The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  Somewhere between consciousness and sleep, he has a vision of his daughter being born. He and Angie are lying together on a high cliff on the coast of Northern California, just below Mendocino; and just before the stroke of midnight, in the light from the stars in the night sky above them, he touches his wife’s face like he’s never touched it. They look at each other terror-stricken by this tenderness. Perhaps it was the very prospect of such an unbearable tenderness that led her to flee him. Perhaps fate believed he was neither capable nor deserving of such tenderness, and so took her from him. But now in Sur-les-Bateaux he remembers it, though in fact it never happened; and there bubbles up in him an overwhelming longing for his little daughter, a longing accompanied by everything he would have felt if he had been there to see her born in that burst of blood and afterbirth, which is to say the realization of an immense new talent for self-sacrifice, the exquisite new instinct by which a father suddenly, without a second thought, knows he might not step off the edge of a cliff for faith, but would immediately and thoughtlessly hurl himself to the sea below for his child.

  With Angie at his side, he walks away from the cliff carrying his daughter. There explodes in his heart a bomb of love where only chaos used to be. He looks down at the newborn’s face and, already world-weary, she yawns: that was a very big yawn, Little Saki, he says to her. That was a very big yawn for such a tiny girl. That yawn was bigger than you; you almost fell into that yawn. For the first time in his life, he finds the most irrefutable evidence of chaos to be not the prospect of his own death, but of his child’s. Where the prospect of his own death filled him with a dread almost too huge to be truly comprehensible, the thought that his own little girl, so small and new, will someday grow and die is bigger than huge, it’s infinite; it’s more mind-boggling than merely incomprehensible, it’s almost literally inconceivable.

  But if the fact of his child’s death seems, in one way, the greatest and cruelest evidence of chaos, then in another way, in some paradoxical fashion that’s finally beyond him, its cruelty is also the very refutation of chaos. Because he has never before assigned a moral property to chaos. He has always before believed chaos eluded either morality or judgment, in the way a hurricane eludes morality or judgment. But now the chaos of his child’s death, in a way he never considered true about his own death, looms in his heart as incontestably cruel, cruel in a way that can’t be denied by chaos’ empiricism, cruel not only in his own heart but in the heart of the universe too, which means that the universe has a heart after all, that the universe has a sense of good and evil after all, before which chaos is finally accountable after all. He’s shocked now, lying on this bed in this little room, the tears streaming down his face, by the universe of his heart, by the way his own heart explodes beyond every dimension he’s ever been capable of feeling before, by the vision of a bomb of love not only in his own heart but in the heart of the universe. That he would walk off a cliff for his child without thought or calculation is a body-blow to chaos, the first thing in his life he’s ever seen or felt against which he knows chaos could never survive; that instinct that would immediately send him off that cliff supersedes any other impulse or thought, of survival or anything else. Now the Occupant realizes that for the past several weeks, since Kristin left, all that’s mattered to him was to try and be a father who measured up to the worth of his daughter, even if it’s a daughter he’ll never know.

  When he wakes the next day, wondering if—for the first time since leaving Los Angeles—he’s had a dream, he almost expects the small mysterious scrap of paper with the date 2.2.79 to have vanished from his fingers.

  But the date still lies on his chest, in what he now surmises to be afternoon light. He doesn’t know exactly what time it is, since there’s no clock in the room; he only knows he’s slept very late. There’s a bowl of soup and a sandwich left for him on the dresser. The soup is cold, so he knows it’s been sitting there a while. He doesn’t feel rested from his long sleep; he feels as though his life tried to slip away from him in the night. It’s now the seventh of May: New Year’s Day 33 by the Apocalyptic Calendar. He rises slow and weak and aching, and washes and dresses. He goes downstairs to say goodbye to the old woman but she’s nowhere to be found. By the time he winds his way through town, among the skull-white hulls of the ancient boats, he has no expectation of finding anyone from the past. By twilight he’s walked down the road that leads in the direction of the sea, through the woods to the crumbling ancient tower in the northwest—condemned, a villager explains to him, not only for its eroding foundation but also for the legend that haunts it. When he reaches the tower he sits among the tall grass looking at the trees rustling above him in the dark Celtic wind. Then he finally gets up from the grass and goes into the tower to lie against the cool stone, where a farmer will find his body the next morning.

