The Oshkosh Trilogy 01 - The Dark Lake

by Anthea Carson

  For some reason I always thought of this road covered in red and orange blowing leaves, and pumpkins. Oh yeah, it was fall when that happened. And now it was winter, and ice, and the air hurt my skin.

  The road began to veer left after that, if you stayed on hwy 45, and would pass through Fon du Lac, if I kept going, which meant Bottom of Lake, in French—at least I think it does. I remember my dad saying that …

  19

  "Miriam," I said, "I don't think they will call me from that job. But I thought maybe I could call them. Do you think I should? My mom doesn't think I should."

  "Have you tried to contact Krishna lately?"

  "Yeah, but she's never home, she never returns my calls."

  "How are the anger-management classes going?"

  "Okay I guess, I have been just sitting there in the classes because you can't get a word in."

  "What about that woman, what was her name again, the one who drove you home the night your car died?"

  "Oh, her, she hasn't been back. I can't remember, Lisa or something like that. She never came back. I thought I dreamed that."

  "Didn't you tell me there was no difference between your dreams and reality?"

  "Is there?” I asked, looking up; would there be an answer. "I know I am so delusional I can barely tell one thing from another anymore. I think I should probably be hospitalized."

  "Yes, you probably should."

  "Then why don't you hospitalize me? Have me committed?"

  "Do you think I need to?” she asked, raising her eyes from her notes, and taking off her clear glasses. She wore a professional outfit in pastel colors. Her hair was neatly coifed. Her nails were long and painted coral pink, which looked elegant against her very black, slender, long fingers.

  I felt safe in her office.

  "I don't know. Home is getting to be a more and more difficult place to be. I can't move out, but I think I'd like to. I guess I either need to apply for disability or get into a hospital. My mom is…"

  "What about her?"

  What was it?

  "Sometimes it seems like all she does is turn the lights out on me. And scowl. Why is she so angry all the time?"

  "I don't know?” she answered.

  "Well, I wasn't asking you. Obviously you wouldn't know. It's just a rhetorical question."

  "We are getting somewhere here,” she began. "Every week I feel we are getting closer and closer to a breakthrough."

  Did she just say this to keep me coming back?

  "Does my mom pay you?"

  "And I think as we get closer to something here, it makes it harder for you out there. That's okay. It's understandable. This week, why don't you focus on getting the disability process started, instead of continuing to try and get a job. I think it might be too much for you to work right now. I'll vouch for you, that you are disabled."

  "Maybe tomorrow, I suppose I can try."

  It was a depressing thought. Like giving up.

  But I guess I acted like I was giving up when I lay there like this watching hours of the Mr. Ed marathon. It was after midnight, and since Mom was asleep, if I turned on any lights she wouldn't run around behind me turning them off. I could let the entire house be lit up like a Christmas tree all night. But instead, I don't know why, I just lit the big, red Christmas candle with the green, plastic wreath wrapped around its base. The flame stood very still, and rose as high and proud as it could go. I lit my cigarette on it and watched as the ash grew to be nearly three inches long before it fell on the carpet. The ashtray was made of ceramic. I think Krishna had made it years ago. It was in the shape of a giant mouth with the tongue licking the upper lip. It was one of her earlier ones, so it still was just a bit crude. She used to have it on her coffee table under the hand she'd made of the boyfriend who'd lasted the longest, Ames with the fish-tank full of piranhas that we had to watch him feed goldfish to on occasion.

  It started at the elbow and went up to the hand, and the hand gripped a red candle in such a way that when the red wax dripped it looked like it was blood running down the arm.

  I don't know how long she kept him around, but he'd lasted so long I had gotten used to him, had even become friends with him, which meant his time with her had been somewhat of a record.

  "He looks just like Mick Jagger, doesn't he?” she asks, a delighted smile on her face, and her eyes full of mischief and glee.

  She does all his little rituals with him like a dutiful wife: walking his dog, accompanying him fishing, thinking, or pretending to think whatever he thinks, admiring whatever he admires, until the afternoon when she terminates the whole one-and-a-half-year thing. No explanation. She hadn't even told me about it.

