The Sea Came in at Midnight (7 page)

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Not so long ago,” he said, “I made this … confounding determination.”

“OK. Confound me.”

He knelt at her feet and ran his hands up one leg, as though looking for the button that would open a hidden door. “I determined,” he said, “that if modern apocalypse is indeed an explosion of time in a void of meaning, then time is moving, and the timelines of the Apocalyptic Calendar are moving as well. All the routes and capitals of chaos on the Calendar are constantly, imperceptibly rearranging themselves in relation to each other … do you understand—?”

“Let’s pretend I do.”

“Which means the Calendar is always … out of whack. You know? Too static on the walls to accommodate, you know, shifts in perspective. Like an ancient starwatcher who always watched the sky from the same place and assumed the stars were moving, only because he hadn’t learned to take into account that it was the earth he was standing on that was moving.” Still on his knees, he touched the hinge of her thighs, and in the dark she could see him looking up at her. “It’s not there.”

“What’s not there?” she said.

“The
place.
Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“It sounds like physics and physics was never my strong suit.”

“It’s not physics,” he said, “it has nothing to do with physics. It’s far beyond the meaning of physics. The Twentieth Century spent far too much time paying attention to physicists. It has to do with … For the calendar of modern apocalypse to be accurate, its nihilistic center—floating in Year Seventeen between the twenty-third of April and the fifth of May 1985—needs to move in relation to the timelines of chaos.”

“Yes?”

He found a spot above her spleen, and his eyes shone in the dark: “
There
,” he whispered, in that same whisper in which he had spoken since the first day she met him. Even in the dark, she thought she saw him smile; it was the first time since that first day and she shuddered. “Right there.” Right above her spleen in black ink he marked the spot, the twenty-ninth of April 1985—
29.4.85—
in the Year Seventeen of the Secret Millennium, and then he stood on his feet and stepped back and kept staring at her, his eyes still shining with such a crazed look that he frightened her more now than he ever had before. He grabbed her by her wrists. “No,” she said.

He pushed her to the wall, and then to the floor.

“No.”

“There are no noes between us,” he hissed, “you know that. No noes, no maybes. Only yeses. You know that.” He lowered her to the floor and fucked her not far from the assassination of an Indian prime minister by her bodyguard (Year Seventeen: 31 October 1984) and the murder of a Sixties soul singer by his father (Year Sixteen: 1 April 1984), his black-and-white beard in her face, rapture displacing grief. Now he had her so as to shoot himself into the vortex of chaos rather than simply empty himself of memory; and she had a hundred dreams in a single climax, until she thought she couldn’t stand one more revelation.

Her body became part of the Calendar, the traveling center of apocalypse. Over the course of the following days and weeks, he positioned her everywhere, studying how the dates shifted in accordance, how the timelines rearranged themselves in relation to her. He had her walk the room in circles for hours, from one corner to the other, in the light cast through the papered window or the shadow beyond the light. He perched her high on ladders and lay her facedown on the floor; he pinned her against the wall and placed her outside the room in the hallway or on the stairs. He took her outside the house to the base of the hillside below, posing her naked where he could see her in relation to this year or that, through a peephole he cut in the Calendar in some frivolous, expendable date; astonished drivers nearly drove off the road. He set her on the next hill over, far out of sight and beyond the range of what even he could see, and finally took her to Black Clock Park, standing her at the grave of his time-capsule in an old long blue coat he gave her, with a stopwatch and instructions that at an exact designated moment, after enough time for him to return to his house and his room and his calendar, she would drop her coat and stand naked among the tombstones while he plotted the shifting courses and charted the swirling clockwork.

By this time she had gotten so used to being naked that she wore her nakedness like a persona. The sex between them changed to something no longer indifferent but, for his part, possessed, like the rest of his life. At his insistence she began sleeping with him in his bed, even when they didn’t have sex, and she would wake in the morning with his arms clutching her close.
Of course you are free,
she remembered his newspaper ad had read,
to end the arrangement and leave at any moment,
but the very nature of the arrangement had changed now, she knew that, whether or not he acknowledged it.

