The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  SHE ALMOST DID. IMMEDIATELY after the birth, to her own great shock, she almost went after the baby at once. To her own great shock, there tore through her heart a treacherous pang whenever she thought of her. Over the next year she suppressed every yearning for her, every feeling of loss. She stayed in the Bay Area, living in the Haight and working as a teaching assistant at the local state college, mostly because it wasn’t so far away from Davenhall, should she change her mind. She kept Marie’s note as though it were a receipt.

  Almost three years later, she came within a river of changing her mind. There were many reasons she hadn’t gone back to Davenhall before, some of them selfish, none of them contradicting the very real conviction that the child was better off with Marie than she would have been with her own mother. On rare occasions, the two women exchanged letters that Louise often couldn’t bear to open, let alone read. Then, almost three years after the baby was born, a letter came addressed not in Marie’s writing but Billy’s, and without reading that one either, knowing full well what it said, Louise sent word that she was coming, took the bus to Sacramento, and caught a ride out to the island ferry.

  There she stood at the edge of the dock as the ferry approached. Far on the other side of the river she could see Billy waiting, with a tiny little person attached to his hand, looking back. Her little dress was a dot of blue fixed patiently on the shore. The ferry slowly made its way through the water and pulled up to the dock and lingered a little longer waiting for Louise to board, before setting sail back to the island without Louise on it. From the dock Louise thought she could see Billy hold out the hand that wasn’t holding her daughter as if to say, Well? and all Louise could do was shake her head, turn, and go back to Sacramento, where she caught the next bus back to San Francisco. It was the twenty-ninth of April 1985.

  NOW WE DRIVE DEEP into the heart of the former Lulu Blu. We drive a seemingly endless two-lane that never offers the long view, always disappearing just around the bend, over a hill, into the dark. But we have a sense that whatever is at the end of the two-lane, whatever city, whatever town, whatever resting stop, whatever clearing in the wilderness, is always a very long way away, with not so many motels to stop at in between.

  Louise has always hated surprises in her life. They have always shaken her sense of possessing her own life. She can remember a surprise birthday party when she was seven, not long before her parents split up, her dim brother stunned at the very notion that a birthday could be a surprise: How could one’s own birthday be a surprise? the boy had wondered; and his sister had spit out in contemptuous explanation, It’s not the birthday that’s a surprise, you toad, it’s the party that’s the surprise. Billy never understood the difference between the birthday and the party. So after little seven-year-old Louise picked up her birthday cake and hurled it across the living room of their tiny one-bedroom house outside North Platte, Nebraska, no one ever gave her a surprise party again; but now, years later, her own heart is a surprise to her, and all the bleak unknown stretches of its future journey. And as much as she hates surprises, she has nowhere to go but deep into her own heart, to follow the sound of a gunshot fired in the shadows of a distant aorta.

  The day after she turned her back on her daughter at the edge of the river and walked away, she quit her job at the college and took off that weekend in a used Camaro heading east. Until she ran down the echo of that gunshot, there was no going back to get her daughter; and over the next twelve years she wandered the country from motel to motel and job to job, supporting herself just enough to revisit the scene of every city and every town and every movie house where she and Mitch and Billy had hawked their films out of the back of a van. What copies of the films she could buy, she bought; what copies she could haggle for, she haggled; what copies she could steal, she stole, breaking into theater vaults and collectors’ basements and bondage shops and mail-order warehouses and the rare video store here and there that might have actually carried one of the films, from Atlanta to Denver to Dallas to Des Moines to Portland to Grand Rapids to Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Albuquerque to Salt Lake City (where her movies had a particularly dedicated cult) to St. George to Rawlins to Scottsbluff to Valentine to Mitchell to Albert Lea to Waukesha to Logansport to Haleyville to Dixons Mills. For a couple of months she scoured New York City from Times Square to the Lower East Side to the Bowery beyond.

