The Sea Came in at Midnight (12 page)

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.

T
WO 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.

M
Y 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.

W
ITH A START HE THOUGHT
at first it was his wife, before he remembered a moment later that wasn’t possible. “It’s Saki, Papa,” she said. He didn’t answer, either that night or the next day, and Angie had decided the possibility for reconciliation was lost forever until, as she finally came to tell him goodbye, he suddenly took her hand in his own, still staring out the window, still conceding nothing, still disowning her with his silence, but holding her hand in a grip that wouldn’t let go.

My bright little star, he had whispered in her ear at exactly 7:02 on the evening of 6 May 1968, as he slipped her stuffed bear from her arms. For a moment little Saki, lying in her bed, was confused: my bear, she called, reaching for it in her father’s hands. Looming over her, her father shook his head. You’re not a baby anymore, he answered, closing her bedroom door behind him as he left, so stunning her with both this news and the loss of her companion that it was several minutes before the enormity of it all sank in and she began to cry. Outside, other kids still played as the Nevada desert sky faded to dark. Four months shy of her sixth birthday, she was already precocious in all matters except stuffed bears, including her sleeping habits; she was quite certain she didn’t know a single other kid who had to go to bed at the ridiculous hour of seven o’clock. But her father was as unyielding about it as he was about the bear, as he was when he had insisted on naming her Saki, as he was when he whispered in her ear My bright little star, not as an endearment, not as an encouragement, not as a hope or even a demand, but a warning.

When she started kindergarten, he began to hang the sign on her door every morning, in the form of a single word. At first it was a game for her, to wake each morning with great excitement and see what waited on the door. Early on, the daily sign reflected his expectations and aspirations in the first words of English he had so resolutely taught himself upon his expatriation from Japan to the United States:
EXCELLENT. AMBITIOUS. DETERMINED. SUCCESSFUL
. Only as the years went by did the sign on the door monitor both her fall into trivial girlish adolescence and the commensurate, steady deterioration of his approval, branding her life with the ways she let him down:
DISAPPOINTING. LAZY. SILLY. FAILURE.

Saki Kai was the only child of parents who assumed that when it came to the matter of producing superior children, one opportunity should be sufficient. What need was there to have more than one child when the first should turn out so well? Already displaying the potential of a clear prodigy, she showed early talent at the piano and tested high on all her early intelligence exams, with scores in mathematics near genius level. Nonetheless, except for the piano lessons which she loved, she was bored by education, and in school her grades were mediocre, baffling her mother and enraging her father. By the time Saki was fourteen, the battle lines between the three of them were drawn, and at sixteen she rescued the stuffed bear from an old box under the stairs and moved out of the house, working underage as a waitress in a seedy downtown bar and as a dancer in another club up the street where all the girls took stage names, not in the interest of self-invention but confidentiality. Hers was Angie, inspired by a popular rock and roll ballad she had loved at the age of ten, and which happened to be the song playing when she auditioned for the job. She wasn’t certain which she hoped for more, that her father would never find out, or that he might happen to stroll into the club one afternoon just in time to see her standing on a table in nothing but her black high heels. That would have been a revelation for both of them, and might have rendered the old battle lines suddenly obsolete.

A
T THIS POINT IN HER LIFE SHE HAD HAD SEX EXACTLY TWICE, WITH
neighborhood boys. Of course neither was for love, both were for rebellion. In the club she was a bad dancer, either too shy to dance sober or too drunk to dance at all. For some of the older men, however—in a way she was still too innocent to understand—her awkwardness stirred a kind of debauched wistfulness.

An investment analyst from New York in his early sixties, flying into Vegas every three weeks for the weekend, became particularly attached to her. She would sit and listen to him talk about things she didn’t care about in the least, and he would ask her questions about this and that, and over the course of several conversations it came out she wanted to become a concert pianist, which he found so wonderfully absurd it practically made his mouth water. After they talked a couple of more times, he called long distance just as she was coming on to the afternoon shift, and explained that if she had the wherewithal to get herself to New York, he would set up an appointment with the musical director at Carnegie Hall, and reserve her a room at the Hilton down the street.

It was now the autumn of 1978, when it was apparently still possible for a precocious teenage girl from the Nevada suburbs to be a little stupid about some things, even one who had danced in a strip joint four or five months. Angie packed one suitcase with as much as a small stuffed bear left room for, took every penny she had, which just covered the plane ticket and the cab ride from JFK to the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, registered at the front desk as Angie Kai, and checked into her room, where she ordered room service and delighted in signing the bill she so blithely assumed was being taken care of by Carnegie Hall. When the telephone rang that night at eleven o’clock, it was not Carnegie Hall but the investment analyst down in the hotel lobby, explaining that the audition was “all set up” for the next afternoon and perhaps it would be a good idea if he came up to the room and explained some things to her, just so as to assure everything went well. A little stupid or not, Angie was finally beginning to have a not-so-great feeling about the situation when she hung up the phone. She was trying to dispel this feeling when the old man showed up at the door with a bottle of champagne.

Twenty minutes later she screamed persuasively enough to send the barely dressed patron of the arts scrambling out into the hallway with her naked disillusionment trailing along after him. “God, Saki,” she said, sitting in front of the hotel mirror looking at herself and wondering what the sign on her bedroom door back home would read now if her father knew; and there and then she began to write the shorthand of her broken heart: “Disgrace. Disgust. Humiliation.
Lost
.” Ten years later, when she once again saw the sign on the door, she would find she had known her father pretty well at that.

She had no money. Any hope she had of squeezing another night or two out of the hotel was dashed with a call the next morning from the manager. “We have just been notified,” he explained, “that the gentleman who placed the deposit on your first night will not be paying for the second.” A pause. “How do you wish to handle the charges?” Up and down Sixth Avenue she dragged her suitcase in a daze, even to Carnegie Hall, where she lingered outside on the sidewalk in the long-shot hope maybe an audition really had been scheduled after all. That night she spent constantly on the move, darting from one dark and dangerous street to the next, eventually discarding everything but the bear; by the morning of the second day she was hungry and exhausted, by the morning of the third desperate and terrified. By the evening of the third she had forty dollars for doing something she would never speak of or think about again. By the evening of the fourth there was just enough of the forty dollars left to buy dinner—a can of cream soda and an over-the-counter bottle of sleeping pills. When she woke, her head pounding and her stomach very sore from having been pumped, she wasn’t sure whether it was still the fourth day or the fifth; she was in the indigent ward of a county hospital that almost anyone else would have reasonably considered a horrorshow. But in a bed under a roof, with a meal in front of her that by subnormal standards was nearly edible, she was as happy to be there as she would have been anywhere, assuming being alive was the only option offered to her.