A city of synthetic dreams flickered in the place between consciousness and unconsciousness where the collective subconscious had fallen through a schism. In his room at the dilapidated Hotel Hamblin, Carl slept as these hysterical dreams sputtered endlessly on his ceiling: a writer, watching a demonically beautiful woman ride the New Mexico mesas on horseback scattering the ashes of her father from an urn, falls madly in love with her; the most beautiful man ever filmed goes to the gas chamber not for a murder he committed but for a murder he contemplated committing, out of love for the most beautiful woman ever filmed; the manager of a casino in postwar Argentina marries the woman he loves solely for the purpose of destroying her for once rejecting him; a wealthy socialite walks into the sea so that the concert violinist she loves won’t give up his music for her; two lovers, an outlaw and a half-breed, crawl wounded and bleeding toward each other over harsh Western plains, beckoning each other with entreaties and unable to resist, though each knows the other is bent on murder. By the time that Carl, gathering together the information from all of his dream maps, had determined the missing dreams were located in the back room of a twenty-four-hour convenience store down at the corner of Adams and Crenshaw, amid the cigarettes and beer and sex magazines, he didn’t care that the city leaders fired him. One last dream convinced him he had had enough anyway.
The mystery of where this last bit of old film came from, and what subversive act introduced it into the dreamloop projected onto the city, was almost incidental to the horror. A young actress hung naked on a hook in a deserted bus terminal, in the throes of a terror nothing less than mortal, before her audition turned fatal. The scene had barely played itself out on his ceiling before Carl hastily packed his bag, ran from the hotel, and hailed a cab on the Strip; he took the cab to the Hollywood bus station and caught a bus north. He wound up in San Francisco, where he thought he might at least eventually get his own dreams back. After that Carl lost his faith in maps for a while, and sank into a destitution that eventually led him to the abandoned Hotel Poseidon next to the Dragon Gate of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
But now, after having found the small bloody blue map in the wall of his suite, he’s become consumed again with the logic of maps. All through the day and night he’s been charting coordinates, maps surrounding him on the floor beneath his feet as well as on the walls around his head, until his mind is swirling. Now, day and night, he’s been doing calculations in his head, racking his brain trying to figure out what algebraic strategy will illuminate the equation in question, what crucial x factor will provide the answer. By the end of this evening, ravenous with hunger since he hadn’t made his usual trek this morning to the bakery and the Chinese eatery, Carl had worked himself into a myriad of postulations involving deranged charts and courses and plots and crisscrossing latitudes and plummeting longitudes, his brain mad with equations, mad with coordinates, mad with x factors, exhausted by increasingly absurd results until he simply couldn’t turn his old brain off. Even when he sank into the chair at the desk and turned off the lamp and closed his eyes, he couldn’t stop the calculations from tumbling through his head. If anything it was worse in the dark, nothing but codes and coordinates rolling up and down the cylinders of his eyes, until even the insides of his closed eyelids became little maps.
He sat with the light off for a while, wishing he had gotten something to eat. In the dark the penthouse was frightening; he found himself listening for strange sounds of other intruders. With a terrible hush, a dark shadow opened up where the elevator used to be, now an empty shaft with only a single board nailed across the space where doors had once closed and opened; he’s always afraid to move around the room in the dark, afraid he’ll topple down the elevator shaft. Outside in the dark he could make out the fog of the bay rolling up Grant, obscuring the mystery graffiti on the building across the street, though he’s read it a thousand times if he’s read it once: it says I FELL INTO THE ARMS OF VENUS DE MILO. He turned the lamp back on and started plotting again a new computation on yet another map, and then again dropped the pencil in fatigue, his body hating the chair, his mind hating this obsession. I’m not obsessed with my maps, my maps are obsessed with me, he had said, years before; but now he was certainly obsessed with them, and he wondered if this meant faith was gone for good. He had never truly known what his faith was, he had once said that at bottom all faith was only in faith itself. His eyes felt weak, losing their focus, though he’d always had very good eyes, for which he’d become more grateful over the years, when glasses had become more difficult for him to afford; but once again, though he lay down the pencil, he couldn’t stop the calculating in his head, and in his exhaustion his brain descended into chaos, all the day’s denials and the night’s beliefs converging, the 2 and the 3 and the 7 and the 5 and the 68 and the 19 and the black gasp of the elevator shaft and the graffiti on the wall across the street, and her name.
