The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  Still, she felt as though the ad had been written expressly to her. In the hope that the call would ultimately lead to her departure, the bartender let her use the phone; he rather liked her, actually, but could already anticipate a moment in the very foreseeable future when she would overstay her welcome. Along with the post office box there was, at the bottom of the ad, a phone and reference number that connected Kristin to a voice-mail service. “Yes, well,” she said into the phone, clearing her throat, “we girls at the end of our rope don’t happen to have our portfolio of eight-by-ten glossies with us today. I’m at Jay’s Grill on Ocean Avenue in Baghdadville, near—” She turned to the bartender.

  “Pico Boulevard,” he said.

  “Pico Boulevard. It’s … Wednesday—”

  “Friday,” the bartender corrected.

  “Friday the … eleventh—”

  “Thirteenth.”

  “The thirteenth of January. And I’ll be here at noon tomorrow … on Saturday, and the day after that.” The bartender winced. She hung up. She slurped down the rest of her soup and wandered out toward the beach, and slept that night on the pier, smoking cigarettes to suppress the hunger. It rained Saturday, and in the rain on the beach in the broad gray daylight she took off her clothes and laid them on a rock and washed herself. Several people passing by on Ocean Avenue saw her, and two members of what she concluded to be a distinctly cretinous strain of teenage boydom watched devoutly. For a few seconds she caressed her breasts at them suggestively, just for laughs, and then decided she better stop when they looked like they were going to start bouncing off the palm trees.

  But no one showed up that day at the grill, and she spent yet another night on the pier sleeping behind the old carousel. By now she was almost nostalgic for the good old days of Isabelle and Cynda. Up and down the pier in the rain she rummaged through the garbage with little success, reduced to licking the browning mustard off hot-dog wrappers and the pink residue of sugar off disposed cotton-candy cones. By Sunday she was staggering deliriously between exhaustion and starvation, and pedestrians on the street gave her a wide berth, assuming she was drunk or on drugs. By Sunday the bartender and the cook at the grill weren’t nearly as friendly. “You can’t come back here anymore,” the bartender said when she showed up out of the rain a little before noon on Sunday.

  She was weaving in the doorway as though she would faint. “It’s Sunday,” she murmured shamelessly, perfectly ready to try whatever worked. “You’re not going to feel so good later, making me leave on a Sunday.”

  “Probably,” he admitted. He didn’t look like he felt so good about it now.

  “I’m really hungry,” was all she could think to add.

  “I’m sorry,” he just kept saying, “you can’t come back anymore.” The rain fell harder. They both turned to look at it through the window; one lone car was parked across the street, metallic blue like the rain and the water rushing by in the gutter. “When the rain lets up, you have to go.” When the rain let up she lingered for a moment, and as she lingered the door of the car across the street opened and a man got out. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and he didn’t run in the rain but walked across the street with his hands shoved in the pockets of his pants, staring at the ground in front of him. He looked to neither left nor right; a truck could have flattened him as easily as not, and he gave no indication it would have mattered to him in the least.

  He came into the grill and gazed around. Other than Kristin and the bartender and the cook, no one was there. Kristin suddenly felt a lot more lucid; she stepped toward the stranger and said, “It’s me.” He was around six feet tall, a bulky man in his early forties with black hair and a black beard splattered white with premature age, disheveled in an absentminded way, a shirt button in the wrong hole and the collar askew. He looked as exhausted as she felt; later she would learn he had aimlessly driven the city in clockwise circles the entire night—racked by one of his excruciating headaches—having come by the grill the previous day without stopping. His startling blue eyes were filled with hurt.

  In the booth where they sat down, the man kept shifting fitfully, eyes darting. Well, Kristin said to herself, I’ve now met a lifetime of psychos in a week and a half. She examined him so as to take the full measure of his derangement and weigh the risks, evaluating the situation as fast as her exhausted brain and famished body would allow. “Would you like,” he said in a voice of great intensity she nonetheless could barely hear, “something to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you serve lunch?” he asked the bartender, still barely audible.

  “Sandwiches,” the bartender answered, “soup.”

  “A hamburger,” Kristin announced.

  “Two,” the man said with a shrug to the bartender. The cook brought two hamburgers. It took ten minutes to prepare them, during which time the man in the booth didn’t say a single word or look at her, but stared out the window in dismay as though Kristin couldn’t possibly be the one he had come to meet, and the right woman would surely appear soon. It’s because I’m not beautiful, she thought, though for the time being—enthralled by the extravagant promise of a hamburger—she didn’t give a flying fuck. She pounced on the burger while thinking things through. “You’re not eating your hamburger,” she said, almost finished with hers.

  “Oh,” he said, shifting in his seat. To her great disappointment he began to eat it.

  “Maybe, before you leave, you could order me something else I could take with me.”

  He seemed perplexed by this request. “Well,” he finally said in his hoarse whisper, “you understood the ad?”

  “Oh yes,” she assured him, “I would like to think I’m in the ‘self-knowing, preternaturally secure’ camp myself. Defile away.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Really?”

