radio, that he’s literally the son of a jerkoff; it wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying with a daughter.

You couldn’t have thought of all this ten years ago could you, the girl says to Sara in her mind, with such force of resentment that for a moment she’s sure she said it out loud. But then she realizes the illogic of her own bitterness: of course if Sara had thought of it ten years ago, in all likelihood she would be with someone else

afterward asked What’s missing from the world? and who then never dreamed,

now and they wouldn’t be together at all. “What was that last stop?” the girl finally says in one of the pauses between arguing that now have become longer than the arguing itself. A man sitting across the aisle stares at her; she pulls her coat to her but not too tight, folds her arms across her chest. Actually she really doesn’t hate men. Actually, sometimes they can be easier to deal with than women because everything’s so straightforward in terms of what they want, and it’s true, no getting ’round it, that women are often confounding labyrinths whereas men, they’re always simple sidestreets just calling themselves boulevards. Plus it’s one of the few advantages of the gender that almost none of the men always checking her out is especially keen for her to have his baby. “Chambers,” Sara answers.

“What?”

“Chambers was the last stop.”

Really? We’re that far downtown? The next station won’t be open this time of night. If she gets off at the stop after that, the girl thinks to herself, should she announce it to Sara, or just do it and see if the other follows? A power play of sorts, the act of just deciding to get off the subway: a way to get Sara to tip her hand, Sara who never tips her hand, who hides everything behind her veil of doctoral calm. A power play — but also an opportunity for the therapist to point out the girl is being unduly, provocatively petulant, even for a nineteen-year-old. So she does the grown-up thing. “I want to get off at the next one,” she says. Sara doesn’t answer; so much for mature behavior, the girl snorts to herself. But at the next stop, when the train doors slide open and the girl grabs her radio and walks off, Sara follows, slipping through the doors just as they close behind her.

never dreamed in all her nights of childhood, in all the nights of childhood

It makes the girl feel a bit more in control and she likes that. She knows they’ve been on the train a long time but she’s momentarily surprised anyway, as the two women walk up the steps from the subway, how dark it is and that it’s not still early twilight as it was when they got on. They’re not saying anything now, Sara just following as they cross the intersection and head for the open plaza. There’s an incongruity between the loveliness of the balmy moment and the women’s heavy tension. Sara won’t continue to follow silently much longer if I don’t concede something, the girl thinks, even if it’s nothing more than a kind word of regret; but even that would sound contrite and the girl realizes she’s beyond contrition, beyond concession — that in fact she’s angry: is it over then? Entering the plaza square, her head is filled with things it’s never been filled with before: the sense of betrayal, the sense of having been taken advantage of — she was my therapist, the girl thinks, but perhaps that’s not fair is it, in as how I made that first move, pursuing the romance with the naked aggression of need. Nothing’s more aggressive than need. But there’s that superiority of Sara’s that makes her so insufferable sometimes, that—

“Where are we going?” Sara finally says almost snappishly, Sara who never snaps, Sara of the endless empathy but no true sympathy. Sara who believes that, beyond the point of logical self-exhaustion, sorrow is only an illusion, a collapse of fortitude on the part of the afflicted.

“I want to go up,” the girl answers.

“Up?”

“To the top.”

when a girl dreams all the possibilities of her life in a way she ’ll never do

The older woman looks up. “At this time of night?”

For a moment the prospect seems a salvation to the girl. For a moment the girl is convinced their relationship will survive if Sara just comes with her. Sometimes a moment presents an unexpected, inexplicable test; the girl says, with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, “I know someone who can take us.”

“Who?”

“This man I know.”

“This man you know? What man you know?”

No, the girl thinks, this isn’t the way the conversation is supposed to go. “Someone I’ve been doing some work for at the library. I told you about him.”

“No….”

“I did,” the girl says, almost furious now.

Sara doesn’t answer for a moment. That means she remembers. “I didn’t know you and this man were such friends,” she says with something almost resembling envy; has Sara ever sounded jealous? Is this a positive sign, or the last straw? As though lost in thought, there in the square the older woman begins to walk in small circles, each taking her off somewhere between the fountain and the buildings beyond. “Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name,” the girl says, “Sara, the men are the ones with the penises, remember? Not my sort, and he’s way older than I am—” and stops herself but too late. In the dark Sara

again, and for that reason after he was born, back from Tokyo and living in the

doesn’t even raise her head to this, just laughs one of her quiet, superior little laughs. The girl has no idea what to say now, feels futile about everything. Actually she has no idea how old the man is, but he’s surely younger than Sara. Now the two women have managed to make their way to the edge of the square and Sara leans up against one of the massive walls.

They don’t talk for a while and now it’s all seeming impossible to the girl. She suppresses an urge to turn on her radio, knowing it will be taken as a sign she’s finished, when she’s surprised to hear Sara, looking up at the buildings — and in that voice one can sometimes barely hear, it seems so calm — ask, “He can take us up there?”

“Yes.”

“How far?”

“All the way.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“What, does he own it or something?”

Now the girl looks up, leaning back farther until it frightens her and she almost topples. “Really I don’t know that much about him. He’s someone who came into the library and asked me to run a search for him, and in return said he could take me up any time.” Beginning to inwardly fume, she insists, “I know I told you about him.”

Hotel Hamblin about the time the lake first appeared, part of me was actually

“Yes,” Sara admits quietly, “I remember. Well,” she says, “not the part about going up. Have you been up before?”

“Naturally not.”

“Well. You might have. It’s not like you couldn’t have.”

“Well, I haven’t. Have you?”

“I don’t know him, this is your secret friend.”

“He’s not a secret friend. I meant have you ever been up before.”

“No.”

“So let’s go then,” the girl says hopefully.

“Where do we find this person?”

“Well—” and she has to confess he may not exactly have had this time of night in mind. She looks around. The fountain with the bronze frankenstein world in the middle is empty; she thinks of it as a frankenstein world because it looks like parts of two or three worlds stuck together. Now she tries to figure out where he told her and realizes the square is bigger than she expected and that finding him will be more daunting than she anticipated. “Let’s just go over—” and then notices Sara doing it again; it would be just like Sara, the girl thinks, to regard healing buildings as a step up from healing people.

Running her fingers along the wall, Sara has her ear pressed to it, listening.

glad for Kirk’s nightmares, part of me was glad for Kirk calling to me in the

Now that the girl thinks about it, the baby thing and the whole business of listening to sick buildings, they started about the same time. It’s a bit cracked isn’t it? she thinks. Sara who’s otherwise so supremely composed and logical — what’s it really about anyway? A melodramatic affectation to justify a pretentious profession that’s just highly lucrative listening at its most harmless and, at its most intrusive, a violation of the psyche’s inner machinery some semanticist was on to something, the girl muses to herself, when she introduced to each other the words “the” and “rapist.” At this moment of crisis between them, the girl wonders if Sara is having a breakdown of some sort, if listening to women’s voices in walls is the first fracture in the imperturbable façade of a woman who’s made indominability an identity. Watching Sara now the younger woman is about to ask, Isn’t this the sort of thing they do on the West Coast? but says instead, “Don’t tell me this building is dying.”

But she’s never seen a look like this on Sara’s face before, the look she has now, not ever. It actually frightens the girl, makes her back away from the other woman; and she realizes one of the things she’s loved Sara for is the promise that she’ll never have on her face a look like this. Sara answers, something in her voice, “Let’s go home.”

The girl finds it in herself to insist, “I’m going up.”

Sara steps toward her in the dark. “Let’s go home,” she says again, a tension in her voice the girl has never heard. Backing away from the wall, Sara looks up: “Come home with me now,” like a mother — and the younger woman can’t stand it. No more mothers, she thinks, I’m done with mothers and that includes ever being one;

night from his crib Mama? as though he feared I was the thing missing from

and she turns where she stands, “I’m going up,” and clutching her radio weaves her way through the concentric rings of symmetrically staggered stone benches surrounding the enormous fountain. I’m going up she keeps telling herself, listening for the other woman’s footsteps behind her and, when she doesn’t hear them, almost turning to look. But there’s no point to it. I’m not going back. Either Sara is still back there at the wall waiting for me or she’s gone, but either way — The girl sees the dark form of someone sitting at the edge of the fountain in the waning light of a moon that’s halfway between menstruation and fertility; at first she thinks perhaps it’s him. “I want to go up,” she says before realizing it’s a stranger to whom her instinctive response is the same as always, pulling her coat closer to cover and protect herself. A stranger: the ghost of someone she’s supposed to have known, she thinks, when he says so quietly and invisibly in the dark it could almost be the fountain speaking, “The Age of Chaos is here.”

Jeez, it is getting to be like the West Coast ’round this place. “What?” she says but doesn’t wait for him to repeat it; now she does turn back to look, but Sara is gone. Unsettled, the girl stumbles off into the shadows of the square: It was ridiculous to think I might just wander ’round and run into him; I had no idea it was so big. Probably it was never a serious offer anyway, a polite gesture of thanks to a young researcher in the uptown university library who agreed to help in a wild goose chase. Probably he was just hitting on me? — even if a girl develops an instinct for such a thing and, instinctively, she doesn’t think so. Now it all appears so preposterous, doesn’t it. So it seems something of a miracle when, there in the other building’s outer lights, he says, “Hello,” just as she’s practically broken into a frightened sprint. “Oh,” she says.

his world, as though his very life might grow into the answer to the question I

“Are you all right?”

She gazes over her shoulder at the fountain behind her. “I, uh … I’m a bit surprised I found you.”

“I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I know. It’s late. Impulse. Spontaneous and all.”

He’s a man who’s spent half a life meditating on the laws of impulse, only to reject them. “Did you want to go up?” he says.

“Can we? Still?”

He says nothing but motions her to follow. They circle around the corner of the building to a side door he opens with a key from a ring of more keys than she’s ever seen; closing the door behind them, he turns on a light in a concrete stairwell and they make their way through two more doors until they’re inside crossing the dim lobby. He stops for a moment, mulling.

She almost asks, Is something wrong? and then, I’m sorry, it’s so late, this is an imposition — but really her thoughts already have returned to Sara. In her head she keeps seeing Sara listening to that wall outside, then Sara gone and the wall empty. On the other side of the lobby, at a row of elevators, the man unlocks one. Looking around at all the flags she absently wonders how he knows which key goes to which elevator; she says, Do you live here? and he says, In the elevator? and she answers, No — and then realizes Oh, it’s a joke. He makes jokes. I keep a little room

had carried inside me, part of me was glad he was having his nightmares of

with a cot, he explains, although I’m not supposed to, “they don’t know,” nodding at the omnipresent they outside. Seeing him for the third time, after twice at the library, she finally notices he’s good looking. More attuned as she is to the looks of women, she finds the phenomenon of lovely men interesting in the abstract — something she sometimes notices even before straight women, who often are distrustful of and on their guard against lovely men. She has the luxury of being awed by such men; she makes a conscious effort not to look at his hand. How many are there? she asks, and he says what? and she says elevators, and he says a couple hundred, more or less, between the two buildings, counting the freight lifts; he’s not exactly sure. The Emperor of Elevators, she says, and when he doesn’t immediately respond is mortified: was that a slur? she wonders. Is it the Japanese or Chinese who have an emperor?

She’s not sure which he is anyway. She’s thinking frantically when he nods, “The Emperor of Elevators,” with that slight smile; he seems genuinely amused. “It’s an aversion to ground-level,” he elaborates. In the elevator she’s warm in her light coat and almost takes it off, and checks herself: a self-conscious pair we would be, she thinks, me trying not to look at his hand and him trying not to look at my tits; but she does free from her coat her long gold hair that’s been tucked under. “You should be a pilot,” she suggests.

