The Sea Came in at Midnight (23 page)

He found the map several mornings ago, the same morning he saw the girl in the kite shop in Chinatown. It was buried in a wall in his penthouse that had been separated by another tremor. He had been out on his errands when the tremor hit, the paper lanterns that hung in the little Chinese eatery he was visiting dancing to something obviously stronger than a wind or a fog, fishball soup sloshing over the sides of the large black urn in which it simmered. Every morning before ten o’clock Carl had been making his way down the precarious stairs of the hotel to Grant Avenue and then up Bush Street to the little bakery where he buys bread, then returning to the Dragon Gate of Chinatown with its once grand monster perched above the entrance now as shabby and toothless as Carl himself, and walking through the gate up past the long-closed bazaar and stopping to gaze in the window of the old kite shop, its own monsters of wood and paper and nylon slowly disintegrating behind the glass. It’s a neighborhood of dead monsters.

At the little Chinese restaurant, one of the few in Chinatown still open, the cook always sends Carl home with some leftovers from the night before. Soup and bamboo shoots, sometimes a little piece of garlic chicken or moo shu pork or a “pot sticker” or two—a dumpling that sticks to the pot in which it’s fried. This one particular morning that the ground shook, it stopped Carl and the Chinese cook still in their tracks, and they held their breath, slowly peering around them to see if anything came crashing down; and it was on his way back to the old hotel that he stopped again to look in the kite-shop window, and saw the pretty Asian girl carefully and patiently painting one of the kites.

She looked up at him as he stood there gazing in the window, and she had the most blazing blue eyes he’d ever seen. He couldn’t remember ever seeing such blue eyes, certainly not in an Asian face, and he was so startled by them that it was only a few minutes later he realized how much the rest of her reminded him of that other girl from forty years ago—though he was quite sure the earlier girl had not had such blue eyes. The girl in the kite shop was probably about the same age as the other girl had been when he knew her, perhaps a little older, and this girl working in the kite shop looked right back at him for as long as half a minute, and then returned to her work.

It was a couple of hours later, after the old man made his uneasy way back up the hotel stairs to the penthouse and sat at the table eating his day’s one and only meal, that he noticed the wall on the other side of the room had separated from the tremor that morning. Just beyond the breach in the wall he could see the glint of the old blue paper, as blue as the Asian girl’s eyes. When he saw the blood on the blue paper, his first horrified thought was that there might also be a body behind the wall; and that night, from his bedding on the floor, he kept staring at the wall, until the next morning, after a sleepless night, he made himself pull part of it away to see what else was there. If there was a body, he kept reasoning with himself, surely he would have known about it before now—these walls weren’t that thick, after all—though on the other hand it was likely to have been there a long time, since this building had been abandoned for a long time. He wondered if he would find a weapon. He most dreaded finding a bloody knife.

But there was nothing else behind the wall. There were no other signs of whatever had happened here, or how the bloodstained paper with the numbers had ever gotten behind the wall in the first place. Maybe, he thought at first, the coordinates themselves held the answer. Maybe someone had been after the code that preceded the coordinates; maybe it was a secret formula of some sort. But if it was a secret formula, it didn’t seem likely it would have been stuck inside a wall; either it would have been taken or destroyed altogether. As a man whose life had been a grid, as a man who had lived his life by coordinates, Carl accepted a more personal meaning in the numbers, an amazing grace: they once were lost and now were found; and had been found by him.

It was possible, he supposed, they weren’t coordinates. But then what were they? A bank account, or a phone number? Upon investigation, the only possible place he found on the planet that might have such a phone number was Cameroon. At first he wasn’t even certain where Cameroon was. Just because maps were his specialty—he said to himself with irritation, in one of those arguments old men are always having with no one—didn’t mean geography was. Studying one of his maps of Africa, he eventually found Cameroon next to Nigeria, above the Congo. On another geological map, he discovered in Cameroon what looked to be a large volcano; that was interesting, but not an answer, or not one he could use; there wasn’t a buried treasure in a volcano in Cameroon, was there? And if so, would there be a phone booth next to it? Did one place a long-distance person-to-person call to a volcano in Cameroon?

