The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  THEY WERE STILL WET. She touched one and felt with her thumb the gritty moist black spot on the end of her finger. Across the street, the sound of the old Camaro trying to start became more frantic.

  Kristin walked over to the Camaro and knocked on the window that was cracked open at the top. All she could see inside was the dark form of the driver and the hovering red glow of the end of a cigarette. She knocked on the glass again and the grinding of the ignition stopped, and finally the woman in the car rolled down the window; a cloud of cigarette smoke floated out. “If you have any jumper cables,” Kristin said, “you can hook it up to that truck.”

  Louise stared at the girl and stubbed out her cigarette in the Camaro ashtray. “I don’t have any cables.”

  “Oh.” Kristin shrugged. “I’d let you use the phone in the house, but it doesn’t work.”

  Louise said, “You live around here?”

  “It’s not really my house. The truck isn’t really mine either.” Kristin explained, “I’m in that phase of life when nothing’s really mine.”

  “Lucky you,” answered Louise.

  “Maybe there’s a service station down the hill.”

  “There is, but it’s closed by now.”

  “Well,” said Kristin, pointing at the homes along the hillside, “I’m in the third one down, if you need anything.” She didn’t know what else to say. She was a little sorry she had said anything, since the woman didn’t seem very friendly. She went back to the house, and a few minutes later Louise was at the door, smoking another cigarette in her leather jacket and appearing ill at ease. Kristin let her in, but the older woman unsettled her so much that she warned her right off, “The guy who owns this place will be back any minute.”

  Louise nodded, looking around the living room. She sat down in silence, gazing out the windows at the lights of the city below her, and after a few minutes she finally said, “When did you say this guy’s coming back?”

  “Any time now,” Kristin insisted.

  She doesn’t have any idea when he’s coming back, Louise thought. “You’re sure the phone doesn’t work?”

  “Yes,” Kristin answered. For a moment she wondered if that was such a good thing to tell her, but given the circumstances there was no way to tell her anything else. “He pulled it out of the wall,” she offered, at this point evaluating the tactical advantage of everything she said; she kept hoping Louise would decide to leave, taking her chances on the streets of Hollywood. “He’s kind of a psycho,” she assured Louise emphatically.

  Well, that makes three of us then, doesn’t it? Louise smiled to herself ruefully, remembering the girl from one night some weeks before, standing naked in the window. She lay her head back against the sofa and closed her eyes; when she opened them, Kristin was still looking at her.

  “You live near here?” said Kristin.

  “About five miles.” Louise added, “Too far to walk.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  Louise looked around at the fireplace and piano.

  “I just stay here once in a while,” explained Kristin, “off and on. Now and then.”

  “You from LA.?”

  “Let’s say it’s the only place I’ve ever lived worth mentioning. You?”

  “Passing through.” Louise closed her eyes again, brow furrowed. “Before this I was in … Albuquerque. No. Yes. From here I go to San Francisco.”

  “I was there,” said Kristin, “a couple of months ago.”

  “Albuquerque?”

  “San Francisco. I lived in a hotel. Been traveling long?”

  “Well,” said Louise, “if you want to look at it a certain way. If you want to look at it a certain way, I haven’t done anything but travel.”

  “I would like to travel. I haven’t been anywhere. I haven’t even been out of California. Have you been to a lot of places?”

  “A lot of places,” Louise agreed.

  “In that car?”

  “In that car.”

  “Are you a salesperson or something?”

  “No.” Louise laughed. “Well, actually … no, I’m not a salesperson.”

  “What do you do? Going around to all those places.” I’m asking too many questions, Kristin thought.

  Louise didn’t want to sound melodramatic. “I undo things. I spent the first half of my life doing things and I’m spending the second half undoing them.”

  “What are you going to San Francisco for?”

  “To find someone I haven’t seen in a long time.”

  “To undo something?”

  “Yes.” Louise didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it filled her with terror; she glanced impatiently at the front door.