  We sit in her room smoking a joint and lighting it on the candle hand when he shows up. After a brief encounter with slightly raised voices downstairs, he comes up the tiny, narrow stairs, turns the corner till he faces the other direction entirely, and knocks on Krishna's little, white door. Krishna’s little nook of the house is a bit like a tree house, or the house where you’d imagine the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland to live.

  "Who's there?” Krishna asks.

  "It's Ames." I have never heard him sound angry before.

  "Oh God." Krishna rolls her eyes and slouches further back into her little papasan chair. "What does he want? What a nightmare! He keeps calling me," she whispers.

  I turn and look toward the door.

  "Are you gonna tell him to come in?"

  "Come in," she yells, and then gives out a big long “if you have to” sigh.

  The Rolling Stones (what else) plays on the stereo. “Paint it Black” or “Sympathy for the Devil” or something like that.

  "Can you turn it down?" he says, or maybe demands.

  Bigger sigh. She leans over and turns the sound down slightly.

  "Can you turn it down some more?"

  "Why?" she asks.

  "So we can talk."

  "What's there to talk about?" she huffs disgustedly.

  Ames looks over at me. He searches my eyes for an explanation, something, anything to make sense of his terminated relationship with her.

  "Do you want me to leave?” I ask him.

  "No," Krishna says. "Just say what you need to say, Ames, Jane stays.”

  He stands for a moment. He shifts from one foot to another. He folds his arms and gives her an ‘I'm very serious’ look.

  She mocks his serious face. She taps her cigarette on her ceramic, pair-of-lips ashtray.

  "What?” she finally says, exasperated.

  "I want my hand back," he says.

  With reluctance and disbelief on her face, she finally looks over at him.

  "What?"

  I admit, I have no idea what he is talking about.

  "My hand. My arm."

  Krishna and I look at each other, and then look back at Ames.

  "You used my arm as a mold to make that candle hand. I want it back!"

  We sit for a moment in stunned silence. We laugh about it for weeks.

  I picked up the phone and dialed her number. She answered on the thirteenth ring.

  "Krishna."

  "Yes."

  "I need to talk to you…"

  Sigh.

  “It's about the night of the car. I want to find out what happened."

  "You live in the past."

  "I think it's because of that night."

  There was a long, dead silence on the phone.

  "Hello," I finally said.

  Sigh. "Well, what?"

  "Can you tell me what you remember?"

  "Look, I'm sorry, I guess I'm a bad friend. I'm sorry. Do I have to keep paying for this for the rest of my life?"

  "That's not what I want…"

  Dial tone.

  20

  "That's not what I want," I said to the dark room lit by the red Christmas candle. I said it to the Mr. Ed marathon. I rose from the scratchy, gold and black couch with elaborate leaves and flowers all over it in a patter
n only Mom could have picked out. She'd picked it out a lifetime ago.

  I walked into the back room that used to be my bedroom with the M.A.S.H. cot. It wasn't used much now. There was just an old discarded couch in there, and a cheap coffee table with a broken stereo sitting practically in pieces on top of it. All the rock-and-roll posters I used to have on the wall had all been taken down, and nothing had replaced them. In the bathroom there were about five lines drawn on the left-hand wall within the gold, felt, flower-patterned wallpaper, one hip high, one to my stomach, and one to my chest. They each had my height written next to them. The toilet seat was green and didn't quite match the gold toilet. I had brought the candle with me, and held it up to look in the elaborately gilded, gold-painted mirror.