It flashed through his mind so quickly he instantly forgot it again. But in its aftermath, his brain made one last inexplicable calculation and, when he opened his eyes, all the coordinates collapsed to zero.
Now he stares at the map on which he’s been working, frowning. Zero? Zero and zero, maybe? Zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude, somewhere at the edge of the Bay of Guinea? But it wasn’t zero and zero that his mind had sputtered, just zero, and now he starts figuring again, only to become confused; and the more he tries to re-create whatever calculation his brain made in that fleeting moment, the more entangled he becomes in other calculations instead. He closes his eyes again and tries to calmly rethink how he possibly came up with zero. He’s certainly never come up with zero before, he’s never been aware of any point on any map he’s ever worked on that was just, simply, zero; and now, no matter how he tries, he can’t re-create it. What did I do to come up with zero, he says to himself out loud, how did I do it? Now he thinks he really will go mad, and begins poring frantically over the earlier calculations for an answer. But he can’t find it.
He doesn’t want to find it. That’s the maddest part. He doesn’t want to find an answer that’s zero. In the moment he arrived at zero, a Moment opened up before him, and beyond that moment a terrible sense of the abyss, and he shrank from it, perhaps explaining why he can’t find it again now, perhaps explaining why he hasn’t been able to find it at all until now. He hopes it’s simply a wrong answer that his brain, now so tired it’s babbling to itself, arrived at in error. But what makes it seem so unlikely is also what makes it feel so true: the perfect emptiness of zero, the perfect collapse of every coordinate—determined by a code that omits the 4 that gives order to space and time and life—to nothingness. Now, after hours and days of being consumed with trying to prove an answer, he’s consumed with trying to disprove one, investigating every possible combination of calculations in order to assure himself that no matter what, no matter how, the blue map on the wall never adds up, or subtracts down, to zero.
Finally, when he can’t stand any more, he sets his old body down on the floor, pulling his maps up around him like a sheet and covering himself, maps across his chest and beneath his head, strewn around him like bedding where he sleeps, so that even in the dark he can immediately crisscross two lines into a point. With pencil still in hand, he slips into a turbulent sleep. Though he dreams often, he almost never dreams of the past; but recently he’s dreamed of Provence, where as a young man he thought of retiring to work in a vineyard, and now in tonight’s fitful sleep he dreams of her, he can see her face quite clearly, can see her on the streets of the East Village in the afternoons or on the occasional night when she would get away from whatever it was she did at night. He wasn’t so completely naive he hadn’t wondered what it was, but that was a time when he was still young enough to forgive anything, assuming she would allow him to forgive her; and when they lay in his tiny St. Marks apartment looking at the maps of London and Paris and Vienna that papered the walls, he knew he came closest to delivering her from the secrets she refu
sed to tell. A small stuffed bear sat in the corner. We’ll take him too, Carl promised her. You are more idealistic about your desire, she said to him—or something like it—than any guy I’ve ever known, you talk about my smile and not my breasts, and I almost believe you mean it.
After that he could only try and live up to that idealism, which often meant choosing idealism over desire, a choice that marks both the end and the beginning of love. For a while, he barely resisted the urge to follow her at night to where she lived, where she worked, to all the places that he knew she didn’t want him to know. At the time he thought that perhaps if he confronted her, if he said to her, I know about this, and it doesn’t matter, all her secrets would decompose into powerlessness. But he did resist the urge to follow her, and was never sure it was because she would consider his following her a betrayal, or because no matter what they were, just by their very revelation those secrets were bound to open a chasm between the two of them, or mostly because he feared that he would find out he was a smaller man than he wanted to know, and having learned her secrets would instead confront her and say, I know about this: and I can’t stand it. He didn’t trust the possibility that she might be more right about his heart than he was. Now, forty years later, her name has become the greatest secret of all.
