The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  Soon she began smuggling books out of the library down to her own room. These included volumes of the Brontë and Cendrars and Kierkegaard she had originally brought from Davenhall, novels of Traven and Toomer and Bowles and Dostoyevsky and Oë and Woolrich and Silvina Ocampo, The Ogre and Arabian Nights and The Book of Lilith and Confessions of an English Opium Eater, the nightmare woodcut epics of Lynd Ward and the autobiography of Vincent van Gogh, a volume of suppressed Egon Schiele comic strips and the collected letters of Edgar G. Ulmer, and the lost unexpurgated diary of Kim Novak. She put them on the shelf below her window. On the wall above her bed she pinned photos and articles she tore out of his magazines, stories of writers and musicians and faraway dream-places like Morocco and Venice and Ireland, as well as a clipping she had managed to keep through all her travails: the news story about the New Year’s Eve in Northern California.

  “They must have believed,” he said, in that strangled whisper of his, “that whatever was coming at midnight was so terrible any risk was worth taking.” She had been sleeping in the sun in one of the windows upstairs and, upon waking, had ambled lazily down to her room; she was startled to find him sitting on her bed, where she supposed he had come looking for her in one of his stormy carnal fits. He had taken the clipping down from her wall and was studying it, not looking up as she came into the doorway. “They must have believed any consequence of whatever risk they took would be preferable to an apocalypse they couldn’t imagine.”

  “They didn’t know what they believed,” she answered.

  “No?” Now he looked up. “How do you know?”

  “I was there.”

  “And what did you believe, that led you there?”

  “I was running away from home.”

  He nodded absently, looking back at the article. “Walking off a cliff is an act of faith. So they must have believed something.”

  “What are you,” she got up the nerve, “a philosopher, a sociologist?”

  Until later, when she was able to sound it out and write it down and look at it, it sounded like an unspeakable medical practice: “I’m an apocalyptologist,” he answered, still studying the clipping intently.

  “Walking off a cliff,” she said, “may be an act of faith, but that doesn’t mean they knew what they believed in.” Talking to him like this, she felt self-conscious about her nakedness for the first time in three weeks. “Isn’t faith just believing in believing? Not wanting to not believe, knowing you simply can’t stand to not believe? So you blindly take whatever faith offers you.” She sighed in exasperation. “You’re a point-misser.”

  He appeared annoyed. “I thought you said you were only nineteen.”

  “Actually I’m seventeen.”

  “You said you were nineteen!” he cried, aghast.

  “I lied. I was desperate, remember? ‘Best if you are desperate,’ I think was the way you put it. I’ll bet you just thought you were being pithy. That will teach you to write pithy sex ads. You want desperate, you’ll get a liar every time.”

  “Yes, you’re right.” He tacked the clipping back on the wall where it had been. “You get a liar every time.” He stood up from the bed and looked at her carefully, and she smiled ingratiatingly, because she was afraid now she had made a mistake. Silently he brushed past her in the doorway and then reappeared, moments later, with her clothes neatly folded in his arms. “Don’t make me go,” she said, looking at them. “I’ll be nineteen if you want. Maybe I really am nineteen and I just told you I was seventeen because I thought you would like that.” Her throat was tight with the prospect of being cast back out into the street. “I’ll be stupid if you want. I’ll tell any lie that pleases you. But I can’t leave yet. I wouldn’t last half a week, OK? Don’t make me go. Please.”

  “I wasn’t going to make you go,” he said. He put her clothes on the bed. “I just thought maybe you would want to take a drive with me. You can stay here if you want, but I just thought we would go out for a while and take a drive.”

