The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  And so her nights continued to pass dreamless as ever, as well as the days in which she sometimes daydreamed of being back in Davenhall. She daydreamed of lying on the deck of the boat that ferried tourists back and forth to the island, on the rare occasions when there were tourists, and wishing on the usual occasions when there weren’t that the boy who navigated the boat would stop just gazing at her longingly and do something. Such daydreams, however, ultimately led back to thoughts of her uncle and the mother who had disappeared when she was a baby—such an abstraction for Kristin it barely seemed worth thinking about at all—and then she stopped thinking about home altogether.

  Now this house in the Hollywood Hills was as good a home as any, and if it meant being jailer to some old drunken crackpot under the illusion he was having his way with her, fine. One evening she went downstairs and stood for a while outside the locked room, staring at it; suddenly the door opened and, framed by the doorway, his silhouette stared back at her in the dark of the hallway. “What do you think you’re doing?” he whispered. Tonight he sounded especially nuts.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “You were going to lock me in, weren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You were going to lock me in.”

  She snorted, incredulous. It had never dawned on her. For the rest of the night her thoughts were swept by the idea: locking him in the room—could she do that? And if she did, then what would she do with him? The next afternoon it made even less sense, when the Occupant was gone and she went downstairs to the room and examined the door, and saw that it locked not from the outside but the inside; so it wasn’t possible to lock him in even if she wanted to. For a moment she became frightened. He was really losing his grip now, she thought to herself. But it wasn’t nearly as terrifying as what she found beyond the door.

  Not entirely to her surprise, the door was now unlocked.

  Perhaps this was because he had accidentally forgotten to lock it, or perhaps he had left it unlocked on purpose, or perhaps at this point his accidents and intentions had become one and the same. In any case, stepping into the afternoon shadows of the room and wading through the empty vodka bottles, she saw the Apocalyptic Calendar for the first time.

  A COUPLE OF HOURS later she was still sitting on the small footstool in the middle of the room, looking at the calendar, when she heard him behind her in the open doorway.

  Not daring to turn, she braced herself for the repercussions, and for some time could feel him standing there, silently raging, she supposed. Finally, when she couldn’t stand it, she looked up at him only to find him studying the calendar as she had been, unperturbed. It appeared as though he, like her, was seeing it for the first time. Or as though, with her there, he thought there was a chance he might finally understand it.

  The calendar entirely circled the room. It covered all the walls except the door, a sky-blue mural blotting out the windows and overflowing the walls onto the floor and ceiling. The dates on the calendar were not sequential like on an ordinary calendar but free-floating according to some inexplicable order, in some cases far-removed dates overlapping, in other cases consecutive dates separated by the length of the room. In varying shades of red and black, apparently senseless timelines ran from the top of the calendar to the bottom, from one end to the other.

  “Look here,” the Occupant finally said, and began tracing the lines for her. She nodded as though everything he said made perfect sense. He was explaining that, after twenty years in which he had become the Western world’s foremost apocalyptologist, he had made the startling discovery that the new millennium, which he called the Age of Apocalypse, had not begun at midnight New Year’s Eve 1999 after all. This was because, he went on, over the course of the last half century the very definition of apocalypse had changed, as empirically and quantifiably as a virus changes, or a galaxy: “You see, sometime in the last half century,” he said, “modern apocalypse outgrew God.” Modern apocalypse was no longer about cataclysmic upheaval as related to divine revelation; modern apocalypse, the Occupant told Kristin, speaking with more passion than she had ever heard him express before, was “an explosion of time in a void of meaning,” when apocalypse lost nothing less than its very faith—and in fact the true Age of Apocalypse had begun well before 31 December 1999, at exactly 3:02 in the morning on the seventh of May, in the year 1968.

  “How do you know?” she said.

  And exactly as she had answered his question about that New Year’s Eve on the cliffs of Northern California, he replied, “I was there.”

