The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  “No noes”—his whisper rose to a pathetic howl—“just yeses.” He stumbled out into the desert, thrashing clockwise among the overgrowth; she could tell one of his headaches had returned. He kept pressing his temples harder and harder, blue eyes about to pop from their sockets; and then trampling the desert shrubbery, he clutched his head as though barely containing it in his hands, trying to hold it together. “Timelines of chaos!” he cried hoarsely to the desert night, “the anarchy of the age!”

  “Jesus,” she muttered, reaching over and pulling her door shut and locking it, though she wasn’t really sure who was the bigger point-misser here, the Occupant or her. She slid over to the driver’s seat, closed the door on the driver’s side and locked it too, and stepped on the gas. Because she had never driven a car before, she had to figure out how to shift it into gear, and while she was figuring that out, he finally understood what was happening and began pounding on the passenger door. As best she could, she appraised the mechanics of reverse, neutral, drive; found a gear and hit the gas and the car lurched; and kept on lurching for a couple of miles before she realized that if she continued, she would lurch into Las Vegas completely naked. She had no way of knowing this was the one American city other than New Orleans to which such an entrance might have endeared her, so she turned around and went back. When she came to him standing in the middle of the highway, pacing in circles in the dark talking to himself as though her abandonment of him was only the most temporary distraction from his obsession, she slowed and then stopped. They looked at each other through the windshield and finally he walked over. It took her a minute to figure out how to lower the window on the passenger’s side. “Do you want a ride?” she said.

  “Move over,” he said, “you don’t know how to drive.”

  “I’m driving, you’re riding,” she answered.

  “You don’t know how to drive,” he quietly insisted, “move over. I’m not going to leave you out here in the desert. I’ll drive us back to Los Angeles.” She saw that he could see how she was looking at him. “Whatever else I’ve done,” he pointed out, “I don’t think I’ve lied to you yet.”

  “Not yet,” she said. She slid back to the other seat and he got in the car and they drove home.

  NOW WHEN HE HAD his headaches, he would lie in the dark of his bedroom and let her rub his head for hours.

  One night when he came for her, she grabbed his hair in two handfuls and even in the dark of the bedroom he could see her looking him squarely in his blue eyes. “What are you doing?” he whispered in alarm.

  “I’m making you look at me,” she said. “I’m making you look in my eyes while you fuck me, I’m making you see me while you do it.”

  He cried out, pulling away from her. On his knees he tried to scramble back to the far end of the bed, and all the while she held onto his hair. When he tried to stand, he pulled her up with him, she was clutching so tightly; the whole time she kept staring determinedly into his eyes. “What are you doing,” he kept saying.

  “Don’t you think it’s time?” she said. “Don’t you think it’s time you looked in my eyes?”

  “What are you talking about?” he choked. Together they tumbled to the floor and into the dark corner of the room.

  “It’s time you looked in my eyes,” she answered, but she meant: time I looked in yours. Time for a personal act of revolt. Time to throw your oh-so-highly intellectualized sense of chaos into a true chaos of the heart and senses. She didn’t much care anymore if he tossed her out of his life for it; she had about decided it was time for that too. They had never understood each other. If she had understood him, she would have known that for almost a year now, since his wife had vanished with their child in her belly, in his mansion of memory he had become increasingly lost and trapped. If he had understood her, he would have known she was a dream-virgin when he met her, and so wouldn’t have been surprised to wake one morning soon afterward and find that she had vanished too.

  LET’S SAY I’M A MONSTER. Let’s say I was never capable of love. Let’s say down in the pit of my soul, beyond whatever I tried to convince myself I believed, everything was always about surrender and control, so the bond I formed with the girl I brought home was true to who I really am, because it was base and hungry.

