The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  “As though they don’t take one look at you and want to lock the doors, Lu. They take one look at you and think you’re going to blow up their theaters. Like you’re really fooling anyone.”

  For some time after that they huddled in the van in silence until Louise finally said, “I guess we should let Billy do the talking.” And so it fell to Billy, a bit dim but not altogether unamiable, to occasionally josh the theaters into taking a chance. These were one-shot opportunities. Booking a Blue Christian movie was the sort of mistake the theaters usually made only once, which didn’t bode well for any grand schemes of a trilogy, even one so promisingly titled the Virgin Trilogy. Enough theaters were duped into Virgin White to raise the ten thousand dollars needed to shoot Virgin Pink, at which point the only theaters the filmmakers could get into anymore were in the most dubious sections of the very largest cities, where there were always enough weird people to generate the requisite minimal interest in almost anything, including one of Mitch and Louise’s movies. But Louise could see the writing on the wall. With Virgin Black they would have to raise the stakes, and that was when, one evening around Christmastime 1976 back in the West Village, after a distinctly discouraging trip around the country trying to sell Virgin Pink, she proposed that in the next film they murder an actress at the moment of climax. “That’s fantastic,” Mitch said.

  There was something about the way he said it that made Louise quietly add, “I don’t mean we really murder her. I mean we just make it look like we murder her.”

  “Oh,” Mitch answered, and her blood froze at how disappointed he sounded. In the days that followed, she assured herself it had been her imagination, but in the years that followed, she would look back and wonder exactly where and when the great cosmic slapstick of their lives, based on nothing more terrible than their glorious and twisted incompetence, had crossed a depraved rubicon. If the terrorist in Louise had accepted, early on, the most basic premise of terrorism, that nothing is innocent, that in a corrupt world innocence is a luxury no one deserves, that it’s justifiable to victimize the innocent not in spite of their innocence but because of it, then Louise and Mitch’s incompetence would exact its price in innocence. Because they weren’t good enough filmmakers to truly fake a murder through artifice, they could do it only with an unwilling and innocent accomplice, the actress herself who was to be the victim. The only way to fake the murder successfully—the only way to make the audience believe the woman had actually been murdered in the film—was to have the actress herself believe it, to have her believe, right up until the last moment, that she was actually going to die.

  They had always been so incompetent at everything else, perhaps Louise believed deep down they would be incompetent at this as well. But in fact it was the only thing Mitch would ever be supremely competent at in his life; casting a particularly naive eighteen-year-old from Minneapolis named Marie, who had come to New York hoping to be in musicals, Mitch scheduled her to show up a day early at the deserted Brooklyn bus terminal where the filming was to take place, at which point she was tied, gagged, blindfolded and hung naked on a hook by her bound hands in a back storeroom for twenty-four hours while there swirled around her various discussions of what was to be done with her body once filming finished. After that, Marie was competent enough for all of them: she was more than competent, she was inspired. The movie, or the rumors that came to surround it, flabbergasted everyone, exceeding Mitch’s fondest dreams and fulfilling Louise’s intentions all too perfectly; but perhaps it didn’t flabbergast everyone enough. Perhaps any age that could produce such a phenomenon—and every age had produced such phenomena, after all, going back to coliseums of spectators happily watching men and women torn apart by lions—wasn’t capable of being fully flabbergasted. For a time Marie from Minneapolis just vanished, and when the police arrested Mitch and Louise on suspicion of murder, and the couple had to produce the girl in order to clear themselves, they wondered if they had been competent to a fault.

  They were in jail four days before the girl turned up. On the one hand she was such a complete emotional and psychological wreck that the couple faced a whole new battery of charges, not the least of which was kidnapping and torture; on the other hand the district attorney’s office finally had to conclude the victim’s account was too rattled and incoherent to build a case on, since there were no other witnesses. “I would ask what kind of animals you are,” the detective who came to release them said, “but I suppose if you could answer that, you wouldn’t be here and none of this would have happened.” Mitch was beside himself with joy. On the subway back to the Village he went on and on about it; it was a coup; they were quite famous now, he assured Louise.