  For instance, the Occupant went on, by the modern definition of faithless apocalypse, the assassination of America’s greatest civil rights leader in April 1968 was not a modern apocalyptic event, because it had a rationale, however villainous the rationale was. The assassination of the civil rights leader’s mother, on the other hand, on the thirtieth of June 1974—Year Seven of the Secret Millennium, he pointed out to Kristin on the Calendar, down along the baseboard—that was a modern apocalyptic event, because it had no rationale at all: the woman had simply been playing the organ in church, when a maniac started randomly firing a gun.

  Such incidents littered the Calendar in sensurround, connected by red and black lines. These included irrational assassinations and killings: nuns in El Salvador (Year Thirteen or, by the old, now obsolete calendar, 27 December 1980), Hollywood Eurotrash in L.A. canyons (Year Two: 9 August 1969), benign Swedish prime ministers walking home from the movies (Year Eighteen: 28 February 1986). Such crimes fundamentally defied whatever conclusions commentators and sociologists and ideologues frantically tried to offer. Incidents of the New Apocalypse included mass exterminations so detached from cogent explanation that tragedy could never quite overcome absurdity: airplane explosions off the coast of Long Island (Year Twenty-Nine: 17 July 1996), schoolchildren beheading other schoolchildren in Kobe (Year Twenty-Nine: 27 March 1997), billowing toxic clouds from East Indian insecticide plants killing two thousand (Year Seventeen: 3 December 1984), nuclear-reactor meltdowns in the Ukraine radiating 400,000 (Year Eighteen: 26 April 1986), 1,400 panicked Moslems on the way to Mecca crushed in a 110-degree tunnel when the air-conditioning failed (Year Twenty-Three: 2 July 1990), thirty-nine members of a religious cybercult, in the hope of riding a passing comet to the next world, committing suicide in Southern California (Year Twenty-Nine: 26 March 1997), and a recently added item, Kristin noted, dated Year Thirty-Two: two thousand women and children walking off a cliff in Northern California. “I can tell you for a fact,” Kristin murmured, just trying to be helpful, “it was no more than 1,999.”

  The Calendar’s apocalyptic flotsam included the emergence of figures of such dazzling dementia as to momentarily mesmerize even thinking people: military buffoons in Uganda (Year Three: 25 January 1971), “holy” men in Iran (Year Eleven: 1 February 1979), megalomaniacal novelists in Japan (Year Three: 25 November 1970), genocidal schoolteachers in Cambodia (Year Seven: 13 April 1975), Nazi war criminals winning presidential elections in Austria (Year Nineteen: 8 June 1986), psychotic Texas billionaires polling one vote in five in presidential elections in America (Year Twenty-Five: 4 November 1992), and ludicrous duets in which it was difficult to know who was loonier—the memoir forgerer, or another psychotic billionaire so reclusively and obsessively shrouded in secrecy for so long it might be argued that the man who appropriated his memories became more the real rememberer than the real rememberer himself (Year Four: 13 March 1972).

  More than these, the crucial reference points of the Apocalyptic Calendar were moments of nihilistic derangement no scheme could accommodate. If the various connecting timelines that the Occupant had drawn in red and black between murder and mayhem and madmen were secret tunnels running through a mansion of memory, in which history was only the floor plan, certain insane events large and trivial eluded the Calendar’s geometry altogether. They included the erection of London Bridge in Arizona (Year Four: 10 October 1971), the gassing of a subway in Tokyo (
Year Twenty-Seven: 20 March 1995), the discovery of a burial ground of slaughtered eagles in Wyoming (Year Four: 3 August 1971), the disintegration of an American spaceship and all its crew due to the erosion of a tiny rubber ring (Year Eighteen: 28 January 1986), the discovery and announcement that video games triggered epilepsy (Year Twenty-Five: 14 January 1993), the decapitation of a notorious snuff-film director in a Manhattan traffic tunnel (Year Fourteen: 3 October 1981), the hounding unto death of an English princess by tabloid photographers in a fatal car crash in Paris (Year Thirty: 31 August 1997), and the mass marriage of four thousand people performed by a cracked Korean minister who chose their spouses for them, on 16 July 1982 (Year Fifteen), which by sheer coincidence happened to be the same day Kristin was born.

