“Thank you, I think I know ten comes after nine.”
“This is a ten-year,” the doctor checked his watch, then looked at a clock on the wall, “in another hour and a half it will be a one-year, and that’s the true beginning of it.”
What’s happening? I can remember saying all those years ago, when I was first here, in this moment, managing to say it between the pain. But this time excuse me
and the doctor stared at me
but it’s all metaphor anyway
as if I was a huge talking pea-pod about to split
it’s all random anyway I went on a conceit, based on the birth of a religious philosopher who wasn’t even born in the Year One but probably the Year Minus-Four or sometime around then, so it’s silly to get hung up on the math of the thing when everyone else has accepted the symbolism of it
and in a dream the doctor might have accepted such an exchange from a young girl in labor, but since this wasn’t a dream, since the currents of memory and time unleashed over the years by the sinking of the lake in fact had carried me back to this actual moment, the doctor stared at me in astonishment. I think the nurse was too confused to feel vindicated. In the meantime I realized I was about to deliver him again, my boy … would I stop it,
apocalypse, with its dates not sequential like an ordinary calendar but
if I could? If I could, would I choose never to have had him at all, if it would undo the next twenty-eight years? Of course not. Not even a little, not for a minute. I looked at the doctor. Please deliver them both this time.
“What?”
There are two … there’s a girl. Deliver them both this time.
He looked at the nurse, the nurse looked at him. The next contraction came and when it subsided I wanted to say, Cut me open this time, to get both of them … but truthfully I don’t know whether I managed it. When the pain of the contraction passed I was suddenly so exhausted, I felt all the forty-some years of my present, even returned as I was by the Lapse to my seventeen-year-old past … and I think I must have dozed a little because I opened my eyes just in time to hear the voices of the doctor and nurse fade, to hear fading in the hall of the hospital on the way to the delivery room the happy-new-years and the doctor’s lone, stubborn Happy New Millennium — you’re a year late, someone says; I’m not, he says, zero isn’t the number before one, zero is … — to see the walls of the hallway fade back to the walls of the Chateau. Cut them out I tried to whisper before the lake carried me back to the present.
The last of the Lapses was just a few days after that … carried me back to a week and half before he was born … I was walking, pregnant to burst, along Santa Monica Boulevard, past little Italian eateries, xerox stores, travel agencies, mailbox rentals, gay fetish shops, video outlets, cappuccino stands, cars driving by, all of it as vivid as can be, in every last detail, I was singing to him in my head our little song that I had just heard for the first time a week or so before, riding a bus on Pacific Coast Highway if there’s a higher light remember this one Kirk? almost forgetting it’s all gone now, all long submerged. Then I was walking up Crescent
freefloating, far removed dates overlapping in some cases, consecutive dates
Heights toward Sunset Boulevard, looking at the old Hollywood apartments with their turrets, trees, realizing soon they would all be under water. It was as if I was wandering aimlessly, although of course I know it wasn’t aimless. If it were aimless the lake and this Lapse wouldn’t have brought me back to it, since it’s the personally momentous remembrances the Lapses resurrect, it’s the major harbors dotting the shore of life’s recollection where memory docks as it’s carried back in the lake’s vortex…. I crossed Sunset and kept walking up Crescent Heights, an awful long way for a pregnant girl due to give birth any minute … and then at some point I stopped, there where Crescent Heights became Laurel Canyon Boulevard … stopped at someone’s lawn and looked down at my feet and there, at the tip of my toes, it was. Nothing more than a small black puddle, not more than a few inches across. There it was, long before it seemed to just suddenly appear that September morning nine months later: chaos: there it was and I stared at it, could almost see it grow as I watched, until it was almost a foot across, and I tried to bend over to look, to peer into it and see into its source but I was so huge I couldn’t. I couldn’t bend over, all I could do was just stand there and watch it get a little bigger with every passing second, almost imperceptibly. I was standing in the very birth of the lake as it spread around my feet. And I turned and started walking away as fast as I could, looking over my shoulder as if it would follow me, which in a way it did and
then I blinked and
the Lapse was over, and I was back on my Chateau terrace staring out at black war almost as far as I could see. In the distance was the war ship that sailed into L.A. Bay ten years ago and dropped anchor and hasn’t moved since or shown a single sign of life … there on the terrace I lay my hands on my belly to feel its vacancy. The next night I scored from one of my last clients some
separated by the length of the room in other cases, with apparently senseless
of the lapsinthe that’s been going around and took the first dose of the sepia-colored evilixir, adding another every night after that….
Sometimes, hovering in the ether between existence and non, I talk to him. Don’t know whether it’s the lapsinthe talking … but I know it’s him right away although now he would be in his late-twenties … there he is sitting beside me saying Mama don’t die and maybe that’s what pulls me back. Sometimes we talk about all the things I would have told him if I had had the chance, sometimes we have no idea what to talk about at all but it doesn’t matter, we might talk of death or God … does anyone ever care so much about the notion of God, whatever she actually thinks about it, as when she has a child? Isn’t it when you have a child that you really need to understand the whole business of God, the whole business of death and the soul? People get to the end of their lives and say they’re not afraid of death … but even in the course of my many tentative suicides I’m afraid to death. To not be at least a little afraid of death you have to have no imagination whatsoever. It isn’t a matter of pain, pain doesn’t frighten me, of course it’s the prospect of nothingness, into which will pass not only one’s own life but everyone else’s as I’ve known it. What I feel for my boy will pass into nothingness, and it’s intolerable: My love for you will not die with me, I promise or plead, or fume at him in our conversations … but the question in his eyes remains: and I see it. I read it. Will she abandon me again? it says.
I know him right away, all these years later, in these moments when we talk near death’s beach. All these years haven’t changed the immediately identifiable beauty of him. All these years haven’t altered the memory of how beautiful he was … but they’ve left me to wonder a terrible thing, which is whether I would have loved him quite so much if he hadn’t been so beautiful. I calculate absurd impossible hypotheses, transferring his soul to the body and face of some little boy not so beautiful, then try to
timelines running from top to bottom leading him to the inescapable
measure the love, testing my heart. Did my own mother not love me because I wasn’t beautiful? of course I hope I see his beauty through the prism of love rather than love him through the prism of beauty, but how can I be certain? Kirk? I say to him from where I lie in this ether on the edge of life Kirk I reach to him, and there flashes some small confusion across his face as if he almost knows his own name but not quite; but not quite knowing, he reaches back anyway. Night-time he answers … our fingers brush….