“Don’t they work when they’re black?”
“What?”
“The dishes,” she said. Jesus, what a numbskull.
“Sure, they work fine,” he answered, almost a little contemptuously, his stated certainty belied only by a furrowed brow. The truth was, he had no idea whether the dishes worked or not, or how they worked; he just delivered them. “People get fucking weird about them when they’re painted black,” he tried to explain to her, “they keep thinking they see weird shit on their TVs.” He didn’t want to pursue it because he wanted to make sure this girl understood that delivering satellite dishes was small potatoes in the larger scheme of his general plans.
Over the course of the next few hours, after he finally gave up on hauling satellite dishes up and down increasingly muddy embankments in the rain, he explained to Kristin—trying to suggest a kind of mysterious criminal glamour in the process—his larger involvement in the Japanese memory black-market. Digging up graves in Black Clock Park that afternoon, Yoshi elaborated, as best he understood it himself, since he was really less Japanese than American, how over the years the capacity for memory in his home country had withered like a genetic trait rendered obsolete by time and history and evolution; it had been going on ever since 1946, when the Emperor had announced he was not God. Now memories were smuggled into Tokyo every day, bought and sold on the memory black-market at a healthy profit. Yoshi would raid time-capsule cemeteries in the West, usually in the dead of night but also sometimes on days like this, when the weather was so bad no one else was likely to be around and the rain softened the ground into mud, and then he sent the capsules back to Tokyo, where customers adopted them as their own.
Picking which grave to dig up was always a matter of random chance. One could be a mother lode of forlornness and sentimentality, another the paltry pickings of some repressed sort who might as well have not bothered. Over the many months that Yoshi had been digging up memory graves, he had found the capsules to include everything from the rather obvious family photos and lovers’ letters and favorite books and travel brochures and video recordings and military medals and cassettes of songs and passages of scripture and prized pieces of jewelry to trinkets of meaning so personal they defied speculation, from a piece of rock covered with unreadable graffiti to a wristwatch broken at a particular hour to a postcard of a showgirl in a Las Vegas casino, to a prescription bottle with nothing inside it but a red paper clip, to a small solid silver ball that didn’t open and had nothing written on its surface, to an occasional tarot card—usually the Fool or the Moon, the cards of faith and madness—to a tiny black coffin that held a tooth and a piece of charcoal and a single long scrolled strip torn from a picture of a naked woman having sex. In one capsule had been a used condom.
It was always difficult to know how much value these more esoteric bits of memorial archaeology would have in Tokyo, as opposed to diaries, for instance, a predictably popular item, or a locket with a picture of a pretty young girl or a handsome young boy. It did seem to Yoshi that the flow of Western memory had been tainted lately, the pure grade-A stuff being cut with something unidentifiable but particularly toxic; recently reports came back from Tokyo of violent reactions and even overdoses in extreme cases, all of which, unless it was completely Yoshi’s imagination, seemed to coincide with the rising incidents of vandalized satellite dishes in the Hollywood Hills. Increasingly bizarre items were being found in the capsules shipped over from L.A.: doorstops, clothes hangers, cockroach baits, rotting hamburger meat, broken light bulbs, the amputated knobs of microwave ovens. It frankly concerned him because it threatened the future of his business and made the arbitrary crapshoot of precisely which time-capsule graves to target all the more consequential.
Standing with Yoshi among the knolls of Black Clock Park trying to choose, Kristin said, “How about this one?”
As they dug up the time-capsule, Yoshi got a look in his eyes that reminded Kristin of when the Occupant had written the twenty-ninth of April 1985 on her body. Yoshi had no sooner unearthed the large metal cylinder than he pounced on Kristin, having finally concluded in his dangerous streetwise fashion that if he just got past the long blue coat, there was indeed nothing underneath to stop him. She was fighting him off when he suddenly flew into the air and landed a few feet away from her with a thud that was audible even in the thunder. Lying on the ground in the drizzle beneath the flashing afternoon, panting and marshaling her resistance for his next assault, she realized he wasn’t making a sound; and when she turned to look at him, he appeared very peculiar. He was lying on his back very still, staring straight up, exposed and very erect, with a little line of smoke rising from where a dream should be. Either he had just had the greatest sex of his very inexperienced life, Kristin figured, or something altogether untoward had happened, and once she realized what it was, she sat on the lawn of the cemetery staring for several minutes at the cylinder that had been touching his thigh when the lightning hit. She wondered if it was still somehow conducting electricity. Physics—or was it chemistry?—had never been her strong suit.