  Louise smoked a cigarette and watched the black tunnel walls out the train window. Her hatred of the cop who had spoken to them that way kept rising in her throat like bile. For four days in jail she had convinced herself she was well and truly fed up with all this horseshit that included Mitch and cops and some little mouse from Minneapolis too stupid for life in the big city to even be in the big city in the first place. Over the course of the four days in jail Louise almost convinced herself that everything that had happened was everyone’s fault except hers. When they got home she was exhausted; Mitch actually wanted to have sex and she pushed him away angrily. She wanted to sleep and sat staring at the bed, where Mitch went on fooling with his camera like always, and she kept thinking about lying down and going to sleep but instead just sat in the chair hypnotized by sleep’s prospect until, in the light of the afternoon sun through the window, she did doze off for several seconds, before waking herself with a start.

  She wanted desperately to sleep, but she also wanted to avoid sleep at all cost. She kept waking herself, until that evening she couldn’t keep awake anymore. Then, asleep in the chair, she had the dream of Marie from Minneapolis that she had known all along was waiting for her outside jail, in the sleep of freedom where dreams are always unbound. She dreamed of Marie from Minneapolis and woke weeping; she continued to have the dreams on and off for the next year, until one morning in the early fall of 1978, sitting in the same chair, with Mitch still on the same bed still fooling with his camera, she read the newspaper and put it down and went into the bathroom and threw up, and Lulu Blu’s own private millennium had begun.

  IMMEDIATELLY MITCH ASSUMED she was pregnant. When she came out of the bathroom he just looked at her and said with great irritation, “Fuck, you’re pregnant.” She returned to the chair clammy and pale, and sat looking out the window where ten years before she had heard the far-off sound of a gunshot. Mitch’s attention returned to his camera, and he said offhandedly, “I know a place we can get rid of it.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to get rid of it,” she answered after a while.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to get rid of it. Maybe I’ll have it.”

  Suddenly he didn’t care about the camera so much. “You’ll have it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’ll have it?” He was incredulous. “You can’t have it.” He began sputtering. “Listen, you go have a baby if you want, but you’ll have it by yourself, you understand? Don’t expect me to be there. I’m not ready yet to be father of any fucking baby.”

  “You’re not ready yet?” Louise laughed, more weary than contemptuous.

  “Oh, yeah, as though you’re really ready. As though you’re really ready to be a mother.” He stopped. “Maybe it’s not mine,” and then he stopped again, confused as to whether this possibility relieved or enraged him. Louise laughed again. “Listen, Lu,” he threatened again, “if you do this, you do it alone, you understand? It’s up to you.” When she didn’t answer he said, “You can’t just go have a baby without me saying it’s all right.”

  “You just said it was up to me.” The more apoplectic he became, the more she liked it. All day long his rant shifted strategies, becoming more and more one-sided as she became less and less responsive; she pref
erred instead to watch him writhe and squirm and twist in his predicament as he tried to bully, persuade, and reason with her, until finally, in the late afternoon, she got up from her chair where she had spent most of the day looking out the window, and on her way out the door she said, “Relax, Mitch. I wouldn’t disgrace the planet with a child of yours.” She went downstairs and down the street into the Village to a café on Bleecker.

  That was the end of her and Mitch. On the one hand she had entirely enjoyed Mitch’s consternation at her pregnancy, and on the other hand it made her sick, in the same way everything made her sick now. Of course, she firmly believed she would have aborted any child of his she might carry, not only because it would have been his but because a terrorist who targeted the world’s false innocence wasn’t worthy of anything as innocent as a child. Exactly when she had come to believe this about herself wasn’t clear to her; maybe she had always believed it, and believing it was what had led her down the path of the past ten years that, in turn, had only confirmed what she believed, right up until this morning when she finally had to vomit up as much of the past ten years as could be expelled. She was not pregnant. She had thrown up in the bathroom because—unlike three years later with the story in the paper about Mitch’s death—there had been another story in this morning’s paper she had seen right away, even though it was buried deep in the front section, and when she read it the abyss opened up behind her, and she was standing on the other side.