It’s not a phone number or bank account, he decided.
2.3.7.5.68.19.
The 68 and 19 were coordinates; the 2, 3, 7 and 5, the code to which latitude and longitude, and what they meant. But then, in spite of himself, his thinking took a slightly more mystical turn; the first thing he noticed, the thing he realized right away, was how every single integer from 1 to 9 was represented in the series, with a single conspicuous exception, or at least conspicuous to anyone who spent any time at all contemplating the meaning of numbers. The truth was that Carl didn’t actually spend a lot of time contemplating the meaning of numbers, he was just a God damned mapmaker, so numbers were always just a means of measurement. But then he noted that all the numbers of the code that preceded the coordinates were prime ones, which is to say numbers that could be divided only by themselves. He was sorry the 5 came
after
the 7; it threw off the progression, and what did
that
mean? Since he wasn’t a numerologist, he couldn’t bring much expertise to the numbers’ meaning beyond the obvious: 2 was the basic division of life, of course, the bipolarity of earth and sky, day and night, male and female. 3, well, there were three physical dimensions, and the gestation period of the human fetus was divided into trimesters. 3 was the most explosive of numbers; it always challenged the 2 that preceded it, threatening to disrupt the 2, until it finally either tore the 2 apart or bound it together forever. Where there were two lovers, for instance, or even two close friends, the intrusion of a third upset the balance—unless the third was the child of the two. So 3 was the number of both unity and chaos, the holy trinity and the three-ring circus. 7: seven days of the week, the time in which God created the Earth and heavens and then rested; and in the Bible, if you were trying to scratch an existence out of the Egyptian dust, 7 was the number that made you run for cover or kick up your heels, depending on whether it was about to attach itself to years of feast or years of famine. 5 was the most primitive unit of higher mathematics, Carl reasoned, cavemen counting their five fingers, until eventually they evolved to joining one hand to the other, in the applause of ten.

But the number that caught Carl’s attention was the only integer between 1 and 9 that wasn’t in the series, in either the coordinates or the code. To begin with the obvious, 4 was the first integer that wasn’t a prime number. But more important, 4 was the number that space and time had in common. In time there were four major points on the clock, four seasons in the year. In space there were four directions, four quadrants. Of course, this translated into larger cosmic terms, if anything could be larger or more cosmic than space and time: four weeks in which the moon circled the earth, four weeks in a woman’s menstrual cycle, four weeks, in other words, in which the human race is constantly offered the chance to perpetuate itself. So 4 was the number of supreme order in space and time, composed as it was by the 2—the number of day/night and earth/sky—doubling itself, with 2 and 4 separated only by the anarchic and unpredictable 3. The absence of 4 from this particular series on this blue bloodstained page, with every other integer present and never repeated, struck Carl as so momentous that it by-passed mere significance and veered into the territory of the ominous. The blue bloodstained page was a map, in other words, in which the single most important numerical component of space and time and life
was missing.

And he still had no idea what it meant. He kept trying to read the formula as a hieroglyphic, trying to impart some symbolic value to each component; but he felt flummoxed from the beginning, almost before he ever got started, in his attempts to interpret the 2. Up or down? Day or night? He never had much consciousness of time anyway, the poetics of time always seemed banal to him compared to those of space; a mapmaker who cared more about time than space should be a watchmaker instead, and in his life Carl had hardly owned a clock, let alone a calendar. Computing figures, adding them, subtracting them, multiplying them, dividing them, adding some and dividing others, subtracting some and multiplying others, he searched for whatever formula would shift the cross-coordinates of the small blue map to a point on his larger maps of some obvious relevance, to a topography of some spectacular familiarity, as inevitably as crosshairs falling on a target.

