The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  Without opening her eyes Marie answered, “You don’t have to dream about it anymore.”

  She smiled. By now she was barely twenty-one. She looked older and plainer than whatever tarted-up incarnation she had advanced so cautiously three years before in a deserted bus terminal in Brooklyn, right before she found herself hanging naked from a hook in the dark for twenty-four hours. “How’s Billy?” said Louise.

  “He drinks too much.”

  After a moment Louise said, “I’ve tried to stop the dreams but I can’t.”

  “I haven’t dreamed about it once,” Marie told her, “that’s rather strange, isn’t it? In fact, I haven’t had any dreams at all since it happened. It isn’t like when I wake I’ve forgotten my dreams—even when you forget your dreams, you still have a feeling of having dreamed, don’t you? You still know you’ve dreamed. You would have thought after it happened I would have had a lot of dreams.”

  Louise lay back into her pillow, staring at the ceiling.

  “I had been hanging there in the dark,” Marie went on, “all those hours, thinking I was going to die, and then something happened. Hanging there in the dark—or I guess it was dark, because I was blindfolded—I fell into a kind of huge light, and the terror passed. Billy said later that when I was let out of the storeroom I was hysterical. He said later that when the police came I was hysterical. I don’t remember being hysterical. I don’t remember anything about the police or much of anything, just a blur, maybe being in the back of a squad car and looking out the window at the street, maybe when the police took me to the station. I just don’t remember.” She saw the look on Louise’s face. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?” Mortified and furious, Louise covered her face with her hands. “My God.” She looked straight at the other woman. “I was there. I was there when we took you out of the storeroom. I was there when we shot the scene.”

  “I know.”

  “I was there when you were crying. I was there when you were screaming. It was all my idea. You can take my word for it that you were very hysterical. You can take my word for it that you were very terrified. We were very competent that day, believe me. If you have a soul—and I don’t know that I believe you do, any more than I believe anyone does—but if you have a soul, we did a very competent job of reaching down far inside you and ripping it out and smearing it across the wall. We had a great time, believe me.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Marie answered evenly, with no anger, “and I don’t need you to tell me this, though maybe you need to tell it. When you fall into a huge light like that, like I did hanging there in that storeroom, maybe there’s a reason, maybe it’s a passageway through all the things you don’t need to have told to you later on. Something opened up and allowed me through, and sometimes maybe that’s just what happens—so you don’t need to tell me this, not for my sake anyway, and you don’t need to try and convince me you’re the monster that you’ve convinced yourself you are. You can believe that if you want to, but I don’t believe it, and you trying to tell me so won’t make me believe it.” She said, “It was a Moment, there in the dark, hanging there on that hook.”

  “Like when you hear a gunshot in the night,” Louise said, ashen, “far away.”

  “Maybe,” said Marie, as though she knew exactly what Louise was referring to, “or maybe not. Maybe your mistake is having always believed the Moment was when you heard the shot. But maybe the Moment is when the sound of the shot has finally passed, and it’s finally quiet again. Maybe that’s the Moment.”

  In the downward spiral of what she believed to be her damnation, Louise couldn’t decide which damned her more, to abort Mitch’s child or inflict it upon the world. Or if she had been capable of believing in her redemption, she might have put it the other way around, wondering which redeemed her more, sparing the child or sparing the world. At first she had no doubt. Gathering her strength as best she could, the afternoon after their first conversation she got to her feet and was trying to put on her clothes when Marie came into the room: I can’t have this baby, Louise tried to explain. Marie nodded. She took the clothes from Louise and put her back in bed. You need more rest, Marie said, and there’s time. Next week, if you still want, I’ll go with you into the city and we’ll find a clinic. So early one morning a week later they took the little ferry across the river to where Billy’s van was parked, and drove the two hours into Sacramento.

  Sitting in the waiting room of the clinic with three other women, only minutes away from the nurse calling her name, Louise suddenly turned to Marie and said, stricken, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You can wait another day,” Marie said, taking her hand, “if you need to think about it.”

  “I can’t have this baby!” Louise cried. Her outburst rippled through the room. One of the other women just stared straight ahead, while the other two visibly started at the sound of Louise’s voice; behind the desk, the nurses seemed to steel themselves. “There are these five girls I keep thinking about,” Louise went on, in an agitated whisper; she didn’t much care if she made sense or not, to Marie or anyone else. “There were these five girls and I’m accountable for all of them. Five girls like you and I had a hand in what happened to every one of them, and now I keep asking myself, what should I do for them? Do I have this baby for them, or do I stop it now, before it even becomes a baby? The sound of a gunshot hasn’t faded yet. I haven’t had that moment yet you talk about so much, that you believe in so much. I haven’t had any magic moment that opens a passageway through my memories and dreams. All I’ve had is a gunshot in the night, so far away I wasn’t even sure it was a gunshot. When will be the moment I don’t hear it anymore? Is it the moment I have this baby, or is it the moment I kill it?” She became furious, her voice rising. “You tell me, Marie. You’ve become such a fucking saint, you tell me. You’ve figured it all out, right?” The nurses now appeared concerned; Marie remained calm. Louise said, “What are you even doing here with me? What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you want to take an ice pick or a knife or a barbecue skewer or something, or a pair of scissors, and stick it up inside me in the middle of the night while I’m sleeping and kill it? That’s what I would want if I were you.”