  With every copy of every film recovered, she transformed herself from erotic terrorist to erotic vigilante. She didn’t suppose or presume she could undo what had transpired before. She didn’t suppose or presume that from erotic vigilante she might transform herself into erotic redeemer; as she continued over the course of the twelve years to hunt out all the copies of Marie’s murder—and in her own mind that was what it was, it was no longer Marie’s “faked” murder or Marie’s “staged” murder, or the “hoax” of Marie’s murder—she came to accept she would never stop hearing the gunshot in her ears, that there was no undoing that either. Rather she accepted her wandering as a mission of the damned that could never make her worthy of her daughter, and she pursued that mission nonetheless until she convinced herself, twelve years later, it was finished.

  Over the years as she drove around the country, she imagined her daughter growing up. She thought of her standing on the other side of the river that late-April afternoon in 1985 in her tiny blue dress. She wondered what she looked like even as there was no doubt whatsoever in her mind that should she ever happen to run into her, she would know her immediately. From time to time she would drop Billy a card asking about her, and from time to time she would stop long enough in one place to get a card back. She would note with expressed relief and forbidden disappointment that he never sent a letter from the little girl, or a photo. How is she? Louise would write, as though only casually interested; and years later, in the last response she ever received from him, written in a drunken slur, he answered, A little pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth. Nine going on nineteen. Really smart, though.

  Well, God knows where she got that, Louise thought to herself, with a proud delight that, for once, she couldn’t suppress. But then she didn’t hear anything for years. She thought about Billy’s drinking, and wished more than anything that Marie were still alive, and with her complicated sense of justice, she wondered if this was the price of what she had done to Marie—that Marie, whom Louise’s child needed most, should be gone; and thus the child was paying for the deed of the mother. Of course this was unbearable to Louise. By such reasoning Louise was continually drawn west toward the child, only to be repelled east every time she drew near, and as more years went by, it became more and more impossible to bear, both the pull and the repulsion growing stronger and stronger, each in reaction to the other. And as more years went by, the prospect of actually seeing her daughter again, of being both reunited with and finally confronted by the child whose mother had abandoned her, became both more irresistible and terrifying.

  Sleeping in the car—as she often did—she often woke as she had that morning in San Francisco when she had found the baby gone from her arms, momentarily believing that the baby had gotten lost in the sheets and blankets of the bed. Now she would wake believing the baby was lost somewhere in the car. For a few frantic, semiconscious moments, she would desperately search the oil rags and glove compartment and the passenger’s seat next to her for the baby, before remembering that her daughter wasn’t with her and wasn’t a baby anymore anyway. One day Louise was driving outside Charleston in the early hours before dawn when she had a vision. It wasn’t a dream, because she was driving, after all, and she hadn’t had a dream in years, since she became pregnant; the vision was such an obvious one that it was strange she hadn’t had it before. She was driving along the coast and there, in the paling early-morning hours, she saw her daughter in the storeroom of a deserted bus terminal, hanging on a hook. Though her daughter’s face was in the shadows, though she could make out only the bare outline of the features, she knew for certain
it was her daughter; and suddenly Louise lost control of the Camaro and ran it off the road, where fortunately there was nothing but the sand of the beach, and she opened the car door and ran out onto the sand, toward the water, where in the first slashing light of the sun rising above the sea, she wept. Her cries floated out above the sound of the waves. Gulls circling overhead broke pattern, fled her sobs in alarm; she walked farther and farther out into the water, not deliberate but dazed, until she finally finished crying and only then seemed to realize where she was, turning to struggle back against the tide.

  It wasn’t until one night in Los Angeles, in the immediate weeks after New Year’s Eve 1999, that Louise finally decided it was time to go find her. That was the night she realized she didn’t hear the gunshot anymore. It was maddening, the way the sound of the shot just faded, its lapse attached to no apparent epiphany or Moment at all. It wasn’t really likely to have cut off exactly at the stroke of New Year’s midnight; had it been at the stroke of midnight, it seemed to her she would have noticed immediately, like the sound of a distant siren that stops at precisely the moment one expects.

