When a woman becomes a mother, she develops this new instinct for danger. She develops this instinct for every possible disaster that awaits her child around every corner. Lulu, once called Kristin, doesn’t know if five years ago her danger-instinct failed or overwhelmed all reason so that she led her son to danger instead of from it, so that everything she did to protect him only endangered him. Little amorphous lumps of human clay, that’s what she once thought babies were; but then she found there were things about her child that had nothing to do with her, things that were his own from the beginning, from the minute he was born, perhaps from before he was born, perhaps from before he was conceived, although there was no point getting into that since no one knows anyway. Anyway, she realized, that’s when you’re stuck with the Soul. That’s when your child becomes inescapable evidence of the cosmos, a membrane-map of the spirit, that’s when God becomes a Piercing Hope or Dark Suspicion or both. Because there’s nothing a mother fears more than the chaos of the world.
And then danger has won.
~ ~ ~
Then danger has won. Then fear takes a form. Detaches itself from all the things she was afraid of, the reasonable things and the stupid, and becomes its own thing, bigger than either the reasonable things or the stupid things. Grows in the pregnant heart until it’s born; and then she stops being a person, then she becomes fear’s walking womb.
Then her fear is bigger than her motherhood. Fear has metamorphosed into the danger it feared
and it’s called a lake.
Absently she listens to the radio all the time now, the radio she listened to all the time with her son when the lake came because the music was the one thing the lake, alive with its own music, couldn’t or wouldn’t drown. She sits on the porch of her house while the people sail by looking at her, and she listens for a song she and Kirk sang together
all the little babies go, Oh! oh! I want to!
while sometimes the snakes of music swarming the lake coil through her house. They wind along wooden beams, pythons of melancholy English verse from before she was born, and Debussy melodies but only if Debussy had been a bossa nova guitarist in a heroin haze, brooding aquatic chamber quartets rising in the background like autumn glimpsed for the first time on the horizon of midsummer. Boas — gorgeous and dangerous — of static bursts and swoons of strings drape themselves along her window sill and slither through her house like women’s voices, dusky, jazz-depraved, desperate.
The first time the lake sends her a vision, Lulu is sitting on her porch at dusk and feels a swell in the lake beneath her. It slowly rises from the water before her, a huge bubble. She gets up from the chair and walks to the edge of the porch and, as she watches, the bubble bursts to reveal a man in his forties with black hair and black beard and startling electric blue eyes, a man whose name she never knew. She lived with him when she first came to L. A. as a teenager nine years before, a kind of sexual serf servicing him when, after being abandoned by his pregnant Asian-American wife, he wasn’t crashing around in a secret room at the bottom of his house where he worked day and drunken night on a huge blue calendar that completely reordered history according to the chronology and logic of apocalypse. Even now she looks back on that time dispassionately, having grown up with a practical view of her own sensuality and surviving then by whatever means she could — until one night he disappeared. She wasn’t altogether certain he was even the father until Kirk was born, another candidate having been a doltish Japanese boy who jumped her one afternoon in the rain out in the Black Clock time-capsule cemetery on the west side of town, now under water, before out of the blue a lightning bolt literally left him lying next to her on the grass, life only in his erection. In the early months of her pregnancy, and particularly on the night she believed she miscarried her twins only for them to somehow become manifest again in an inexplicable resurrection, she felt Kirk and Bronte glow inside her as if with electricity — so when Kirk was born, she wouldn’t have been shocked if he had been half Asian. Now as Kirk’s father rises from the lake in Lulu’s vision, it’s only long enough for him to reach out to her, not as if asking her to save him but as if beseeching her to understand or even forgive him; and at that moment, for the first time in the eight years since she last saw him, although she’s often suspected it, she knows he’s dead.
Her house is drenched with the evidence of visions. She wakes in the morning to puddles by the bed, in the hallway, just inside the front door, and knows other visions came to her in the night when she was asleep. Her next vision is of her other self. Another twilight and again the lake bubbles, and again Lulu rises from her chair but not going so near the water, and from out of the lake’s fountain emerges Kristin. This other self swims to the edge of the porch and, reaching up and grabbing hold of the post, looks at Lulu for a full minute with the lake glistening on her skin and her hair hanging in her face, before she sinks back into the water without a breath. She comes again three nights later. This woman Kristin who looks just like Lulu, who is just like Lulu, who is the woman Lulu was before she became Lulu, swims up from the bottom of the lake and breaks the surface of Lulu’s nights. Lulu wakes from her bed just long enough to sit up and catch sight of Kristin flitting around the corner of the bedroom door, before Lulu falls back to sleep; but then the next night Lulu wakes right before dawn and Kristin is sitting in the corner of the dark bedroom, naked and wet, and she says, Why did you leave me?
“I couldn’t stand to be you anymore,” Lulu answers, “couldn’t stand to be Kristin … you left him in the fucking boat in the middle of the lake. Why did you do that, or … why did we do that … leave him there like that?”
Doesn’t matter anymore why, Kristin answers in the corner. There’s some serious point-missing going on here if you don’t know that by now.
“I don’t care about you or me anymore,” Lulu says.
Me neither.
“All I care about is him.” In the dark, she starts to cry.
Then go find him, Kristin says.
“I don’t know,” really crying.
Look, Kristin says, pointing to the front door that Lulu can see from the bedroom, and Lulu gets up and goes out onto the porch, and the lake is black and still and the light of the sun is just starting to pale the sky a dark dawn-blue over the east hills, and Lulu turns to stare back into the house where Kristin was a minute ago, but then she hears the lake bubbling again, although she’s never had a vision at dawn, and Lulu stares into the water black with sunrise and hears from its bubble a small faraway sound and takes the telescope that hangs from the beam of the porch and looks through it down into the bubble into the funnel of the lake and what she sees in the reflection of the barely paling sky makes her pull away as if the telescope is enchanted and she doesn’t trust what it shows her.
At first she thinks it’s an airplane, which in itself is startling because there haven’t been any airplanes in the skies of L.A. for a long time. But when she squints she sees it’s not an airplane rather it’s something very little, flying deep down in the sky of the bubble. She looks back into the telescope.
II Duce, bigger now of course than when she last saw him five years ago, pointing this way and that, talking with his arms and hands, conducting his higher mathematics and dividing night-robots by day-robots, directing the aging owl that still holds him in its talons. A battalion of owls wearily follows. Go this way, go that way! happily snapping orders at them, go up, go down! with great delight while the owls appear to be, oh, a little beleaguered maybe? to her untrained eye, of course … what does she know from beleaguered owls? But as if they’re thinking maybe this is a classic case of having bitten off more than they can chew, although she supposes just letting go of him is out of the question, against an owl’s owlish nature.
She doesn’t hear her Kierkegaard saying “please” either, she notices that right off. What happened to his manners I taught him, is all she can think.