The Dark Lake (15 page)

"Jane sneezed three hundred dollars’ worth of coke into the air.” Krishna laughed, and her black eyes seemed to have mirrors in them as she glanced over at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire cat's.

"Yep, but it was her money," Gay said
. "So the only one who can really be pissed off at her is herself."

"Oh I am, believe me."

"We can pay you back," Krishna promised, with the smile still fresh from the laughter.

"Oh for sure, believe me, we will," I promised, nodding.

"Oh God!” He shook his head, rubbed his eyes and laughed. "That shit
is
good, isn't it? No, I'm not giving you the money. If you get more of it, it certainly won't be on my head."

"Oh God, what are we gonna do?” Krishna whined.

"Here," he said, grabbing his stash of weed, "roll yourselves a joint. I'm gonna go take a nap.”

And with that he went into his room, which was literally covered from wall to wall with scattered and carelessly stacked books
: books on philosophy—Kant, Hegel, Aristotle—books on biology, chemistry, math, books on music, old volumes of
Rolling Stone
magazine. I'd been in there. It was like wading through a pool up to your knees practically.

He collapsed on his mattress with no sheet
, which was thrown right on the floor, and we smoked a joint and talked some more about where to go and how to find more coke before we left.

So it was a stoned plan, the one we came up with. We would steal the money.

* * *

"I think what happened was … I don't know why, but for some reason they all grew up. And I didn't…"

"Uh huh…" Miriam nodded ferociously. "Good, Jane, keep going, keep going…” She rolled her hand in the 'give me more' motion.

"I don't know why
, but I guess it was the trauma…"

"The trauma?” she asked, eyebrows up.

"Of the car going in the lake," I said, "maybe because I …"

"Shall we look at the…"

"No! No! I have to…"

"Do you want the nightmares to end?"

"No! I mean yes! Isn't our time up?"

"See you next week then
, Jane.” She held the door open for me with a wary grin.

"Did they call from the
Gazette
?” I asked my mom.

"Oh come on, they are not gonna call from that job,” she said from behind the newspaper.

"How can you read in the dark?” I asked, annoyed. I knew the answer.

"I do not like to waste money,” came the
so-predictable response.

"You will hurt your eyes reading in the dark."

"I do not waste electricity."

"It's not wasting it if you need it. Aren't your eyes worth preserving?"

She only turned the page in response. It was dark in the whole house. I turned on the kitchen light, dining-room light, the basement light, and the light in the living room on my way to the stairway, where I lit the way up to my bedroom. Basically I left a path of turned-on lights behind me through the whole house in response to her stinginess. They stayed on less than two minutes. I turned three of them on again: the living room, the dining room, and the stairway. She turned them off immediately, and with a huff.

"God damn it
, I am not going to walk around here in the dark, you cheapskate," I screamed, and slammed the bedroom door behind me. Then I walked back out and turned on the hall light just in time to hear about how she was Scottish and thrifty with money.

I
laid down on my bed. It was neatly made, but I hadn't made it. I thought maybe I could call that newspaperwoman and ask her about the job. What was her name again, oh yeah, Leelah. Leelah the 1940s pin-up girl. Leelah with the dark-red lipstick and the curly, long, well-kept, black hair, and the violet-colored eyes with deep, black, heavily made-up lashes. Laughing at me. Wanting to see who it was that had a car in the lake. God damn her.

It was a cold night, as all winter nights were. Some were only colder than others. I sort of didn't want to be in this dark house anymore
; it was oppressive. The thought of watching cable cheered me up, but I thought maybe I could go for a drive.

I went back down through the house. This time I didn't pass my mom. I got in the car and spent a few moments just waiting for it to heat back up again, breathing the visible air out like puffs of smoke from a cigarette. It made me want a cigarette, but I was trying to quit. I could barely afford them anymore. And I was so broke lately I was reduced to carrying a matchbook around in my pants pocket, instead of owning my own lighter.

I drove down New York Avenue. I'd never been to the real New York. Krishna always talked about how great it was there, and Ziggy sent us cool things he'd bought downtown there, like that bootleg copy of ‘Cocksucker Blues.’ I drove toward the lake and, out of mindlessness and good music on the car radio, just found myself driving around the edge as far as I could go. If you went north you ended up driving past the carp ponds. If you went south, (or was it an east-west directional axis, I don't know) then it became residential. You had to go through the richest neighborhoods in town, the Kellermans, who owned Kellerman Napkin, the Miltons, who owned Milton Candle, and were supposedly the richest family in town, if not the county, Sara Seyemore’s house.

***

"Get me back to class! If I don't go today they are not gonna let me play tonight!” Gay demands in a pissed-off voice.

"You are so wasted, they're not gonna let you play anyway,” Krishna mentions.

"I am not dropping you off. What is this bullshit?” I reply, but indeed I drive toward Oshkosh North High to let her out for her stupid, idiotic, jock-like, "What is it this time, basketball?"

"Volleyball," Gay answers calmly from the back, arms folded.

Where is the yelling, smart-ass, bong-toking, acid-taking, goldfish-rescuing, hands-free bike riding, Jackson Five listening 'girl' now? Where is that Gay? I want that one back.

“Ok
ay, I'll drop you off, but you have to be
seen
getting out of the druggy car.” I pull up right on to the grass and drive quite a ways on it.

