Our Ecstatic Days

by Steve Erickson

  is dead too, even as now I know that my own father was dead before I was

  others, and utterly nonplused by either distinction, Angie has pursued her musical grail throughout Europe, the Middle East and America as the diminished skirmishes of what’s no longer called by anyone the “tribulation” but rather the Unrest have receded to the last bastions of certifiably insane Americans, Wyoming and Utah. For two years she conducts her research in lower Manhattan, for five years in the two hundred miles of desert west of formerly occupied Albuquerque, using as her headquarters an old Spanish hacienda once converted into a railroad hotel.

  In wire glasses and dour attire, adopting an increasingly severe appearance in the way of women who believe no other physical identity is possible for them, Angie has neither her mother’s beauty nor her father’s handsomeness. If she did, it’s possible she wouldn’t marry anyway. But in the early ’70s, as she nears her fiftieth birthday, to her own surprise she finds herself seized by a compulsion.

  This is the compulsion to adopt a child. She listens for the compulsion’s melody so she might analyze its mathematics, but all she hears is a fugue not of numbers but indecipherable runes. She pores over pictures of motherless children from all over the world, waiting for one to strike a chord. They all strike a chord. Her head fills with an awesome and heartbreaking symphony. For more than a year she wrestles with the decision, finally waking one morning in a strange ecstasy from a dream about her father; when she finally files the application, she’s stunned to be turned down, due to institutional doubts as to her “domestic stability.” Thousands of children in the world without mothers or fathers and she’s turned down? She appeals the decision and is turned down again. She applies to go to China where she might find one of the countless infant girls abandoned by their parents, but ironically is

  born and it’s just as well, and in a way here in the birth canal of the lake none

  denied not in spite of her Chinese heritage but because of it, as though there’s some subversiveness about it she doesn’t know. For months afterward she sits at night in her endless stream of hotel rooms poring again over the pictures of children, of sons or daughters who might have been. She runs her finger over their small faces. She holds the photos up to the light and peers into them as though some flicker in their faces, something in the backgrounds of their lives in Africa or Appalachia or the Andes, will offer clues as to why she isn’t worthy of them. Like all children who assume responsibility for their own desertion, she becomes convinced this is her punishment for leaving her errant father outside her school that morning she was a small girl when, in rags, he cried futilely for her arms in the company of the mother who cursed him.

  She returns to looking for the helix. She privately despairs of ever redeeming her life with a purpose when, in the late ’80s at the far end of her career, she’s called to Los Angeles, the city that takes leave of men’s senses.

  Arriving late afternoon, she asks to be taken to the site immediately but is convinced by excavation officials to rest first. She spends the night in one of the new hotels that have gone up near the old airport razed and rebuilt in the last five years after being closed more than seven decades. As dark falls, from the highrise window she can see a hesitant galaxy of lights growing across the basin, though still far less than the dazzling overturned jewel box that was night-time L.A. a century ago. The next morning, her driver explains that while the last of the freeways has finally been reopened, none takes Angie where she’s going so they make their way instead up Old La Cienega Road, one of the city’s major thoroughfares before the lake and now a narrow two-lane,

  of it matters and in a way there’s nothing that matters more, and am I still

  part paved and part mud. They keep the windows rolled up due to the black clouds of mosquitoes that descend suddenly from swampier parts of the city. From the backseat Angie can see the permanent watermark on warped buildings that haven’t been demolished yet, like the permanent shadows of mid-Twentieth Century Hiroshima: How long since this part has been submerged? she asks halfway across the lake bottom, and is stunned when the driver answers almost twenty years, as much by how quickly her own life is passing; it doesn’t seem so long ago she was hearing the stories about the “new L.A.” being built—as the civic phrasemakers had it—“from out of the shale,” when the lake was finally declared officially dead. “Recovery’s been slow,” she notes.

  “Yes,” the driver, not wanting to venture too far into politics, answers carefully, “well … some never saw the point.” Then, becoming bolder, “After all, it’s not like there ever was supposed to be a city here in the first place. Even back before the lake,” the driver goes on, “everyone knew it was doomed.”

  It’s two hours before they reach the site. As it looms into view she’s astonished at the size of it; her sixty-six-year-old heart beats harder and faster than it has in a long time. The car stops and the driver helps Angie unload from the car a large case of instruments and equipment. She’s greeted by two members of the excavation team, one of them the director of the project, a man in his early thirties with tired watery gray eyes who fairly exudes skepticism. He asks if she would like some lunch first. They’re not in a rush about this, she thinks—a battle of bureaucrats: the government wants me here, these guys don’t. She says she would like to take a look at what she’s come for but the director insists on lunch and, given how her heart is racing, she relents. Over tacos she heads off

  sinking? am I still drowning? am I still descending? am I still falling down

  his questions with her own, and studies in the near distance the outside scaffolding that props up part of the recovered structure. At this point, he explains, we’ve cleared almost everything but the western wall that was the most deeply embedded when that part of the hills collapsed from the water.

