The Sea Came in at Midnight (22 page)

This is a house, Louise said to herself, where everything disappears.

The last thing she did before leaving was go back down to the bottom floor, into its lone room, and tear off from the Blue Calendar the date in the farthest corner that read
2.3.7.5.68.19.
She folded it into a square and put it in her pocket.

Then she went back upstairs and pulled on her leather jacket and went outside. Looking over her shoulder, she quickly walked down the street to her Camaro, noting the truck still parked with the black dishes, though there seemed to her perhaps fewer dishes than there had been the evening before. She tried to start the Camaro, more dead than ever. I can drive the truck down to the service station at the bottom of the hill, she thought, and get someone to come up and start the Camaro; then I can leave the truck and the keys where I found them.

She got in the truck and started it up, and rolled down the hill with her cargo of black satellite dishes. She was quite sure people stared at her as she descended the hill, though in fact the residents of the neighborhood had gotten used to seeing the truck take the ruined dishes away every morning, if not so many at one time. She was so paranoid by the time she got to the bottom of the hill that she kept on driving past the service station, and then found herself heading west on Sunset Boulevard toward the hotel where she lived. As she drove on, her paranoia grew rather than diminished; she wanted to stop the truck in the street and run from it, and at the same time she felt like she didn’t dare stop, and so kept on going. When she reached the hotel she drove right on by, hit Santa Monica Boulevard and continued west until she reached the beach, then turned north on Pacific Coast Highway.

She drove up Pacific Coast Highway through Malibu and then on to Ventura. An hour later she was hungry and stopped at a Mexican stand in Oxnard and had a fish taco. After lunch she got back in the truck and continued north, passing the turnoff back to Los Angeles and heading on to Santa Barbara. Past Santa Barbara, the highway cut inland before picking up the coast again outside San Luis Obispo where, after five hours of driving, Louise now realized she was exhausted from not sleeping much the night before. Thirty miles past San Luis Obispo, she stopped for the night at a beachside motel south of San Simeon. By the time she paid for a room she was already low on money, having filled up the truck twice since leaving L.A., where she had also left everything she owned behind at her hotel. The next day she continued on up what had become Highway 1, through Big Sur, where the winding road along the seaside cliffs—treacherous even in the best of conditions—was partially fogged in and slowed her progress to ten miles an hour. With every perilous turn she could hear satellite dishes rolling around in the back; she expected them to go tumbling out of the truck altogether, crashing to the ocean below. By the time she got through Big Sur it was dark, and in Monterey she slept in the truck.

From Monterey she assumed she would take the San Jose route into San Francisco, which was mainly eight-lane highway, but a service-station attendant advised her that traffic was always so bad she might want to consider just continuing up the coast instead, through Santa Cruz and past the lighthouse. As she got farther and farther up the coast, people seemed to find her satellite dishes both generally less interesting on the one hand, barely noticing at all, and more individually interesting on the other hand, since each time she stopped, either to sleep for the night or get a bite to eat or pick up something at a market, she would return to one or two fewer dishes in the back. By the morning she woke in Monterey, there were only three left. While she certainly didn’t miss the dishes, their disappearance didn’t particularly alleviate her paranoia since, she noted to herself, a trail of stolen black satellite dishes up and down the entire West Coast seemed rather conspicuous for anyone who wanted to follow it.

She decided to ditch the truck in San Francisco, from where she would catch a bus to Sacramento and then a ride from Sacramento to Davenhall to find her daughter. She now realized how fate had forced her hand in its own mysterious way, conspiring to pull her to her daughter beyond all resistance. Many times she had wondered if she would have the courage to take that final ferry across the water to the island, as she hadn’t that afternoon many years before when her daughter was just a little girl standing on the other side of the river in her little blue dress. In such moments Louise both felt herself pulling away from this meeting and, in response, driving herself toward it all the more ruthlessly; and so, driving herself ruthlessly, upon entering the city she went directly to the bus station, parked the truck, and went into the station to buy a ticket.

