Read Online The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson - Free Book Online Page A

happening and began pounding on the passenger door. As best she could, she appraised the mechanics of reverse, neutral, drive; found a gear and hit the gas and the car lurched; and kept on lurching for a couple of miles before she realized that if she continued, she would lurch into Las Vegas completely naked. She had no way of knowing this was the one American city other than New Orleans to which such an entrance might have endeared her, so she turned around and went back. When she came to him standing in the middle of the highway, pacing in circles in the dark talking to himself as though her abandonment of him was only the most temporary distraction from his obsession, she slowed and then stopped. They looked at each other through the windshield and finally he walked over. It took her a minute to figure out how to lower the window on the passenger’s side. “Do you want a ride?” she said.
    “Move over,” he said, “you don’t know how to drive.”
    “I’m driving, you’re riding,” she answered.
    “You don’t know how to drive,” he quietly insisted, “move over. I’m not going to leave you out here in the desert. I’ll drive us back to Los Angeles.” She saw that he could see how she was looking at him. “Whatever else I’ve done,” he pointed out, “I don’t think I’ve lied to you yet.”
    “Not yet,” she said. She slid back to the other seat and he got in the car and they drove home.

N OW WHEN HE HAD his headaches, he would lie in the dark of his bedroom and let her rub his head for hours.
    One night when he came for her, she grabbed his hair in two handfuls and even in the dark of the bedroom he could see her looking him squarely in his blue eyes. “What are you doing?” he whispered in alarm.
    “I’m making you look at me,” she said. “I’m making you look in my eyes while you fuck me, I’m making you see me while you do it.”
    He cried out, pulling away from her. On his knees he tried to scramble back to the far end of the bed, and all the while she held onto his hair. When he tried to stand, he pulled her up with him, she was clutching so tightly; the whole time she kept staring determinedly into his eyes. “What are you doing,” he kept saying.
    “Don’t you think it’s time?” she said. “Don’t you think it’s time you looked in my eyes?”
    “What are you talking about?” he choked. Together they tumbled to the floor and into the dark corner of the room.
    “It’s time you looked in my eyes,” she answered, but she meant: time I looked in yours. Time for a personal act of revolt. Time to throw your oh-so-highly intellectualized sense of chaos into a true chaos of the heart and senses. She didn’t much care anymore if he tossed her out of his life for it; she had about decided it was time for that too. They had never understood each other. If she had understood him, she would have known that for almost a year now, since his wife had vanished with their child in her belly, in his mansion of memory he had become increasingly lost and trapped. If he had understood her, he would have known she was a dream-virgin when he met her, and so wouldn’t have been surprised to wake one morning soon afterward and find that she had vanished too.

L ET’S SAY I’M A MONSTER . Let’s say I was never capable of love. Let’s say down in the pit of my soul, beyond whatever I tried to convince myself I believed, everything was always about surrender and control, so the bond I formed with the girl I brought home was true to who I really am, because it was base and hungry.
    Let’s say I never really believed in anything but myself. Let’s say my soul was so impoverished I never really believed in anything but my appetites, because of all the things I’ve felt, appetite was beyond my control. This assumes I ever really believed there was a soul to be impoverished. Let’s say from the first moment of my life, everything’s always been about me and nothing else, including