The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  BY THE NEXT NIGHT she had moved in. I never fooled myself into believing it was for love, even with that crack about the Korean minister choosing us for soul mates. It’s possible if I’d thought for a moment it was for love, I would have had nothing to do with it. On my part it was to have her: she let me. On her part it was to survive: I saved her life. My specialty. I was the evangelist of romance. Every time I needed to justify my existence I could pull her life out of my pocket and say, See this life of yours? I saved it. Every time she nearly slipped from my fingers I could snap her back into my arms and hold her life up in front of her eyes, so she got a good look, and say, See this life of yours I saved? Please don’t thank me. Think nothing of it. And by the way, where do you suppose you’re going?

  “Truthfully,” Angie answered, “I have no idea,” because she was too young to know who she was, let alone where she was going, and too wise to pretend otherwise. Her identity surfaced in bits and pieces—a head for higher mathematics, and how she was called Saki as a girl, and the afternoon in, where, London? months after we’d been together, when she sat down to a piano in someone’s flat and out of the blue started playing Debussy and Liszt and Duke Ellington. She clung to the little girl in her, sometimes clutching that fucking little stuffed bear as if the innocence of it could cleanse her life of those moments when sometime, somewhere before, in the same hand she cracked a whip in black leather. Was she trying to live down the sleek sophisticated side of her that was still hard from at least one teenage suicide attempt—if I read between the lines right—as well as whatever was the source of the bad dreams at night? She labeled her emotional responses. Instead of laughing she would say, “Haha,” with just a hint of humor in her eyes. Instead of groaning she would say, “Groan,” with something in her eyes between exasperation and disdain. She translated her own feelings first to herself then to everyone around her, and the truth is, it was probably what kept us together so long, because then I could deal with her as though her feelings were only signposts on the highway of our relationship. Lanes merging, detour here, danger ahead. Slow down. Stop.

  Fleeting revelations about her parents … their early expectations. … Hints about the angry and bitter estrangement from them at least three or four Nevada winters past, from what I could gather, when they must have wondered if she was dead or alive. I guess this accounted for why at first Angie didn’t much give a damn whether I saved her life or not. The streets of Paris might threaten her life, but something in New York had threatened her soul. That was the real difference between us; she valued her soul more than her existence and I had it the other way around. It didn’t seem such a great incompatibility. Seemed a minor difference compared to the way she never confronted me and the way our sex never demanded to call itself love, a minor difference compared to whatever erotic radar existed between us that led my lips straight to hers in the dark and reduced all our other language to non sequiturs. “How arrogant of you,” she’d say, “to assume my mouth is always right where you want it. What if I slept pointed the other direction?”

  “I would kiss your toe. I would believe your head had gotten very little.”

  “Haha,” she said, sounding all the more solemn in the dark because I couldn’t see her eyes.

  Because I valued my existence more than my soul, I had no need of my memories. Because I valued my existence more than my soul, I didn’t go looking for Mama after she disappeared. Because I valued my existence more than my soul, I didn’t see my father before he died. Because I valued my existence more than my soul, there was a certain corner in Paris I avoided altogether, just a half mile down the boulevard from the Lipp. Once we almost happened upon it, strolling along, when I suddenly realized it was only a café or two away, and I turned us abruptly the other direction, yanked her along with me down the boulevard Saint-Michel toward the river. “What is it?” she said.

  “I thought we agreed we weren’t talking about the past,” I said. August now, a month since we’d come together, Paris all ours. …

  “No,” Angie explained, “we agreed we’re not talking about my past. We never said anything about your past.”

  “Well, now we agree we’re not talking about my past too.”