  Authorities in Hamburg, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Tokyo and Los Angeles, said the newspaper, had confirmed the recent arrests of nearly two dozen people, in five separate pornography rings, for the murders of five different women tortured and executed on film, whose bodies had been found fastened to racks or bound in chairs or chained to walls or hung from hooks. The crimes were unrelated except by the similar circumstances and the way they “followed in the wake,” the story went on, “of a controversy last year involving a New York husband-and-wife team of pornographers widely believed to have made the first known, so-called ‘snuff’ film. Sources close to at least several of the investigations say that while those under questioning appear to have been influenced by the New York case, they were apparently unaware, until being taken into custody, that in fact the earlier film was a hoax.”

  It was only a momentary relief to Louise that the name of Marie from Minneapolis was not in the story. It was only a momentary relief not to see her own name or Mitch’s, or that of her brother, who had disappeared in his van after their arrest the year before, lighting out for a less intense America of laughing weed and room-temperature six-packs and aging hippie women, in order to forget New York, where he couldn’t figure out anymore what was real. And not seeing Billy’s name or Mitch’s or Marie’s or her own in the morning paper was only a momentary distraction from the fact that Louise was the Pandora of the story, and that all the ways over the years she had thought herself so tough now vanished, all the things over the years she had so bluntly denied now tormented her, and on this day in the early fall of 1978 she wasn’t Lulu Blu anymore but Louise Blumenthal again, if not Louise Pagel, which would represent a turning back of the clock she didn’t deserve.

  After leaving Mitch, Louise took a job in a small bookstore where she barely earned enough to pay the rent. She kept to herself. When she did go out at night, terrified she might run into Marie from Minneapolis, she was also looking for her, though what she could possibly say to her if she found her, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t even sure, assuming Marie had pieced herself back together enough to be cognizant of anything, that the girl would still know who Louise was. For a while Louise had the dreams again, five murdered girls all looking like Marie, and then all the women in the streets of the Village looking like the five girls.

  In the rumors that she heard about Mitch during these years, he transformed from a hopeless bungler into something of more consequence, in the way that evil always makes someone more consequential, always makes someone more serious. Who, Mitch might have well asked, wouldn’t willingly become evil in order to make himself taken more seriously? He was now another embodiment, ludicrous and penny-ante though it was in comparison to more spectacular examples, of the Twentieth Century’s most prevalent phenomenon: the failure and laughingstock who transcends penny-ante ludicrousness through evil genius of a distinctly audacious kind, the rejected art student who takes over half the world and in the process wipes out a few million here and a few million there on French battlefields and in Polish extermination factories, for the sheer sake of being taken seriously. Having perpetrated a pathetic fraud that led to the monstrous realization by others of an idea he didn’t have the nerve for—conscience obviously having had nothing to do with his previous restraint—he was now as inspired by his own fraud as others had been.

  So Louise became something more profound than tormented: she became haunted. Having trafficked in the sort of memories people had spent thousands of years trying to forget, and the sort of dreams they had spent thousands of years trying to awake from, she had wandered at will and without accountability on the apocalyptic landscape of the imagination. Now a stain spread from the darkest center of the unaccountable imagination, becoming only more confounding and unbearable with every moment, the question of when and where the imagination becomes accountable by and to whom, beginning with the one who imagines a nightmare simply for the thrill of its imagining, moving to the one who renders it an artifact to be experienced in common by others, eventually to the collective audience that chooses to watch, for the thrill of watching, a girl actually being murdered in a movie, to the individual man or woman who, before suppressing it in horror, entertains a fleeting curiosity, dallying with the temptation to look, then finally conforming to whatever sick social chic compels everyone at a cocktail party to watch, like they would watch the home movie of a summer vacation or a child getting his first bike. At what point, if any, in the exchange between the one who bears the fruit of the imagination and the one who devours it, does it all stop short of being beyond the pale, at what point is everyone complicit, at what point can one still consider himself unaccountable for what the imagination has wrought, right up until the moment that he’s damned by it? Now in the years of the New York City zombielife, with the great punksurge of the late Seventies fading into the embalmed aftermath, all the girls in the clubs who reminded Louise of Marie from Minneapolis, every one of whom Louise believed she had betrayed, had the look of chaos in their eyes. They had been serviced by the chaos of the age. When Louise ran into Maxxi Maraschino down at Bleecker and Bowery, just a year or so before the “accident” that killed her, Louise could only hope the look of chaos in Maxxi’s eyes wasn’t answered by a look of murder in her own. Maxxi said a very strange thing to Louise. I’m the twentieth of November 1978, she said. I’m a thousand people desperate for salvation, poison Kool-Aid on our lips, dying together in the jungles of Guyana.

