The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  For three nights he didn’t leave Baghdadville at all, sleeping in his car and virtually living at a brothel called The Angel Eyes where, every few hours, he returned to Room 7. A Turk sat inside the front door of the brothel watching soccer games on an Italian television station, along with a big German blond hired as security guard and enforcer. The Turk would greet the Occupant with a cold amused charm, as a pusher greets a customer who is obviously and rapidly in the process of becoming addicted: Ah, the gentleman for Angel 7, he would smile, and lead the Occupant up the stairs, down the hall, and around the corner of a dark L-shaped corridor to Room 7, where the door locked from the outside. The Turk would turn the lock on the door, open it, and the Occupant would give him some money and step inside Room 7, where a young girl, no more than sixteen years old, blond with long legs and small breasts, hung by her bound hands from the ceiling, naked and blindfolded on a hook at the end of a rope. The rope attached to the hook ran down along the side of the wall so that one could raise the girl to her feet or lower her to her knees. Next to a single bare burning bulb on the wall behind her was a sign written in black marker ink, like the sign a father might hang on his daughter’s bedroom door, that read YOU CAN STICK IT IN ANY HOLE. I WANT YOU TO CUM NOW. It was always the same girl, no matter when the Occupant visited Room 7, whatever the hour of the day or night, and it would have been difficult for him to be certain, with the blindfold across her eyes, whether she was awake or asleep, alive or dead, except for the slight resistance of her body when he put himself inside her. She never made a sound, she never responded to the door opening or closing, she never stirred when he was inside her, except for the way her body slightly tensed; when he was inside her, at the moment of climax there opened up in his head, in the midst of the pain of the searing headache, a light into which he could almost fall, as though it was a Moment into which he could almost step, a passageway through his memories. It was only much later that it occurred to him maybe the light was for the girl, not him. Of course he meant to obliterate the memory of his wife and daughter. Of course he meant to obliterate the landscape of his life around him and the end of his dreams and the terror of death as old as time. Humiliation couldn’t have mattered less to him; he had no interest one way or another in whether the naked blonde hanging from the hook felt anything or not. The girl on the hook didn’t respond in any way to his being there, or in any way to his white moan inside her. She was his favorite. Sometimes, inside her, he was sure he loved her.

  HE DOESN’T RETURN TO Room 7 for a couple of months, until after Kristin leaves. He sleeps late that morning, awakened by a particularly vicious crack of thunder, and the moment he wakes he knows instantly Kristin has become one more vanished woman in his life. She isn’t in his bed, where she was sleeping; when he gets up from bed and goes to her room, she isn’t there either.

  As he stands in the doorway of her room staring at her empty bed, it doesn’t occur to him even for a moment that she might have gone for a walk, or upstairs to make tea. He’s altogether familiar with the aura of this kind of absence. It’s a female absence, of someone who’s come to take on a particular importance to him beyond what he can possess or control. She has in recent weeks gone from being the device of his sensual satisfaction to something more, the missing piece of his Apocalyptic Calendar by which he believed he could solve the inconsistencies of modern time’s terrain and thereby track down the mother of his child. Now the girl is loose, wandering the city with the vortex of the Apocalyptic Age marked on her bare body, setting into motion pending cataclysm like an alien presence that makes all the monitors and compasses go haywire.

  He can only hope that, as when he first found her, she has nowhere else to go, and will return.

  But she doesn’t return, and the Occupant just sits in his house watching the hills sink into dusk. He waits all the next day. On the morning of the third day he drives out to Black Clock Park to visit the grave of the time-capsule he buried upon returning to Los Angeles. All the way there he keeps his eyes peeled for her hitching a ride or loitering at a bus stop. When he gets to the park he leaves the car and walks out across the knolls of the cemetery, passing the other graves toward his own.

  A hundred feet away, he can already see it. A hundred feet away, he can already see the rude gash in the ground. The grave is open. The capsule has been dug up and taken. The hole is empty except for the unmistakable print of a hand in the mud. Trailing off from the hole, the grass is matted, as though something was very recently dragged from it, though exactly what, the Occupant can’t begin to guess, since the capsule itself isn’t that big or heavy. Stunned, he just stands staring at the hole where the capsule was, feeling a deeply fundamental kind of shock. It’s the kind of violation one waits for his whole life, without knowing he’s been waiting for it.