There were no more buses to Sacramento that afternoon, however. The next wasn’t scheduled until ten-thirty the following morning. Louise sat in the station prepared to spend the night there, and for a while sat calmly looking at the torn blue corner of the Calendar she had taken from the house in Los Angeles, and the date on it. But it made her nervous to have the truck sitting right outside with the last of the telltale dishes, and so she decided she should move it; then she had an idea: she would leave the truck in the parking garage of the hotel for which she had the key. The girl from L.A. might be more likely to find it there, assuming she wanted it back. So Louise folded the piece of Blue Calendar and put it back in the pocket of her leather jacket and looked up the address of the hotel in the phone book, and vaguely remembered from her time living in San Francisco right after her daughter was born that Grant was the main street running through Chinatown. She went back out to the truck and got in. It was night when she got to the hotel.

But there was no parking garage that she could find, only a valet in front. If a valet parked and unparked all the cars, why would there be a key for the parking garage? She kept looking at the key to make sure it was the right hotel, and then, as she gazed at the sign of the hotel over the outside of the lobby, her eyes rising up the side of the building, it occurred to her maybe P didn’t stand for “parking” after all. She kept watching the windows on the top floor, trying to determine if it was a light she saw there, or if the place was perhaps vacant, and then she kept thinking about something odd Kristin had said, about sweet dreams she wouldn’t know, somehow so portentous a non sequitur it was almost a code, and she thought about waking that morning in the house in the Hollywood Hills to the keys sitting right there on the table next to her, and to a realization—a knowledge she had forgotten as soon as she knew it. But maybe more than anything else she thought about how old she had felt sleeping on a sofa, and how old she would feel sleeping in the truck again or the bus station.

And then after thinking all that, she didn’t think at all. She just followed an impulse, and left the truck where it sat, and strolled past the Dragon Gate that opened up into Chinatown, past old Chinese dreams and Chinese jabber and the clamor of gongs, through the doors of the hotel and across the lobby and into the elevator, where the key fit perfectly into the lock that read “Penthouse.” She turned it and the doors closed. She leaned against the back of the elevator and closed her eyes, and didn’t open them until she heard the doors open first.

T
WENTY YEARS LATER, IN
a decade that lives in its own hindsight, an old man opens his eyes and—his brain making one last inexplicable calculation—sees all his coordinates collapse to zero.

He’s surrounded by maps tacked up to the walls of the old condemned penthouse. Maps of the world, maps of every continent, maps of oceans and maps of mountain ranges. Maps he’s collected for more than sixty years, since he was a boy, maps he’s worked with for more than forty years, since he became a professional mapmaker. Almost all of them are old maps, more than a few outdated, brown at the edges and coming apart at the seams, where they’ve been folded and unfolded, again and again, as maps always are. Maps are really the only thing he has left, kept in a shoe box, dragged around with him his whole life.

As well as by the maps, the old man is also now surrounded by scraps of paper on which he’s made endless calculations for what seems like days, though in fact it’s been only a little less than forty-eight hours. The calculations have been translated on the maps into coordinates. The mystery of the coordinates has so gripped him he hasn’t slept at all, until he now feels slightly delirious; he hasn’t gone out for food today, and is finally feeling hungry. He’s done nothing but sit in the shambles of the penthouse at the top of the old condemned hotel, staring at maps and plotting coordinates, and then sometimes staring out the window, and then back at the maps in a growing rage over what the coordinates mean.

The maps surround a window before which sits an old wooden table covered with all of old Carl’s calculations. The window overlooks the dark and desolate Dragon Gate of what’s now more ghost town than Chinatown. As twilight falls and the small desk lamp burns brighter, it becomes harder to make out the graffiti of the building across the street, though Carl has read it a thousand times if he’s read it once; when and how someone wrote this particular graffiti isn’t entirely clear, since it didn’t reveal itself until the building in front of it fell. All the buildings of San Francisco are destined to fall sooner or later, including presumably this destitute old hotel in which this destitute old man has taken up residence in the penthouse. If you’re going to be a squatter, Carl says to himself, you might as well squat in a penthouse. But he wonders what scrawled manifesto will materialize on a hidden wall when this hotel comes down, taking him with it.