“That would be an aversion to gravity,” he answers, “which is different.” Staring at the ascending numbers above the doors, he says firmly, “The square outside, for instance: I don’t like it.” After they’ve gone seventy or so floors, changing elevators on one of the sky lobbies, she says, “I’m sorry I haven’t had any luck finding what you’re looking for.”

the lake or lost monkeys, because it meant at least he was dreaming and

“It’s all right,” he answers. “I didn’t give you much to work with.”

“I’ve done a search on everything before and up through June ’89, for anything with ‘higher light’ or, in case you misunderstood, ‘higher life.’ You’re sure none of the ones I’ve found is—”

“I’m afraid not.”

“It’s not some sort of hymn, or gospel—”

“No.”

“But you would know if you heard it, right?”

“Yes, I would,” although over the years he’s become not so certain.

“They need to develop a software,” she jokes, “where you can hum it into the computer.”

“I doubt it would help. I’m not much of a singer.” The elevator stops and the doors open. They step out and, overwhelmed, she almost faints: Mega, she mutters to herself, tottering a bit where she stands and reaching for the wall beside her, almost dropping the radio. Before her a quadrant of the world lies in moonlight; she’s convinced she can see the curve of the earth in a white shimmering arc against the black of space. The river far below to the west glitters, and a lunar gale howls somewhere in the night sky beneath them. Looming overhead is a towering transmission mast three or four hundred feet high. “Sorry,” he says, “I should have prepared you. Actually,” he says, “no one ever comes to the

therefore I knew he hadn’t inherited his dreamlessness from me as I must have

top of this one, except for workmen or … that’s why we used the service lift.” About ten feet from them is some bedding, a mattress and a sleeping bag. “Sometimes I even sleep up here when conditions allow. A night like tonight,” looking around him, “you, uh, sleep above your dreams.”

“Is that good?”

“Depends on the dreams.” Thinking a moment, “In my case, it’s good.”

“I’m not going to get blown off, am I?” she says, beginning to walk around a bit, wandering the roof and circling the spire that glows above them. He doesn’t say anything for a while, lets her just walk around in the moonlight as he watches. He’s not in any great rush to take her back down and she’s not in a rush to leave. He’s aware she’s chosen not to ask too much about what he does or how he lives or, for instance, why the song for which he came to her for help is so important; as the rationalist he likes to think he is, generally unconvinced by the existence of intangibles, he probably couldn’t explain, even if he wanted to, his theory that if he could locate and fasten down in some way more permanent than the humming in his head, if he could take apart and reassemble the melody that’s been haunting him for twelve years, inside could be found (since all music is mathematic) the helix of freedom and desire, transcendence and oblivion, even (if he believed in either) god and chaos. And that this would explain his life and the great event that transfixed the world, and its secret the world never knew and that he knows but doesn’t understand. Now being up here with this girl makes him look around anew at what he’s seen many times. His gaze settles on the west river and the blasted gardens of

inherited it from my own mother who couldn ’t even cross the river to come see

smoke beyond and, three thousand miles beyond that, the woman he loves.

For a wild impetuous moment, a man who’s spent half a life meditating the laws of impulse only to reject them thinks about phoning her. It’s not too late, three-hour time difference — but he’s just not ready yet, he tells himself, not having communicated with her for a while other than in letters. So he can’t just pick up the phone and call thoughtlessly unless, of course, thoughtlessly is in fact exactly the way he should call, the only way he’ll ever bring himself to call. Not ready yet, no. Since there’s no changing the fact of her child then there’s only changing the sense of betrayal—beautiful betrayer, killer of my trust—something he thought he got over long ago, something he thought he let go of long ago, only to wake each morning and find it still in his grip or perhaps, more precisely, to find he’s still in its grip. Maybe if you can’t get over it then it’s just not going to get gotten over. It’s been six years now since the boy was born, with the father long out of the picture — he was barely in it except to make a son, which somehow only made her infidelity worse — so you just ought to get over it and if you can’t then it’s not going to get gotten over because she can’t undo it and you can’t expect she would if she could, it’s her child after all.

But not our child. And he should have been.

He turns to look another direction, anywhere but west. The girl turns her radio on low, tries to find the right soundtrack for a darkling world before her; but perhaps the only soundtrack that’s right is silence. She settles into the base of the transmission mast. She never asked why the song was so important because it wasn’t her business and’ getting right down to it, she doesn’t really care.

me, because the very first dream I ever had in my life wasn’t until that night I

With most women, she tells herself, curiosity is an unchecked reflex; perhaps I’m not the inquisitive sort. Perhaps I have an overly developed male sense of privacy — that is, for a female. Perhaps that’s why it’s women not men who have babies, because as a gender women are predisposed not only to not value privacy so much but to unconsciously abhor it like nature does a vacuum, because it’s women who are capable of that generous voluntarily surrender of profound privacy, the privacy of the body, the privacy of the heart.

I have nowhere to go tonight, it suddenly occurs to her. She watches the Asian man pacing the rooftop and then changes the station on the radio again: Are you a musicologist? she asked when he first showed up at the library, and he said no and then sometime later in the conversation revealed he had been a mathematics student in college before “history had its way with me,” by which she assumed he meant he became a history student instead — which doesn’t exactly explain, she thinks, what he’s doing operating elevators. Did you go to school in—? and then had stopped herself, checked her curiosity reflex, as much because she didn’t want to insult him. Japan? Korea? China? Thailand? can’t tell them apart, can you, she muses to herself. Well it’s true, you just can’t. The Emperor of Elevators, he’s musing to himself as he paces the rooftop not impatiently but aimlessly; he’s not yet become a man who never looks up.

To the contrary he’s a man who looks up as much as possible, who would look anywhere but ground level. East he can make out the lights of the harbor; from there his eyes follow the river north and count the bridges, contemplating the twinkling suture of the boroughs where, just at this moment, he can almost hear raven

miscarried him in Tokyo, waking and stumbling in terror through the dark to

navies surfacing from the floors of islamic oceans. Something about the night has already become familiar to him before he ever feels the tail-end of the gust, funneled hot memory brushing his face. And as he lifted his burning hand back in the Square twelve years ago to look through its new wound at the sky behind it, now he lifts the same hand not to feel the gust, since there are no nerve endings in the hand anymore to feel anything, not even so much to look at the night through the hand’s tiny window, but almost as though he expects that the lens in his palm will refract the gust and then burst into a vision, or as though perhaps the light of the moon above, shining down through the small round prism, will catch him in its spotlight. Or maybe even her. What it does cast is a moonbeam on the gust’s source — or maybe he would have shifted his gaze anyway, noting the vent in the low rectangular storage hut near the rooftop’s east edge.

By the time he reaches the vent, his mind feels about to explode.

The gust hasn’t subsided. In how many dreams in the last twelve years has he felt it blow across his face as it does now? Up here, he told her just a few minutes ago, you sleep above your dreams; so how is it his dreams have reached this altitude? How high do I have to go, he thinks to himself angrily, to rise above them once and for all? Once he wondered if this gust was an ally meaning to rescue him, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove him; but it’s really an anarchist without conviction either way, without interest in either rescue or attack. Once he stood his ground and the gust subsided, but now as he nears the vent it comes roaring out. Taking from his belt his ring of keys, he uses one to begin prying the vent loose around its rim, before he takes the vent cover in his one good hand and tears it from its space.

the toilet down the hall and making it just in time to see the glistening white

He peers inside.

He looks so deeply — although he can’t fit in his whole head as he did into the tank’s gun that morning twelve years ago — that when he hears the song, of course he thinks it’s coming from the other end of the dark to where the vent leads, from where and when he first heard it twelve years ago. Same strange distant Moorish drums, same dreamy Middle Eastern melody with the soft Spanish horns in the background, and the same woman’s voice of another century’s turn: excited, he turns to call to the girl who’s been trying to track down this very song, astonished that the song should happen to present itself at this very moment just as she happens to be here — only to realize the song isn’t coming from the vent at all but her radio. “But that’s it,” he says to her. What? she says sleepily, and he says, “That’s it,” pointing at the radio.

She looks at the radio a moment. “Are you sure?”

“That’s it.”

“Well that’s odd isn’t it,” she finally says. She listens awhile. “You’re sure.” She listens some more. “I don’t think this is that old a song.”

“Do you know it?”

“No but I think perhaps I’ve heard them play it before and I don’t think they would play an old song like this that often, if it was that old.” She says, “It doesn’t sound that old.”

“How can you tell?”

rain of my boy run from my body, and at that moment I thought of all the

“Well, I suppose I can’t,” she confesses. He turns back to the vent and from deep down out of the darkness feels as he did twelve years ago the same gust in his face; it smells of that same morning, the vent a tunnel to that very morning and that very place, at the other end of which is the portal of a gun barrel. This is when he realizes that, twelve years ago, what he actually heard was this very moment now, in this time and place, up here overlooking the world on this very night — that somewhere at the other end of this tunnel he’s there standing on the Square, his Other Self at an irrevocable moment, a young man of nineteen alone before the tanks with his head in the barrel of a gun, listening to a song coming from a girl’s radio twelve years and twelve thousand miles away. That what now blows through this tunnel is the Oblivion Wind back and forth across the shadowyears between the end of the Twentieth Century that morning, and this night — although he can’t imagine why this particular night, when nothing would seem to be happening of any importance at all.

He turns to see her lying there on his bedding, gold hair around her head ablaze in the ovulating moon. He walks over to her; she dozes at his feet. He has this distracted impulse to lie next to her, only because he’s suddenly so tired, but of course she would only take it wrong. If she could see him now, he wonders if he would appear to her as he feels: a man caught mid-transport. Uh, he whispers, we should go down now I think, but she doesn’t answer and he just nods in the dark and mumbles I’ll come back for you in the morning then, and turns to the dank light of the elevator, doors closing on his bewildered face. Briefly her eyes flutter to the sound of the closing doors, having somewhere in her semiconsciousness heard him speak, and now she answers from her sleep, But I have no place to go. She stumbles up from the bedding because she has to pee, and stripping off her jeans she

nights after I first learned he was inside me that I had stood in windows

half-registers the tsunamic vista of dawn’s armada in a far enflamed east. Then she slides back into the sleeping bag on the mattress at the base of the throbbing antenna above her.

In her head she keeps seeing Sara listening to that wall down below. One of the last conscious thoughts she has is that her lifè has veered wildly out of control lately and she likes to be in control, even if it means assuming the well-defined role of slightly subservient daughter, its definitions threatened only by her role of lover. But Sara is gone now or perhaps, she thinks at the end, I’m the one who’s gone. Not long before the crash of morning light she sleeps the sleep of the dead, as Sara always put it, and dreams of her own birth, her mind ticking down all her memories like the last hours of summer.

Two women on a train. Their destination is the end of a lie, although they don’t yet know it’s a lie. The older woman has truly convinced herself that in her last days she wants to get as far from the lake as she can, that she’ll die free of it at last; and thus the 2029–2031 younger woman arranged for them to leave the Chateau X in the dead of night by boat, although not sailed by the young man who loved her so unrequitedly and to whom she couldn’t bear to explain she was leaving. Rather the two other women Brontë met months earlier from the Freek Recherche lunatique drove her and the Mistress along the serrated shoreline in a beat-up thirty-year-old

exposing my pregnant belly to the city and the outside world in order to try

Jag that barely had room for them to the port at Los Feliz, with its abandoned observatory looming in the hills above.