  Standing there on the mound, under the clearing storm, he has no doubts about who’s taken the capsule. All he can wonder is when she first got the idea to steal it, whether it was a sudden impulse or something she had planned for a while, a retributive bit of vandalism by which something is taken not because it has any value whatsoever to the thief, but because it has value to the victim. The only thing he knows for sure, staring at the slash in the earth in an amazement that is at once disbelieving and knowing, is that there’s no point in waiting anymore for her to come back, there’s no point in waiting anymore for anyone to come back. The only thing he knows for sure, staring at the open grave, is that if there’s to be a Moment in his life that is a passageway through his memories, it isn’t a light but a black gaping pit.

  HE DRIVES BACK HOME and goes down into the room at the bottom of the house, where he stands for half an hour looking at the Calendar, which has constituted the magnum opus of his past twenty years.

  He can’t make any sense of it now. No matter how closely or carefully he studies it, none of the timelines are as he remembers them, or as he has drawn them, and none of the dates correspond to anything of meaning. Not the apocalypse but the apocalapse, his daughter had laughed in his dreams; he thought it was a joke.

  He goes back upstairs and lies down on his bed again and sleeps. When he wakes, he looks over next to him to see if anyone has returned; but the bed is still empty, and he gets up and goes back upstairs and gets in his car and drives back into town. It’s now late afternoon. He gets to the bank in time to close out his account, and then drives to a dress shop down on Melrose Avenue and buys two blue cotton dresses, one dark and one light, that he supposes might match a certain girl’s eyes, if he had any idea at all what color her eyes are. Of course, he can’t be entirely sure of the size. The young sales clerk watches him a while and finally says, For your wife? A girlfriend? And then, hoping she won’t insult him, Your daughter? My daughter, he agrees. She helps him pick out some underwear. He asks her what an average size is for women’s shoes and she says seven and he picks out a pair of size-six sandals. He drives to the market and buys a couple of weeks’ worth of food, and loads the bags of groceries in the trunk of his car, and then drives west on Sunset Boulevard.

  Just before Black Clock Park he cuts down Beverly Glen under the canopy of trees now showing the signs of spring. Then he drives out Pico toward Baghdadville. Above him the sky is darkening blue, completely windswept of the huge storm that woke him a couple of mornings ago. The Los Angeles he drives through now routinely anticipates apocalypse the way other cities routinely anticipate nightfall; no one is a citizen of Los Angeles, in Los Angeles everyone is a citizen of his dreams, and if he doesn’t have any dreams he’s a nomad. As night falls, he parks across the street from The Angel Eyes and waits. He can hear the moaning of dogs that run through the streets in wild packs, and every once in a while he sees in the shadows the flitting figures of reguibat pleasure-girls, naked except for their heels and jewelry and black burnooses, muttering to the passing men in bastardized Maghrebi. Even in the night a white silted light seems to lie like a filter over the braying palm trees.

  He sits for almos
t forty minutes before he sees a guy come walking along, passing back and forth in front of the brothel several times, constantly and furtively peering over his shoulder trying to muster up the nerve to go in. The Occupant gets out of his car and, without hurrying, strolls across the street. The man is startled when the Occupant speaks to him; he thinks he’s a cop.

  I’m not a cop, says the Occupant. I want you to do me a favor.

  The man keeps looking over his shoulder. You’re not a cop?

  The Occupant takes out his wallet and gives the man a hundred dollars. I’m going to go in there now, he says, gesturing at the front door, and in ten minutes I want you to go in and ask for Room 8. If Room 8 is taken, ask for Room 6.

  The man waits for the Occupant to finish. You’re giving me a hundred dollars to get a room?

  Room 8 or 6.

  The man thinks for a moment. You’re not a cop.

  No.

  How do you know after you go in I don’t just take the hundred and split?

  Well, I don’t, of course, the Occupant answers. Just before he enters the brothel, he thinks of something and turns back to the man: it’s a leap of faith, he explains. Inside, the same Turk who was there a couple of months before vaguely acknowledges him. The same big blond German enforcer sits just within the door, half dozing, half watching a movie on television. Ah, the Turk says, trying to place the Occupant, the gentleman for Angel …

  7.

