The Sea Came in at Midnight (17 page)

So Louise became something more profound than tormented: she became haunted. Having trafficked in the sort of memories people had spent thousands of years trying to forget, and the sort of dreams they had spent thousands of years trying to awake from, she had wandered at will and without accountability on the apocalyptic landscape of the imagination. Now a stain spread from the darkest center of the unaccountable imagination, becoming only more confounding and unbearable with every moment, the question of when and where the imagination becomes accountable by and to whom, beginning with the one who imagines a nightmare simply for the thrill of its imagining, moving to the one who renders it an artifact to be experienced in common by others, eventually to the collective audience that chooses to watch, for the thrill of watching, a girl actually being murdered in a movie, to the individual man or woman who, before suppressing it in horror, entertains a fleeting curiosity, dallying with the temptation to look, then finally conforming to whatever sick social chic compels everyone at a cocktail party to watch, like they would watch the home movie of a summer vacation or a child getting his first bike. At what point, if any, in the exchange between the one who bears the fruit of the imagination and the one who devours it, does it all stop short of being beyond the pale, at what point is everyone complicit, at what point can one still consider himself unaccountable for what the imagination has wrought, right up until the moment that he’s damned by it? Now in the years of the New York City zombielife, with the great punksurge of the late Seventies fading into the embalmed aftermath, all the girls in the clubs who reminded Louise of Marie from Minneapolis, every one of whom Louise believed she had betrayed, had the look of chaos in their eyes. They had been serviced by the chaos of the age. When Louise ran into Maxxi Maraschino down at Bleecker and Bowery, just a year or so before the “accident” that killed her, Louise could only hope the look of chaos in Maxxi’s eyes wasn’t answered by a look of murder in her own. Maxxi said a very strange thing to Louise. I’m the twentieth of November 1978, she said. I’m a thousand people desperate for salvation, poison Kool-Aid on our lips, dying together in the jungles of Guyana.

As it happened—the universe having a strange sense of humor—Louise did find Marie from Minneapolis, long after she ever expected to. When she finally got a card from Billy it was from a little town out west Louise had never heard of, and so after Mitch’s death she set out on the bus to Sacramento, where she caught a couple of rides up to the delta. Billy was running a small bar he had taken over in a deserted Chinatown on an island that could be reached only by ferry—about as much distance as he could put between himself and the stoned bonhomie of his early years now flooded by drink and a growing, uncomprehending terror for his mortal soul; in Davenhall he spent his time drinking up the profits he never made, and trying to forget what he had once been so awfully and complicitly part of, back when he was making movies with names like
Virgin Black
with his sister and his best friend. Louise got to Davenhall, walked into the bar, and found Marie from Minneapolis behind the counter drying whisky glasses. The girl appeared not the least surprised, as if she had been expecting her.

Then Louise went into the bathroom and threw up, not because she had finally found Marie but because she had been throwing up since a month or so after that last night she slept with Mitch, who presumably, even if he hadn’t lost his head in New York traffic, still wouldn’t have been ready to be a father. “God, I hate surprises,” she muttered deep into the toilet of Billy’s bar.

S
HE WENT ON THROWING
up for the next five weeks, until not only did it seem like nothing of her could possibly be left, but nothing of the child inside her either. Racked and depleted, she spent five weeks in bed in the room in back of the bar where Marie brought her soup and bread and juice. She felt alternately becalmed and beset by the stillness of the little Chinatown, which was always silent except for an occasional tourist’s voice or a transistor radio from the hotel across the street; sometimes she liked to imagine she heard the river beyond the trees, but it wasn’t quite close enough that that was possible.

Marie had been with Billy for the past three years, scooped up by him in his van outside the police station the day before the cops released Louise and Mitch. “Jesus, little sister,” was all Billy could exclaim now when he found Louise there in his bathroom, embracing the toilet bowl as Marie embraced her; from her bed Louise saw him look back and forth from her to Marie to her again, as Louise herself looked back and forth from Marie to Billy to Marie again, both of them looking for an answer in the air between them, Marie the only one not looking for it, maybe because she already knew it.

