The Sea Came in at Midnight (26 page)

Now, on the verge of bringing our child into the world, she could no longer afford innocence, she could no longer afford denial. Let’s say she woke that last morning, looked over at the father of her child sleeping next to her and, aghast at the sight of the monster, left. … Or: the apocalypse that was my plaything took her. In the form of an intruder or kidnapper, chaos stealthily broke into our house, made his way down to the second floor, put his hand over her mouth as she woke, and dragged her from the bed and up the stairs and out the front door. Either way she vanished from the face of the earth, the price paid for my flirting with apocalypse so romantically. All along I had been vain enough to believe chaos was my plaything. All along I had been the plaything of chaos.

On New Year’s Day the Occupant came home. He drove to Black Clock Park and bought a plot and time-capsule. He stood staring at the grave for an hour and returned the following day, and returned the day after that. Each day he returned at the same time to visit the grave.

He took out the ad in the newspaper that Kristin would read a week and a half later. The ad was both a fiction and a confession. It was a confession because it was what he truly wanted at that moment, unvarnished, and it was a fiction because he didn’t really expect anyone to answer it, and might not have even printed it at all if he had thought someone would. He intended the ad as a kind of erotic virus unleashed on the world, just to see who would catch it; at best—or at worst—he expected women to read and recoil from it, and then, perhaps, the carnal immune system not quite being what they thought, find themselves swept up in the virus’ irresistible contagion, unsettled by day, sleepless by night. He not only put the ad in the newspaper but sent it in response to the personal ads of select women, the shy ones mostly, privately looking “to be put in my place,” or “to be made shameless,” by someone who would nonetheless also save their lives. Not the ones who signed themselves “HornyGirl” or “Slut4U,” but rather “Dreamer,” or “Amethyst.” In his original ad the Occupant wrote
I’m more interested in the look in your eyes than how perfect your body is. The only thing I ask of you, other than that you be available however I want you whenever I want you, is that you be true to who you are,
two lines he wound up not merely deleting but slashing out with his pen as though with a knife. He had no way of knowing that of all the lines he wrote, those two in particular would best describe the girl who answered.

That week and a half he spent every night out by the beach in the strip joints and brothels of Baghdadville. In single-minded pursuit he went looking for its saddest girls in particular. If a girl onstage or at his table gave him one of her practiced frozen smiles, he left immediately. He wasn’t looking to save anyone, he wasn’t looking to deliver to anyone the Kiss of Chaos. Constantly wracked by an increasingly spellbinding headache, he administered to himself ever larger doses of fiorinal and vodka. Picking up plump fortyish women in bars and driving them out across the desert where he would take Kristin a couple of months later, he would pull over and have the women over the hood of the car with fleeting joyless exhilaration, their breasts bobbing in the Mojave dust on the chrome. Then he would drop them off at the airport on the way into Vegas, check into a hotel alone for the night, and drive back the next day.

For three nights he didn’t leave Baghdadville at all, sleeping in his car and virtually living at a brothel called The Angel Eyes where, every few hours, he returned to Room 7. A Turk sat inside the front door of the brothel watching soccer games on an Italian television station, along with a big German blond hired as security guard and enforcer. The Turk would greet the Occupant with a cold amused charm, as a pusher greets a customer who is obviously and rapidly in the process of becoming addicted: Ah, the gentleman for Angel 7, he would smile, and lead the Occupant up the stairs, down the hall, and around the corner of a dark L-shaped corridor to Room 7, where the door locked from the outside. The Turk would turn the lock on the door, open it, and the Occupant would give him some money and step inside Room 7, where a young girl, no more than sixteen years old, blond with long legs and small breasts, hung by her bound hands from the ceiling, naked and blindfolded on a hook at the end of a rope. The rope attached to the hook ran down along the side of the wall so that one could raise the girl to her feet or lower her to her knees. Next to a single bare burning bulb on the wall behind her was a sign written in black marker ink, like the sign a father might hang on his daughter’s bedroom door, that read YOU CAN STICK IT IN ANY HOLE. I WANT YOU TO CUM NOW. It was always the same girl, no matter when the Occupant visited Room 7, whatever the hour of the day or night, and it would have been difficult for him to be certain, with the blindfold across her eyes, whether she was awake or asleep, alive or dead, except for the slight resistance of her body when he put himself inside her. She never made a sound, she never responded to the door opening or closing, she never stirred when he was inside her, except for the way her body slightly tensed; when he was inside her, at the moment of climax there opened up in his head, in the midst of the pain of the searing headache, a light into which he could almost fall, as though it was a Moment into which he could almost step, a passageway through his memories. It was only much later that it occurred to him maybe the light was for the girl, not him. Of course he meant to obliterate the memory of his wife and daughter. Of course he meant to obliterate the landscape of his life around him and the end of his dreams and the terror of death as old as time. Humiliation couldn’t have mattered less to him; he had no interest one way or another in whether the naked blonde hanging from the hook felt anything or not. The girl on the hook didn’t respond in any way to his being there, or in any way to his white moan inside her. She was his favorite. Sometimes, inside her, he was sure he loved her.

