Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson Read Free Book Online Page A

have to shake myself loose of the love that holds me down, and find inside me the love that will save him. I have to go to war with the womb of the century that would reclaim him. Hand in hand, Kirk and I make our way downstairs to Valerie and Parker’s room and they’re gone, door standing open and crib hastily ransacked, the water only a few feet below their window.
    Around noon the power goes out in the rest of the hotel. I know now that Kirk and I are the last light burning in the window for some other mom to see from some other window in the future. When the hotel manager’s deserted silver gondola washes up on the stairs just below our floor, I know it’s a sign.
    In my heart my boy opens the floodgate to a vast sea of fear; but I must close that gate. I despise myself when I look at him at the other end of the gondola, without even a life jacket, precarious on the lake beneath us … I despise the danger I subject him to now, the danger I’ve given birth to that laps at our boat. His hair shines in the sun above, and I’m amazed to see him hold his toy monkey Kulk in its redspacesuit and space helmet. You found it, I say, and he just nods. Looking east I’m not certain anymore how far the lake goes, although in the distance I still see Wilshire office complexes. Nobody else is on the lake. But where did you find it? I say and Kirk says, Under my pillow. But I looked there, I say, I looked there a hundred times. The afternoon passes, we sail through the labyrinth of old Hollywood buildings thatrise from the black water like the heads of granite fetuses the world has miscarried. Out in deeper water the black of the lake frames Kirk’s head, his bright light. Scraps of wood from the disintegrating Chateau X harbor drift by. Of course it seems my wildman has no fear at all. For a minute I reassure myself that from his three-year-old perspective this all seems impossibly cool. As we follow the hills around to the northeast, the lake is still shallow enough I can push us most of the way with the pole … I want to push the pole please, Kirk says. He starts to stand in the gondola to take the pole and I explode with terror: Sit down! I scream at him, and he starts to cry.
    He cries, and as he cries his hands start to move, start to talk the language of hands he learned from Parker. For a while I just sit there at my end of the boat, then gingerly move to him, to pull him to me for a minute and hold him. The way his fingers keep talking in the air, the way he clutches me, I know he’s more afraid than I thought. Sorry wildman, I whisper in his ear over and over sorry and I almost turn the boat back to the peninsula … but I know what I know, and I must do what I must do.
    La-la please, Mama his frightened whisper matching mine, conspiratorial in our fear.
    If there’s a higher light let it shine on me
     
    and by four-thirty we circle around the bend at Laurel Canyon and push our way up the watery ravine where we once watched city divers swim to the bottom of the lake
    ’cause I know this sea wants to carry me
     
    and the sound of loons echoes around us in the growing fog even as the lake’s songs have gone silent. On the banks of the lake in the wind we can see flapping the tents from the abandoned fair where one afternoon we saw up close the owl that hears human heartbeats, and where another afternoon we saw and heard the melody-snakes from the lake’s source. By now the lake has takenmost of the fairgrounds. In a long dark row the empty tents billow and collapse, black mouths blowing out over the water.
    We reach the lake’s center. The hole at the bottom is somewhere right below us.
    Listen to me wildman I say as calmly as possible, lowering myself over the side of the gondola into the water. He’s puzzled.
    Mama in Big Agua? Yes, Mama’s going in the Big Agua for a minute. Just for a minute, do you understand?
     
    He blinks at me in the twilight. Please don’t cry, it will break my heart. I’m already