Our Ecstatic Days (10 page)

The last vision the lake shows her is a vision of herself again, except she’s changed places with it. This time rising from the lake and stepping from the black atrium of an underwater geyser, among the cinders of her house that still float on the lake’s surface like slivers of ice from a black arctic, is Lulu; that’s when the naked woman in the gondola knows she’s Kristin again.
She continues to watch as the vision of Lulu slowly recedes in the distance, getting smaller and smaller with all the other people on the shore that now gets farther and farther away. Lulu raises her hand in farewell and Kristin nods in farewell back, continuing to push herself out into the water with the pole.

As she pushes the gondola by pole along the edge of the lake, people run alongside. The farther she sails, the bigger the crowd becomes, mesmerized by the spectacle of the nude woman with the pole guiding her silver gondola. After a while Kristin pushes herself beneath the inverted arc of the fallen line of the sky tram, then around the bend where the Chateau X rises up out of the water. Off to her right in the southwest she can see the Hotel Hamblin. She feels calm unlike the afternoon before when she took this same trip. Accompanying her are the melody-snakes loosed last night from her house by the fire; now homeless they slither alongside the gondola as the growing throng of observers run alongside on land. She can hear them as they brush past her, women’s voices in the lake crossing her path as if daring her to cut them in two in her image, and then there’s a school of them, all the voices she’s heard for five years, some she didn’t even know were singing to her, now slipping back and forth across her path darting across her passage as if to either clear the way or stop her, because they can’t stand to lose her, not to the lake that’s now her sister or lover or mother. Beneath the hemorrhaging sky, the snakes just beneath the water’s surface reflect red strings of blood.

The crowd on land grows. Stragglers along the shore are caught up by the others following her, until by the time she rounds the Chateau and approaches the lake’s origin there appear to be several hundred onlookers, including people who before now have never heard of the Madwoman of the Lake. No one calls or heckles, everyone is quiet. Soon Kristin puts down the pole and takes the oars to row, and as she approaches the spot she drops the oars and allows herself to drift to it, as if trusting the boat’s precision more than her own. The melody-snakes that have followed her relentlessly for the last quarter of a mile have stopped
at an unseen but unbreachable border, out of earshot of the past, muted into invisibility by the lake’s hush. Kristin peers over the side of the boat. Zed is blacker and emptier than it’s ever been. Kristin looks up for a moment at the shore of the northern Laurel Bay which is now lined with people. No one calls to stop her. In the red glare from water and sky she can just make out some people holding their hands over their eyes. It’s perfectly quiet, not a voice or a song to be heard and

Wildman?

she says, leaning over the gondola. She doesn’t shout it, she lets it fall from her mouth and watches it sink. It vanishes into the pitch black of the lake and she waits. Seconds pass. A minute. Another minute and another, and then, in the pitch black where she watched her question disappear, she sees the approach of its answer. Slowly it grows before her eyes, floating up to her until it breaks the surface

Mama

and she scoops it up in her hands. She cups it in her hands and sits in the gondola looking at it, as if it’s a prayer and the gondola is a floating pew. She splashes her face with it and feels his voice run down her cheeks. For a moment she covers her eyes. She feels his voice dry on her face. She looks back down into the lake and now deep in the black water she sees something else, slowly floating up to her, another answer; and she reaches into the water and takes it as it breaks the surface.

