The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  And then after thinking all that, she didn’t think at all. She just followed an impulse, and left the truck where it sat, and strolled past the Dragon Gate that opened up into Chinatown, past old Chinese dreams and Chinese jabber and the clamor of gongs, through the doors of the hotel and across the lobby and into the elevator, where the key fit perfectly into the lock that read “Penthouse.” She turned it and the doors closed. She leaned against the back of the elevator and closed her eyes, and didn’t open them until she heard the doors open first.

  TWENTY YEARS LATER, IN a decade that lives in its own hindsight, an old man opens his eyes and—his brain making one last inexplicable calculation—sees all his coordinates collapse to zero.

  He’s surrounded by maps tacked up to the walls of the old condemned penthouse. Maps of the world, maps of every continent, maps of oceans and maps of mountain ranges. Maps he’s collected for more than sixty years, since he was a boy, maps he’s worked with for more than forty years, since he became a professional mapmaker. Almost all of them are old maps, more than a few outdated, brown at the edges and coming apart at the seams, where they’ve been folded and unfolded, again and again, as maps always are. Maps are really the only thing he has left, kept in a shoe box, dragged around with him his whole life.

  As well as by the maps, the old man is also now surrounded by scraps of paper on which he’s made endless calculations for what seems like days, though in fact it’s been only a little less than forty-eight hours. The calculations have been translated on the maps into coordinates. The mystery of the coordinates has so gripped him he hasn’t slept at all, until he now feels slightly delirious; he hasn’t gone out for food today, and is finally feeling hungry. He’s done nothing but sit in the shambles of the penthouse at the top of the old condemned hotel, staring at maps and plotting coordinates, and then sometimes staring out the window, and then back at the maps in a growing rage over what the coordinates mean.

  The maps surround a window before which sits an old wooden table covered with all of old Carl’s calculations. The window overlooks the dark and desolate Dragon Gate of what’s now more ghost town than Chinatown. As twilight falls and the small desk lamp burns brighter, it becomes harder to make out the graffiti of the building across the street, though Carl has read it a thousand times if he’s read it once; when and how someone wrote this particular graffiti isn’t entirely clear, since it didn’t reveal itself until the building in front of it fell. All the buildings of San Francisco are destined to fall sooner or later, including presumably this destitute old hotel in which this destitute old man has taken up residence in the penthouse. If you’re going to be a squatter, Carl says to himself, you might as well squat in a penthouse. But he wonders what scrawled manifesto will materialize on a hidden wall when this hotel comes down, taking him with it.

  AS THOUGH IN RESPONSE, the hotel shakes a little. The old man braces himself.

  Not this time. Well, actually this might be a good time, Carl thinks, it might make me forget the business with the coordinates. But do I really want to die in rubble with their riddle still in my head, expiring in frustration? So let me just figure this one out, Carl asks whatever god or fate is listening, before you bring everything down.

  Once he had told someone, what was it? that he wasn’t obsessed with maps, that maps were obsessed with him. “I have faith,” he had said, “and faith transcends obsession.” He had hoped to be a playwright then, and had begun the maps one morning while sitting in a Village café back in New York City drinking his morning espresso and working on his play—when sometime during the third act a character walked onstage, opened his mouth, and nothing came out. Now, years later, looking again at the building across the street, Carl remembers he made a map of graffiti once, back in the Eighties. Was that the one the city fired him over? No, they wouldn’t have fired him for that: a map of graffiti in a city like New York almost made a kind of sense; a map of graffiti would barely be crazy at all, it would hardly even qualify as eccentric.

  No, there had been odder maps to come. Having mapped the city streets and having mapped the city bridges, having mapped the sewers and having mapped the subways, having mapped the power grids and having mapped the water ducts, having mapped the sound currents and having mapped the wind tunnels, Carl had eventually begun mapping the true heart of the city, until there was nothing left to map and until his superiors, trying to run things as reasonably as possible, trying to get a grip on things in a time that already seemed to be slipping from their grip, didn’t want to see another map from him, not his maps of graffiti or his maps of sexual rendezvous or his maps of mad women or his maps of runaway children or his maps of dead bodies—not, in short, his Maps of Real Life, not to even mention the later maps, the Maps of the Subconscious City: the maps of nervous breakdowns and the maps of psychotic episodes and the maps of religious hallucinations.

  Now that Carl thinks about it, it was the Map of Unrequited Love that got him fired. It was his most subjectively conceived and tenaciously rendered cartographic triumph, inspired by a pretty, secretive Asian girl who dumped him at the time; he was around twenty-five or -six; he can’t even remember her name now. But while he can’t remember her name, he’s thought of her every so often, every once in a while, since it was she who inspired him to make the Map of Unrequited Love that provoked the city to fire him, that changed the direction of his life, though he can’t honestly say it was for the worst, even if now he’s a slightly addled old man without a dime to his name or a single human contact of any significance, with nothing but his maps. In the past few days he’s been thinking of the girl a lot, ever since a few mornings ago when he passed a small kite shop in Chinatown and saw another young girl who reminded him of her. Now he thinks about both girls as he stares at the mysterious coordinates tacked to the penthouse wall in front of him, the coordinates he’s been trying to decode for days and which are finally starting to drive him crazy.