As well as the dull delta sunlight allowed, Marie appeared lit with a beatific kindness, from which Louise recoiled. Marie’s reproach she was prepared to live with, but not her forgiveness, especially when it hadn’t even been asked for. The weeks passed in which Marie continued to nurse Louise, who was dangerously drained and weak; she fed her and wiped her brow and changed her sheets and opened and closed the windows, as within Louise there grew a debilitating rage. “You don’t have to do this,” she muttered to whatever act of gratuitous tenderness Marie was performing at the moment. Often as Louise slept, Marie would sit in the room with her, quietly reading a book; when Louise was awake, the two women said nothing to each other, except for Marie’s daily inquiries as to Louise’s condition, and Louise’s hateful protests to Marie’s abject generosity. For his part Billy avoided the both of them, only occasionally peering around the edge of the door from the bar in front of the building before darting back out of sight. Finally one afternoon Louise woke from a nap and found Marie there in a chair by the bed; though she was sitting straight up, Marie’s eyes were closed and her book lay open on her lap as the breeze through the window blew the pages. Not knowing if Marie was awake, Louise said, “I dream about it all the time.”

Without opening her eyes Marie answered, “You don’t have to dream about it anymore.”

She smiled. By now she was barely twenty-one. She looked older and plainer than whatever tarted-up incarnation she had advanced so cautiously three years before in a deserted bus terminal in Brooklyn, right before she found herself hanging naked from a hook in the dark for twenty-four hours. “How’s Billy?” said Louise.

“He drinks too much.”

After a moment Louise said, “I’ve tried to stop the dreams but I can’t.”

“I haven’t dreamed about it once,” Marie told her, “that’s rather strange, isn’t it? In fact, I haven’t had any dreams at all since it happened. It isn’t like when I wake I’ve forgotten my dreams—even when you forget your dreams, you still have a feeling of having dreamed, don’t you? You still know you’ve dreamed. You would have thought after it happened I would have had a lot of dreams.”

Louise lay back into her pillow, staring at the ceiling.

“I had been hanging there in the dark,” Marie went on, “all those hours, thinking I was going to die, and then something happened. Hanging there in the dark—or I guess it was dark, because I was blindfolded—I fell into a kind of huge light, and the terror passed. Billy said later that when I was let out of the storeroom I was hysterical. He said later that when the police came I was hysterical. I don’t remember being hysterical. I don’t remember anything about the police or much of anything, just a blur, maybe being in the back of a squad car and looking out the window at the street, maybe when the police took me to the station. I just don’t remember.” She saw the look on Louise’s face. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” Mortified and furious, Louise covered her face with her hands. “My God.” She looked straight at the other woman. “I was there. I was there when we took you out of the storeroom. I was there when we shot the scene.”

“I know.”

“I was there when you were crying. I was there when you were screaming. It was all my idea. You can take my word for it that you were very hysterical. You can take my word for it that you were very terrified. We were very competent that day, believe me. If you have a soul—and I don’t know that I believe you do, any more than I believe anyone does—but if you have a soul, we did a very competent job of reaching down far inside you and ripping it out and smearing it across the wall. We had a great time, believe me.”

“I don’t believe you,” Marie answered evenly, with no anger, “and I don’t need you to tell me this, though maybe you need to tell it. When you fall into a huge light like that, like I did hanging there in that storeroom, maybe there’s a reason, maybe it’s a passageway through all the things you don’t need to have told to you later on. Something opened up and allowed me through, and sometimes maybe that’s just what happens—so you don’t need to tell me this, not for
my
sake anyway, and you don’t need to try and convince me you’re the monster that you’ve convinced yourself you are. You can believe that if you want to, but I don’t believe it, and you trying to tell me so won’t make me believe it.” She said, “It was a Moment, there in the dark, hanging there on that hook.”

“Like when you hear a gunshot in the night,” Louise said, ashen, “far away.”

“Maybe,” said Marie, as though she knew exactly what Louise was referring to, “or maybe not. Maybe your mistake is having always believed the Moment was when you heard the shot. But maybe the Moment is when the sound of the shot has finally passed, and it’s finally quiet again. Maybe that’s the Moment.”