  The clothes on her body had a stunning weight and texture. Having fully adjusted to the initial vulnerability of always being nude, she now felt almost claustrophobic in her clothes. But it was exhilarating to be outside, riding in the car with the window down and feeling the breeze, once she assured herself he wasn’t going to abandon her somewhere. He didn’t blindfold her or put her in the backseat. They descended the hills and cruised through Hollywood and spent a couple of quiet hours in a cafe where he read old newspapers. He was surprised to see that her taste ran to literary journals rather than fashion magazines. “Oh, I’m not nearly intelligent enough for fashion magazines,” she said witheringly. “All those conceptual juxtapositions of shirts and skirts—and of course the phylogenetic manifestations of makeup application are beyond me. Don’t you have to have an advanced degree in art philosophy or something to understand that stuff?”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” he said, “us sitting here talking, me taking you out for a drive. If you want to live in my house it has to be on the same terms, because it’s what I need and it doesn’t matter to me if it’s right or wrong, it doesn’t matter to me in the least if you think I’m exploiting you or if anyone thinks I’m exploiting you. It’s what I need.”

  “Actually,” she answered, “I thought I was the one exploiting you.”

  He went back to his newspaper for a moment and then looked up. “Where did you get those books in your room?”

  “I’ve been stealing them from your library.”

  After another moment looking at the newspaper, he said, “I don’t believe in them anymore.”

  “Not any of them?”

  “Not any of them. I don’t believe anything a single fucking one of those books says. I was desperate for what they said once, but like you said, desperation will get you lies every time.”

  “I don’t think I meant it like that.”

  “You may not think you meant it like that,” he whispered furiously, “but someday you’ll find out. Someday when you’re not just seventeen. You’ll find out you meant it exactly like that.” In that moment he seemed to hate her last shred of innocence as much as he coveted it. They left the cafe and drove west on Sunset Boulevard almost to the old abandoned freeway, and then he parked the car at Black Clock Park, where they strolled the time-capsule cemetery looking at the headstones where the capsules were buried. It started to rain; it seemed to rain all the time, a growing freakishness of the weather, strange guerrilla assaults of jigsaw lightning and increasingly torrential downpours. Up and down the rows of capsules they walked as the rain came down harder. As their clothes soaked through, he barely noticed. We’re getting soaked, she finally said at one point, and he told her to go wait at the edge of the park beneath the trees. She went over to wait where he told her and then he walked back alone to one grave in particular several hundred feet away and stood staring at it for almost an hour, as the rain kept coming down and Kristin became colder and wetter.

  When they got back home he stripped her and had her in the window where she had slept in the sunlight earlier that afternoon. She could see out the corner of one eye the storm clouds racing past the moon and the trees in the hills below them swaying in the shimmering patches of rain. In her mind she had an image of the window shattering and the two of them tumbling out over stalagmites of broken glass, plunging bloody to the little road that wound far below.

  SHE FIGURED OUT SOON enough that an apocalyptologist wasn’t a doctor. In the three weeks she had been living with the Occupant he had no contact with the outside world at all, as far as she could tell, except when he went out driving alone, communing with his buried time-capsule at the cemetery.

  The phone never rang. There were no visitors. He had cut himself off from everything, having placed between himself and everyone else first the hills, then the house, then the door to the room on the bottom floor. She was the sole occupant of this designated no-man’s-land between him and the world, wandering the house for hours and
watching from the windows as the Japanese boy unloaded the new white satellite dishes off his truck and loaded the defaced black ones in their place.

  She came down with a terrible fever from the hour she had waited for him in the cold rain at Black Clock Park, although in the fit of the fever she wondered if it was something more, her New Year survivor’s luck exacting its toll. He brought to her soup and bread and juice, protecting his investment, she told herself cynically, in the rare moments amid the fever’s throes when she was lucid enough to be cynical. Finally, by the third day when the fever had finally gone, he couldn’t resist having her again, and seemed to find her new enervation particularly thrilling.

  She had expected to be filled with dreams by now. She had expected by now she would be awash in them, dreams lapping at the coves of her body in white tides. But she was still a dream-virgin, her sleep a long black moonless expanse: it’s my luck, she ruefully realized, to have sold myself to the one man in Los Angeles who has no dreams. If a dream is a memory of the future, she had found the one man with no future to remember.