From there, over the course of twenty-two slow hours a ferry sailed the two women further inland to San Gabriel. Lulu is sick. On the ferry deck bundled in a large coat and scarf and swathed in the gray of the wind, black late-autumn countryside and the solar casbahs of outer zedberia passing by and white waves on the lake like the veils of a hundred drowned brides, she seemed to Brontë only intermittently conscious of the journey. On the train now Brontë reproaches herself for bringing Lulu. But it’s too late, they can’t go back; they’re traveling on Armand’s money and, at that moment, Armand is shackled blindfolded and naked in the Chateau dungeon with the little red ball in his mouth, delirious far beyond any thrilling contemplation of the cracking of the walls around him and the lake beyond, delirious even beyond wondering when his Mistress Bronte is going to return. His henchmen wait in a limo on shore. In thirty-six hours it will begin to cross the narrow landfill of their minds that perhaps something’s amiss, at which point they’ll begin calling a cell phone that lies on the stone dungeon floor two wicked inches beyond the farthest expanse of Armand’s chains. Sometimes Armand can hear the footsteps of his Mistress in the Lair upstairs, or so he supposes. What he actually hears are the steps of another man searching the Chateau for one woman he knows of, and another he won’t admit to himself he knows of.

By early morning Brontë and Lulu reached San Gabriel port. They missed by twenty minutes a train that comes through only once a night, when it’s on time at all, and winds up in Chicago. Unsure how stupid she could count on Armand’s boys to be, or how far they might come to find her once they retrieved their boss, Brontë didn’t much care for the idea of sitting around the station

and prepare him for its chaos, and in that minute there in the toilet when I was

another twenty-four hours. In the small waiting room of the terminal, she found a kid who just put his girlfriend on the train, eating a sandwich out of a vending machine; she offered him one of Armand’s hundred-dollar bills if he would drive them to the next station and beat the train there doing it. Is she all right? the kid said looking at Lulu, chewing his sandwich in deep thought. She’s sick, Brontë answered. I need to get her on that train. Forty-five minutes later the three were careening through the San Berdoo badlands into the rising morning sun. Slipping in and out of an ecstasy of sunlight through the windows, trying to remember the color blue, in her mind Lulu added greens to grays to see if they made blue together.

All she knows she remembers is red. Two hours after having left San Gabriel, they beat the train to the Barstow station by ten minutes. After moving Lulu slowly up the stairs of the train and down the aisle to a seat, Brontë was bringing up the luggage as the train pulled out; the conductor came by and sold her two tickets. In the concessions lounge several cars down, Brontë buys water, a sandwich, fruit salad from a can. She’s alarmed when Lulu won’t eat. Lulu surfaces consciousness long enough to look out the window and say, Where are we? Seven or eight other passengers are scattered throughout the car; a couple of other women several seats up whisper between them. You have to eat something, Brontë insists, tearing off some more bread. “Where’s the lake?” says Lulu.

“At least drink some water.”

Lulu takes a sip of the water Brontë gives her. “Where’s the lake.”

“Behind us. We’re going to Chicago.” Chicago? Lulu asks; for

losing him all I could do was hate myself for not having taken him back to the

however much it means to either of them, Brontë might as well have said China. All Lulu knows she remembers is red. In her mind she’s been on this journey a long time, with its rails of green and yellow and its tracks of orange and purple (Tyrone the Train! I want to ride away with you …) as they rumble through the Mojave marshlands. After nearly forty-eight hours without sleep, Brontë sleeps until the train jolts her awake and pitches her upward; she’s momentarily disoriented, and for an instant she thinks Lulu is dead. Jeez, she cries softly touching the woman’s cheek, to which Lulu opens her eyes and turns to look at her. By this time they’ve been on the train all day. It seems to be moving slower and slower, crossing landscape more and more barren although, looking out the other side of the train, Brontë notes snow on far northern mountains. Every ten or fifteen minutes a tiny house glitters in the distance. Twilight falls in blueless magenta; a spreading red sky from the west is scratched with livid vapor trails, like God trying to claw his way in. Plutonium sagebrush blows south.

Lulu mutters in her sleep. Brontë gives her more water, trying again without success to get her to eat; then the younger woman dozes again and the next time she wakes, the train has stopped completely. In the night outside their window, symmetrically staggered in concentric circles around them and stretching out for miles like battlefield bunkers, single abandoned railway cars are lit by the lightning of a desert storm. The lightning is so fierce that the flash of it across Lulu’s face, as well as the tremendous thunder that follows almost immediately, wakes her as well. Brontë sits up looking around them. No one else is on the train except, at the far end, the conductor in his own seat; when he sees his last passengers have awakened, he saunters up the aisle.

silence of a dreamless delta, while at the same time I also believed it was

Pueblo d’Elektrik, he announces idly.

“Is this Chicago?” asks Brontë.

“Pueblo d’Elektrik. Last stop.”

“I thought this train goes to Chicago.”

“You have to transfer here. Nothing between here and Occupied Albuquerque and that’s another two hundred miles.”

“When does the Chicago train come through?”

“You’ll have to check with the station.” He leans down to look out the windows on the other side of the train. “Couple of days, I think. Station may be closed for the night.”

“A couple of days?”

“Might be open in the morning,” he says, “you can find out then. In the meantime you can probably get a room here at the pueblo. Yes,” he laughs at something he finds extremely funny, “you probably can. Yes,” he goes on laughing, “I would think so.” Brontë helps the older woman to her feet and moves her down the aisle. Down the stairs and off the train, she scurries Lulu to the shelter of an outside corridor that links the station to the railroad hotel next door, then moves the bags as the conductor watches. With Lulu and the baggage huddled against a wall, the younger woman darts from one dark window of the pueblo to the next, trying to see in. She finds a door and raps loudly; the rain and lightning and thunder grow. The conductor still watches from the top of the car as the train pulls out, heading down the track. Brontë has almost decided to break one of the windows when a light

because he was starved of his own umbilical dreams that the glistening yolk of

comes on and a freckled man with cropped red hair opens the door. We need a room, Brontë says.

In the shadow of the light behind him, the man with the red hair considers this. “It’s late”

“Yes, well, please explain that to the train that left us here,” Brontë snaps, pointing down the track. The man squints at the train disappearing in the distance. He seems to find the situation confounding until a particularly vicious crack of lightning catches his attention. He opens the door and Brontë hustles Lulu inside and brings in the bags. At the front desk she pays the man a deposit and the man gives the young woman a key to a room upstairs at the farthest end even though, as Brontë will learn, all the downstairs rooms are empty and there’s no other guest in the hotel except one whose light seeps out beneath the door three down from theirs. Slowly Brontë moves Lulu up the stairs, then hauls up the bags one by one as the hotel manager watches. She’s gotten the last suitcase up to the landing at the top in time to see an Indian girl a year or two younger knocking quietly on the door of the other occupied room; the light goes out and the door opens, and the girl glances over her shoulder at Brontë before slipping in through an electric white rip in the dark.

From their room in this section of the pueblo that juts out from the top floor, Brontë can see in almost every direction a molten desert bubbling with silver racket and tumbling from the navajo plateaus to the north. Outside the western window a grove of incinerated trees struggles skyward in black webs, and surrounding rings of single railway cars divert the storm from trains that slither through the countryside. The light and clamor are so relentless that all

Kierkegaard Blumenthal broke and emptied from me, and that night dropping

Brontë can do is huddle in her bed trying to decide whether to cover her ears or eyes; she wishes they had never left the lake. She’s only seen such fire and noise once before but can’t remember it. The next morning she finally gets Lulu to eat some cereal cooked by the manager’s wife; next door she finds the station still closed, and when it’s still closed that afternoon and the next morning and the next afternoon as well, she gets this feeling. Oh any time, says Roy the manager with red hair when Brontë asks what hour the station opens. Deep in the middle of the third night, in the middle of a dream she hears a rumbling and rushes to the window in time to see the light of a train disappearing down the track. Yes, replies Roy the following morning when she asks, anytime now that train ought to be coming back through here: maybe tomorrow or the next day. You said that yesterday, Brontë finally stops answering after a while.

After a while longer she stops asking. Built in the Nineteenth Century as the grandest estancia in northern Arizona by a Spanish aristocrat who fled San Sebastian in disgrace with his fortune, then eventually handed down to his great great grandson, the pueblo was finally lost by the family in the Wall Street crash of ninety-nine years ago. Serenely the great great grandson walked out through the adobe porticoes into the desert never to be seen again. Taken over by the Santa Fe railway, the mansion was converted into a railroad hotel. In the fourth and fifth decades of the Twentieth Century it bustled with travelers to and from the Midwest stopping for a meal or the night; with its sweeping entryways and arched passages and suspended staircases, the pueblo was all blue tile and hacienda-deco then. A quarter century ago the electrical storms blew in from the Juarez wastelands to the east, and both the railroad and hotel began to die. The tile isn’t blue anymore, and besides Roy and his wife Wanda there’s no one

to my knees I moaned for him to come back come back come back, dropping to

else in the hotel except Barbrasita the Navajo girl who delivers meals and cleans the rooms and mops the wide black-oak hallways, and Rollin the other guest three rooms down.

Moving from city to city selling shady weather reports until stranded by a west-bound train a few weeks before, Rollin is a traveling meteorologist in his mid-fifties. Soon after Brontë and Lulu’s arrival he takes to rapping on their door day and night, posting himself there for hours on end, chatting up the younger woman. He’s too unabashedly stupefied by her breasts to even pretend interest in anything else about her. If his knock goes unanswered, he invites himself in regardless. Ceaselessly he recounts the itinerary of his life and expounds with great expertise on the caprice of lightning, talking about anything and everything except — as Wanda dryly points out — his wife and daughter back in St. Louis. Bronte finds him too ridiculous to be threatening, but when he accosts her one night in a darkened corridor, she can’t help wondering where’s a whip and a good pair of handcuffs when a girl needs them. As the nights go by, the moody Barbrasita who Brontë saw slipping into Rollin’s room the first night becomes more sullen, lingering outside his door to less and less attention, as the music of a radio can be plainly heard on the other side.

Whenever she sees Brontë, Barbrasita’s expression grows darker. Delivering dinner from the kitchen downstairs, she practically hurls it in the other’s face, and when she refuses to help change Lulu’s bed a week later, the two young women have a blistering bilingual argument in the hallway that neither understands. “I think,” Bronte finally tries to confront things head-on, “perhaps you’ve the wrong idea about me and your weatherman—” to which Barbrasita grabs the soup spoon from a meal tray and lunges at the other woman to scoop out her eyes, before Wanda pulls

my knees I retracted every stern admonition I had already given him, I scooped

her away. Walking the hotel corridors at night, Brontë takes to rounding darkened corners at a wide arc in anticipation of ambush. When she’s not waking to the sound of trains, it’s to the expectation of the Indian girl standing over her, lethal spoon in hand. Somehow Rollin is oblivious to all this. He assumes everyone basks in his bonhomie. Day after day then week after week, as Barbrasita lurks outside his room, he lurks outside Brontë’s, telling again and again the same stories he’s told before, each time embellishing wildly as though no one ever would notice the variance with earlier versions. Sometimes Bronte thinks he’s forgotten about seduction altogether, so satisfied is he by his own regalement. It occurs to her to set him straight on her preferences but she’s got the feeling Rollin would just find further inspiration in ever preposterous reveries of the two women in all their possible permutations.

A couple of weeks stretch into a couple more. Only after Brontë and Lulu have been at the pueblo almost a month does Rollin — peviously in no great hurry to leave a hotel so conveniently remote and teeming with comely Indian maidens and pneumatic golden-haired pixies — suddenly become very anxious himself about the next train. For several nights Brontë hears the sound of terrible fights coming from his room. Whatever Barbrasita is saying, Rollin seems to understand very well.

