The Sea Came in at Midnight (2 page)

K
RISTIN WANTS TO GO
back up to her room, but can’t bring herself to leave the old man alone. Waiting for someone to come for the body, she sits back down next to the old doctor in the dark.

In death he seems less sad than she ever saw him in life. Is he now simply and completely empty of all his memories, or is he afloat somewhere on one in particular that’s brought him some peace? As he sat here in the hotel waiting for Kristin, did his thoughts drift and then, stumbling on a memory that would save him, and making a moment’s split decision, did he cast his lot, running alongside like a traveler jumping on a passing train, seizing his last and best chance to escape forever?

S
EVERAL MINUTES LATER KRISTIN
is still waiting. She makes small talk in order to break the awkward silence. Thinking of the ongoing account of his life that he’s been relating to her, she says, “Well, Doctor,” playfully feigning annoyance, “now I’ll never know how it all turned out, will I?” and then she realizes that
this
is how it all turned out. Who would have thought, she wonders to herself, that one’s life would run out before his memories? A couple of times she gets up from the seat and sticks her head back out through the curtain into the hotel lobby; Mika is on the other side of the room, still on the phone. A few of the other girls seem to have caught on that something’s amiss, and gather around the booth’s drawn curtain looking at Kristin. A couple say something to her in Japanese. She shakes her head and pulls it back inside.

After all, she simply can’t just leave him here, even if no one has asked her to stay. She remembers how she promised that when he finished telling his story, she would tell him hers; and for all the promises of his life that were broken, none more devastating than the ones he made to himself, she can’t bear to break this last one. So as they wait, and as the minutes pass, the west of midnight slowly shifting to the east of it, she begins to speak, and it makes sense to start four months ago, on her last night in the little town called Davenhall, in the Sacramento Delta where she grew up. “Since I’ve never had a dream,” she begins, “one night I woke and went looking for one.”

B
UT THOUGH SHE’D HEARD
a man has an erection when he dreams, she certainly hadn’t wanted the dreams of any of Davenhall’s chinamen, old wrinkled dried-up dreams. As she tells her story to the old Japanese doctor now, Kristin sort of glosses over this part, because she doesn’t want to shock him, even if he is dead.

“After all,” she says to the old doctor, “a dream’s only a memory of the future, right? And there I was living in this little town on this little island in the middle of this delta that had no future at all,” and so that night she quietly stole from her room in back of the town tavern and into the back alley, after first determining that her uncle wouldn’t stir from his drunken stupor behind the bar. Above her, the bare branches of the trees had scraped the moonlight. The dark had hummed with the buzz of mosquitoes.

Soundlessly she had moved down mainstreet past the houses to the town hotel, through the old wooden lobby and up the stairs, from room to room, looking for any random stranger passing through. She knew that the one she found in the shadows was drunk on his back by the way he snored: “I could smell the vodka,” she tells the dead doctor in the Hotel Ryu, “I mean, you’re not supposed to be able to smell vodka, but remember, I’d been living in back of a bar my whole life,” and so she had pulled off her jeans and touched herself for a few minutes until she was wet. Then, straddling the sleeping man, she slipped him inside her.

I
MPATIENT FOR THE FLASH
of his dream in her mind, she’d had him faster and faster. As he stirred from his sleep, his erection collapsing in confusion before climax, he murmured a strange woman’s name, half desperately and half with hope. “Angie?”

A thousand years ago, in the last moments of the Tenth Century, in an ancient Celtic village twelve kilometers from the coast of Brittany, exactly one thousand men, women and children waited in their wooden boats for an apocalyptic tide to come rolling in at midnight. In the light of the moon one could see across the valley all the boats perched high above the landscape on stilts, which the villagers expected to be washed away by the tide, setting them adrift in the millennial deluge. It was only just before midnight that the leaders of the village realized to their dismay they were missing someone, that in fact they didn’t number exactly one thousand, but 999—the name of the year that was about to expire. Since the village didn’t wish to expire with it, it seemed an ominous miscalculation. From the vantage points of their landlocked boats, the villagers could see the one-thousandth in the village tower to the northwest, in the direction of the sea, watching from the highest window.

