The Dark Lake (4 page)

I noticed a stack of newspapers. I slid one of them over and glanced at the picture. It was some sports team. God, who cares?

“And then when I looked around I noticed everyone was staring at me. I don't know what I was thinking, telling everyone I was an alcoholic like that. What did I expect them to do? But I don't care. I think it's important to admit what I am and if they don't like it they can—blah, blah, blah," said some redheaded newcomer. She had big green eyes and freckles and had the jitters all the time. She was constantly reaching for her cigarettes in the nonsmoking meeting and then pulling her hand back from the box, all the while speaking.

I turned the page of the newspaper. I knew it was kind of rude
, but I was feeling defiant. Weather forecasts and a chart. A little picture of the sun. God, couldn't someone interesting please share? All this and then I was going to have to get up and go to work tomorrow.

At least I could sleep in. I didn't have to be at work till 3:00
, so I could go home and turn on the TV and just lay there watching movies or old programs. I could also read, I suppose, but reading kind of scared me lately, not like when I was a kid. Now reading seemed purposeless, meaningless. I suppose it always had been and now I was just noticing it.

I was tempted to share again, partly because I did like to hear myself talk
, but also genuinely because I wanted to hear something else, something interesting. Now a man was telling about how he worked the program and if you would just work the program too you would be so great.

Did the program do anything about nightmares?

I drank my coffee slowly and turned another page. I'd been coming to these meetings a long time now. I used to swear by them, and they did help. It was partly that the longer you were in here, the less bullshit you had to spew. A lot of them didn't stick around.

Strange as it seemed
, I'd never run into a single person I knew in there. You'd think that with all the dysfunctional people I knew one of them besides me would end up here. None of them lived here anymore, so I suppose that was why.

I flipped to the next page. On page seven of the local news
, there it was:
a picture of my little blue Chevette being pulled out of the lake.

I peered at the picture. It couldn't be.

The headline read
, "Car Pulled From Lake."

I shut the paper and several people turned and looked at me. I kept my head real still for a moment
, and then I practically spilled the rest of my coffee as I jumped up from my seat. I didn't take the paper with me. Could barely touch it. Knocking over a chair on my way out of there, I made so much disturbance that the person sharing stopped talking and watched me leave.

"Are you ok
ay?" asked someone by the door.

What did they care? They didn't give a damn if I was 'ok
ay,' and what the hell did “okay” mean, anyway. I nearly knocked them over, trying to get out the door. If I didn't get out of there I knew I would scream right there in the meeting. Oh God, did I leave my keys in there? Where were they–where were they? Oh good, they were there at the bottom of my purse amidst the clutter. I didn’t have to go back in there.

No one followed me out. I was glad, because I didn't want to explain myself. They always had some sort of insipid answer like, ‘work through your issues.’ Did they think I hadn't done that a thousand times?

No this wasn't ‘issues,’ not an emotional trauma.
The nightmares
.
The dreams of Krishna and the water. The freezing water.
I needed to talk to … maybe not Krishna, but one of them, any one of them.

If I could just talk to one of them.

It was such a surreal drive home, as if I were in another town, not my hometown, not Oshkosh. The streets were strange, and I made a wrong turn. How could that happen in the town I'd been driving around and around in, complaining about the restrictive boundaries of, for—well—since I started driving at age sixteen. I was too tired to do the math, and besides I was never good at math.

I couldn't find the street. It was supposed to be only two or three blocks. A right on Bowen, three blocks and then a left on New York Avenue, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw, for just a moment, Gay riding her bike, headphones on, hands free, arms waving, dancing wildly in the air, jammin' and swinging to bubblegum pop.

Okay, I recognized this road, but there was no way I could be way out here, unless I'd driven at least twenty minutes longer than I thought I had, and in the completely wrong direction. I was out by the carp ponds where we used to get stoned and stare at the lake.

***

"This lake is named after an Indian tribe, you know. I think that calls for a peace pipe." Gay fills the bowl after deseeding the bag by throwing those seeds right onto the floor of my little blue Chevette. The fire lights her eyes and cheeks as she sucks in off of that peace pipe. It’s Krishna's pipe. We have been using that thing so long I don't think we would know how to smoke a different one. It is wooden, red like Krishna's room, all the red clothes that hang from her walls, and the red bedspread with silver and gold etchings, and glittery embroidery of elephants and palaces. Not like the embroidery in my house of darling hot pads and little farms with ducks.

"It's not a tribe. It's a chief," I say, blowing slowly and meditatively through my pursed lips. I hand it ceremoniously to Krishna. We had a whole bag of pot. We were ok
ay for several days, but who thought about several days.

"No. You're both wrong
." Gay and I look at her as if we had no idea what she was talking about. We didn't. "It's a chief and a tribe."

And then
, after what seemed like an eternal pause, and from out of nowhere, I hear my own voice—sounding very far away—say, "Wouldn't that make us both right?"

We all three stare out at the dark lake.

Then, for no reason, all three of us burst out laughing at the same time.

***

I pulled up right to the old, white lighthouse and parked. I hadn't been out here in such a long time. There was no one else out here. Once, in the middle of winter, Gay and I went off the road into a ditch and were stuck at a 45-degree angle in a snow bank. I think only one car drove by in the time it took us to smoke an entire half-ounce. It wasn't until we were completely out of pot that we got out and walked the half-mile in the knee-deep, bright, afternoon snow to knock on some unwilling stranger's door.