  The Turk nods, his eyes narrow: haven’t seen you in a while. Everyone seems suspicious tonight, or perhaps it’s just the Occupant’s imagination. The Turk’s demeanor shifts to a false cordiality. Well then, he smiles, and leads the Occupant up the stairs and down the hall, around the corner to the other hallway that leads to Room 7 before it disappears into shadow. At Room 7 the Turk unbolts the door and the Occupant gives him a hundred dollars and goes inside. The same naked young blonde is hanging from the same hook as two months ago. It’s hard to be sure in the light from the bulb that burns on the wall behind her, but her pallor seems grayer, and her body seems to slump on the hook even more than usual; she’s thinner than before, and in the dank light the Occupant can almost count her ribs. She’s still blindfolded, and drools slightly from the corner of her dazed, parted mouth.

  He’s relieved when she lifts her head slightly at his entrance, as though struggling for some kind of consciousness. He loosens the rope that runs down along the wall, lowering her to her knees and then to the floor where she collapses. He takes her blindfold off. She’s semiconscious and her eyelids barely flutter. He takes off his coat and puts it around her shoulders, and then puts his arm beneath her, lifting and supporting her, and opens the door of the room with some struggle. He carries her not in the direction of the stairs but rather into the shadows at the end of the hall, where he lies her down against the wall.

  From the door of Room 7 one can almost see her in the shadows at the end of the hall if one looks closely enough, a faint figure in the dark on the floor against the wall. From the door to Room 6 the Occupant is afraid the girl will almost certainly be noticed. But maybe not from the door to Room 8. He goes back into Room 7, closes the door, unscrews the bulb so the light can’t be turned on, and waits in the pitch black.

  Five minutes pass, then ten, then fifteen. He’s in the middle of trying to devise what can only be a very unsatisfactory and highly confrontational alternative to his original plan when he finally hears the sound of footsteps in the hall, though it’s impossible to be certain exactly where or whose they are. He’s wondering what he will do if the Turk notices the girl lying in the dark end of the hall a few feet away. Then he hears the door of Room 8 open, a brief exchange between the Turk and the man to whom the Occupant spoke outside, and then the door close followed by the footsteps of the Turk starting back down the corridor toward the stairs.

  As the footsteps pass Room 7, the Occupant loudly raps twice on the wall next to the door. The footsteps stop. The Occupant pounds more violently; outside in the hall the Turk says something through the door, and the Occupant answers only with more pounding until the door opens and the Turk comes in. As the Turk stands stupefied in the dark of the room, blinking in confusion, the Occupant steps from behind the door and out into the hall, closing the door behind him. He’s turning the lock just as the Turk, with an outburst of outraged Turkish, finally understands what’s happening.

  The Turk begins banging on the door. The Occupant lifts the naked girl from the shadows and carries her down the hall. Behind him the Turk is making quite a racket, and halfway down the stairs with the girl, the Occupant meets the German security guard. You better see what’s happening, he shakes his head to the German, while I get her out of here. For a moment the German looks at the girl in confusion, and then up the stairs in the direction of the Turk’s voice; fortunately he doesn’t appear to fully grasp outraged Turkish. He pushes past the Occupant, who now knows he doesn’t have much time. He hoped the snoozing German might be a bit slower in his response.

  The Occupant carries the girl down the stairs and out through the lobby. He carries her out the building as the sound of the crashing sea a block away fills the night. He’s barely gotten across the street, setting the girl against his car and trying to hold her up as she keeps slumping while he unlocks the door, when he hears the faint shouts of the Turk inside the building suddenly become louder. He knows the German has just let the Turk out of the room. He opens the car and puts the girl inside. He’s getting into the driver’s seat when they come running out into the street, the Turk shouting and the German scooping up a pipe from the gutter; swinging wildly, the German catches the back window of the car with the pipe and shatters it just as the Occupant is pulling away.

