Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

The city was going crazy with sound. There was an explosion even as we stood there on the wharf; we could hear it and feel the timber rattle beneath us. There were two more explosions in the five-minute ride to the library, the car swerving both times. The sound was changing every time. Just when you thought it couldn’t get louder or more harrowing, it did. What the hell, Mallory muttered, is going on?

That was nine days ago. I’ve been waiting in the tower, watching you.

I’ve been waiting for the time to move. I have been, indeed, under house arrest as Wade promised. Indeed, as he promised, someone has brought my meals twice a day and asked if I needed anything. I haven’t seen Wade himself. I somehow don’t think I will. Not after the last time. Every once in a while I ask one of the cops what’s going on out there. They always pretend they don’t know what I mean. But they do know what I mean. I heard from one of them about Janet Dart or Dash. I heard she was in the grotto over on the east side where I always saw her and one night she stepped off one of the overlooking platforms and dropped like a stone into the river that ran past the bar. Not a sound from her. As though it would carry her out beneath the city to whomever it was she’d been looking for. As though to pursue her passion to the edge of her world and then beyond. She was gone in an instant.

I don’t read the legends of murdered men any more. Instead I finish your poem. I’ve seen you go by eight times in nine days — not actually you, of course, though I wondered why you didn’t simply appear at the foot of my bed or in the back rooms below. But I’ve seen your boat, or the top of it, pass every day at a different time, only once a day; though I haven’t seen you on the boat, I know you’ve been there. During this period the entire city has become a radio. It transmits songs from the deadest part of the center of the earth, and they’re living dead songs, zombie songs. Some of these songs last a day, some last only hours. Some last a few minutes before someone changes the channel in a flurry of geological static that shakes and recharts the underground rivers. Until yesterday I’ve been biding my time. The cops become lazier and more complacent. At the exact pitch of night, when the radio is turned to the right channel, I know it is no problem for a dead man to elude them. I could exit through doors they don’t even know exist. I’ve been biding my time: but yesterday something changed. Your boat stopped still in the harbor and rested all night; it was there this morning when the sun came up. But then I watched it turn in the harbor and I saw the smoke, and I knew a new voyage was in the making. And then I watched in horror as you sailed away, out toward the sea; and for several hours I believed I’d lost you. I should have known you’d jump ship. It should not have taken the flash of something signaling me from out across the bay in the moors to the north. But I see your knife now, and it calls me, and I don’t have any more time.

It was you, wasn’t it. It was you on the other end of that line when I picked up that telephone out in the middle of nowhere twenty years ago, out in America, probably at the very moment you were somewhere being born. At the very moment you were somewhere being born I answered the phone and heard the silence of your dying in a bed. Sometimes one must live half a lifetime before he understands the silences of half a lifetime before — sometimes, if it’s someone like me. Sometimes, if it’s someone like you, one understands from the first the silences of a lifetime to come, the silences that come at the end; and one emulates them early, so as to recognize them later. I hear the call of your knife over the songs of a zombie city. I cast myself in flight for the decapitation of my own guiIt, to live where I once died, to resurrect my passion, my integrity, my courage from out of my own grave. Those things that I once thought dead. By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

Later, in a Malibu hospital listening to a Malibu sea, she dreamed of the night of the shipwreck. She wasn’t certain this was her earliest memory but it was the earliest memory of which she was certain. She had awakened as a small girl of three to the sounds of her brothers outside her window; sitting straight up in the dark, she was too self-possessed even as a child to open her mouth and cry. Rather, typically, she waited to correctly place her own consciousness, misplaced during the previous hours of the evening. She heard four of her brothers talking. The fifth, a year older than herself, slept three feet from her side. She listened for the sound of either her mother or father or sisters. She rose from the bedding of grass in the middle of the hut and went to the window and gazed out. The four brothers stood on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the bay jabbering among themselves with a quiet heat in their voices, their father watching the bay and speaking only to silence his sons. They were five dark forms before her. Catherine went into the other small room of the hut and found her mother in the door, the other two daughters watching from their beds. Calmly the three-year-old girl slipped beneath the skirts of her mother so that by the time the mother saw her it was too late, Catherine was off down the path toward the bay, where now there stretched out before her blotches of sand and dark water in the glare of men’s torches, and unfamiliar people lying strangely on the beach, and also the scattering of toppled trunks and drowned lanterns, the splinters of the ship and the rags of its white sails washing in with the tide, and more motionless unfamiliar people who didn’t know enough to lift their faces from the sand. At the bottom of the path Catherine stood watching one such person gaze face down into the earth, in the way she had seen her brothers gaze into the rivers looking for fish. To the corpse at her feet the small child explained, Nothing swims in the dust.

It was like Catherine that she did not exclaim joy at the freedom of being on the beach any more than she exclaimed terror at the night to which she woke, some moments before, in puzzlement. On the path behind her she heard her mother running and calling her name. The beach was covered with men poring over the sand and its bodies and loot, and the light of the torches was bright enough so that, as she wandered among and between them, she could distinguish only vaguely the form of the ship out in the water. It looks like a huge dead critter, she thought to herself. It’s a tangle of arms and extended things. She stepped out into the tip of the bay and stood several minutes watching the dead ship. The sights and sounds of everyone around her died away. It was the earliest memory of which she would ever be certain again, standing there in the middle of the night staring out into the dark of a dead ship, lights and voices somewhere behind her. Many years west of her, many thousands of miles to the north of her, she thought of it; and lying in a hospital bed in Malibu, as she slipped from the oppressive care of her attendants, she recalled last her father’s laugh in her ear as he came from behind and scooped her up from a white hooded wave. It’s time to sleep, she remembered him saying, for little girls of crazy courage. When he carried her back up the path from the tumuIt of the beach, her wet feet in his hair, they were met by her exasperated mother and all her older siblings, jealous of her recklessness. For the first time that night, and maybe in her life, she allowed her face to display delight.