The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  In the last moments of the Twentieth Century, with neither protest on their lips nor ecstasy in their eyes, two thousand women and girls—“that’s what the newspaper said anyway,” Kristin advises her rapt listener in the dark of the Hotel Ryu, “but I can tell you for a fact it was only 1,999”—silently walked off a high cliff of the Northern California coast and plunged to the black waves below. It was impossible to know what they hoped was waiting for them in their last step off the rocks into space. Perhaps they believed some hole would open up in the night, and they would step into infinity. Perhaps they believed the open palm of the cosmos would catch them in midair. Likeliest they had no idea what to believe, since until this very moment they had no idea what rendezvous awaited the end of a migration that had begun eleven weeks before in the desolation of southern Idaho. The cult’s male priests brought up the rear, their hands clandestine in their white robes. Only when, at the back of the migration, a few women of less resolute faith finally understood what was taking place and tried to bolt, did there emerge from the white robes into the hands of the priests the long curved knives, swaying as methodically and casually as if they were cutting the tall grass.

  A HERETIC AT HEART, Kristin had broken for freedom.

  “You have to understand,” Kristin continues, “I never had anything to do with their cult in the first place. I had just gotten off Davenhall Island as quick as I could, given that … well, that part’s not worth going into,” she assures the dead man, “but let’s just say I left in a hurry. So there I am standing by the road somewhere north of Sacramento, with only the clothes on my back and my books”—Brontë and Cendrars and Kierkegaard in a cloth bag—“when the whole migration comes around the bend,” and also at the exact moment that the priests were troubling over their latest count of the flock: 1,999, having lost someone somewhere along the way. Which on this particular New Year wouldn’t do. Like earlier priests, they believed in nothing if not the precision of their rituals, so they happily scooped up the young girl as the last plump sacrificial morsel.

  Such precision “saved” Kristin, if that was the word, on the night of December 30, twenty-four hours before the Great Walk Off, when she had roamed the cult encampment in the dark, up and down the hillside from sleeping bag to sleeping bag, still looking for a dream, just as she had on her last night in Davenhall. Whether the young priest she selected actually slept through her ravishment or just pretended to sleep, no one could know; the impromptu tribunal proceeded on into the early-morning hours amid a flurry of whispered accusations that eventually woke the other campers. Soon, dawn made a decision imperative. The priest was excommunicated. Kristin, number two thousand, was “forgiven,” to not much gratitude or concern on her part one way or the other. She would have been even less grateful had she known the evening’s plan.

  Then at 11:57 on the thirty-first of December, the best-planned mathematics of the priests went haywire. Suddenly aware of what was happening, Kristin ran for as much land as her feet could cross, the ocean furious in her ears, priests lunging this way and that, swinging their knives. “I almost thought of stopping to ask one of them, you know, just how they could be so sure. You know?” For a moment there in the deathly still chamber of the memory hotel with the old dead doctor next to her, she wonders if this entire subject is rather tactless, given the circumstances; but she persists. “How could they be so sure before I came along that the count wasn’t really 1,998? You understand? But this one maniac coming at me was swinging a very large machete—so I thought maybe I should postpone that particular conversation,” and Kristin, younger and faster than the priests in pursuit, and still with a dream to find, alone among the congregation survived the stroke of midnight.

  ALMOST A MILE AND a half down Highway 1, somewhere between Mendocino and Bodega Bay, she finally convinced herself there was no one chasing her anymore, and slowed down. She walked along the side of the road in the dark, panting hard and listening; when she heard a car approaching from the other direction, she stepped out onto the blacktop and into the oncoming headlights, frantically waving her arms. It nearly ran her over, barely swerving as she jumped back out of the way at the last minute. “Two hours later I finally flag a ride—same van, coming back from wherever they were in such a hurry to get to.” Two women in their late twenties: the one in the passenger seat didn’t look so happy to have stopped. Where you heading? the one driving asked. Inland, answered Kristin.