  She almost said, All right, eighteen; but since that was untrue too, it seemed better to stick to the first lie: “Almost twenty, actually,” embellishing it instead. She stopped feeding her face for a moment to give him her best sly smile, and hope that in the previous forty-eight hours she might have lost a few of those ten extra pounds. Later she would have to analyze it for herself in order to truly understand the insight, but there and then, in the booth at Jay’s Grill in Baghdadville near the beach, Kristin had her first realization of how pathetic male sexuality really was. It has nothing to do with their dicks at all, she thought to herself with some amazement; rather it’s all there in that ludicrous little lump of lapses and impulses they like to think of as a psyche. We’ve had them right in the palms of our hands all along. There in the grill it was all she could do not to burst out laughing.

  But because she was even more desperate for what he offered her than he was for what she offered him, she submitted herself recklessly. Blindfolded in the backseat of his car on the way to his house, of course she considered the possibility he would chop her up with an ax or sell her to sex-crazed Moroccans or maybe, if she were lucky, only lock her away in an attic for two or three years until he was bored with her; but now all she really cared about was the prospect of spending a night indoors, perhaps even in a bed, regardless of whose it was or what happened to her in it. That seemed worth risking everything: take me home with you, she had said to him in the booth of the grill, and if you like me, you can keep me. If you don’t, you haven’t lost anything. On the other hand, lying blindfolded on the backseat and aware of his many quick and erratic turns as he drove, as though he was trying to lose the psychotic boyfriend he suspected was following and for whom she would unlock the front door of his house in the middle of the night, she tried to reassure herself that he was vulnerable too, a hope emboldened by the way she later noticed he had stripped his house of all identity—photos removed and no name on the mailbox, no bills in sight or any personal correspondence, the address labels torn off all the magazines and every possible self-reference hidden from her except the junk mail addressed to “occupant.�
�� The only personality the house had was someone else’s: a woman’s jewelry box in the main bedroom, in the bathroom a woman’s lipstick and eyelash curlers that appeared to have been there for some time, and, saddest and most mysterious of all, the empty bassinet in what would come to be her room, with soft cotton blankets arranged on the chest of drawers alongside, awaiting a baby.

  When they got to the house an hour after meeting at the grill by the sea, she was led, still blindfolded, into what she figured was the middle of the living room, the sound of the front door closing behind her. After a moment of waiting for him to say something, she broke the silence by taking off her clothes. In the dark of the blindfold she stood nude until she finally said, “I need a bath.” All right, he answered. She took off the blindfold and he was still standing at the front door, as though to stop either her or himself from escaping; and her clothes that she had dropped to the floor at her feet were nowhere to be seen, as though they had evaporated, falling into the silvery afternoon light that came through the living room window.

  SHE SUPPOSED SHE WAS already violating the spirit of the arrangement, but she locked the bathroom door behind her. While the bathtub filled with hot water, she analyzed the remnants of a lost female presence, the small blue art-deco atomizer and the bottles of French bubble bath, the old hair spray canisters and the little plastic bottles of nail polish remover, all beginning to crust over and take on the film of age. For an hour she sat in the tub drifting dreamlessly in the steam, wondering if he would break down the door for her.

  Please don’t fake it, she heard him whisper harshly in her ear that first night. She wasn’t aware she had been. After her bath and a meal, which she ate alone, she had gone to her room as instructed and lay on the bed, where she waited three hours in the dark until he finally came for her. Don’t pretend, he said, because you think it will please me. I would rather you said nothing at all. I would rather you showed no feeling whatsoever. So she refined her impassivity. She was naked on her bed most of the days that followed, industrial rave and Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes” playing in the background, viscera twinkling along the flesh horizon of her body like the lights of the Hollywood Hills. Through the open window of her room she could smell the eucalyptus and the smoke of the city. Some nights he took her to his own bed, always dismissing her when he finished except once when he drank too much and, unable to perform, passed out and she fell asleep next to him. In those first few weeks he often came to her in the dark early-morning hours when she was still asleep. She would stir awake to find he had slipped into her soundlessly, pinning her to the bed by her wrists as if afraid she would run away, even though she was barely conscious.

  Up and down the house stacked against the hillside in three narrow stories, she wandered aimlessly, standing naked for hours in the large windows overlooking the city, while he vanished into a room on the bottom floor that he always kept closed and locked. Be ready in an hour, he would tell her before disappearing for three or four, commissioning her to her room to wait on her bed, in the dark, in her daydreams.

  THEY DIDN’T CONVERSE AT all. Everything about his manner discouraged conversation. After a couple of days she couldn’t remember whether she had even told him her name, and once when she almost blurted, I’m Kristin, he looked at her as though he knew exactly what she was about to say and adamantly didn’t want to hear it.

  They didn’t eat together or pass time together otherwise, and the house became more hers than his, since he confined himself to the locked room on the bottom floor. He had no hours or daily clock, from what she could tell, his days and nights running together. He never slept, as such; rather he just passed out now and then from exhaustion or drink or terrible headaches that plagued him on a regular basis. Sometimes the headaches incapacitated him, sometimes he seemed to draw energy from them as though the pain radiating from behind his hot blue eyes propelled him through the day and his work. Sometimes he would lie on the sofa or his bed holding his head in his hands, his unblinking eyes focused straight ahead of him as though he was staring into a piece of blue sky lodged in the ceiling above, waiting to catch sight of something. “Are you all right?” she asked one afternoon, finding him like that in the living room.

