Read Online The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steve Erickson
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apocalypse and chaos; let’s say even apocalypse and chaos have been conceits of my psyche and bad faith—this assumes I ever kept any kind of faith at all, bad or otherwise. … Let’s say I’m faithlessness made flesh, the modern age’s leap of faith stopped dead in its tracks, fucking around with apocalypse and chaos only because in some broken part of me, among any wreckage of honor or altruism or commitment or compassion, or the bits and pieces of moral vanity, I really believed the abyss was always just the playground of my imagination, and I was its bully.
How do you know, the girl said the afternoon she found the Calendar in the downstairs room, when I told her about the true millennium of the modern soul, and I said, I was there. I was eleven. My father was a semi-celebrated, proverbially lion-maned American poet and romantic egomaniac, larger than life and moving us to Paris when his political activities made staying in the States uncomfortable. Dragging Mama and me from one forum to the next, from one podium to the next, from one adoring standing ovation to the next, from Boston to San Francisco till institutional harassment and ominous threats and anonymous phone calls seemed to make exile the only viable option. He reveled in exile more than he ever really agonized over it. … Mama, half French half Russian Jew, determined self-sacrificer and silently suffering martyr, first went to America as a student after the second world war had cast across her family twin shadows of looming extermination on the one hand, rumors of collaboration on the other. What was exile for my father, she was determined to call home. Back in Paris maybe she was also determined to stop either the suffering or the silence, if she couldn’t stop both.
I was asleep in our flat at the corner of the rue Dante and rue Saint-Jacques, on the left bank of the city, not far from Notre Dame, when I woke to a sound unlike any I’d ever heard before. People always say it’s like a car backfiring but hearing it anyone can tell it’s different. Years later I still don’t know whether the gun was Mama’s or my father’s, or belonged to the dead girl in their bed. One of the smaller mysteries. Like lots of things, it never got explained. But when it woke me, even at age eleven I knew something was wrong, and I ran out my room in my underwear straight to my parents’ bedroom and Mama catching me in her arms, and I didn’t ask what happened … in my eleven-year-old life I already hated anything that might constitute emotional upheaval. I just wanted her to tell me everything was all right, that I could go back to sleep, that it was only a sound from out in the street.
Then there was a sound from out in the street.
It was the night of 6 May 1968, or to be exact 3:02 in the morning of 7 May. The shot that woke me woke the modern age. Echoed down the rue Saint-Jacques to the boulevard Saint-Germain and the university a few blocks beyond, where a few thousand students had taken over, thrown out the professors, draped red and black flags over the statues of Hugo and Pasteur, hoisted banners that read FORBID THE FORBIDDEN and BELOW THE BOULEVARD, THE BEACH, and waited as what seemed like tens of thousands of cops surrounded the school waiting in turn. Who knows what any of them took the sound of the gunshot to be. Years later, for everything that’s been written about it, there’s no record of any student having a gun, and the police weapon of choice was the truncheon, when it wasn’t a tank … did the cops really think some student had fired a gun? Did the students really think some lone cop had fired a gun? Maybe they thought it was the snap of a truncheon across some anonymous body. Maybe it doesn’t matter in the least. Maybe in the early-morning hours what mattered was the sound’s sheer explosiveness not its source, and it cracked the waiting in two—and cracked in two there could be no waiting anymore. The cops charged.
Upstairs
How do you know, the girl said the afternoon she found the Calendar in the downstairs room, when I told her about the true millennium of the modern soul, and I said, I was there. I was eleven. My father was a semi-celebrated, proverbially lion-maned American poet and romantic egomaniac, larger than life and moving us to Paris when his political activities made staying in the States uncomfortable. Dragging Mama and me from one forum to the next, from one podium to the next, from one adoring standing ovation to the next, from Boston to San Francisco till institutional harassment and ominous threats and anonymous phone calls seemed to make exile the only viable option. He reveled in exile more than he ever really agonized over it. … Mama, half French half Russian Jew, determined self-sacrificer and silently suffering martyr, first went to America as a student after the second world war had cast across her family twin shadows of looming extermination on the one hand, rumors of collaboration on the other. What was exile for my father, she was determined to call home. Back in Paris maybe she was also determined to stop either the suffering or the silence, if she couldn’t stop both.
I was asleep in our flat at the corner of the rue Dante and rue Saint-Jacques, on the left bank of the city, not far from Notre Dame, when I woke to a sound unlike any I’d ever heard before. People always say it’s like a car backfiring but hearing it anyone can tell it’s different. Years later I still don’t know whether the gun was Mama’s or my father’s, or belonged to the dead girl in their bed. One of the smaller mysteries. Like lots of things, it never got explained. But when it woke me, even at age eleven I knew something was wrong, and I ran out my room in my underwear straight to my parents’ bedroom and Mama catching me in her arms, and I didn’t ask what happened … in my eleven-year-old life I already hated anything that might constitute emotional upheaval. I just wanted her to tell me everything was all right, that I could go back to sleep, that it was only a sound from out in the street.
Then there was a sound from out in the street.
It was the night of 6 May 1968, or to be exact 3:02 in the morning of 7 May. The shot that woke me woke the modern age. Echoed down the rue Saint-Jacques to the boulevard Saint-Germain and the university a few blocks beyond, where a few thousand students had taken over, thrown out the professors, draped red and black flags over the statues of Hugo and Pasteur, hoisted banners that read FORBID THE FORBIDDEN and BELOW THE BOULEVARD, THE BEACH, and waited as what seemed like tens of thousands of cops surrounded the school waiting in turn. Who knows what any of them took the sound of the gunshot to be. Years later, for everything that’s been written about it, there’s no record of any student having a gun, and the police weapon of choice was the truncheon, when it wasn’t a tank … did the cops really think some student had fired a gun? Did the students really think some lone cop had fired a gun? Maybe they thought it was the snap of a truncheon across some anonymous body. Maybe it doesn’t matter in the least. Maybe in the early-morning hours what mattered was the sound’s sheer explosiveness not its source, and it cracked the waiting in two—and cracked in two there could be no waiting anymore. The cops charged.
Upstairs
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