  RELIEVED TO BE DRIVING away from the ocean cliffs, Kristin didn’t care about anything else. Since she never dreamed, she knew the conversation between the two women in the front seat was real, even as she dozed in the back.

  They spoke in the same tense whispers of the priests the night before. It was crazy to pick her up, said the one in the passenger seat, what were you thinking? and then the driver, She’s a kid, besides she might have told someone she saw us, didn’t you see we nearly hit her on the way up? and then the passenger, Well, what now, we can’t just drop her off somewhere; and then the driver, We’ll keep her with us a while, see what happens—and then the driver started giggling as the passenger glanced back at Kristin over her shoulder, checking her out.

  Kristin feigned sleep. The driver kept giggling. “Stop it,” the passenger spit. The driver stopped, then after a moment said, “Pass it,” and the passenger, hesitating, passed a bottle from which the driver took a drink. From her nights in the bar back on Davenhall Island, Kristin recognized the smell of bourbon.

  THEY TURNED LEFT AT Bodega Bay and made their way through Marin County, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and driving up Lombard toward the center of the city just before sunrise. Kristin had never been to San Francisco before, unless one counted being born there, and with the light of day and the suspension of ominous talk between the two women in front, she watched from her window. A couple of times the woman in the passenger seat would turn and look over her shoulder at Kristin, who noticed the driver was also watching her in the rearview mirror. “You hungry?” the driver said.

  “Yes,” said Kristin.

  “We’ll stop at a little bakery over in North Beach.” She kept watching Kristin in the rearview mirror. “What were you doing out there on the road?”

  “Well, now,” Kristin said, “you know someone might ask you the very same thing,” and then thinking to herself, Kristin, do you always have to be smart? “Heh heh,” said the driver, not finding it particularly funny, to which the passenger’s pointed silence answered, See, what did I tell you? Except for a stray banner blowing down the street, there wasn’t a sign of celebration. It would be another hour or two before Kristin could be certain a midnight tide hadn’t washed everything away after all, and that this particular New Year had been no different from the ninety-nine that preceded it or the nine hundred that preceded them. The women parked at a bakery on Columbus and went inside. Eating her croissant and drinking her espresso, Kristin changed strategies, employing abject apology: “It’s a long story,” she said meekly, “but thanks for picking me up. Can I have another of these?”

  They bought Kristin another croissant. The two women sat staring at her as she ate, the driver sipping her coffee and the passenger smoking a cigarette. “You can stick around with us for a while,” the driver said; the passenger just kept staring at Kristin through the cigarette smoke.

  Their names were Isabelle and Cynda. At first Kristin had a hard time keeping track which was which. After breakfast they drove around the city a while, finally parking in front of a hotel on Grant not far from Union Square and sitting for half an hour, looking back and forth between the hotel and each other: This it? Isabelle in the driver’s seat kept asking Cynda, who kept checking the address on some piece of identification that obviously wasn’t hers. They murmured between themselves and glanced back at Kristin now and then, and finally got out of the van. Nonchalantly the three of them walked into the lobby of the hotel past the front desk and the concierge and the bell captain, and got in the elevator. Using a key, they too
k the elevator to the top floor.

  When they got off the elevator they were in the penthouse. To Kristin, who had never been in a big-city hotel, let alone a penthouse, it seemed lavish and glamorous beyond belief; in fact it was a small though sleek penthouse in a small though chic hotel. The hotel was located half a block from the Dragon Gate into Chinatown, where it wasn’t even the new year, let alone a new millennium: I am still surrounded, was all Kristin could think, staring out the window of the hotel, by nothing but old Chinese dreams; and it was the sounds of Chinatown that invaded her sleep at night, Chinese jabber and the clamor of gongs echoing through the cave of unconsciousness.

