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You’ll spend your whole life,” Doc said when I told her this dream I had, “making peace with your own true nature …”
… whatever that means. In the dream I was on the banks of what was once Laurel Avenue, near the old 1930s apartment where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived when he was writing movies … I was lying there hypnotically fixed on the center of the lake….
Lying there in my dream I was suddenly aware of my own womb predating me. Aware of my womb being older than I … down inside I could hear historical rumors little spasms of collective memory rippling outward up to my lungs and down to my thighs … it infuriated me. It seemed so typical … after all, do men’s dicks predate them? In my dream I rejected it, this part of me that was my son’s first home … and then in a surge of guilt I rejected him. And then realized, in the dream, he wasn’t there. I sprang up from where I was, looking around frantically, from the water in front of me to the trees on the banks behind me … and opened my eyes to find myself sitting up in my bed, in the grip of this maternal dread I can’t ignore….
I never dreamed at all the first seventeen/eighteen years of my life … slipping into the womb of the night every time I slept … dark, still, swaddled in the unseen, the unlistened. Waking every morning knowing I had tumbled down this wormhole of the unconscious into some void, feeling a little more nuts every morning I woke like I spent the night drifting in the black, farther and farther from the mothership of who I am, barely twinkling stars of all my impulses all around me. Feeling even when I was awake that I was really still out there, floating…. Crazy, when I was young, just to have any dream at all, and doing some crazy crazy things in the night to find one. But I never dreamed until that night in Tokyo that I lost him, electric icicle of him melting out of me between my legs onto my fingertips. Then he was back later that morning, I felt his return, my little unborn man who himself had been cut loose in space the night before, drifting far away until somehow, in a burst of embryonic will, he swam back through the tide of Nada in a cosmic breaststroke….
… and since then I dream all the time. Almost never remember the dreams but I know they were there the night before, I can feel them like I felt him that morning he was conceived again inside me, good dreams, bad dreams, mostly dreams that aren’t so certain of themselves. My kind of dreams, in other words.
I used to be fucking fearless, you should know that about me. None of this terror I have all the time now means anything if you don’t know that. Ran away from home at sixteen, traveling with this weird religious-suicide cult for a while, moving down to L.A. and getting into all kinds of situations just blindly, sometimes out of desperation but sometimes because I didn’t have enough sense to be afraid. Lived by wits and recklessness. Went to Tokyo the same way…. I was the most fearless person I’ve ever known. Not a better one and definitely not a smarter one, but … not only didn’t I know there was all that fear behind that door in myself I didn’t know there was a door. Everything was about me … and then you have a kid and not only isn ’t everything about you anymore, in some way too hard to explain, it never was….
No doubt about it my Kierkegaard’s my little wildman. Runs around the apartment naked with his flapdoodle sticking straight out and his treasured balloons flying along behind him, one string in each hand…. Before I had him I had this idea babies were amorphous lumps of human clay that take distinct shape only over time. But he was half-wildman half-zenbaby right out of the chute … before, actually. The weeks after I got back from Tokyo where I worked for a year as a memory girl in Kabuki-cho
we would go down to the lake which at that time was still small enough you could walk around all of it in ten minutes except the part cut off by the Hollywood Hills, and
we would sit watching the water and, other than when I would sing to him … if there’s a higher light, let it shine … it was the only time he settled down inside me, mesmerized by the lake beyond my belly. First days after he was born, when the lake started spreading west down what was then the Strip, we would watch it together from the window of our room while he lay in my arms, and I would think he was asleep and then I would look to see his eyes open and calm, gazing at the lake and — I swear — smiling.
Big Agua he started calling it when he turned two, having picked up the baby-spanish I don’t know where, same place he learned to call the moon luna….
The lake was starting to get a lot of attention then, sightseers coming and going, city officials and geological experts standing around scratching their heads. The first year everyone was kind of enchanted by it, however much disruption it caused schedules and traffic and bus lines. That’s when the gondolas and rowboats came out, sailing in and out of the red light that poured over the hills like a tide of fire bursting the levee of the sun. Charred palms stitched the horizon. A makeshift harbor was built over by the flooded Chateau X hotel. Parasols were in fashion that autumn, women walking the lakeshore with them, twirling them from their boats so on Saturdays this panorama of spinning colored spheres floated above the surface of the lake and in its reflection…. Balloons! Kirk would point when he saw the parasols. While I lay on the grass reading, he would blow bubbles from a bubblewand I bought him … so we blew bubbles together, watching them float to the grass where those that didn’t pop would settle like dew. He would smash them with his foot. “Smash the bubbles!” I would cry, and he would smash them, “Pap,” and then I felt funny, it seemed wrong to encourage him to smash something as delicate as a bubble
pap, pap, pap he would go. One afternoon he blew a particularly large bubble and said out of nowhere, “This one’s for my daddy,” and it caught my breath … he had never mentioned his father before
this one’s for my daddy and the bubble slowly tumbled down through the air before us like a little spinning glass world, and when it landed, it didn’t pop and he didn’t smash it but watched it there on the grass for a long time until it finally popped on its own….
My kid’s beautiful. What else is a mom going to say, right? except that my kid really is beautiful … the minute he was born they held him up for me to look at slackjawed, stupefied — me, not him…. “This child is beautiful,” the nurse assured me the next day in some wonder, and I had finally come out of my fog enough to crack, “Yeah, but you tell all the moms that,” and she glanced quickly over both shoulders to see whatever other mother might be listening in the bed next to mine before she whispered back, “Well, yes, I do. But this child is beautiful” … and so he is. Which he certainly didn’t get from his mother or father, so go figure. He’s a throwback to someone I can’t even begin to know, never having known either my own mother or father…. Don’t know where he got the hair that shines brilliant in the sun or the sea-green eyes flecked with amber, or the sanguine mouth of a mad monk. People’s attraction to him is remarkable … when he was younger I would push him in the stroller around the lake and people would gawk like there was something slightly supernatural about him, and not just little old grandmothers either. “Hey, cute kid, man!” some tattooed skinhead sociopath would interrupt his mayhem long enough to stop and exclaim.