The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  He spends the rest of the afternoon making the rounds of Parisian cemeteries. He goes from Père Lachaise, where Proust and Chopin and Bernhardt and Piaf lie among the vandalized remains of L.A. rock singers, to the Montparnasse Cemetery, where Baudelaire and Beckett and Saint-Saëns rest in the arms of Hollywood-starlet-turned-radical-activist suicides, to the Montmartre Cemetery, where Berlioz and Nijinsky and Truffaut hear no rock and sleep with no blondes that anyone knows of, to the little Saint-Vincent cemetery where no one of any note at all is buried, to the catacombs where the millions of bones have no names, let alone celebrity. The Occupant isn’t looking for starlets or rock singers or immortals. He’s looking for the grave of his father.

  But the body of a man isn’t as immutable as a time-capsule. Finally he gives up, and around seven o’clock strolls back down the boulevard Saint-Germain to the Lipp, where he has dinner of chicken and potatoes and spinach and red wine. At that time of evening the Lipp is uncrowded and he’s the only one in the restaurant. Then he walks back to the hotel and up to his room and lies on the bed staring at the ceiling.

  OF COURSE IT ISN’T the same bed his parents slept in. It’s a different bed, probably two or three or half a dozen beds removed from that earlier bed, and not even in the same place but against a different wall altogether.

  Actually the room doesn’t look anything like he remembers it. It’s been entirely repainted and redecorated. If not for the general layout of the room and its relationship to the outer hallway—which used to be the hallway that ran from this room to his own, the hallway into which he rushed when he heard the gunshot and where his mother grabbed him in time to stop him from seeing the body—it would be difficult to be sure this was the right room at all. Lying on the bed thinking about this, he gets up and starts searching the room. There’s a dresser against the wall where the bed had been, and after inspecting the wall around it and moving the dresser away to look at the wall behind it, he gives up. There’s no telling for sure that there was ever a bullet hole in the first place, since the bullet would have had to go through the girl, and perhaps through the headboard of the bed, to lodge in the wall. And if there was ever a bullet hole in the wall, in more than thirty years the chances are pretty excellent someone patched it up and painted over it. Obviously the actual bullet itself would have been recovered by the police.

  He lies back down and turns off the light by the bed and goes to sleep. An hour and a half later he wakes in the dark with a start, to the presence of someone in the room. Angie? he whispers. In the moment that he wakes he’s certain she’s there; when he turns on the light and there’s no one, he might conclude it was only a dream, except for the fact that since the night that Kristin left, he hasn’t had any dreams. He doesn’t sleep again for the rest of the night. Exhausted in the morning, he shaves and takes a long shower. Though he feels as if one of his headaches is coming on, by the time he’s gotten to the Gare Montparnasse, the headache has passed. In one of the shops at the train station he buys a large leather billfold and stuffs it with most of the money he got when he closed out his bank account on his way over to The Angel Eyes that last night in L.A. He rents a locker in the train station and puts the billfold in the locker. He doesn’t much like the idea of leaving the money in the locker, but he doesn’t want to open a bank account and he doesn’t want to keep it in his room or anywhere on his person. He isn’t going to be staying in the room much longer anyway, or in Paris, for that matter.

