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

starting to shiver, and I don’t want him to see that. My teeth chatter, and I don’t want him to hear that….
    Why?
    So it can’t hurt you anymore
    … don’t ask why …
    do you understand?
    … there isn’t time for your whys. He nods, like he’s actually figured it out.
    Who’s the boss here, wildman. It’s a minute before he answers quietly
    You are.
    You have to sit here in the boat very still. Very, very still. You have to sit here and wait for me to come back, you can’t move at all or else you could fall in—
    No Big Agua for me.
    No, no Big Agua for you. So you sit very still, OK?
    Yes.
    And I ’ll be right back for you. OK?
    Yes please.
    I’ll be gone just a minute.
     
    Silently he watches me. He doesn’t cry. He looks around us at the lake and at the sky above him in that preternatural way of his.
    Night-time
    he says.
    I love you, Kirk.
    Mama come back?
    Right back.
     
    He blinks.
    Yes, please.
    I look around me, and for a minute the chill of the water passes. My eyes drink in everything, they’re thirsty like they know something I don’t…. the twilight is the kind of blue you see maybe once in a lifetime, maybe once. In the wind I hear the murmur of the fluttering tents on the lakeshore, and I know I have only minutes before the sky fills with owls that can hear his heart
and suddenly she can hear his heart herself, its steady thump in the murmur of the tents near the water. She reaches over and takes Kirk’s hand in her own and presses it, and before he can cry or try and grab her, she takes as deep a breath as she can, and down into the lake she slips.
    He watches his mother disappear. Another presence whispers in his ear and instinctively his head turns, like an owl, to gaze at the shore, where he sees another young woman, not more than eighteen or nineteen years old, watching him. Kneeling at the lake’s edge, she’s like a sprite with long straight gold hair almost to her waist, and when she sees that he notices her, she raises her hand to wave. The little boy waves back.
    Sinking, Kristin can still hear his heart. Looking up through the water one last time, she can see him leaning over the edge of the silver gondola peering down at her with his red monkey in hand, his head a shimmery sphere floating above the lake, like the parasols of autumn.

2009
     
    Every passing day, the edge of the water rots a little more the front porch of her little house, until one morning she expects to find she’s finally been swept away. Every honeymoon twilight, across the house’s threshold the lake is carried by its lesbian groom the moon, with a bridal train of small dead animals, palm fronds ripped from their trees, the trash of the recently submerged: pages of paperbacks, gin bottles, old tickets from the drowned Cathode Flower nightclub that used to be right below her on the Sunset Strip, at the foot of a hillside now under water. Step out her front door at dawn into the puddles that seep up through the decking, sunlight from the lake’s surface cutting a gash across her eyes, and she sees the glub glub glub of rising bubbles, and wonders from what sinking building or body.
    Six months ago the lake finally stopped rising. This was what everyone had been waiting for, once it became clear the lake wasn’t going to stop until it reached the ocean. Once that became clear, there was no reason not to wish the lake would just get it over with, so everyone could stop moving to higher ground. It feels to her like the foundation of the house gives way a little more every night, and it wakes her in the dark, when the dream doesn’t.

Then in the days between nights’ dreams, the visions come, often just after the sun sets. Through the hinge where day hangs on to night, the visions come up with the bubbles from the lake’s bottom. She sits on the porch of her little house and stares at the top of the Hotel Hamblin to the southeast, that roof where sometimes at fall of dark she took him in her arms to