So she never doubted what he had in mind the night they drove out to the desert. By now night and day meant nothing to him, he slept only moments here and there; and the night they drove out to the desert, three hours northeast of Los Angeles, the sky was on fire with stars. She was uneasy the whole way, exhausted, but her anxiety and the cold kept her awake, and he kept looking over at her as though trying to decide exactly what to do with her, as though he was as uncertain as she exactly what desire or revelation or madness was dictating the moment. They drove out toward San Bernardino and then up through the Cajon Pass, flying out across the desert highway in the dark, Liszt and industrial music on the tape player. Somewhere in the desolation between Barstow and Las Vegas, he finally pulled over. He turned off the engine but not the ignition, turning up the music because it had gotten particularly depraved and he wanted to be able to hear it outside the car. He got out of the car and went around to the other side and opened her door. “Get out,” he said.

“What are we doing,” she said.

“Just get out.”

“No.”

“No noes,” he snarled, “just yeses.”

“No,” she said. She sat in the passenger’s seat looking up at him. She knew what he was going to do, she knew exactly what he had in mind: “I know exactly what you have in mind,” she said. “You’re going to drag me out into the desert and stick me next to a cactus and then you’re going to drive back to L.A. and study your fucking calendar. And then you somehow think—because you’ve gone completely off the deep end—you somehow think you’re going to drive back out here in seven or eight hours and just pick me up again. And what you don’t understand,
because you are completely out of your mind,
what you don’t understand is that in seven or eight hours I’ll be dead. I’ll be dead because I’ll have frozen to death or some motorcycle gang will have come by and raped me and killed me, or some wild animal will have eaten me or … or maybe I won’t be dead, maybe I’ll just have had
a really unpleasant experience.
No. I quit. We can waive the pension plan. ‘You’re free to end the arrangement and leave at any moment,’ that’s what your ad said. This is the moment.”

“No noes”—his whisper rose to a pathetic howl—“just yeses.” He stumbled out into the desert, thrashing clockwise among the overgrowth; she could tell one of his headaches had returned. He kept pressing his temples harder and harder, blue eyes about to pop from their sockets; and then trampling the desert shrubbery, he clutched his head as though barely containing it in his hands, trying to hold it together. “Timelines of chaos!” he cried hoarsely to the desert night, “the anarchy of the age!”

“Jesus,” she muttered, reaching over and pulling her door shut and locking it, though she wasn’t really sure who was the bigger point-misser here, the Occupant or her. She slid over to the driver’s seat, closed the door on the driver’s side and locked it too, and stepped on the gas. Because she had never driven a car before, she had to figure out how to shift it into gear, and while she was figuring that out, he finally understood what was happening and began pounding on the passenger door. As best she could, she appraised the mechanics of reverse, neutral, drive; found a gear and hit the gas and the car lurched; and kept on lurching for a couple of miles before she realized that if she continued, she would lurch into Las Vegas completely naked. She had no way of knowing this was the one American city other than New Orleans to which such an entrance might have endeared her, so she turned around and went back. When she came to him standing in the middle of the highway, pacing in circles in the dark talking to himself as though her abandonment of him was only the most temporary distraction from his obsession, she slowed and then stopped. They looked at each other through the windshield and finally he walked over. It took her a minute to figure out how to lower the window on the passenger’s side. “Do you want a ride?” she said.

“Move over,” he said, “you don’t know how to drive.”

“I’m driving, you’re riding,” she answered.

“You don’t know how to drive,” he quietly insisted, “move over. I’m not going to leave you out here in the desert. I’ll drive us back to Los Angeles.” She saw that he could see how she was looking at him. “Whatever else I’ve done,” he pointed out, “I don’t think I’ve lied to you yet.”

“Not yet,” she said. She slid back to the other seat and he got in the car and they drove home.

N
OW WHEN HE HAD
his headaches, he would lie in the dark of his bedroom and let her rub his head for hours.

