The Sea Came in at Midnight (21 page)

She went back up to what had been her room. The first thing she noticed was that the bed was unmade; and remembering that she had slept in the Occupant’s bed the last night before she left, and the night before that, she was more and more sure that her own bed had been made the last time she saw it. Still on the shelf by the bed were the books she had taken from the library, and still on the wall were the various news clippings she had tacked there. Then she saw a dress—in a shade of light blue that might have been chosen to match the color of someone’s eyes, though certainly not hers—hanging in the closet. She was damned sure there hadn’t been any damned blue dress there before. Had the Occupant already found someone to replace her? Had his wife returned? Immediately Kristin dropped his coat she had been wearing and slipped on the dress, which was too tight.

She found her own clothes about an hour later, underneath the mattress of the Occupant’s bed, cleaned and pressed and folded. She went back up to the kitchen and found a fully stocked refrigerator and cabinets, as though he had stored up for some long siege with his demons, which made the fact that he wasn’t there all the more curious, and suggested to her that wherever he had gone had been in a hurry, and that he would be back at any moment. Now she wasn’t sure she wanted to be there after all, her guilt about the time-capsule notwithstanding. It occurred to her maybe he had gotten a phone call about the capsule being disinterred and that was why he had taken off so quickly, but when she checked the phone that he had yanked out of the wall that one night, it was still dead. The other possibility was that he had torn out of the house immediately upon discovering she had escaped—if that was the right word—in order to find her, and hadn’t come back since. But that really didn’t make sense either: he would have returned at some point, if not to sleep or shower or do what normal people do, or people more normal than he was, then at least to confirm she hadn’t shown up; and besides, there was all this new food and a strange dress in the closet that had materialized in the meantime.

Every answer she came up with seemed contradicted by other questions, and all the answers to those questions seemed contradicted by other answers. Kristin’s main concern now was exactly when the Occupant was going to reappear, and whether she really wanted to be there when he did; but finding somewhere else to spend the night just didn’t seem like an option at this point. She would bathe and read and get some sleep, and whatever happened when the Occupant showed up, she would deal with. She got the key to the truck from out of the pocket of the coat and in her too-tight blue dress went back out into the night, because if and when someone came looking for the truck, whether it was cops or Japanese gangsters, she didn’t want it near the house. The night was very quiet except for the sound of someone down the street trying, without success, to start their car. At first, walking down the street, from a distance Kristin thought someone had taken the truck, and then when she finally made it out in the dark, she thought someone had taken all the satellite dishes from the back, until she realized the dishes were still there, but now painted black: every single one.

T
HEY WERE STILL WET
. She touched one and felt with her thumb the gritty moist black spot on the end of her finger. Across the street, the sound of the old Camaro trying to start became more frantic.

Kristin walked over to the Camaro and knocked on the window that was cracked open at the top. All she could see inside was the dark form of the driver and the hovering red glow of the end of a cigarette. She knocked on the glass again and the grinding of the ignition stopped, and finally the woman in the car rolled down the window; a cloud of cigarette smoke floated out. “If you have any jumper cables,” Kristin said, “you can hook it up to that truck.”

Louise stared at the girl and stubbed out her cigarette in the Camaro ashtray. “I don’t have any cables.”

“Oh.” Kristin shrugged. “I’d let you use the phone in the house, but it doesn’t work.”

Louise said, “You live around here?”

“It’s not really my house. The truck isn’t really mine either.” Kristin explained, “I’m in that phase of life when nothing’s really mine.”

“Lucky you,” answered Louise.

“Maybe there’s a service station down the hill.”

“There is, but it’s closed by now.”

“Well,” said Kristin, pointing at the homes along the hillside, “I’m in the third one down, if you need anything.” She didn’t know what else to say. She was a little sorry she had said anything, since the woman didn’t seem very friendly. She went back to the house, and a few minutes later Louise was at the door, smoking another cigarette in her leather jacket and appearing ill at ease. Kristin let her in, but the older woman unsettled her so much that she warned her right off, “The guy who owns this place will be back any minute.”