In these five years she’s forgotten all about it. It’s a small plastic monkey in a red spacesuit with a space helmet. She thinks about that last day in the gondola five years ago, Kirk clutching in his hand the monkey he named after himself; she remembers slipping into the water and hearing his heartbeat under the water, and looking up through the water and seeing him peer over the edge of the gondola, still holding the monkeyman he called Kulk in his fingers. She remembers now the terrible emptiness of the gondola when she returned to the water’s surface a minute later, the way there had been no sign of him at all, and now she looks
at the toy monkey that’s come floating up to her out of the lake and says

I’m coming

and slips her naked body, pink with the light of the red sky, over the gondola’s side. As she slips beneath the water she thinks maybe she hears someone on the shore finally break the silence of the lake and shout out No! but she isn’t certain about that,
that may be in my own head. Because I also hear if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me but I look around for some sign of the melody bolder than the others, having dared to swim into this forbidden zone of the lake but I don’t see it, so the song must be in my head too … all the songs and all the No’s are in my head. I sink. I don’t swim to the hole below, I let it pull me. I didn ’t even get a good gulp of air first, I’m calm in my chest and my descent, and feel the peace that maybe comes with drowning, once the panic is over … I don’t know why I don’t panic. I look up and see the gondola above me like I saw it above me the last time I went this way, five years ago, but this time without his small head looking over the side. As I sink there rise around me the small canyon houses that went under when the lake first appeared, I can see below me the sidewalks that once lined the boulevard below me too, and around me the neighborhood where I walked years ago pregnant not much more than a week from labor, drawn here as I’m drawn now, only to find at my feet a black puddle where now is the dark hole I can see through the water’s murk, coming up at me, the opening of the lake’s birth canal, here it comes. Here it comes. Too small it would seem for anyone to slip through, and yet I

slip through anyway, drawn beyond any resistance, pushed through in a new

birth, when domination is submission and submission is domination, shaking

myself loose of the love that held me down so as to find inside me the love that

will save him, continuing down with bits of everyone I’ve ever been falling

away from me, down down down down in what I know is my own passage, as

In his sleep, the dome
of his eyelids is red, like the bloody red sky of L.A. that he remembers from nine years ago, and he hears the song like he heard it that day in the Square twenty-eight years ago.

In his dream, which he has often, he’s standing there in the Square again, although it’s not clear to him whether he’s nineteen again, as he was then, or in his late forties, as he is now. He clutches her yellow dress in his hand
—K, beautiful betrayer—
and watches the tank roll toward him. Even looking at the famous photograph that thrilled the world, one still couldn’t know how big that tank really was.

though it’s unique to me as the same passage would be unique to someone

But when he stood there in
the Square that day twenty-eight years ago, watching it come closer, it rolled toward him like a huge metallic wave, followed by another behind it, and another behind that and another behind that.

Now in his dream the tank rolls toward him more like a giant stainless-steel egg, with another behind it. The rolling of the eggs always nauseates him; once he lurched from the dream running for the latrine, vomiting in the outer tunnel. Just as it was twenty-eight years ago, in the dream he knows that somewhere, along with the rest of the world, she’s watching. Somewhere she’s watching, was what he thought to himself on that June day, and in his dream he thinks it to himself now; and knowing this, he can die, because he’s not just dying for the freedom of man, he’s dying for the tyranny of love. Kristin, he whispers into the barrel of the tank’s gun as though it’s the opening between her legs and he’s her slave again, whispering her name that curls up into her body like smoke.

In his dream, standing in the Square as the tanks roll toward him like great eggs, he hears the song as he heard it that morning. Hears it drift out from what he reasoned at the time must be, beneath the red sky, some unknown window.

else, the same but different, a passage without time, that might take a minute

For a moment in his dream he’s
distracted. As he did that morning, he searches for it, a melody he would hear again only once, years later.

A gust rises on the Square as mysterious as the song, as though to blow the song away, as though to blow him out of the
way of the tanks: Is the gust, he wondered at the time, an ally meaning to rescue me, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove me? before he learned it was really an anarchist without conviction. He stands his ground. The tank tries to go around him, he moves to block it. The tank moves again, so does he. Was it only six minutes, as a newsmagazine reported? Of course it seemed much longer. There in the Square he’s ecstatic in his terror: Try to deny me now, he says to her, as I defy the world. As happened then, he hears the melody and in his dream is just beginning to remember its source, leaning into the large gun barrel of the tank before him, when there is out of the corner of his vision a blinding flash of something, and he raises his hand to shield his eyes. At some point in the dream he sees her appear at the far end of the Square that’s empty except for him and the tanks, a distant figure crossing the Square toward him.