  Oh dear, said one of the nurses. Two of the other women began to cry.

  “That’s what I would want! That’s what I do want!” Louise pulled away from Marie, who was looking at her with great sadness. “Stop looking at me that way!” Louise said. “Stop looking at me with great sadness! What’s the matter with you?” I’m having a breakdown, Louise told herself, with the first relief she had felt in years; then she collapsed into Marie’s arms. We’re going to go now, she heard Marie say, though whether to her or the others she wasn’t sure. Maybe we’ll come back. Helping Louise up from the waiting room couch, Marie led her outside where they sat in the van.

  They didn’t speak for half an hour. Then Louise said, Let’s go back, and maybe she meant back to the clinic. But when Marie started the van and headed back to Davenhall, Louise didn’t stop her.

  AFTER THAT LOUISE DIDN’T dream anymore. After that she had no dreams at all, the little Chinatown where she spent the next six months hushing all the dances of her sleep, snuffing out every image of her subconscious, as though in the fitful hours of her nights, among the static blips of unconsciousness when her pregnancy made sustained sleep more and more difficult anyway, she was hurled out beyond all the color and noise of eternity into nothingness, until she landed hard and abruptly on terra consciousness.

  She didn’t dream anymore of the five girls in the newspaper article. She didn’t dream of Marie from Minneapolis in the bus terminal. As spring approached, somewhere around the mystic fourth month of her pregnancy when the mass of tissue and light inside her hovered on the borderland of humanity, the blood coursing through Louise’s body and into her child carried no nightmares to challenge the immune system of the soul: as the mother didn’t dream, the child didn’t dream. Through the gen
es and blood, the child was handed down no dreams of the past, no dreams of its own creation; it was handed down no dreams of its mother or father, or of itself.

  Louise hadn’t told anyone that Mitch was the father. Maybe Marie suspected; she never asked. Billy, altogether less perceptive or tactful, made some allusion to the matter a month or two after Louise had been there, wondering where the father was or whether he even knew, and Marie gently admonished him. On the banks of the island Louise lay under the trees staring out at the river, her womb rising on the horizon, swelling into her sight lines. As she didn’t dream of her child in the unconsciousness of night, in the consciousness of day she felt no communion with it. She didn’t speak to it inside her or hold it between her hands in the cocoon of her belly; she tried not to think about it at all, even as she could feel it sometimes try to crawl its way into her thoughts. She tried not to picture a son who looked like Mitch, or a daughter who looked like her, or some ghastly collusion of the two, a son with Louise’s dark hair or a daughter with Mitch’s light hair. When, in early March, the river rose from the rains and flooded much of the island including one end of the town’s mainstreet, Louise thought of wading into the water in search of the perfect deadly current that would wash up into her and drown the child and carry it downstream and out into the delta, eventually to the sea. Some weeks later, when the spring came, the season was a perversion in her eyes, all its budding and blooming and growing and gushing; she yearned for a more forbidding autumn, of more funereal ambers, than the one in which the child had been conceived.

  But as the child grew inside her, and as the spring flowed into summer, under the delta sky above, that glowed a hotter and hotter blue, the only thing that was dying was Marie. They were on the bus that early-July afternoon going into San Francisco to have the baby there, Billy having dropped them off that morning at the station in Sacramento in the midst of a hangover, and as Marie stared out the bus window, Louise said the thing that had been on her mind a while: Marie, she said; and Marie turned to her from the window. Will you take this baby? said Louise; and Marie turned back to the window, and for a moment Louise felt a mean kind of satisfaction. I’ve finally enraged her, she thought triumphantly. But then Marie said, “I can’t,” in the saddest way Louise had ever heard; despising herself as usual, Louise realized that once again, as usual, she had underrated Marie’s goodness. “I’m sorry,” said Louise bitterly.

  “No,” Marie murmured to the window, “I’m sorry.”

  “Christ,” Louise shook her head, “what made me think I could ask you? It’s Mitch’s, you know. It’s the child of the man who destroyed your life.”

  “He didn’t destroy my life,” Marie lied. “Don’t you see? This child deserves everything because it’s Mitch’s.” And that was when Marie turned back to Louise from the window and said, “I’m dying.”