  Louise had arrived in L.A. eighteen months before, having settled on it as a logical base of operations for the next phase of her mission. She drove into town with the trunk and backseat of her Camaro loaded down with hundreds of copies of her movies, and she took a room in a rundown Hollywood hotel called the Hamblin just off the Sunset Strip. For eighteen months every night thereafter, under cover of dark, she got in the Camaro and headed for the Hollywood Hills where she painted the satellite dishes black with the ashes of her films, into which she also mixed the cinders of other incontrovertibly evil mementos: torture films, murder manuals, autopsy photos, racist pamphlets, survivalist propaganda, soldier-of-fortune magazines, Nazi souvenirs.

  On all the television sets in all the hillside homes, the regular transmission sputtered and gave way to images of cataclysmic memoir, a subjective newsreel of riots and murders and assassinations and bombings and hostages and demonstrations and killing fields and catastrophic accidents not simply as everyone had seen them in news footage over the years and decades, but as everyone had known and believed them. But mixed in with the images of collective memory were the confidential memories, the collapse of a marriage, the crash of a car, the passing of a parent, the death of a child, the discovery of a terminal illness: in the hills where Louise conducted her new crusade, from one house to the next, people were suddenly stopped frozen in their living rooms by the images coming over their television sets, jaws slowly falling, bodies slowly sinking into their chairs, transfixed by something on the television inexplicably familiar—an old movie they had forgotten? wait a minute, haven’t I seen this one before?—until suddenly realizing it was the most profoundly hidden memory of all, tucked away so many years ago and now unleashing a personal millennium like a gunshot: a rumor one never should have started, a compromise one never should have made, a thing one witnessed about which he never should have remained silent, an illicit love affair one never should have had or never should have ended, a baby who died at birth never to be spoken or thought of again, so as to futilely try and make it something that never happened at all. The L.A. nights of 1999 were haywire with collective and personal memory. Into the dark of every home flickered a thousand soundless reckonings. Every morning people emerged stunned from their homes, cut loose from psychic moorings, panicked by the onslaught of all their lives’ many meanings. In the light of dawn, their blackened satellite dishes left them feeling as if sometime during the hours of the previous night they had been marked by the angel of the Twentieth Century flying by overhead, though whether such a mark meant the angel would spare them or descend on them wasn’t clear: had the blackened dishes been exorcised? or were they now rips in the fabric of a millennium that had nothing to do with the banal arithmetic of arbitrary calendars—gashes behind which marshaled, and through which rushed, a terrible invasion of the soul? With every morning, there came up the road that wound through the hills a truck full of new satellite dishes gleaming white, driven by a Japanese kid who replaced the disfigured black ones, which he then drove to a vandalized-satellite-dish dumping ground far outside the city that modern legend soon called cursed.

  So on the night that Louise realized she didn’t hear the sound of the gunshot anymore, its suspension wasn’t like an incessant siren suddenly ceasing after all. She had no idea, for sure, when she had stopped hearing it; she didn’t think it could have been long. She had just finished her last dish for the night, around ten-thirty, and with a little more effort than usual was pushing her fifty-four-year-old body up the hillside toward her Camaro parked in the shadows of a streetlamp, in the same leather jacket she had been wearing for almost twenty years now, when she stopped still in the dark, listening. The night was entirely quiet. There was nothing to be heard, either outside her memories or in, not the sound of a gunshot or traffic or television or coyotes in the canyons or voices in the foyers. The city had slipped off into the unconsciousness of the Twenty-First Century and there wasn’t any sign of life at all, except of course for the girl standing naked in the window of that one house in the distance.

  THE MORNING SHE LEFT the Occupant, Kristin believed it was a sudden impulse that drove her from his bed out into the rain.

