The Sea Came in at Midnight (25 page)

We spent so much of the Eighties trying to make ourselves be together, Angie and I, for a reason we never understood. … Spent so much of the Eighties trying to overcome the emotional wasteland between us that we stared out over from opposite horizons. By the beginning of the Nineties, we finally met in the middle of that wasteland, crossing from opposite ends with great effort, overcoming everything our lives set in our paths. But of course our meeting in the middle didn’t change the landscape. While she and I were in closer proximity to each other, the landscape was still all around us, its proximity to us not having changed at all. We had believed that each of us crossing the landscape in the direction of the other might somehow make the terrain disappear, when in fact upon reaching each other we looked around us only to see wasteland everywhere. Maybe going the direction of each other, we’d each been going the wrong direction all along. Married fifteen months after I reached L.A., in another fifteen months I had an affair with an “executive producer,” one of those witty titles L.A. bestows on people to make them think their lives mean something. Couple of years later I had a brief fling with an office receptionist, so in one sense I was moving up.

More corrosive than the feeling of guilt over infidelity was the feeling of bad faith, assuming there’s a difference between the two. Both are betrayals but one seems more routine, something in the course of day-to-day life and love, the other more fundamental, a corruption of not just a sexual agreement but a mutual understanding of shared life. I cheated on more than Angie’s body. Can’t say for sure I cheated on Angie’s love, the question of love as mysterious to us ten years later as it was when we first met. But I cheated on everything we’d gone through together, I cheated on the price we paid together, even as we each paid it in our own way. Bad faith lay in the realization that my cheating might not tear us apart at all but rather keep us together, and that if she cheated as well, that was also likelier to keep us together. We got to a point where, if I suspected her of cheating too, it was a relief. That was what our marriage was based on, mutual relief at our common corruption. Maybe some marriages are based on even worse. But that wouldn’t change the bad faith of it and, as the years went by, I woke at night in terror of my whole life being an act of bad faith, where everything was self-interest and nothing more, where every human interaction was driven by a silent, even subconscious calculation of some ulterior motive, where at the point that a sea of bad faith has taken over your whole life, there’s no small island left from which you can even try to build a bridge of good faith, because even that effort becomes suspect, even good faith is nothing but self-interested, even altruism is nothing but solipsistic, even this professed agonizing right here right now is nothing but a gesture, made to the conscience in order to assure it that it exists.

In the midst of this, neither of us ever talked about having a child. By the time Angie got pregnant she was thirty-six, and I’d known her nearly half her life. Having in the age of chaos kissed women awake from their own private millennia, which was also bad faith, given the reason I kissed them—to own them—I now faced a void of meaning in my life because Angie had the temerity, if you can believe this, to save her own life. She saved it just by living it, saved it just by surviving the bad dreams of New York, by growing beyond the one-word reductions of everything she felt and believed, even if the surviving and growing was in a wasteland. I think I’m pregnant, she said, and I nodded—and she was surprised I wasn’t surprised. We talked about the steps we would take to end the pregnancy, till finally I said, “What if we had her?”

Angie looked at me in confusion. “Her?”

“The baby.”

“It’s a her?”

“Whatever,” I said. “The baby.”

“You want to have the baby?” Part of her was moved, part of her angry. Most of her was more shaken than I’d ever seen her, more shaken than by a hundred New York nightmares. None of her various adopted personae over the years, not the little girl with the stuffed bear or the sleek tough sophisticate, was prepared for this development. We’re talking, I told Little Saki in my dream that night, of ending the pregnancy. The child seemed unfazed. Let’s say, I said to her, you’re the god you say you are … what divine mission will it terminate, to terminate you?

There’s no divine mission, the little girl said patiently. If you don’t give me birth, the god in me just moves on, to be born somewhere else to someone else. “We have to decide,” Angie said a couple of days later, “do you want to have this baby?”

Why couldn’t I have just said yes? I didn’t believe the yes, I didn’t believe the no. In a life of bad faith, every answer was suspect. I left it to Angie, who needed to hear me believe something out loud, or at least believe in this one thing, of all things. So I said nothing and later, after she was gone, concluded that in my silence I betrayed my child. Having saved lives I never cared about just for the thrill of it, I couldn’t say a simple yes to save this one for the love of it.