One afternoon Brontë sees from her window a distant car, snubbed and blunted like a discharged bullet, weaving its way toward the pueblo through the storm, daring the lightning to take it out. Driving in thirty miles from the northeast, a family of four has come for the train. When dark falls they roam the lobby waiting, an older man and woman and a younger man who dozes on one of the wooden monastery benches strewn throughout the foyer, and a

him up in a puddle and held him in the cup of my hands just as I did up there a

boy of about eleven who plays games on an ancient laptop. It’s not clear to Brontë how the four are related. “Here to bury her son,” the old man shrugs at the woman sitting quietly alone, “killed in the fighting up in Zion. Going back home now,” but not east it turns out, rather back the way Bronte and Lulu came. Graying hair pulled back, the woman sits on her bench for hours saying nothing,staring ahead of her and only lifting her eyes and nodding slightly whenever the old man whispers to her. She never settles into the bench, rather she sits at the edge in anticipation of something she’s already too late for, as though so flabbergasted by her grief she doesn’t feel it, as though distilled in this moment is the tenor of her entire life. For a while Brontë waits up to see with her own eyes if a train actually rolls through, heading any direction.

Finally around midnight she goes back up to her room where, after cooling Lulu’s fevered brow with a damp cloth, she sleeps.

She’s awakened by yet another argument between Rollin and Barbrasita. This is by far the most violent she’s heard, coming not from the room just a few doors away but downstairs. From the darkened landing of the stairs she can see Barbrasita below with a furious grip on Rollin’s arm, pulling him from the family that, apparently, has given up on the train and now means to drive back through the storm and the night; over her screams, desperately Rollin beseeches them to take him. The family seems stricken. Somewhere Roy and Wanda hide beneath their covers. Finally shaking themselves free of their bereaved inertia, the older man and woman, the young man and the boy dash madly for the bullet car; and confronted with the choice of the storm before him or Barbrasita behind him, Rollin bolts in pursuit past the same adobe porticos through which the great great grandson of the San Sebastian aristocrat vanished almost a century ago — as though

few minutes ago on the lake, or down there, whichever way the lake is now, in

he thinks he can charm the lightning.

In the following weeks, Barbrasita watches from the pueblo’s front window for signs of how far Rollin got — but out here, Wanda tells Brontë, even the vultures don’t fly. Soon the Navajo girl gives up her vigil and instead takes to sitting every day for hours on a stark high-back chair in the hallway outside Brontë’s door, not unlike the way the woman who lost her son in the fighting up in Zion sat all night on the bench downstairs. With no rooms other than Brontë’s and Lulu’s to make up, no other clean towels to be delivered, no other lunches or dinners to be served, she stares at her growing belly and rains on it the same black curses she rained on the child’s father the night he left. Sitting at her own window staring out at the desert stonehenge of railway cars surrounding the pueblo, Brontë realizes she no longer knows for sure whether she’s waiting for a train or for the woman in the bed to die; on the frontier of a kind of catalepsy, from time to time Lulu arouses herself to an uncognitive waking, drinking and eating only enough to endure but never to speak or, as far as Bronte can tell, truly know. Brontë herself cannot know, for instance, that, beyond the windows, Lulu sees — as no one else sees — the melody-snakes crawling up out of the parched dust long enough to rattle a few notes before lightning cuts short their songs in a throttled shriek. Female screams fill the charged air. Lulu hears them even as she slips back to sleep, the way Bronte hears trains.

Brontë has no idea why it’s important to get to Chicago. Actuallyshe doesn’t think it’s important at all, Chicago’s just the place the train happens to go to. She doesn’t really suppose it will make any difference to Lulu. But this hotel seems to her an intolerable placefor someone to die — better the Chateau. On the pay phone downstairs, she tra cks down a doctor in the territory who drives in

the gondola where I came from, when his answer to my call came bubbling up

two days later. Half Indian, half white, he’s never diagnosed someone dying of sorrow, dying not of physical dissolution or even a fatigue of body and spirit as triggered by sorrow, but sorrow itself: Isn’t there somewhere to take her, Brontë asks, a hospital or rest home? The doctor answers that there’s something about this dying that’s beyond the peace of hospitals and rest homes. When she tries to call him again a week later, the phone is out of order. The weeks become months. Outside, the storm is unmoved by the change of seasons, and the arrival of spring.

Brontë discovers a television one afternoon in one of the back suites on the first floor, but as she might have expected, there’s nothing on it except a faint broadcast from Flagstaff, buzzing out of the clouds to the west. Constantly awakened by trains taunting her, constantly gazing out the windows for signs of a light coming up the track, at night she takes to drifting through the dark hacienda and cold cinderblock foyer, past the bare newsstand and forsaken gift shops and faded Indian murals and the bar lined with tequila bottles and cracked martini glasses drunk on their own dust. She scours the stray pieces of hotel literature as well as the volumes of local lore on the shelves; after a while she knows more about the pueblo and the families that built it and lived here than she does her own life. When the storms originally came, the first part of the hotel to have been closed was the dining room, once the finest in the territory. Now for the pueblo’s rare guest Wanda cooks in the hotel kitchen a traditional soup half spicy black bean and half sweet corn, sending it up to Brontë along with lemon slices.

Boarded up after the dining room was the cavernous ballroom, its once-blue ceiling that’s flecked with silver now gray like the overcast sky outside. The small tadpoles of silver flicker like the

from the bottom, so in the same way the night I miscarried him I splashed

lightning’s stray offspring. One night Brontë peeks past the slabs of wood that barricade the ballroom entrance and pulls one away, stepping through; because of how the silver flashes in the dark ceiling, there in the black of the old ballroom she can almost believe there are no ceiling or walls, that there’s no pueblo at all. She can almost believe the massive Navajo carpet across the ballroom floor is a great rooftop floating high above the earth. Actually tottering a bit where she stands, she reaches for the wall to steady herself; before her, a quadrant of the world is ablaze with lightning. It curves in an electric white arc against the black of space. A lake glitters far below to the west, lunar gales howl in the sky below, and pacing the eye of the storm Brontë contemplates the shimmering suture of the northern mesas. For a moment she can almost believe that here one sleeps above her dreams — for good or ill, depending on the dreams.

Lately Brontë has been having dreams of a small boy. Only after she found a crumbling old book on a remote shelf did she learn the story that the official literature of the hotel doesn’t tell: that on the afternoon the great great grandson of the Spaniard who built the pueblo walked out its porticos into the desert, he left behind a sole inheritor of his ruin. This was a three-year-old child who he so refused to acknowledge as his own son that the forsaken mother, a local Indian woman, died giving birth in a ravine just beyond the western garden. Even when the infant boy was taken in by the hotel servants, his cry was regarded by the father as simply a stray sirocco blowing through the abandoned ballroom. Thus three years later, with the hacienda empty of everyone else, on his nonchalant stroll into the desert the newly destitute patrician walked right past the child as though he was invisible, and for hours the little boy stood in the open doorway first watching the disappearance then awaiting the return of the father who had never

myself with him then, splashed him on my face and neck and breasts until I

held or kissed or spoken to him.

Brontë goes back through all the other old books of the hotel to try and find out what happened to the son left behind. But as the forbidden history of the pueblo would have it, he’s still standing in the doorway waiting for his father, and at night sometimes Brontë wakes to his small sirocco-cry from somewhere in the hotel. She presses her ear to the walls listening for him, convinced the brown-haired brown-eyed child scampers up and down secret passages between the rooms looking for his father who’s hiding from him, as though his abandonment has been only a game. Outside, the storms seem to stop moving over the mesas, rather it’s as though the earth continues turning its way into a single endless storm that rolls on and on and on into the coming years.

As Barbrasita gets bigger, she begins lumbering slowly up and down the hall snarling at the growing child inside her in ever blacker language. Even to someone who doesn’t understand the Spanish, it’s awful. In her sleep Lulu hears the girl cursing her unborn baby and murmurs for someone to make her stop. Bronte stands at the window staring for trains and thinks that between the dying woman in the bed behind her and the pregnant girl outside in the hall, perhaps she’ll go insane: Perhaps I will. Then what willthey do, she rages silently, what will they do when I’m crazy. As her belly grows in the passing months, Barbrasita curses it more and Lulu curses back, and this exchange continues until the night Brontë finally wakes to find the Mistress sitting straight up in bed, streaked with the electric frost of the storm outside, eyes wide to the sound of something Bronte can’t hear through the cracked euphonium of the storm, until it trails off in a baby’s cry.

Brontë rushes into the hall of the darkened pueblo. Searching for

couldn’t distinguish the tears of my eyes from the discharge of my uterus, until

the sound of the crying, she finds Barbrasita who, like a cat, has taken her labor into the linen closet, producing a bloody baby between her thighs, umbilical snake singing between them; the young Indian mother seems in shock. Down the dark deserted halls Bronte runs knocking on doors until Wanda appears. Calmly taking a flashlight hanging from a hook, grabbing from the kitchen the knife used for slicing Brontë’s lemons, she follows the crying to its source and, with a single swipe, slashes the cord. Its song howls into silence. Bronte reels. “Can you warm up a pot of water, miss,” Wanda says, “not too hot?”

Barbrasita doesn’t curse her baby anymore after that. In the days after that, she sits in her bed so rapt at the sight of the little boy that she almost has to be reminded to feed him, his small hands pawing her breast. Trying to explain it’s not a good idea for the two to sleep together, Wanda has to gently pry the child from the mother’s arms: You could roll over on him dear, she says, wedging the baby on his side in a small makeshift cradle a few feet away. Commissioned to keep an eye on the infant while Barbrasita sleeps, Brontë fumes. It’s very convenient for everyone isn’t it.It’s very convenient that a train abandoned me here so I could baby-sit a dying woman and a newborn. Brontë feels no affinity for babies. She believes she has a man’s sense of privacy that doesn’t accommodate babies. But as more weeks pass and she tires of watching for trains in whose arrival she has no more faith, she finds herself looking in on the baby anyway, even when the mother is awake. “Just thought I should check,” she tells the Indian girl. “Force of habit.”

Later, almost four hundred days after coming to the Pueblod’Elektrik, standing out on the station platform one night and seeing at long last, long after faith’s exhaustion, the small distant

both had seeped into me and I was bone dry, profoundly unmistakably empty,

light of an approaching train, Brontë will note it’s not so much like a full moon at all. But one night a few months before, before she can even imagine let alone know what’s to happen, out on the station platform one night she sees a globe of light emerge down the line over the far ridge and for a moment thinks it’s a train before realizing it’s the moon growing larger and larger like a plummeting airplane, its nose a burning bomb. That’s when she doesn’t believe in trains anymore. That’s when she thinks that she and the Mistress have as much chance of riding the moon to Chicago — assuming the moon ever traveled from west to east. But of course this moon like all others travels from east to west, back the way they came from. There in the pueblo station, what Brontë doesn’t yet know is that, as the four hundred days of the Pueblo d’Elektrik tick down, the two women come nearer their destination than she thinks: the end of the lie that they can or ever could leave the lake, or live beyond it.

Enthralled by her child, Barbrasita is paralyzed. In the weeks after his birth she can’t even bring herself to name the little boy, so afraid is she that her first maternal act will be a mistake, setting everything thereafter wrong. What if I name him something bad? she asks Brontë in broken English. She’s consumed with guilt about having cursed the baby when he was inside her. She’s convinced he heard every word, so now she pets his brown hair and begs his small brown eyes to forgive her. She seems to Brontë in a trance. One night when lightning strikes one of the railway cars outside, the reflection of the flaming mausoleum through the window makes the Indian’s face appear on fire, ecstatic, purged by love; that’s the night Brontë checks in one more time on the Mistress three doors down, turns down the lamp by Barbrasita’s bed, closes Barbrasita’s door behind her, and then takes off her clothes. Is the look on the Indian girl’s face just a variation of the

and then it was after that that I dreamed, for the first time in my life, not

one she always wears now as a mother, or a response to Brontë’s naked body next to her? Never with another girl before huh,Brontë whispers, careful should the wound of birth still be tender. Vixen, Bron të accuses herself, I’m no better than Rollin. Afterward, as the young Navajo woman sleeps in her breasts, wrapped in her long gold hair, out of her sleep Brontë reaches over in the dark and slowly rocks the cradle.