  Thinking about it later, however, she realized the plan had been forming in her head for some time. It had been forming since before the night he had taken her out into the desert, since before he had made her the traveling center of his Calendar—since, in fact, the moment he had written the twenty-ninth of April 1985 on her body. When Kristin woke that last morning she realized that while she could be the vortex of pleasure, she could not go on being the vortex of chaos; so she took one last look at him sleeping in the bed, noting that his black beard had grown much whiter since the day they first met, grabbed the money that she had saved from the hundred-dollar weekly stipend he had been paying her, put on the long blue coat she stole from his closet since he had hidden away her clothes, and slipped out of the house at dawn just in time to hitch a ride with the Japanese boy driving by in his truck full of satellite dishes.

  On that particular morning the weather was especially crazy and the sky was filled with lightning, which filled the dishes with little glowing white electric clouds. When Kristin came running out of the house in the rain, waving for him to stop, the first thing Yoshi did was wait to see who came running after her, and just how big he was and just how angry he was, and whether or not he had a weapon. It was cool, calm displays of judgment like this that made Yoshi, in his own estimation, such a dangerous customer, streetwise beyond his nineteen years. I like to appraise the situation and see what I’m getting into first, Yoshi told himself with some satisfaction. But more than once he had seen the girl standing naked in the window of the house, and so he slowed the truck and in the rearview mirror watched her leap into the back with the satellite dishes.

  A FEW BLOCKS AWAY he pulled over. He didn’t get out of the truck himself—it was fucking pouring now—but waited for the girl to get the message and climb down out of the back and come around to the passenger side.

  She seemed to hesitate, perhaps afraid that as soon as she got off the truck he would hit the gas and strand her there. He turned and knocked on the back window, through which he could see her huddling under a dish; in the thunder, however, she didn’t hear him. Soon, though, she figured out for herself that he was waiting for her and scrambled out from beneath the dishes and came around to the side, hoisting herself up into the seat next to him.

  He just stared at her, somewhat more stunned than one would perhaps expect of such a streetwise and dangerous customer. “Where are you going?” he said.

  “Anywhere you’re taking me,” Kristin answered, far more breathlessly suggestive than she had intended, but not looking at him anyway, instead gazing up through the windshield at the weather. Well, Yoshi certainly liked that answer. In that extremely discerning streetwise way of his
, he wondered whether underneath the blue coat the girl was wearing anything at all. “Why don’t you take off that wet coat?” he said, and she said, “I’ll leave it on,” and he said, “Oh, boy.”

  “What does oh boy mean?” said Kristin.

  “Nothing.” Yoshi flushed. All right, he’s a jerk, Kristin said to herself, like every other teenage guy. You can’t even call him a point-misser—he doesn’t know there’s a point to be missed. He seemed about sixteen to her, but since he had a regular job she decided he was probably older. They sat for a while in the rain and didn’t say much more, though he kept trying to strike up a conversation, asking questions she wasn’t inclined to answer: You running away? You that guy’s daughter? Where you going now? or, What are you going to do now? or the recurring favorite, Why don’t you take off that wet coat? When the rain let up a little he started the truck again and drove on to the next address listed on his clipboard, where she watched him unload a dish and haul it down the slope behind the house and then haul the black one back up; as Yoshi worked, she kept her eye out for the Occupant, possibly searching the neighborhood for her at this very moment.

  Beyond the windshield there fell harder and harder an amnesia rain, washing the L.A. sky clean. Hungry, Kristin stole one of Yoshi’s cigarettes. Yoshi got back in the truck and looked at the cigarette with great disapproval. “I only took one,” she said, but he didn’t care about that, he just didn’t like it when girls smoked. He didn’t say anything. “What do they paint them black for?” she asked as they drove on to the next house.

  “Who?”

  “Whoever’s painting them.”

  “Got me,” said Yoshi, still disgruntled about the smoking.