The Sea Came in at Midnight (6 page)

As for the terror she felt with the rage, that lay in knowing that everything their arrangement had been was about to change; and perhaps particularly because she was still feeling weak from her fever, she didn’t believe she had the strength for whatever was next. The other thing, the deep, personal violation she had no name for, came from something else: that not by his cock but rather by his loveless kiss on her, she had just had her first dream, of the morning almost a year before when the Occupant woke to find his wife, nine months pregnant, vanished from their bed.

F
OR A WHILE AFTER
that he didn’t come for her. “Look,” she tries to explain now in the dark of the Hotel Ryu in Tokyo, “I certainly didn’t care about the sex one way or the other. But I was a little concerned maybe his need for me had already exhausted itself, and I didn’t want to have to leave yet. Life …” she says, not at all sure she’s communicating clearly, “life’s really just a process of trading on your most valuable commodity, isn’t it? Intelligence, strength, talent, charisma, beauty. Well, in order to survive I traded on my nakedness, in the way I trade on my memories now, here, and on yours too,” she says to the dead doctor. “I traded on my nakedness till a more valuable personal commodity presented itself. It never crossed my mind that anything but my body was subservient to him. There wasn’t a moment my mind or spirit submitted to him, I knew that and I think he did too. … Then one night I went into his bedroom, where he had collapsed unconscious and drunk.” She had knelt by the bed and looked at his face; it seemed to her his beard had gotten much whiter in just the few weeks since she had come to live there. “Are you awake?” she had said to him.

He didn’t stir, snoring deeply, like she had heard him in Davenhall.

Kneeling there by his bed, she whispered in his ear, “How ridiculous,” her face inches from his, “how absurd. Didn’t slave girls and tying up women sort of go out with the Twentieth Century, even for pathetic middle-aged drunks? Whose life do you think you’re saving anyway? Not your own, and not your wife’s or your baby’s”—and she could almost swear she saw him wince, and for a moment she wasn’t sure he was unconscious at all. For a moment she was sure he was entirely awake, listening to her words only inches from his face; but she went on anyway—“so whose life, then, tell me. Is it possibly mine? You don’t think for a second you’re really saving
my
life, do you? That can’t really be what this is all about, can it? Or is it just to lose your own life altogether? Is it that you’ve simply become that broken now, you’ve simply become that pitiful, that you’ve decided everything is just beyond saving?”

She stopped and waited five, ten, fifteen minutes just to see if he stirred, the courage of her words succumbing to her instinct for survival; she really had to watch her smart mouth. She really couldn’t afford to so alienate him as to wind up back out on the street. Not only had she come to see this life, in this house that she loved with all the books that she read, as not such a bad one for the time being, less dreary than many lives, but she also understood—maybe he did as well—that though he had brought her home as his prisoner, he had become hers, or at least his own, locked up in his little room while she had the run of the rest of the house, as though he had relinquished his life to her.

And so her nights continued to pass dreamless as ever, as well as the days in which she sometimes daydreamed of being back in Davenhall. She daydreamed of lying on the deck of the boat that ferried tourists back and forth to the island, on the rare occasions when there were tourists, and wishing on the usual occasions when there weren’t that the boy who navigated the boat would stop just gazing at her longingly
and do something.
Such daydreams, however, ultimately led back to thoughts of her uncle and the mother who had disappeared when she was a baby—such an abstraction for Kristin it barely seemed worth thinking about at all—and then she stopped thinking about home altogether.

Now this house in the Hollywood Hills was as good a home as any, and if it meant being jailer to some old drunken crackpot under the illusion he was having his way with her, fine. One evening she went downstairs and stood for a while outside the locked room, staring at it; suddenly the door opened and, framed by the doorway, his silhouette stared back at her in the dark of the hallway. “What do you think you’re doing?” he whispered. Tonight he sounded especially nuts.

“Nothing,” she said.

“You were going to lock me in, weren’t you?”

“What?”

“You were going to lock me in.”

She snorted, incredulous. It had never dawned on her. For the rest of the night her thoughts were swept by the idea: locking him in the room—could she do that? And if she did, then what would she do with him? The next afternoon it made even less sense, when the Occupant was gone and she went downstairs to the room and examined the door, and saw that it locked not from the outside but the inside; so it wasn’t possible to lock him in even if she wanted to. For a moment she became frightened. He was really losing his grip now, she thought to herself. But it wasn’t nearly as terrifying as what she found beyond the door.