But in the ensuing days, the fire that’s been cast in Barbrasita’s face doesn’t die, rather ecstasy burns down to the diamond of a fixed notion. In her heart, her nameless little boy has opened the door to a vast plateau of fear, stretching out beyond her young years when mortality is supposed to be so inconceivable. In the beginning, perhaps her dread was attached to nothing she could name but now she can name it, pyre of the railway car outside flaming in her face: it’s the way she cursed him made manifest that’s coming for him. Like it was a thought wandering the desert waiting for her to rescue it, she’s come to know in no way she can explain even to herself that it doesn’t matter where she goes, it doesn’t matter how far she tries to get her little boy away,the lightning outside will keep coming for him, moving through the labyrinth of railway cars ring by outer ring, striking closer and closer, and that she can’t be paralyzed anymore. Out in the storm, out where the sky curses the earth in sound and light, lurks her son’s doom and she must stop it. She has to shake herself loose of the love that holds her down and find inside her the love that will save him. She has to go to war with the sky that would take him.

In the room three doors down, Brontë is alarmed by Lulu’s moans in her sleep. Oh jeez she’s going to die now, Brontë thinks to herself; she sits on the woman’s bed holding her, trying to calm her, but Lulu’s rant — stop her no no no stop, stop her, stop (in

realizing at first I was dreaming since I had never had a dream and didn’t

dreams of red) — grows from the depths of something else.Finally, not knowing what else to do, Bronte hurries from the room in search of Wanda only to find Barbrasita standing in the dark hall with her unnamed baby in her arms. Brontë can no longer see the fire in Barbrasita’s face but Barbrasita can, it’s right there in frontof her eyes, getting closer: “What are you doing?” says Brontë. She pulls the young mother back to bed. Then she starts back down the hallway knocking on doors like the night the baby was born, but this time Wanda doesn’t answer: “Where is everybody?” Brontë actually says out loud in the dark at one point. When she turns back to the room, Lulu’s ramblings growing louder and more agitated, Barbrasita is in the hallway again, with her baby in her arms again.

Brontë takes hold of the girl’s shoulders. “Go to bed,” she says.

Barbrasita answers, in what sounds to Brontë like remarkably good English, “I know what I know, and I must do what I must do,” and with that shoves the baby boy into Brontë’s arms. “Hey,” Brontë says, Barbrasita striding past her, and in the porticos of the pueblo the Indian girl pulls open the doors that then seem to blast apart in the storm.

“Hey, hey!” Brontë calls again, holding the child and running in confusion after the other woman, who stops only for a moment in the doorway. Only for a moment in the doorway, everything about Barbrasita’s ravaged life comes to a halt. She’s riveted by a calm that’s still secret to her. She’s riveted by a resolution beyond rationality, by some wisdom forgotten as soon as she’s seen it;’for a second, she lives in the red gazebo of her heart, standing at its placid center where her life surrounds her like a diorama. Brontë can hear her say very clearly, very calmly over the sound of the

know how to identify one or distinguish it from consciousness, rather in that

thunder, “Give him a good name,” and then the young mother runs out into the lightning.

“No!” Brontë screams after her. But Barbrasita runs for the burning railway car, not to meet the fire but to head off the storm’s advance and conduct up into her, between her legs, through the place she gave birth, all the sky’s electric rage. Just outside the blowing, slamming doors of the hacienda, ëronte is pelted by rain and wind, stopped in her tracks as she turns her back on the wet and cold to protect the baby; at her side Wanda has finally appeared, eyes wide, and Brontë goes on crying “No!” over her shoulder at Barbrasita now far beyond earshot in the dark distance splattered with wet light — until there streaks from the black sky a bolt that suspends the girl in a momentary glow. Then she’s gone. She’s stepped through a white rip in the sky to some other desert on the Other Side where mothers don’t fear for the loss of their children. Brontë thinks it’s her own cry that she hears until she realizes it comes from the other end of the pueblo, Lulu sitting up in her bed in her room tearing at the sheets around her.

Will they make a saint of her? Lulu wonders, collapsed back into her pillow and red dreams. Will they all come out and gather on the mesas surrounding the electric desert, revering the place where she went up in smoke, Saint Barbrasita of the Loud Light? Wherever she is now, on the Other Side of the cracked sky,does she wonder to herself, What have I done? What mad love made me abandon him, in order that I might believe I could save him from all the vagaries of life? Does she find herself burned into some place between chaos and God, neither within reach? Does she sing to herself if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me when it’s a higher light jagged like a knife she meant to take

first dream I believed that the small flicker of light I saw on the other side of

up into her womb and snuff out? Wherever she is now in the Other Desert, staring around in bewilderment in a place where the same storm seethes and everything is the same except that her child is gone, missing him she doesn’t even know what to call him.

For a while, all she knew she remembered was red. Here’s Lulu’s lie: that she would not die on the lake. It’s now been so long since that day when some other naked version of her left to sail back where she left her small son in that silver gondola that she can’t be certain anymore it really happened at all. She can’t be certain it wasn’t a dream or hallucination, she can’t be certain of anything she ever did or didn’t do, she can’t be certain of her own life except: the one thing she knows for certain was ever real is him—that she knows — and she also knows she wouldn’t die anywhere else but on that lake even if she could, as if she could leave her heart behind and forget where it was and then, having lost it, forget there ever was a heart. So as the lake stopped draining, because it would wait to die with its mistress, so the Mistress in return has laid suspended on the edge of death four hundred days waiting for the lake to die: Well no kidding, Lulu says to herself in her fever. Who’s the point-misser now. She waits for the lake, the lake waits for her. But now in the first vision she’s had in a long time, like those she used to have going back to her very earliest, when she would sit on her bathroom floor reading the patterns of her periods in the porcelain toilet, now as if she’s conducting one final ceremony and as if a melody-snake has wound its way up out of the desert from the ashen place where the lightning took Barbrasita, Lulu has a new epiphany.

In it she runs after Barbrasita to stop her, into the wind and the

the darkness, on the other side of unconsciousness, was the very dream itself,

rain. As she almost catches her, the girl stops and turns and the lightning rips the sky in two and, inside the radiance that Barbrasita becomes, the red that’s been the only thing Lulu could remember finally takes form: and she sees him standing there in the Chateau lair with the small red toy monkey in his hand, wondering how it is he’s been abandoned again. First confronted by this vision, she can’t face the question of whether she left the toy behind accidentally or, so to speak, accidentally on purpose, but once the memory of red takes the form of the red monkey, then in this ozone between living and dying, for the first time since motherhood, Lulu fights to live …

… and opens her eyes, and he’s gone. Opens her eyes and she lies in her bed in the pueblo and, outside, after four hundred days, the lightning has finally subsided. It flashes just enough that the snow falling glitters like glass — but that isn’t what she notices. What she notices is the bird beyond the window of her room, in the high black branches of a charred tree, very calmly unperturbed by the falling ice, as though the tree’s surrounding wisps might actually shelter it. “Look,” she says.

Rocking in a chair at the foot of the bed, resting with a brown baby in her arms, Bronte opens her eyes at the sound of Lulu’s voice, a little astonished. “Hello,” she brings herself to say.

“Look,” Lulu says again, weakly raising her arm to point through the window, and Bronte turns to look.

It takes a moment for Brontë’s eyes to communicate the color of the bluejay to her mind, or perhaps it’s the other way around: “It’s not a trick of the light, is it,” says Brontë. “That is, it’s not really just some strange shade of green and gray mixed together.

which I approached across some limbo between consciousness and sleep, and

It’s really blue?”

“All color is a trick of the light,” Lulu explains.

After a moment, “It’s New Year’s.”

“Really?”

“Day before yesterday, actually.”

Lulu looks at the baby in Brontë’s arms. “How long since …?”

“Five weeks.”

“Five weeks?”

“You would come to just long enough for me to get some soup in you. You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“Some part of you must have wanted to stick around awhile.”

“Have you named him?”

“Not yet,” Brontë sighs, shaking her head. “Want to hold him?”

Lulu has a pang at the sight of him. “His mother: she chose you.”

“No,” Brontë argues, “I was just the one who happened to be there, that’s all.” She doesn’t mention the night she and Barbrasita slept together. “Who else was she going to give him to? Wanda I suppose, but….”

it was like the flicker of a gunshot in the distance, a small flash on the far

“She chose you,” Lulu insists, as vehemently as her weakness allows, “with boobs like those, she figured you were the woman for the job.”

“Well aren’t you feeling better,” Brontë says. “They’re not exactly baby-ready.”

“Tell him that. Put a bottle between them and he’ll never know the difference.”

“He’ll just grow up to be another breast-blinded man like his father.”

“He’ll grow up to be that anyway. The male wangie at its most basic.”

“Hold him while I go get you some soup,” and Bronte gets up and gives the baby to Lulu. While she’s gone Lulu barely brings herself to look in the little boy’s brown eyes. She holds him pretending he isn’t there. She hears his gurgles pretending she doesn’t; the soft brown of his hair, she pretends she doesn’t feel that. The small hand that waves in the air for her finger, she pretends she doesn’t see it. She pretends she’s not thinking of names. Brontë comes back and sets the baby in his cradle nearby and feeds the other woman some soup, then when she’s finished she lies in the bed next to Lulu and picks up the little boy as he starts to cry. Bronte pretends she’s sick and fucking tired of crying babies. She pretends it was the unluckiest day of her life when Barbrasita pushed this child in her arms and ran out into the storm. What I get for seducing her, she thinks. She looks at the baby in her arms who’s stopped crying. “Why does he make me afraid?”

horizon, until I finally identified the sound coming from it as crying, and when

“Because there’s nothing a mother fears more,” Lulu says closing her eyes, “than the chaos of the world.” Before she sleeps, she looks once more to see if the bluejay is still in the black tree outside; together, the two women on the bed watch it with the baby asleep between them. “Brontë….”

“I know.”

“I have to go back.”

Jeez, Brontë wonders, you don’t suppose Armand is still chained up in that dungeon, do you? “I know.”

It’s the fur. There’s something about it that makes his flesh crawl. He would vastly prefer the cold hard metal of regular handcuffs cutting into his skin. With every twist of his body, with every struggle against his constraints, then the more the fur of 2018 (2004–2089) the cuffs softly caresses his wrists. A wave of disgust washes over him. There’s something depraved about it; it’s like a strange animal, mutated and hermaphrodite, curling between Tapshaw’s hands. Oh God don’t even…. He actually thinks he’s going to throw up. “Can’t you use rope or something?” he says.

“I don’t have rope,” the other man says. “I thought you would find those comfortable.”

I finally reached it I saw it was a baby sitting on the ground waiting for

For a moment Tapshaw stops struggling. “You’re a sick….” I’m definitely going to throw up, he thinks, drenched in sweat; another long moment goes by before the feeling subsides. “You’ve taken leave of your senses,” he croaks. Sitting on the other side of the room, Wang considers this: That’s it, he thinks. He turns it over in his head, deliberating it in all its meaning: I’ve taken leave of my senses. Regaining his composure, Tapshaw growls, “You don’t even know how to use that.”

“Uh,” Wang says, studying the gun in his hand, “I point it at you and a bullet comes out and hurts you?”

“How in God’s name you ever became the hero of a revolution, I’ll never understand.”

