The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  Actually I wasn’t asleep, I was just lying there with my eyes closed. And in the rare quiet of dawn I might have heard the click of the dead bolt, but in fact my life wasn’t quiet anymore, the roar of chaos was always in my ears now, the roar of Paris when I was eleven, the roar unleashed with a kiss in all the human jukeboxes of the Scene’s women … I couldn’t even hear my tapes anymore. And it wasn’t till I got up and used the bathroom and tried to open the outer door to the rest of the flat that I realized I was locked in. Like anyone suddenly and unexpectedly trapped, my first instinct was to free myself. I rattled the knob, started banging with my fist. On the other side of the door, various denizens who had spent the night either slept through the ruckus or were just cognizant enough to laugh at what they considered an amusing situation. On the other side of the door, I could hear Max writing something.

  Over the course of the following days then weeks, I alternated between desperation to try and free myself, and an acceptance of the boundaries of my new universe, along with the consolation that if I couldn’t get out, no one else could get in. I stared out my window for days on end at the vacant lot below and the drug house next to it, where the line of kids on the sidewalk grew longer or shorter depending on the weather or the whims of the pharmaceutical market or the popularity of the drug du jour or the news on the street—good or bad—and the circling squad cars. I could never shout to anyone outside my window or outside my door because my cries never rose above the whispers and mutters that chaos had left to me when it took my voice in Paris years before. …

  Max always had an uncanny sense when to unlock the door and slip me a sandwich and water or juice or a soda while I slept. Meanwhile, with the roar that I always heard in my head, my headaches got worse, to which she responded with some generic painkiller she scored on the street … coming to me in the dark as I lay on my mattress in a blinding incapacitated delirium, Max would withhold the painkiller till I serviced her to satisfaction and then leave as I slept off the pain and the stupor of the drug, turning the dead bolt locked behind her. “Baby?” I heard her through the door one afternoon.

  Through the roar in my head I could barely make out her voice. “What?” I said.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Am I all right?” Through the pain and noise I think I still managed to sound a little testy. “I’m locked in a room.”

  “Yes,” she admitted, “is it so bad?”

  “I can’t get out. I’m a prisoner.”

  “Try to learn to accept it,” she explained gently, and so for seven months I lived in the locked room. In my hallucinations from the headaches, I began to see for the first time the timelines of chaos on the walls around me, on the ceiling above me, and the whole Calendar started to take shape. If I’d had anything to write with I might have drawn it all out right then and there, and then and there it would still be, in some hovel down at Second and Second on the Lower East Side of New York City. On the other side of the door, I heard the Scene come and go, sound of chaos slowly transforming from exhilaration to despair … sometimes I thought I could make out the whimper of death. Max would return from a gig in the early-morning hours and call through the door. “Baby?”

  “What?”

  “You all right?”

  “I’m still here, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “You missed my show tonight.”

  “Yes, I was detained.” I could hear her discouragement. “How was it?”

  “I don’t know,” she’d say. I could hear the Scene’s collective faith ebbing from her voice. “I wish you’d been there, you could tell me.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it seems like something we should share together. As part of our ever-deepening relationship. Sometimes,” I said, “I can almost hear it from here.”

  “You can almost hear it?”

  “Almost. I lie on the floor and put my head next to the vent and I can almost hear it, your voice, your song, coming through the vents of the Lower East Side, traveling up the Bowery from Houston, taking a right at Second, coming through the vent into the room.”

  “How’s it sound?”

  “Hard to say. By the time it gets here, sound traveling at the speed of chaos as it does, you’re into the next verse.”

  “I wish,” she said forlornly, “you could hear it better. So you could tell me.”

  “Me too.”

  “It’s hard to know whether it’s good or not, without someone I can trust there listening.”

  “I know what you mean,” I assured her.

  “I miss you.”

  I said, “Max, I have an idea.”

  “Yes?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll come to the show, and I’ll listen, and I’ll be able to tell you then, because I’ll be right there.”

  For a while I didn’t hear anything. I wondered if she was saying something and I was just missing it through the door and the roar in my head. “But then,” she finally answered, “I’d have to let you out of the room.”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” she said through the door, “I don’t think that will work out.”

  “I’ll be right there, so I’ll be able to hear everything.”

  “I don’t think so, no,” she said.

  “It’s a very good idea, actually.”

  “No, actually, it’s not so good. Really, it’s not that great an idea.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “No, actually,” she said, “thinking about it, having given it some thought, really, I think the show tonight went well.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “I think it went quite well, giving it some thought. I’m quite happy with the way it went.”

  “From here,” I tried to point out, “it seemed like … it seemed like it went well, but maybe it could be … better. It seemed … maybe it might have just missed being perfect. If I was there listening, I could tell for sure.”

  “No,” she said through the door, “I don’t believe it missed at all. I think it was divine. I think it was groovy. I’m tired now, you know, baby? It’s been a long night. How’s your headache?”

  “Open the fucking door, Max.”

  “I’m going to sleep now, baby. I’ll come see you again soon.”

  “Max!”

