Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  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.

  When I can leave Kirk with Valerie here in the hotel a few hours, I cobble together what jobs I can, including the one with Doc and the one for the writer down the hall….

  … desperate over-the-hill novelist who checked in for a few days in order to finish this screenplay he saw as his last best chance to salvage a career … he wound up staying a week and then two and then a month and now he’s been here almost a year. The screenplay never gets finished and meanwhile his wife and daughter who live on the other side of the city come see him like relatives visiting an inmate. The little girl is about Kirk’s age, long gold hair, and sometimes when the reunion is over and there’s this tearful clutching between the writer and his wife, the little girl stands in the hallway staring at Kirk and he stares back at her. Two little kids, little boy and little girl, just stand there staring at each other wordlessly, they don’t play, they don’t fight. During these times I stay as inconspicuous as possible because I don’t want Mrs. Over-the-Hill-Novelist to get the
wrong idea. “I miss my little girl,” he whispers later. Since it would seem he can check out of the hotel anytime he wants and go home, it’s hard to figure.

  Day after day, night after night, he sits in his room gazing morosely at his blank computer screen drinking tequila and watching old movies stacked up in the corner. He stares out his window at the growing lake and talks about missing his little girl, and he never answers except to a secret knock, while bellmen slip notes under his door wondering when he’s going to check out. I’ve read some of his script and maybe I’m wrong but I’ve begun thinking the main character, a chick punk singer, sounds a little like me. It isn’t the best movie but I’m certain there have been worse. I think his big problem is he hasn’t the slightest idea how to write women characters, but he looks completely baffled when you try and tell him this. “What do you mean?” he says.

  “What do I mean? I mean every female character is a stripper or porn star or sex slave.”

  He’s thunderstruck. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes I’m sure.”

  He ponders this a while more. “What about Tara Spectaculara?”

  “Tara Spectaculara? The amazonian motorcycle mistress with the huge tits? The one in the black leather jacket that’s … how did you put it?”—flipping through the script—“…‘unzipped so far it threatens the space-time continuum’?”

  “Uh,” he’s thinking furiously, “well, these characters,” he finally clears his throat, “are just, uh, you know … they’re just the … forbidden iconography of the male psyche….”

  “Oh, well then. In that case. ‘Forbidden iconography of the male psyche,’ that’s OK then. Stupid me, I thought this Tara was just your basic male wangle.”

  “Male what?”

  “Wangle.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Yes you do.” Talk about a point-misser! This guy is a serial point-misser. Anyway he got this idea of passing me off as the writer of the script, that’s the way his mind works, and an even better example of how his mind works is he’s saddled me with the nom de plume “Lulu Blu,” who apparently was some kind of woman pornographer back in the Eighties—which you would think kind of proves my whole argument. He’s convinced Hollywood isn’t going to have any interest in failed literary-type novelists, better if a script filled with male wangies about motorcycle mistresses and rocker babes, submitted to guy-studio-execs with their own male-wangies, is written by a twenty-two-year-oldpunkette who would be expected to have special credibility on the subject of motorcycle mistresses and rocker babes since undoubtedly I live with a harem of them and we all have sex together all the time, which of course is the biggest male wangie of all. So for a while one of my jobs has been to run around town sitting sullenly in Century City offices listening to why I’m being turned down—which is to say why he’s being turned down—and I guess I have to admit on some level I must find this guy just pathetic enough to feel bad for him, since I keep doing it even though it’s obviously never going to pay me anything, my five percent of the script contingent on someone actually buying it….

  I don’t know much about the movie business but it seems obvious to me they have a problem. “Looks like you have a problem,” I mumble to this one studio guy in his office one afternoon with the lake sloshing through the doorway. Throughout the whole floor they’ve set up little footbridges from this desk to that, and after a while the ultimate status power-move by a ruthless studio boss isn’t the lunchtime blowjob by the personal assistant of either gender but rather commanding an associate producer to swim to his suite on the double rather than walk the little planks now reserved for the elite of a Hollywood that no longer exists. “This?” the executive sneers, “this isn’t a problem. Are you kidding? Sound—now that was a problem. Cinemascope. Television. We survived all that,” this guy, maybe five years older than I tops, shakes his finger at me, “long before your time. What’s this? A little fucking water,” contemptuously waving his hand at the tide lapping at the ankles of the anxious secretary in the corner.

  At the beginning, the lake was banked on the north side of the Strip, but then the dam there broke and the water cut most of the city in two, and before they built the San Vicente Bridge all the east-west bus routes had to detour down to Venice Boulevard before turning back up the peninsula formed by the La Cienega and Crescent rivers. It screwed up my other part-time job and the couple of times I was late I could tell Doc was annoyed, which was mortifying given she’s a fount of patience, one of those people you never want to let down. Truth is I’ve never quite figured out what I contribute to her work except to take the patient’s various atmospheric readings and hand her whatever instruments she needs. Last time I think her irritation was aggravated by the fact that the diagnosis hadn’t gone so well and she was breaking the news to the habitants just as I got there, breathless from having run the half mile from the bus.

