At the beginning, the lake was banked on the north side of the Strip, but then the dam there broke and the water cut most of the city in two, and before they built the San Vicente Bridge all the east-west bus routes had to detour down to Venice Boulevard before turning back up the peninsula formed by the La Cienega and Crescent rivers. It screwed up my other part-time job and the couple of times I was late I could tell Doc was annoyed, which was mortifying given she’s a fount of patience, one of those people you never want to let down. Truth is I’ve never quite figured out what I contribute to her work except to take the patient’s various atmospheric readings and hand her whatever instruments she needs. Last time I think her irritation was aggravated by the fact that the diagnosis hadn’t gone so well and she was breaking the news to the habitants just as I got there, breathless from having run the half mile from the bus.
“It’s dying,” she had just told them … they were still standing on the front lawn arm in arm, looking at the terminal house stunned. I think because there’s something so calm and deep about Doc, people find this kind of bluntness easier to accept … there’s a manner about even her most ominous prognosis that says both: This is the way it is; and I’m sorry. The habitants can tell she feels for them and I can tell it too, watching her move through the sick house from room to room in a bubble of stillness, running her fingers along the walls and the doorframes and the windowsills, pressing the side of her face against the plaster listening. When she does this, her lined face glows with the flash of both twilight and dawn at the same time … OK, I’m getting carried away. OK, you can tell I’m a little in love with her. Her eyes older than her face and her smile younger, her hair lost between the auburn of yesterday and the silver of tomorrow, serenity woven in the air around her like a glistening web. Truth is, this job isn’t much more lucrative than trying to peddle Jainlight’s script for him, but I do it because I covet my time with her. Sometimes at night, I dream she’s my mom I never knew.
There’s a sadness about Doc, something she brought with her when she came out to L.A. from New York a couple of years back, not long after the lake appeared. Or maybe it’s just from listening to all these sick buildings, however fatalistic she tries to be about it. She presses her face against the wall and closes her eyes, listening to the fading life of the house … I finally asked what it is she hears and that was when she told me about the music. Female voices singing, inside the walls, songs of … once I saw a tear run down her cheek. But, what makes a house die? I ask, and she shrugs, “Well,” in that voice you can sometimes barely make out, “as with people, it isn’t always easy to say. I just know it’s slipping away. I can hear it in the walls, it sings to me. I hear death spreading through the baseboards or in the ceilings, sometimes it’s just old age. Sometimes it’s something unbearably sad the house never recovers from, an untimely death, the end of a marriage, an act of violence, something only the house knows, something only the house has seen, a betrayal the house absorbs while shielding the habitants from it. Sometimes when a house dies, it’s an act of sacrifice.”
But what happens when the house can’t stand its secrets anymore? that’s what I want to know. What happens when the house starts telling the secrets back because it can’t bear to bear them. Maybe Jainlight down the hall can’t finish his script because the walls of the Hamblin constantly hum in his head the secrets of girlfriends and mistresses that producers and studio chiefs kept here back in the early part of the last century…. A few nights after Doc said this, Valerie was working a night shift and Parker was staying over, sleeping in Kirk’s room when I heard “Mama?” with that insistent question mark I can’t resist, emphatic as a period. There was something different about it this time, though, he was whispering it, and when it was obvious he wasn’t going to go back to sleep on his own, I went to him. He was standing in his crib in the dark, hair white in the moon through his window. “Mama,” he whispered again, and pointed at Parker lying in the crib Valerie brought up from their apartment.
Flailing in the air, Parker’s hands formed strange half-patterns while there twitched in his sleeping face a whimper he couldn’t say. Alarmed in his three-year-old way, Kirk reached up his arms to me and I picked him up and held him a while, but then after watching Parker a few more minutes he strained to get down, so I set him on the floor and together we continued to watch Parker’s hands fluttering in the air before him.
I finally realized Parker was dreaming. He was “talking” in his sleep. I looked around at the dark room, shadows throbbing with secrets of abandonment. Kirk stood there with his hand in mine “listening” to Parker’s dream of lost daddies, before he went to Parker and placed his palm on the younger boy’s brow. Immediately calmed by Kirk’s touch, Parker dropped his arms to his sides and slept.
~ ~ ~
For a while Kierkegaard howls on buses and in coffee shops, Owoooooh! like the coyotes we hear in the hills at night. Owoooooh, owoooooh over and over until it’s driving me nuts and I tell him to shut up with the howling already. But sometimes when I’m putting him to sleep, I howl with him very softly … he puts his ear against my tummy and listens to Bronte his sister still inside me and howls quietly to her, all our howls getting quieter until he howls himself to sleep.
He has his own way of seeing things, there’s no doubt about that, depending on whatever fantasia he lives in at the moment. Up on top of the Hamblin, as dark falls he explains how the clouds are flying igloos and the lights in the hills are the night-robots that come out when the day-robots go back in their cage in the sun. We ’re riding on the bus together looking out the window and I’m thinking about some meeting I’ve got that afternoon with a producer in my Lulu Blu incarnation and Kirk is driving me nuts with the howling and the endless questions he asks about this and that. It’s a strange overcast day and the sunlight is shining through the clouds in a strange way and, out of the blue, my three-year-old says, “It’s the face of God.”
He has a toy he calls Monkeyman, a small plastic gorilla in a red spaceman suit and space helmet that he takes into the bath, to bed, on the bus, clutching it in his hand at all times. Sometimes hours go by and I see Kirk has had Monkeyman in his hand the whole time, has never let go of it even once, has never set it down anywhere for a second, has never even stuck it in his pocket. There’s even a song that goes with Monkeyman, an old rock and roll song from before I was born that we heard on the radio with a woman singing spacemonkey, it goes, sign of the time. At night Kirk clutches Monkeyman in his sleep like it’s this talisman-thing, and only after sleep has come over him does his hand slowly open and let go.
Then in the middle of the night he wakes and realizes he doesn’t have the monkey. He starts crying and I have to look through all the bedding and under the crib and around the floor. Or sometimes in the night if Kirk has a bad dream and I go get him from his crib and take him into my bed in the other room, he ’ll still be holding on to it, and I’ll hear this plop on the floor behind me as I’m carrying him from one room to the next and I’ll know he’s dropped it, and I go back and find it so I’ll have it to give to him when he wakes up wondering where it is. Not long ago Kirk named the red monkey Kirk, except when he says it, it comes out Kulk.