  On a long path of planks that disappear under the complex of scaffolding, Angie, the project director and the driver with Angie’s instruments head into the site. Workers stop to watch. When she emerges into what appears to have been once a grand,now decayed lobby, the workers inside stop as well. Across the atrium, two wide stone stairways spiral up one side and the other, as well as long corridors that glint with a dead blue residue; above, much of what was the roof has been washed away. Almost immediately she hears it. It’s very faint and high, almost beyond human hearing; her ears, once extremely attuned to such sounds, aren’t as sharp as they once were. “A hotel?” she says.

  “That’s what we figure,” the director answers, “hard to think it could have been anything else.” They climb the stairs and continue down one of the corridors, cutting through a small, comparatively barren room and then what might have been a sitting room beyond that, with a large window. Sodden overstuffed sofas and high-armed chairs lie overturned against the walls. In every room through which they pass, workers stop what they’re doing: She’s here, she hears them whisper, that’s her. “There are a couple of things,” the director says, “that make this site more interesting than some of the other structures we’ve excavated in the area.” As they make their way down a long corridor into a room overwhelmed by both a massive fireplace

  down down? or am I rising? up up up, and how did I get turned around then?

  and a melancholy Angie feels almost immediately, the music she’s heard since they entered the unearthed hotel grows. “First,” he says, “there’s no record of a hotel being here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we go back into old references to try to find some sort of entry, old travel books, old hotel guides, we go back into the city archives and pull out old geological surveys, zoning ordinances … and find no record of a hotel here at all.” He stops and gazes around them. “Look at this. This wasn’t a truck stop. This wasn’t a motel on some back road to nowhere. There are plenty of records of another hotel about half a mile southwest of here, but not this.”

  “Maybe this is that other hotel. Maybe the records aren’t exact.�
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  He shakes his head, “We found that other one. It never went all the way under and actually was pretty famous, the Chateau Something with rock musicians and movie stars back in the last century, and then in the ’10s and ’20s some sort of religious-mystic fortune-telling bondage … uh … hey,” he shrugs when he sees the way she’s looking at him, “it was L.A., even if it was under water. But this,” he sighs, sweeping his arm at the floor beneath them, “was just the middle of a road leading into an old canyon that led to a valley beyond that. Records show homes, a neighborhood, a corner gas station … no hotel though, and nothing like this.”

  “What’s the other thing?” Angie says. They come into what appears to have been a huge ballroom, or several ballrooms

  or have I really gotten turned around at all? and now I feel my first real panic,

  conjoined; a few patches of wall still have shards of old mirror, and from the ceiling sway the stems of chandeliers plucked by the lake long ago. “The other thing?” says the project director.

  “You said there are a couple of things that make this site interesting.”

  “The other thing,” he answers, “is that … what our records do show is that … well, this was it.”

  “This was what?”

  “This was where it came from.”

  “This was where what came from?”

  “The lake.”

  “The lake?”

  “Yes.”

  “The lake came from here?”

  “Yes.”

  “The lake came out of this hotel.”

  “Well of course we don’t have any official indication there was a hotel.”

  “Well there was, obviously, officially or not.”

  that I’ve gotten turned around, that maybe I’m returning up up and up to the

  The director takes a deep breath. “I can’t explain the hotel,” he says, “but the whole reason for digging here in the first place was a pretty formidable amount of evidence, ranging from the anecdotal to the geological, that the source of the lake was somewhere right under here. Look,” he takes another deep breath, “I don’t know … and the stories surrounding all this you wouldn’t believe….” They cross the plundered ballrooms into two small transitional rooms that appear to provide the only passage to the rest of the building. In one stands the remnants of what may have been a large pillar; if there was such a pillar in the other, it’s gone now. Out of these rooms Angie and the director exit into the hotel’s mezzanine, once obviously spectacular and lavish. Now the music, still high and vague, is close; once again, at the sight of Angie the workers stop. There’s a buzz in the mezzanine as they turn from their work.

  By itself, in the middle of the mezzanine that dwarfs it, under lights that have been set up around it, stands a rough wooden table, with high legs and a small surface-top; the table has been roped off. On top is a closed metal box.

  “That’s where we first found it,” the director says, “crawling across the floor where the table is now.”

  “Do you know where it came from?” the woman says looking around the mezzanine.

  “Not really,” he answers, pointing, “we assume one of these suites.”

  “I would like to take a look there first, if it’s all right,” she says, “before the box.” She follows the director through one suite then

  wrong lake, to the version of the lake I came from, and I almost turn back

  the other. They wander among the strewn beds and loveseats in a rounded blue chamber beneath a light fixture that’s managed to survive all the water and years; another suite is circled by doors, a couple still with their original mirrors. “We looked through all those,” the director nods at them, “there are passages running to some of the other rooms and we went through those too.” Angie walks over to the wall. Running her fingers along its side, she presses her ear to it, listening; the director peers around at the workers watching.