H
E DOESN’T RETURN TO
Room 7 for a couple of months, until after Kristin leaves. He sleeps late that morning, awakened by a particularly vicious crack of thunder, and the moment he wakes he knows instantly Kristin has become one more vanished woman in his life. She isn’t in his bed, where she was sleeping; when he gets up from bed and goes to her room, she isn’t there either.

As he stands in the doorway of her room staring at her empty bed, it doesn’t occur to him even for a moment that she might have gone for a walk, or upstairs to make tea. He’s altogether familiar with the aura of this kind of absence. It’s a female absence, of someone who’s come to take on a particular importance to him beyond what he can possess or control. She has in recent weeks gone from being the device of his sensual satisfaction to something more, the missing piece of his Apocalyptic Calendar by which he believed he could solve the inconsistencies of modern time’s terrain and thereby track down the mother of his child. Now the girl is loose, wandering the city with the vortex of the Apocalyptic Age marked on her bare body, setting into motion pending cataclysm like an alien presence that makes all the monitors and compasses go haywire.

He can only hope that, as when he first found her, she has nowhere else to go, and will return.

But she doesn’t return, and the Occupant just sits in his house watching the hills sink into dusk. He waits all the next day. On the morning of the third day he drives out to Black Clock Park to visit the grave of the time-capsule he buried upon returning to Los Angeles. All the way there he keeps his eyes peeled for her hitching a ride or loitering at a bus stop. When he gets to the park he leaves the car and walks out across the knolls of the cemetery, passing the other graves toward his own.

A hundred feet away, he can already see it. A hundred feet away, he can already see the rude gash in the ground. The grave is open. The capsule has been dug up and taken. The hole is empty except for the unmistakable print of a hand in the mud. Trailing off from the hole, the grass is matted, as though something was very recently dragged from it, though exactly what, the Occupant can’t begin to guess, since the capsule itself isn’t that big or heavy. Stunned, he just stands staring at the hole where the capsule was, feeling a deeply fundamental kind of shock. It’s the kind of violation one waits for his whole life, without knowing he’s been waiting for it.

Standing there on the mound, under the clearing storm, he has no doubts about who’s taken the capsule. All he can wonder is when she first got the idea to steal it, whether it was a sudden impulse or something she had planned for a while, a retributive bit of vandalism by which something is taken not because it has any value whatsoever to the thief, but because it has value to the victim. The only thing he knows for sure, staring at the slash in the earth in an amazement that is at once disbelieving and knowing, is that there’s no point in waiting anymore for her to come back, there’s no point in waiting anymore for anyone to come back. The only thing he knows for sure, staring at the open grave, is that if there’s to be a Moment in his life that is a passageway through his memories, it isn’t a light but a black gaping pit.

H
E DRIVES BACK HOME
and goes down into the room at the bottom of the house, where he stands for half an hour looking at the Calendar, which has constituted the magnum opus of his past twenty years.

He can’t make any sense of it now. No matter how closely or carefully he studies it, none of the timelines are as he remembers them, or as he has drawn them, and none of the dates correspond to anything of meaning. Not the apocalypse but the apocalapse, his daughter had laughed in his dreams; he thought it was a joke.