  ***

  They—my mom’s neighbors and friends—had stood in the kitchen taking in the house with horrified looks on their mid-life faces. One of them held up half a broken, gold toilet seat, which was all the way in the kitchen, but came from my back bedroom. Several passed-out teenage bodies littered the living-room floor, and I even think one lay in the dining room. There were many there I didn’t even know. They all looked indistinguishable from one another, in their crumpled, punk clothes, Mohawk hairstyles, and ‘up yours’ attitude, which was visible even in their sleep. The house had the look of a crime scene: knocked-over chairs, chocolate ice cream smeared across my mom's favorite painting, the one of the umbrellas in Paris. Red, dripping tampons hung from the chandeliers, dozens of empty wine bottles lay scattered from one end of the house to the other. Gay had torn through the rooms the night before, at one of the parties, hanging those tampons, dipped in red wine, from the chandeliers. Siegfried had thrown a whiskey bottle through the front window, breaking out the glass. It had been one of those heavy glass pints. The perfect high, he used to say, was a pint of whiskey and two and a half beers. Whenever he achieved the perfect high, things usually ended up crashing through glass windows, or heavy dining-room tables. I remember the moment when my mom discovered the empty pint of whiskey in the front yard, laying amid the broken glass. I remember how she stood there looking at it.

  ***

  I walked to the back window and looked out at the yard, lit by the ghastly moon.

  Then I heard myself screaming, for out back the grass was terribly overgrown all the way to the picket fence way in the back—three feet high, at least.

  I shook my head, closed my eyes and opened them again. The grass was mown again. Whew. If I was going to be having hallucinations, I definitely wouldn’t be able to stay out of the hospital.

  Then I went back into the living room. The marathon continued. I had the sound down so low all you could hear was the laugh track. I went through the living room, looking to my left on the way to the little trapezoid window. I used to sit there and lean my elbows on the sills on rainy days, while Mom baked apple pies and let me make tarts alongside her.

  I walked into the hall, into total darkness, barely even lit by the thick, red candle with the Christmas wreath wrapped around the base that I held with both my hands. The red carpet looked black. Up the stairs my mother was asleep. And was that my dad standing there at the top? No. It wasn’t him, just a shadow from the moon coming in through the upstairs bathroom window, where the wind blew the white, gauzy curtain into that tiny room. That upstairs bathroom had seemed so big when I was small.

  ***

  "It's five minutes past eight. We need to decide what we are going to do," Krishna says. She is sitting at the rippled, glass table with the wrought-iron rim in the New Orleans kitchen.

  Krishna's latest sits next to her. He doesn’t need a name. He won’t be around long. This one is skinny, wears an earring, and has a tattoo of a snake crawling up his neck. It goes up the side like the head of it is ready to bite his ear, crawling up from beneath the shirt, which makes you wonder what it looks like under there. "We need to decide what to do tonight. It's not getting any earlier," he says.

  There is a long, hot, silent pause. It is hot in the house, and there is no breeze coming in through all the wide-open windows.

  "Yeah, but that's always true. You could've said that at eight o’clock," Ziggy says, from the Danish blue dining room, leaning back on a chair, his long legs holding the chair in balance, his size 13 feet up on the table.

  There is another long, silent pause.

  "We could drive out to the quarry," suggests Gay, who lies on my blue dining-room floor and twirls her baseball cap on one finger, held high in the air, directly above her head.

  I sit at the table eating ice cream out of the box with my hand, using no spoon, just my hand. I am laughing.

  "God that's disgusting, Jane," Krishna says.

  "She gets like that when she's tripping," Ziggy says from the dining room, even though he can’t see me.

  "It feels so interesting on my hand," I say, the sound of maniacal giggling ringing in my head like a bell. "And using spoons just makes no sense anymore."

  "All words stop making sense after a while. Say spoon over and over again. You’ll see,” Krishna says.

  "Spoon, spoon, spoon, spoon, spoon," Gay, after another pause, begins to murmur. Now she is laying on the burnt-orange and slate-grey tiled kitchen floor behind the glass table. It must feel cooler on the tiled floor. Well, it’s not really tiled; it’s rubbery to the touch. When had she moved? We had forgotten she was there, because she was on the floor, so we couldn’t see her.

  We had spent all afternoon finding the ingredients and made the acid ourselves. Ziggy was our guide. He had done some research on how to do it. Where did he find this information, I wondered. I guess because he is always reading. We had driven all day, all around town, locating a certain brand of morning-glory seeds. It had to be a specific brand. Then came the cheesecloth. It had to be cheesecloth. You had to strain it and let it sit with something else, some other ingredient; I forget what it was.

