Our Ecstatic Days (2 page)

… and since then I dream all the time. Almost never remember the dreams but I know they were there the night before, I can feel them like I felt him that morning he was conceived again inside me, good dreams, bad dreams, mostly dreams that aren’t so certain of themselves. My kind of dreams, in other words.

I used to be fucking fearless, you should know that about me. None of this terror I have all the time now means anything if you don’t know that. Ran away from home at sixteen, traveling with this weird religious-suicide cult for a while, moving down to L.A. and getting into all kinds of situations just blindly, sometimes out of desperation but sometimes because I didn’t have enough sense to be afraid. Lived by wits and recklessness. Went to Tokyo the same way…. I was the most fearless person I’ve ever known. Not a better one and definitely not a smarter one, but … not only didn’t I know there was all that fear behind that door in myself I didn’t know there was a door. Everything was about me …
and then you have a kid and not only isn ’t everything about you anymore, in some way too hard to explain, it never was….

No doubt about it my Kierkegaard’s my little wildman. Runs around the apartment naked with his flapdoodle sticking straight out and his treasured balloons flying along behind him, one string in each hand…. Before I had him I had this idea babies were amorphous lumps of human clay that take distinct shape only over time. But he was half-wildman half-zenbaby right out of the chute … before, actually. The weeks after I got back from Tokyo where I worked for a year as a memory girl in Kabuki-cho

we would go down to the lake which at that time was still small enough you could walk around all of it in ten minutes except the part cut off by the Hollywood Hills, and

we would sit watching the water and, other than when I would sing to him … if there’s a higher light, let it shine … it was the only time he settled down inside me, mesmerized by the lake beyond my belly. First days after he was born, when the lake started spreading west down what was then the Strip, we would watch it together from the window of our room while he lay in my arms, and I would think he was asleep and then I would look to see his eyes open and calm, gazing at the lake and—I swear—smiling.

Big Agua he started calling it when he turned two, having picked up the baby-spanish I don’t know where, same place he learned to call the moon luna….

The lake was starting to get a lot of attention then, sightseers coming and going, city officials and geological experts standing around scratching their heads. The first year everyone was kind of enchanted by it, however much disruption it caused schedules and traffic and bus lines. That’s when the gondolas and rowboats came out, sailing in and out of the red light that poured over the hills like a tide of fire bursting the levee of the sun. Charred palms stitched the horizon. A makeshift harbor was built
over by the flooded Chateau X hotel. Parasols were in fashion that autumn, women walking the lakeshore with them, twirling them from their boats so on Saturdays this panorama of spinning colored spheres floated above the surface of the lake and in its reflection…. Balloons! Kirk would point when he saw the parasols. While I lay on the grass reading, he would blow bubbles from a bubblewand I bought him … so we blew bubbles together, watching them float to the grass where those that didn’t pop would settle like dew. He would smash them with his foot. “Smash the bubbles!” I would cry, and he would smash them, “Pap,” and then I felt funny, it seemed wrong to encourage him to smash something as delicate as a bubble

pap, pap, pap he would go. One afternoon he blew a particularly large bubble and said out of nowhere, “This one’s for my daddy,” and it caught my breath … he had never mentioned his father before

this one’s for my daddy and the bubble slowly tumbled down through the air before us like a little spinning glass world, and when it landed, it didn’t pop and he didn’t smash it but watched it there on the grass for a long time until it finally popped on its own….

My kid’s beautiful. What else is a mom going to say, right? except that my kid really is beautiful … the minute he was born they held him up for me to look at slackjawed, stupefied—me, not him…. “This child is beautiful,” the nurse assured me the next day in some wonder, and I had finally come out of my fog enough to crack, “Yeah, but you tell all the moms that,” and she glanced quickly over both shoulders to see whatever other mother might be listening in the bed next to mine before she whispered back, “Well, yes, I do. But this child is
beautiful”
… and so he is. Which he certainly didn’t get from his mother or father, so go figure. He’s a throwback to someone I can’t even begin to know, never having known either my own mother or father…. Don’t know where he got the hair that shines brilliant in the sun or the sea-green eyes flecked with amber, or the sanguine mouth of a mad monk.
People’s attraction to him is remarkable … when he was younger I would push him in the stroller around the lake and people would gawk like there was something slightly supernatural about him, and not just little old grandmothers either. “Hey, cute kid, man!” some tattooed skinhead sociopath would interrupt his mayhem long enough to stop and exclaim.

