Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson Read Free Book Online

up inside me. At the moment of the most unwilling orgasm I’ve ever had, I grab him by his black Chinese hair and my water breaks—am I pregnant?—and the torrent that pours from me sweeps in its path the Chevron at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights (in reality now long gone), rushes down the street and ebbs for a minute before streaming down the Strip. The force of it tears him from me. Last I see him he’s caught in the racing flood somewhere down the boulevard, trying to keep his head above the water as his arms flail frantically to grab on to something. I laugh out loud at the sight of it. Then in the last gush here comes Bronte, finallyready to emerge, and I reach to catch her as she leaves me but, slick with afterbirth, she slips from my hands, caught in an undertow that burps her up once at Zed’s center before pulling her back down….
    I wake. I bolt upright. Because my thighs are soaked, for a minute I’m confused, certain I’ve given birth to the lake. I can still smell the dream. My heart pounds with fear. I lunge at the white waves of the bed before me to catch my daughter I’ve ejected so cruelly, all before my consciousness understands it was a dream—but I can still smell the dream. I catch my breath in the dark to wonder what’s wrong, and look out the window by my bed and, in the light of the moon, see the ripples of the lake below me. Then I realize I haven’t heard Kierkegaard’s Mama where are you, his Mama come back, and I stumble through the apartment from my bed to his.
    An amniotic fog fills the room. I can barely see him through it. The smell of birth and the lake is overpowering. I move through the vapor to his crib where he sleeps too soundly, and pick him up … he barely stirs. In his sleep his hand grasps for Kulk his missing spacemonkey, and his face glistens from the fog off the lake. I take him from his room and close his door behind me. I take him to my bed and put him on the pillow next to mine where he goes on sleeping. I place my body like a barrier between him and the window with the lake beyond it. I watch the center of the lake waiting, my heart still pounds from my dream—but now it isn’t a dream:
    the lake is coming for him.

When I wake this morning, the hotel is quiet. There are no sounds in the hall, or in the rooms above or below me. Kirk still sleeps on the pillow … almost always he wakes before I do. I lean over him, inches from his face, and listen to his breathing, watch his chest rise and fall. I get up from the bed only kind of remembering at the last second to pull on a robe … the world’s never been as casual about my nakedness as I am. I walk out in the hall and down to the writer’s room, my ear at the door listening for the sound of old movies or even the tapping on the computer of him working. But I don’t hear anything.
    It’s still early enough that the hall lights are on except, I notice, in the east end of the hotel, and I realize this part of the building has finally lost power. I go back to my room and Kirk still sleeps on the pillow, and leaning back out the window I see the black waters of the lake have already pushed past our hotel. The lake extends north to the hills, just a sliver of the top of the peninsula still dry land.
    The lake is coming for my kid.
In my heart,
I once wrote,
he opens the door to this vast terrain of fear.
But now I know it’s a lake not a terrain, and that it’s my fear made manifest that’s coming for him.
Sometimes I’m paralyzed by my love for him….
In the last few hours, between dream and dawn, like a thought cast adrift waiting for me to rescue it, I’ve come to know in no way I can explain that it doesn’t matter where we go, it doesn’t matter how far we try to get away, the lake will keep coming for him and that I can’t be paralyzed anymore. Down in the hole of the lake, down in the opening of the birth canal where the world broke its water, lurks my son’s doom and I must stop it. I