The Sea Came in at Midnight (27 page)

From the door of Room 7 one can almost see her in the shadows at the end of the hall if one looks closely enough, a faint figure in the dark on the floor against the wall. From the door to Room 6 the Occupant is afraid the girl will almost certainly be noticed. But maybe not from the door to Room 8. He goes back into Room 7, closes the door, unscrews the bulb so the light can’t be turned on, and waits in the pitch black.

Five minutes pass, then ten, then fifteen. He’s in the middle of trying to devise what can only be a very unsatisfactory and highly confrontational alternative to his original plan when he finally hears the sound of footsteps in the hall, though it’s impossible to be certain exactly where or whose they are. He’s wondering what he will do if the Turk notices the girl lying in the dark end of the hall a few feet away. Then he hears the door of Room 8 open, a brief exchange between the Turk and the man to whom the Occupant spoke outside, and then the door close followed by the footsteps of the Turk starting back down the corridor toward the stairs.

As the footsteps pass Room 7, the Occupant loudly raps twice on the wall next to the door. The footsteps stop. The Occupant pounds more violently; outside in the hall the Turk says something through the door, and the Occupant answers only with more pounding until the door opens and the Turk comes in. As the Turk stands stupefied in the dark of the room, blinking in confusion, the Occupant steps from behind the door and out into the hall, closing the door behind him. He’s turning the lock just as the Turk, with an outburst of outraged Turkish, finally understands what’s happening.

The Turk begins banging on the door. The Occupant lifts the naked girl from the shadows and carries her down the hall. Behind him the Turk is making quite a racket, and halfway down the stairs with the girl, the Occupant meets the German security guard. You better see what’s happening, he shakes his head to the German, while I get her out of here. For a moment the German looks at the girl in confusion, and then up the stairs in the direction of the Turk’s voice; fortunately he doesn’t appear to fully grasp outraged Turkish. He pushes past the Occupant, who now knows he doesn’t have much time. He hoped the snoozing German might be a bit slower in his response.

The Occupant carries the girl down the stairs and out through the lobby. He carries her out the building as the sound of the crashing sea a block away fills the night. He’s barely gotten across the street, setting the girl against his car and trying to hold her up as she keeps slumping while he unlocks the door, when he hears the faint shouts of the Turk inside the building suddenly become louder. He knows the German has just let the Turk out of the room. He opens the car and puts the girl inside. He’s getting into the driver’s seat when they come running out into the street, the Turk shouting and the German scooping up a pipe from the gutter; swinging wildly, the German catches the back window of the car with the pipe and shatters it just as the Occupant is pulling away.

T
HE OCCUPANT DRIVES THE
girl back to his house and carries her inside, down to the room that was Kristin’s. He lays her on the bed and pulls the sheets up around her and gets her a glass of water and tries to make her drink. Then he goes back out to the car and brings in the groceries he got at the market, some of which have spilled all over the trunk in his lurching getaway from Baghdadville. He puts away the groceries and then hangs the two blue dresses he bought on Melrose in the closet of Kristin’s room, where he also leaves the shoes and underwear, and for several minutes stands looking at the bassinet that Kristin put away there. For a while he sits in the dark of the room watching the blonde in bed and soon it seems to him her breathing has gotten easier and she’s resting more comfortably, and then he goes back into his own room and packs a simple overnight bag with some clothes, as if he’s going to be gone for only a couple of days. He goes downstairs and stands there for a while studying the Calendar again, as though perhaps he will now understand it better and be able to read it with more clarity; finally, however, he assures himself it remains incomprehensible to him. If there were something meaningful to be done with it, if some ritual bonfire would change anything, he would do it, but he leaves the Calendar on the walls and goes back up to where the girl is sleeping, and there in the dark he might ask her to forgive him if he was entirely sure she was really still all that unconscious now, and if he didn’t believe it would only be the worst faith of all. He goes back upstairs with his overnight bag, leaves the house, gets back in his car with the shattered back window, and, heading down the hillside in the night, nearly hits some fool driving a Camaro with its lights off.