Then the dream whispers the secret in his ear.
He wakes in the dark to her name. Once again it vanishes immediately from his memory. Fog from the bay drifts through the window and fills the penthouse. He sits up from his bed, still holding the pencil in one hand, still holding in the other hand the map he’s plotted in his sleep; hobbling over to the table where he turns on the small desk lamp, he sees, written a split moment before waking, coordinates spiraling off into space before reducing themselves to a single point, located—if one could blow this map up to the size of life—in a ramshackle penthouse at Grant and Bush in the city of San Francisco. He doesn’t turn out the light for the rest of the night, in the certain and unshakable conviction that he’s disappearing.
Still, it has to happen one more time before he actually understands. It’s the next morning when, more exhausted than ever, but with his exhaustion now locked in a bitter duel with hunger, Carl gets up to make his way down to the street and then to the bakery and Chinatown—only to find that rather inconveniently, during the night, the hotel stairs have collapsed. Several of the steps leading down from the penthouse hang in midair, and far below him he can see several steps rising and stopping in midair, with no particular sign of ruin between the two, as though all the other flights of stairs just vanished in the dark. He stands at the top peering down at the bottom, stunned and trying to remember if he heard the collapse of the stairs in his sleep, wondering how the steps could disintegrate so completely and silently, stranding him here. Wondering if he’s going deaf or numb, or has just become so submerged in exhaustion and obsession that he’s completely unaware of everything else happening around him, Carl feels more baffled than panicked by the fact that he now has no way to get down to the street. He stumbles back into his penthouse in a daze and over to his window, looking out over the city and wondering if there’s anyone he can call, if there’s anything he can say that anyone can hear, if there’s anything anyone can do anyway, even if they heard.
He’s staring out the window like this when he happens to see in the street below the girl from the kite shop, who some days ago reminded him so much of the girl whose name he can’t remember. Then, in the arch of the Dragon Gate, she actually looks right back up at him; even from the distance, Carl can make out her electric blue eyes.
He’s about to try and call out to her when, as though it’s floated in on the fog, he remembers the other girl’s name for a split second, and the lightning-fast calculation of zero occurs once more in his mind—and he finally realizes it’s the memory itself that’s the elusive x factor of his demented geography. Triggering and exploding every possible meaning of his life, reducing him to a void, the small blue map hanging on the wall fixes him fast on the terrain of his memory; though it’s not, the blood that stains it might as well be his own. To a man whose life has been a grid, to a man who has lived by coordinates, these are numbers of a grace more perverse than amazing: he once was found but now is lost, his own personal coordinates traveling with him, corresponding not to any common map but rather to an ever-fluid, ever-transforming map that’s only his. These coordinates are a reference point for everything and everyone else but him. He’s the north pole of unrequited love, and all around him, with the tide of memory rising from the street to the top of the arched gate of the dead dragon to his penthouse window, swallowing up the girl below, the zero of the fog closes in.
ONE NIGHT IN THE late months of 1998 the Occupant woke to a terror as old as time. It was a terror of death’s presence, if not its presence in his bedroom, if not its presence in his house, if not its presence in his city, then its presence in a chaos now known for sure and glimpsed for real rather than conceived abstractly. He had been vaguely aware recently of crossing into that realm of life when the memory of a thing is more magical than the thing itself, when the memory of the dream that didn’t come true is more powerful than the life that did.