  “Good night.” I didn’t get out of the room till one afternoon when, with neither the sound in my ears nor the pain in my head as bad as usual, I heard the voice of yet another woman outside my door. Hello? I heard her, and on my knees I scrambled from the mattress to the door and pressed my ear against it. Hello? she said again, and I felt a very strange confusion as to whether to answer, as if, faced with the prospect of release, I wasn’t as sure anymore I wanted it. When I tried to call back, for a moment I found my voice failing again, till I finally managed to croak out a strangled response: Yes, I said, getting on my feet, Yes! and then rapping on the door. Are you all right? the girl on the other side said, and when I tried to answer, once again my voice failed, and so I just kept rapping on the door. I stepped back from the door to see if it would open. But nothing happened, and after a moment to my great fury I could hear amid the sound in my head footsteps of the girl leaving. I slammed my hand against the door and returned to my mattress on the floor and dozed. …

  A few minutes later I woke and got up and went to the door and turned the knob and found it unlocked. I went out into the apartment, like a man emerging from the underground into the sunlight of the earth’s surface, gazing around at the empty flat. Looking back at the door of the room where I had spent seven months, I saw Max had written, in black marker ink, OCCUPIED. I left everything behind—including my tapes—took fifty-five bucks from the cigar box where she kept her spare cash, and got out.

  LET’S NOT ANALYZE TOO much why I went back to Paris in ’82. The timing was probably random anyway … sooner or later I was going back, and it just happened to be then. Got fired—for “insubordination” and being a “disruptive influence in the office,
” but that’s not worth going into either—from a job with a research firm where I had a thousand facts of chaos at my fingers … and fleeing that and an affair with a recently separated woman still feeling bad about her ex-husband, I went to Paris. So there I was. I lived for a while with some anarchists on the rue de Vaugirard, not far from the Eiffel Tower, then moved into a hotel on the rue Jacob, just off the boulevard Saint-Germain, where the concierge supplied me with toothpaste and toilet paper and aspirin for my headaches while deferring payment on the hotel tab.

  “Can we make a deal,” Angie said at the Brasserie Lipp the first time I saw her, “we won’t ask too much about the past?” How much of a past can she have? I thought. She was a daunting nineteen. I was an unconvincing twenty-five. It was July and she was the only person on the boulevard that afternoon sitting in the sun, with no use for the shade, the slimmest of breezes moving the long black hair that fell on her shoulders. I would have thought she was so sophisticated in the black boots she wore outside her jeans like the French girls, if not for the ridiculous little stuffed bear she sat in the chair next to her. Later the only thing besides the bear that betrayed her was the way, forgetting herself, she would bite her nails, because Angie biting her nails was as fully incongruous with the rest of her as she meant it to be, the rest of her such a practiced determined cool.

  She never broke a sweat. Amerasian, she wasn’t quite beautiful, but near enough to confuse and unsettle the passing guys. Twenty years before, her mother met her father in Tokyo while on leave from duty as an army nurse in Korea, and after that they settled near Las Vegas, where she was born. Her father was a physicist, Rising Sun expatriate among a half-dozen Third Reich expatriates now working for the victorious Americans in the Nevada desert, and in the afternoons her pregnant mother went out on the patio and lay on the chaise lounge sunbathing in the nuclear light of the tests her husband worked on just beyond the backyard fence. … This was as much of Angie’s past as I was going to find out right away, drinking my vodka tonic and wondering if I said something wrong trying to make conversation: “Four thousand people,” I read out loud from the Herald Tribune, though my voice was still such a hoarse whisper I wasn’t sure anyone could hear me, “married in New York by a crazy Korean who picked their husbands and wives for them,” and then thinking, Shit (as I said it), maybe she’s Korean.

  “Maybe,” she said instead, “he would have picked us.”

  That answer alone probably got us through the next three years. For that answer alone I avoided certain magazines at the newsstands, certain movies in dark moviehouses full of men, from which your doomed eyes and sorry smile and all the naked rest of you would have stared back at me, if I had gone looking for trouble. … I don’t know whether not looking for trouble was a sign of maturity or cowardice—whatever, Angie had left something behind in New York, and whatever New York had done to her, it was lousy enough that Paris seemed liberating in comparison, for all the ways the city was so ragged around the edges that ’82 summer, hot and overrun with beggars and trash piling up on the streets and people getting pushed in front of oncoming Métro trains. After buying her dinner at the Lipp, I got her to come back with me to my hotel and we climbed the five flights to my room and in one hand she held her stuffed bear and in one hand I still had a white rose some old woman had given me in the Luxembourg Gardens that afternoon. … At the Lipp I kept trying to give you the rose and you kept pushing it back. So it lay on the table, next to the profiteroles. …

  Back at my hotel, five flights up, the room was stifling. I opened the window that looked out on the street, worked on the cork of a Côtes du Rhône, and turned to find a naked girl on my bed, in nothing but knee-high boots as black as her hair. She lay on her stomach reading the Herald Tribune, spread out on the bed before her, her elbows getting black from newsprint, legs swaying back and forth in the air behind her, stuffed bear on the pillow at the head of the bed and the white rose I thought I’d finally gotten her to take tossed on the table next to the bathroom door.