  As it happened—the universe having a strange sense of humor—Louise did find Marie from Minneapolis, long after she ever expected to. When she finally got a card from Billy it was from a little town out west Louise had never heard of, and so after Mitch’s death she set out on the bus to Sacramento, where she caught a couple of rides up to the delta. Billy was running a small bar he had taken over in a deserted Chinatown on an island that could be reached only by ferry—about as much distance as he could put between himself and the stoned bonhomie of his early years now flooded by drink and a growing, uncomprehending terror for his mortal soul; in Davenhall he spent his time drinking up the profits he never made, and trying to forget what he had once been so awfully and complicitly part of, back when he was making movies with names like Virgin Black with his sister and his best friend. Louise got to Davenhall, walked into the bar, and found Marie from Minneapolis behind the counter drying whisky glasses. The girl appeared not the least surprised, as if she had been expecting her.

  Then Louise went into the bathroom and threw up, not because she had finally found M
arie but because she had been throwing up since a month or so after that last night she slept with Mitch, who presumably, even if he hadn’t lost his head in New York traffic, still wouldn’t have been ready to be a father. “God, I hate surprises,” she muttered deep into the toilet of Billy’s bar.

  SHE WENT ON THROWING up for the next five weeks, until not only did it seem like nothing of her could possibly be left, but nothing of the child inside her either. Racked and depleted, she spent five weeks in bed in the room in back of the bar where Marie brought her soup and bread and juice. She felt alternately becalmed and beset by the stillness of the little Chinatown, which was always silent except for an occasional tourist’s voice or a transistor radio from the hotel across the street; sometimes she liked to imagine she heard the river beyond the trees, but it wasn’t quite close enough that that was possible.

  Marie had been with Billy for the past three years, scooped up by him in his van outside the police station the day before the cops released Louise and Mitch. “Jesus, little sister,” was all Billy could exclaim now when he found Louise there in his bathroom, embracing the toilet bowl as Marie embraced her; from her bed Louise saw him look back and forth from her to Marie to her again, as Louise herself looked back and forth from Marie to Billy to Marie again, both of them looking for an answer in the air between them, Marie the only one not looking for it, maybe because she already knew it.

  As well as the dull delta sunlight allowed, Marie appeared lit with a beatific kindness, from which Louise recoiled. Marie’s reproach she was prepared to live with, but not her forgiveness, especially when it hadn’t even been asked for. The weeks passed in which Marie continued to nurse Louise, who was dangerously drained and weak; she fed her and wiped her brow and changed her sheets and opened and closed the windows, as within Louise there grew a debilitating rage. “You don’t have to do this,” she muttered to whatever act of gratuitous tenderness Marie was performing at the moment. Often as Louise slept, Marie would sit in the room with her, quietly reading a book; when Louise was awake, the two women said nothing to each other, except for Marie’s daily inquiries as to Louise’s condition, and Louise’s hateful protests to Marie’s abject generosity. For his part Billy avoided the both of them, only occasionally peering around the edge of the door from the bar in front of the building before darting back out of sight. Finally one afternoon Louise woke from a nap and found Marie there in a chair by the bed; though she was sitting straight up, Marie’s eyes were closed and her book lay open on her lap as the breeze through the window blew the pages. Not knowing if Marie was awake, Louise said, “I dream about it all the time.”