It worries me he’s this beautiful … not only that some stranger could try to snatch him away, but also for how life might let him get away with too much, given how he’s a wily schemer too, already determined to run the show, musical in his self-assured insubordination. “Nooooooooo please,” he demurs my commands in a lilting singsong voice. Silent defiance comes into his eyes, there isn’t even the slightest submission in him. At the age of three he gives orders all the time, “Do this please! do that please!”—a very polite dictator. “La-la!” he orders at night when I’m putting him to sleep, II Duce’s way of telling me he wants me to sing to him. “More la-la please!” means Keep singing. “Bigger la-la please!” means, Sing louder.

Who’s the boss here, wildman? I ask, and he narrows his eyes for a minute looking in mine, calculating the question, before he points at me and says with a big smile

You
are because he knows, you see, he’s already figured out that’s the right answer, even if he doesn’t believe it for two seconds….

… but I decided he might turn out OK one afternoon he was playing with Valerie’s kid Parker, the only other child in the hotel, about eight months younger than Kirk—black, deaf and mute, and Valerie is another single mom who works a tedious job answering telephones for the city, so sometimes to help her out I’ll take Parker for a few hours if I’m free. On weekends she and I and the two kids go down to the lake where they play together … and this one afternoon I saw it … Valerie saw it too….

It wasn’t a big deal. Kirk and Parker each sat in their folding chairs with balloons we had gotten them tied to their
wrists, Kirk a yellow one and Parker a blue one, and Parker pulled the string on his only to watch it float up and out over the water … it was a minute before he realized it wasn’t coming back. Then he tried to cry, which was much more terrible than any actual little-kid cry because it was a cry no one could hear … he was wracked by the futility of cries he can’t voice and balloons that don’t return. No matter how much Valerie tried to comfort him, he was inconsolable, until Kirk got up from his chair, walked over, pulled the string of his own balloon from his wrist and handed it to Parker. Parker took the balloon and stopped crying.

Maybe other three-year-olds do things like this all the time, what do I know? but I was under the distinct impression that empathy was something we don’t learn until five or six. For a while neither Valerie nor I said anything. Kirk went back to his chair and sat down and watched the lake….

I used to be a notorious smart-ass … well, notorious to myself anyway. Always with the smart answer … but I’m not that smart anymore. There’s no great revelation in having a kid … you think you’re going to be transformed, you’ll somehow become a more substantial human being … but there’s no change in me I can tell other than all the new ways I’ve become afraid. I can’t tell that parenthood has made me a whit wiser or less trivial, or older except in the ways I’m not ready to be older….

… all I know is the meaning of myself begins and ends with my boy, where I didn’t know there even was a meaning before. All I know is he’s the shore of the lake of my life where before maybe I knew there was a lake out there somewhere but had no clue where. It doesn’t mean there’s nothing of me. There’s always been a me there, I know that. But it means he’s the single lit lantern on the road to Me, dangling from the branch of experience that overhangs my night of doubt.

These are the memoirs of Kristin Blumenthal, L.A. single mom, former Kabuki-cho memory girl. In July I’ll be twenty-two.

When I returned to L.A. from
Tokyo before he was born, I went to see an obstetrician for a sonogram, and they looked at the screen a long time and finally said, “There’s two.” Two?

“Yes.”

Twins?

“Uh … yes. We think.”

You think?

“Yes.”

Or: there was one … and a female shadow. The shadow of resurrection? Burned into my womb like bombs over Japan burning shadows into walls? So on his birthday out came Kirk and we all waited for the other, waited and waited, doctors and nurses peering up into me and looking at each other and kind of shrugging like, Well, where is she? What’s she waiting for, trumpets? “I guess we’ll settle for one,” the doctor finally announced jauntily, when she didn’t appear.

