From up over the hills in the far west come the first wave of owls, still far away enough that their shadows on my back skitter up my spine like small black spiders. Reflexively I turn to face the sun through the window, squinting for sight of them and looking to my own building on the other side of the lake, hoping Valerie has scurried Kirk to safety. For a while Doc seems frozen where she stands. With a kind of hesitation I’ve never seen in her, she lays her hands on the walls and moves through the apartment slowly, from the far doorway that already darkens with night into the part of it blood-red with sunset, like she’s melting into the decomposed smear of the dead day, hands spreading out away from her until it’s like she’s scorched to the wall, face burned in the plaster.
She doesn’t make any sound at all for a minute. Then I hear this cry — at first I think it’s coming from the room itself — and she drops to the floor. The grief on her face is … it’s like her face is trying to catch up to it, eyes and mouth so stricken they’re incapable of tears or sound, and, well, I just wish I didn’t see it. God only knows what terrible song she heard coming out of that room, and I just wish I hadn’t seen it, because some last shred of trust in me shatters when I see her fall apart like this, some small capacity for faith I didn’t even know I still had, until this moment when I know I don’t have it anymore. Doc the quietly indomitable, who tends to sick and dying houses with the kind of resolve where strength trumps sympathy every time, lies at my feet waiting for whatever she’s sensed in this room to recede just far enough away that she can finally lower all her defenses against it and break down.
Just standing there I don’t know whether I feel more terrified or betrayed, because this isn’t my role with Doc, to comfort her. It’s her role to comfort me, and I can’t even bring myself to go near her. All I can do is crouch on the floor studying her from somewhere near the new sea level, the best I can offer is eye contact, if she wants it. She never tells me what the walls sing. She never tells me what she heard in the yawn of the floor beneath her. What’s the matter with you! is all I can finally scream at her out on the lake, after waiting almost an hour in that room for Doc to get herself together or for the other Kristin to show, which we both know isn’t going to happen, until finally it starts to get dark enough that I know we have to get back to the gondola if we ’re going to find our way back through the garage and across the water. “ Why are you acting like this? it ’s just another dead building …!” I’m hysterical with disillusion. The whole trip back across the water she doesn’t look at me at all, sitting in the gondola staring straight ahead in this blank way until all I can say is, I depended on you, to be better and stronger and braver and wiser than I can ever be … and then before the final fall of dark she looks straight at me, the mouth once younger than the rest of her now old, the eyes once older now ancient.
~ ~ ~
Are you a monkey?
No!
Are you a boy?
No!
Are you a Bright Light!
No!
No? and my heart sinks. Then what are you? … and with great glee….
I’m Nothing!
he cries, clapping his hands together.
~ ~ ~
I’m lying naked on the Laurel banks. In reality there are no such banks anymore, they’re long since underwater but in my dream there’s no lake just the banks where I lie at war with my womb….
… it grows dark. We’re well into the hour of the owls. From out of the trees behind me I hear him come, I close my eyes and wait, feel his hands on my feet and feel him lower himself to my thighs. He puts his tongue inside me. Mao of my desire, killer of my trust: I feel his words make their way up inside me. At the moment of the most unwilling orgasm I’ve ever had, I grab him by his black Chinese hair and my water breaks — am I pregnant? — and the torrent that pours from me sweeps in its path the Chevron at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights (in reality now long gone), rushes down the street and ebbs for a minute before streaming down the Strip. The force of it tears him from me. Last I see him he’s caught in the racing flood somewhere down the boulevard, trying to keep his head above the water as his arms flail frantically to grab on to something. I laugh out loud at the sight of it. Then in the last gush here comes Bronte, finally ready to emerge, and I reach to catch her as she leaves me but, slick with afterbirth, she slips from my hands, caught in an undertow that burps her up once at Zed’s center before pulling her back down….
I wake. I bolt upright. Because my thighs are soaked, for a minute I’m confused, certain I’ve given birth to the lake. I can still smell the dream. My heart pounds with fear. I lunge at the white waves of the bed before me to catch my daughter I’ve ejected so cruelly, all before my consciousness understands it was a dream — but I can still smell the dream. I catch my breath in the dark to wonder what’s wrong, and look out the window by my bed and, in the light of the moon, see the ripples of the lake below me. Then I realize I haven’t heard Kierkegaard’s Mama where are you, his Mama come back, and I stumble through the apartment from my bed to his.
An amniotic fog fills the room. I can barely see him through it. The smell of birth and the lake is overpowering. I move through the vapor to his crib where he sleeps too soundly, and pick him up … he barely stirs. In his sleep his hand grasps for Kulk his missing spacemonkey, and his face glistens from the fog off the lake. I take him from his room and close his door behind me. I take him to my bed and put him on the pillow next to mine where he goes on sleeping. I place my body like a barrier between him and the window with the lake beyond it. I watch the center of the lake waiting, my heart still pounds from my dream — but now it isn’t a dream:
the lake is coming for him.
~ ~ ~
When I wake this morning, the hotel is quiet. There are no sounds in the hall, or in the rooms above or below me. Kirk still sleeps on the pillow … almost always he wakes before I do. I lean over him, inches from his face, and listen to his breathing, watch his chest rise and fall. I get up from the bed only kind of remembering at the last second to pull on a robe … the world’s never been as casual about my nakedness as I am. I walk out in the hall and down to the writer’s room, my ear at the door listening for the sound of old movies or even the tapping on the computer of him working. But I don’t hear anything.
It’s still early enough that the hall lights are on except, I notice, in the east end of the hotel, and I realize this part of the building has finally lost power. I go back to my room and Kirk still sleeps on the pillow, and leaning back out the window I see the black waters of the lake have already pushed past our hotel. The lake extends north to the hills, just a sliver of the top of the peninsula still dry land.