“Well, I’ll admit it was from staring into guns rather than firing them.” Wang gets up from the chair and walks to the window. “Anyway I never said I was a hero. And is that what this is, a ‘revolution’?” Leaning in the sill, he’s noticed lately the sky is less and less blue. In the nearby hills, the observatory above Los Feliz glows in the sun like a skull. “I thought this was a ‘crusade,’ and I’m the mystic — I who don’t have a mystic bone in my body — divining messages that come singing out of the sky or floating up in boats in the form of children’s toys. Which is really more a crusade-thing than a revolution-thing. What sort is this anyway?”

Tapshaw snorts in contempt.

“Oh, all right,” Wang shrugs, “it’s a nine-millimeter. You see? I’m not as hopeless as both of us like to suppose.”

me, and he stopped crying and looked up at me blinking, and now in the

“It’s an old nine-millimeter that will probably….” Tapshaw stops a moment for the nausea to pass, “… that will probably blow up in your hand when you fire it.”

“Yes, well,” Wang goes back to the chair where he was sitting, staring at the captive man on the floor, “there’s one way to find that out, isn’t there.”

“These things are going to make me puke,” the bound officer gasps, swallowing frantically.

“Tapshaw,” … Wang answers gently and not completely without sympathy, “if you’ll permit me: that may say just a little more about you than it does about anything else. Anyway the handcuffs are all I have and they’re not coming off, not for a while anyway. So if I were you, I would calm down.”

After a moment Tapshaw says, “Where are we?”

“Actually,” Wang sets the gun down on the old table next to him, “I used to live here.” He gazes around the tiny one-room wooden house. “When I first came to Los Angeles, this part of the city wasn’t even under water.” He gets back up and returns to the window. “There was a park over there,” he nods, “right down those banks, at what used to be the corner of Alvarado and Sixth. A nice park once, I think I heard, back in the earlier part of the last century, 1930s, ’40s. I got here at the end of’1, from … well, by way of that proverbial slow boat from China but in a roundabout fashion, let’s put it like that. I would sit here at this same window at a table a lot like this one and smell the Mexican bread baking, I could never figure out where exactly, and …” In the northwest, the sky is definitely less blue than it used to be. “… write letters, lots of letters.” He says, “Each right

memory-stream of the lake’s birth canal, remembering it so distinctly, I can

after the other. Hadn’t mailed one before I started the next.”

“In code, no doubt,” says Tapshaw, leaning back against the wall taking deep breaths, “to the other side you were spying for.” “Yes, that’s right,” Wang snaps impatiently, “that’s the way we top agents send all our secret messages — by the postal service. Now you’re just being irrational. This was seventeen years ago, remember such a time? Before there was another side for me to spy for, if in fact I were spying for anyone, now or then or ever.” He sighs, paces back to the chair. For a while neither of them says anything. “You know,” Wang finally decides to try again, “you can believe what you want of me. You will anyway. And when your men catch up with us, as I know they’re bound to, persuasion brought to bear will undoubtedly get me to say exactly whatever it is our superiors — well, your superiors — want said. But right now, before the truth becomes so opportunistic, I’m telling you two things, assuming the truth means anything to you at all. The first is this. I promise you, I absolutely guarantee you, that most of what we call, oh, history, happens for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with why we think it happens. The second is, that kid had nothing to do with anything. You want to tell yourself I’m whatever it is you want to believe I am, go ahead. But all that boy ever did was row me in that boat.” He runs his hand through his hair. “He was barely verbal.”

“Yes, well maybe he was a little more verbal than you know,” and of course now, unwittingly, Tapshaw has revealed he’s not really so sure about Wang’s complicity after all. Both men realize this as

tell it was obviously him, I can see it so obviously in a way I couldn’t then

soon as Tapshaw says it but Wang lets it go because it’s a little beside the point, and also because part of him has always suspected the same about the boatman — not that he was part of any plot, which is absurd, but that maybe he wasn’t exactly the idiot savant of the lake he pretended to be. “Are you going to tell me he wasn’t broadcasting those messages?” Tapshaw says.

“I’m telling you,” Wang answers evenly, “they were meaningless,” which to Tapshaw, Wang understands, is the most dangerous prospect of all, the most subversive of all possibilities, the possibility that polemicists and ideologues, political spokesmen and militarists alike reject down to their core, not to mention rationalists: yes, Wang ruefully reminds himself, let’s not forget rationalists. “I’ll tell you what,” he says to the other man. Tapshaw glares up at him from the floor. “I’ll let you go,” Wang nods, “if you can answer one question.”

“I’m not playing your games.”

“Tribulation II, or III?”

“What?”

“Tribulation II or III. That shouldn’t be so hard. Haven’t you been keeping track? Haven’t you been able to tell when one ends and one begins, and then when the next ends and the one after that begins? You answer that and I’ll unlock those cuffs right now.”

Unconsciously Tapshaw begins chewing his lip. Wang can practically see the gears turning in his head.

because I didn’t really know him then, now I can see it’s Kirk with flashes of

“Come on, III or IV? Or, wait a minute, I said II or III didn’t I?” Wang taps the gun on the table next to him. “Well, we’ll throw in IV too. Give you more choices, more chances to get it right.”

Tapshaw exhales. “III.”

“Wrong.”

The other man’s shoulders sink in defeat. A moment of silence passes before Tapshaw finally thinks to ask, “How do you know?”

“Actually,” Wang says, “I don’t. But apparently, neither do you.”

“Then it was a trick question,” Tapshaw says.

“You’re really not getting the gist of this, are you.”

“What do you care about that kid anyway?”

Another trick question, Wang thinks, because he doesn’t know the answer, just as he doesn’t actually know for a fact what the young boatman was involved with or wasn’t, it’s just intuition — a little late in my life for intuition, Wang muses. A little late for instinct. That’s what bondage queens are for, instinct. There’s no mathematics for intuition, even for someone who was a student of mathematics once, but then mathematics isn’t always necessarily the language of reason and sense; you can stick numbers after anything, including a tribulation or two or three, and pretend everything adds up. He doesn’t really know for a fact, moreover, that what he’s told Tapshaw is true, that what the boy was broadcasting those nights from out on Hamblin Island was truly meaningless. The broadcasts didn’t mean anything to Tapshaw or Wang, or maybe even the boy, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t

Bronte in him maybe, as if she was the shadow of his resurrection, or maybe

mean something to someone, or that they didn’t have a meaning no one knows.

And at that point, of course, well then what’s rational and what isn’t? At that point there’s no saying anymore what chaos is, there’s no saying anymore what “meaning” means. At that point. The broadcasts were meaningless, Wang said to Tapshaw, as though that was the rational explanation — which only means sometimes randomness is rational and meaning isn’t. Then you’re lost in the dark heart of god or the void, whichever you’ve decided you believe in: when there are no accidents, is chaos chaos anymore? And if everything is an accident, is order an accident as well? One man stands before a line of tanks. Another crashes an airliner into a building. One ends an Age of Reckoning, the Age of the Sky; the other begins the Age of Chaos, in which the sky melts to earth and becomes a lake. On one or the other or both, those who record the times and those who interpret or use the lessons of what’s recorded — and especially those who love power first and last and only, and use such interpretations to their own ends — will impose a rationale. But ultimately and interiorly, the reasons belong not to those who watch and record and interpret and use, but those who do.

Which isn’t to say that, because the man standing before the tanks and the man crashing the airliner each does so for his own secret reason, they’re the same. It’s not to say there’s no difference between them, or that good and evil aren’t real. To the contrary — thinking about this now, although he doesn’t know it Wang crosses a point of inexorability, on his journey to the center of his life’s enigma — it’s men’s secret reasons that best testify to good and evil, which are as real as love and hate, which in turn are the world’s only incontrovertible things,

he was the manifestation of hers, and I woke then or rather was awakened in a

empirically incalculable as they may be. In his self-loathing there’s part of this proposition even Wang won’t accept yet, even as he now, yes, intuits it: he won’t accept that because he may not have stood before a line of tanks solely for whatever reason the world believes, the act was no less noble, no less heroic. Sometimes an act means something unto itself. Sometimes it has a heroism unto its own. That boy who rowed him in the boat back and forth to the Chateau, well, Wang didn’t even know him; and he’s going to live only long enough to begin to intuit the way a child — above and beyond any other creature or thing — explodes all notions of meaning and rationale, chaos and god, because it’s one’s child who makes such things matter beyond one’s own self. And if Wang can’t really answer the question of why the boy in the boat matters to him, or even if boy matters to him, what does matter is that she had a boy, not my boy no; no not mine, not ours, but one perhaps who could have used a father anyway, if there had been a man around big enough to overcome his pain and pride: so this, Wang thinks, this is for lost sons, and Tapshaw will never understand that.

A sudden dusk descends.

In China they would have found me by now, he thinks to himself sitting at the table; and then, turning to the increasingly frayed ribbon of blue in the sky through his window, rationale fractures to its fundament — and he catches his breath, thunderstruck.

She never got the letters.

His jaw actually drops a bit. A hot wave of his own absurdity washes over him; a moan only he can hear rises from the pit of him. Never having remotely crossed his mind before, this sudden

wave of nausea by the bubble of him breaking the surface of my dream and

realization out of the, well, gray if not blue, now has a stunning clarity: she never got the letters (labial jewel, riverine rapture …); and suddenly he sees the last fourteen years for their grand error, the greatest hubris of which has been not simply how reactively and immediately he concluded she had spurned him, without even considering the possibility that chaos might have intervened to thwart his attempts to reach her, but that he then called this conclusion “rational.” The rational processes of mathematics aside, one chooses what it is he wishes to consider rational about his life; and now if Wang could simply find a way to begin breathing again, if he could simply find a way to loosen himself from the revelation that grips his chest at this moment, he might ask himself not only how it is that rationality minus chaos equals not rationality but chaos, but also why he chose to believe in her rejection of him rather than in the intercession of chance. He might ask himself how it is he could have not taken into account a lake that appeared in the center of a city, and that cast into such pandemonium the age before him and all its correspondences.

Then he might ask himself who he is. The Emperor of Elevators, he whispers. What? asks the man handcuffed on the other side of the room; but Wang takes no notice. He raises his hand to the sky as though, viewed through the prism of his palm, its rare blue might be located. Wang? the other voice says again from the floor a few feet away, what’s wrong with you? but holding his hand up to his eye, staring through, Wang is transfixed, and finds himself back fourteen, fifteen years ago in this same house, sitting in this same place at a table much like this one, pen and stationery spread out where, just a moment ago, there was a gun, the waters of the lake not yet having risen as high up the banks outside the window. Oh this is one of those spells, he tells himself very lucidly, one of those “lapses” that have been reported around the city lately,

reclaiming his place in my womb, and it wasn’t ong after that I came back to

that he’s dismissed out of hand as outbreaks of mass psychosis even as he himself experienced such a thing one night a year ago, after returning from the Chateau for what proved to be his final visit there. Possessing both “present” and “past” consciousness, now he’s back in the days of ’4, back before the crusades and his days as a dockhand at Port Justine, hurled back to this time by force of either trauma or triggered recollection, to this memory on which a life turned — several lives, as he’s about to learn. He feels it all again, his rage at her silence then and, beyond that, at her old infidelity that produced the son that was not his, and at the forsaken years between them, and at his simultaneous imprisonment by and exile from the polar events of great moment through which he lived without her so anonymously: and once again, as he was fourteen years ago, he’s paralyzed by, what? … my love for her? or my fear of it … and then a man who has from time to time meditated on the laws of impulse only to reject them does the second profoundly impulsive thing of his life, and the first since he was nineteen years old.

Having been cast by his Lapse back into this memory, now he breaks free of its destiny. He turns from his window to gaze at the small empty house around him, stares at the pen and stationery on the table, and takes in his one good hand the umpteenth furious unfinished letter that another Kristin would receive by accident if he ever sent it … and instead crumples it up; then he takes leave of his senses. He walks quickly from the house and breaks into a run, hurrying to a boat moored on the banks, gets in the boat and, binding his bad hand to one of the oars with his belt, begins to row, undaunted by the four or five miles he has to cross.