Finally, she decided that just leaving the Occupant’s capsule behind on the ground or in the open grave was unacceptable. So she gripped it with both hands, found herself quite unelectrified, and then grimly and delicately took the key to the truck from Yoshi’s shirt pocket before rolling him into the nearby hole.
THE LIGHTNING THAT HIT the Occupant’s time-capsule left a mark part black scorch and part livid scar. It was a Rorschach blot in which Kristin saw an ashen one-winged bird plummeting to earth. She put the capsule in Yoshi’s truck and went through the glove compartment, finding not only Yoshi’s wallet with a driver’s license but a one-way ticket to Tokyo. Naked in her wet coat, she sat in the truck becoming colder and colder, finally starting the truck and driving just to get warm.
She still really didn’t know Los Angeles at all—having spent most of the past two months in the Occupant’s house—and she was still a less-than-proficient driver. So she spent the afternoon shuddering up and down city streets at fifteen miles an hour, constantly stalling out as passing drivers shouted at her. It took her the rest of the day to locate Yoshi’s loft downtown, on the other side of a black wasteland of railroad tracks and junk where a flaming train car had once jumped the track and set the landscape around it on fire. Four floors up a fire escape, Yoshi’s loft was barren and gray except for a small television and a map on the wall in which Tokyo coiled like a snake; there was a bed on an upper half-level that looked down on the rest of the space, a refrigerator with nothing in it but beer, and several huge freezers lining the walls in which Kristin found more than a dozen other time-capsules all sealed and carefully preserved. There was also dry ice and packing crates for shipping the capsules to Tokyo. The freezers made the loft cold, and a puddle of water seeped out at the bottom, slowly widening across the floor.
She stayed in the loft a couple of days since she had nowhere else to go. But she didn’t like it and was all the more uncomfortable that it was Yoshi’s, and while she had left the truck with the satellite dishes on the next block over rather than in the parking lot of the building, she knew that sooner or later someone would find it and report it and it would be traced back to Yoshi and then back to the loft. With the little money she had and the little money that had been in Yoshi’s wallet, she would slip across the street for a meal at a Mexican restaurant. She supposed she should try and buy some clothes; Yoshi was thinner than she was and his didn’t fit. The rest of the time she sat in the loft, staring at the Occupant’s time-capsule marked with the black lightning-scorched one-winged bird on it. She was consumed by curiosity to open it, but resisted; several times she ran her hands along the metal surface, picking up the capsule once or twice and shaking it.
On her second night in the loft, asleep in the bed on the upper level, she was awakened around one o’clock by angry rapping on the door. There was more rapping and then voices she recognized as Asian, if not necessarily the Chinese she ha
d grown up with in Davenhall; she could make out Yoshi’s name. When those on the other side of the door broke through, she lay absolutely still, terror-stricken. Yoshi! one called up to the bed. It sounded as if there were four or five of them. I’m going to be raped and murdered by Japanese gangsters all because this stupid boy was struck by lightning while trying to fuck me, she thought to herself with great annoyance; it certainly seemed in the general spirit of the rest of her life lately. Yoshi! the one called again. Kristin didn’t answer. The beam of a flashlight flitted around her and across the ceiling above her. She waited for the sound of their footsteps coming up the stairs; instead there was some mumbled discussion among them, and then she heard them moving around in the loft below as flashlights continued to dart along the walls. There was some determined activity in what sounded like the corner of the loft that went on for nearly twenty minutes. With a minimum of talk people came and went; she could hear their shoes in the puddle of water from the freezers, wet footsteps slapping back and forth across the floor.