  I drank a full glass. It seemed to have had no effect on Ziggy, though it hit me immediately. I was so high I grabbed the wheel of Gay's bicycle by the spokes and lifted her up! Then I held up a throbbing hand and said, "Wow, it’s throbbing, but it doesn’t hurt.”

  "I think time is like this!” I announce suddenly, from the rippled, glass table. I hold my fist up in the air, to illustrate what I think time is. Everyone turns to look at my fist.

  "What does that mean?"

  "There is no such thing as time,” I say, as if I had been researching time by using ice cream to play with, and had suddenly reached this as a profound and final conclusion. “Time doesn’t exist.”

  "Yes, time does exist. Otherwise how could cereal get soggy in the milk?” Ziggy says from the blue dining room.

  "It's time to figure out what to do." Krishna's boyfriend says it again, as if none of this time nonsense mattered to him or his tattoo of a snake.

  "Spoon, spoon, spoon, spoon," is said again from the floor.

  "No, the cereal could be soggy and dry at the same time, all of it is happening at once,” Krishna says.

  "That's right.” I hold one fist in the air still and eat ice cream with the other.

  "Well what do you mean by 'at once' if there's no such thing as time?” Ziggy says.

  "We could go to Pat's Tap,” says Krishna. "It's the same spelled backwards."

  I closed the ice-cream box. "This has no taste. I can’t taste anything."

  "Pat's Tap. Pat's Tap. Pat's Tap," from the floor.

  "If time is motion,” I say, "and if all we have is the moment, then there is no other moment except this moment right now."

  "Sounds like Parmenides," Ziggy says.

  "Parmeni-Who?” asks Krishna's boyfriend.

  "Parmenides, Parmenides, Parmenides …Parmesan cheese," from the floor.

  ***

  I stood at the door of my old room, the one I slept in as a child—as a six year old—as an eight year old. As Janey Lou.

  I put my hand on the knob. Climb the red, carpeted stairs. I turned the knob, but
I couldn't open it. If I did I might see an empty, old room, and I couldn't face that.

  So I went back downstairs to the kitchen. Outside the snow fell in big flakes. I put my hand on the glass and felt the coldness. Icicles hung from the porch. So thick at the top, and so tiny and thin at the bottom. So pretty.

  I went back to lie down on the sofa to watch the marathon, but after I lay down for a minute the cable went off. I got up to mess with the knobs. It was off. All I got was static.

  21

  With the cable still off the next day, and the next, I hung around the house in shock all day. I kept trying to fix the TV. I banged the side of it. I tried calling the cable company but couldn't get through. I found the number in the phone book and everything, but then I think it must have been the wrong number, from the garbled conversation I got. I looked for my mom. She was nowhere in the house. I wondered if she paid the bill. I went out of the house and the car was gone. How would I get to my classes?

  I tried the door to get back in but it wouldn't open. I walked down New York Street toward Miriam's office. It was evening when I started. The darker it got the more I wanted to go home. I started getting lost, turned around. I began to retrace my steps like I did when I was little, and had lost my way. I would go back and see if there was some way in. Thank goodness I had remembered my coat, or I would be freezing out there. I had a pack of cigarettes too, in my pocket, and a pack of matches, so I was set for a while. I glanced at the front yard, covered by up to a foot of snow. That must have been what I’d seen earlier, just a trick of the light that made me think I saw the grass overgrown all the way to my knees, as if it were an abandoned house. Not hallucinations, just a trick of the moonlight.

  It was so cold. How long had this window been broken out? I stood in front of it shivering. I suppose I could climb back in. Had Mom lost her key and had to climb in? The glass was shattered out. There were glass shards out here in front of the window. An empty glass pint of whiskey lay at my feet. I shuddered, and reached to pick it up, then changed my mind. It wasn’t there. It couldn’t be there. If I touch it, and it is there, then God only knows what it means. So I stopped looking at it.