A
S THOUGH IN RESPONSE
, the hotel shakes a little. The old man braces himself.

Not this time. Well, actually this might be a good time, Carl thinks, it might make me forget the business with the coordinates. But do I really want to die in rubble with their riddle still in my head, expiring in frustration? So let me just figure this one out, Carl asks whatever god or fate is listening, before you bring everything down.

Once he had told someone, what was it? that he wasn’t obsessed with maps, that maps were obsessed with him. “I have faith,” he had said, “and faith transcends obsession.” He had hoped to be a playwright then, and had begun the maps one morning while sitting in a Village café back in New York City drinking his morning espresso and working on his play—when sometime during the third act a character walked onstage, opened his mouth, and nothing came out. Now, years later, looking again at the building across the street, Carl remembers he made a map of graffiti once, back in the Eighties. Was that the one the city fired him over? No, they wouldn’t have fired him for that: a map of graffiti in a city like New York almost made a kind of sense; a map of graffiti would barely be crazy at all, it would hardly even qualify as eccentric.

No, there had been odder maps to come. Having mapped the city streets and having mapped the city bridges, having mapped the sewers and having mapped the subways, having mapped the power grids and having mapped the water ducts, having mapped the sound currents and having mapped the wind tunnels, Carl had eventually begun mapping the true heart of the city, until there was nothing left to map and until his superiors, trying to run things as reasonably as possible, trying to get a grip on things in a time that already seemed to be slipping from their grip, didn’t want to see another map from him, not his maps of graffiti or his maps of sexual rendezvous or his maps of mad women or his maps of runaway children or his maps of dead bodies—not, in short, his Maps of Real Life, not to even mention the later maps, the Maps of the Subconscious City: the maps of nervous breakdowns and the maps of psychotic episodes and the maps of religious hallucinations.

Now that Carl thinks about it, it was the Map of Unrequited Love that got him fired. It was his most subjectively conceived and tenaciously rendered cartographic triumph, inspired by a pretty, secretive Asian girl who dumped him at the time; he was around twenty-five or -six; he can’t even remember her name now. But while he can’t remember her name, he’s thought of her every so often, every once in a while, since it was she who inspired him to make the Map of Unrequited Love that provoked the city to fire him, that changed the direction of his life, though he can’t honestly say it was for the worst, even if now he’s a slightly addled old man without a dime to his name or a single human contact of any significance, with nothing but his maps. In the past few days he’s been thinking of the girl a lot, ever since a few mornings ago when he passed a small kite shop in Chinatown and saw another young girl who reminded him of her. Now he thinks about both girls as he stares at the mysterious coordinates tacked to the penthouse wall in front of him, the coordinates he’s been trying to decode for days and which are finally starting to drive him crazy.

More out of instinct than any analysis, he knew immediately, the moment he saw them, that the final numbers in the series were coordinates. Jesus, he’s been making maps more than forty years so he God damned well knows coordinates when he sees them. But by any latitude or longitude he chooses, north or south or east or west, 68 and 19 wind up in the middle of nowhere—the Sargasso Sea, the Arabian Sea, off the coast of Iceland, deep in the jungles of Chile. Maybe a treasure is buried in one of those places. I hope to God, Carl growls to himself, it’s not a God damned buried treasure. I’m too old to go search for a buried treasure. No, it’s obvious the answer is in the code that precedes the coordinates, written on the small crinkled square of old blue paper tacked to the wall: you’re mocking me! he yells at it, but the truth is, it’s not mocking him so much as haunting him, it’s commanding him to solve the equation from somewhere beyond the grave. Because splattered across the series of numbers, and across the rest of the old blue paper, is a very deep purplish-brown stain that, as soon as he saw it, Carl knew instantly was a burst of blood. Not the thin streak of a single cut or the trickle of an accident, but the splash of a gleefully violent wound, delivered to someone who wore the map a little too close to the heart.