Other than the smattering of lights coming on in the Silverlake casinos to the northeast, he takes little note of the slightly altered

the city where he had been conceived, and if once I was convinced that no

not yet submerged scenery around him. The ghost of history, he feels himself grow more corporeal by the moment. He glides through the watery sky of the lake an hour and a half without break until the weak arm of the bad hand throbs with pain. In this moment on the lake, everything about Wang’s absurd life comes to a halt; he’s riveted by a calm still secret to him. He’s riveted, as when he was nineteen years old in the Square, by a resolution beyond rationality, by a wisdom forgotten as soon as he’s seen it. In this moment he has more than passing acquaintance with his own strange courage. After a while he turns to look over his shoulder for where he’s heading; he sees her hotel, not far from the Hamblin where he and Tapshaw, following the sound of a song, once sailed out thirteen years from now. He grows closer to her hotel as twilight grows darker and, just as though his life was exactly timed for such a thing, his final approach coincides with the cry of a child from the waves around him.

He hears her wail for her drowning son from a hotel window. He hears again the boy’s desperate call and turns the boat to the sound; just as though his life is exactly timed for such a thing, he unties his hand from the oar and reaches into the water — nd small fingers reach up and grabs his throbbing arm. With his other good hand, Wang pulls the boy up from out of the lake into the boat. In the boat, holding close to him the nine-year-old soaked and terrified but, as of this new moment, alive, Wang thinks to himself, Someone try telling me this isn’t my son.

The next morning Wang, the woman he called K in his letters, and her son Kim leave the sinking hotel and move to shore. A day later, Wang buys a used car that needs new tires. On their way up Highway 1, Kim rides in the front seat with Wang as the woman sleeps in back; they stop at a shop in San Luis Obispo and get the

matter where I went a lake would have followed me there, now I don’t know, I

boy some new animé posters to replace the ones left behind in L.A. His room is the first they decorate when they rent the new flat in San Francisco that rests at a fork in the fog and overlooks the bay. On their first night in the apartment, staring out the large windows at the blue bay, Wang doesn’t think of Lake Zed but only this, his most fulfilled moment; the next morning, when he makes a quick run to the market for chocolate milk — Kim’s favorite — and his used car that needed new tires suddenly spins out of control on Van Ness and crashes into the oncoming bus, in those final moments before his neck snaps Wang wonders how it is that he, of all people, personally bore witness to both the very moment the Twentieth Century died and the very moment the Twenty-First was born, separated by the twelve shadowyears between them. He’s a little surprised in those final seconds that it should be the young girl with the long gold hair he remembers, who he saw only a few times and whose name he never knew. In those final seconds he would like to believe he’s been redeemed somehow, something about which he would give more thought if he had the time, but in the few seconds he has, the only thing he can be sure of is that the view of the San Francisco Bay from the new apartment the night before was worth everything.

Orphanhood is the bond, then, when Kim meets Saki more than fifteen years later. By the time he’s twenty-five years old Kim is an orphan three times over, having lost first the father who was there only long enough to make a son, then Wang, then his mother to ovarian cancer three years ago in Toronto, where the two of them fled before the Bay Area’s occupation in ’9. Returning to liberated San Francisco in ’18 following the siege of Monterey, Kim sees Saki for the first time when she mysteriously emerges from a condemned hotel at Chinatown’s Dragon Gate looking coolly and fully capable of casting a spell on every man before her.

don’t know, even as I feel like there are so many things now that I do know,

Part Japanese, Saki was orphaned by her mother, a former stripper from Las Vegas who vanished early in the girl’s life — into a religious cult, unconfirmed and dubious rumor has it — and by her American father she’s seen only in her dreams, a strange man who once charted a huge blue calendar that completely reordered history according to the chronology and logic of apocalypse, and from whom the daughter got her electric blue eyes. Kim can’t believe his luck to have a woman so beautiful. He and Saki move in together. When he receives a position at the university as a professor of musicology, Saki goes to work for a map maker, walls around her floating with brightly colored places of indefinite borders, oceans of uncertain shores; although it would make more sense for the couple to live in Berkeley where they work and the rents are cheaper, Kim can’t bring himself to leave a single-room flat not far from where he grew up near Van Ness. If he leans from the upstairs window as far as possible and turns his head sharply north, he can see a blue sliver of the view of the bay that the adopted father of one week who saved Kim’s life saw on the last night of his own life.

Kim marries Saki two months after she becomes pregnant. Angie is named after her grandmother even if it wasn’t the grandmother’s real name but the one she took from an old rock and roll ballad she loved while dancing underage in a Vegas strip joint back in the 1970s. So it is that two generations later Kim and Saki’s daughter has more music in her genes than she knows. When Angie is eight years old, long before he’s entitled to a midlife crisis her father has a ludicrous and cataclysmic affair with a student not nearly as beautiful as Saki; far from only a passing distraction, even after it comes to light the affair becomes an ever more disastrous obsession. It’s as clear to Kim as to everyone else that he’s taken leave of his senses. One afternoon Saki marches Angie to a hotel

even as now I know not only that Kirk’s father is dead but that my own mother

room and bursts in on the rendezvous at a particularly debauched moment, a scene that profoundly traumatizes Angie more than whatever indignant satisfaction on Saki’s part can compensate; in the years to come, she’ll hate the mother for it more than the father. Two years later, the relationship between daughter and father is finally reduced to Kim — now without job or family or lover, and in defiance of a restraining order — suddenly appearing one morning before Angie and her mother on the sidewalk outside the little girl’s elementary school, in rags and pleading for a single embrace, sobbing the little girl’s name as Saki curses him.

Angie never sees him again. He disappears, either to enlist in some distant crusade of some undetermined roman numeral or to fulfill a family tradition of disappearing fathers and mothers. Given this, on some level it doesn’t really make sense Angie would go to the same university as her father and, like her father, study musicology — or it makes complete sense. Perhaps it makes sense for all the reasons it doesn’t. The rational processes of mathematics aside, one chooses what it is she wishes to consider rational about her life; and in fact Angie is not one to set rational processes aside even if, Wang not being her true grandfather, technically his blood doesn’t run in her veins. She works hard in school to the exclusion of everything else. Except for one extremely perfunctory dating relationship that lasts five months with a young computer programmer, her life is consumed bycombinations of music and math (since all music is mathematic), and her theory that as there’s a basis for physical matter so there isfor psychic matter, that within a deconstructed and reassembledmelody there’s to be located the helix of freedom and desire, transcendence and oblivion, even — if she believed in either — god and chaos. She spends her life searching for this helix. By the late ’40s and early ’50s, called a genius by some and a crackpot by

is dead too, even as now I know that my own father was dead before I was

others, and utterly nonplused by either distinction, Angie has pursued her musical grail throughout Europe, the Middle East and America as the diminished skirmishes of what’s no longer called by anyone the “tribulation” but rather the Unrest have receded to the last bastions of certifiably insane Americans, Wyoming and Utah. For two years she conducts her research in lower Manhattan, for five years in the two hundred miles of desert west of formerly occupied Albuquerque, using as her headquarters an old Spanish hacienda once converted into a railroad hotel.

In wire glasses and dour attire, adopting an increasingly severe appearance in the way of women who believe no other physical identity is possible for them, Angie has neither her mother’s beauty nor her father’s handsomeness. If she did, it’s possible she wouldn’t marry anyway. But in the early ’70s, as she nears her fiftieth birthday, to her own surprise she finds herself seized by a compulsion.

This is the compulsion to adopt a child. She listens for the compulsion’s melody so she might analyze its mathematics, but all she hears is a fugue not of numbers but indecipherable runes. She pores over pictures of motherless children from all over the world, waiting for one to strike a chord. They all strike a chord. Her head fills with an awesome and heartbreaking symphony. For more than a year she wrestles with the decision, finally waking one morning in a strange ecstasy from a dream about her father; when she finally files the application, she’s stunned to be turned down, due to institutional doubts as to her “domestic stability.” Thousands of children in the world without mothers or fathers and she’s turned down? She appeals the decision and is turned down again. She applies to go to China where she might find one of the countless infant girls abandoned by their parents, but ironically is

born and it’s just as well, and in a way here in the birth canal of the lake none

denied not in spite of her Chinese heritage but because of it, as though there’s some subversiveness about it she doesn’t know. For months afterward she sits at night in her endless stream of hotel rooms poring again over the pictures of children, of sons or daughters who might have been. She runs her finger over their small faces. She holds the photos up to the light and peers into them as though some flicker in their faces, something in the backgrounds of their lives in Africa or Appalachia or the Andes, will offer clues as to why she isn’t worthy of them. Like all children who assume responsibility for their own desertion, she becomes convinced this is her punishment for leaving her errant father outside her school that morning she was a small girl when, in rags, he cried futilely for her arms in the company of the mother who cursed him.

She returns to looking for the helix. She privately despairs of ever redeeming her life with a purpose when, in the late ’80s at the far end of her career, she’s called to Los Angeles, the city that takes leave of men’s senses.

Arriving late afternoon, she asks to be taken to the site immediately but is convinced by excavation officials to rest first. She spends the night in one of the new hotels that have gone up near the old airport razed and rebuilt in the last five years after being closed more than seven decades. As dark falls, from the highrise window she can see a hesitant galaxy of lights growing across the basin, though still far less than the dazzling overturned jewel box that was night-time L.A. a century ago. The next morning, her driver explains that while the last of the freeways has finally been reopened, none takes Angie where she’s going so they make their way instead up Old La Cienega Road, one of the city’s major thoroughfares before the lake and now a narrow two-lane,

of it matters and in a way there’s nothing that matters more, and am I still

part paved and part mud. They keep the windows rolled up due to the black clouds of mosquitoes that descend suddenly from swampier parts of the city. From the backseat Angie can see the permanent watermark on warped buildings that haven’t been demolished yet, like the permanent shadows of mid-Twentieth Century Hiroshima: How long since this part has been submerged? she asks halfway across the lake bottom, and is stunned when the driver answers almost twenty years, as much by how quickly her own life is passing; it doesn’t seem so long ago she was hearing the stories about the “new L.A.” being built — as the civic phrasemakers had it—“from out of the shale,” when the lake was finally declared officially dead. “Recovery’s been slow,” she notes.

“Yes,” the driver, not wanting to venture too far into politics, answers carefully, “well … some never saw the point.” Then, becoming bolder, “After all, it’s not like there ever was supposed to be a city here in the first place. Even back before the lake,” the driver goes on, “everyone knew it was doomed.”

It’s two hours before they reach the site. As it looms into view she’s astonished at the size of it; her sixty-six-year-old heart beats harder and faster than it has in a long time. The car stops and the driver helps Angie unload from the car a large case of instruments and equipment. She’s greeted by two members of the excavation team, one of them the director of the project, a man in his early thirties with tired watery gray eyes who fairly exudes skepticism. He asks if she would like some lunch first. They’re not in a rush about this, she thinks — a battle of bureaucrats: the government wants me here, these guys don’t. She says she would like to take a look at what she’s come for but the director insists on lunch and, given how her heart is racing, she relents. Over tacos she heads off

sinking? am I still drowning? am I still descending? am I still falling down

his questions with her own, and studies in the near distance the outside scaffolding that props up part of the recovered structure. At this point, he explains, we’ve cleared almost everything but the western wall that was the most deeply embedded when that part of the hills collapsed from the water.