  The first impulse, as usual, was to say, What do you mean? But Marie had said it in a way so shorn of self-pity and with such a self-reconciled gravity, more profoundly regretful than anything, that Louise immediately resisted a trite response. Instantly, running down the litany of called-for responses, she rejected one after another: What do you mean? What are you saying? Are you really sure? Oh I’m so sorry—until rapidly descending the list to the basic “When?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How?” No one knew that either. There was no tumor or malignancy, no forecast of a black biological rain on the x-rays, “the blood count’s just been all wrong now for at least a year,” Marie tried to explain, “and I just get weaker and weaker,” and so, Louise said to herself with annoyance, it was going to be one of those coy and suspect deaths, where you never know what’s killing you and you can go at any time, next month or next year; and if it occurred to Louise, then it must have occurred to Marie too: that almost four years before, in a vacant bus terminal, it entered Marie, the death no one knew, the death no one could find or name, defiling her in the dark on the altar of her own innocence. Hanging there, her hands bound, naked on a hook, she had stepped into the light of her own end and, in exchange, because she didn’t deserve to die, and because the mystery malignancy could defile her body but not her spirit, she had been offered a small reprieve.

  In San Francisco they checked into a small motel on Van Ness not far from the hospital, and as the days passed there, Louise awaited her baby like doom. The two women didn’t speak anymore of Mitch or Billy or Marie’s dying; they hardly spoke at all, just waiting, until the fifth night, when Louise woke in a sweet pale-yellow red-streaked puddle, a flurry of theretofore clandestine contractions suddenly only minutes apart. Later, long after her daughter’s birth, she would remain disturbed by the dream she had right before her water broke. In it, she and Marie made love. Even at the moment of waking, her memory of it wasn’t clear: she couldn’t remember whether it was she who approached Marie in the dream—and therefore it was a predatory act, a continuation of the way she had violated Marie in New York—or whether it was Marie who came to her, and therefore it was an act of forgiveness. At any rate, the two women had embraced and been swept by a tsunami of amniotic fluid to a far and foreign shore, where an orgasm ruptured the membrane in Louise’s uterus and woke her to the beginning of labor.

  Out of this orgasm—her body’s expression of either violation or forgiveness, and the only orgasm Louise had ever had, long delayed since the night of 6 May 1968—the baby was born. Marie called a cab and helped Louise dress and waited out on the balcony until the taxi pulled into the parking lot, and then helped Louise down the stairs. What’s wrong with her? the alarmed cab driver said, and Marie said, She’s going to have a baby, and the driver said, Not in my cab she isn’t, and Marie said to him very calmly, summoning a fierceness Louise hadn’t seen or heard before, Now listen to me, you’re going to take us to the hospital, and you’re going to take us now. On the way up Nob Hill, as the night flew by, Louise said, Marie? and Marie said Yes, and Louise, for the first time, as though taking an oath, took firm hold of her belly and the baby inside and said to Marie: forgive me. “Forgive me, Marie,” she whispered, “forgive me for four years ago.”

  Yes, Marie said.

  “I’ve been wanting to say it,” Louise whispered, “and I wouldn’t let myself—because I knew you would. I wouldn’t ask you to forgive me, because I knew you would and I had no right to take advantage of that.”

  I know, Marie said.

  “I had no right to take advantage, because it’s not something that can be forgiven.”

  It’s all right now.

  “Not even you can really forgive it,” whispered Louise. “I mean, it’s bigger than you, what we did to you. It’s too big for anyone to forgive, even if you wanted to.”

  Shhh.

  “I feel a little dizzy.”

  Cup your hands and breathe into them.

  “I hope,” Louise murmured in the dark, in the back of the cab, “it doesn’t look like Mitch if it’s a boy. I hope it doesn’t look like me if it’s a girl.”

  We’re almost there now. Driver, there’s the emergency entrance.

  “I’m glad Mitch isn’t here. Let’s not ever tell the baby about him.”

  Shhh, we’re here now.

  “I hope it’s all right,” said Louise. “Marie? I hope the baby is all right.”

  The baby will be all right.

  “But not like Mitch, and not like me. Like you.”

  They got out of the cab and Marie helped Louise into the waiting room, where they put Louise in a wheelchair and wheeled her away as Marie watched her disappear. Five hours later Louise delivered a daughter without dreams. When they brought the baby to Louise, she cowered from it at first, and then fell asleep with it in her arms; she was vaguely aware, before she slipped off into exhaustion, of Marie coming into the room and taking the baby from her arms and then a nurse coming in and taking it from Marie. The next day Louise finally made herself look at her daughter and study her, for a single trace of a single recognizable feature. Th
e day after that, Louise was discharged from the maternity ward and they took a cab back to the motel on Van Ness, where she was perfectly willing to let the other woman hold onto the child while the new mother plummeted into a deep emotional stupor. She was now reasonably certain, even after the birth of the baby, that she hadn’t had a Moment yet.

  The last night that Louise saw her daughter, she once again fell asleep with the baby in her arms as she had in the hospital. Sometime the next morning she heard in her sleep the sound of the baby crying, growing more and more faint, until it disappeared altogether, and she woke to find the baby gone from her arms. In the first few moments of waking, she believed the baby had slipped from her arms into the bedding, becoming entangled and smothered; frantically in these first moments of semiconsciousness she searched the sheets and blankets for the little girl. But the baby wasn’t there. Instead there was a note on the other bed. I changed my mind, it read. If you change yours, you know where we are.