Read Online Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson - Free Book Online Page A

sound she sings
for my release …
     
    and bares her thigh to it, inviting its lunge.
    One night at dusk before the sun falls, the final vision comes. A black globe of water rises from the lake’s surface just as the moon chases the sun into the west. “Kirk!” she calls to the bubble and in its wet wound there he is again far away, same black dot as he was the night five years ago when she saw him carried off, but distinct, unmistakable, calmly issuing directives to his chagrinned feathered squadron. Somewhere inside the periscope of the lake, for one fleeting moment she watches him fly away once more, and can almost see him waving back to her or maybe calling to her in the language of hands
    catch you next time Mama, but now I’ve got places to go, things to do….
     
    Even when she lived in Tokyo, when the signs were everywhere, she never understood how she was the agent of chaos. Later she would tell herself Kirk was the chaos factor in her life because, pregnant with him, she would walk the streets of Tokyo andaround her everything went berserk: radios went haywire, subways broke down, glass buildings shattered. Had she been as self-aware as she thought she was, she might have noted how it was that on her return to Los Angeles a lake appeared. In the early months of the new century, it was she who embodied the chaos of the coming age. Her child would only be chaos’ son.

And now she sits by the lake in a state of truce. She’s not certain she can actually say the lake delivered him back to her, but a deal is a deal, so she takes off her clothes and gives herself to the lake, lowers herself in the lake’s waters for a while and gives the lake a chance to have her way with Lulu in the moonlight.
    But Zed is too weary of all her brides, and soon Lulu climbs back up on the porch, goes inside the house and gets under the covers of her bed and in the dark tells her boy a story, the first in five years; she makes it up as she goes along, as she used to. There was a little train named Tyrone that rode through hills and across deserts and past houses and towns and over bridges until it reached the end of its track where there was a cloud raining, and just beyond the raining cloud was a rainbow. And for a long timeTyrone was afraid to go through the rainbow to the other side where there was no track he could see, and every day he would try to work up the courage until one day he finally did. He went through the rainbow and on the other side was a tunnel, and the rainbow became a train track, with rails of green and yellow, and tracks of orange and purple. And in the meantime there was a little tugboat named Tyrone, sailing along the shore of a huge lake….
    But
    Kirk interrupts in the dark, finger poised in correction
    you said Tyrone is a
train—
    Yes Tyrone is a train,
she answers,
but the tugboat is named Tyrone too, and he’s sailing along the shore of the lake, and on the beach is a little boy named Kirk
     
    and she expects him to say, That’s
my
name, but he doesn’t, accepting this as if it makes complete sense, eyes blinking in the light of the moon off the lake beyond the bedroom window.
    The boy named Kirk waves to Tyrone the Tugboat.
Tyrone the Tugboat!
he calls,
I want to sail away with you,
so Tyrone the Tugboat sails over to the beach and the boy named Kirk climbs in, and they sail out onto the lake and down the Venice Channel where the canals used to be, down to the marina where the harbor used to be, out to sea. They sail past other boats, past tropical islands, with fish and dolphins and squid swimming alongside, following a faraway cloud in the sky, and just when they reach the cloud it bursts into rain, and just beyond the rain is a rainbow, and Tyrone the Tugboat is afraid to sail into the rainbow because he doesn’t know what’s on the other side. But Kirk the boy gives Tyrone the courage to go on, and they sail into the rainbow and on the other side is a cave in the ocean, and inside the