"Oh my God
, what is she doing?” Gay yells.

"She's dropping you off!" Krishna is in stitches.

"Okay, get out." I smile. My car is literally in front of her class window, and I make sure to wave at everyone inside.

Gay gets sheepishly, yet cooperatively
, out of the car and walks to her class.

***

If you kept hugging the lake you had to see all these houses, but you could take a shortcut. You couldn't actually see the lake when you drove past the million-dollar homes. You could only glimpse the lake through the space between the houses. The space between …

But if you took the short
cut, you cut across directly to the Pioneer Inn, the fancy bridge, with the mall on the right, and you would have to take High Street and pass by Ziggy's and go past the library, and look at the stone lions… the stoned lions…

Always reminded me of the
Twilight Zone
, where the library lions came to life in the black and white park and chased the businessman.
Twilight Zone
every night at 10:00, meet at my house everyone, an unspoken ritual came up somehow. When did that start? But there we'd all be in the dark, stoned like the lions in front of the library, lying on the living-room floor, or in easy chairs turned backwards completely on their backs with the feet part up in the air, giggling.

"When you're dead
, you're dead. And then it doesn't matter anymore when you died or how long you lived," Krishna observes, one night after another excursion into the mundane philo-musings of Rod Serling that seem brilliant when you're stoned.

"No, that's not true," Ziggy maintains
. "You don't die when you die, you die when the last person who knew you forgets you."

"No way," Krishna argues, "When you die, the whole universe dies because you're not there to perceive it."

"Uhn huh," he says, "you are more than the sum of your parts—"

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Gay interrupts.

"You are not just the body you are in—"

"So you believe in souls?” I ask.

"No," he says, "you don't need to believe in souls for this to be true—"

"It's either true or it's not true
; it wouldn't matter what you would need to believe," Gay interjects.

Each other's faces are lit intermittently whenever the scene on the screen is bright.

"No, for logical consistency," Ziggy says.

"Logical consistency with what?” Krishna says, becoming amused.

"With the thing I said before—that you don't die when you die. You are more than that—"

"A soul," I reiterate.

"No, you don't need a soul for this to be true. Your existence includes the concept of you in the minds of the people who knew you. This was why Achilles chose immortality over a long life. He knew that to die completely was to be forgotten."

And then Gay says, "
Not because his soul would live, but because you die when the last person who knew you forgets you."

"Or who knew of you," Ziggy clarifies. He lays on his back, arms folded, squinting at the ceiling, head tilted slightly to the side, like he is coming up with this stuff as he speaks, trying it out in his mind.

"No," Krishna says after a long moment of silence, and halfway through another episode, and another clove cigarette. "You die when you die. And that's it."

***

How far had I driven now? I'd passed the Pioneer Inn a while ago, and I'd passed the railroad tracks on the edge of town, and the turnoff to my first boyfriend's house, where I'd driven without my license once. I passed my mom in her car, and to this day I could still see that angry face.

For some reason I always thought of this road covered in red and orange blowing leaves, and pumpkins. Oh yea
h, it was fall when that happened. And now it was winter, and ice, and the air hurt my skin.

The road began to veer left after that, if you stayed on hwy 45, and would pass through
Fon du Lac, if I kept going, which meant Bottom of Lake, in French—at least I think it does. I remember my dad saying that …

"Miriam," I said, "I don't think they will call me from that job. But I thought maybe I could call them. Do you think I should? My mom doesn't think I should."

"Have you tried to contact Krishna lately?"

"Yeah, but she's never home, she never returns my calls."

"How are the
anger-management classes going?"

"Ok
ay I guess, I have been just sitting there in the classes because you can't get a word in."

"What about that woman, what was her name again, the one who drove you home the night your car died?"

"Oh, her, she hasn't been back. I can't remember, Lisa or something like that. She never came back. I thought I dreamed that."

"Didn't you tell me there was no difference between your dreams and reality?"

"Is there?” I asked, looking up; would there be an answer. "I know I am so delusional I can barely tell one thing from another anymore. I think I should probably be hospitalized."

"Yes, you probably should."

"Then why don't you hospitalize me? Have me committed?"

"Do you think I need to?” she asked, raising her eyes from her notes, and taking off her clear glasses. She wore a professional outfit in pastel colors. Her hair was neatly coifed. Her nails were long and painted coral pink, which looked elegant against her very black
, slender, long fingers.

I felt safe in her office.

"I don't know. Home is getting to be a more and more difficult place to be. I can't move out, but I think I'd like to. I guess I either need to apply for disability or get into a hospital. My mom is…"

"What about her?"

What was it?

"Sometimes it seems like all she does is turn the lights out on me. And scowl. Why is she so angry all the time?"

"I don't know?” she answered.

"Well, I wasn't asking you. Obviously you wouldn't know. It's just a rhetorical question."

"We are getting somewhere here,” she began. "Every week I feel we are getting closer and closer to a breakthrough."

Did she just say this to keep me coming back?

"Does my mom pay you?"

"And I think as we get closer to something here
, it makes it harder for you out there. That's okay. It's understandable. This week, why don't you focus on getting the disability process started, instead of continuing to try and get a job. I think it might be too much for you to work right now. I'll vouch for you, that you are disabled."

"Maybe tomorrow, I suppose I can try."