Free Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson Page A

just gotten confused. She assumed she just got turned around, what with currents and tides coming and going. But now up here on top of Justine, hanging on to the rail in this red wind, with her blood splattered across the sky, she suddenly knows something she didn’t until now: that she wasn’t confused. That she wasn’t turned around. That she was pulled through the opening from one lake into another just like it, just like it in every way, every way except one, and that one difference was that on this other lake, there was another silver gondola just like on the first lake—except that this was a gondola without her son.
    In the thrall of the wind and the red sky, there at the top of the billboard she feels hysteria lapping at her mind, first a small swell then rocking her harder and harder: suddenly she understands that the vision of the boy and the owls given to her by the lake has led her here to this vantage point at this place in this moment beneath this sky so that, beneath the red heavens above, she could have this revelation of another lake and, on it, her son, still waiting there even now. Understanding this with more clarity than she’s ever understood anything, she feels the coming hysteria and an irresistible urgency to get off the billboard; but when she moves to climb down, the red wind threatens to blow her off, and finally all she can do is lie flat and wait. Lying flat on her back, she slipsoff her red dress and ties herself to the rail with it, although this is more instinctive than any kind of cool collected action: she’s in a trance because, lying there flat on her back staring up at the sky and the wind, all she can think is that back through that hole at the bottom of the lake, back on the other side of that opening, on the Other Lake she left behind five years ago, her wildman is still there sitting in the gondola looking around, still trying to be brave, still waiting for his mother to come back. He’s been waiting what’s been five years on this side of the hole, on this lake, although who knows how long it’s been on his side, five minutes or five seconds; but he sits there now waiting as it gets darker and darker, calling “Mama?” and gazing over the gondola’s side. The more Lulu thinks about this up there on top of the billboard, the more she knows it to be true. Lying there in the wind beneath the endometrial sky, hysteria finally begins to recede. But the realization of what happened five years ago doesn’t recede with it.

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 shelashed 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