Not entirely to her surprise, the door was now unlocked.

Perhaps this was because he had accidentally forgotten to lock it, or perhaps he had left it unlocked on purpose, or perhaps at this point his accidents and intentions had become one and the same. In any case, stepping into the afternoon shadows of the room and wading through the empty vodka bottles, she saw the Apocalyptic Calendar for the first time.

A
COUPLE OF HOURS
later she was still sitting on the small footstool in the middle of the room, looking at the calendar, when she heard him behind her in the open doorway.

Not daring to turn, she braced herself for the repercussions, and for some time could feel him standing there, silently raging, she supposed. Finally, when she couldn’t stand it, she looked up at him only to find him studying the calendar as she had been, unperturbed. It appeared as though he, like her, was seeing it for the first time. Or as though, with her there, he thought there was a chance he might finally understand it.

The calendar entirely circled the room. It covered all the walls except the door, a sky-blue mural blotting out the windows and overflowing the walls onto the floor and ceiling. The dates on the calendar were not sequential like on an ordinary calendar but free-floating according to some inexplicable order, in some cases far-removed dates overlapping, in other cases consecutive dates separated by the length of the room. In varying shades of red and black, apparently senseless timelines ran from the top of the calendar to the bottom, from one end to the other.

“Look here,” the Occupant finally said, and began tracing the lines for her. She nodded as though everything he said made perfect sense. He was explaining that, after twenty years in which he had become the Western world’s foremost apocalyptologist, he had made the startling discovery that the new millennium, which he called the Age of Apocalypse, had not begun at midnight New Year’s Eve 1999 after all. This was because, he went on, over the course of the last half century the very definition of apocalypse had changed, as empirically and quantifiably as a virus changes, or a galaxy: “You see, sometime in the last half century,” he said, “modern apocalypse outgrew God.” Modern apocalypse was no longer about cataclysmic upheaval as related to divine revelation; modern apocalypse, the Occupant told Kristin, speaking with more passion than she had ever heard him express before, was “an explosion of time in a void of meaning,” when apocalypse lost nothing less than its very faith—and in fact the true Age of Apocalypse had begun well before 31 December 1999, at exactly 3:02 in the morning on the seventh of May, in the year 1968.

“How do you know?” she said.

And exactly as she had answered his question about that New Year’s Eve on the cliffs of Northern California, he replied, “I was there.”

For instance, the Occupant went on, by the modern definition of faithless apocalypse, the assassination of America’s greatest civil rights leader in April 1968 was not a modern apocalyptic event, because it had a rationale, however villainous the rationale was. The assassination of the civil rights leader’s
mother,
on the other hand, on the thirtieth of June 1974—Year Seven of the Secret Millennium, he pointed out to Kristin on the Calendar, down along the baseboard—
that
was a modern apocalyptic event, because it had no rationale at all: the woman had simply been playing the organ in church, when a maniac started randomly firing a gun.

Such incidents littered the Calendar in sensurround, connected by red and black lines. These included irrational assassinations and killings: nuns in El Salvador (Year Thirteen or, by the old, now obsolete calendar, 27 December 1980), Hollywood Eurotrash in L.A. canyons (Year Two: 9 August 1969), benign Swedish prime ministers walking home from the movies (Year Eighteen: 28 February 1986). Such crimes fundamentally defied whatever conclusions commentators and sociologists and ideologues frantically tried to offer. Incidents of the New Apocalypse included mass exterminations so detached from cogent explanation that tragedy could never quite overcome absurdity: airplane explosions off the coast of Long Island (Year Twenty-Nine: 17 July 1996), schoolchildren beheading other schoolchildren in Kobe (Year Twenty-Nine: 27 March 1997), billowing toxic clouds from East Indian insecticide plants killing two thousand (Year Seventeen: 3 December 1984), nuclear-reactor meltdowns in the Ukraine radiating 400,000 (Year Eighteen: 26 April 1986), 1,400 panicked Moslems on the way to Mecca crushed in a 110-degree tunnel when the air-conditioning failed (Year Twenty-Three: 2 July 1990), thirty-nine members of a religious cybercult, in the hope of riding a passing comet to the next world, committing suicide in Southern California (Year Twenty-Nine: 26 March 1997), and a recently added item, Kristin noted, dated Year Thirty-Two: two thousand women and children walking off a cliff in Northern California. “I can tell you for a fact,” Kristin murmured, just trying to be helpful, “it was no more than 1,999.”