  “I don’t agree at all.” She stopped on the sidewalk to look in a shop window as she continued to talk. There really wasn’t anything in the window that interested her, it was just a place to stare while she bitterly pointed out the ways I shut her out of my thoughts and feelings. “When we first met,” she said, “we agreed we wouldn’t talk about my past. You should have said right then if there was something you weren’t going to talk about, if you were going to shut me out. It might have made a difference.” She stood so close to the window that, from the side, I couldn’t see her face through the black hair that fell down her profile. … “It’s a betrayal to tell me now there’s part of your life that’s off limits. You should have told me from the beginning, the way I told you.”

  “I don’t see how it matters when I told you,” I said, “I’m telling you now.”

  “Fume,” she said. “Dismay.”

  If it had been anyone but Angie, I would have kept on walking down to the river. I would have kept on walking down to the quays, heading west toward the Eiffel Tower, looking for a houseboat navigated by some other desperate female sailor begging to be bailed out. But instead I told Angie about what had happened in Paris when I was eleven, if not every detail then most of it, and then I had to tell her about the Calendar, at that point just a grand scheme more than anything else, points of seismic apocalyptic activity still uncharted and undetermined … and when I told Angie all that, she was inside the walls of my life for good. She had all my most important secrets and I had none of hers, and I had no choice but to keep a close eye on her from then on, and try not to let her out of my sight.

  Once winter came, we watched Paris from that beginning stage of a fever when consciousness is dimmed and everything seems dark, slow songs from the next room always like an echo, and distant memories jangling with present dreams, riddled with the sound of someone saying something you can’t quite hear. Riding through the Bois de Boulogne where prostitutes had fucked men in the summer trees, with the calamitous crash of sunset and the ferocious rattle of the foliage through the taxi window, autumn colors of death and rouge buried by winter, woods gleaming with semen and snow, Angie sat with me in the back of the cab biting her nails without realizing and then, looking at her fingers, suddenly lurched into my arms and held me. In the rubble she obsessed me. In the ruins I was both her pimp and john, selling her to myself. In the decay it seemed all the more suitable a place to have her however I wanted. Through the lace of the curtains in the hotel window I could watch young girls in the vacant room across the courtyard while I was behind her. Rock and roll was in the halls, guys hacked tubercular on the stairs, sink pipes rumbled like the streets. Drains gurgled near the sidewalks. Whispers from 1968 rose to a wail from the river, windows banged open and shut in the gust, the heads of the girls across the courtyard dropping from their necks, hair hanging to the gutters … and from the streets I can hear it now, the waves of truncheons and swaying clubs, cops wearing empty tear-gas canisters around their genitals, flagellating dead revolutionaries. Chaos banal and splendid—black workers killed in Johannesburg on 3 July, IRA bombs in Hyde and Regent parks on 20 July, grenades lobbed into a kosher Paris restaurant on 9 August—marks my violations of her. “Insist,” Angie hisses in the dark, digging her nails in my thighs; first I take it for one of her signposts, but it’s a command. “Insist on what you want from me. Make me do what I can barely bear to do,” she says, turning beneath me, thrusting herself onto me. “Make me do something nearly as bad and depraved as I am,” and I do, down all the days and weeks and months to the very hour Christian militiamen in Beirut randomly slaughter Palestinian peasants: “Moan,” she sighs in the Paris twilight.

  Went to London and fell in with a debauched couple who had nothing but money and looks and an
tics. An older South American woman and her young Englishman. I knew immediately everything they proposed didn’t shock Angie in the least but bored her. Soon she had no more interest in antics and I was outgrowing my own capacity for them too, feeling too absurd to succumb. Besides, it was now 1983, the newspapers full of deadly new statistics, desire’s new mortality rate. “I have to go back to New York,” I said a year later on Boxing Day, in Piccadilly.

  “Regret,” she answered quietly, “sob.”