For nearly an hour after they left she didn’t move, and then when the adrenaline wore off she was exhausted and fell back to sleep. At dawn she woke with a start, and sat up listening for the sound of anyone else in the loft. Carefully she got out of bed and went to the rail of the landing and peered over, down to the space below; it took her a moment, following the smear of water from the puddle of the freezers across the room, to notice that the freezers were open and empty. All of the capsules were gone. Then it took her another moment to remember the Occupant’s capsule, which had been sitting at the foot of the stairs.
IT WAS GONE TOO. At the top of the stairs she just stood staring down at the bottom steps and their awful vacancy. Slowly she descended and gazed around at the surrounding floor, as if in hopes that the capsule had somehow rolled out of view by itself.
But it was absolutely, unmistakably gone. And then finally, certainly for the first time since leaving Davenhall, maybe for the first time ever, everything about Kristin collapsed, every wall she had erected around herself, every piece of psychic armor she had worn around her, every one of the seventeen years during which she had been so tough, so self-sufficient, shattered and fell away from her, leaving the girl in nothing but her long-lived sense of abandonment, leaving her more completely and utterly the twenty-ninth of April 1985 than she knew; and she sat at the foot of the stairs where the capsule had been and sobbed into her hands. Everything finally shattered and fell away from her for the first time since one afternoon when she could remember, as a small girl of three or four, running from out of the Davenhall mainstreet into the town bar and stopping dead still in the middle of the room and asking her astounded and half-sodden uncle, What’s missing from the world?
What? Billy had choked in disbelief.
What’s missing from the world? she asked again, and for years afterward she thought she had said something wrong, the way Billy had recoiled from the little girl’s question. Billy wasn’t quite bright enough, of course, to know it would have been an impossible question for even an intelligent person to answer, certainly to the satisfaction of a four-year-old; he assumed it was his failing that he was struck so dumb by it, and hated her for it. By this point he had done the only thing he figured any reasonable man could or would have done in his situation, stuck with a small girl to raise alone: he had thrown up his hands and left her to raise herself. But for years afterward Kristin assumed she had said something indiscreet, that her question was taken for an accusation, as though she could possibly know that the answer to the question of what was missing from the world might be: her mother. For years Kristin assumed she had asked something bad, and then made the conscious choice anyway not to be ashamed, no matter how bad it was, no matter that she had no idea what it was she had said or done that warranted shame.
Now the Occupant’s time-capsule was missing, and it would have been bare consolation, if it had occurred to her at all, to think the capsule might have distracted the intruders from coming up the stairs where she had slept, thus saving her. She was too devastated to think of that. Like a midnight tide, abandonment rushed in, loneliness rushed in, terror rushed in, a childhood without love rushed in, and swept her away for a while, dashing her on this memory and casting her adrift on that, until she was beached on her own nature: it wasn’t her nature, in the end, to go under. It was her nature to swim; so after she had cried for a long time, she composed herself, put on the Occupant’s blue coat, took her money and Yoshi’s plane ticket and the key to the truck and a beer from the refrigerator, and left the loft, pulling closed behind her the door that, splintered around the latch from being broken open the night before, now didn’t quite shut.
She was half surprised to find the truck still parked where she had left it, though a few satellite dishes had been pilfered. For the rest of the morning she lurched around the city in an aimless panic. She ate in drive-thru places so she wouldn’t have to get out of the truck or stop for very long. At one point she parked on a side street to sleep, but these days she never slept well, always waking to sounds that were all the more ominous in her dreamlessness, seventeen years of black empty dreamlessness beginning to leave her feeling more fitful, slightly crazed, pushed to the brink of something.
She returned to the Occupant’s house for several reasons. The first was that there was nowhere else she knew to go. The second was that she felt compelled to somehow try and explain to him that, at this moment, his time-capsule was on its way to Tokyo in the hands of black-marketeers. The third and perhaps most compelling reason was sheer accident; wandering the city in a truck full of satellite dishes, from the beach to the hills, as twilight fell, Kristin just happened to find herself at a somewhat familiar intersection passing a somewhat familiar hill, then on a somewhat familiar street passing a somewhat familiar house.