Waving frantically to the villagers, trapped and unable to bear the thought of a colossal ocean wall advancing across the countryside and smashing her and the tower into smithereens, the young girl climbed into the tower window, gazed at the night, spread out her arms, and dove to her death.

In the boats, witnesses shrieked, confusion erupted. The father of the seventeen-year-old girl, who had only belatedly realized his daughter was in the tower, and was restrained from rushing to her by the other villagers who feared he would be swept away by the stupendous midnight sea, wailed at the sight of his daughter’s plummeting. “Murderers!” he cried in futility, pointing at the priests watching the drama from the stern of the boat. Later, in the earliest days of the Eleventh Century, after the midnight of reckoning had come and gone with no heavenly wrath manifest, some legend would eventually take shape in the surrounding villages; but in the meantime there were only questions and rumors: Did the young girl in the tower fall asleep, and was then simply forgotten as everyone else scurried madly for the sanctuary of the boats? Did she stay behind on purpose, out of remorse for some transgression that placed her in the tower in the first place? Or, precisely because she was number one thousand, was she intentionally locked away there by the priests, who considered her a suitable sacrifice to whatever pagan god or druid was in control, as the first thousand years capitulated to the second. …

In the last moments of the Twentieth Century, with neither protest on their lips nor ecstasy in their eyes, two thousand women and girls—“that’s what the newspaper said anyway,” Kristin advises her rapt listener in the dark of the Hotel Ryu, “but I can tell you for a fact it was only 1,999”—silently walked off a high cliff of the Northern California coast and plunged to the black waves below. It was impossible to know what they hoped was waiting for them in their last step off the rocks into space. Perhaps they believed some hole would open up in the night, and they would step into infinity. Perhaps they believed the open palm of the cosmos would catch them in midair. Likeliest they had no idea what to believe, since until this very moment they had no idea what rendezvous awaited the end of a migration that had begun eleven weeks before in the desolation of southern Idaho. The cult’s male priests brought up the rear, their hands clandestine in their white robes. Only when, at the back of the migration, a few women of less resolute faith finally understood what was taking place and tried to bolt, did there emerge from the white robes into the hands of the priests the long curved knives, swaying as methodically and casually as if they were cutting the tall grass.

A
HERETIC AT HEART,
Kristin had broken for freedom.

“You have to understand,” Kristin continues, “I never had anything to do with their cult in the first place. I had just gotten off Davenhall Island as quick as I could, given that … well, that part’s not worth going into,” she assures the dead man, “but let’s just say I left in a hurry. So there I am standing by the road somewhere north of Sacramento, with only the clothes on my back and my books”—Brontë and Cendrars and Kierkegaard in a cloth bag—“when the whole migration comes around the bend,” and also at the exact moment that the priests were troubling over their latest count of the flock: 1,999, having lost someone somewhere along the way. Which on this particular New Year wouldn’t do. Like earlier priests, they believed in nothing if not the precision of their rituals, so they happily scooped up the young girl as the last plump sacrificial morsel.

Such precision “saved” Kristin, if that was the word, on the night of December 30, twenty-four hours before the Great Walk Off, when she had roamed the cult encampment in the dark, up and down the hillside from sleeping bag to sleeping bag, still looking for a dream, just as she had on her last night in Davenhall. Whether the young priest she selected actually slept through her ravishment or just pretended to sleep, no one could know; the impromptu tribunal proceeded on into the early-morning hours amid a flurry of whispered accusations that eventually woke the other campers. Soon, dawn made a decision imperative. The priest was excommunicated. Kristin, number two thousand, was “forgiven,” to not much gratitude or concern on her part one way or the other. She would have been even less grateful had she known the evening’s plan.

Then at 11:57 on the thirty-first of December, the best-planned mathematics of the priests went haywire. Suddenly aware of what was happening, Kristin ran for as much land as her feet could cross, the ocean furious in her ears, priests lunging this way and that, swinging their knives. “I almost thought of stopping to ask one of them, you know, just how they could be so sure. You know?” For a moment there in the deathly still chamber of the memory hotel with the old dead doctor next to her, she wonders if this entire subject is rather tactless, given the circumstances; but she persists. “How could they be so sure before I came along that the count wasn’t really 1,998? You understand? But this one maniac coming at me was swinging a v
ery
large machete—so I thought maybe I should postpone that particular conversation,” and Kristin, younger and faster than the priests in pursuit, and still with a dream to find, alone among the congregation survived the stroke of midnight.