  THE OCCUPANT DRIVES THE girl back to his house and carries her inside, down to the room that was Kristin’s. He lays her on the bed and pulls the sheets up around her and gets her a glass of water and tries to make her drink. Then he goes back out to the car and brings in the groceries he got at the market, some of which have spilled all over the trunk in his lurching getaway from Baghdadville. He puts away the groceries and then hangs the two blue dresses he bought on Melrose in the closet of Kristin’s room, where he also leaves the shoes and underwear, and for several minutes stands looking at the bassinet that Kristin put away there. For a while he sits in the dark of the room watching the blonde in bed and soon it seems to him her breathing has gotten easier and she’s resting more comfortably, and then he goes back into his own room and packs a simple overnight bag with some clothes, as if he’s going to be gone for only a couple of days. He goes downstairs and stands there for a while studying the Calendar again, as though perhaps he will now understand it better and be able to read it with more clarity; finally, however, he assures himself it remains incomprehensible to him. If there were something meaningful to be done with it, if some ritual bonfire would change anything, he would do it, but he leaves the Calendar on the walls and goes back up to where the girl is sleeping, and there in the dark he might ask her to forgive him if he was entirely sure she was really still all that unconscious now, and if he didn’t believe it would only be the worst faith of all. He goes back upstairs with his overnight bag, leaves the house, gets back in his car with the shattered back window, and, heading down the hillside in the night, nearly hits some fool driving a Camaro with its lights off.

  TWO DAYS LATER HE’S in Paris. He checks into the same hotel on the rue Jacob near Odéon where he lived for a while almost eighteen years ago. He walks down the boulevard Saint-Germain to the rue Saint-Jacques where the rue Dante converges, only to find that the apartment building in which he lived with his mother and father in 1968 is now a hotel as well.

  He talks with the concierge for a while and explains how the flat on the top floor was once his home. It’s difficult to be sure just how fascinating she finds this disclosure. But she agrees to show him the flat, or rather what used to be the flat; it’s since been divided into three separate units, one of which was once his
bedroom, the second his parents’ room and the third the living room. All three are vacant. The Occupant pays for a two-night stay in the room where his mother and father once slept, and then goes back and checks out of the hotel on the rue Jacob. He walks into the Quartier latin and gets a sandwich, then over to the river where he leans on the low stone wall gazing out at the water. Finally he makes himself turn back up the boulevard Saint-Michel, walking to the Sorbonne, sitting for three hours in the enclosed courtyard where more than thirty years ago time became a ghost and history became an equation that disproved itself. I am 7 May 1968 he says to himself. I am students sitting in the windows smoking, I am songs being sung and wine being passed, I am a low drone rattling the walls of the courtyard. I am the yellow lights of the Sorbonne in the dark and, in the amphitheater from the lectern to the galleries, students and professors talking themselves into exhaustion. I am strategies proposed and rejected. I am the train workers on strike, I am two thousand workers on strike at Nantes, I am Renault on strike then Citroen, then the chemical plants of Rhône Poulenc, I am the post offices closed, I am the newspapers closed, I am the airports closed. I am the power plants on strike, I am the strippers of the Folies Bergère seizing the premises, I am Nanterre closed. I am Berlitz closed. I am the Sorbonne closed. I am many angry hands raised against the sun, I am an outcry against the dull bourgeois spectacle, against the matinees of affluent matrons and fat balding doctors, I am the chant of Métro boulot dodo, I am Sartre saying something silly, I am history pretending to be a science now crumbling into absurdity, I am the gaslamps of Odéon and the blond colonnades of the theater fastened with red and black flags in the archways, I am cops with fiberglass stares and poreless faces, I am a girl’s heedless murmur Pas de provocation and then the response of pandemonium, I am the snarling of the trees in the gardens, I am the last time the garden pools will ever stand still and shimmering, I am murder beyond the intimidation of witnesses, I am children caught in fences, caught in the hedge of roses, pink bloody petals strewn across the grass, I am café tables spilled and overturned, wineglasses hurtling through the air, I am window shutters splintered from their hinges and old men roasting chestnuts flung from their stools on the street corners, I am the quotation boards of the Bourse going up in flames, I am a dull red smoke in the night, I am the exodus of the riot from the Luxembourg Gardens into the mouth of the Métro at Gay Lussac, I am panic trapped in the turnstiles, smashing the exit gates, tumbling down the steps into the tunnels where the trains rumble in, except there are no trains; I am a cul-de-sac of melee. I am the moment in which explodes the Twentieth Century’s great ménage à trois between chaos and faith and memory. I am the moment when everyone turns to everyone else, student to student, cop to cop, student to cop, cop to student, thrilled beyond comprehension, faces shining, mouths trembling, eyes ecstatic, and says: we are all out of our minds.