  All right, I was stunned. I admit it. I stood there with the bottle in my hand staring at her, till she looked up. “So if he’d married us,” she said, “how long do you suppose it would be before you left me?”

  “How do you know I would leave you? Maybe you would leave me.” I sat next to her on the bed. She was very casual about the way she read the newspaper naked, lazily swaying her legs back and forth behind her, and I’d almost say there was no sexual suggestion about it at all except for the boots—such a hackneyed and effective male fantasy, for her to be wearing nothing but those boots, like she just neglected to remove them, though of course she couldn’t have taken her jeans off without also taking off the boots. In the few seconds that I’d turned my back to open the window and uncork the bottle of wine, she’d taken off her boots and then all her clothes—and then put the boots back on. …

  “No,” she assured me with utmost seriousness, “you would leave me, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. I wouldn’t assume,” she added, now obliquely addressing the subject of her nakedness, though it took me a moment to catch up with the shift in conversation, “I wouldn’t assume, if I were you, that things are as easy as they appear. For all you know,” she said, “it’s my way of seizing control of the situation. For all you know, I may just be trying to intimidate you. Are you intimidated?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “For all you know,” she went on, “it might be much easier for me to take off my clothes in front of a strange guy than to sleep with him. You shouldn’t assume, just because many men might have seen me naked, that many men have had sex with me.”

  I took a drink from the bottle and offered it to her. “I didn’t necessarily assume many men had seen you naked.”

  “Don’t you have any glasses?” she said, looking at the bottle disdainfully, and I got up from the bed and got her a glass from the bathroom and poured her some wine. “Don’t assume,” she said, sipping the wine, “I’ve had sex with more men than I can count.”

  “I don’t assume that.”

  “I can count them. I don’t need all my fingers either.” She wiggled the fingers of her free hand at me. “I may not be able to name them, but I can count them.”

  “Is this the part of the past we aren’t supposed to talk about?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. She tapped the Herald Tribune in front of her. “So how do you think this guy paired them up?”

  “What?”

  “This Korean guy, Reverend Whatsis. Who married these four thousand people in New York. He chose all their partners for them, it says. How did he do that? Did he choose them by age, did he choose them by height? Did he choose alphabetically? Did he have a file on them, did he match up their interests, hobbies, college degrees? That doesn’t seem possible, does it, that he would have a file on all these people?” Unconsciously she began to bite her fingernail on one of the fingers that she didn’t need to count all the men she’d had sex with, then she caught herself and closed her hand in a fist, burying it beneath her breasts. Outside, the noise of the street was starting to die and the summer light that doesn’t die in Paris till after ten o’clock was finally dying too. “So on the one hand you figure he doesn’t care if any of these marriages are successful, or happy, or if any of these people belong together—all he cares is that he can snap his fingers and everyone just does what he wants, right? Everyone just surrenders to him the single most important decision of their lives. That’s the point.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all he cares about.”

  “A demonstration to the world of his control over chaos.”

  “You think?” she said, frowning. “Except,” and now she rolled over onto her back staring at the ceiling, raising the finger she had been biting and blithely showing me the rest of her, “if all these marriages fall apart later, then the point he’s making sort of falls apart too. You know?” She twisted her head around now, looking at me half sideways, half ups
ide down. “Bad public relations really, to perform whatever it is, two thousand marriages as the world watches, and then, you know, nineteen hundred of them don’t last. Not a very convincing demonstration of control.”

  I was still distracted.

  “You’re distracted,” she said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “But you’re distracted.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Not at all,” she scoffed.

  “I don’t think there was any grand scheme,” I said, “that was the real point. That’s the real power. That he can be so completely arbitrary. It makes him that much more powerful to be able to marry anyone to anyone without any rational reason. People’s lives completely changed through a whim. You see?”

  “I’ll bet he just threw a bunch of names in a hat and picked. They’re probably lucky he even matched guys to girls.” She thought about it. “In its own way, it’s completely evil.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” she assured me, “it is. I know. I’ve seen evil,” she said quietly, “not evil in the abstract, but in the concretely tangible. I know what evil is, and I can now tell you for a fact it’s not me lying on this bed in nothing but my boots drinking red wine with you. That isn’t even close.”

  “And the four thousand people who blindly deliver themselves over to his decision, are they evil?”

  “That’s not evil. That’s faith.”

  “Where does there stop being a difference?”

  She rolled onto her side and closed her eyes. “Confusion,” she said, concluding the argument, but at the time I had no idea what she meant. We fell asleep without making love. Sometime in the early-morning hours I woke to a kick from one of her boots, and thinking I might close the window, I got up, but it was still so warm I left the window open, and then I pulled off her boots in the dark and pulled the sheet up over her. I was about to take from her arms the small stuffed bear she was clutching when she muttered from out of her sleep, “I would seriously advise you not to try and come between me and my bear.” I sat on the bed a while and noticed, in the dark, that the white rose I got in the Luxembourg Gardens that afternoon, which had been lying on the small table by the bathroom door, was now stuck in the bottle of wine I’d opened. I had no idea why or when she put the rose in the wine, but since there was still wine in the bottle, the next morning when we woke, the white of the rose had turned a deep and saturated pink.