The Calendar’s apocalyptic flotsam included the emergence of figures of such dazzling dementia as to momentarily mesmerize even thinking people: military buffoons in Uganda (Year Three: 25 January 1971), “holy” men in Iran (Year Eleven: 1 February 1979), megalomaniacal novelists in Japan (Year Three: 25 November 1970), genocidal schoolteachers in Cambodia (Year Seven: 13 April 1975), Nazi war criminals winning presidential elections in Austria (Year Nineteen: 8 June 1986), psychotic Texas billionaires polling one vote in five in presidential elections in America (Year Twenty-Five: 4 November 1992), and ludicrous duets in which it was difficult to know who was loonier—the memoir forgerer, or another psychotic billionaire so reclusively and obsessively shrouded in secrecy for so long it might be argued that the man who appropriated his memories became more the real rememberer than the real rememberer himself (Year Four: 13 March 1972).

More than these, the crucial reference points of the Apocalyptic Calendar were moments of nihilistic derangement no scheme could accommodate. If the various connecting timelines that the Occupant had drawn in red and black between murder and mayhem and madmen were secret tunnels running through a mansion of memory, in which history was only the floor plan, certain insane events large and trivial eluded the Calendar’s geometry altogether. They included the erection of London Bridge in Arizona (Year Four: 10 October 1971), the gassing of a subway in Tokyo (Year Twenty-Seven: 20 March 1995), the discovery of a burial ground of slaughtered eagles in Wyoming (Year Four: 3 August 1971), the disintegration of an American spaceship and all its crew due to the erosion of a tiny rubber ring (Year Eighteen: 28 January 1986), the discovery and announcement that video games triggered epilepsy (Year Twenty-Five: 14 January 1993), the decapitation of a notorious snuff-film director in a Manhattan traffic tunnel (Year Fourteen: 3 October 1981), the hounding unto death of an English princess by tabloid photographers in a fatal car crash in Paris (Year Thirty: 31 August 1997), and the mass marriage of four thousand people performed by a cracked Korean minister who chose their spouses for them, on 16 July 1982 (Year Fifteen), which by sheer coincidence happened to be the same day Kristin was born.

But finally, the Occupant told Kristin, he had determined that the true center of the Apocalyptic Age, and the true center of the true millennium that began on the seventh of May 1968, and the true center of the Apocalyptic Calendar among all its crisscrossing lines and floating anarchic events, the true vortex where all meaning collapsed into blackness, lay between two abysmal events so beyond the pale of unreason that a civilized person could barely bring himself to contemplate them. One, on 5 May 1985, was the pilgrimage of an American president to a German cemetery for the express purpose of laying a wreath in honor of the most singularly vicious, sadistic and incontestably evil human beings of the Twentieth Century. The other, only twelve days before on 23 April, was the utterly arbitrary decision by America’s greatest soft-drink company to immediately discontinue the single most successful product in the history of modern commerce, in order to produce in its place a bad imitation of its obviously inferior competitor.

B
Y THE TIME THE
Occupant had finished talking, afternoon had given way to dusk and dusk had given way to night. No light came through the pale blue calendar that papered over the windows except small throbbing white orbs of streetlamps on the road below the back of the house, that curved to the east before curling down the hill.

Bonkers with a capital B, Kristin said to herself. Around and around in the dark, in clockwise circles, the Occupant paced furiously. It was not unlike the night Kristin had awakened to hear him prowling the foot of her bed; mindlessly he kicked vodka bottles out of his way. She could see his blue eyes glittering in the dark. “What?” she said nervously to his silence.

He stepped toward her. He pulled her up from the small footstool where she’d sat almost motionless for hours and ran his hands over her body, as though searching for a particular spot on her thigh, along her forearm, under a breast.