  This is the day he begins his campaign to save the whores of Paris. Clockwise he scours the city searching; he finds the first in Pigalle. She’s fifty-something years old, with once black hair going white and most of her teeth gone, and can barely stand against the shop window where she plants herself whenever the shopkeeper doesn’t chase her away. Seeing her ravaged face flashing black circles and black lines and a flesh the color of marble, the Occupant knows immediately she’s dying. When she musters everything in her being to give him a smile, it’s so awful and heartbreaking he recoils; backing away from her in a horror he can’t disguise, he turns on his heels and runs, and when he finally gets up the nerve to look back over his shoulder, he sees her slumped back into her place on the ledge of the shop window. A few minutes later he returns and, propping her up, waves down a cab that drops them off ten minutes later at a small right-bank hotel. The concierge of the hotel takes one look at the woman and turns them away. They go to several more hotels of ever-diminishing reputation until one gives them a room. He takes the woman upstairs to the room and undresses her and bathes her as best he can at the bidet and puts her in bed. He goes back downstairs and pays for the room and catches the last Métro down to the river, where he walks down to the quay below the Pont Neuf and hides the train-station locker key between two stones in the wall a hundred feet away from where he sleeps beneath the bridge. A few hours later in the night, he’s awakened by a couple of thugs who roll him, and by dawn he’s pummeled over most of his body, his mouth dried with blood, but the locker key is still in its place.

  The second whore is a terrified fourteen-year-old he meets in Les Halles. He buys her dinner and puts her up in a hotel and that night under the Pont des Arts he’s accosted again. The third whore is a sad plain junkie he picks up on the rue Saint-Denis after she’s been viciously beaten by her pimp. He gets her a hotel and nurses her wounds and leaves some food for her on the small table by the bed where she sleeps. He isn’t interested in the good-looking whores or the healthy ones or the girls on the avenue Foch who can take care of themselves. Rather it’s the ones with the chaos in their eyes who are each adrift in their own millennia where memory has no beginning or end.

  After a couple of weeks, word gets around about him and the whores and he isn’t attacked anymore in the night except by an indignant pimp or two. Generally the thieves and beggars stay clear of him because they assume he’s demented, a cracked deviant saint of futile gestures who goes around rescuing old diseased hookers from the street and checking them into hotels, though more than a few wonder where he gets the money that he never seems to have when they roll him. The whores themselves don’t know what to make of him except that he obviously has an angle, even if they can’t figure out what it is, because every man has an angle and they’re inclined anyway to feel contempt for any man who doesn’t. A few conclude it’s in fact the ultimate perversion, a man who gives a whore money and buys her a meal and a hotel room and then expects nothing: what kind of sick psychological shit is that? As for the Occupant, he doesn’t for a moment think he’s really saving anyone. He doesn’t for a moment think any of these women will wind up anywhere except back on the street or perhaps dead in the hotel beds where he leaves them. But now, far beyond the question of his own good or bad faith, he does it because somehow, when the meaning of apocalypse fled him, faced with a Moment that wasn’t a light but a black hole, as much to his own surprise as it would have been to anyone else’s, he found himself filled with not guilt, not remorse, not torment, not the heavy burden of being monstrous, but rather a new and inexplicable and unendurable capacity for pity that his heart simply cannot hold in.

  Lying on the quay of the river in the afternoon, staring up into the blue French sky, he thinks back on his life. He remembers almost twenty years ago, the last time he was in France, lying in a field outside Paris staring at the same blue sky, a month or so before he moved into the hotel on the rue Jacob and met Angie. It was a rootless and potentially dangerous time of his life … twenty-five years old, the chaotic punk soundtrack of the Scene behind him, he had been fired from his job with a New York research firm and returned to Paris, where he fell in for a while with a group of bohemian revolutionaries who kept a flat near the rue de Vaugirard, south of the Eiffel Tower. There everyone fought constantly, crazed ex-boyfriends bursting through windows in rampages of lover’s revenge that proved more ridiculous than consequential, until soon they had all gotten so completely on each other’s nerves that when spring came, they fled Paris for the countr
yside. Lying on the quay of the Seine now, the Occupant tries to remember the names of the old couple who owned the little farm and vineyard in the country where the whole entourage stayed; he assumes by now both have long since passed on. Nearing the end of their lives, they had little to show for themselves but the farm and vineyard and a garden and a wine cellar that wasn’t much more than a hole beneath the house … and—as is often the case with people who have so little—they couldn’t have been more generous. He remembers now how there was nothing they wouldn’t do for him, how they seemed to view every moment as an opportunity to refill his glass, as though they lived to do nothing else, how there wasn’t a need or wish they wouldn’t attend to.