Since she had never really seen the house very often from the outside, she wasn’t sure it was even the right house—dark, unlit, with no sign of life. His car wasn’t there. She rolled the truck a little farther down the block and parked.
She found the front door standing wide open, exhaling the house’s black breath. Inside, she called and no one answered. Her heart was beating and she called again, and when no one answered again, she turned on the light switch of a lamp near the old piano, next to the sofa where the Occupant would lie tormented by headaches, and then she moved from room to room, from the library to the kitchen, where she found a package of luncheon meat on the counter torn open as though by an animal, and bread scattered in pieces across the counter and floor. In the sink sat a juice bottle without the top, and her bare foot stepped in something sticky which turned out to be more juice. She wasn’t sure what to make of these small signs of upheaval. Even in the frenzy of his headaches, the Occupant wasn’t the sort to leave packages of food ripped apart on the counter. But except for the kitchen, nothing else about the house appeared particularly disturbed from how it had been several days before, and so Kristin went downstairs. She went into the Occupant’s bedroom and turned on the light, half expecting to find him still in bed, in the same position that she had last seen him sleeping, his once black beard now the color of ice. But his bed was empty, and then she went down to the bottom level of the house, breaching the sanctuary of the four-walled Calendar. He wasn’t there either.
She went back up to what had been her room. The first thing she noticed was that the bed was unmade; and remembering that she had slept in the Occupant’s bed the last night before she left, and the night before that, she was more and more sure that her own bed had been made the last time she saw it. Still on the shelf by the bed were the books she had taken from the library, and still on the wall were the various news clippings she had tacked there. Then she saw a dress—in a shade of light blue that might have been chosen to match the color of someone’s eyes, though certainly not hers—hanging in the closet. She was damned sure there hadn’t been any damned blue dress there before. Had the Occupant already found someone to
replace her? Had his wife returned? Immediately Kristin dropped his coat she had been wearing and slipped on the dress, which was too tight.
She found her own clothes about an hour later, underneath the mattress of the Occupant’s bed, cleaned and pressed and folded. She went back up to the kitchen and found a fully stocked refrigerator and cabinets, as though he had stored up for some long siege with his demons, which made the fact that he wasn’t there all the more curious, and suggested to her that wherever he had gone had been in a hurry, and that he would be back at any moment. Now she wasn’t sure she wanted to be there after all, her guilt about the time-capsule notwithstanding. It occurred to her maybe he had gotten a phone call about the capsule being disinterred and that was why he had taken off so quickly, but when she checked the phone that he had yanked out of the wall that one night, it was still dead. The other possibility was that he had torn out of the house immediately upon discovering she had escaped—if that was the right word—in order to find her, and hadn’t come back since. But that really didn’t make sense either: he would have returned at some point, if not to sleep or shower or do what normal people do, or people more normal than he was, then at least to confirm she hadn’t shown up; and besides, there was all this new food and a strange dress in the closet that had materialized in the meantime.
Every answer she came up with seemed contradicted by other questions, and all the answers to those questions seemed contradicted by other answers. Kristin’s main concern now was exactly when the Occupant was going to reappear, and whether she really wanted to be there when he did; but finding somewhere else to spend the night just didn’t seem like an option at this point. She would bathe and read and get some sleep, and whatever happened when the Occupant showed up, she would deal with. She got the key to the truck from out of the pocket of the coat and in her too-tight blue dress went back out into the night, because if and when someone came looking for the truck, whether it was cops or Japanese gangsters, she didn’t want it near the house. The night was very quiet except for the sound of someone down the street trying, without success, to start their car. At first, walking down the street, from a distance Kristin thought someone had taken the truck, and then when she finally made it out in the dark, she thought someone had taken all the satellite dishes from the back, until she realized the dishes were still there, but now painted black: every single one.
The Sea Came in at Midnight Page 16