  But finally, the Occupant told Kristin, he had determined that the true center of the Apocalyptic Age, and the true center of the true millennium that began on the seventh of May 1968, and the true center of the Apocalyptic Calendar among all its crisscrossing lines and floating anarchic events, the true vortex where all meaning collapsed into blackness, lay between two abysmal events so beyond the pale of unreason that a civilized person could barely bring himself to contemplate them. One, on 5 May 1985, was the pilgrimage of an American president to a German cemetery for the express purpose of laying a wreath in honor of the most singularly vicious, sadistic and incontestably evil human beings of the Twentieth Century. The other, only twelve days before on 23 April, was the utterly arbitrary decision by America’s greatest soft-drink company to immediately discontinue the single most successful product in the history of modern commerce, in order to produce in its place a bad imitation of its obviously inferior competitor.

  BY THE TIME THE Occupant had finished talking, afternoon had given way to dusk and dusk had given way to night. No light came through the pale blue calendar that papered over the windows except small throbbing white orbs of streetlamps on the road below the back of the house, that curved to the east before curling down the hill.

  Bonkers with a capital B, Kristin said to herself. Around and around in the dark, in clockwise circles, the Occupant paced furiously. It was not unlike the night Kristin had awakened to hear him prowling the foot of her bed; mindlessly he kicked vodka bottles out of his way. She could see his blue eyes glittering in the dark. “What?” she said nervously to his silence.

  He stepped toward her. He pulled her up from the small footstool where she’d sat almost motionless for hours and ran his hands over her body, as though searching for a particular spot on her thigh, along her forearm, under a breast.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Not so long ago,” he said, “I made this … confounding determination.”

  “OK. Confound me.”

  He knelt at her feet and ran his hands up one leg, as though looking for the button that would open a hidden door. “I determined,” he said, “that if modern apocalypse is indeed an explosion of time in a void of meaning, then time is moving, and the timelines of the Apocalyptic Calendar are moving as well. All the routes and capitals of chaos on the Calendar are constantly, imperceptibly rearranging themselves in relation to each other … do you understand—?”

  “Let’s pretend I do.”

  “Which means the Calendar is always … out of whack. You know? Too static on the walls to accommodate, you know, shifts in perspective. Like an ancient starwatcher who always watched the sky from the same place and assumed the stars were moving, only because he hadn’t learned to take into account that it was the earth he was standing on that was moving.” Still on his knees, he touched the hinge of her thighs, and in the dark she could see him looking up at her. “It’s not there.”

  “What’s not there?” she said.

  “The place. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “It sounds like physics and physics was never my strong suit.”

  “It’s not physics,” he said, “it has nothing to do with physics. It’s far beyond the meaning of physics. The Twentieth Century spent far too much time paying attention to physicists. It has to do with … For the calendar of modern apocalypse to be accurate, its nihilistic center—floating in Year Seventeen between the twenty-third of April and the fifth of May 1985—needs to move in relation to the timelines of chaos.”

  “Yes?”

  He found a spot above her spleen, and his eyes shone in the dark: “There,” he whispered, in that same whisper in which he had spoken since the first day she met him. Even in the dark, she thought she saw him smile; it was the first time since that first day and she shuddered. “Right there.” Right above her spleen in black ink he marked the spot, the twenty-ninth of April 1985—29.4.85—in the Year Seventeen of the Secret Millennium, and then he stood on his feet and stepped back and kept staring at her, his eyes still shining with such a crazed look that he frightened her more now than he ever had before. He grabbed her by her wrists. “No,” she said.

  He pushed her to the wall, and then to the floor.

  “No.”