Louise nodded, looking around the living room. She sat down in silence, gazing out the windows at the lights of the city below her, and after a few minutes she finally said, “When did you say this guy’s coming back?”

“Any time now,” Kristin insisted.

She doesn’t have any idea when he’s coming back, Louise thought. “You’re sure the phone doesn’t work?”

“Yes,” Kristin answered. For a moment she wondered if that was such a good thing to tell her, but given the circumstances there was no way to tell her anything else. “He pulled it out of the wall,” she offered, at this point evaluating the tactical advantage of everything she said; she kept hoping Louise would decide to leave, taking her chances on the streets of Hollywood. “He’s kind of a psycho,” she assured Louise emphatically.

Well, that makes three of us then, doesn’t it? Louise smiled to herself ruefully, remembering the girl from one night some weeks before, standing naked in the window. She lay her head back against the sofa and closed her eyes; when she opened them, Kristin was still looking at her.

“You live near here?” said Kristin.

“About five miles.” Louise added, “Too far to walk.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

Louise looked around at the fireplace and piano.

“I just stay here once in a while,” explained Kristin, “off and on. Now and then.”

“You from LA.?”

“Let’s say it’s the only place I’ve ever lived worth mentioning. You?”

“Passing through.” Louise closed her eyes again, brow furrowed. “Before this I was in … Albuquerque. No. Yes. From here I go to San Francisco.”

“I was there,” said Kristin, “a couple of months ago.”

“Albuquerque?”

“San Francisco. I lived in a hotel. Been traveling long?”

“Well,” said Louise, “if you want to look at it a certain way. If you want to look at it a certain way, I haven’t done anything but travel.”

“I would like to travel. I haven’t been anywhere. I haven’t even been out of California. Have you been to a lot of places?”

“A lot of places,” Louise agreed.

“In that car?”

“In that car.”

“Are you a salesperson or something?”

“No.” Louise laughed. “Well, actually … no, I’m not a salesperson.”

“What do you do? Going around to all those places.” I’m asking too many questions, Kristin thought.

Louise didn’t want to sound melodramatic. “I undo things. I spent the first half of my life doing things and I’m spending the second half undoing them.”

“What are you going to San Francisco for?”

“To find someone I haven’t seen in a long time.”

“To undo something?”

“Yes.” Louise didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it filled her with terror; she glanced impatiently at the front door.

Kristin chewed the inside of her cheek. “Want to see something?”

“All right,” Louise finally answered. Kristin got up and started down the stairs, and Louise followed her, lighting another cigarette. They got to the bottom, where Kristin and Louise stood in the middle of the room looking around at the Blue Calendar. Louise said, “What is it?”

“See, it has all these dates of various events that have happened over the years,” Kristin said. Louise stared at the Calendar, smoking her cigarette. “Now, the man who made this calendar has a certain way of looking at things,” Kristin went on. “He believes things that happened for important reasons are not important, and things that happened for unimportant reasons are very important. Also, you’ll notice something different about this calendar. You know how, on most calendars, the first of August tends to be followed by the second of August? And after that usually comes the third of August? People have always tended to be very conventional that way. On this calendar, the first of August may be followed by the twenty-third of May, while the twenty-third of May is followed by the eleventh of October. Also, have you ever noticed how, on most calendars, if you get three hundred and sixty-five dates in one place, they all tend to fall in the same year? That’s just way too much of a coincidence for this guy. I mean, how likely is that, that three hundred and sixty-five consecutive days would all happen to fall in the same year?”

Louise studied the Calendar and continued to smoke her cigarette. “You’re right,” she finally concluded. “He’s a mental case.”

“Check this out,” said Kristin. She undid the tight blue dress she was wearing that was already straining the buttons. On the side of her bare body was a now fading
29.4.85.

“What’s it mean?” said Louise.

“It means,” Kristin replied, “
nothing.
Not a single thing. Nothing happened on this date of any importance to anyone, least of all me, since I wasn’t even three years old at the time. It means I
am
this date: I’m a date in time, a date on this calendar, of paramount importance because absolutely nothing important whatsoever took place on it.”

“Maybe something important happened to him.”

“If it did, he’s forgotten.”

“Maybe it’s something nobody wants to remember.”