But ever since, not all the time but now and then, I feel her there inside me, Kirk’s little sister Bronte. Is she being willful?
Is she just shy? Does she know something the rest of us don’t, and is taking refuge? She tumbles around inside me at night until she hears me thinking about her, and then rests in a way Kirk never rested, listening, considering options, waiting for her moment….

Over the last few months, more and more people have moved out of the first floor of the Hotel Hamblin where I rent a room for Kirk and myself on a more or less permanent basis, until there’s no one down there but the manager and a nomadic halfdog halfwolfthat wanders in and out of the hotel scrounging for something to eat. As the lake gets bigger, the power starts going out in parts of the city, you can tell that the lights in the faraway windows on the other side are lanterns and candles from their pinpoint flickering in the wind off the water, like fireflies hovering against the black hills of the distant shore. Soon the city started rewriting all the addresses. Without over-explaining it here, each new address has two parts, one fixing its place on the lake’s perimeter and the other its distance from the lake’s center … for instance the Hamblin is PSW47/VI80, which means it’s 470 yards west of the southernmost point on the lake’s edge, and 1,800 yards from the center … and of course as these addresses get bigger, they render the earlier addresses obsolete. PSW47/V170 doesn’t exist anymore, it’s now under water. L.A. is a city of drowning addresses.

At first people wondered: if the P was for “perimeter” and the SW for “southwest,” then what was “V” for? If the V part of the address was the distance from the center of the lake, why wasn’t it a “C” address, or M for “middle” or B for “bull’s-eye”? It turned out that V was for “vortex,” and when that got out, everyone kind of freaked. A rather poor choice of words, vortex … leave it to a bureaucrat to get poetic at exactly the wrong moment. Vortex sounds like a drain. It gives the impression not only something’s coming up from the hole at the bottom of the lake, but something’s going down too….

Not that long ago I got a letter addressed to Kristin B, and I assumed it was for me until I opened it,
My beautiful K
it began
and right then and there I knew he had the wrong girl,
labial jewel, riverine rapture
and so on and so forth in that vein, for the first few letters anyway, until they became more bitter, ecstasy replaced by bile as one letter after another went unanswered. Soon the letters started coming every day, each more furious and desperate than the last, and each enclosing a small piece of an old photo which I stuck to our hotel wall with the other pieces, waiting for the complete portrait to fall into place….

Of course as each letter became more tormented, it occurred to me to write and put him out of his misery. I felt guiltier and guiltier reading them … I mean, I had no excuses after the first one. After the first one it was pretty obvious the letters weren’t for me. But there was no return address and I guess it never occurred to him they might-be going to the wrong person, and soon it became pretty obvious to me he’s what I’ve always called a point-misser. Everyone misses the point now and then but some people are just born missing the point. It never occurred to him there might be any other possible reason his labial jewel wasn’t answering. His desire was so grand and uncompromising he would rather assume she was rejecting him than that something as banal as the incompetence of the postal service could be at fault. Some part of him wanted to judge her monstrously, some part of him wanted to be a martyr for cunnilingus instead of a prisoner of chance.

There was something else about the letters, something clandestine, subterranean:
The lake,
he finally wrote in one,
is coming for me,
and the second I read it, I saw him somewhere out there in the city barricaded away, building an ark maybe.
In China they would have found me by now.
I don’t know how long it was, at least fifteen or twenty letters, before I finally noticed they weren’t actually addressed to PSW47/V180, but VI70.

When I saw this, I grabbed up Kirk—at the moment busy trying to demolish my carefully constructed jigsaw of little pieces of the correspondent’s photo attached to the wall—and ran up the stairs to the Hamblin rooftop, where a panoramic view of the lake
stretches all the way from Hollywood in the east to the San Vicente Bridge in the west. There out in the water, about a thousand yards away on a more or less straight line from us to the center of the lake, rose an old abandoned apartment building like my own … and I knew right away it was PSW47/V170 where she lived, waiting for his letters to come floating up to her window in bottles, maybe. It was dusk, light failing at our backs, and only after Kirk and I stood there a while watching the black of the water meet the black of the hills beyond, darkness slowly swallowing up VI70 in the distance, did a light flicker in one of its faraway windows, clear as could be since every other window was dark. And just like I knew that was her address, when that light appeared I knew it was her, and she was still out there, waiting for him.