  More out of instinct than any analysis, he knew immediately, the moment he saw them, that the final numbers in the series were coordinates. Jesus, he’s been making maps more than forty years so he God damned well knows coordinates when he sees them. But by any latitude or longitude he chooses, north or south or east or west, 68 and 19 wind up in the middle of nowhere—the Sargasso Sea, the Arabian Sea, off the coast of Iceland, deep in the jungles of Chile. Maybe a treasure is buried in one of those places. I hope to God, Carl growls to himself, it’s not a God damned buried treasure. I’m too old to go search for a buried treasure. No, it’s obvious the answer is in the code that precedes the coordinates, written on the small crinkled square of old blue paper tacked to the wall: you’re mocking me! he yells at it, but the truth is, it’s not mocking him so much as haunting him, it’s commanding him to solve the equation from somewhere beyond the grave. Because splattered across the series of numbers, and across the rest of the old blue paper, is a very deep purplish-brown stain that, as soon as he saw it, Carl knew instantly was a burst of blood. Not the thin streak of a single cut or the trickle of an accident, but the splash of a gleefully violent wound, delivered to someone who wore the map a little too close to the heart.

  He found the map several mornings ago, the same morning he saw the girl in the kite shop in Chinatown. It was buried in a wall in his penthouse that had been separated by another tremor. He had been out on his errands when the tremor hit, the paper lanterns that hung in the little Chinese eatery he was visiting dancing to something obviously stronger than a wind or a fog, fishball soup sloshing over the sides of the large black urn in which it simmered. Every morning before ten o’clock Carl had been making his way down the precarious stairs of the hotel to Grant Avenue and then up Bush Street to the little bakery where he buys bread, then returning to the Dragon Gate of Chinatown with its once grand monster perched above the entrance now as shabby and toothless as Carl himself, and walking through the gate up past the long-closed bazaar and stopping to gaze in the window of the old kite shop, its own mon
sters of wood and paper and nylon slowly disintegrating behind the glass. It’s a neighborhood of dead monsters.

  At the little Chinese restaurant, one of the few in Chinatown still open, the cook always sends Carl home with some leftovers from the night before. Soup and bamboo shoots, sometimes a little piece of garlic chicken or moo shu pork or a “pot sticker” or two—a dumpling that sticks to the pot in which it’s fried. This one particular morning that the ground shook, it stopped Carl and the Chinese cook still in their tracks, and they held their breath, slowly peering around them to see if anything came crashing down; and it was on his way back to the old hotel that he stopped again to look in the kite-shop window, and saw the pretty Asian girl carefully and patiently painting one of the kites.

  She looked up at him as he stood there gazing in the window, and she had the most blazing blue eyes he’d ever seen. He couldn’t remember ever seeing such blue eyes, certainly not in an Asian face, and he was so startled by them that it was only a few minutes later he realized how much the rest of her reminded him of that other girl from forty years ago—though he was quite sure the earlier girl had not had such blue eyes. The girl in the kite shop was probably about the same age as the other girl had been when he knew her, perhaps a little older, and this girl working in the kite shop looked right back at him for as long as half a minute, and then returned to her work.

  It was a couple of hours later, after the old man made his uneasy way back up the hotel stairs to the penthouse and sat at the table eating his day’s one and only meal, that he noticed the wall on the other side of the room had separated from the tremor that morning. Just beyond the breach in the wall he could see the glint of the old blue paper, as blue as the Asian girl’s eyes. When he saw the blood on the blue paper, his first horrified thought was that there might also be a body behind the wall; and that night, from his bedding on the floor, he kept staring at the wall, until the next morning, after a sleepless night, he made himself pull part of it away to see what else was there. If there was a body, he kept reasoning with himself, surely he would have known about it before now—these walls weren’t that thick, after all—though on the other hand it was likely to have been there a long time, since this building had been abandoned for a long time. He wondered if he would find a weapon. He most dreaded finding a bloody knife.

  But there was nothing else behind the wall. There were no other signs of whatever had happened here, or how the bloodstained paper with the numbers had ever gotten behind the wall in the first place. Maybe, he thought at first, the coordinates themselves held the answer. Maybe someone had been after the code that preceded the coordinates; maybe it was a secret formula of some sort. But if it was a secret formula, it didn’t seem likely it would have been stuck inside a wall; either it would have been taken or destroyed altogether. As a man whose life had been a grid, as a man who had lived his life by coordinates, Carl accepted a more personal meaning in the numbers, an amazing grace: they once were lost and now were found; and had been found by him.

  It was possible, he supposed, they weren’t coordinates. But then what were they? A bank account, or a phone number? Upon investigation, the only possible place he found on the planet that might have such a phone number was Cameroon. At first he wasn’t even certain where Cameroon was. Just because maps were his specialty—he said to himself with irritation, in one of those arguments old men are always having with no one—didn’t mean geography was. Studying one of his maps of Africa, he eventually found Cameroon next to Nigeria, above the Congo. On another geological map, he discovered in Cameroon what looked to be a large volcano; that was interesting, but not an answer, or not one he could use; there wasn’t a buried treasure in a volcano in Cameroon, was there? And if so, would there be a phone booth next to it? Did one place a long-distance person-to-person call to a volcano in Cameroon?