It could have been any dream. It could have been an architect’s dream or a movie star’s or a politician’s, its death more devastating than the death of life, because one must live with the death of a dream afterward in a way that one never has to live with the death of one’s own life. The Occupant woke one night in 1998 and then the next night and then the next to this most important of deaths, the death of a reason for living, knowing his Calendar was a failure, that the meaning of the age had eluded him, that the great huge mesh of crossing timelines—in which he had hoped to catch the truth, at the center of which he had hoped to build a door, through the portal of which he had hoped to step back to the moment thirty years before, when as an eleven-year-old boy in the streets of Paris his childhood was lost forever—that great web of crossing timelines was broken, only a gossamer of his imagination all along, and that moreover it had been a quest made in bad faith, pursued not for truth but for glory, for the most vainglorious of reasons that undermined not only the integrity of his life but any chance of success the quest might have had. He had failed in his pursuit because, he now knew in the dark, he deserved to fail.
He had recently taken out a life insurance policy. Over the course of the Eighties and early Nineties he had survived by—and he and Angie had lived on—support for his work from academic and historic circles, and the modest and moderate grants they gave him to pursue the apocalypse. But finally in the late Nineties everyone just got fed up with him. He came to be seen not as a visionary but as a minor crackpot who had nothing to say of interest to anyone. Soon his resources began drying up and then his prospects with them, until there was no convincing anyone anymore and he knew he was irrevocably caught in the downward spiral of life’s end. Late in 1998 he had a dream one night in which he coughed up his own heart. In this dream he caught his heart in his hands after dislodging it from his throat and spitting it out. For a while he stood there in his dream looking at the still-beating heart in his hands, and then he took the organ and was about to nail it to the Calendar on his wall, to the date marked the seventh of May 1968, when he heard someone behind him say, What are you doing? He had been about to strike the first blow with his hammer when he turned and saw a small infant with black Asian hair and Angie’s features, but with his own startling blue eyes.
ARE YOU MY DAUGHTER? he said.
Yes, she answered; and he woke.
Let’s say I’m a monster. But let’s say the night my child was conceived I heard the first murmur of possible redemption. I dreamed of her before Angie even knew she existed, a newborn talking up a storm, erudite and provocative. Let’s say, the little girl said to me, I’m the god you want to pretend you don’t believe in.
When I woke from the dream, I was sleeping between Angie’s thighs, my ear to her belly.
&
nbsp; The next night the infant was already growing into a person, with the black Asian hair of her mother and the blue eyes of her father, and the night after that she was a year old, and a week later she was a toddler, beset by primal calm, a sanguine visitor from outer space. With each night and week she grew older into childhood till Angie deduced a presence. … More and more, Little Saki looked like Angie except for the blue eyes, all the more unnerving in her Asian face. In the dreams, she spoke in the voice of the cosmic reason I had always insisted time had swallowed. We debated life and she beat me every round, my defeats not crushed humiliations but joyous realizations, their clarity and force evaporating only with the first light of waking.
One night not so long ago, in an interview on television, a very famous actress, a legend in her own time, flinty and New English and “indomitable,” now well into her eighties and looking back over what she clearly considered the grand drama of her days, said the sort of thing you hear from such people who are constantly reading from the script they’ve come to call a life. “If I had it to do all over again,” she declaimed with quivering pride, “I wouldn’t change a thing.” Of course the world loves this. It’s so flinty and indomitable and legendary. The world receives it as evidence of a survivor’s hard-earned wisdom, a triumphant valediction, a granitic testament to the human spirit, rather than what it is, the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation, a humble parting homage to one’s own myth … my life has been so legendary, who could want to change it? Even my fuckups have been so legendary, who could want to change them? I am so legendary and indomitable and flinty, who could want to have wasted such a fabulous life actually learning something? Given the chance to relive such a mythic existence, who could bother wanting to do a hundred things I didn’t have the passion or courage to do before, who could bother wanting to undo a hundred things I didn’t have the good sense or strength of character not to do before? My life has simply been too perfectly extraordinary—and really, could it have been anything else, given that I lived it?—for me to now have anything resembling a single human regret, to feel anything resembling a single pang of remorse, to spend anything resembling a single reflective moment acknowledging and reconciling myself to a thousand missed opportunities to have done, or not done, one single thing better, stronger, braver. …
The Sea Came in at Midnight Page 19
