Lacs

For the second day in a row, when I went to the lake’s shoreline, three loons swam by. One by one, they dove under the surface.

This is not a metaphor. But when I told my two brothers, or my two best friends, or when I tell you, it threatens to become one. Even though in multiplying the image, the sentence insists on remaining exactly what it was: three loons going about their morning feed.

On a third morning, I returned to find just one loon, alone. I sat down at the dock. Before I could tell the loon what I’m about to tell you, it went back under water.

~

About fifteen years ago, when my heart broke for the first time, I looked out at this lake from a window. M. had returned to his boyfriend, but in the water’s reflection I could see that he would remain in the lake, with me. Not because he was still texting me to come over on Saturday mornings. Or because of the endless open-mouthed tear I had cried in Z.’s mother’s bed. To my eye-body, the lake was where he had gone, and, once under water, where he would stay.

~

If the unconscious describes one person’s reservoir of semi-accessible feelings and memories that live below the surface, what do you call those shared yet unsaid urges and thoughts conjured by two or more people, for example, when they fuck? What do you call the torque of how his hips balance against yours—as if this body of his had another body before, that knew; and as if his body will have another body that might one day know again? What words do you have for that? Is erotics a more descriptive name for what other people call history?

Since that day at the window fifteen years ago, I have called this knowledge—created and held in common—the lake. In this naturalist fantasy, every person with whom each of us has had sex continues to bathe there. (Here let’s, consider “sex” an umbrella term for doing things you more or less want to do with others, with differing degrees of intensity.) Some of these people graze at the shoreline; others have been in so long that it can be hard to distinguish the make-up of their bodies from the body of water itself. Here’s to hoping that this urge-to-merge is more invitation than affliction, my love.

~

There are no signs in the lake. There are no signs in the lake that say “no fishing” or “no boating” or “no hunting.” (There is no fishing and no boating and no hunting in the lake.) There are no numbered lists here. No rules of engagement. No rules of consent.

In the lake, there are no elections, or other false promises of democracy.

In the lake, there is no campaigning, no leafletting, no signatures that can withstand the water’s swell.

In the lake, there are no regulations for the remains of the dead. Or rather, all is regulated for the remains of the dead. Did I mention that my grandmother’s ashes are scattered in this lake with the loons? You knew this.

An owl from the parliament sits in a nest that another creature made. The nest that another creature made is on a rock in the middle of an island, a short distance from the shore. Every fourth hour, another owl takes its place and sits in the nest on the rock. If you need help, if someone or something shows up without home training, the owl will bring them to a marshy cove and say, “Tell us all why we should do things the way you want: sing!” And as each creature sings, it is through their song that it is decided whether and what and how we do what we do. Some of us really can’t sing.

~

How did we find ourselves here? Did we climb far enough up the umbilical cord? Is JDate a beard for Neurodivergents Anonymous? How can you just tell that someone works at the mental asylum from a smile on a grid? I hope for Blackness the way I hope for rain when the earth is parched.

The way you can tell when choking is a synonym for the capacity for care. The way you can know their gender through the fit of your hand. The way some choreographies are not taught. The way this is one long plea for a substitute to women’s land.

~

The first time I had sex with D., after meeting him at the door to his apartment—standing there tall and sweet and looking not so different from the photo he had of his mother holding him—I could picture us in the lake together. I haven’t figured out where I was watching us from, or how I was at once at the window, in his bed and, also, in the water.

~

In the United States, there are thirteen towns named, simply, Lake. Lake, Mississippi. Lake, West Virginia. Lake, Oklahoma. Without article, definite or otherwise, or a pillaged proper name, none of these places has a specific object to point to outside of their town. Imagine the person you meet who greets you with, Hello, I come from Lake: A fast friend. Some of these Lakes aren’t even on or near a lake. Were they named by people so satisfied by their Lake—lo and behold!—that they had no need to find another? Were they incorporated in the hopes that, land-locked, they would create a good-enough refuge with none other in sight?

Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria, is also located in a lake-less geography. Named Èkó in Yoruba—which might translate as gateway—this port was given the name “Lagos” by the Portuguese colonizers who arrived there in the fifteenth century. Mistakenly, they bestowed their word for “Lakes” on the sandbars and lagoons that lead the city’s islands to the mouth of the Atlantic. It’s possible that Lagos was named after the southern Portuguese city Lagos, from which the sailors had departed—on other words, that this misrecognition was an act of colonial projection. (Would it be too reductive to describe the last five hundred years as some people imagining their own lacks as other peoples?)

Lagos, Portugal is, also, not on a lake. Imagine: You’re from a place called Lakes that’s named another Lakes where there’s not one lake. Lagos, Portugal is also a copy of a copy, taking its name from Lacobriga, the city that previously existed where the river meets the ocean. Settled by the Celts, the Romans later colonized it but kept its Celtic name. In their endless regresses, etymologies reflect the accidents and brutalities of human contact; these are the origins of semantic content. Silt and decaying matter piling up.

~

The English word “lake” comes directly from the Latin word lacus: a pond, pool of water, basin, reservoir. Lacuna is a diminutive form of lacus, a mini-lake, a little lakie; for example, a hole or a pit. By the seventeenth century, the English language had adopted this name for the gap in the land’s surface to describe a missing portion of a manuscript. A “little lake” became a way of marking the traces of narrative absence, a blank space. Had M. indeed gone missing in my story? How long had D. been behind the door? What kind of a void is itsy bitsy anyways?

~

Bassin. Bassin.

In French, the same word for pelvis describes a basin—the wide, round container used for holding water. The word for a wicker cradle, bassinette, is its diminutive form: a little basin.

~

Words that, we are told, are unrelated to lake: Lack, as in shortage, or, deficiency.

Leak, as in to let water in or out; and, figuratively, to come to be known despite efforts at concealment, as in she leaked the police report.

Lacan, as in the law of the father.

Lac, as in the apple-seed-sized insects that invade trees and excrete a hard, shiny resin. Harvested and then processed, the resin has been extracted for thousands of years in India, Southern China, and Southeast Asia to make a cherry-red dye. Trade brought lac westward, an extant record of which exists in the form of an Italian wine jug, a basin, that dates from the third century BCE. It carried its crimson on its surface.

After lac insects settle in a host tree, they secrete a sweet honeydew liquid. In Sanskirt and Hindu, laksha and lakh mean “one hundred thousand,” giving an image-number to the swarm of these tiny critters made visible against a tree branch. A name defined by its multitude, lac is a stand-in for a mass: the parasites who, without intention, make so much color.

~

I’ve noticed that some people with a thing for parent-child role play enjoy the fantasy of always being surveilled, the fantasy that, God-like, Dad or Mom is always watching.

The lake is both like and completely unlike that—a fetish endowed with supernatural powers, an act of faith in the unprovable. And yet it can be seen, for example, as a view from a window, and better yet, felt, as physical experience. Breath work while crawling. The easeful proximity to death at the center of the basin. Setting off to swim to the other side.

In the face of being watched, you’ve learned to go under, find cover.