He knows it isn’t his Kristin. Rather,
as she grows in the distance it’s the Mistress; in his dream he vaguely knows she doesn’t belong here, that she’s out of time. She’s dressed as

or a hundred years depending on the one being born through it, from

always, in stockings and garters and heels and a small chain belt around her waist, but the attire is more an assertion of power than a suggestion of seduction. In one hand she carries the chain leash she keeps for him, in the other her black riding crop. She has shoulder-length sandy hair; she isn’t beautiful but commanding. She doesn’t offer her sensuality but marshals it. As she strides
toward him across the Square, her eyes locked on him never averted, not alluring but imperious, a spreading pool of black water precedes her like an honor guard. As she grows closer, the pool spreads faster and wider, seeping across the Square until it’s a wet black mirror tinged with red, reflecting the sky above.

There’s a cracking sound. Is it the explosion of guns, or red thunder announcing a red rain? Not the marxist red of the State…. A seed in the uterus of history to be washed away in the flow of the womb’s rejection, he recognizes it rather as the dark rust-red of his Kristin’s blood on their thighs after they have made love during her period. There’s another round of explosions

and he wakes and

in the dark, as he lies on his cot, someone pounds on his door.

He sits up from the cot, holds his face in his hands. “Sir?” comes a voice from the other side of the door; Wang fumbles for the small lamp on a nearby desk. “Sir?” comes the voice again. When he turns on the light he sees the picture looming over him as always, it’s everywhere, on every wall up and down the front line; a flash of rage comes over him. I took that down, he thinks to himself. Someone put it back up. In my own quarters.

The men draw inspiration from it, one of his officers explained not long ago. Well I don’t draw inspiration from it, Wang had answered. They can paper the entire front with it if they want but he doesn’t understand why they have to hang it in his

somewhere that was a minute ago or a hundred years ago, a passage from my

own quarters. He sees quite enough of it everywhere he goes, every headquarters, every outpost, every barracks—raised over the battlefields like the towering banners the Party used to hoist of its leaders back in his home country
so I don’t see why I have to look at it in my own quarters.
Back in his home country they would have called this a “cult of personality.”

No wonder I dream every night.

The pounding on the door continues. “Come in,” Wang says.

The soldier comes in. “Sir,” he says.

“Why is that on my wall?” Wang says.

“Sir?”

“Why is that on my wall.” Wang points at the picture. “I took it down. Someone came into my quarters and put it back up after I took it down.”

The young guerrilla looks at the enlarged photo. “The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”

“My own quarters.”

“Yes, sir. The men—”

“Yes I’ve heard how the men are inspired by it but I’m not inspired by it. Why don’t you put up something that inspires me?”

The soldier, a kid, not much older than Wang in the photo, seems flummoxed. “Uh … what would that be, sir?”

He tried to get them to stop calling him “sir” since he’s not an officer and in fact has no ranking at all, but that only seemed to cause more chaos among the ranks. “What’s your name?”

“Parsons, sir.”

“Parsons, let me ask you something.”

“Sir.”

“How do you know it’s me?”

“Sir?”

“I said how do you know it’s me,” Wang points at the

own unique chaos maybe to my own unique god, and as I slip on down through

poster. “It’s almost thirty years old, this picture, blown up about a hundred times its original size … that man”—pointing at the lone figure before the tanks—“is a blur … he could be anybody. So how do you know it’s me?” This is perverse, Wang thinks. Such questions just undermine the resolve of Tribulation III … is it Tribulation III now, he asks himself, or still Tribulation II? “Never mind,” he says, his face in his hands again. “Please take it down.”

The young soldier takes down the picture. He rolls it up and puts it under his arm.