The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson

seemed … maybe it might have just missed being perfect. If I was there listening, I could tell for sure.”
    “No,” she said through the door, “I don’t believe it missed at all. I think it was divine. I think it was groovy. I’m tired now, you know, baby? It’s been a long night. How’s your headache?”
    “Open the fucking door, Max.”
    “I’m going to sleep now, baby. I’ll come see you again soon.”
    “Max!”
    “Good night.” I didn’t get out of the room till one afternoon when, with neither the sound in my ears nor the pain in my head as bad as usual, I heard the voice of yet another woman outside my door. Hello? I heard her, and on my knees I scrambled from the mattress to the door and pressed my ear against it. Hello? she said again, and I felt a very strange confusion as to whether to answer, as if, faced with the prospect of release, I wasn’t as sure anymore I wanted it. When I tried to call back, for a moment I found my voice failing again, till I finally managed to croak out a strangled response: Yes, I said, getting on my feet, Yes! and then rapping on the door. Are you all right? the girl on the other side said, and when I tried to answer, once again my voice failed, and so I just kept rapping on the door. I stepped back from the door to see if it would open. But nothing happened, and after a moment to my great fury I could hear amid the sound in my head footsteps of the girl leaving. I slammed my hand against the door and returned to my mattress on the floor and dozed. …
    A few minutes later I woke and got up and went to the door and turned the knob and found it unlocked. I went out into the apartment, like a man emerging from the underground into the sunlight of the earth’s surface, gazing around at the empty flat. Looking back at the door of the room where I had spent seven months, I saw Max had written, in black marker ink, OCCUPIED. I left everything behind—including my tapes—took fifty-five bucks from the cigar box where she kept her spare cash, and got out.

L ET’S NOT ANALYZE TOO much why I went back to Paris in ’82. The timing was probably random anyway … sooner or later I was going back, and it just happened to be then. Got fired—for “insubordination” and being a “disruptive influence in the office,” but that’s not worth going into either—from a job with a research firm where I had a thousand facts of chaos at my fingers … and fleeing that and an affair with a recently separated woman still feeling bad about her ex-husband, I went to Paris. So there I was. I lived for a while with some anarchists on the rue de Vaugirard, not far from the Eiffel Tower, then moved into a hotel on the rue Jacob, just off the boulevard Saint-Germain, where the concierge supplied me with toothpaste and toilet paper and aspirin for my headaches while deferring payment on the hotel tab.
    “Can we make a deal,” Angie said at the Brasserie Lipp the first time I saw her, “we won’t ask too much about the past?” How much of a past can she have? I thought. She was a daunting nineteen. I was an unconvincing twenty-five. It was July and she was the only person on the boulevard that afternoon sitting in the sun, with no use for the shade, the slimmest of breezes moving the long black hair that fell on her shoulders. I would have thought she was so sophisticated in the black boots she wore outside her jeans like the French girls, if not for the ridiculous little stuffed bear she sat in the chair next to her. Later the only thing besides the bear that betrayed her was the way, forgetting herself, she would bite her nails, because Angie biting her nails was as fully incongruous with the rest of her as she meant it to be, the rest of her such a practiced determined cool.
    She never broke a sweat. Amerasian, she wasn’t quite beautiful, but near enough to confuse and unsettle the passing guys. Twenty years before, her mother met her father in Tokyo while on leave from duty as