A
LMOST A MILE AND
a half down Highway 1, somewhere between Mendocino and Bodega Bay, she finally convinced herself there was no one chasing her anymore, and slowed down. She walked along the side of the road in the dark, panting hard and listening; when she heard a car approaching from the other direction, she stepped out onto the blacktop and into the oncoming headlights, frantically waving her arms. It nearly ran her over, barely swerving as she jumped back out of the way at the last minute. “Two hours later I finally flag a ride—same van, coming back from wherever they were in such a hurry to get to.” Two women in their late twenties: the one in the passenger seat didn’t look so happy to have stopped. Where you heading? the one driving asked. Inland, answered Kristin.

R
ELIEVED TO BE DRIVING
away from the ocean cliffs, Kristin didn’t care about anything else. Since she never dreamed, she knew the conversation between the two women in the front seat was real, even as she dozed in the back.

They spoke in the same tense whispers of the priests the night before. It was crazy to pick her up, said the one in the passenger seat, what were you thinking? and then the driver, She’s a kid, besides she might have told someone she saw us, didn’t you see we nearly hit her on the way up? and then the passenger, Well, what now, we can’t just drop her off somewhere; and then the driver, We’ll keep her with us a while, see what happens—and then the driver started giggling as the passenger glanced back at Kristin over her shoulder, checking her out.

Kristin feigned sleep. The driver kept giggling. “Stop it,” the passenger spit. The driver stopped, then after a moment said, “Pass it,” and the passenger, hesitating, passed a bottle from which the driver took a drink. From her nights in the bar back on Davenhall Island, Kristin recognized the smell of bourbon.

T
HEY TURNED LEFT AT
Bodega Bay and made their way through Marin County, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and driving up Lombard toward the center of the city just before sunrise. Kristin had never been to San Francisco before, unless one counted being born there, and with the light of day and the suspension of ominous talk between the two women in front, she watched from her window. A couple of times the woman in the passenger seat would turn and look over her shoulder at Kristin, who noticed the driver was also watching her in the rearview mirror. “You hungry?” the driver said.

“Yes,” said Kristin.

“We’ll stop at a little bakery over in North Beach.” She kept watching Kristin in the rearview mirror. “What were you doing out there on the road?”

“Well, now,” Kristin said, “you know someone might ask you the very same thing,” and then thinking to herself, Kristin, do you
always
have to be smart? “Heh heh,” said the driver, not finding it particularly funny, to which the passenger’s pointed silence answered, See, what did I tell you? Except for a stray banner blowing down the street, there wasn’t a sign of celebration. It would be another hour or two before Kristin could be certain a midnight tide hadn’t washed everything away after all, and that this particular New Year had been no different from the ninety-nine that preceded it or the nine hundred that preceded them. The women parked at a bakery on Columbus and went inside. Eating her croissant and drinking her espresso, Kristin changed strategies, employing abject apology: “It’s a long story,” she said meekly, “but thanks for picking me up. Can I have another of these?”

They bought Kristin another croissant. The two women sat staring at her as she ate, the driver sipping her coffee and the passenger smoking a cigarette. “You can stick around with us for a while,” the driver said; the passenger just kept staring at Kristin through the cigarette smoke.

Their names were Isabelle and Cynda. At first Kristin had a hard time keeping track which was which. After breakfast they drove around the city a while, finally parking in front of a hotel on Grant not far from Union Square and sitting for half an hour, looking back and forth between the hotel and each other: This it? Isabelle in the driver’s seat kept asking Cynda, who kept checking the address on some piece of identification that obviously wasn’t hers. They murmured between themselves and glanced back at Kristin now and then, and finally got out of the van. Nonchalantly the three of them walked into the lobby of the hotel past the front desk and the concierge and the bell captain, and got in the elevator. Using a key, they took the elevator to the top floor.