  Let’s say I never really believed in anything but myself. Let’s say my soul was so impoverished I never really believed in anything but my appetites, because of all the things I’ve felt, appetite was beyond my control. This assumes I ever really believed there was a soul to be impoverished. Let’s say from the first moment of my life, everything’s always been about me and nothing else, including apocalypse and chaos; let’s say even apocalypse and chaos have been conceits of my psyche and bad faith—this assumes I ever kept any kind of faith at all, bad or otherwise. … Let’s say I’m faithlessness made flesh, the modern age’s leap of faith stopped dead in its tracks, fucking around with apocalypse and chaos only because in some broken part of me, among any wreckage of honor or altruism or commitment or compassion, or the bits and pieces of moral vanity, I really believed the abyss was always just the playground of my imagination, and I was its bully.

  How do you know, the girl said the afternoon she found the Calendar in the downstairs room, when I told her about the true millennium of the modern soul, and I said, I was there. I was eleven. My father was a semi-celebrated, proverbially lion-maned American poet and romantic egomaniac, larger than life and moving us to Paris when his political activities made staying in the States uncomfortable. Dragging Mama and me from one forum to the next, from one podium to the next, from one adoring standing ovation to the next, from Boston to San Francisco till institutional harassment and ominous threats and anonymous phone calls seemed to make exile the only viable option. He reveled in exile more than he ever really agonized over it. … Mama, half French half Russian Jew, determined self-sacrificer and silently suffering martyr, first went to America as a student after the second world war had cast across her family twin shadows of looming extermination on the one hand, rumors of collaboration on the other. What was exile for my father, she was determined to call home. Back in Paris maybe she was also determined to stop either the suffering or the silence, if she couldn’t stop both.

  I was asleep in our flat at the corner of the rue Dante and rue Saint-Jacques, on the left bank of the city, not far from Notre Dame, when I woke to a sound unlike any I’d ever heard before. People always say it’s like a car backfiring but hearing it anyone can tell it’s different. Years later I still don’t know whether the gun was Mama’s or my father’s, or belonged to the dead girl in their bed. One of the smaller mysteries. Like lots of things, it never got explained. But when it woke me, even at age eleven I knew something was wrong, and I ran out my room in my underwear straight to my parents’ bedroom and Mama catching me in her arms, and I didn’t ask what happened … in my eleven-year-old life I already hated anything that might constitute emotional upheaval. I just wanted her to tell me everything was all right, that I could go back to sleep, that it was only a sound from out in the street.

  Then there was a sound from out in the street.

  It was the night of 6 May 1968, or to be exact 3:02 in the morning of 7 May. The shot that woke me woke the modern age. Echoed down the rue Saint-Jacques to the boulevard Saint-Germain and the university a few blocks beyond, where a few thousand students had taken over, thrown out the professors, draped red and black flags over the statues of Hugo and Pasteur, hoisted banners that read FORBID THE FORBIDDEN and BELOW THE BOULEVARD, THE BEACH, and waited as what seemed like tens of thousands of cops surrounded the school waiting in turn. Who knows what any of them took the sound of the gunshot to be. Years later, for everything that’s been written about it, there’s no record of any student having a gun, and the police weapon of choice was the truncheon, when it wasn’t a tank … did the cops really think some student had fired a gun? Did the students really think some lone cop had fired a gun? Maybe they thought it was t
he snap of a truncheon across some anonymous body. Maybe it doesn’t matter in the least. Maybe in the early-morning hours what mattered was the sound’s sheer explosiveness not its source, and it cracked the waiting in two—and cracked in two there could be no waiting anymore. The cops charged.

  Upstairs in our flat Mama, half hysterical, held me in the dark of the hall and I could smell gunfire through the door of their bedroom, open just enough so I could see in the light of the bed lamp my father standing there holding his head in his hands. A lifeless feminine arm jutted into view. Bedlam exploded in the streets. Tearing myself from Mama I ran downstairs as she chased after me, and in the dark of the rue Dante up and down the rue Saint-Jacques people were yelling and running, ripping cobblestones up from the road, hurling them aimlessly, pushing cars over on their sides and setting them on fire. Cops were swinging at everything. They surged against the sidewalks, uprooted the chestnut trees. Glass glistened everywhere. Tear gas canisters rolled in the gutters. The air was thick with fumes and smoke and there was a chant in the distance I didn’t recognize as Métro boulot dodo till I read it in the papers later.