He goes back upstairs and lies down on his bed again and sleeps. When he wakes, he looks over next to him to see if anyone has returned; but the bed is still empty, and he gets up and goes back upstairs and gets in his car and drives back into town. It’s now late afternoon. He gets to the bank in time to close out his account, and then drives to a dress shop down on Melrose Avenue and buys two blue cotton dresses, one dark and one light, that he supposes might match a certain girl’s eyes, if he had any idea at all what color her eyes are. Of course, he can’t be entirely sure of the size. The young sales clerk watches him a while and finally says, For your wife? A girlfriend? And then, hoping she won’t insult him, Your daughter? My daughter, he agrees. She helps him pick out some underwear. He asks her what an average size is for women’s shoes and she says seven and he picks out a pair of size-six sandals. He drives to the market and buys a couple of weeks’ worth of food, and loads the bags of groceries in the trunk of his car, and then drives west on Sunset Boulevard.

Just before Black Clock Park he cuts down Beverly Glen under the canopy of trees now showing the signs of spring. Then he drives out Pico toward Baghdadville. Above him the sky is darkening blue, completely windswept of the huge storm that woke him a couple of mornings ago. The Los Angeles he drives through now routinely anticipates apocalypse the way other cities routinely anticipate nightfall; no one is a citizen of Los Angeles, in Los Angeles everyone is a citizen of his dreams, and if he doesn’t have any dreams he’s a nomad. As night falls, he parks across the street from The Angel Eyes and waits. He can hear the moaning of dogs that run through the streets in wild packs, and every once in a while he sees in the shadows the flitting figures of reguibat pleasure-girls, naked except for their heels and jewelry and black burnooses, muttering to the passing men in bastardized Maghrebi. Even in the night a white silted light seems to lie like a filter over the braying palm trees.

He sits for almost forty minutes before he sees a guy come walking along, passing back and forth in front of the brothel several times, constantly and furtively peering over his shoulder trying to muster up the nerve to go in. The Occupant gets out of his car and, without hurrying, strolls across the street. The man is startled when the Occupant speaks to him; he thinks he’s a cop.

I’m not a cop, says the Occupant. I want you to do me a favor.

The man keeps looking over his shoulder. You’re not a cop?

The Occupant takes out his wallet and gives the man a hundred dollars. I’m going to go in there now, he says, gesturing at the front door, and in ten minutes I want you to go in and ask for Room 8. If Room 8 is taken, ask for Room 6.

The man waits for the Occupant to finish. You’re giving me a hundred dollars to get a room?

Room 8 or 6.

The man thinks for a moment. You’re not a cop.

No.

How do you know after you go in I don’t just take the hundred and split?

Well, I don’t, of course, the Occupant answers. Just before he enters the brothel, he thinks of something and turns back to the man: it’s a leap of faith, he explains. Inside, the same Turk who was there a couple of months before vaguely acknowledges him. The same big blond German enforcer sits just within the door, half dozing, half watching a movie on television. Ah, the Turk says, trying to place the Occupant, the gentleman for Angel …

7.

The Turk nods, his eyes narrow: haven’t seen you in a while. Everyone seems suspicious tonight, or perhaps it’s just the Occupant’s imagination. The Turk’s demeanor shifts to a false cordiality. Well then, he smiles, and leads the Occupant up the stairs and down the hall, around the corner to the other hallway that leads to Room 7 before it disappears into shadow. At Room 7 the Turk unbolts the door and the Occupant gives him a hundred dollars and goes inside. The same naked young blonde is hanging from the same hook as two months ago. It’s hard to be sure in the light from the bulb that burns on the wall behind her, but her pallor seems grayer, and her body seems to slump on the hook even more than usual; she’s thinner than before, and in the dank light the Occupant can almost count her ribs. She’s still blindfolded, and drools slightly from the corner of her dazed, parted mouth.

He’s relieved when she lifts her head slightly at his entrance, as though struggling for some kind of consciousness. He loosens the rope that runs down along the wall, lowering her to her knees and then to the floor where she collapses. He takes her blindfold off. She’s semiconscious and her eyelids barely flutter. He takes off his coat and puts it around her shoulders, and then puts his arm beneath her, lifting and supporting her, and opens the door of the room with some struggle. He carries her not in the direction of the stairs but rather into the shadows at the end of the hall, where he lies her down against the wall.