T
WO DAYS LATER HE’S
in Paris. He checks into the same hotel on the rue Jacob near Odéon where he lived for a while almost eighteen years ago. He walks down the boulevard Saint-Germain to the rue Saint-Jacques where the rue Dante converges, only to find that the apartment building in which he lived with his mother and father in 1968 is now a hotel as well.

He talks with the concierge for a while and explains how the flat on the top floor was once his home. It’s difficult to be sure just how fascinating she finds this disclosure. But she agrees to show him the flat, or rather what used to be the flat; it’s since been divided into three separate units, one of which was once his bedroom, the second his parents’ room and the third the living room. All three are vacant. The Occupant pays for a two-night stay in the room where his mother and father once slept, and then goes back and checks out of the hotel on the rue Jacob. He walks into the Quartier latin and gets a sandwich, then over to the river where he leans on the low stone wall gazing out at the water. Finally he makes himself turn back up the boulevard Saint-Michel, walking to the Sorbonne, sitting for three hours in the enclosed courtyard where more than thirty years ago time became a ghost and history became an equation that disproved itself. I am 7 May 1968 he says to himself. I am students sitting in the windows smoking, I am songs being sung and wine being passed, I am a low drone rattling the walls of the courtyard. I am the yellow lights of the Sorbonne in the dark and, in the amphitheater from the lectern to the galleries, students and professors talking themselves into exhaustion. I am strategies proposed and rejected. I am the train workers on strike, I am two thousand workers on strike at Nantes, I am Renault on strike then Citroen, then the chemical plants of Rhône Poulenc, I am the post offices closed, I am the newspapers closed, I am the airports closed. I am the power plants on strike, I am the strippers of the Folies Bergère seizing the premises, I am Nanterre closed. I am Berlitz closed. I am the Sorbonne closed. I am many angry hands raised against the sun, I am an outcry against the dull bourgeois spectacle, against the matinees of affluent matrons and fat balding doctors, I am the chant of
Métro boulot dodo,
I am Sartre saying something silly, I am history pretending to be a science now crumbling into absurdity, I am the gaslamps of Odéon and the blond colonnades of the theater fastened with red and black flags in the archways, I am cops with fiberglass stares and poreless faces, I am a girl’s heedless murmur
Pas de provocation
and then the response of pandemonium, I am the snarling of the trees in the gardens, I am the last time the garden pools will ever stand still and shimmering, I am murder beyond the intimidation of witnesses, I am children caught in fences, caught in the hedge of roses, pink bloody petals strewn across the grass, I am café tables spilled and overturned, wineglasses hurtling through the air, I am window shutters splintered from their hinges and old men roasting chestnuts flung from their stools on the street corners, I am the quotation boards of the Bourse going up in flames, I am a dull red smoke in the night, I am the exodus of the riot from the Luxembourg Gardens into the mouth of the Métro at Gay Lussac, I am panic trapped in the turnstiles, smashing the exit gates, tumbling down the steps into the tunnels where the trains rumble in, except there are no trains; I am a cul-de-sac of melee. I am the moment in which explodes the Twentieth Century’s great ménage à trois between chaos and faith and memory. I am the moment when everyone turns to everyone else, student to student, cop to cop, student to cop, cop to student, thrilled beyond comprehension, faces shining, mouths trembling, eyes ecstatic, and says: we are all out of our minds.

He spends the rest of the afternoon making the rounds of Parisian cemeteries. He goes from Père Lachaise, where Proust and Chopin and Bernhardt and Piaf lie among the vandalized remains of L.A. rock singers, to the Montparnasse Cemetery, where Baudelaire and Beckett and Saint-Saëns rest in the arms of Hollywood-starlet-turned-radical-activist suicides, to the Montmartre Cemetery, where Berlioz and Nijinsky and Truffaut hear no rock and sleep with no blondes that anyone knows of, to the little Saint-Vincent cemetery where no one of any note at all is buried, to the catacombs where the millions of bones have no names, let alone celebrity. The Occupant isn’t looking for starlets or rock singers or immortals. He’s looking for the grave of his father.

But the body of a man isn’t as immutable as a time-capsule. Finally he gives up, and around seven o’clock strolls back down the boulevard Saint-Germain to the Lipp, where he has dinner of chicken and potatoes and spinach and red wine. At that time of evening the Lipp is uncrowded and he’s the only one in the restaurant. Then he walks back to the hotel and up to his room and lies on the bed staring at the ceiling.