So Angie saved it. She didn’t have an abortion, for reasons that, given my passivity, she decided were none of my business. In my life of bad faith I got through my faithless days just to be with my daughter at night. Down through the weeks and then the months, Angie swelling toward deliverance, I slept each night with my ear to her belly. One night several weeks after we confirmed the pregnancy, Little Saki was nowhere to be found. I wandered my sleep looking for her, was awakened in the dark by a rip in the unconscious universe … Angie lay in bed next to me in terrible pain. For three hours she had writhed, uterus slithering, sure she was losing the baby, and to my astonishment I found myself praying, to any dubious god who listened, Don’t lose the baby. It was a plea beyond rationale or even emotion, speaking from a part of me I didn’t know. Don’t lose the baby.

Angie didn’t lose the baby. It wasn’t a response, on either her part or any god’s, to my prayer, just happenstance. The next night when I saw the little girl again, I said to her, Something happened last night—and she only answered, We won’t speak of it. As she grew older into adolescence and then young womanhood and then full maturity and middle age, we spent many hours in which I taught her nothing and she taught me everything. We traveled endless railroads and witnessed the vast night’s errant shooting stars. What do you see? I asked her. I see the shadows of my mother’s ribs crossing the dome of the sky, she said. What do you hear? I asked her. I hear the rapids of my mother’s blood roaring through capillary ravines, she said. All I could offer in return was the Blue Calendar, stretching down a long narrow hall. … This, I told her, vain with a father’s hope to finally impart something of significance to his child, is what I’ve spent my whole life learning. This is the passage of chaos I’ve spent my whole life walking.

She followed me patiently down the narrow hall to the farthest corner at the very end, where she’d found me in the first dream about to nail my heart to the wall. I pointed out to her the second minute of the third hour of the seventh day of the fifth month of the sixty-eighth year of the final century, “when it all began,” I explained—and she said, It? She must have seen the panic in my face, because immediately she rushed to reassure me, Oh, yes, of course, Father, I understand. The apocalypse, I said. The apoca
lapse
, she answered, and laughed—she was making a joke. As I did every morning, I woke to doubt and faithlessness. As I did every evening, I returned to her inexplicable wisdom. In the dark of the bedroom, before falling asleep, I would lie in the terror of death, as I had for a lot of nights now. I would think about how the meaning of my life had run out along with the money, and I would will my heart to stop beating while I slept. …

It didn’t seem so self-indulgent. There was a $400,000 life insurance policy, after all, that Angie and Little Saki could survive on a lot longer than they could survive on my terror and self-loathing. But then I’d fall asleep and see her, and sense with the growing movement in Angie’s belly the birth of a faith I couldn’t name, a faith no more or less complicated than the simple fact that there was finally something in my life that wasn’t about me, that there was something in my life of more value than myself, that the solar system of my life had acquired another sun.

Thirty-eight weeks after my first dream of her, she came to me and shook my arm. Asleep in my bed, I woke to her touching me; by now she was an old woman. Her bright blue eyes were wet in her old Asian face and she smiled sadly at me. “Goodbye,” she said.

“Goodbye?” I asked, alarmed.

“Goodbye,” she whispered again, and closed her eyes, and the tears ran from them.

I had no idea what she meant, but I cried, “Wait!” before she faded from view, so loudly I woke myself. I sat straight up from my nightmare, burying my head in my hands, waiting for Angie to reach over and touch me. But she didn’t, because she wasn’t there.

