Mama
and she scoops it up in her hands. She cups it in her hands and sits in the gondola looking at it, as if it’s a prayer and the gondola is a floating pew. She splashes her face with it and feels his voice run down her cheeks. For a moment she covers her eyes. She feels his voice dry on her face. She looks back down into the lake and now deep in the black water she sees something else, slowly floating up to her, another answer; and she reaches into the water and takes it as it breaks the surface.
In these five years she’s forgotten all about it. It’s a small plastic monkey in a red spacesuit with a space helmet. She thinks about that last day in the gondola five years ago, Kirk clutching in his hand the monkey he named after himself; she remembers slipping into the water and hearing his heartbeat under the water, and looking up through the water and seeing him peer over the edge of the gondola, still holding the monkeyman he called Kulk in his fingers. She remembers now the terrible emptiness of the gondola when she returned to the water’s surface a minute later, the way there had been no sign of him at all, and now she looks at the toy monkey that’s come floating up to her out of the lake and says
I’m coming
and slips her naked body, pink with the light of the red sky, over the gondola’s side. As she slips beneath the water she thinks maybe she hears someone on the shore finally break the silence of the lake and shout out No! but she isn’t certain about that, that may be in my own head. Because I also hear if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me but I look around for some sign of the melody bolder than the others, having dared to swim into this forbidden zone of the lake but I don’t see it, so the song must be in my head too … all the songs and all the No’s are in my head. I sink. I don’t swim to the hole below, I let it pull me. I didn ’t even get a good gulp of air first, I’m calm in my chest and my descent, and feel the peace that maybe comes with drowning, once the panic is over … I don’t know why I don’t panic. I look up and see the gondola above me like I saw it above me the last time I went this way, five years ago, but this time without his small head looking over the side. As I sink there rise around me the small canyon houses that went under when the lake first appeared, I can see below me the sidewalks that once lined the boulevard below me too, and around me the neighborhood where I walked years ago pregnant not much more than a week from labor, drawn here as I’m drawn now, only to find at my feet a black puddle where now is the dark hole I can see through the water’s murk, coming up at me, the opening of the lake’s birth canal, here it comes. Here it comes. Too small it would seem for anyone to slip through, and yet I
slip through anyway, drawn beyond any resistance, pushed through in a new
birth, when domination is submission and submission is domination, shaking
myself loose of the love that held me down so as to find inside me the love that
2017(2016)
~ ~ ~
will save him, continuing down with bits of everyone I’ve ever been falling
away from me, down down down down in what I know is my own passage, as
~ ~ ~
In his sleep, the dome of his eyelids is red, like the bloody red sky of L.A. that he remembers from nine years ago, and he hears the song like he heard it that day in the Square twenty-eight years ago.
In his dream, which he has often, he’s standing there in the Square again, although it’s not clear to him whether he’s nineteen again, as he was then, or in his late forties, as he is now. He clutches her yellow dress in his hand—K, beautiful betrayer—and watches the tank roll toward him. Even looking at the famous photograph that thrilled the world, one still couldn’t know how big that tank really was.
though it’s unique to me as the same passage would be unique to someone
~ ~ ~
But when he stood there in the Square that day twenty-eight years ago, watching it come closer, it rolled toward him like a huge metallic wave, followed by another behind it, and another behind that and another behind that.
Now in his dream the tank rolls toward him more like a giant stainless-steel egg, with another behind it. The rolling of the eggs always nauseates him; once he lurched from the dream running for the latrine, vomiting in the outer tunnel. Just as it was twenty-eight years ago, in the dream he knows that somewhere, along with the rest of the world, she’s watching. Somewhere she’s watching, was what he thought to himself on that June day, and in his dream he thinks it to himself now; and knowing this, he can die, because he’s not just dying for the freedom of man, he’s dying for the tyranny of love. Kristin, he whispers into the barrel of the tank’s gun as though it’s the opening between her legs and he’s her slave again, whispering her name that curls up into her body like smoke.
In his dream, standing in the Square as the tanks roll toward him like great eggs, he hears the song as he heard it that morning. Hears it drift out from what he reasoned at the time must be, beneath the red sky, some unknown window.
else, the same but different, a passage without time, that might take a minute
~ ~ ~
For a moment in his dream he’s distracted. As he did that morning, he searches for it, a melody he would hear again only once, years later.
A gust rises on the Square as mysterious as the song, as though to blow the song away, as though to blow him out of the way of the tanks: Is the gust, he wondered at the time, an ally meaning to rescue me, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove me? before he learned it was really an anarchist without conviction. He stands his ground. The tank tries to go around him, he moves to block it. The tank moves again, so does he. Was it only six minutes, as a newsmagazine reported? Of course it seemed much longer. There in the Square he’s ecstatic in his terror: Try to deny me now, he says to her, as I defy the world. As happened then, he hears the melody and in his dream is just beginning to remember its source, leaning into the large gun barrel of the tank before him, when there is out of the corner of his vision a blinding flash of something, and he raises his hand to shield his eyes. At some point in the dream he sees her appear at the far end of the Square that’s empty except for him and the tanks, a distant figure crossing the Square toward him.
~ ~ ~
He knows it isn’t his Kristin. Rather, as she grows in the distance it’s the Mistress; in his dream he vaguely knows she doesn’t belong here, that she’s out of time. She’s dressed as
or a hundred years depending on the one being born through it, from
always, in stockings and garters and heels and a small chain belt around her waist, but the attire is more an assertion of power than a suggestion of seduction. In one hand she carries the chain leash she keeps for him, in the other her black riding crop. She has shoulder-length sandy hair; she isn’t beautiful but commanding. She doesn’t offer her sensuality but marshals it. As she strides toward him across the Square, her eyes locked on him never averted, not alluring but imperious, a spreading pool of black water precedes her like an honor guard. As she grows closer, the pool spreads faster and wider, seeping across the Square until it’s a wet black mirror tinged with red, reflecting the sky above.