On a long path of planks that disappear under the complex of scaffolding, Angie, the project director and the driver with Angie’s instruments head into the site. Workers stop to watch. When she emerges into what appears to have been once a grand,now decayed lobby, the workers inside stop as well. Across the atrium, two wide stone stairways spiral up one side and the other, as well as long corridors that glint with a dead blue residue; above, much of what was the roof has been washed away. Almost immediately she hears it. It’s very faint and high, almost beyond human hearing; her ears, once extremely attuned to such sounds, aren’t as sharp as they once were. “A hotel?” she says.

“That’s what we figure,” the director answers, “hard to think it could have been anything else.” They climb the stairs and continue down one of the corridors, cutting through a small, comparatively barren room and then what might have been a sitting room beyond that, with a large window. Sodden overstuffed sofas and high-armed chairs lie overturned against the walls. In every room through which they pass, workers stop what they’re doing: She’s here, she hears them whisper, that’s her. “There are a couple of things,” the director says, “that make this site more interesting than some of the other structures we’ve excavated in the area.” As they make their way down a long corridor into a room overwhelmed by both a massive fireplace

down down? or am I rising? up up up, and how did I get turned around then?

and a melancholy Angie feels almost immediately, the music she’s heard since they entered the unearthed hotel grows. “First,” he says, “there’s no record of a hotel being here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we go back into old references to try to find some sort of entry, old travel books, old hotel guides, we go back into the city archives and pull out old geological surveys, zoning ordinances … and find no record of a hotel here at all.” He stops and gazes around them. “Look at this. This wasn’t a truck stop. This wasn’t a motel on some back road to nowhere. There are plenty of records of another hotel about half a mile southwest of here, but not this.”

“Maybe this is that other hotel. Maybe the records aren’t exact.”

He shakes his head, “We found that other one. It never went all the way under and actually was pretty famous, the Chateau Something with rock musicians and movie stars back in the last century, and then in the ’10s and ’20s some sort of religious-mystic fortune-telling bondage … uh … hey,” he shrugs when he sees the way she’s looking at him, “it was L.A., even if it was under water. But this,” he sighs, sweeping his arm at the floor beneath them, “was just the middle of a road leading into an old canyon that led to a valley beyond that. Records show homes, a neighborhood, a corner gas station … no hotel though, and nothing like this.”

“What’s the other thing?” Angie says. They come into what appears to have been a huge ballroom, or several ballrooms

or have I really gotten turned around at all? and now I feel my first real panic,

conjoined; a few patches of wall still have shards of old mirror, and from the ceiling sway the stems of chandeliers plucked by the lake long ago. “The other thing?” says the project director.

“You said there are a couple of things that make this site interesting.”

“The other thing,” he answers, “is that … what our records do show is that … well, this was it.”

“This was what?”

“This was where it came from.”

“This was where what came from?”

“The lake.”

“The lake?”

“Yes.”

“The lake came from here?”

“Yes.”

“The lake came out of this hotel.”

“Well of course we don’t have any official indication there was a hotel.”

“Well there was, obviously, officially or not.”

that I’ve gotten turned around, that maybe I’m returning up up and up to the

The director takes a deep breath. “I can’t explain the hotel,” he says, “but the whole reason for digging here in the first place was a pretty formidable amount of evidence, ranging from the anecdotal to the geological, that the source of the lake was somewhere right under here. Look,” he takes another deep breath, “I don’t know … and the stories surrounding all this you wouldn’t believe….” They cross the plundered ballrooms into two small transitional rooms that appear to provide the only passage to the rest of the building. In one stands the remnants of what may have been a large pillar; if there was such a pillar in the other, it’s gone now. Out of these rooms Angie and the director exit into the hotel’s mezzanine, once obviously spectacular and lavish. Now the music, still high and vague, is close; once again, at the sight of Angie the workers stop. There’s a buzz in the mezzanine as they turn from their work.

By itself, in the middle of the mezzanine that dwarfs it, under lights that have been set up around it, stands a rough wooden table, with high legs and a small surface-top; the table has been roped off. On top is a closed metal box.

“That’s where we first found it,” the director says, “crawling across the floor where the table is now.”

“Do you know where it came from?” the woman says looking around the mezzanine.

“Not really,” he answers, pointing, “we assume one of these suites.”

“I would like to take a look there first, if it’s all right,” she says, “before the box.” She follows the director through one suite then

wrong lake, to the version of the lake I came from, and I almost turn back

the other. They wander among the strewn beds and loveseats in a rounded blue chamber beneath a light fixture that’s managed to survive all the water and years; another suite is circled by doors, a couple still with their original mirrors. “We looked through all those,” the director nods at them, “there are passages running to some of the other rooms and we went through those too.” Angie walks over to the wall. Running her fingers along its side, she presses her ear to it, listening; the director peers around at the workers watching.

They go back out into the mezzanine that’s filled with sound. “All right,” Angie says, nodding at the box. All the workers watching back up against the surrounding walls. The director moves the rope that cordons off the table while Angie pulls from her case some gloves and two long-handled stainless steel forceps, one large and one smaller. Everything has so long led to this moment that now, for her own reasons, Angie realizes she’s afraid of it too, like the rest of them; she’s about to ask either the driver or project director to open the box but decides it’s something she should do herself, as though her hands aren’t shaking and her heart isn’t thundering in her chest. The workers circling the edge of the mezzanine shrink back even though there really isn’t anywhere else to back into; some flee the room. Although the music is much louder now and — as she reaches the large forceps into the box and picks up the glowing snake — grows louder still, it isn’t cacophonous exactly. It’s hardly a din. Some of the time it even exists at a level barely anyone can hear, spiraling into itself, devouring first its own tail and then the rest of itself, at the place where terror becomes beauty before it becomes terror again.

It writhes brilliantly at the end of the forceps. Then suddenly the

downward, but I go on up up and up rising like the bubble of him that rose in

snake’s body sizzles into nothing, and in its place is a vapor, leaving only the snake’s head in the forceps’ grip.

By now most of the excavation workers have fled the mezzanine, along with Angie’s driver. The project director is stricken, fixed to where he stands. Almost spellbound herself, gripped by an ecstasy she’s felt before but can’t identify, Angie tells herself she must work quickly should the snakehead vanish too; with the smaller forceps she invades the snake’s mouth and then, when the tool proves useless, throws the forceps to the floor and sticks her fingers in the snake’s open mouth roughly pulling the helix from its throat. An answer? she wonders, the Question? holding it up before her, one moment a black bubble the next moment collapsed light, neither reducible nor mutable by chaos or god

this is the loss of one’s child

and then in the blink of an eye it’s gone as well. Completely alone in the mezzanine now, the director having unfixed himself and run, Angie spins in her place before rushing into the first suite turning one ear then the other to the walls, then rushing into the next suite and then the third, listening to the walls of each. She runs back into the mezzanine and slides herself along the walls listening with one ear then the other until she stops, cocks her head, and then turns her gaze to the mezzanine’s far end, and a single small pantry door. She crosses the length of the mezzanine. Reaching the small closed door, she places her fingers to it, putting her ear to it and immediately pulling back. She presses her ear to it again and,

my dream that night I miscarried him, up up and up rising to break the surface

opening the door, can practically feel the oxygen leave the room; leaning into the small dark pantry, it seems like minutes before she can see in the black gorge beneath her, far inside the birth canal of the century; the small boy in the water, both unknown to her and more familiar than she can stand, flailing and grasping for someone’s hand, a mother’s that’s too far from him or, perhaps, a man’s with a glint of glass in it — except there is no man there. The boy descends. Angie feels rise behind her the nullifying tide of a life never lived.

Then this is for lost fathers, she thinks. Then this is for lost fathers and lost mothers, and the Measure of the Real, the bond forged by lost fathers and their daughters, mothers and their sons, against which all else is dream. Knowing she has only moments in which to fulfill a life, she gazes over her shoulder just long enough to see hovering overhead the wave of the null, before she vanishes, along with everything around her, into the unremembered.

Divide the mist on the grass by the sway of the trees. Add the still of the water’s surface and multiply the result by forty vineyards of loam. Subtract the burning masts of seven boats while factoring in the cosine of smoke, then add all the rooms of loss times thesuites 2031 of sorrow divided by half the somnambulist highways outbound. Compute the barges of the wind multiplied by the total of fire-robots falling within the radius of rain, adding twenty-one

of the dream of the lake, as something that’s once more being born to the lake

spacemonkeys with a variable of black bridges cubed, subtracting the unmelted icicles of the moon plus the gaslights of night-time, then dividing the result by the whips of love minus the collars of devotion. Taking into account, of course, the square root of snakes times one boat of missing mothers for each year of his life, he’s calculated how and when to make his way to the Chateau which, as darkness falls, he can now see from where he hides on the lakeshore.

He doesn’t ask why they’re after him. He has no idea why but he’s been living the life he lives too long to think that why matters; twelve, thirteen years ago it was soldiers then it was gangsters in the Hollywood Hills, now it’s soldiers again. He recognizes one of them, wonders whatever happened to the other, the one he would row back and forth to the Chateau in the dead of night many years ago. He knows they’re going to catch him, because sooner or later everyone gets caught by something. They’re closing in, all over the hills with their lights and dogs, they’re all over the lake in their boats, swarming everywhere; he tallies the inevitability of his capture; his aren’t the mathematics of freedom but time. An hour, a few minutes. Just long enough to talk to her.

He’s wondering why she came back, although maybe that’s just another why that doesn’t matter. After watching the Chateau dark and silent for more than a year he had finally given up, leaving the lake behind and heading for the sea; he was sleeping on the beach one night when he woke, his ears — which don’t hear very well anymore the sound of heartbeats — picking up one’s faint telegram. Making his way back from the coast past soldiers, moving in the shadowy perimeters of the mulholland highway inland, he tracked the approaching heartbeat from the mojave

that thinks it miscarried me, up up and up to reclaim my place in its womb, and

marshes growing closer, reaching the port at San Gabriel about the time he reached the sepulveda channel. He’s been hiding on shore for a day now, in the trees and watching the lights in the Chateau out on the water. He hears the barking of dogs grow nearer. Thus he’s figured his best moment of opportunity, and with aggregates of light and sound in his head he makes his move and slips into the lake. He swims to the Chateau grotto and, when he reaches its stone steps, lingers for a while in the water to rest, at the place where years ago he used to find food and wine in a basket. Having caught his breath, he climbs out of the water and up the steps, turning out the old lantern that hangs at the top by the door. Either someone, he thinks, will have seen me, or will notice the light is out; in any case he doesn’t have long.

He opens the door and slides into the dark of the entryway. He waits for a moment then walks quietly in through the outer transitional chamber into what was once the ceremony room, then her sleeping quarters, then goes through another door and he’s in the Lair’s shadows.

Brontë sits on the divan before the hearth where a fire burns. He notices she’s cut her hair and that maybe it’s darkened just a bit, not quite as brilliant gold as it was. Not yet having seen him, she gets up and crosses the Lair holding something in her arms; then Kale realizes itvs a baby. He’s baffled for an instant, then nods to himself oh that’s why she left then. Guess some man changed her mind after all. In the kitchen on the other side of the Lair she heats some milk; he’s stood there almost a full five minutes before — crossing back the way she went, steadying the bottle in the baby’s mouth — she looks up, astounded for a moment before she decides she’s not, really. He looks at the baby’s brown hair and eyes. He thinks maybe the dogs outside have gotten louder.

far above me I see it, I see it as I dreamed it, and maybe the lake sees it too in

“You shouldn’t have come,” she finally blurts, “they’ll find you.” She shakes her head. “I’m not worth it.”

Over Bronte’s shoulder, through a door ajar, is a glimpse of someone lying in a darkened room. He says, “It isn’t you I’ve come to see.”

its own dream of me, that flicker of light in the dark, up up and up and