I
LAY IN BED
waiting for her to return from the bathroom, but she didn’t return. I went upstairs looking to find her sitting in the window drinking tea, but she wasn’t to be found. I worried she had strayed off for a moment in the night, only to collapse suddenly in labor, but there was no sign of her. I waited for her to reappear from her morning walk, but she never showed up. I looked for signs of foul play—fingernail marks along the wall, forced lock on the front door, an ominous splash of blood—but there were no signs. I looked for signs she had packed and left—a suitcase missing, clothes and makeup gone, the nursery stripped of baby things—but everything was in its place. I noted the car still in the driveway and the car keys still on the bookshelf where we kept them. I found her little stuffed bear still sitting on top of the piano where she always kept it, the most telltale sign of all—except I didn’t know what it told. She hadn’t come back by noon, and I went walking the neighborhood to find her. She hadn’t come back by midafternoon, and I went driving the hills looking for her. She hadn’t come back by evening, and I called the police and the nearby hospitals. She hadn’t come back the next morning, and I went driving the city; I drove to the beach, I drove through the valleys, I drove to Black Clock Park. I came home so I might find her mysteriously back in place, like she never left, sitting at the piano playing a Chopin nocturne or a Jerome Kern tune, with a forbidding air about her suggesting these past twenty-four hours must just be one of those mysteries of her life that remain a mystery, no questions asked; but the house was still empty. I waited for her the next day and the day after that, and the day after that … I drove to the desert, I drove to the sea, I drove to Mexico. I drove to the Mojave, I drove to Las Vegas, I drove to Monument Valley. I drove from Santa Fe to the Continental Divide, I drove from the Rockies to dormant Canadian volcanoes. I assumed that, like Mama, she was taken by the apocalypse I so arrogantly came to believe was mine to master. I drove to all coordinates of my Apocalyptic Calendar, from one date to another, from one pulsing source of anarchy to every outpost of chaos within my reach, all over the country looking for her. I drove from thoughtless sites of toxic-waste dumps to wrecking grounds of pointless air disasters to conspiratorial hotbeds of senseless terrorism. I drove from furious Mormon metropolises to half-deserted California Chinatowns.

A
T A BLACKJACK TABLE
in Reno, the Occupant heard a guy say he thought he’d seen a pretty Asian girl carrying a baby walking with two thousand other women and children in the Nevada desert, before disappearing into the Sierras.

The Occupant caught up with the migration at Lake Tahoe. Circling them clockwise in his car, then parking several miles down the shore of the lake, he trudged back to meet them, falling in with them and mingling. He checked every woman’s face and listened for the sound of every baby crying. Every woman he asked shook her head. After searching for an hour, he found himself surrounded by half a dozen men in white robes who, without saying a word or answering any of his questions, escorted him back to his car. Before leaving Tahoe, he bought a pair of binoculars at a sporting-goods store and followed the exodus in his car, watching them through the glasses from an adjacent ridge as they descended from the Sierras into a delta plain that was half field and half marsh; for hours from the ridge he pored over all the faces of the women through the binoculars, searching for hers, the white-robed priests watching him back, the glint of his old silver car caught by the blue winter sun. After three days of searching the same faces over and over, he gave up.

A couple of days later, hearing of a Chinese woman that a pair of Western eyes had taken for Japanese, he took a river ferry over to an island in the delta where he spent the night in a small ghost town. In the mainstreet bar where he had dinner, the only people were himself and the bartender; he also seemed to be the only guest of the old hotel across the street. That night the bare branches of the trees outside his window scraped the moonlight, the dark hummed with the buzz of mosquitoes; and he had a dream in which Angie came to him, moving soundlessly down the street past the houses to the hotel, through the old wooden lobby up the stairs to his room—to make another daughter, she said. Another? he asked. Through the shadows of the room she glided to his side. She dropped her clothes, touched herself until she was wet, and then straddled him, slipping him inside her. Impatient for the flash of his dream in her mind, she had him faster and faster until, stirred from his sleep, his erection collapsing in confusion before climax, he woke, half desperate and half mad with hope, to a strange girl on top of him in the dark. Angie? he murmured; and she vanished.

L
ET’S SAY SHE KNEW.
After seventeen years with me, married for nine, with our first and only child in her belly, she woke one morning, looked at me asleep in our bed, and saw the monster. Maybe she never saw it before, so she must be held as accountable for her blindness as I am for my monstrousness. Maybe she saw it in glimpses and turned away, so she must be held as accountable for her denials. But in the first case, what was her worst crime, except to have been innocent? And in the second case, what was her worst crime, except to have given me the benefit of the doubt?