The Dark Lake (17 page)

"Sounds like Parmenides," Ziggy says.

"Parmeni-Who?” asks Krishna's boyfriend.

"Parmenides, Parmenides
, Parmenides …Parmesan cheese," from the floor.

***

I stood at the door of my old room, the one I slept in as a child—as a six year old—as an eight year old. As Janey Lou.

I put my hand on the knob.
Climb the red, carpeted stairs.
I turned the knob, but I couldn't open it. If I did I might see an empty, old room, and I couldn't face that.

So I went back downstairs to the kitchen. Outside the snow fell in big flakes. I put my hand on the glass and felt the coldness. Icicles hung from the porch. So thick at the top, and so tiny and thin at the bottom. So pretty.

I went back to lie down on the sofa to watch the marathon, but after I lay down for a minute the cable went off. I got up to mess with the knobs. It was off. All I got was static.

With the cable still off the next day, and the next, I hung around the house in shock all day. I kept trying to fix the TV. I banged the side of it. I tried calling the cable company but couldn't get through. I found the number in the phone book and everything, but then I think it must have been the wrong number, from the garbled conversation I got. I looked for my mom. She was nowhere in the house. I wondered if she paid the bill. I went out of the house and the car was gone. How would I get to my classes?

I tried the door to get back in but it wouldn't open. I walked down New York Street toward Miriam's office. It was evening when I started. The darker it got the more I wanted to go home. I started getting lost, turned around. I began to retrace my steps like I did when I was little, and had lost my way. I would go back and see if there was some way in. Thank goodness I had remembered my coat, or I would be freezing out there. I had a pack of cigarettes too, in my pocket, and a pack of matches, so I was set for a while. I glanced at the front yard, covered by up to a foot of snow. That must have been what I’d seen earlier, just a trick of the light that made me think I saw the grass overgrown all the way to my knees, as if it were an abandoned house. Not hallucinations, just a trick of the moonlight.

It was so cold. How long had this window been broken out? I stood in front of it shivering. I suppose I could climb back in. Had Mom lost her key and had to climb in? The glass was shattered out. There were glass shards out here in front of the window. An empty glass pint of whiskey lay at my feet. I shuddered, and reached to pick it up, then changed my mind. It wasn’t there. It couldn’t be there. If I touch it, and it is there, then God only knows what it means. So I stopped looking at it.

I approached the window
, reasoning whether I should crawl through the window. That sounded pretty fucked up though. Maybe I should, maybe it was the only way to get back inside. Or maybe I could go on a drinking binge, getting people to buy me drinks in the bars just long enough to have a warm place to stay. The cold snow around my ankles was beginning to soak through my socks.

Then I heard my mother’s voice coming from inside the house. Oh good, she’s in there. She can let me in. But why is it still dark in there? I got closer to the window, touching the edges, careful of the glass. I called to her. A cold wind blew the gold curtains till they billowed inside the darkness. It was only light enough to barely make out any of the furniture.

“Mom?” I shouted into the void and heard an echo.

Nothing.

It sounded like I heard shouting from the back—the sound of an argument. A cloud passed over the moon and all went completely black. Only the snow behind me reflected the streetlights, and lit the side of the house white. Then the cloud passed and the moonlight shone so I could make out some of the furniture, but it didn’t look right, somehow. Something was terribly wrong. The gold couch looked wrong. The gold wallpaper seemed wrong. I thought it was my mom in there, but something told me this was not my mom—that I had better not try to climb through the window. I touched the broken glass. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “Mom?” I called one more time.

“
I gave up on you a long time ago
,” I heard a whispering, hushed voice say, and it sounded like my mom. I couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from, but I knew it wasn’t her. I knew it wasn’t her. It was just the wind, and my imagination.

I knew it wasn’t her, but I immediately I took off running. I ran toward Miriam’s, as if I could out
run these hallucinations. The mental hospital, that’s where I need to go. Maybe she can get me there. I don’t know how to get there on my own. It’s out by the lighthouse. I have no car. I’m on foot, I can’t get there; I just have to run.

Miriam's office was about sixteen blocks away. I had to run past Walker
’s, the largest grocery store on New York Avenue. Then past the train tracks. There were three sets of train tracks in Oshkosh. Open Pantry on my left. Open Panties. Panting as I run.

Left on Main Street, slide around that corner so fast I slip and fall and
get up again as fast as I can.

Miriam's office was dark. I guess I could wait, bu
t not outside. It was too cold.

There was a Laundromat next door. I could wait in there. Thank God it’s open. I burst in the door and tried to calm down my breathing.

I found a quarter on the floor. Foolishly, I hadn't brought any cash with me, or my purse. I don't know why.

I put the quarter in the pay-phone slot and called my mom. When I did get hold of her I was going to find out what in the heck was going on. Don't tell me she'd gone somewhere and locked me out. Could that happen? I know she had things to do and all, like showing her home-interiors products, and visiting people. But still, she should be home soon.

I let the pho
ne ring and ring and ring.

There was a load of clothes going round and round in a dryer
, but there was nobody in there. I went and sat down in front of it and just stared. A red shirt in there fell into a repetitive pattern.

***

“Ames is here,” Gay had shouted. I think that’s what she shouted. I can’t remember.

I had heard something like that on my way out. I was so drunk I couldn’t even feel my feet on the pavement. Only the keys digging into my hands
—that’s how tightly I had to hold them to keep the others from taking them away from me. I had had a fight with Ziggy. It got physical. That’s what I remember. And something had happened that day. There was some reason I had gotten so enraged.