  It’s not a phone number or bank account, he decided. 2.3.7.5.68.19. The 68 and 19 were coordinates; the 2, 3, 7 and 5, the code to which latitude and longitude, and what they meant. But then, in spite of himself, his thinking took a slightly more mystical turn; the first thing he noticed, the thing he realized right away, was how every single integer from 1 to 9 was represented in the series, with a single conspicuous exception, or at least conspicuous to anyone who spent any time at all contemplating the meaning of numbers. The truth was that Carl didn’t actually spend a lot of time contemplating the meaning of numbers, he was just a God damned mapmaker, so numbers were always just a means of measurement. But then he noted that all the numbers of the code that preceded the coordinates were prime ones, which is to say numbers that could be divided only by themselves. He was sorry the 5 came after the 7; it threw off the progression, and what did that mean? Since he wasn’t a numerologist, he couldn’t bring much expertise to the numbers’ meaning beyond the obvious: 2 was the basic division of life, of course, the bipolarity of earth and sky, day and night, male and female. 3, well, there were three physical dimensions, and the gestation period of the human fetus was divided into trimesters. 3 was the most explosive of numbers; it always challenged the 2 that preceded it, threatening to disrupt the 2, until it finally either tore the 2 apart or bound it together forever. Where there were two lovers, for instance, or even two close friends, the intrusion of a third upset the balance—unless the third was the child of the two. So 3 was the number of both unity and chaos, the holy trinity and the three-ring circus. 7: seven days of the week, the time in which God created the Earth and heavens and then rested; and in the Bible, if you were trying to scratch an existence out of the Egyptian dust, 7 was the number that made you run for cover or kick up your heels, depending on whether it was about to attach itself to years of feast or years of famine. 5 was the most primitive unit of higher mathematics, Carl reasoned, cavemen counting their five fingers, until eventually they evolved to joining one hand to the other, in the applause of ten.

  But the number that caught Carl’s attention was the only integer between 1 and 9 that wasn’t in the series, in either the coordinates or the code. To begin with the obvious, 4 was the first integer that wasn’t a prime number. But more important, 4 was the number that space and time had in common. In time there were four major points on the clock, four seasons in the year. In space there were four directions, four quadrants. Of course, this translated into larger cosmic terms, if anything could be larger or more cosmic than space and time: four weeks in which the moon circled the earth, four weeks in a woman’s menstrual cycle, four weeks, in other words, in which the human race is constantly offered the chance to perpetuate itself. So 4 was the number of supreme order in space and time, composed as it was by the 2—the number of day/night and earth/sky—doubling itself, with 2 and 4 separated only by the anarchic and unpredictable 3. The absence of 4 from this particular series on this blue bloodstained page, with every other integer present and never repeated, struck Carl as so momentous that it by-passed mere significance and veered into the territory of the ominous. The blue bloodstained page was a map, in other words, in which the single most important numerical component of space and time and life was missing.

  And he still had no idea what it meant. He kept trying to read the formula as a hieroglyphic, trying to impart some symbolic value to each component; but he felt flummoxed from the beginning, almost before he ever got started, in his attempts to interpret the 2. Up or down? Day or night? He never had much consciousness of time anyway, the poetics of time always seemed banal to him compared to those of space; a mapmaker who cared more about time than space should be a watchmaker instead, and in his life Carl had hardly owned a clock, let alone a calendar. Computing figures, adding them, subtracting them, multiplying them, dividing them, adding some and dividing others, subtracting some and multiplying others, he searched for whatever formula would shift the cross-coordinates of the small blue map to a point on his larger maps of some obvious relevance, to a topography of some spectacular familiarity, as inevitably as crosshairs falling on a target.

  HIS LAST
AND MOST deranged adventure in cartography had been more than fifteen years ago, when he was hired by the city of Los Angeles to map the city’s missing dreams. Over the months immediately following the thirty-first of December 1999, the residents of L.A. began to realize their sleep was now utterly drained of dreams, a phenomenon that coincided with a wholesale ransacking of time-capsules from the city’s Black Clock Park over on the west side of town. Gradually the city’s populace sank into a state of insomniacal fitfulness and then a kind of functional madness.

  Of course, by any logical consideration Carl’s assignment was absurd. It would be difficult enough to map dreams that existed, let alone those that didn’t: what’s missing from the world? a four-year-old girl had once run from the dusty mainstreet of a small Chinese ghost town to ask her bewildered uncle—and years later Carl was being commissioned to not only answer the question, but diagram it. While the leaders of the city were at a loss to account for why the dreams were missing, they were determined to track them down at any rate, because the life of the city depended on it. Though Carl had never been to L.A. before, he understood it was nothing if not the city of vicarious dreams, and that this was why the city leaders had had the urbanscape literally transformed into one vast projection room, where old movies were constantly screened night and day on the sides of buildings, on the walls of rooms, on the concrete slabs of sidewalks and the asphalt plains of streets.