  “There are no noes between us,” he hissed, “you know that. No noes, no maybes. Only yeses. You know that.” He lowered her to the floor and fucked her not far from the assassination of an Indian prime minister by her bodyguard (Year Seventeen: 31 October 1984) and the murder of a Sixties soul singer by his father (Year Sixteen: 1 April 1984), his black-and-white beard in her face, rapture displacing grief. Now he had her so as to shoot himself into the vortex of chaos rather than simply empty himself of memory; and she had a hundred dreams in a single climax, until she thought she couldn’t stand one more revelation.

  Her body became part of the Calendar, the traveling center of apocalypse. Over the course of the following days and weeks, he positioned her everywhere, studying how the dates shifted in accordance, how the timelines rearranged themselves in relation to her. He had her walk the room in circles for hours, from one corner to the other, in the light cast through the papered window or the shadow beyond the light. He perched her high on ladders and lay her facedown on the floor; he pinned her against the wall and placed her outside the room in the hallway or on the stairs. He took her outside the house to the base of the hillside below, posing her naked where he could see her in relation to this year or that, through a peephole he cut in the Calendar in some frivolous, expendable date; astonished drivers nearly drove off the road. He set her on the next hill over, far out of sight and beyond the range of what even he could see, and finally took her to Black Clock Park, standing her at the grave of his time-capsule in an old long blue coat he gave her, with a stopwatch and instructions that at an exact designated moment, after enough time for him to return to his house and his room and his calendar, she would drop her coat and stand naked among the tombstones while he plotted the shifting courses and charted the swirling clockwork.

  By this time she had gotten so used to being naked that she wore her nakedness like a persona. The sex between them changed to something no longer indifferent but, for his part, possessed, like the rest of his life. At his insistence she began sleeping with him in his bed, even when they didn’t have sex, and she would wake in the morning with his arms clutching her close. Of course you are free, she remembered his newspaper ad had read, to end the arrangement and leave at any moment, but the very nature of the arrangement had changed now, she knew that, whether or not he acknowledged it.

  So she never doubted what he had in mind the night they drove out to the desert. By now night and day meant nothing to him, he slept only moments here and there; and the night they drove out to the desert, three hours northeast of Los Angeles, the sky was on fire with stars. She was uneasy the whole way, exhausted, but her anxiety and the cold kept her awake, and he kept looking over at her as though trying to decide exactly what to do with her, as though he was as uncertain as she exactly what desire or revelation or madness was dictating the moment. They drove out toward San Bernardino and then up through the Cajon Pass, flying out across the desert highway in the dark, Liszt and industrial m
usic on the tape player. Somewhere in the desolation between Barstow and Las Vegas, he finally pulled over. He turned off the engine but not the ignition, turning up the music because it had gotten particularly depraved and he wanted to be able to hear it outside the car. He got out of the car and went around to the other side and opened her door. “Get out,” he said.

  “What are we doing,” she said.

  “Just get out.”

  “No.”

  “No noes,” he snarled, “just yeses.”

  “No,” she said. She sat in the passenger’s seat looking up at him. She knew what he was going to do, she knew exactly what he had in mind: “I know exactly what you have in mind,” she said. “You’re going to drag me out into the desert and stick me next to a cactus and then you’re going to drive back to L.A. and study your fucking calendar. And then you somehow think—because you’ve gone completely off the deep end—you somehow think you’re going to drive back out here in seven or eight hours and just pick me up again. And what you don’t understand, because you are completely out of your mind, what you don’t understand is that in seven or eight hours I’ll be dead. I’ll be dead because I’ll have frozen to death or some motorcycle gang will have come by and raped me and killed me, or some wild animal will have eaten me or … or maybe I won’t be dead, maybe I’ll just have had a really unpleasant experience. No. I quit. We can waive the pension plan. ‘You’re free to end the arrangement and leave at any moment,’ that’s what your ad said. This is the moment.”