  It meant, more or less, subway, work, sleep—a bitter reduction of everything the modern age had become. It was the moment when the meaning of the modern age unraveled. In the years leading up to this moment there was an incontrovertible moral logic to upheaval, upheaval was the instrument of morally distinct aspirations, whatever you thought of those aspirations. In the minutes before 3:02 on the morning of the seventh of May, the students who seized the Sorbonne did so on behalf of complaints that ceased to matter at all by 3:03 … by 3:04 upheaval lost all rationale, it was the expression of a spiritual chaos no politics could address; by 3:07 I was running in my underwear in the street, sprung loose of moral meaning along with everyone else, time exploding in a void of meaning; at 3:08 I turned to see Mama behind me in the door of our apartment building, not running after me but just looking as if to commit me as fast to memory as the moment allowed. And then she just walked from the doorway into the crowd as calmly as everyone else around me ran insanely. …

  I stopped and said, Mama? and stepped toward her, when someone knocked me over. When I picked myself up, she was gone.

  THERE I AM CRYING in the street. Around me there’s a sound that’s more than just the collective voice of upheaval, it’s the collective voice of the age growing into a din like I wouldn’t hear again for years … the louder it grew the louder I tried to call her, till I was screaming so loud finally my voice was gone. It would be seven years before I got it back.

  Timelines of chaos! Anarchy of the age! It wasn’t possible everything could have happened in that one night, it just seemed like one night. Had to have been nights and nights, weeks of nights. … The last lucid memory I had was standing there looking for Mama in the riot, then turning back to the doorway of our building on the rue Dante waiting for her to come back and somehow knowing she wasn’t going to come back. And I wasn’t going back upstairs, back to the gun on the floor and the smoke in the hall and my father in the bedroom, so I took off down the boulevard Saint-Germain in the direction of the very café where I would meet Angie years later, and up the boulevard in waves I could see them in the streetlights, tanks rolling, cops marching. In their black helmets in the night they looked headless, thousands of headless cops snapping truncheons in their hands and a sound from the helmets like black hail bouncing off, handfuls of bolts and nuts thrown by students. I traveled below the sight lines of chaos. I moved unscathed, except to be drenched by erupting water mains and buckets of water that Parisians in the upstairs windows kept dumping on the students below, whether to douse or revive their fury I never knew—I don’t think they even knew. Medical students in white frocks streaked with blood ran back and forth shouting at everyone to calm down, but no one wanted to calm down, the spectacular disintegration of everything was too exhilarating, and now everyone existed just to be exhilarated.

  The smell of exhilaration’s smoke settled over everything. From one end of the city to the other … but I never found it as overpowering as the smoke in the hall of our flat that last time. That was the smell of years to come. What would have been one of the more sensational murder trials in modern France just happened to coincide with the country’s most anarchic days since 1871, if not the last years of the Eighteenth Century, so, busy picking through the rubble of the following weeks, France barely noticed. The dead girl in my parents’ bed was a literature student at the Sorbonne, part of the protest only hours before she was shot, maybe destined to be cut down by a charging cop, dying for anarchy instead of desire. I’d seen her once before, actually, one afternoon when I was with my parents at the Deux Magots. She was a couple of tables over, red hair and freckles and a smile I still remember. The position of the gun on the bedroom floor near her hand indicated the possibility of suicide, maybe like it was meant to, a conclusion the police rejected when they charged my father with second-degree murder. He went first to trial then prison stonily and uncharacteristically silent. The romantic in him, compelled by a personal code that was narcissistic at heart but still had its occasional heroic results, I guess, may have been protecting Mama after she caught the girl in bed with him and killed her. It wasn’t till years later it occurred to me it might have been Mama, sick of her silent suffering and feeling unleashed in a Paris flirting with havoc, who was in bed with the girl, something my egomaniac father would have been too proud to explain to anyone let alone police and newspapers, and which wouldn’t have absolved him in any case.

