She never got the letters.
His jaw actually drops a bit. A hot wave of his own absurdity washes over him; a moan only he can hear rises from the pit of him. Never having remotely crossed his mind before, this sudden
wave of nausea by the bubble of him breaking the surface of my dream and
realization out of the, well, gray if not blue, now has a stunning clarity: she never got the letters (labial jewel, riverine rapture …); and suddenly he sees the last fourteen years for their grand error, the greatest hubris of which has been not simply how reactively and immediately he concluded she had spurned him, without even considering the possibility that chaos might have intervened to thwart his attempts to reach her, but that he then called this conclusion “rational.” The rational processes of mathematics aside, one chooses what it is he wishes to consider rational about his life; and now if Wang could simply find a way to begin breathing again, if he could simply find a way to loosen himself from the revelation that grips his chest at this moment, he might ask himself not only how it is that rationality minus chaos equals not rationality but chaos, but also why he chose to believe in her rejection of him rather than in the intercession of chance. He might ask himself how it is he could have not taken into account a lake that appeared in the center of a city, and that cast into such pandemonium the age before him and all its correspondences.
Then he might ask himself who he is. The Emperor of Elevators, he whispers. What? asks the man handcuffed on the other side of the room; but Wang takes no notice. He raises his hand to the sky as though, viewed through the prism of his palm, its rare blue might be located. Wang? the other voice says again from the floor a few feet away, what’s wrong with you? but holding his hand up to his eye, staring through, Wang is transfixed, and finds himself back fourteen, fifteen years ago in this same house, sitting in this same place at a table much like this one, pen and stationery spread out where, just a moment ago, there was a gun, the waters of the lake not yet having risen as high up the banks outside the window. Oh this is one of those spells, he tells himself very lucidly, one of those “lapses” that have been reported around the city lately,
reclaiming his place in my womb, and it wasn’t ong after that I came back to
that he’s dismissed out of hand as outbreaks of mass psychosis even as he himself experienced such a thing one night a year ago, after returning from the Chateau for what proved to be his final visit there. Possessing both “present” and “past” consciousness, now he’s back in the days of ’4, back before the crusades and his days as a dockhand at Port Justine, hurled back to this time by force of either trauma or triggered recollection, to this memory on which a life turned — several lives, as he’s about to learn. He feels it all again, his rage at her silence then and, beyond that, at her old infidelity that produced the son that was not his, and at the forsaken years between them, and at his simultaneous imprisonment by and exile from the polar events of great moment through which he lived without her so anonymously: and once again, as he was fourteen years ago, he’s paralyzed by, what? … my love for her? or my fear of it … and then a man who has from time to time meditated on the laws of impulse only to reject them does the second profoundly impulsive thing of his life, and the first since he was nineteen years old.
Having been cast by his Lapse back into this memory, now he breaks free of its destiny. He turns from his window to gaze at the small empty house around him, stares at the pen and stationery on the table, and takes in his one good hand the umpteenth furious unfinished letter that another Kristin would receive by accident if he ever sent it … and instead crumples it up; then he takes leave of his senses. He walks quickly from the house and breaks into a run, hurrying to a boat moored on the banks, gets in the boat and, binding his bad hand to one of the oars with his belt, begins to row, undaunted by the four or five miles he has to cross.
Other than the smattering of lights coming on in the Silverlake casinos to the northeast, he takes little note of the slightly altered
the city where he had been conceived, and if once I was convinced that no
not yet submerged scenery around him. The ghost of history, he feels himself grow more corporeal by the moment. He glides through the watery sky of the lake an hour and a half without break until the weak arm of the bad hand throbs with pain. In this moment on the lake, everything about Wang’s absurd life comes to a halt; he’s riveted by a calm still secret to him. He’s riveted, as when he was nineteen years old in the Square, by a resolution beyond rationality, by a wisdom forgotten as soon as he’s seen it. In this moment he has more than passing acquaintance with his own strange courage. After a while he turns to look over his shoulder for where he’s heading; he sees her hotel, not far from the Hamblin where he and Tapshaw, following the sound of a song, once sailed out thirteen years from now. He grows closer to her hotel as twilight grows darker and, just as though his life was exactly timed for such a thing, his final approach coincides with the cry of a child from the waves around him.
He hears her wail for her drowning son from a hotel window. He hears again the boy’s desperate call and turns the boat to the sound; just as though his life is exactly timed for such a thing, he unties his hand from the oar and reaches into the water — nd small fingers reach up and grabs his throbbing arm. With his other good hand, Wang pulls the boy up from out of the lake into the boat. In the boat, holding close to him the nine-year-old soaked and terrified but, as of this new moment, alive, Wang thinks to himself, Someone try telling me this isn’t my son.
The next morning Wang, the woman he called K in his letters, and her son Kim leave the sinking hotel and move to shore. A day later, Wang buys a used car that needs new tires. On their way up Highway 1, Kim rides in the front seat with Wang as the woman sleeps in back; they stop at a shop in San Luis Obispo and get the
matter where I went a lake would have followed me there, now I don’t know, I
boy some new animé posters to replace the ones left behind in L.A. His room is the first they decorate when they rent the new flat in San Francisco that rests at a fork in the fog and overlooks the bay. On their first night in the apartment, staring out the large windows at the blue bay, Wang doesn’t think of Lake Zed but only this, his most fulfilled moment; the next morning, when he makes a quick run to the market for chocolate milk — Kim’s favorite — and his used car that needed new tires suddenly spins out of control on Van Ness and crashes into the oncoming bus, in those final moments before his neck snaps Wang wonders how it is that he, of all people, personally bore witness to both the very moment the Twentieth Century died and the very moment the Twenty-First was born, separated by the twelve shadowyears between them. He’s a little surprised in those final seconds that it should be the young girl with the long gold hair he remembers, who he saw only a few times and whose name he never knew. In those final seconds he would like to believe he’s been redeemed somehow, something about which he would give more thought if he had the time, but in the few seconds he has, the only thing he can be sure of is that the view of the San Francisco Bay from the new apartment the night before was worth everything.
Orphanhood is the bond, then, when Kim meets Saki more than fifteen years later. By the time he’s twenty-five years old Kim is an orphan three times over, having lost first the father who was there only long enough to make a son, then Wang, then his mother to ovarian cancer three years ago in Toronto, where the two of them fled before the Bay Area’s occupation in ’9. Returning to liberated San Francisco in ’18 following the siege of Monterey, Kim sees Saki for the first time when she mysteriously emerges from a condemned hotel at Chinatown’s Dragon Gate looking coolly and fully capable of casting a spell on every man before her.