It worries me he’s this beautiful … not only that some stranger could try to snatch him away, but also for how life might let him get away with too much, given how he’s a wily schemer too, already determined to run the show, musical in his self-assured insubordination. “Nooooooooo please,” he demurs my commands in a lilting singsong voice. Silent defiance comes into his eyes, there isn’t even the slightest submission in him. At the age of three he gives orders all the time, “Do this please! do that please!”—a very polite dictator. “La-la!” he orders at night when I’m putting him to sleep, II Duce’s way of telling me he wants me to sing to him. “More la-la please!” means Keep singing. “Bigger la-la please!” means, Sing louder.
Who’s the boss here, wildman? I ask, and he narrows his eyes for a minute looking in mine, calculating the question, before he points at me and says with a big smile
You are because he knows, you see, he’s already figured out that’s the right answer, even if he doesn’t believe it for two seconds….
… but I decided he might turn out OK one afternoon he was playing with Valerie’s kid Parker, the only other child in the hotel, about eight months younger than Kirk — black, deaf and mute, and Valerie is another single mom who works a tedious job answering telephones for the city, so sometimes to help her out I’ll take Parker for a few hours if I’m free. On weekends she and I and the two kids go down to the lake where they play together … and this one afternoon I saw it … Valerie saw it too….
It wasn’t a big deal. Kirk and Parker each sat in their folding chairs with balloons we had gotten them tied to their wrists, Kirk a yellow one and Parker a blue one, and Parker pulled the string on his only to watch it float up and out over the water … it was a minute before he realized it wasn’t coming back. Then he tried to cry, which was much more terrible than any actual little-kid cry because it was a cry no one could hear … he was wracked by the futility of cries he can’t voice and balloons that don’t return. No matter how much Valerie tried to comfort him, he was inconsolable, until Kirk got up from his chair, walked over, pulled the string of his own balloon from his wrist and handed it to Parker. Parker took the balloon and stopped crying.
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….