Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

I’m sorry, I said. I heard my echo in the dark and on the water.

You bastard, I heard her say.

I said, I’m sorry. But I have to get out to that hotel.

You don’t know the water, she said.

I’ll bring the boat back, I called to her.

Don’t fucking bother. You come back and I’ll fucking slit your throat.

So I’ve heard, I said. I pushed my way out into the lobby and then glided toward the doorway. She stood in the distance on the stairs as though at the back of a cave, the water black and wounded with occasional light. You don’t know the water! she shouted. I nodded and turned a corner, and she disappeared from view.

I emerged from the house and floated out into the canal. She was right of course; I didn’t know the water, and all I did was meander aimlessly between currents. Finally I got myself to the nearest of the docks where I tore off one of the posts that was lit at the top. I doused it in the canal and pulled it back into the boat with me. It wasn’t flat enough to use as an oar but it was ten or twelve feet long and, kneeling in the boat, I could push myself along the shallow part of the river. I kept as quiet as I could, heading back up canal until I reached the main waterway from where we had originally come. I imagined a tribal horde of women suddenly emerging from the houses with weapons, to get back their boat and take care of me good.

I got to the southern edge of the lagoon and could see the old hotel plainly in the distance. But I could also see the girl was right: the hotel was far, farther than I’d thought, and now I was in some trouble. The water was too deep for the pole to do any good. I was somewhere between lagoon water and ocean water; the sea itself wasn’t a quarter of a mile behind me, and while the tide was washing me in rather than out, the island where the hotel stood was still far away. I was sitting in the dark staring into the distance and trying to gauge whether I had the remotest chance of making a swim for it when I heard a voice that sounded as though it were directly behind me. I turned and a large schooner was some twenty feet away, sailing silently by; someone on deck shone a light. Need a tow? came his voice, and out here on the flat water beneath the flat black sky his words carried as though he were sitting in my boat.

I’m trying to get to the hotel, I said.

He answered in an even lower voice than before, I can’t take you there, that’s off limits you know. I can tow you in to the southern harbor, though.

The southern harbor was not the one in Downtown but rather where the East Canal emptied out onto the coast, near the beach where I’d seen the Latin girl and Ben Jarry the first night. All right, I said. Toss me a line and I’ll follow you in.

The schooner edged up to me and this guy in a jacket and T-shirt tossed me a line. In the dark he looked as if he was probably friendly. Then we started on our way.

Everybody trusted me tonight.

Because the point was, of course, that since we were heading to the southern harbor rather than Downtown, we were going to pass the island with the hotel — if not right by it, then a hell of a lot closer to it than I was now. It’s possible the guy on the schooner suspected something. He insisted that I ride in his boat instead of remaining in my own, which dragged along behind us at the end of a rope. So the blonde in the mansion wouldn’t be getting her boat back after all.

I kept watching the island, waiting. When we had almost passed by, skirting its eastern tip on our way to port, I knew this was as near as I was going to get, about half the distance from where I had been before, out in the middle of the water. In another three minutes the island would be irrevocably behind me. I never even thought of not going.

In midair, when my hands were inches from touching the water, I could already feel the cold of it. Then there was the shocking black rush, and when I came up the first time I almost thought I might have heard shouting in the distance. But I went back under, and for a moment I saw her in the sea, where blood knows no stain but only rivers. That was only for a moment. I’ve been acting funny, I said to myself. I’ve been doing strange things.

I began swimming hard. The most difficuIt thing was maintaining my orientation, keeping my head clear as to where I was and where I was trying to get. After it seemed I had swum half an hour I began to panic; I feIt my effort collapsing. In fact I probably hadn’t swum half an hour at all. Probably it was more like ten minutes. I was treading and thinking to myself, I’m thirty-eight or thirty-nine; my body does not believe it. My body believes my face, which believes my heart, and it makes me an old man in the water, who believes his panic and exhaustion. For the moment I cared nothing about her, I cared nothing about Ben Jarry. This, I said to myself, maybe aloud though I don’t remember, this is as my damned traitor heart would have it. It would have me in my tower living in the gloom of moral death. I began to swim again. I swam against my face and my heart, I swam as though I had my face in one hand and my heart in the other, and I pummeled the sea with them in order that they would take me, against their will, where I chose to go.

On the island I slept. I dreamed I buried my face and my heart in the sand, the first wrapped around the second.

I didn’t lie there very long. The cold woke me; I was wet through and through, and there on the edge of the sea was a hard wind, though an hour before the night had been still. The hotel hovered before me, a monstrous dark yawn, and I got up and headed for it. I was walking around it ten minutes before I found the entrance. There were no doors, just a gouge where glass had been. There was no light. I was cold and inside the building it wasn’t much warmer. A corridor turned south and shot off in the distance, each side of it lined with little cubicles: empty ticket agencies and barbershops and clothes boutiques and post offices and rental centers filled with busted mirrors and dilapidated shelves and counters, maps across walls and racks with old postcards and magazine stands and ledges filled with small cracked bottles and things I couldn’t make out. At the end of the corridor were some stairs. I stumbled up in the dark and could see the main lobby of the hotel open up before me, a black expanse, rows of motionless elevators and a dining hall and beyond that a lounge. I thought I heard some sort of music overhead and caught a glittering of something framed within the gash of the ceiling. I found myself staring up into a huge tunnel that ran through five or six floors of rooms to the sky; the glitter was stars in the distance.

A light was coming from the lounge. I held myself, shuddering. I’m damn cold, I said out loud. I got to the doorway of the lounge and it was immediately warmer. A bulb was burning at one end of the room dirty orange electricity. I said to myself, What, they have someone come around and change the bulbs? The lounge was gritty and lined with webs; a bar was at the back shadowed and still, with liquor bottles on the shelves behind it and glasses sitting upside down on what was once a white cotton towel. All of it was dimly visible to me in the light of the hearth at the other end of the room, where a fire was burning. The hearth was set in large flat stones and surrounded by large worn chairs. I went over Io the fire and was standing there several moments before I realized someone was sitting in one of the chairs. “Lee?” he said, blinking at me in the dark.

I looked at him in stupefaction. He stood up and came over to me. Ile was tall, probably as tall as Jon Wade but nowhere near the mountainous build; he moved like an aristocrat. As far as I could tell from the flames of the fire he was in his mid-fifties. He was stylishly dressed and groomed but his face had a certain thickness to it, as though he drank a lot. At this moment, in fact, he was holding an amber glass with ice clinking in it and seemed just the slightest bit tipsy.