  Kristin chewed the inside of her cheek. “Want to see something?”

  “All right,” Louise finally answered. Kristin got up and started down the stairs, and Louise followed her, lighting another cigarette. They got to the bottom, where Kristin and Louise stood in the middle of the room looking around at the Blue Calendar. Louise said, “What is it?”

  “See, it has all these dates of various events that have happened over the years,” Kristin said. Louise stared at the Calendar, smoking her cigarette. “Now, the man who made this calendar has a certain way of looking at things,” Kristin went on. “He believes things that happened for important reasons are not important, and things that happened for unimportant reasons are very important. Also, you’ll notice something different about this calendar. You know how, on most calendars, the first of August tends to be followed by the second of August? And after that usually comes the third of August? People have always tended to be very conventional that way. On this calendar, the first of August may be followed by the twenty-third of May, while the twenty-third of May is followed by the eleventh of October. Also, have you ever noticed how, on most calendars, if you get three hundred and sixty-five dates in one place, they all tend to fall in the same year? That’s just way too much of a coincidence for this guy. I mean, how likely is that, that three hundred and sixty-five consecutive days would all happen to fall in the same year?”

  Louise studied the Calendar and continued to smoke her cigarette. “You’re right,” she finally concluded. “He’s a mental case.”

  “Check this out,” said Kristin. She undid the tight blue dress she was wearing that was already straining the buttons. On the side of her bare body was a now fading 29.4.85.

  “What’s it mean?” said Louise.

  “It means,” Kristin replied, “nothing. Not a single thing. Nothing happened on this date of any importance to anyone, least of all me, since I wasn’t even three years old at the time. It means I am this date: I’m a date in time, a date on this calendar, of paramount importance because absolutely nothing important whatsoever took place on it.”

  “Maybe something important happened to him.”

  “If it did, he’s forgotten.”

  “Maybe it’s something nobody wants to remember.”

  “Yes, well, you can pursue that line of conversation with him when he shows up.”

  Looking at her intently, Louise said, “Does he do things to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean does he do things to you when you stay with him.”

  “He’s never hurt me,” Kristin said.

  “Does he frighten you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You shouldn’t let him frighten you.”

  Actually, Louise frightened her, truth be told. But Kristin didn’t say that. “I’m not really planning to stick around much longer.”

  “What’s this?” said Louise, something on the Calendar catching her eye.

  “Very perceptive of you.” Kristin walked over to the date in the corner. “This is the other thing he’s figured out that the rest of us are all just very confused about. That last December thirty-first that everyone thought was the beginning of something, or the end? That wasn’t the beginning or end of anything. This was where everything rea
lly began, in Paris, right here”—she pointed at the place on the Calendar where it read 2.3.7.5.68.19—“at two minutes past three o’clock on the seventh day of the fifth month, in the sixty-eighth year of the 1900s. May 7, 1968. That was the real beginning of everything.”

  “The beginning of everything?” said Louise.

  “Or, looked at another way, the real beginning of nothing.”

  “In Paris?”

  For a while the two women stood watching the Calendar in silence. After a moment Kristin said, “So why do you paint them black?”

  Louise was trying to figure out a place to put out her cigarette, and finally dropped the butt in the pocket of her leather jacket. “To purge the evil airwaves,” she answered.

  “Ah,” Kristin nodded, thinking, Oh yeah, and the Occupant’s a mental case. She led Louise back upstairs. On the second level she gave Louise a small tour, showing her the Occupant’s bedroom and then what had been her room—as though to make it clear, Louise said to herself, that the girl in fact slept in her own bed and not his. Louise noted the clippings that Kristin had tacked to the wall above the bed, as well as the books on the shelf. By now it was getting late, and when they got back up to the living room Louise said to Kristin, “Maybe this guy’s not coming back tonight.”

  “I don’t know,” Kristin admitted.

  “Maybe,” said the older woman, “I could sleep here on the sofa.”