  There was something revelrous about their graciousness. In the day they worked the vineyard and garden, cooked the meals and cleaned the house and washed everyone’s clothes. At night they sat around watching American TV shows badly dubbed in French on their little black-and-white TV. Caught in this peaceful pastoral in that spring of ’82, the Occupant had gotten one of his worst headaches, exploding in nausea and shooting up his spine and radiating behind his eyes with such intensity he wanted to tear them out of his head. So the others had hustled him into an ancient concrete guest house where they boarded up the windows and barricaded the door and locked him away like a wild animal.

  When he rose the next morning, his headache had lifted and the door was unlocked. On the outside of the door had been written, in black letters, OCCUPÉ.

  The old woman of the house was cooking the first of two grand feasts. Around eleven o’clock, everyone sat down to eat in the French garden with the blue sky above, the white tablecloth lapping in the breeze, flies buzzing languorously around their heads. She started bringing out the food and the old man started hauling up bottles of wine from the cellar and at some moment during this, a wind shifted perhaps, a cloud drifted dreamily across the sun, and all the havoc of the Occupant’s life settled like dust, until by the time the old man brought up the last bottle, four hours and many bottles after the meal had begun, the Occupant thought to himself, Oh, this is what life is supposed to be about. Everyone was in love with everyone else, ex-boyfriends who had been fighting with ex-girlfriends, revolutionaries who had been fighting with decadent Americans, there was something about the red wine on the white tablecloth under the blue sky that brought out the humanity in everyone, flirting and joking in a tangle of languages no one understood, laughing in a common language everyone understood perfectly until, when the meal was over, it was all they could do to push themselves away from the table and stumble down the road to a clearing in the high grass and lie down. Now, years later, lying on the quay of the Seine looking up at the sky, the Occupant remembers lying in the high grass and closing his eyes and falling into the sky above him, his head as light as air, as though it was a balloon that would float away from the rest of him and leave him in peace, and he wonders, as he supposes probably everyone who’s ever had such a moment wonders, why such moments are so fleeting, why all moments can’t be like that one. Sleeping in the grass, he had awakened a couple of hours later to Madame Mao or Miss World Revolution 1982 or whoever she was—actually her name was Sylvie, and she had never looked so beautiful—gently touching his shoulder and calling his name, and telling him it was time for dinner.

  SOON HE’S ALMOST OUT of money. After a few weeks in Paris, as April turns to May, he returns one morning to the Gare Montparnasse to make a withdrawal from his train locker and buy a ticket on the French bullet train to the Breton coast. Waiting for his train, he buys a shirt and an inexpensive pair of pants in one of the station shops, because his old clothes are now nearly in tatters. He would like to buy some new shoes too, but can’t afford them. He spends a few francs on the public shower.

  Though he’s now showered and shaved and in clean clothes, and though he sleeps for most of the train ride, the other passengers steer clear of him. By now he’s tired and sick from nights of sleeping under the bridges of the Seine and being mugged. From Paris to Chartres to Le Mans to Laval to Rennes, he sleeps better than he has in a while; and seven hours after leaving Paris, at the old fortified seaport of Wyndeaux, he transfers from the bullet to a local train which takes him to the Breton village of Sur-les-Bateaux. Here all the original houses still stand built from the overturned hulls of boats that mysteriously beached themselves on the land a thousand years ago, twelve kilometers from the sea. Getting off the train at the hilltop station in the middle of the night, he can see the bleached white bottoms of the hulls in the valley below him, gleaming in the light of the moon.

