~ ~ ~
Every passing day, the edge of the water rots a little more the front porch of her little house, until one morning she expects to find she’s finally been swept away. Every honeymoon twilight, across the house’s threshold the lake is carried by its lesbian groom the moon, with a bridal train of small dead animals, palm fronds ripped from their trees, the trash of the recently submerged: pages of paperbacks, gin bottles, old tickets from the drowned Cathode Flower nightclub that used to be right below her on the Sunset Strip, at the foot of a hillside now under water. Step out her front door at dawn into the puddles that seep up through the decking, sunlight from the lake’s surface cutting a gash across her eyes, and she sees the glub glub glub of rising bubbles, and wonders from what sinking building or body.
Six months ago the lake finally stopped rising. This was what everyone had been waiting for, once it became clear the lake wasn’t going to stop until it reached the ocean. Once that became clear, there was no reason not to wish the lake would just get it over with, so everyone could stop moving to higher ground. It feels to her like the foundation of the house gives way a little more every night, and it wakes her in the dark, when the dream doesn’t.
~ ~ ~
Then in the days between nights’ dreams, the visions come, often just after the sun sets. Through the hinge where day hangs on to night, the visions come up with the bubbles from the lake’s bottom. She sits on the porch of her little house and stares at the top of the Hotel Hamblin to the southeast, that roof where sometimes at fall of dark she took him in her arms to look at the lights of faraway windows, when clouds were flying igloos and the night-robots reigned. She’s vaguely aware of the boats that drift by, the way the people in them look at her and mutter to each other.
About half the top floor of the Hamblin is still above water. Once she thought about taking the silver gondola out there but couldn’t really see the point, unless it was one of the two or three hundred occasions she considered slipping into the water for good, the way she should have that evening five years ago when, out on the center of the lake, she lowered herself from the gondola. So then why keep moving to higher land at all? Let some watery night take her. Night after night, hour after hour, moment after moment she sees his smile, hears his voice from the other bedroom that used to call Mama where are you? Five years, two months, sixteen days since she heard him say the last words she heard him say: and when she came up for air, swimming desperately up up up until she finally broke the surface of the water to gasp back her life at the very last possible second, the devastating emptiness of the gondola left her to curse for the rest of her life that last second God gave her just so that she might hear those words over and over
yes please
You Sick Fuck. Having had Your little joke with Abraham, hissing Your little amusement in his ear and finding what cowards fathers are when he didn’t spit in Your face, when he didn’t clutch his son close to him and say I ’ll go to hell first … when for all his supposed righteousness he couldn’t even be a man when it came to protecting his child, then You moved onto mothers didn’t You, because mothers were more your match, beginning with Mary. Now that was fun. Tortured her boy in the grisliest most twisted way possible before her very eyes and then had the sadistic wit to call it The Salvation of the World: so what I want to know is, was that the forbidden iconography of the divine psyche, or just the Male Wangle of all male wangles? God tries to hurt my kid, He has to go through me first. God tells me what He told Abraham, then He isn’t any god that means anything to me, He isn’t any god I owe anything. I kill anyone who tries to hurt my kid, any man, any woman, any god, any lake.
She’s dreamed it so often, sometimes she’s almost not certain it really happened. She breaks the lake’s surface gasping, grabs the side of the gondola, and her soul implodes at the horror of its emptiness; for a minute she stares into the bottom of the gondola like he must be there and she just isn’t seeing him. Like there’s some place he could be hiding. But it’s as if he was never there at all. She dives beneath the water again, thrashing around as if to catch him on his way to the bottom — but there’s no one to catch, and she rises to grab the gondola once more and look frantically around her. It’s only then she hears something, and looks up.
~ ~ ~
Looks up and sees him in the distance, high in the sky. Hears his voice as it gets farther away
Mama where are you?
like he would call from his crib
Mama come back
and the owl that has him in its clutches actually seems to falter a bit, confused by the burden and sound, finding Kirk bigger and noisier than the usual prey. Sometimes in her dream Kirk plummets to earth, and she wakes to a black room with the taste of no please on her lips.
One morning about six months ago she got up from the toilet to stare down at the blood in the bowl. She was so fascinated by the pattern that she sat on the bathroom floor studying it, circling to see it from every angle. Next month the same pattern and the month after that, and it’s been the same every month since. She keeps trying to decipher this menstrual rorschach; slit between her legs is the stigmata of the full moon from which her womb telegraphs a message. A month or so back she even tried copying it down on paper before it dissolved into streaks down the white porcelain. Sometimes she lies in bed at night and sees the pattern in the dark above her, and watches baffled for hours until its mystery lulls her back to sleep.
Lately, in a city where sooner or later any kind of cult behavior becomes a fashion statement, everyone wears the blue of the lake, all the colored parasols of five years ago having given way to blue from the neck down. Everyone camouflages herself and slips alongside the water like a spy of the shoreline, disguised as a splash. Blue hat, blue shirt, coat blue except for dark shadows rippling across the buttons like riptides, or flashes of white on the thigh of the pants like the glare of the sun on the water’s surface. When she rows her silver gondola on the lake wearing a brilliant red dress, the lake around her suddenly clears of all other boats, taking cover, as if she’s an incoming fireball from space. As if she’s a drop of blood — but is she the lake bleeding, or blood rained from the sky? She can see it in everyone’s eyes, the red provocation of her, the defiant affront of her red to the blue of the lake, daring it to rise higher and seep deeper into the land.
If the lake sends back my boy, I’ll wear whatever it wants, the blue garb of its Order, I’ll wear blue until the day I die. If it wants I’ll wear nothing and dip my naked body into its blue embrace whenever it wants me, lie nude in my silver gondola and drift wherever it drifts me. If the lake will just send me back my boy.
~ ~ ~
Until then, the only thing blue about her is her name….
… the writer who lived down the hall of the Hamblin having left her with Lulu Blu….
… and afterward she couldn’t tell for certain when she stopped being Kristin; maybe it was that very moment she came up for air and saw the empty gondola. But now she’s taken refuge in Lulu. She’s fled from any Kristin who would leave her three-yearold son out in the middle of a lake because she had this insane idea she had to stop the lake from taking him. She fled to Lulu because she believed Kristin should have sunk back down to the bottom where she belonged, and left to someone with better wings the task of flying after that owl. So it was a kind of debased suicide, abandoning Kristin for Lulu, and now she sits on her porch at the water’s edge in her red dress staring out over the lake while blue citizens drift by in their blue boats and whisper among themselves The Madwoman in Red, whose son was abducted by owls.