  He closes his eyes for a moment, and opens them to see a young girl about seventeen years old standing in front of him.

  ARE YOU MY DAUGHTER? he says.

  Of course not, she replies. I’m not your wife either, or your lover.

  Who are you then, he says.

  I’m the occupant of this place, she answers.

  He closes his eyes again, and when he opens them a few moments later, she’s still there. Everyone is his own millennium, he says.

  Yes.

  Everyone is his own age of chaos. Everyone is his own age of apocalypse.

  No, she says, there is no age of apocalypse. Everyone, she says, is his own age of meaning.

  Thinking about this, he asks, What was my meaning?

  She smiles; at that moment, upstairs back at the Pissarro Inn, Nathalie can’t help hoping the Occupant is gone for good, and that he’s not to return this night. She doesn’t want him to ask any more questions about his mother, whom she met only briefly anyway, many years before, and she doesn’t understand why the old piece of map that her daughter once tore from a navigational journal long ago has been taken down from the wall and lies on the bed where the Occupant slept. It always disturbed her, tacked to the wall like that, even as it also disturbed her to remove it, which she could never bring herself to do, even as it now disturbs her that the Occupant removed it. She picks it up off his bed and looks at it in the light of the lamp from the dresser: 2.2.49, not 79 as the Occupant thought, having mistaken the French 4 for a 7. Nor is it a date. They are coordinates, 2.2 degrees longitude and exactly 49 degrees latitude, that marked the place in the English Channel where, in the last days of summer in the year 1950, her young husband was blown up on a French weather ship by a long-dormant World War II sea mine. The difference between the generation of the young pregnant widow and that of her daughter, who would be born three weeks later, could be marked by how reasonably tragic the mother considered such an event, as opposed to how infuriatingly irrational her daughter considered it.

  When the Occupant’s mother had come to her, many years before in 1968, to try and tell her about what had happened to Christina in her own bedroom in Paris, Nathalie didn’t really want to speak of lost daughters any more than she wanted to speak with the Occupant of lost mothers. By that point Nathalie’s life seemed so defined by loss that just trying to understand it was a risky, perhaps even life-and-death proposition: what if she failed? What if, after trying so hard to understand it, her loss made even less sense? If loss was all her life was to be about, then the utter failure to understand it would render life unlivable. So it was a matter of her own sheer survival for Nathalie to leave undisturbed the meaning of loss. When the Occupant’s mother came to Sur-les-Bateaux more than three decades ago, at which time the two women met for no more than ten minutes, each was at such a loss for words that they finally just ran from each other, bursting from each other’s presence so combustively it was hard to be sure who bolted first; and for all the years after that, for all the ways in which it was such a tiny town, they avoided each other. They learned each other’s schedules, ascertaining that their individual timelines never
need cross, until the day came when the Occupant’s mother suddenly vanished forever. In the meantime Nathalie consigned the mystery of her daughter to the same universal mystery that had consumed her husband, even as she knew it was exactly this sort of resignation that had driven her daughter from Sur-les-Bateaux in the first place.