  ISABELLE SAID THE PENTHOUSE belonged to her brother. But while there were photos of a good-looking young man with parents and boyfriends and even someone who appeared as though she might be a sister, there was no sign of Isabelle among the effects at all. The two women went through the apartment with the detached curiosity of complete and distinct strangers, picking up things and casting them aside with indifference; they made no effort to tidy up, and gave no indication they expected anyone else to show up any time soon. When the phone rang, they never answered. They stayed for several days, and after a while the messages Kristin heard coming in over the phone machine tended to sound a little mystified and concerned, until Isabelle turned the volume down.

  The livelier and more reckless of the two women, Isabelle was prettier—taken feature for feature—than her thin mouth and small eyes would have suggested, with dark hair falling just above her shoulders. Cynda, perpetual passenger, was more pinched, with short blond hair just a little longer than Kristin’s. She almost never spoke to Kristin, not over pasta dinners in North Beach or in the afternoons when the women routinely polished off a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, or in the morning over coffee when they finally emerged before noon from the bedroom where they slept together. So it was a shock to Kristin, who assumed Cynda hated her, when she tried to kiss Kristin the fourth night, in retaliation against Isabelle, who had kissed Kristin the third night, to Cynda’s great rage. “That was when I figured it was time to get out of there,” Kristin tells the old doctor in the Hotel Ryu. She now has his undivided attention.

  In the dwindling hours of that last night in San Francisco, alone in the dark of her bedroom, Kristin heard Isabelle and Cynda in the next room engaged in a terrible argument. It ranged from matters of fidelity and desire to more mysterious implications that on the one hand didn’t explain anything but on the other hand confirmed everything. By now it was obvious that whoever lived in the penthouse wasn’t Isabelle’s brother, and that in fact his acquaintance with the two women began and ended New Year’s Eve, and culminated in a desperate drive to some remote dumping ground a hundred miles or so north of San Francisco. It’s insane, Cynda sputtered, that we’re here at all, staying here of all places, to which Isabelle had laughed that Cynda worried too much. It’s only a matter of time, Cynda had continued, before someone shows up and starts asking questions, and what are we going to do about the kid, it was stupid to pick her up that night, you have to have your toys don’t you Isabelle always your toys, and on and on a little more hysterically until Kristin heard Isabelle finally answer, very quietly and evenly, all the amusement suddenly gone from her voice, Calm down, you’re losing it. We’ll get out of here when it’s time, and we’ll do something about the kid when it’s time.

  Then Kristin heard Cynda start to cry, and Isabelle begin to giggle like she had in the van the night they had picked Kristin up. Then Isabelle’s giggling tapered off along with Cynda’s crying, and about forty-five minutes later—because she had learned that people sleep most soundly after they’ve first slipped into unconsciousness, especially when they’re drunk—Kristin got up and dressed in the dark. She peered through the doorway of the women’s bedroom and reached in and pulled a pair of jeans from the nearby chair, and going through the pockets found some money and the keys to the van and the key to the penthouse. “I took the money,” Kristin admits now, “and I took the penthouse key—I needed the key to operate the elevator.” She was sure the noise of the elevator was going to wake them, since the shaft was right behind the wall of their bedroom; as she waited in the dark, it seemed to take forever.

  HER BAG OF BOOKS had gone the way of the old millennium, smashed on the ocean rocks in her place, so she had nothing but the clothes on her back and, adding the money she took from Isabelle and Cynda to what she had brought of her own from Davenhall, $319.

  Part of that got her a ticket on a bus out of San Francisco down Highway 1 past Santa Cruz to Monterey. Then the bus cut inland to avoid the winding and perilous road through Big Sur, then back to the coast picking up Highway 1 again at San Luis Obispo, proceeding to Santa Barbara and many small stops in between. Mexican laborers, for whom the coastal trek was as routine as a crosstown line, got on and off. Kristin arrived in L.A. at the Hollywood station on Vine Street, five days into the new year at one in the morning in a rainstorm, when it was impossible to know if the hush of the place was from sleep or the sort of anticlimax that comes so naturally to a city unimpressed by time.

