Free The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson

in our flat Mama, half hysterical, held me in the dark of the hall and I could smell gunfire through the door of their bedroom, open just enough so I could see in the light of the bed lamp my father standing there holding his head in his hands. A lifeless feminine arm jutted into view. Bedlam exploded in the streets. Tearing myself from Mama I ran downstairs as she chased after me, and in the dark of the rue Dante up and down the rue Saint-Jacques people were yelling and running, ripping cobblestones up from the road, hurling them aimlessly, pushing cars over on their sides and setting them on fire. Cops were swinging at everything. They surged against the sidewalks, uprooted the chestnut trees. Glass glistened everywhere. Tear gas canisters rolled in the gutters. The air was thick with fumes and smoke and there was a chant in the distance I didn’t recognize as Métro boulot dodo till I read it in the papers later.
    It meant, more or less, subway, work, sleep—a bitter reduction of everything the modern age had become. It was the moment when the meaning of the modern age unraveled. In the years leading up to this moment there was an incontrovertible moral logic to upheaval, upheaval was the instrument of morally distinct aspirations, whatever you thought of those aspirations. In the minutes before 3:02 on the morning of the seventh of May, the students who seized the Sorbonne did so on behalf of complaints that ceased to matter at all by 3:03 … by 3:04 upheaval lost all rationale, it was the expression of a spiritual chaos no politics could address; by 3:07 I was running in my underwear in the street, sprung loose of moral meaning along with everyone else, time exploding in a void of meaning; at 3:08 I turned to see Mama behind me in the door of our apartment building, not running after me but just looking as if to commit me as fast to memory as the moment allowed. And then she just walked from the doorway into the crowd as calmly as everyone else around me ran insanely. …
    I stopped and said, Mama? and stepped toward her, when someone knocked me over. When I picked myself up, she was gone.

T HERE I AM CRYING in the street. Around me there’s a sound that’s more than just the collective voice of upheaval, it’s the collective voice of the age growing into a din like I wouldn’t hear again for years … the louder it grew the louder I tried to call her, till I was screaming so loud finally my voice was gone. It would be seven years before I got it back.
    Timelines of chaos! Anarchy of the age! It wasn’t possible everything could have happened in that one night, it just seemed like one night. Had to have been nights and nights, weeks of nights. … The last lucid memory I had was standing there looking for Mama in the riot, then turning back to the doorway of our building on the rue Dante waiting for her to come back and somehow knowing she wasn’t going to come back. And I wasn’t going back upstairs, back to the gun on the floor and the smoke in the hall and my father in the bedroom, so I took off down the boulevard Saint-Germain in the direction of the very café where I would meet Angie years later, and up the boulevard in waves I could see them in the streetlights, tanks rolling, cops marching. In their black helmets in the night they looked headless, thousands of headless cops snapping truncheons in their hands and a sound from the helmets like black hail bouncing off, handfuls of bolts and nuts thrown by students. I traveled below the sight lines of chaos. I moved unscathed, except to be drenched by erupting water mains and buckets of water that Parisians in the upstairs windows kept dumping on the students below, whether to douse or revive their fury I never knew—I don’t think they even knew. Medical students in white frocks streaked with blood ran back and forth shouting at everyone to calm down, but no one wanted to calm down, the spectacular disintegration of everything was too exhilarating, and