  By the time she followed, five or six months later, it was unaccompanied by promises. “Maybe it’s for a month, or a week, or a day …” she said on the phone from London, sounding confused, and at first I took it as a good sign she hadn’t simply announced, “Confusion.” Having gotten what I wanted and left to question only whether I really wanted it, I wondered if it meant she was slipping, that maybe she was now an altogether less postmodern Angie, maybe her survival instinct kicked in after all and she had decided it was time to call the expert on Angie-saving. It put me in control, the way I liked it … but now I also realized saving Angie made me responsible, a thought I pushed from my mind the moment it entered. And then in New York I saw how she peered around every corner before turning it, how she scoured the shadows of every doorway before entering it. …

  It was now seven years after the Scene. The Girls of Chaos were gone! By tracking them down I had hoped to plot chronologies, lay out the temporal schematic, because I didn’t have the sound in my head anymore, and had to rely on memory, even as I already knew memory was the first casualty of the new calendar, that the Calendar would have its own memory. … Spring of ’86, the Calendar’s blue panorama was already creeping its way round the walls of my Upper West Side apartment. By then Angie had been with me in the city a year, and that was when I found out what it was in New York she so dreaded all that time, what it was she so feared. It was me.

  The day that the letter came with the news about her mother, I was sitting in a chair by the window overlooking Broadway and Seventy-first, Angie at a piano I had bought for her. I could tell she didn’t think it was such a great piano. The keys were cracked, and I couldn’t explain why I considered this a virtue, she would have had to hear the music of years before. She hit a discordant note and looked at me, and then at the letter, and for a while it just sat there on the piano—did she somehow know what it was, and just couldn’t bring herself to open it right away? She kept hitting the bad note on the keyboard till I’d gone into the back of the flat awhile and then from the back room heard her note just stop, hover in the hallway, in a way that made me go find her again. … As far as I could gather, her father hadn’t even written it himself. Still so alienated and furious, even in a moment of mourning and grief, he wouldn’t even break the news to his own daughter. He’d had someone else write it for him.

  Well, what did you expect, Angie? What did you expect of fathers in this day and age? What did you expect of mothers, for that matter? What did you expect of me—wasn’t this our bargain, to leave the past out of it? To leave mothers out of it, and fathers? What was the point of our pact if, in the end, we have to deal with these things, what was the point if, in the end, I have to feel it tear my heart out just to look at you so desolate there in the corner of the flat with the Blue Calendar looming over you like a wave, with your bedraggled little bear close to you as though it could explain everything, as though it could give you a comfort I could not or would not. So don’t look so betrayed. Don’t look so abandoned. This paralysis of mine was part of the deal, from our first moment at the Lipp on the boulevard Saint-Germain.

  It was later that night I dreamed the walls were raining. I dreamed the Blue Calendar was swallowing up the apartment like the sea flooding in around my head as we slept, splashing on my face. Only when I woke did I realize the walls were not raining, the Calendar was not the sea, and Angie was crying on my pillow. It was the first time I’d seen her cry. I’d felt her hold me tightly before, in the backseat of cab rides through the Bois de Boulogne, I’d felt in rare moments, hard as she tried to conceal it, a need from her I never answered. It wasn’t till years later, thinking back on our time together, and thinking back on this particular night, that I understood both the power and powerlessness of our bond, and that what I thought made her so powerful before—the confidence into which I had taken her when I told her what happened to me as a boy in Paris—was in fact only a testament to how powerless she really felt. She needed to know my secrets without divulging her own, just to feel she had a fighting chance with me. And what I thought made her so powerless, her tears on my pillow, was in fact a testament to how she was coming to finally deliver herself from the past by no longer denying it.

  Years later I also understood, when it was too late, that had I been a better and wiser man, I would have pulled her close to me that night and made her tears into a new bond between us, and maybe even cried with her. But I didn’t do that. I just lay in the dark listening to her, dreading both the sound of her and the brief glimpse I had of some larger insight that hid in the shadows of me, and having the terrible suspicion that my failure to really understand the moment, or to even want to, was the irrevocable cowardice I would never redeem.