H
IS LAST AND MOST
deranged adventure in cartography had been more than fifteen years ago, when he was hired by the city of Los Angeles to map the city’s missing dreams. Over the months immediately following the thirty-first of December 1999, the residents of L.A. began to realize their sleep was now utterly drained of dreams, a phenomenon that coincided with a wholesale ransacking of time-capsules from the city’s Black Clock Park over on the west side of town. Gradually the city’s populace sank into a state of insomniacal fitfulness and then a kind of functional madness.

Of course, by any logical consideration Carl’s assignment was absurd. It would be difficult enough to map dreams that existed, let alone those that didn’t: what’s missing from the world? a four-year-old girl had once run from the dusty mainstreet of a small Chinese ghost town to ask her bewildered uncle—and years later Carl was being commissioned to not only answer the question, but diagram it. While the leaders of the city were at a loss to account for why the dreams were missing, they were determined to track them down at any rate, because the life of the city depended on it. Though Carl had never been to L.A. before, he understood it was nothing if not the city of vicarious dreams, and that this was why the city leaders had had the urbanscape literally transformed into one vast projection room, where old movies were constantly screened night and day on the sides of buildings, on the walls of rooms, on the concrete slabs of sidewalks and the asphalt plains of streets.

A city of synthetic dreams flickered in the place between consciousness and unconsciousness where the collective subconscious had fallen through a schism. In his room at the dilapidated Hotel Hamblin, Carl slept as these hysterical dreams sputtered endlessly on his ceiling: a writer, watching a demonically beautiful woman ride the New Mexico mesas on horseback scattering the ashes of her father from an urn, falls madly in love with her; the most beautiful man ever filmed goes to the gas chamber not for a murder he committed but for a murder he
contemplated
committing, out of love for the most beautiful woman ever filmed; the manager of a casino in postwar Argentina marries the woman he loves solely for the purpose of destroying her for once rejecting him; a wealthy socialite walks into the sea so that the concert violinist she loves won’t give up his music for her; two lovers, an outlaw and a half-breed, crawl wounded and bleeding toward each other over harsh Western plains, beckoning each other with entreaties and unable to resist, though each knows the other is bent on murder. By the time that Carl, gathering together the information from all of his dream maps, had determined the missing dreams were located in the back room of a twenty-four-hour convenience store down at the corner of Adams and Crenshaw, amid the cigarettes and beer and sex magazines, he didn’t care that the city leaders fired him. One last dream convinced him he had had enough anyway.

The mystery of where this last bit of old film came from, and what subversive act introduced it into the dreamloop projected onto the city, was almost incidental to the horror. A young actress hung naked on a hook in a deserted bus terminal, in the throes of a terror nothing less than mortal, before her audition turned fatal. The scene had barely played itself out on his ceiling before Carl hastily packed his bag, ran from the hotel, and hailed a cab on the Strip; he took the cab to the Hollywood bus station and caught a bus north. He wound up in San Francisco, where he thought he might at least eventually get his own dreams back. After that Carl lost his faith in maps for a while, and sank into a destitution that eventually led him to the abandoned Hotel Poseidon next to the Dragon Gate of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

But now, after having found the small bloody blue map in the wall of his suite, he’s become consumed again with the logic of maps. All through the day and night he’s been charting coordinates, maps surrounding him on the floor beneath his feet as well as on the walls around his head, until his mind is swirling. Now, day and night, he’s been doing calculations in his head, racking his brain trying to figure out what algebraic strategy will illuminate the equation in question, what crucial
x
factor will provide the answer. By the end of this evening, ravenous with hunger since he hadn’t made his usual trek this morning to the bakery and the Chinese eatery, Carl had worked himself into a myriad of postulations involving deranged charts and courses and plots and crisscrossing latitudes and plummeting longitudes, his brain mad with equations, mad with coordinates, mad with
x
factors, exhausted by increasingly absurd results until he simply couldn’t turn his old brain off. Even when he sank into the chair at the desk and turned off the lamp and closed his eyes, he couldn’t stop the calculations from tumbling through his head. If anything it was worse in the dark, nothing but codes and coordinates rolling up and down the cylinders of his eyes, until even the insides of his closed eyelids became little maps.