In the downward spiral of what she believed to be her damnation, Louise couldn’t decide which damned her more, to abort Mitch’s child or inflict it upon the world. Or if she had been capable of believing in her redemption, she might have put it the other way around, wondering which redeemed her more, sparing the child or sparing the world. At first she had no doubt. Gathering her strength as best she could, the afternoon after their first conversation she got to her feet and was trying to put on her clothes when Marie came into the room: I can’t have this baby, Louise tried to explain. Marie nodded. She took the clothes from Louise and put her back in bed. You need more rest, Marie said, and there’s time. Next week, if you still want, I’ll go with you into the city and we’ll find a clinic. So early one morning a week later they took the little ferry across the river to where Billy’s van was parked, and drove the two hours into Sacramento.

Sitting in the waiting room of the clinic with three other women, only minutes away from the nurse calling her name, Louise suddenly turned to Marie and said, stricken, “I don’t know what to do.”

“You can wait another day,” Marie said, taking her hand, “if you need to think about it.”

“I can’t have this baby!” Louise cried. Her outburst rippled through the room. One of the other women just stared straight ahead, while the other two visibly started at the sound of Louise’s voice; behind the desk, the nurses seemed to steel themselves. “There are these five girls I keep thinking about,” Louise went on, in an agitated whisper; she didn’t much care if she made sense or not, to Marie or anyone else. “There were these five girls and I’m accountable for all of them. Five girls like you and I had a hand in what happened to every one of them, and now I keep asking myself, what should I do for
them
? Do I have this baby for them, or do I stop it now, before it even becomes a baby? The sound of a gunshot hasn’t faded yet. I haven’t had that moment yet you talk about so much, that you believe in so much. I haven’t had any magic moment that opens a passageway through my memories and dreams. All I’ve had is a gunshot in the night, so far away I wasn’t even sure it was a gunshot. When will be the moment I don’t hear it anymore? Is it the moment I have this baby, or is it the moment I kill it?” She became furious, her voice rising. “You tell me, Marie. You’ve become such a fucking saint, you tell me. You’ve figured it all out, right?” The nurses now appeared concerned; Marie remained calm. Louise said, “What are you even doing here with me? What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you want to take an ice pick or a knife or a barbecue skewer or something, or a pair of scissors, and stick it up inside me in the middle of the night while I’m sleeping and kill it? That’s what I would want if I were you.”

Oh dear, said one of the nurses. Two of the other women began to cry.

“That’s what I would want! That’s what I
do
want!” Louise pulled away from Marie, who was looking at her with great sadness. “Stop looking at me that way!” Louise said. “Stop looking at me with great sadness! What’s the matter with you?” I’m having a breakdown, Louise told herself, with the first relief she had felt in years; then she collapsed into Marie’s arms. We’re going to go now, she heard Marie say, though whether to her or the others she wasn’t sure. Maybe we’ll come back. Helping Louise up from the waiting room couch, Marie led her outside where they sat in the van.

They didn’t speak for half an hour. Then Louise said, Let’s go back, and maybe she meant back to the clinic. But when Marie started the van and headed back to Davenhall, Louise didn’t stop her.

A
FTER THAT LOUISE DIDN’T
dream anymore. After that she had no dreams at all, the little Chinatown where she spent the next six months hushing all the dances of her sleep, snuffing out every image of her subconscious, as though in the fitful hours of her nights, among the static blips of unconsciousness when her pregnancy made sustained sleep more and more difficult anyway, she was hurled out beyond all the color and noise of eternity into nothingness, until she landed hard and abruptly on terra consciousness.

She didn’t dream anymore of the five girls in the newspaper article. She didn’t dream of Marie from Minneapolis in the bus terminal. As spring approached, somewhere around the mystic fourth month of her pregnancy when the mass of tissue and light inside her hovered on the borderland of humanity, the blood coursing through Louise’s body and into her child carried no nightmares to challenge the immune system of the soul: as the mother didn’t dream, the child didn’t dream. Through the genes and blood, the child was handed down no dreams of the past, no dreams of its own creation; it was handed down no dreams of its mother or father, or of itself.