  What remained of the $319 lasted three days. In the first early-morning hours of her arrival, she walked about two miles west on Sunset Boulevard in the rain, cop cars pulling up alongside and slowing, studying her and then moving on. She would have been just as happy to spend a night or two in jail. She would have been just as happy to confess to whatever felony might have gotten her there. The next day, exhausted but still going on the adrenaline of her near brush with salvation five nights before and whatever fate her deadly dalliance with Isabelle and Cynda had held in store for her, she checked into a hotel called the Hamblin just south of the Strip.

  The hotel was just dilapidated enough that Kristin’s remaining funds covered three nights, paid for up front. Stiffing the hotel for the fourth night, she slipped out at three in the morning and pressed her New Year survivor’s luck by hitching a ride on Santa Monica Boulevard with a man whose predilection for molestation was fortunately disposed to seventeen-year-old boys rather than seventeen-year-old girls. Her size and cropped hair, seen through his windshield at three-thirty in the morning, fooled him just long enough to get her inside the car; disgruntled, he reluctantly drove her to Century City. She slept in an alcove of one of the towers until a little past eight, when a security guard woke her.

  By now all the New Year adrenaline was wearing off. Her focus was sharpened only by the fact that there was nothing behind her to which she could return. She wandered Century City raiding trash cans like an animal, then walked down to Pico Boulevard, where she hitched another ride with a boy about her own age whom she could handle if she needed to. Once they reached the beach he seemed, if anything, all too happy to drop her off. Stumbling through the streets of Baghdadville, as lacking in prospects as she was in dreams, she begged for food outside restaurants until she was chased away, scorn and hostility the only interruptions in the hush of anticlimax that still gripped the city. She spent that night in an alley and then the next in the kitchen of a seaside grill where the late-night cook took pity on her. Twice she nearly prostituted herself, first with a huge black man in a red Chevy who kept circling the block, and then with a bisexual art dealer who craved diversion, soul-numbingly bored in his empty gallery, surrounded by a dreary series of eight black canvases. Even Kristin couldn’t entirely be sure whether her rejection of him was an act of morality or aesthetics.

  LATER, AFTER SHE MOVED into the spare room of the Occupant’s house in the Hollywood Hills, she would understand a little better what mysterious force had directed her attention to the advertisement in the week-old newspaper.

  I want you at the end of your rope, it read, back among the personals, lashed to the mast of my dreams. She was sitting in the seaside grill sipping a bowl of charity soup, having just read, on page five, the sketchy details of the mass murder/suicide of two thousand women and children off the coast of Northern California. I do not want a wife, I do
not want a girlfriend. I do not want a mistress or a maid or a cook or a cleaning woman. My heart has no needs, except to be left alone with the memories that have already wounded it. Beauty is as unnecessary as intelligence. Best if you are desperate. Best if you are either absolutely self-knowing, so preternaturally secure about who you are that no physical defilement can violate it, or absolutely empty of self-concern, so primally attuned to basic appetites that pathology is beside the point. The naturally indignant need not apply. You will be given a place to live, a room of your own, access to the kitchen and most parts of the house, a weekly stipend of $100, and whatever free time in which you are not otherwise needed. Of course you are free to end the arrangement and leave at any moment. Auditions voluntary.

  “Well,” she sighs now to the old dead doctor, “that part about not being beautiful was certainly a relief, even if there was a post office box to send a photo.” In fact, Kristin secretly held out hope she wasn’t as plain as all that: “I know my eyes are a little too far apart,” she acknowledged, “and my mouth’s a little too thin,” but it did have an appealing way of curling up on one side into a sly smile. Her hair was its dirty and undistinguished blond chopped to prisoner-of-war length. A big girl, she nonetheless had an exaggerated sense of her own size; she certainly regretted about ten pounds, none of which had the decency to accumulate in her breasts, of course, but steadfastly located themselves instead on her hips. Rereading the ad, she wondered if it automatically assumed she was stupid too. He probably thinks I’m another idiotic seventeen-year-old who doesn’t know what preternatural means, she said to herself.