  “All right.”

  Louise took off her leather jacket and lay down on the sofa, pulling the jacket up around her. “Thanks.”

  “Do you want me to turn out the light?”

  “I’ll get it. Thanks.”

  “I would say sweet dreams, but I wouldn’t know.”

  “Me neither,” said Louise. Half an hour later, after the girl had disappeared down the stairs, Louise found Kristin’s last comment as curious as Kristin had found Louise’s answer. Lying in the dark with the lights of the city coming through the window, Louise didn’t fall asleep until she had given up on sleep, resigning herself to waiting impatiently for daybreak; when she woke, sunlight having replaced the window’s city lights, it was to a realization that slipped from her mind as quickly as it had entered, not unlike a dream. For some time, thinking about the girl, she lay there trying to recapture it. On the small table next to the sofa were the keys to the truck.

  THEY HADN’T BEEN THERE before, had they? Picking them up, Louise discovered that in fact only one of the keys was to the truck, and presumed the other was to the house, until upon closer scrutiny she read on the key Hotel Poseidon San Francisco, and then, under that, P—for the parking garage, she guessed. What else would P stand for?

  Louise got up from the sofa slowly, feeling old. But it was better than spending the night in the Camaro, she thought. She assumed the guy who lived here had not returned in the night or she would have awakened. “Hello?” she called out at the top of the stairs. She went downstairs to use the bathroom. When she came out of the bathroom she looked into the main bedroom to see the bed still empty, and then into the other small bedroom across the way, which was also empty. She now had the feeling the girl was gone.

  She went down the stairs to the bottom floor, and looked in the room with the Calendar. No one was there either. For a few minutes she stood in the middle of the room trying to read the Calendar and then went back upstairs. She tried the telephone on the off chance it really did work after all. In the meantime she kept trying to figure out what to make of the keys, whether the girl had left them there for her on purpose, and what exactly it meant if she had, or if in fact it was purely by chance. She went back to the main bedroom searching for some kind of clue, and then to the other bedroom, where the only thing that struck her was that most of the news clippings that had been tacked to the wall above the bed were gone. She thought maybe some of the books were gone too.

  This is a house, Louise said to herself, where everything disappears.

  The last thing she did before leaving was go back down to the bottom floor, into its lone room, and tear off from the Blue Calendar the date in the farthest corner that read 2.3.7.5.68.19. She folded it into a square and put it in her pocket.

  Then she went back upstairs and pulled on her leather jacket and went outside. Looking over her shoulder, she quickly walked down the street to her Camaro, noting the truck still parked with the black dishes, though there seemed to her perhaps fewer dishes than there had been the evening before. She tried to start the Camaro, more dead than ever. I can drive the truck down to the service station at the bottom of the hill, she thought, and get someone to come up and start the Camaro; then I can leave the truck and the keys where I found them.

  She got in the truck and started it up, and rolled down the hill with her cargo of black satellite dishes. She was quite sure people stared at her as she descended the hill, though in fact the residents of the neighborhood had gotten used to seeing the truck take the ruined dishes away every morning, if not so many at one time. She was so paranoid by the time she got to the bottom of the hill that she kept on driving past the service station, and then found herself heading west on Sunset Boulevard toward the hotel where she lived. As she drove on, her paranoia grew rather than diminished; she wanted to stop the truck in the street and run from it, and at the same time she felt like she didn’t dare stop, and so kept on going. When she reached the hotel she drove right on by, hit Santa Monica Boulevard and continued west until she reached the beach, then turned north on Pacific Coast Highway.