  In any case Mama disappeared. Into the Apocalyptic Age! Into the Secret Millennium! The next couple months, as the country descended into disorder, the closest exit out of France was Belgium and you had to get there first, presumably on foot since no cars drove because they had no gas, no trains ran because they were on strike, no planes flew because they were grounded. … I never saw her again, or my father. I was shuffled around a while among friends in Paris, then shipped back to New York and New England to be shuffled among friends there. Didn’t communicate with my father in prison before leaving Europe, hadn’t communicated with him when word came of his death—by then I was sixteen, deposited at a commune in upstate New York and finding the loss of my voice altogether convenient … when I got the letter, I read it once, and went into town to catch a movie. I was unmoved by the lost opportunity of reconciliation—let’s say I never would have believed it. Let’s say I saw nothing to reconcile. Let’s say I’m a monster.

  Years later, after I married Angie, the day we moved to the house in the Hollywood Hills, I stumbled on a box of letters. Flipping through, I found an empty envelope addressed in a woman’s hand I knew immediately, though I hadn’t seen it since I was eleven. I kept blinking at it as if something would click in my head that explained it. I had no recollection of receiving it. Though the envelope was torn open at the top, I had no recollection of having read it. In a panic I went through the box knowing the letter had to have fallen out, but it wasn’t there. I went through the other boxes and for a long last time stood in the middle of the empty apartment knowing that letter was there somewhere, slipped through some crack, and that if I left now I’d never find it.

  Finally, of course, I had to leave. Kept the empty envelope with its postmark faded and obscured, the date lost forever and the origin a tiny French town I never heard of called Sur-les-Bateaux, about twelve kilometers—according to the atlas—from the coast of Brittany.

  OH I’M SORRY. HAVE I SPOKEN TOO LOUDLY? HAVE I RAISED my voice? Have I taken a tone? Have I transgressed my station in life as chaos assigned it to me, to always exist just above a whisper? Would I have just gone on never living beyond the sound of my own voice, if I hadn’t rescued Jenna’s copy of Gorky from the gutter on Central Park West that spring day in, what, 1975? … I was nineteen. Eighteen. Don’t even remember what I was doing in the city but there I was, and when I picked up the book that slipped from her arms, she gave me as radiant a smile as I was ev
er going to get from her. Jenna was a card-carrying Stalinist, an exotic and preposterous bird even in the zoo of the Seventies … now, of course, when I think about her at all, which isn’t much, I realize that—dialectical materialism being what it was—the odds of Jenna giving herself to me were always exactly zero. But I didn’t know that. I was historically naive, as she would have been the first to tell you or me or anyone else.

  She’d just gotten back from studying abroad in Madrid, where by some machination far too mysterious to divulge to an inescapably bourgeois American boy—the son of a poet, no less: a bohemian—she’d gone to Moscow for two weeks as part of some sort of “friendship” program that opened her eyes forever. … All right, I went a little around the bend for Jenna that spring in New York. Followed her to secret meetings and clandestine rendezvous with this or that comrade, at the headquarters of this or that cadre where she would spend the night while I stood on the curb outside counting the windows up the side of the brownstone to the one I decided was hers. …

  A stalker is just a particularly dedicated romantic, right? Next morning I’d still be there, slumped against a tree. In a way she gave me back my voice, seven years after it was drowned out by revolution, the anarchic kind that disciplined Stalinists had no use for—gave me back my voice albeit in whispers and mutters, and I sat up nights rewriting her speeches for her, the language of her convictions having either failed those convictions or eluded her altogether. I didn’t believe a word. I didn’t believe a word I wrote or a word I said. I didn’t believe a word I whispered or muttered. I believed in the way I wanted her, and when I realized I wanted her so much I’d mutter or whisper almost any conceivable horseshit for her, I knew I had to get away, and hope my voice went with me.