  TWO YEARS LATER IN the fall of 1988—Year Twenty-One of the Apocalyptic Calendar—somewhere on the highway between his old life and his new, as the Occupant drove across the country from east coast to west in clockwise loops, somewhere in the wake of the phone call from Angie ten months after another split-up and after she had left New York and gone to Las Vegas in order to let her Rising Sun father know she was still alive and to try and make some sort of tattered peace with him if possible, her mother having died from a cancer born of too many afternoons in her father’s nuclear sun, sometime after Angie had then moved to L.A. where she was cobbling together several part-time jobs into one full-time life, teaching English to the children of Asian immigrants and piano to the children of movie producers, somewhere on the highway after he received her call and immediately packed everything up in New York and loaded his car with what he could without thinking about it two seconds, because he missed her and it was nothing more complicated than that, somewhere past the Texas-New Mexico border and then the New Mexico-Arizona border in a shambling little motel on Route 66 just east of Kingman, with its windows tightly closed to discourage the sandy grit of the relentless desert wind and the small determined dust devils that smuggled their way into his room anyway, somewhere past half a bottle of cheap vodka that he picked up at a liquor store in Williams because they had nothing better, sometime after sitting in the motel room listening to the wind and trying to call her and then pouring the rest of the vodka down the sink, and after going to bed and slipping off into the wail of the desert wind that reminded him of a long-ago music whose euphoria he believed he had forgotten, while he wondered how in their six years he and Angie managed to circumvent love altogether, and where things went wrong, and realizing there’s never any one point where it goes wrong, that the flaw is there in the original mold and then the question becomes whether the crack is deep and fundamental, bound to lengthen with time and finally break altogether, or can be lived with if not entirely mended, somewhere before reaching L.A., he realized something and dismissed it so quickly that it would be years later—on the morning he woke to find she had disappeared from their bed with their first and only child inside her—before he admitted it to himself again: and that was that she had saved his life more than he had ever saved hers.

  MY BRIGHT LITTLE STAR, Angie’s father had called her when she was small.

  Now he was sixty-nine years old. He still lived in the same little tract house in the Vegas suburbs where he had raised his family since first coming to the United States from Japan. When Angie returned home after almost ten years, she found him sitting in the same room where she had slept as a little girl; on the outside of the bedroom door hung a very old sign that had been there since the day Angie, then named Saki, left at the age of sixteen. It was made
of cardboard and written in black marker ink, in English letters that nonetheless had the quality of Japanese characters, frail and slightly open-ended and not quite connecting: LOST, the sign said. After standing in the front yard a long time wondering if someone would see her, after knocking a long time at the front door wondering if someone would answer, Angie had finally let herself in to prowl the dark house that now seemed much smaller than she remembered; and upon finding her father in what was once her old bedroom, she noted the sign ruefully.

  He sat before the large window through which, as a little girl, she used to watch the desert sky go dark, when her father always made her go to bed at seven o’clock. In the distance he could see the neon halo of Las Vegas in the same way that, one August morning around eleven o’clock in 1945, he could see from his hometown of Kumamoto the nuclear halo of Nagasaki across the bay. A great glowing star, he had said to himself that morning; he had been twenty-six then. For Angie’s father this wasn’t the birth of the new age, as Westerners so arrogantly assumed—he could see it in the smirks of the American scientists out at the test site: we gave you a new millennium—but rather the death of the old, the past of his country blasted into the future at the speed of annihilation. For Angie’s father the new millennium, the age of nihilism, was born on the first of January 1946, with the mortifying confession by the Emperor to his people that he was, in fact, not God. That was the day the Emperor told his countrymen and Angie’s father that his descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu was—how did he put it?—“a false conception.” Now there was no god, only a new sun in God’s place. In annihilation there had been honor, in God’s disownment there was the void. Forty-three years later, Angie’s father sat in what had been his little girl’s bedroom, watching a similar light rise from the casinos and hotels and clubs where he had once heard that his daughter danced in nothing but her shoes; and he was sitting there watching the light when she came through the bedroom door behind him.