O
F COURSE IT ISN’T
the same bed his parents slept in. It’s a different bed, probably two or three or half a dozen beds removed from that earlier bed, and not even in the same place but against a different wall altogether.

Actually the room doesn’t look anything like he remembers it. It’s been entirely repainted and redecorated. If not for the general layout of the room and its relationship to the outer hallway—which used to be the hallway that ran from this room to his own, the hallway into which he rushed when he heard the gunshot and where his mother grabbed him in time to stop him from seeing the body—it would be difficult to be sure this was the right room at all. Lying on the bed thinking about this, he gets up and starts searching the room. There’s a dresser against the wall where the bed had been, and after inspecting the wall around it and moving the dresser away to look at the wall behind it, he gives up. There’s no telling for sure that there was ever a bullet hole in the first place, since the bullet would have had to go through the girl, and perhaps through the headboard of the bed, to lodge in the wall. And if there was ever a bullet hole in the wall, in more than thirty years the chances are pretty excellent someone patched it up and painted over it. Obviously the actual bullet itself would have been recovered by the police.

He lies back down and turns off the light by the bed and goes to sleep. An hour and a half later he wakes in the dark with a start, to the presence of someone in the room. Angie? he whispers. In the moment that he wakes he’s certain she’s there; when he turns on the light and there’s no one, he might conclude it was only a dream, except for the fact that since the night that Kristin left, he hasn’t had any dreams. He doesn’t sleep again for the rest of the night. Exhausted in the morning, he shaves and takes a long shower. Though he feels as if one of his headaches is coming on, by the time he’s gotten to the Gare Montparnasse, the headache has passed. In one of the shops at the train station he buys a large leather billfold and stuffs it with most of the money he got when he closed out his bank account on his way over to The Angel Eyes that last night in L.A. He rents a locker in the train station and puts the billfold in the locker. He doesn’t much like the idea of leaving the money in the locker, but he doesn’t want to open a bank account and he doesn’t want to keep it in his room or anywhere on his person. He isn’t going to be staying in the room much longer anyway, or in Paris, for that matter.

This is the day he begins his campaign to save the whores of Paris. Clockwise he scours the city searching; he finds the first in Pigalle. She’s fifty-something years old, with once black hair going white and most of her teeth gone, and can barely stand against the shop window where she plants herself whenever the shopkeeper doesn’t chase her away. Seeing her ravaged face flashing black circles and black lines and a flesh the color of marble, the Occupant knows immediately she’s dying. When she musters everything in her being to give him a smile, it’s so awful and heartbreaking he recoils; backing away from her in a horror he can’t disguise, he turns on his heels and runs, and when he finally gets up the nerve to look back over his shoulder, he sees her slumped back into her place on the ledge of the shop window. A few minutes later he returns and, propping her up, waves down a cab that drops them off ten minutes later at a small right-bank hotel. The concierge of the hotel takes one look at the woman and turns them away. They go to several more hotels of ever-diminishing reputation until one gives them a room. He takes the woman upstairs to the room and undresses her and bathes her as best he can at the bidet and puts her in bed. He goes back downstairs and pays for the room and catches the last Métro down to the river, where he walks down to the quay below the Pont Neuf and hides the train-station locker key between two stones in the wall a hundred feet away from where he sleeps beneath the bridge. A few hours later in the night, he’s awakened by a couple of thugs who roll him, and by dawn he’s pummeled over most of his body, his mouth dried with blood, but the locker key is still in its place.

The second whore is a terrified fourteen-year-old he meets in Les Halles. He buys her dinner and puts her up in a hotel and that night under the Pont des Arts he’s accosted again. The third whore is a sad plain junkie he picks up on the rue Saint-Denis after she’s been viciously beaten by her pimp. He gets her a hotel and nurses her wounds and leaves some food for her on the small table by the bed where she sleeps. He isn’t interested in the good-looking whores or the healthy ones or the girls on the avenue Foch who can take care of themselves. Rather it’s the ones with the chaos in their eyes who are each adrift in their own millennia where memory has no beginning or end.