  She was there in the house alone on the one afternoon that the telephone finally rang. She stood staring at it, wondering what to do. Perhaps it was his usual complete obliviousness to her that made her blurt out later that night, just as he was disappearing into the downstairs room, “The phone rang.” His door didn’t quite close. It lingered uncertainly between closing and opening until he stepped back out into the hallway. “What?”

  “The phone rang.”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Did you answer it?”

  “No.”

  He pondered her. He turned and went back into the room, but she noticed he still didn’t entirely close the door. She had been lying on her bed reading a book for almost an hour when she came out into the dark hallway and found him standing there on the stairs, staring up at the telephone in its small cubbyhole in the landing on the first floor. There he stood in the dark, staring at the phone. She saw his silhouette turn in the dark and heard it say, “Did it ring a long time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “What do you consider a long time?”

  “A long time,” she heard his silhouette say heatedly, “you know what a phone sounds like when it rings a long time. Each ring gets … worse. …” He didn’t know what he was trying to say. He turned in exasperation and then once again vanished back down the stairs into the room at the bottom. Kristin went upstairs to get a glass of water and when she came back down she once again found the Occupant at the foot of the second landing, watching the phone. “Why didn’t you answer it?” he said.

  “Why should I have answered it?”

  “If it rang a long time, anyone would have answered it.”

  “I didn’t say it rang a long time,” she said, “you said it rang a long time. ‘I don’t need a maid, I don’t need a cook,’ that was what your ad said, right? You never said you needed someone to answer the phone.”

  “Look,” he whispered, taking a threatening step toward her up the stairs out of the shadow. His hovering dark form bled into the shadow so that all she saw were his throbbing ice-blue eyes and the floating spots of white in his black hair and beard. “You’re a very smart seventeen-year-old, I know that. But keep your bright little seventeen-year-old mouth and your bright little seventeen-year-old mind to yourself, please. I don’t care that you didn’t answer the phone, do you understand? Look.” He charged past her to the cubbyhole with the phone and grabbed the instrument and tore it from the wall. The wire whipped past her head in the dark. “See? I don’t care. I don’t care if the phone rings now, because now when it rings, it won’t ring. Now if she calls, it won’t matter. What do I need her for, I have you. That’s why I have you, so I can do whatever I want with you and I don’t have to need her anymore. See? Now we don’t have to talk about this again. Now if the phone rings again you won’t have to not not answer it. It will be like it never rang at all.” He yanked more phone cord from the wall. “Here, let’s do this. Let’s do this, all right?” He grabbed Kristin and dragged her down the stairs with one hand, holding the phone cord with the other. He pulled her into her room and threw her on the bed and got on top of her and tried to tie the cord around her wrists, but the cord kept getting tangled and somehow he couldn’t manage a knot. “Let’s do this,” he kept saying, “let’s not answer the phone anymore.” Finally he formed a haphazard knot and tied her wrists to the bed. He took her legs and opened her thighs and lowered himself to her and put her in his mouth.

  She was shocked by it. Though she could have easily slipped from the phone cord around her wrists, she suppressed every instinct to, instead gripping the bedposts in rage trying to concentrate on the moon through her window, full and depthless like the moon that had shone her last night in Davenhall when she had awakened and gone looking for a dream. She kept concentrating on the moon and then closed her eyes and held the white sphere of it in her mind and imagined herself floating in space; feeling the breeze that came through the window, she imagined herself alone and falling into the moon with the breeze brushing her face and blowing between her legs. Just as she realized in horror she was about to have an orgasm, he fell away from her, half growling and half crying as he crumbled against the wall. “Angie,” she heard him mutter before collapsing in grief.