  She drove up Pacific Coast Highway through Malibu and then on to Ventura. An hour later she was hungry and stopped at a Mexican stand in Oxnard and had a fish taco. After lunch she got back in the truck and continued north, passing the turnoff back to Los Angeles and heading on to Santa Barbara. Past Santa Barbara, the highway cut inland before picking up the coast again outside San Luis Obispo where, after five hours of driving, Louise now realized she was exhausted from not sleeping much the night before. Thirty miles past San Luis Obispo, she stopped for the night at a beachside motel south of San Simeon. By the time she paid for a room she was already low on money, having filled up the truck twice since leaving L.A., where she had also left everything she owned behind at her hotel. The next day she continued on up what had become Highway 1, through Big Sur, where the winding road along the seaside cliffs—treacherous even in the best of conditions—was partially fogged in and slowed her progress to ten miles an hour. With every perilous turn she could hear satellite dishes rolling around in the back; she expected them to go tumbling out of the truck altogether, crashing to the ocean below. By the time she got through Big Sur it was dark, and in Monterey she slept in the truck.

  From Monterey she assumed she would take the San Jose route into San Francisco, which was mainly eight-lane highway, but a service-station attendant advised her that traffic was always so bad she might want to consider just continuing up the coast instead, through Santa Cruz and past the lighthouse. As she got farther and farther up the coast, people seemed to find her satellite dishes both generally less interesting on the one hand, barely noticing at all, and more individually interesting on the other hand, since each time she stopped, either to sleep for the night or get a bite to eat or pick up something at a market, she would return to one or two fewer dishes in the back. By the morning she woke in Monterey, there were only three left. While she certainly didn’t miss the dishes, their disappearance didn’t particularly alleviate her paranoia since, she noted to herself, a trail of stolen black satellite dishes up and down the entire West Coast seemed rather conspicuous for anyone who wanted to follow it.

  She decided to ditch the truck in San Francisco, from where she would catch a bus to Sacramento and then a ride from Sacramento to Davenhall to find her daughter. She now realized how fate had forced her hand in its own mysterious way, conspiring to pull her to her daughter beyond all resistance. Many times she had wondered if she would have the courage to take that final ferry across the water to the island, as she ha
dn’t that afternoon many years before when her daughter was just a little girl standing on the other side of the river in her little blue dress. In such moments Louise both felt herself pulling away from this meeting and, in response, driving herself toward it all the more ruthlessly; and so, driving herself ruthlessly, upon entering the city she went directly to the bus station, parked the truck, and went into the station to buy a ticket.

  There were no more buses to Sacramento that afternoon, however. The next wasn’t scheduled until ten-thirty the following morning. Louise sat in the station prepared to spend the night there, and for a while sat calmly looking at the torn blue corner of the Calendar she had taken from the house in Los Angeles, and the date on it. But it made her nervous to have the truck sitting right outside with the last of the telltale dishes, and so she decided she should move it; then she had an idea: she would leave the truck in the parking garage of the hotel for which she had the key. The girl from L.A. might be more likely to find it there, assuming she wanted it back. So Louise folded the piece of Blue Calendar and put it back in the pocket of her leather jacket and looked up the address of the hotel in the phone book, and vaguely remembered from her time living in San Francisco right after her daughter was born that Grant was the main street running through Chinatown. She went back out to the truck and got in. It was night when she got to the hotel.

  But there was no parking garage that she could find, only a valet in front. If a valet parked and unparked all the cars, why would there be a key for the parking garage? She kept looking at the key to make sure it was the right hotel, and then, as she gazed at the sign of the hotel over the outside of the lobby, her eyes rising up the side of the building, it occurred to her maybe P didn’t stand for “parking” after all. She kept watching the windows on the top floor, trying to determine if it was a light she saw there, or if the place was perhaps vacant, and then she kept thinking about something odd Kristin had said, about sweet dreams she wouldn’t know, somehow so portentous a non sequitur it was almost a code, and she thought about waking that morning in the house in the Hollywood Hills to the keys sitting right there on the table next to her, and to a realization—a knowledge she had forgotten as soon as she knew it. But maybe more than anything else she thought about how old she had felt sleeping on a sofa, and how old she would feel sleeping in the truck again or the bus station.