The images were seeping into my brain. The rusted piece of old metal, the shell of my car. And what was that inside it? It was too dark to tell in the picture in the newspaper that I
had stared at for that one transfixed second.

The car door slam echoed in the dark behind me as I wandered to the edge of the lake. The lighthouse glowed white and eerie from the
grass-covered, rocky edge up the way. It loomed closer and closer until I climbed the weed-covered, stone steps that led to the dead, locked door.

"Why did you get out of your car and walk around?” Miriam took off her glasses when she said this. She only took those
clear-plastic frames off when she was serious. I wondered if the glass in them was really prescription or just a prop for these occasions. They hung by a beautiful, silver chain around her neck, over a lovely, caramel-colored, silk blouse.

"What do you mean why?"

"I mean, you were frightened by the picture, seems like a more frightening thing to do to drive to a park in the middle of the night and walk around a lighthouse at midnight alone?"

"It's not a park. It was the
carp ponds."

I stared at the serene pieces of art on the wall, the ones in all offices of pastel colors. Who could get upset looking at
these?

There was one piece of art in there that I thought truly represented Miriam. It was a very small mask that must have come from
someplace like Sumatra.

Krishna had a lot of things like that in her room. Small
, jeweled elephants, dark masks, little decorated boxes and knickknacks that came from far-flung corners of the world. Indonesia. The Philippines. Japan.

On her coffee table she had lots of interesting pieces of art that she had made: a ceramic ashtray in the shape of lips, a white
, ceramic mold she had made of her boyfriend Ames’s arm. It held a red candle, and when she burned it, it looked like the arm was dripping blood. She used to giggle about that. She had designed it that way. She had made a mold of his arm and put that red candle in it so she could light it and watch blood drip down his arm and giggle about it. When she broke up with him, she didn’t even bother telling him she had. She just said, when he showed up somewhere, “What are you still doing here? We’re not dating anymore.”

Boxes and boxes
: tiny, jeweled ones, larger ones painted in bold, beautiful colors, ones laden with ivory carvings. Not cluttered looking even for the fact that they seemed to be everywhere I looked.

"Here," she would say, her eyes sparkling with mischievous glee, "
you can have this one. It's perfect for containing weed."

And she would hand me an embroidered red and silver and
gold silk case with gold snaps.

I'd ceased to question why I should be so enchanted with this idea. It was part of being with Krishna
: receiving odd little gifts from around the world to contain my dope in.

They were the exotic counterpart to the cedar chest belonging to my grandmother, or the cigar box from the nineteen twenties from my grandfather. I accepted them with the delight she expected to see, then loaded up her little
, red, wooden pipe and passed it around. Once I had brought a dragon-shaped bong, but we just sat and looked at it while passing the pipe. It was far too fancy for use. We'd yet to take a single toke off it.

One time we lost her red
, wooden pipe. It was nowhere to be found. We were stuck using the dragon beast and out of matches. Fortunately Krishna was always lighting incense and candles everywhere, so even though we'd run out of matches, we still had fire.

"They once asked Keith Richards what's the worst thing imaginable
; he said not having a match,” Krishna observed as she looked in every single drawer more than once.

"Shit,” she said finally
. "I'm too stoned to go downstairs.” And she sat down, exhausted from the search. It was, after all, 2:00 a.m.

Meanwhile, Gay
was holding that giant, white arm that drips candle-wax blood at an angle, trying to light the dragon bong, trying to get a toke off it, but the red wax keeps dripping into the bowl, causing the weed to smolder much longer than normal, and hurting her lungs. She coughs and complains. Krishna sits giggling at the sight of it.

After a while I notice the lighter sitting on Krishna's glitter
- and candle-laden coffee table.

I grab the lighter and light a cigarette while watching Gay's struggle with my dragon bong, and toss
it casually back on the table.

It takes Gay a few moments to recognize the humor in it. She looks over at my cigarette embers glowing in the dimness of the candle
-lit room. She glances over at Krishna, who has closed her eyes and laid her head back against the pillowed chair. As if to say, I’ve wasted this much time, I might as well continue, Gay resumes her struggle with the arm, the dripping candle wax, and the dragon pipe.

***

“Snap out of it, Jane, come back to the present. Why were you out by the carp ponds?”

“What was the question?”

“Why were you out by the carp ponds?”

"Well," I began, still focusing on her small
, dark mask set on the desk, "I, um … it didn't seem … it wasn't scary out there …"

"It sounds a bit like the start of your dream."

"No,” I said. "The dream always starts out at the party.
For some reason it seems like the last party before everyone began to drift away
."

"The Beatles versus the Stones face-off?"

"Yes.” I laughed.

"
Things often have a deeper meaning than appears on the surface
."

"True, and this sure seemed to. You see, we'd been arguing about this for years. Who was better? And sometimes I would get so confused because she seemed to really like the Beatles … oh this sounds so ridiculous."

"Not at all," Miriam reassured. "Go on. Before we run out of time today. Don't worry about how it sounds."

"Well they all did
, you know: Ziggy, Krishna, Gay, everyone. They all loved the Beatles. But I guess it came down to whether they loved the Stones more. This really bothered me
. I think it was because they loved something about jadedness and cynicism more than innocence
."

"Good.”

"Well, we decided to have it out once and for all."

"And you lost count of your drinks,” Miriam said
. “You were drinking very heavily that night. More than usual.
Why were you drinking heavier than usual, Jane?"