  She didn’t know which startled him more, the question itself or just the sound of her voice. “Yes,” he finally answered quietly through his clenched teeth. He lay there with his eyes closed a few more minutes before opening them to see her still there: “It comes and goes,” he added, more as a dismissal of her than an explanation.

  Oh, excuse me, she almost answered, did I cross a line? Did I overstep my bounds, trying to relate to you as a human being? But she bit her tongue and came over and knelt down on the floor beside him and began to rub his head.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Rubbing your head.”

  “Why?”

  She nodded. “Good question.” She stood and turned and walked away, stopping at the stairs only when she thought he might say something. But he’d already forgotten her.

  Downstairs, when he was inside the locked room below her, she could hear the vodka bottles rolling around on the floor. But he never sounded or smelled or staggered like a drunk man, the way her uncle did back on Davenhall Island, and he never became violent with her like a drunk man, though the sounds that came from the locked room were often violent, hoarse cries of desperation, either from the headaches, she imagined, or some mysterious thwarted effort. The Occupant’s behavior was more possessed than anything: Kristin noted, for instance, that he always moved in a clockwise direction. His furious pacing was always clockwise; if there was a light switch to his right just beyond his reach, he would get up and circle the room to the left to turn it off, like his life going down a drain.

  The terrible sounds that sometimes came from the secret room, the crashing and thrashing like a trapped animal, were always left behind, locked away, when he emerged. When he emerged, all he brought with him was the look in his eyes, anguish invaded by fury; she could anticipate when he would come for her, always after he had been in the secret room a particularly long and sullen time, or when he had been passed out and would wake wanting her. After a while she stopped being afraid of what he might do. Once she woke in the middle of the night to hear him pacing in the dark, no doubt in clockwise circles, at the foot of her bed; for fifteen minutes she lay there holding her breath, but he just went on circling and finally she fell back to sleep. When she woke he was gone, nothing having happened between them. Once, in his bed after he had finished with her, he pulled her to his chest and held her, absently caressing her hair, until he suddenly realized he was verging on a moment of actual feeling and fled from the room in terror. Later, when she finally got up the nerve to go looking for him, she found him back upstairs in the living room, sleeping on the sofa.

  When he had no interest in her, or when he left the house, she would halfheartedly search for a clue to who he was, reading her way through his library on the lookout for an old forgotten letter or maybe a memo tucked among the pages of a book. From the windows of the house all she could tell was that she was somewhere in the hills of a city that was strange to her; as part of the first generation of human beings to have been born with an actual photographic knowledge of what the Earth looks like from outer space, for a while she found something psychically reassuring, even profoundly secure, about living her life entirely within the walls of a space she had never seen from the outside. She relished the times the house was empty. She liked walking up and down the stairs from room to room and staring out the large drapeless windows at the panorama of little houses and little trees, and little cars driving up and down the winding streetlit roads that seemed to drop off in midair, and white satellite dishes erupting from the hillsides like monstrous mushrooms in the rain.

  Sometimes she noticed the satellite dishes had been painted black in the night. Sometimes at night she could even see them vanish one by one, and the dark form of a clandestine fi
gure fleeing the scene of the crime. The morning always brought a truck of huge new dishes; it was driven by a young Japanese boy who regularly replaced the vandalized black dishes with pristine white ones. Once, having just finished unloading a dish for the next-door neighbor and installing it on the hillside, he turned to see Kristin naked in the window, watching him.

  There was a time, not so long before, she might have stepped back from view. Now she just ate a plum and watched him back.

  IT WAS AN OLD HOUSE for L.A., dating back to the Thirties, with the main floor at the top, at street level. There, perched with the library and kitchen, was the living room, shaped like a large half-moon, walled in white brick with a wooden floor and fireplace and a small empty piano in the corner, circled by the large bare windows with window seats.

  On the level below were his bedroom, with a window facing east, and hers, with a window facing west. The locked room was down on the third floor below that. After a week or so, she began taking liberties with her room, putting away in the closet the bassinet that so unsettled her, anticipating a furious response from him. But he said nothing, maybe because he didn’t notice or maybe because he too had wanted to move it but for some reason couldn’t bring himself to.

  The house offered few signs of either a life or a life’s secrets. There was nothing on the walls except one overwhelming black-and-white print of a particularly desolate stretch of Route 66 in Arizona, circa 1953, a Texaco gas station and a motel in the background, and back beyond them a car disappearing under a sky of delirious clouds. The old dirty-white piano in the living room sat undisturbed, never played; there was something barren and forsaken about it, as though recently abandoned by someone who sat behind it often, as though recently vacated by some significant memento that sat on top of it. In the library, that stray letter or photo, filed away among the pages of a book, wasn’t to be found. This wasn’t the kind of man who left, in the wake of his life, purposeless miscellany.