“Do you know where it came from?” the woman says looking around the mezzanine.
“Not really,” he answers, pointing, “we assume one of these suites.”
“I would like to take a look there first, if it’s all right,” she says, “before the box.” She follows the director through one suite then
wrong lake, to the version of the lake I came from, and I almost turn back
the other. They wander among the strewn beds and loveseats in a rounded blue chamber beneath a light fixture that’s managed to survive all the water and years; another suite is circled by doors, a couple still with their original mirrors. “We looked through all those,” the director nods at them, “there are passages running to some of the other rooms and we went through those too.” Angie walks over to the wall. Running her fingers along its side, she presses her ear to it, listening; the director peers around at the workers watching.
They go back out into the mezzanine that’s filled with sound. “All right,” Angie says, nodding at the box. All the workers watching back up against the surrounding walls. The director moves the rope that cordons off the table while Angie pulls from her case some gloves and two long-handled stainless steel forceps, one large and one smaller. Everything has so long led to this moment that now, for her own reasons, Angie realizes she’s afraid of it too, like the rest of them; she’s about to ask either the driver or project director to open the box but decides it’s something she should do herself, as though her hands aren’t shaking and her heart isn’t thundering in her chest. The workers circling the edge of the mezzanine shrink back even though there really isn’t anywhere else to back into; some flee the room. Although the music is much louder now and — as she reaches the large forceps into the box and picks up the glowing snake — grows louder still, it isn’t cacophonous exactly. It’s hardly a din. Some of the time it even exists at a level barely anyone can hear, spiraling into itself, devouring first its own tail and then the rest of itself, at the place where terror becomes beauty before it becomes terror again.
It writhes brilliantly at the end of the forceps. Then suddenly the
downward, but I go on up up and up rising like the bubble of him that rose in
snake’s body sizzles into nothing, and in its place is a vapor, leaving only the snake’s head in the forceps’ grip.
By now most of the excavation workers have fled the mezzanine, along with Angie’s driver. The project director is stricken, fixed to where he stands. Almost spellbound herself, gripped by an ecstasy she’s felt before but can’t identify, Angie tells herself she must work quickly should the snakehead vanish too; with the smaller forceps she invades the snake’s mouth and then, when the tool proves useless, throws the forceps to the floor and sticks her fingers in the snake’s open mouth roughly pulling the helix from its throat. An answer? she wonders, the Question? holding it up before her, one moment a black bubble the next moment collapsed light, neither reducible nor mutable by chaos or god
this is the loss of one’s child
and then in the blink of an eye it’s gone as well. Completely alone in the mezzanine now, the director having unfixed himself and run, Angie spins in her place before rushing into the first suite turning one ear then the other to the walls, then rushing into the next suite and then the third, listening to the walls of each. She runs back into the mezzanine and slides herself along the walls listening with one ear then the other until she stops, cocks her head, and then turns her gaze to the mezzanine’s far end, and a single small pantry door. She crosses the length of the mezzanine. Reaching the small closed door, she places her fingers to it, putting her ear to it and immediately pulling back. She presses her ear to it again and,
my dream that night I miscarried him, up up and up rising to break the surface
opening the door, can practically feel the oxygen leave the room; leaning into the small dark pantry, it seems like minutes before she can see in the black gorge beneath her, far inside the birth canal of the century; the small boy in the water, both unknown to her and more familiar than she can stand, flailing and grasping for someone’s hand, a mother’s that’s too far from him or, perhaps, a man’s with a glint of glass in it — except there is no man there. The boy descends. Angie feels rise behind her the nullifying tide of a life never lived.
Then this is for lost fathers, she thinks. Then this is for lost fathers and lost mothers, and the Measure of the Real, the bond forged by lost fathers and their daughters, mothers and their sons, against which all else is dream. Knowing she has only moments in which to fulfill a life, she gazes over her shoulder just long enough to see hovering overhead the wave of the null, before she vanishes, along with everything around her, into the unremembered.
Divide the mist on the grass by the sway of the trees. Add the still of the water’s surface and multiply the result by forty vineyards of loam. Subtract the burning masts of seven boats while factoring in the cosine of smoke, then add all the rooms of loss times thesuites 2031 of sorrow divided by half the somnambulist highways outbound. Compute the barges of the wind multiplied by the total of fire-robots falling within the radius of rain, adding twenty-one
of the dream of the lake, as something that’s once more being born to the lake
spacemonkeys with a variable of black bridges cubed, subtracting the unmelted icicles of the moon plus the gaslights of night-time, then dividing the result by the whips of love minus the collars of devotion. Taking into account, of course, the square root of snakes times one boat of missing mothers for each year of his life, he’s calculated how and when to make his way to the Chateau which, as darkness falls, he can now see from where he hides on the lakeshore.
He doesn’t ask why they’re after him. He has no idea why but he’s been living the life he lives too long to think that why matters; twelve, thirteen years ago it was soldiers then it was gangsters in the Hollywood Hills, now it’s soldiers again. He recognizes one of them, wonders whatever happened to the other, the one he would row back and forth to the Chateau in the dead of night many years ago. He knows they’re going to catch him, because sooner or later everyone gets caught by something. They’re closing in, all over the hills with their lights and dogs, they’re all over the lake in their boats, swarming everywhere; he tallies the inevitability of his capture; his aren’t the mathematics of freedom but time. An hour, a few minutes. Just long enough to talk to her.
He’s wondering why she came back, although maybe that’s just another why that doesn’t matter. After watching the Chateau dark and silent for more than a year he had finally given up, leaving the lake behind and heading for the sea; he was sleeping on the beach one night when he woke, his ears — which don’t hear very well anymore the sound of heartbeats — picking up one’s faint telegram. Making his way back from the coast past soldiers, moving in the shadowy perimeters of the mulholland highway inland, he tracked the approaching heartbeat from the mojave
that thinks it miscarried me, up up and up to reclaim my place in its womb, and
marshes growing closer, reaching the port at San Gabriel about the time he reached the sepulveda channel. He’s been hiding on shore for a day now, in the trees and watching the lights in the Chateau out on the water. He hears the barking of dogs grow nearer. Thus he’s figured his best moment of opportunity, and with aggregates of light and sound in his head he makes his move and slips into the lake. He swims to the Chateau grotto and, when he reaches its stone steps, lingers for a while in the water to rest, at the place where years ago he used to find food and wine in a basket. Having caught his breath, he climbs out of the water and up the steps, turning out the old lantern that hangs at the top by the door. Either someone, he thinks, will have seen me, or will notice the light is out; in any case he doesn’t have long.