Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

And then I stopped. Not because I was babbling but because of the nights and the lights forgotten. And I saw it again, right then, that light, not in that room but in my head.

In my head, I was standing on the boat. In my head, the girl with the black hair was standing on the beach. The man was kneeling at her feet. In the light of the moon was another light, a flash of something soundless and instant, that went off between his face and mine. Then I saw the blade in her hand. Then in my head I was standing in the back room of the library archives and there was a glow through the library windows from the street. There were cops all around and Ion Wade standing in front of me. Looking just over Wade’s shoulder I saw Janet Dart or Dash with her camera. And just beyond the cops and Wade and Janet Dart, I saw her in the corner, hidden as deep in the dark as she could bury herself. I saw all this in my head as though I were looking at the enlargement of one of Janet Dart’s photographs, sharpening its background definition; and Janet Dart was right, some faces have their own light. Her hair was blacker than the corner itself so that only her face was a pale haze, and only her eyes shone with the glint of the weapon that caught the glow through the windows and cut me across my eyes.

She was there, I whispered. I let go of Janet Dart or Dash, who dropped her hands and rubbed her wrists. She was there all along, right in front of us, I said.

Of course, said Janet Dart.

I turned from the gallery of black spots and walked to the wall that would have been bars had this been Bell Pen. I waited in the middle of the room for a long time.

I thought, How could we have not seen her? Cops all over the room and she was right there in the corner; how could we have not seen her? But in fact I had seen her. I knew I had seen her because I could see her now, back there in the corner, flashing the knife in my face. And if she had not wanted me to see her, why didn’t she put the knife beneath her dress, why was she there at all? Why was she watching me and what was she waiting for me to do? How was it I never noticed anything of her but her knife and her face, not her dress or her feet or her very presence in a room filled with many people?

I turned to Janet. Of course? I asked.

Of course, she said again. I told you she went back in the library after I found her on the steps in front.

So you saw her there too, I said.

I have her picture, said Janet. She pointed at the black photos. But it’s not the picture I’m looking for, she said. For Janet Dart’s camera it was not the face with its own light. Did you think you would find it that night, I said, the picture you were looking for?

Yes, said Janet.

Because she was there? I said.

Because you were there, said Janet.

But I’m not the one you’re looking for, I told her.

You’re the one everyone’s looking for, she told me.

I left her. As I walked out the door I thought I heard her say, from a far place, She has such a hold on you. Whoever she is, it’s such a hold. I spent half an hour trying to find my way down to the street through all the zigzagging halls of the warehouse. Doors locked behind me. At some point all the doors lock behind you instead of before you. Every place has its point of no return. All the way back to the library I was followed by cops.

I was born in America. ‘Thirty-some years later a storm blew in from Sonora to lash the far outpost of L.A. where I lived in a tower that held the legends of America’s murdered men. The rain beat against my home. My tower rose like a secret passage into the maelstrom. At night I read the white maps of a woman as charted by a phantom poet, and in my head I carried the black spot of her photograph. The storm lasted five days and the water that ran through the streets carried doors torn from their hinges. The peaks of the waves took the form of birds, white foam extending into wings until wild white gulls were everywhere, flying into each other and falling into mauled heaps on the water. When the storm had passed, it took with it the fog that clotted the bay, and when I rose from five days and nights of rain and poems and black portraits and looked from the top of my tower into the blue city below, the sea itself was black. Thick white rain had fallen leaving a black smoking sea. The trees were bare and leafless, cold bald amputees after the white rain, and from the top of my tower Los Angeles was a seashell curling to its middle. The roof of the shell was beveled gray, the ridges pink where the clouds edged the sky, and as with all shells there was this dull roar, you know the roar, the sound of the sea they told you when you were a child.

I was born in America: and I have to finish this soon. I have this feeling of urgency, that penuItimate flush before the end, the last rush of blood to the face and light to the eyes. I once supposed I was bleeding in order to bleed myself dry; now I wonder if it was the flow itself I loved. Now I wonder if it was the spilling itself that held me speechless. It isn’t that my voice is failing; rather, it almost sounds familiar, the voice of a dead relative from the bedroom closet, from back behind his clothes and shoes I’ve been wearing since he left. I won’t delude myself that integrity can be reborn or that passion can grow young. But the maps I’ve stolen from the archives navigate more than just the face of a woman. And if she was there in the corner of the archives that night as I believe, then she knows it too, and she’s waiting for me with the light of her face and her knife.

The evening the storm cleared I went out to the lagoon. In the twilight and the smoke from the sea the mansions sat in a green and silver cloud threaded by a tangle of empty trees. I found the boatman I’d talked to the week before. I’ll put you out there buddy, he said, but I won’t hang around to bring you back. We run into any feds I turn right around, I don’t need trouble with them. Feds go out there much? I said. Every once in a while, he said. It’s not the girls they care about, the girls have got their system. It’s the others, the ones they don’t know. Guys like you, said the boatman, guys with their own reasons. The feds hate people with their own reasons.

As we got closer to the mansions he told me of the pimps who used to live in town and bring the men out there. The pimps had operated under the assumption that they kept the girls out there in the lagoon like animals in a wildlife sanctuary. As usual, such a mistaken assumption, said the boatman, leads to other mistaken assumptions. The girls put up with it for a while. Then one day someone noticed there weren’t any more pimps around. They were found by the cops on the banks of the Rossmore Canal, one of the three main waterways of Hancock Park. An entire beach of pimps, every last one with his throat slit, lined up along the canal, said the boatman, gulls perched on their foreheads shitting. The girls dawdling under the trees twirling their hair and smoking cigarettes, watching bored as the pimps were hauled away by their feet. Not a witness in the bunch of course.

Now we roared up one of the smaller canals and the boat man cut his engine. The girls had already been at work. On the sand I could see the imprint of couples. The tide came in and went out and the imprints were filled with white foam, so the sand was spotted with the wet white pictures of lovers. The sun was down when he dropped me off; his farewell wasn’t exactly profuse. Ten feet from me there was nothing left but the noise of him. I was standing in front of a huge earthen house that was dark except for one gaslight coming from a front corridor. The house was arabic and like all Los Angeles houses it could have been buiIt anytime in the last five thousand years. As I walked up to the gaslight the sound of the boat disappeared completely and there was nothing but the faint din of the coast in the distance, the sound of the city buildings slivering through the stripped webbed trees. I got to the corridor which led to a door but off to my left were some steps upward and I took them. They led to a veranda. From there I could see the rest of the canal and some of the other houses; for a moment the water ignited from the sun as if someone had set a match to it and then went dark, a new fog drifting in and hanging on the fences like foliage. Creaking wooden bridges swung in the wind over the water between the houses. Three or four small boats were tied to shambling makeshift docks and someone was moving from dock to dock lighting the lanterns on the posts. After a while I could make out lights all over the lagoon, lanterns and gas lamps and a few fires.