Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

AM A BETTER DRIVER after a few drinks, more focused.

Walking dogs was solitary and independent, piecemeal and part-time. Informal work that was impossible to verify, and from which Lucien would want to save me.

Vito announced that I had trampled on his dream. I told him that’s what dreams are for.

“Get Lucky” wafted from portable radios, all tuned to the same station, forming one disco-scroll. We’re up all night to the sun… we’re up all night to get some… And over it was the sound of someone shrieking.

In that scenario, I am walking down a street in some city, and I hear this “waaah, waaah,” issuing from a helpless little bundle of warm life in a heap of trash. I have imagined that. It’s a mental tic. It has no meaning. But it has created this uncomfortable feeling that someone, somewhere, is going to need me at some point.

In my sole fantasy of motherhood, where I raise a baby that I find in a dumpster, the baby has no awkward phase. As

(Everyone at Le Moulin was white, or at least they looked white to me, but they were white people with the burnish of good language, who knew not to be coarse and racist.)