The Sea Came in at Midnight (32 page)

It still doesn’t occur to Kristin, even after what’s happened this afternoon, even with what happens now, that she’s a vortex of chaos after all. Irrationally, all she can think is that she shouldn’t have stood in the window of her room all those mornings, exposing her pregnant belly to the din of the city. All she can think is that if she had it to do all over again, she would have gladly taken her little boy back to the silence of the delta town that starved her of her dreams; all she can think is that it’s because he was starved of his own little umbilical dreams that the glistening yolk of little Kirk Blu has broken, emptying from her.
Noooo,
Kristin moans, and drops to her knees sobbing. She begs him to come back. She drops to her knees retracting every stern admonition she’s given him: I promise I’ll make the world whisper to you, she cries, and scoops him up in a puddle, holding him in the cup of her hands and splashing herself with him, on her face and neck and breasts, until she can’t distinguish the tears of her eyes from the discharge of her uterus, until both have seeped into her and she’s bone-dry.

When Kristin wakes the next morning, it’s the first day of the Year 33 in the Age of Apocalypse. She slowly sits up, exhausted, profoundly aware of nothing inside her. She has no idea what time it is, but it seems still early and she wants to go back to sleep, and wonders when Mika will knock on her door. She opens the window of her tiny chamber and lies back down staring at the rare generous blue of the Tokyo sky. For a while she rubs her stomach absently, as though hungry, though she’s not hungry. She rolls over onto her side and for several seconds lies looking at the image of the scorched-black one-winged bird on the time-capsule that sits against the wall. She closes her eyes and opens them again, and the falling black bird is still on the steel cylinder, and she pushes herself back up painfully, her side killing her, and scoots across the tatami mat to look at the capsule more closely.

Because at this moment she isn’t thinking so clearly, she doesn’t immediately understand what happened. She has it in her head that maybe someone broke into the hotel during the night and switched capsules on her or something. But then she remembers the water smashing her and tearing the capsule she held from her grip, and she remembers going under and then surfacing, and grabbing the capsule that was in the water in front of her; Doctor Kai’s capsule, she imagines, is now somewhere at sea, sailing to Hawaii or the Philippines or Australia. She wonders who will find it.

It isn’t a matter of coincidence that the Occupant’s capsule has returned to her, she does know that. In the midst of everything else that confuses her, she would really have to be a big point-misser to believe anything ever really has to do with coincidence. Though she knows the contents of the capsule will link her to the Occupant forever, as morning comes through the window of her room, she works at prying open the capsule with the spoon for the morning tea. She’s so stunned by the single item she finds inside that she just puts it back in. Wrapping the capsule in a small blanket, she huddles in the corner of the room and closes her eyes; and cradling the capsule to her breast, untouched by a stranger and unkissed by chaos, she dreams.

A
NGIE, THE OLD MAN SAYS
. Twenty years after Kristin’s flight to Tokyo and the Occupant’s to Brittany, in the old condemned hotel penthouse by the Dragon Gate of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Carl wakes to a secret as old as memory. Angie, he says in his sleep, waking himself with it; but this time the name doesn’t disappear as before, this time when it flits across his mind and he says it out loud, it hovers there, in the air just beyond his lips. For a moment, the zero of his maps threatens to answer as before; but in the next moment, as her name still lingers, there is no more zero, any more than there’s an answer that matters to his mysterious coordinates on the wall. What matters is that the
x
factor that rendered him zero wasn’t the remembering, it was the forgetting; and now he remembers and so, with perhaps more relief than true peace, with perhaps more hope than true faith, he is slipping back into a more contented sleep than he’s known in days, when the building begins to shake.

L
ETS SAY I HAD
it to do all over again: and I changed everything. Let’s say I gave myself over a little more to faith and a little less to vision, let’s say I could take back the first lie that broke a heart, let’s say that in settling for something smaller I in fact gained something larger. Let’s say that everything I did, I never did; let’s say that everything I never did, I did. Let’s say that having exploited chaos in terms of my own imagination, I learned to trust it in terms of my life; let’s say love won every struggle over cowardice. Let’s say I didn’t
think
so damned much. Let’s say I dared to suspend myself in the moment between breaths. Let’s say I found a way to say one comforting word to her the night she cried, or even to just reach over and touch her. Let’s say I had the courage of my sensuality, thus overcoming my depravity; let’s say I had an emotional fortitude to match the tenacity of my ambitions. Let’s say my dreams were not so attached to the tangible rewards that I was smart enough to know didn’t matter.

Let’s say I was incapable of despair, because despair is not a grief of the heart, but a grief of the soul.

As he lies in the shadows of the ancient village tower of Sur-les-Bateaux, the last thing the Occupant sees is the smile of the girl standing before him, the last thing he hears is her reply.

Let’s say, he hears her tell him, that sometime, somehow, not in this life, not in this millennium, but in another, one of your own, that begins tonight and ends a thousand years ago, you will have another chance.

A
T FIRST SHE DOESN’T
realize she’s dreaming. Since she’s never had a dream, she doesn’t know how to identify one; rather she believes that the small flicker she sees on the far side of the darkness, on the other side of unconsciousness, is the dream itself, which she approaches across some limbo between consciousness and sleep. It’s like the flicker of a gunshot in the distance, except as it grows closer and larger, it has a sound of its own. It’s as though this small flash is on the far horizon of a vast veldt she’s crossed, and as she grows closer to it she believes at first it’s a time-capsule, glistening in the light of a star she can’t see, until she finally identifies the sound coming from it as crying, and when she finally reaches it, she sees it’s a baby sitting on the ground waiting for her. He stops crying and looks up at her, blinking.

And she wakes. Or rather she’s awakened, in a flash of nausea, by a bubble breaking the surface of her dream and reclaiming its place in her womb.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 by Steve Erickson

cover design by Jason Gabbert

978-1-4804-0997-2

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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