  Christina had become obsessed with the chaos that took the father she never knew. A bomb from a war five years over, not even an evil Nazi bomb but a good Churchillian bomb, a bomb of obsolete political function but still completely functional destruction, bobbing and drifting in the channel waters off Saint-Malo, waiting to collide with the stupidity of life in a bright flash of stalemate. … As an adolescent in the early Sixties, the girl would stare in cold fury at the map coordinates that she tore from a navigational journal and tacked to the wall of her bedroom; she would talk lust-struck village boys into driving her to the coast, where she stood on the shore staring hatefully at the channel waters waiting for some scrap from fourteen years before to come floating up on the sand, a piece of shrapnel maybe, or a body part, or a ship’s errant deadly compass cracked and stuck on whatever southwest or northeast direction had pointed the way to oblivion, or a bottle with a presciently written note inside, written by her father the night before his death. Of course, nothing like that ever washed up on shore. “It was fourteen years ago,” some lunkhead of a boy would plead, “what’s going to suddenly wash up after fourteen years?”

  “What bomb,” she coolly answered, “suddenly explodes after five?”

  The bomb of love. The bomb of chaos. The bomb of faith. The bomb of memory. The bomb of the missing number. The bomb of the forgotten letter. The bomb of the locked door. The bomb of the penthouse key. The bomb of the fallen stairs. The bomb of the free-floating day. The bomb of the desert night. The bomb of the empty grave. The bomb of the hanging girl. The bomb of the taken child. The bomb of the saved whore, of the redeemed man. The bomb of the broken heart, of the desolate soul. The bomb of Christina’s smile, not to be confused with the bomb of beauty, because she wasn’t really beautiful, but God the guys loved her; freckled and redheaded, she had a smile that not only broke through the rage, it was somehow lit by her rage. The bomb of rage: if rage ever smiles, it was Christina’s smile.

  If rage ever laughs, it was Christina’s laugh, heard across the square from her bedroom window. Until she was fifteen, it didn’t even occur to her there was any place she would rather be than Sur-les-Bateaux. Like any other young romantic girl, she was charmed by the Celtic legends of Arthur sleeping in the nearby grottos, waiting for his stony tomb to crack open and release him from the previous millennium so he would reunite Breton with the homeland that lay across a channel since riddled with bombs. Christina was in love with such a promise of deliverance from chaos. For a thousand years the countryside had hummed with the legend of a king who would rise from the ground and cut down chaos with a sword. But by the time she was fifteen she was laughing at the village and its legends, out of not only the natural cynicism of adolescence but a more personal disenchantment; she was laughing at the villagers with all their silly nonsense about Pissarro and the light—“as if,” she cracked, “they don’t have the same light in the next village over”—and then one night, to the alarm of her mother, she slept in the condemned, crumbling ancient tower outside town where she woke around two in the morning, quite unstartled, to meet another girl, about seventeen years old, whom Christina had never seen before. For the next several hours the two girls lay together in the dark discussing the betrayal of fathers and, by extension, of ancient kings, who promise to return and never do. When Christina woke again at dawn, she went back home and, completely ignoring her mother’s pleading and scolding, packed and left for Saint-Malo, where she caught a ferry across the Channel to Portsmouth, half expecting and half hoping it would blow up on the way. When it didn’t, she believed herself released from something. From Portsmouth she took the train to London, a very lively and modern place in those days. Nathalie never saw her again.

  In London, Christina was one of the wildest girls in a time and town of wild girls, riding motor scooters in miniskirts on Carnaby Street. Her favorite song was a dirty smudge on the airwaves called “Over Under Sideways Down,” its recurring question, When will it end? swathed by a druggy, orgiastic Middle Eastern guitar riff; fifteen years later and five thousand miles away, in a club on Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan, Angie would strip to an entirely different song called “Day of the Lords” that asked almost exactly the same question. Christina had been living in Earls Court for a year when she began to have the dreams. At first there was only a flicker of red in the far dark distance, like a cigarette lighter being lit; and then in the ensuing dreams the small red flash grew closer and larger, until it even had a sound. By the time she left London for Paris in the fall of 1967, the dreams were coming to her one after another, not just every night but several times every night, and then all night, each dream picking up where the last one left off, the small burst of flame growing nearer and noisier as though it was on the far horizon of a vast veldt she was crossing; and with each new dream Christina moved ever more inevitably toward it.