“Yes, well, you can pursue that line of conversation with him when he shows up.”

Looking at her intently, Louise said, “Does he do things to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean does he do things to you when you stay with him.”

“He’s never hurt me,” Kristin said.

“Does he frighten you?”

“Sometimes.”

“You shouldn’t let him frighten you.”

Actually, Louise frightened her, truth be told. But Kristin didn’t say that. “I’m not really planning to stick around much longer.”

“What’s this?” said Louise, something on the Calendar catching her eye.

“Very perceptive of you.” Kristin walked over to the date in the corner. “This is the other thing he’s figured out that the rest of us are all just very confused about. That last December thirty-first that everyone thought was the beginning of something, or the end? That wasn’t the beginning or end of anything. This was where everything really began, in Paris, right here”—she pointed at the place on the Calendar where it read
2.3.7.5.68.19—
“at two minutes past three o’clock on the seventh day of the fifth month, in the sixty-eighth year of the 1900s. May 7, 1968. That was the real beginning of everything.”

“The beginning of everything?” said Louise.

“Or, looked at another way, the real beginning of nothing.”

“In Paris?”

For a while the two women stood watching the Calendar in silence. After a moment Kristin said, “So why do you paint them black?”

Louise was trying to figure out a place to put out her cigarette, and finally dropped the butt in the pocket of her leather jacket. “To purge the evil airwaves,” she answered.

“Ah,” Kristin nodded, thinking, Oh yeah, and the Occupant’s a mental case. She led Louise back upstairs. On the second level she gave Louise a small tour, showing her the Occupant’s bedroom and then what had been her room—as though to make it clear, Louise said to herself, that the girl in fact slept in her own bed and not his. Louise noted the clippings that Kristin had tacked to the wall above the bed, as well as the books on the shelf. By now it was getting late, and when they got back up to the living room Louise said to Kristin, “Maybe this guy’s not coming back tonight.”

“I don’t know,” Kristin admitted.

“Maybe,” said the older woman, “I could sleep here on the sofa.”

“All right.”

Louise took off her leather jacket and lay down on the sofa, pulling the jacket up around her. “Thanks.”

“Do you want me to turn out the light?”

“I’ll get it. Thanks.”

“I would say sweet dreams, but I wouldn’t know.”

“Me neither,” said Louise. Half an hour later, after the girl had disappeared down the stairs, Louise found Kristin’s last comment as curious as Kristin had found Louise’s answer. Lying in the dark with the lights of the city coming through the window, Louise didn’t fall asleep until she had given up on sleep, resigning herself to waiting impatiently for daybreak; when she woke, sunlight having replaced the window’s city lights, it was to a realization that slipped from her mind as quickly as it had entered, not unlike a dream. For some time, thinking about the girl, she lay there trying to recapture it. On the small table next to the sofa were the keys to the truck.

T
HEY HADN’T BEEN THERE
before, had they? Picking them up, Louise discovered that in fact only one of the keys was to the truck, and presumed the other was to the house, until upon closer scrutiny she read on the key
Hotel Poseidon San Francisco,
and then, under that, P—for the parking garage, she guessed. What else would P stand for?

Louise got up from the sofa slowly, feeling old. But it was better than spending the night in the Camaro, she thought. She assumed the guy who lived here had not returned in the night or she would have awakened. “Hello?” she called out at the top of the stairs. She went downstairs to use the bathroom. When she came out of the bathroom she looked into the main bedroom to see the bed still empty, and then into the other small bedroom across the way, which was also empty. She now had the feeling the girl was gone.

She went down the stairs to the bottom floor, and looked in the room with the Calendar. No one was there either. For a few minutes she stood in the middle of the room trying to read the Calendar and then went back upstairs. She tried the telephone on the off chance it really did work after all. In the meantime she kept trying to figure out what to make of the keys, whether the girl had left them there for her on purpose, and what exactly it meant if she had, or if in fact it was purely by chance. She went back to the main bedroom searching for some kind of clue, and then to the other bedroom, where the only thing that struck her was that most of the news clippings that had been tacked to the wall above the bed were gone. She thought maybe some of the books were gone too.