  This is the town whose postmark was borne by the letter the Occupant found from his mother years ago, though he still can’t remember ever receiving it. Arriving this first night in Sur-les-Bateaux, he sleeps in the train station and when he wakes doesn’t feel so great; he walks down the hill into town and has a bowl of stew and a glass of wine at the Café Pissarro. The bartender and cook explain that Pissarro spent one night there in the village a hundred and some years ago and many of the townspeople are still in quite a tizzy about it. Besides the Café Pissarro there’s the Restaurant Pissarro, the Hôtel Pissarro, the Boulangerie Pissarro, the Patisserie Pissarro, the Crêperie Pissarro, the Supermarché Pissarro, the Pissarro laundromat, the rue Pissarro, a small patch of water where the river collects called the Lac de Pissarro, the Bois de Pissarro, and two or three hundred villagers who claim to be direct descendants of Pissarro, apparently a very busy man on his one night passing through. Other artists come to Sur-les-Bateaux to paint in its magical light, which the residents of the town point out so obviously infused everything that Pissarro ever painted afterward, though since the painter spent the night in Sur-les-Bateaux, exactly when and how he experienced this profoundly transformative glow is unclear. At any rate, the bartender explains, the town feels quite proprietary about both the light and Pissarro.

  When it’s time to settle the bill and the Occupant comes up short, the bartender pays for the glass of wine himself. He takes the American stranger into town, where he sets him up for the night with Nathalie, an old woman in her mid-seventies who’s lived in Sur-les-Bateaux her whole life. Widowed at the age of twenty-three when she was eight months pregnant, and never remarried, Nathalie has been running the small Pissarro Inn that her father handed down to her; she makes up a room for the Occupant on the top floor from where he can see, through his window, the town square below, with its cafés and markets and tourist shops and the small cobbled pedestrian way that leads up to the art school on top of the hill. Beyond the square is the river. What conversation the American stranger and the old woman have is very brief, cordialities surrounding his single question: non, she lies when asked if she remembers an American woman passing through years before. It’s only afterward, when the innkeeper has gone back downstairs, that the Occupant feels a little foolish, even addled, to realize that his mother wasn’t, after all, actually American, that a French person would have considered her French.

  The room he sleeps in is very plain for an old European bedroom in an old house, even one used as an inn or hotel. Besides the bed, there’s a simple dresser with a mirror, no clock; and on the wall, other than one small watercolor painted, no doubt, with Pissarro light, there’s only an old fragment of a page from what the Occupant presumes was once a diary. On the fragment of paper is a date, 2.2.79.

  He’s been a maker of calendars too long not to know a date when he sees one. He takes the date down from the wall and, for much of the night, in the light of the small lamp that sits on top of the dresser, he lies on his bed staring at it, wracking his brain trying to place it. Having studied nothing but such dates his whole life now, he would have thought he could instantly identify any date and its significance in the scheme of chaos; for a long time, however, as hard as he thinks about it, he has no idea what happened on the second day of February in the year 1979. He goes over all the dates of that month and that year in his head; he goes over all the corresponding events; his
brain zeroes in on the second of February 1979 and then expands, a widening circle, to take in all the dates around it. On the first day of February 1979, an old and vengeful ayatollah, who spent many years of exile in Paris, returned to his homeland in the Middle East and a hero’s welcome, so the Occupant wonders if perhaps an ecstatic Shiite Moslem, possibly even one of the ayatollah’s Parisian disciples, was passing through Sur-les-Bateaux at that time and commemorated the moment by pinning the date to this wall. But would he have gotten such an important date wrong even by a single day? And would the old innkeeper have then left it pinned to the wall for twenty years? It’s only after he’s closed his eyes for a moment that the Occupant remembers the second of February 1979 was the day that the most infamous of all punk rockers, suspected of having murdered his girlfriend, was found dead in New York’s West Village, and consequently also the day that Maxxi Maraschino locked the Occupant in a room on the Lower East Side where he spent the next seven months. Suddenly realizing this, he’s astonished, but exactly what it means in this place and at this moment, and exactly why it should appear here and now in this remote room in this remote village at this remote time, he has no idea.