  Eventually she was having literally hundreds of dreams a night. She barely had to shut her eyes, as though the dreams were too impatient to even wait for unconsciousness. By now she had determined this explosion in the distance was a mine going off in the Channel, and that she was dreaming over and over of her father’s death. But on the night she took the ferry from Dover back to Calais and France, from where she would take the train to Paris, the crack of the ever-repeating flash finally revealed itself to be not a bomb—it was too sharp and abrupt—but a gunshot, its source and reason incomprehensible.

  Soon she could hardly bear to blink, dreading the vision of this gunshot that had come to frighten her far more than when she thought it was a mere bomb. Because she was desperate to release herself from this dream, before the red gunshot got too close and too loud, she moved through the cabin in the early-morning hours of the ferry ride, looking for another dream into which she might escape. She understood, after all, that a dream is a memory of the future. The Channel was rough as usual, and though there was more than half a moon, most of the night weather blotted out the light. The cabin was filled with the slumping figures of other passengers, fitfully asleep in their seats or sprawled out across several vacant seats. Though she had heard a man has an erection when he dreams, it was difficult to read either the bodies or the clothing of the men around her, particularly in the dark, except for those moments when the clouds parted overhead and the moonlight slashed through. Pulling off her jeans and touching herself until she was wet, she straddled and slipped one man after another inside her, so as to leave the detonation of her own dream inside all the dreams around her, blowing up all the dreams that sailed that night on the Dover-to-Calais ferry, the heads of all the male passengers exploding with a gunshot from the future, until she hoped she would finally close her eyes and see only darkness, until she hoped she might go to sleep and slip into a quiet dreamlessness.

  It was to no avail. By the first light of dawn and the sight of the Norman beaches, exhausted, she had delivered herself from nothing, the light and report of her recurring dream just that much closer; and finally, by the time she stepped back onto French soil, she had just resigned herself to it.

  Having resisted the dream for so long, she finally embraced it in her reckless way. From her nights in the small hotel attic where she lived near the Opéra, to her afternoons at the Sorbonne where she enrolled as a literature student, if she couldn’t leave her dream behind in the dreams of the men she had sex with, she would find another way to blow up their dreams: if chaos was coming for her, she would take everyone down with her. This was the thought that occurred to her the afternoon she sat at the Deux Magots near the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, looking at the American couple with their young son several tables over. The father was a poet; Christina had seen him at the university. The mot
her was a prodigal daughter of France, on the edge of rebellion. The man looked at Christina, the woman looked at Christina, and Christina looked back, a brilliant red in the golden Paris spring, and flashed at both them, like a burst of gunfire, the smile of rage.

  PEOPLE MAKE MAPS ON the corners of Tokyo. Kristin sees this her first full day in the city. She doesn’t yet understand how Tokyo is the most epic and confounding expression of chaos by a national soul otherwise famous for its love of order. Tokyo is a city of no order that Kristin’s alien eye can discern; the streets have no names, the houses no addresses of any sequence that makes sense in space. Rather it is a sequence of time, structures numbered by their age and memories.

  In Tokyo, Kristin is never really sure which way is east and which way is west. Everyone constantly circles Tokyo looking for a place to land, commuters riding the Yamanote subway line in a never-ending loop, cabbies in taxis wandering pell-mell the spiraling boulevards, students driving freeways around and around in search of phantom exits. On the back of every hand in Tokyo is tattooed a small piece of one huge moving map of the city, and in their perpetual confusion people constantly gather in circles on street corners thrusting their hands palms-down into the center, the backs of their hands joined like the reunited fragments of a letter torn to shreds. The whole map can be formed finally and completely only by all fifteen million Tokyoites joining hands. Everywhere she goes Kristin sees congregations of lost people gathering on street corners trying to read directions from their assembled fragments of the larger map.