I start glaring at Krishna. She plays that song and it is the final straw for me. I run over and try to grab that record off the stereo, totally intending to
break it.

First of all, Ziggy had just been sitting in the same position all night at that party. He sits with his arms folded, near the entrance to the living room, staring out the window. I think he doesn’t even know what is going on. The song she chooses really pisses me off, more than any of her other choices. I had played
“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” definitely an all-time Beatles classic. And the song she picks to counter it is “Cocksucker Blues.”

It is a special
, bootleg version of an unreleased song by the Rolling Stones. Ziggy has brought it all the way from New York as a gift for Krishna. I try to rip it off the stereo. He is up within seconds. He grabs both of my wrists with one of his hands tight enough that I cannot get them loose. I have never encountered his physical strength before. I cannot, no matter how hard I struggle against him, tear my hands loose from his grip. I start kicking and trying to bite him. It has no effect. While he holds my wrists with one hand, fingers like a vice grip, with his other hand he is carefully, gingerly peeling my fingers off his record. Her record. What does he care so much about this bootleg version of “Cocksucker Blues” for, anyway? But it is the only version. There is no legal version. But he gave it to her.
If it is hers, why is he still so protective of it
, I am wondering, while struggling to get my wrists loose from his fingers that could strangle with no effort.

This is not when I grab the keys. First, when I finally get loose, which I am only able to do once his, her record is safely in his grasp, I run into Krishna’s brother’s room. I know right where to look; I grab the Sex Pistols off the alphabetized shelves that line the entire wall. I run back into the living room where everyone is laughing, drinking. I don’t even know if they have seen what’s been going on. I place the needle on a song called
“Bodies” that has no melody. It is the worst, just a loud, fast guitar and some idiot screaming about a bloody abortion. Then I get right in Krishna’s face and scream at her, calling her a bloody abortion. I scream and scream and scream at her, falling eventually to the floor. I begin writhing around like I am in a psychotic state. Everyone is laughing. Everyone thinks I am putting on a show. But something had happened that day. Something I still can’t remember.

Then I grab my car keys and started running for the door. Ames must have showed up. I think that must be him standing in the bushes, in white pants. They are soaked with blood. I’m not sure who it is. I think it is one of her ex-boyfriends.

“Ames is here, Krishna, I think he wants his other body parts back!” I can remember Gay yelling. She is laughing near the window and pointing at him.

They try to follow me outside. It is total chaos. Someone is shouting angry obscenities. And I hear Krishna say, “What is he doing here? What a freak!”

I knew there was a scuffle. I remember that. It must have been one of her ex-boyfriends, wearing white, standing in the shadows. I must have ended up in the back seat of the car, somehow. I must have been forced in.

And then Krishna takes the wheel.

***

I had only ten cigarettes left, and only three more matches. I supposed that if someone else came in here I could borrow one from them. If they smoked that is. I lay back on a bench and lit the first match, and inhaled slowly on my cigarette, careful to savor every moment of it. Miriam would get here soon.

***

I look over to see what Krishna is reading. Whatever it is, it isn't English. It doesn't look like French either. I don’t know what the fuck language it is, but whatever it is she sure is absorbed in it.

"Ugh! I hate being in a body," she says.

The girl across from us picks up her lunch tray and, glancing sideways at Krishna, moves away from us.

"That girl sits next to me in Geometry class,” Krishna says without looking up. Then, turning toward me she says, "I make it a point never to talk to whoever is sitting to my left.”

Gay sits down
to her left.

"
What the fuck is this shit I’m eating?” Gay says. She stabs a fork in her formless meat, holds it up in the air, and stares with a puzzled look at it.

Three or four of the popular girls sit down near Gay. They scan what Krishna is reading and then say to her.

"You gonna tell me you hang out with these guys and you can't pass a Spanish test?” ask the girls.

"These guys?" Gay makes a sweeping gesture at us with the meat
. "I don't even know these guys."

"That's right,” Krishna says, never looking up from her book
. "Gay doesn't know us. Gay, you left your pot-pipe in my room last night."

All of the girls gasp, and their eyes widen. There
seems like a crowd of them now. Ziggy pulls up a tray and sits down.

"Ziggy
, the dialect doesn't change the essential meaning of the text,” she says to him, nonchalantly.

"Yes it does. It's makes them two completely different religions."

"My pipe? I don’t smoke pot. You must mean the one you were smoking that made you think I was there at your Bible study,” Gay says.

"No,” Krishna says, ignoring Gay and looking at Ziggy, "it's only got a few minor differences
, but the essence is the same."

"The differences,” Ziggy says, “minor or not, are significant. Otherwise why not just read it in English?"

"Mainly just differences in pronunciation,” she continues.

"Geeks?
” one of the girls whispers to the other.

K
rishna looks over at them. Then she looks back down at her book. She holds her lips in a gesture she had that says with dramatic intentionality, “I'm biting my lip.”

"In certain dialects," Ziggy continues, "
questions are answered with simplistic phrases designed to quiet the questioner. In others the questions are seriously addressed, showing respect for the learner, which showed they held certain cultures in lower esteem. Very hierarchical."

"
So for all the supposed enlightenment of these people, they were still a bunch of racists then," I say.

“Not racist, classist,” says Ziggy.

"I'd like some enlightenment,” Gay says, in a mocking tone, "enlightenment as to what the fuck this meat is really made of."

Then she holds it up to the girls and starts
whinnying with it, at which the popular girls giggle with delight.