Free The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson Page A

now everyone existed just to be exhilarated.
    The smell of exhilaration’s smoke settled over everything. From one end of the city to the other … but I never found it as overpowering as the smoke in the hall of our flat that last time. That was the smell of years to come. What would have been one of the more sensational murder trials in modern France just happened to coincide with the country’s most anarchic days since 1871, if not the last years of the Eighteenth Century, so, busy picking through the rubble of the following weeks, France barely noticed. The dead girl in my parents’ bed was a literature student at the Sorbonne, part of the protest only hours before she was shot, maybe destined to be cut down by a charging cop, dying for anarchy instead of desire. I’d seen her once before, actually, one afternoon when I was with my parents at the Deux Magots. She was a couple of tables over, red hair and freckles and a smile I still remember. The position of the gun on the bedroom floor near her hand indicated the possibility of suicide, maybe like it was meant to, a conclusion the police rejected when they charged my father with second-degree murder. He went first to trial then prison stonily and uncharacteristically silent. The romantic in him, compelled by a personal code that was narcissistic at heart but still had its occasional heroic results, I guess, may have been protecting Mama after she caught the girl in bed with him and killed her. It wasn’t till years later it occurred to me it might have been Mama, sick of her silent suffering and feeling unleashed in a Paris flirting with havoc, who was in bed with the girl, something my egomaniac father would have been too proud to explain to anyone let alone police and newspapers, and which wouldn’t have absolved him in any case.
    In any case Mama disappeared. Into the Apocalyptic Age! Into the Secret Millennium! The next couple months, as the country descended into disorder, the closest exit out of France was Belgium and you had to get there first, presumably on foot since no cars drove because they had no gas, no trains ran because they were on strike, no planes flew because they were grounded. … I never saw her again, or my father. I was shuffled around a while among friends in Paris, then shipped back to New York and New England to be shuffled among friends there. Didn’t communicate with my father in prison before leaving Europe, hadn’t communicated with him when word came of his death—by then I was sixteen, deposited at a commune in upstate New York and finding the loss of my voice altogether convenient … when I got the letter, I read it once, and went into town to catch a movie. I was unmoved by the lost opportunity of reconciliation—let’s say I never would have believed it. Let’s say I saw nothing to reconcile. Let’s say I’m a monster.
    Years later, after I married Angie, the day we moved to the house in the Hollywood Hills, I stumbled on a box of letters. Flipping through, I found an empty envelope addressed in a woman’s hand I knew immediately, though I hadn’t seen it since I was eleven. I kept blinking at it as if something would click in my head that explained it. I had no recollection of receiving it. Though the envelope was torn open at the top, I had no recollection of having read it. In a panic I went through the box knowing the letter had to have fallen out, but it wasn’t there. I went through the other boxes and for a long last time stood in the middle of the empty apartment knowing that letter was there somewhere, slipped through some crack, and that if I left now I’d never find it.
    Finally, of course, I had to leave. Kept the empty envelope with its postmark faded and obscured, the date lost forever and the origin a tiny French town I never heard of called Sur-les-Bateaux, about twelve kilometers—according to the atlas—from the coast of Brittany.

O H I’M SORRY. HAVE I SPOKEN TOO LOUDLY? HAVE I RAISED my voice?