Steve Erickson: Rubicon Beach

I never closed up the building when I went out in the evenings; I wasn’t expected to. As I said, I had no keys. It didn’t bother me that I was followed; I knew it was routine. The feds weren’t trying to fool me, they were out in the open. I wondered why they followed me since there wasn’t any place to go; a few guards at the canal gates and bridges would have kept me in town. It was possible, I guess, that someone could vanish into the cracks of Los Angeles and drop out of sight. But you still weren’t going anywhere. You still had to come out somewhere in Los Angeles. I hadn’t been in town long before I noticed that music was everywhere, the music I heard out of Chinatown that first night. It came out of the buildings, a distinct and different melody out of each one. The few people you did run into hummed a lot. The addresses of the doors were scratched and defaced; there were no signs on the street corners. Ask someone how to get to this place or that and he’d sing you the directions.

I kept asking people where the sound came from and finally someone explained, The sea, the sound was the sea, seeping in under the city and forming subterranean wells and rivers. The rivers made a sound that came up through the empty buildings, and the echoes of the buildings made a music that came out into the streets. One day you’d see a building standing upright and the next day it was entirely collapsed, the earth caved in around it, the music turning into a hiss from out of the rubble. In Chinatown they called the shops along the water the Weeping Storefronts; at night you could hear them gurgling and howling in the dark all the way from the library tower. I went there one night after checking out an isolated hardware store for a radio. The clerk asked if I was a cop. I’m no cop, I said. He thought about it a moment and looked me over and then said, No radios here. I’m a law-abiding citizen, he said. He said, You new around here or what? and I said, Sort of, and he said, Check out Chinatown, bub, but watch it. I went to two merchants in Chinatown before the third led me into a back room and asked for the fifth time if I was a cop and sold me a transistor radio. He wrapped it in paper and had me put it in my coat pocket and let me out the back door. By now I knew there was something wrong. But I had the radio and didn’t notice anyone following me for a change, so after walking briskly along the wharf toward home I decided maybe I wasn’t in such a hurry.

Staring into the sun from the harbor, I saw before the shadowmansions of the lagoon something like a black mountain rising from the water, alive with insects; not until it blocked out the sun entirely could I tell it was a boat. Its dark wood hull was blotched with oil and slime, and a cloud of soot hovered over the deck. The deck was swarming with voices, Asian and Spanish and Portuguese and German, to the dull percussion of the tide and the sobbing of the storefronts at my back. The vessel glided past the first dock where I had originally disembarked and then headed into the canal gate, its engines cut and the whole hulk of the thing slipping along soundlessly. The silence of it snuffed the yammering of the people. Just a lot of faces, old Chinese women in scarves and bareheaded Latinos and their wives and here and there a child, all watching from the edge of the boat — or so I thought. When they got right next to me about thirty feet away I saw, in the fast groan of the last sun and the few nagging lights of Chinatown, the nullified blaze of all their dead eyes; every one of them was blind. A towering wooden crate of blind people drifting the waterways of East L.A. I turned around and took my radio home.

At the library I closed the doors and slid the boIt without checking for squatters first. If there were squatters tonight, room and board was on me. I read at my desk awhile and went to bed. Not long after turning out the light there was a dull thud in the distance, so quiet I might not have noticed but for the way the tower shook. It lasted only a few seconds but I lay there half an hour gripping the sides of the bed so hard I could have broken my hands. Then I got up and took a shot of brandy and got back in bed and read some more and tried to fall asleep. There was the sound of sirens and shouting. Finally the music put me out — the city music, not my radio — and I noticed it was different music, the sound of the buildings in the distance had changed. The last thing I thought of was all those blind people watching me across the water.

Two or three nights later I was sitting at my desk and looked up and there was someone in the doorway. He was huge black man, a little under six and a half feet tall; a few more inches of him on each side and he wouldn’t have fitted the space in the wall. His hair was cut close to his head and speckled with gray, and his flat face looked as if it were pressed against a window, except there was no window. There was a step up into my room and he took it. He made no apologies for his sudden appearance, even though I’d been visibly startled. His voice was much softer than I would have thought. Are you Cale? he said. He might have been there to kill me for all I knew; that was a serious possibility. I was a little relieved that it mattered to me much. By now I thought I didn’t care who killed me; it had been months since I cared about being free or being alive enough to know freedom. Now, seeing this black monster, I cared a little, at least until the scare in me died. Then I didn’t care again. Let’s assume I am, I said, then what happens?

“Then,” said the monster, “I come in and have a seat.”

“You’ve already done half that.”

His head barely cleared the low ceiling of the tower. He admired the view of the harbor. He took in the bed and the desk and the small radio I’d gotten in Chinatown and then me. He sat on the bed and the mattress wheezed under him. “Mister Cale,” he said in this distant voice, “my name is Jon Wade. I’m a federal inspector. Would you like to see my credentials?”

“Sure.”

He took credentials out of his coat and handed them to me and I handed them back. “I came in from the seaboard last night,” he said, putting the credentials away, “on a special assignment. I thought that while I was here, we should get to know each other.”

“What for?”

“I will be seeing you and you will be seeing me. It’s an empty little town and we’re bound to run into each other. The police, as I think you’re aware, have you under surveillance. Personally I would rather use them for other things. My understanding of your case is such as to lead me to conclude surveillance isn’t especially necessary. My understanding of your case is such as to lead me to conclude you’re not going anywhere. I believe you’re a man who takes his prison with him — I think you follow me. But for me to take these officers oil your detail requires you and I getting our signals straight. Because as I think you know, or as you should know, part of that surveillance is not just keeping you on a long tether—”

“Not that long.”

“Not that long, all right, part of that surveillance is not just keeping you on a tether, but also making sure that, for the time being, for as long as the government chooses to keep you on parole out here in the territories, you do not get your brains smeared across any random urban edifice.”

“Does the government really care?” I said.

“Well, Mister Cale,” he said, sinking across the width of the bed into the wall, “it does and it doesn’t, you know. It does and it doesn’t. At some point it’s not going to give a good God damn where your brains are; the public-relations value of their whereabouts is short-lived. But for the moment the government thinks you’re a fine example. It likes the idea of a man who sells out his compatriots.” He stopped and waited for me to react. He shrugged. “My own understanding of your case is such as to lead me to conclude that the government cares more about your welfare than you do yourself.”