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That night the red storm blows across the lake while she stands on her front porch staring east to where she left her son in the gondola five years ago, promising she would be right back. She waits for the storm to pass but it blows all night and, watching, she lashes herself to the porch with sheets from her bed as she lashed herself to Justine that afternoon with her dress; she can’t bear to abandon him again. She’s torn between two sons, the one she’s seen flying with the owls and the one down beyond the uterus of the lake on the other side, in the gondola still waiting for her.
In the morning she wakes chilled and soaked, still bound to the porch and having slept through the rain in a blizzard of dreams, she who used to never dream. She can’t be certain whether the fever that wracks her is the fever of dreams or the fever of rains, and she finally undoes all the wet saturated knots of the sheets to stumble into the house and fall on the bed. The last time she was this cold was the night five years ago she lowered herself from the gondola into the lake; and as she takes off all her wet clothes and wraps her nude body in several blankets and sleeps again, in her sleep she sees him, still waiting for her in the gondola, calling to her
Mama?
and she wakes to a bed drenched in fever. She smells the dreams like wet ash on the mattress. She sniffs the mattress up and down from the foot of the bed to the head and sometimes catches a whiff of the lake at the juncture where the fresh water meets the sea, sometimes a whiff of the wet wood of oars, and there at the mattress’northeastern quadrant is the smell of him. It’s there. She had forgotten how he smelled but now, this afternoon, in the sweat of her dreams she remembers, because the wet stain of memory is there on the mattress. The mattress has become a map of her dreams and their remorse, longing, rage, desolation. For the rest of the afternoon she lies naked on the bed with her head in that one spot, one side of her face to the mattress so she can smell him, and when she falls asleep yet again, the smell of him is all she dreams. She wakes to a call
Mama?
and hears it so distinctly that for a moment she believes he’s there in the house. She believes he’s fallen asleep in his bed in another room and that he calls out to her like he used to back at the Hamblin. She sits up with a start in the dark and listens, but the call doesn’t come again until she falls back to sleep.
Her fever has passed but it’s exhausted her. She lays back down but every time she falls asleep on the map of dreams she wakes to his call, until even in her fatigue there’s nothing she can do but pull on some clothes, stumble out to the porch of the house, loosen the line of the gondola and get in slowly, wearily pushing herself with the pole east along the coastline of the Hollywood Hills to that place on the lake she last went five years ago. Although it’s not much more than a mile from where she lives, she’s avoided this part of the lake all these years and dreads it now.
The shoreline has changed a little since then, the lake having risen farther down what was once the Strip, now submerged. Rowing along the Hollywood cliffs she sees newly abandoned patches of the hills, empty houses and what were once chic little lanes that now disappear into water. Several members of a tribe of nomads, identifiable by their lack of either blue attire or Lulu’s subversive red, run alongside the water following the gondola for a while before they give up and turn back. Around a bend in the coast she sees the spires of the old Chateau X hotel; as dusk falls she can see lit candles darting in the castle’s top windows. From the top of the hill above the Chateau the sky tram erected just a few years ago launches itself out over the water, the Nichols Canyon Line that runs to the Fairfax station in the east and then to the Old Cahuenga station beyond; plunging south into the lake in the distance is the Port Justine Line that was begun but never finished. Not far from the coast there still bobs on the lake’s surface the remnants of the sky tram shuttle that plummeted into the water ten months ago when the line broke, drowning nine people including two children. Forty-five minutes later the terrain becomes familiar to her in the twilight, minus the empty fair tents she so distinctly remembers as blowing on the Laurel Canyon beaches that evening that now seems like it was just a month ago, a week, an hour.
She rows to the spot; she dreads it; these are the watery coordinates of her loss and shame, and now her failure of nerve. She fears she can’t go through with this and so hopes this vision is madness, that down through the dark water there is no Other Lake on the Other Side attached to this one by a common birth canal. She drifts on the spot, pulling up the oars, and sings in a cracked, unconvinced voice
if there’s a higher light
hearing the hypnotizing Spanish horns in her head — and for a moment she stops to lean her tired self over the side of the gondola and put her ear as close to the water’s surface as the gondola will allow.
She listens for his voice.
Listens for him calling from the Other Lake on the Other Side. For a while she almost convinces herself she hears nothing, and is appalled how momentarily relieved she is, as if she would rather not have to go through whatever she has to go through to have him back; and then, confronted with her relief and guilt, and confronted with his loss all over again, she feels a despair more unnamable than she’s ever felt at any moment in these five years, which she wouldn’t have thought possible. Leaning over the side of the gondola, her face very close to the water so that the ends of her hair are wet, she begins to cry, tears dropping onto the surface of the lake until
Mama?
unmistakably. Oh dear God she says to herself, and then hears it again
Mama?
and she recoils from the lake. She stares at the black water his Mama? floating up through the dark water toward the surface like a fish. She can see it down below silvery and fluttery light, with the scales of a child’s sobbing. With the waver of his voice the word flashes in and out of view; when she lunges her hand down into the lake she feels his call brush against her fingertips before slipping away. She calls back. For a moment it sticks in her throat
Kirk?
and then she watches it fall from her mouth and sink into the lake, blue and porcelain and breathless. There’s a moment’s silence before he answers, with that question mark so insistent it’s not a question
Mama?
and then she begins rowing away. This is her great failure of nerve. Maybe it’s that she can’t bring herself to believe. Maybe it’s that she’s afraid reaching him is beyond her … and that’s unbearable, because she’s always been convinced she would do anything for him. She’s always been convinced she would hurl herself off any towering building, before any roaring airplane, in any harm’s way for him. When he was born, every instinct of self-interest seemed to give way to an instinct she never knew she had before she had him: the love of something bigger than the love of one’s own life; and now in this moment she’s failed that love.