  “It’s dying,” she had just told them … they were still standing on the front lawn arm in arm, looking at the terminal house stunned. I think because there’s something so calm and deep about Doc, people find this kind of bluntness easier to accept … there’s a manner about even her most ominous prognosis that says both: This is the way it is; and I’m sorry. The habitants can tell she feels for them and I can tell it too, watching her move through the sick house from room to room in a bubble of stillness, running her fingers along the walls and the doorframes and the windowsills, pressing the side of her face against the plaster listening. When she does this, her lined face glows with the flash of both twilight and dawn at the same time … OK, I’m getting carried away. OK, you can tell I’m a little in love with her. Her eyes older than her face and her smile younger, her hair lost between the auburn of yesterday and the silver of tomorrow, serenity woven in the air around her like a glistening web. Truth is, this job isn’t much more lucrative than trying to peddle Jainlight’s script for him, but I do it because I covet my time with her. Sometimes at night, I dream she’s my mom I never knew.

  There’s a sadness about Doc, something she brought with her when she came out to L.A. from New York a couple of years back, not long after the lake appeared. Or maybe it’s just from listening to all these sick buildings, however fatalistic she tries to be about it. She presses her face against the wall and closes her eyes, listening to the fading life of the house … I finally asked what it is she hears and that was when she told me about the music. Female voices singing, inside the walls, songs of … once I saw a tear run down her cheek. But, what makes a house die? I ask, and she shrugs, “Well,” in that voice you can sometimes barely make out, “as with people, it isn’t always easy to say. I just know it’s slipping away. I can hear it in the walls, it sings to me. I hear death spreading through the baseboards or in the ceilings, sometimes it’s just old age. Sometimes it’s something unbearably sad the house never recovers from, an untimely death, the end of a marriage, an act of violence, something only the house knows, something only the house has seen, a betrayal the house absorbs while shielding the habitants from it. Sometimes when a house dies, it’s an act of sacrifice.”

  But what happens when the house can’t stand its secrets anymore? that’s what I want to know. What happens when the house starts telling the secrets back because it can’t bear to bear them. Maybe Jainlight down the hall can’t finish his script because the walls of the Hamblin constantly hum in his head the secrets of girlfriends and mistresses that producers and studio chiefs kept here back in the early part of the last century…. A few nights after Doc said this, Valerie was working a night shift and Parker was staying over, sleeping in Kirk’s room when I heard “Mama?” with that insistent question mark I can’t resist, emphatic as a period. There was something different about it this time, though, he was whispering it, and when it was obvious he wasn’t going to go back to sleep on his own, I went to him. He was standing in his crib in the dark, hair white in the moon through his window. “Mama,” he whispered again, and pointed at Parker ly
ing in the crib Valerie brought up from their apartment.

  Flailing in the air, Parker’s hands formed strange half-patterns while there twitched in his sleeping face a whimper he couldn’t say. Alarmed in his three-year-old way, Kirk reached up his arms to me and I picked him up and held him a while, but then after watching Parker a few more minutes he strained to get down, so I set him on the floor and together we continued to watch Parker’s hands fluttering in the air before him.

  I finally realized Parker was dreaming. He was “talking” in his sleep. I looked around at the dark room, shadows throbbing with secrets of abandonment. Kirk stood there with his hand in mine “listening” to Parker’s dream of lost daddies, before he went to Parker and placed his palm on the younger boy’s brow. Immediately calmed by Kirk’s touch, Parker dropped his arms to his sides and slept.

  For a while Kierkegaard howls on buses and in coffee shops, Owoooooh! like the coyotes we hear in the hills at night. Owoooooh, owoooooh over and over until it’s driving me nuts and I tell him to shut up with the howling already. But sometimes when I’m putting him to sleep, I howl with him very softly … he puts his ear against my tummy and listens to Bronte his sister still inside me and howls quietly to her, all our howls getting quieter until he howls himself to sleep.

  He has his own way of seeing things, there’s no doubt about that, depending on whatever fantasia he lives in at the moment. Up on top of the Hamblin, as dark falls he explains how the clouds are flying igloos and the lights in the hills are the night-robots that come out when the day-robots go back in their cage in the sun. We ’re riding on the bus together looking out the window and I’m thinking about some meeting I’ve got that afternoon with a producer in my Lulu Blu incarnation and Kirk is driving me nuts with the howling and the endless questions he asks about this and that. It’s a strange overcast day and the sunlight is shining through the clouds in a strange way and, out of the blue, my three-year-old says, “It’s the face of God.”