One night when he came for her, she grabbed his hair in two handfuls and even in the dark of the bedroom he could see her looking him squarely in his blue eyes. “What are you doing?” he whispered in alarm.

“I’m making you look at me,” she said. “I’m making you look in my eyes while you fuck me, I’m making you see me while you do it.”

He cried out, pulling away from her. On his knees he tried to scramble back to the far end of the bed, and all the while she held onto his hair. When he tried to stand, he pulled her up with him, she was clutching so tightly; the whole time she kept staring determinedly into his eyes. “What are you doing,” he kept saying.

“Don’t you think it’s time?” she said. “Don’t you think it’s time you looked in my eyes?”

“What are you talking about?” he choked. Together they tumbled to the floor and into the dark corner of the room.

“It’s time you looked in my eyes,” she answered, but she meant: time I looked in yours. Time for a personal act of revolt. Time to throw your oh-so-highly intellectualized sense of chaos into a true chaos of the heart and senses. She didn’t much care anymore if he tossed her out of his life for it; she had about decided it was time for that too. They had never understood each other. If she had understood him, she would have known that for almost a year now, since his wife had vanished with their child in her belly, in his mansion of memory he had become increasingly lost and trapped. If he had understood her, he would have known she was a dream-virgin when he met her, and so wouldn’t have been surprised to wake one morning soon afterward and find that she had vanished too.

L
ET’S SAY I’M A MONSTER
. Let’s say I was never capable of love. Let’s say down in the pit of my soul, beyond whatever I tried to convince myself I believed, everything was always about surrender and control, so the bond I formed with the girl I brought home was true to who I really am, because it was base and hungry.

Let’s say I never really believed in anything but myself. Let’s say my soul was so impoverished I never really believed in anything but my appetites, because of all the things I’ve felt, appetite was beyond my control. This assumes I ever really believed there was a soul to be impoverished. Let’s say from the first moment of my life, everything’s always been about me and nothing else, including apocalypse and chaos; let’s say even apocalypse and chaos have been conceits of my psyche and bad faith—this assumes I ever kept any kind of faith at all, bad or otherwise. … Let’s say I’m faithlessness made flesh, the modern age’s leap of faith stopped dead in its tracks, fucking around with apocalypse and chaos only because in some broken part of me, among any wreckage of honor or altruism or commitment or compassion, or the bits and pieces of moral vanity, I really believed the abyss was always just the playground of my imagination, and I was its bully.

How do you know, the girl said the afternoon she found the Calendar in the downstairs room, when I told her about the true millennium of the modern soul, and I said, I was there. I was eleven. My father was a semi-celebrated, proverbially lion-maned American poet and romantic egomaniac, larger than life and moving us to Paris when his political activities made staying in the States uncomfortable. Dragging Mama and me from one forum to the next, from one podium to the next, from one adoring standing ovation to the next, from Boston to San Francisco till institutional harassment and ominous threats and anonymous phone calls seemed to make exile the only viable option. He reveled in exile more than he ever really agonized over it. … Mama, half French half Russian Jew, determined self-sacrificer and silently suffering martyr, first went to America as a student after the second world war had cast across her family twin shadows of looming extermination on the one hand, rumors of collaboration on the other. What was exile for my father, she was determined to call home. Back in Paris maybe she was also determined to stop either the suffering or the silence, if she couldn’t stop both.

I was asleep in our flat at the corner of the rue Dante and rue Saint-Jacques, on the left bank of the city, not far from Notre Dame, when I woke to a sound unlike any I’d ever heard before. People always say it’s like a car backfiring but hearing it anyone can tell it’s different. Years later I still don’t know whether the gun was Mama’s or my father’s, or belonged to the dead girl in their bed. One of the smaller mysteries. Like lots of things, it never got explained. But when it woke me, even at age eleven I knew something was wrong, and I ran out my room in my underwear straight to my parents’ bedroom and Mama catching me in her arms, and I didn’t ask what happened … in my eleven-year-old life I already hated anything that might constitute emotional upheaval. I just wanted her to tell me everything was all right, that I could go back to sleep, that it was only a sound from out in the street.