  He lay naked on the floor and wept. Kristin sat up in the moonlight of the bed, torn between rage and terror and a sense of violation she didn’t understand. It took her a minute or two to place the name he had spoken and the voice in which he had spoken it, and then she felt betrayed or tricked, as if he had known it was her all along, though the rational part of her understood this wasn’t a reasonable conclusion. She was enraged at how he had taken her in a way that somehow seemed beyond the unspoken bounds of their agreement—a rape of her erotic will rather than simply her body, by nearly bringing her to the point of orgasm. And she was enraged at the way he now lay on the floor and wept into his hands, as though there could possibly be something purifying about it, as though, she thought to herself bitterly, it was supposed to tear her heart out or something, as though she was supposed to extend to him some kind of compassion just because the way he used her had been premised on a secret grief. She didn’t see that his grief was her responsibility. She had never presumed, after all, that her alienation should be his. And now it was all coming out, his grief, and she hated the hypocrisy of it, as though it was supposed to absolve him of everything; and she didn’t owe him absolution, it was too much for him to ask, he didn’t have the right to ask for it in words let alone sobs.

  As for the terror she felt with the rage, that lay in knowing that everything their arrangement had been was about to change; and perhaps particularly because she was still feeling weak from her fever, she didn’t believe she had the strength for whatever was next. The other thing, the deep, personal violation she had no name for, came from something else: that not by his cock but rather by his loveless kiss on her, she had just had her first dream, of the morning almost a year before when the Occupant woke to find his wife, nine months pregnant, vanished from their bed.

  FOR A WHILE AFTER that he didn’t come for her. “Look,” she tries to explain now in the dark of the Hotel Ryu in Tokyo, “I certainly didn’t care about the sex one way or the other. But I was a little concerned maybe his need for me had already exhausted itself, and I didn’t want to have to leave yet. Life …” she says, not at all sure she’s communicating clearly, “life’s really just a process of trading on your most valuable commodity, isn’t it? Intelligence, strength, talent, charisma, beauty. Well, in order to survive I traded on my nakedness, in the way I trade on my memories now, here, and on yours too,” she says to the dead doctor. “I traded on my nakedness till a more valuable personal commodity presented itself. It never crossed my mind that anything but my body was subservient to him. There wasn’t a moment my mind or spirit submit
ted to him, I knew that and I think he did too. … Then one night I went into his bedroom, where he had collapsed unconscious and drunk.” She had knelt by the bed and looked at his face; it seemed to her his beard had gotten much whiter in just the few weeks since she had come to live there. “Are you awake?” she had said to him.

  He didn’t stir, snoring deeply, like she had heard him in Davenhall.

  Kneeling there by his bed, she whispered in his ear, “How ridiculous,” her face inches from his, “how absurd. Didn’t slave girls and tying up women sort of go out with the Twentieth Century, even for pathetic middle-aged drunks? Whose life do you think you’re saving anyway? Not your own, and not your wife’s or your baby’s”—and she could almost swear she saw him wince, and for a moment she wasn’t sure he was unconscious at all. For a moment she was sure he was entirely awake, listening to her words only inches from his face; but she went on anyway—“so whose life, then, tell me. Is it possibly mine? You don’t think for a second you’re really saving my life, do you? That can’t really be what this is all about, can it? Or is it just to lose your own life altogether? Is it that you’ve simply become that broken now, you’ve simply become that pitiful, that you’ve decided everything is just beyond saving?”

  She stopped and waited five, ten, fifteen minutes just to see if he stirred, the courage of her words succumbing to her instinct for survival; she really had to watch her smart mouth. She really couldn’t afford to so alienate him as to wind up back out on the street. Not only had she come to see this life, in this house that she loved with all the books that she read, as not such a bad one for the time being, less dreary than many lives, but she also understood—maybe he did as well—that though he had brought her home as his prisoner, he had become hers, or at least his own, locked up in his little room while she had the run of the rest of the house, as though he had relinquished his life to her.