  They go back out into the mezzanine that’s filled with sound. “All right,” Angie says, nodding at the box. All the workers watching back up against the surrounding walls. The director moves the rope that cordons off the table while Angie pulls from her case some gloves and two long-handled stainless steel forceps, one large and one smaller. Everything has so long led to this moment that now, for her own reasons, Angie realizes she’s afraid of it too, like the rest of them; she’s about to ask either the driver or project director to open the box but decides it’s something she should do herself, as though her hands aren’t shaking and her heart isn’t thundering in her chest. The workers circling the edge of the mezzanine shrink back even though there really isn’t anywhere else to back into; some flee the room. Although the music is much louder now and—as she reaches the large forceps into the box and picks up the glowing snake—grows louder still, it isn’t cacophonous exactly. It’s hardly a din. Some of the time it even exists at a level barely anyone can hear, spiraling into itself, devouring first its own tail and then the rest of itself, at the place where terror becomes beauty before it becomes terror again.

  It writhes brilliantly at the end of the forceps. Then suddenly the

  downward, but I go on up up and up rising like the bubble of him that rose in

  snake’s body sizzles into nothing, and in its place is a vapor, leaving only the snake’s head in the forceps’ grip.

  By now most of the excavation workers have fled the mezzanine, along with Angie’s driver. The project director is stricken, fixed to where he stands. Almost spellbound herself, gripped by an ecstasy she’s felt before but can’t identify, Angie tells herself she must work quickly should the snakehead vanish too; with the smaller forceps she invades the snake’s mouth and then, when the tool proves useless, throws the forceps to the floor and sticks her fingers in the snake’s open mouth roughly pulling the helix from its throat. An answer? she wonders, the Question? holding it up before her, one moment a black bubble the next moment collapsed light, neither reducible nor mutable by chaos or god

  this is the loss of one’s child

  and then in the blink of an eye it’s gone as well. Completely alone in the mezzanine now, the director having unfixed himself and run, Angie spins in her place before rushing into the first suite turning one ear then the other to the walls, then rushing into the next suite and then the third, listening to the walls of each. She runs back into the mezzanine and slides herself along the walls listening with one ear then the other until she stops, cocks her head, and then turns her gaze to the mezzanine’s far end, and a single small pantry door. She crosses the length of the mezzanine. Reaching the small closed door, she places her fingers to it, putting her ear to it and immediately pulling back. She presses her ear to it again and,

  my dream that night I miscarried him, up up and up rising to break the surface

  opening the door, can practically feel the oxygen leave the room; leaning into the small dark pantry, it seems like minutes before she can see in the black gorge beneath her, far inside the birth canal of the century; the small boy in the water, both unknown to her and more familiar than she can stand, flailing and grasping for someone’s hand, a mother’s that’s too far from him or, perhaps, a man’s with a glint of glass in it—except there is no man there. The boy descends. Angie feels rise behind her the nullifying tide of a life never lived.

  Then this is for lost fathers, she thinks. Then this is for lost fathers and lost mothers, and the Measure of the Real, the bond forged by lost fathers and their daughters, mothers and their sons, against which all else is dream. Knowing she has only moments in which to fulfill a life, she gazes over her shoulder just long enough to see hovering overhead the wave of the null, before she vanishes, along with everything around her, into the unremembered.

  Divide the mist on the grass by the sway of the trees. Add the still of the water’s surface and multiply the result by forty vineyards of loam. Subtract the burning masts of seven boats while factoring in the cosine of smoke, then add all the rooms of loss times th
esuites 2031 of sorrow divided by half the somnambulist highways outbound. Compute the barges of the wind multiplied by the total of fire-robots falling within the radius of rain, adding twenty-one

  of the dream of the lake, as something that’s once more being born to the lake

  spacemonkeys with a variable of black bridges cubed, subtracting the unmelted icicles of the moon plus the gaslights of night-time, then dividing the result by the whips of love minus the collars of devotion. Taking into account, of course, the square root of snakes times one boat of missing mothers for each year of his life, he’s calculated how and when to make his way to the Chateau which, as darkness falls, he can now see from where he hides on the lakeshore.

  He doesn’t ask why they’re after him. He has no idea why but he’s been living the life he lives too long to think that why matters; twelve, thirteen years ago it was soldiers then it was gangsters in the Hollywood Hills, now it’s soldiers again. He recognizes one of them, wonders whatever happened to the other, the one he would row back and forth to the Chateau in the dead of night many years ago. He knows they’re going to catch him, because sooner or later everyone gets caught by something. They’re closing in, all over the hills with their lights and dogs, they’re all over the lake in their boats, swarming everywhere; he tallies the inevitability of his capture; his aren’t the mathematics of freedom but time. An hour, a few minutes. Just long enough to talk to her.

  He’s wondering why she came back, although maybe that’s just another why that doesn’t matter. After watching the Chateau dark and silent for more than a year he had finally given up, leaving the lake behind and heading for the sea; he was sleeping on the beach one night when he woke, his ears—which don’t hear very well anymore the sound of heartbeats—picking up one’s faint telegram. Making his way back from the coast past soldiers, moving in the shadowy perimeters of the mulholland highway inland, he tracked the approaching heartbeat from the mojave