Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

The man with the mustache said, That’s about how I figured it sounded.

We have no food, Coba said in a dry mumble. We’re getting low on water.

Well now, that has to be your problem there, said the man with the mustache jauntily. During this discussion the other two men continued sitting idly in the boat, not saying a word but staring at Coba and Catherine with heavy lidded eyes. Now they picked up the oars and turned the boat in its place, starting back for town. We’ll be waiting for your decision, the man with the mustache said with a wave. Adios.

Coba sat a long time staring at the other boat as it grew smaller and the approaching town grew bigger. When he was close enough he could see that, as the man with the mustache had advised, a throng was waiting on the makeshift dock. They carried hatchets, machetes, guns and ropes. Coba decided he didn’t want to go there. He also knew he didn’t want to go back to Town Three. So, aimlessly, without any real command on his part, the boat slid past the town and approached the beginning of a more astounding lethal maze than any he had sailed. The entrance to the new jungle seemed to ooze darkness. He noticed there was a funny roar that seemed to come not from the ooze but from all around him, or behind him; and then he realized that it came from the town itself, and the roar was the laughter of the populace, ushering him off to oblivion. As Coba closed in on the jungle the merriment seemed to grow instead of fade.

Or perhaps it was mirth at another turn of events. For he turned to find that Catherine, who was still at her place on the other end of the boat, now instead of bonds was wearing two ragged rope bracelets, the two wrists having been separated from their captivity to each other. In her hands she held the knife with which the sailor had been cutting fruit.

Later in Los Angeles, when the dreams began, she would remember, but only vaguely, the way the knife felt in her hands on that boat on the river while she was watching him. No vengeance coursed through her, and she was nearly beyond hatred, she was beyond the color of it, into something white. Rather she was caught by the necessity of it, as though by slashing the knife across the pale of his throat she would sever herself from a cord, through which she had once been nourished with food and air but by which now, at the moment of a kind of birth, she could only be strangled. He was not this cord of course, but her memory of him was a cord attaching her to what and where she had been before; and she wondered if every fetus regards the cord with the same sense of betrayal, as an attachment to something black, before memory, nourishing one’s journey to something white, beyond hate, until the journey only stalls in another station, where the wait between departures is a thousand colors that never end.

For himself, one of the last of life’s revelations would be a smell in the jungle, a smell he’d never known, after a life in which the vocabulary of sensations seemed to have exhausted itself early. By the second day of the New Jungle it was all around him, this odor. It wasn’t fruit, it wasn’t a plant, it wasn’t the water, it wasn’t the fine blue mist of the air; it was human. Not human in that the jungle was filled with humanity, though it might have been, but rather in that the boat was always entering a small black round cavity where the leaves had the purple texture of flesh pulled over a mass of broken capillaries and the branches clotting the river passageway were webbed with veins. The boat drifted farther into the dark epidermal tissue of the jungle, the smell getting stronger and stronger until he was mortified to even consider hacking through it, he was convinced it would splatter blood across his eyes. Huge drops hung from the trees. At the other end of the boat Catherine said to him, The jungle mourns that it has to foul itself with your death. Shut up, he whispered to her, peering around him.

The jungle got blacker. Have I been swallowed by a monster? he cried. She answered, You’ve been swallowed by yourself.

The river was moving faster, the momentary beams of sunlight that fiItered through Hashing by more and more quickly. Where does it go? he said, not really to her. There’s a hole at the end, she explained, where the water runs in. You lunatic bitch, he snarled, rivers don’t have holes. He watched the river carefully and tried to make out what was ahead. Of course he constantly had to keep his eye on Catherine too, who still had the knife.

Since she’d gotten the knife they’d been at a standoff. Coba had the oar of the boat, the reach of which was obviously a good deal longer than a knife’s, the same oar that had cracked the head of Catherine’s father. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure but that she couldn’t throw the knife; it seemed a more complicated skill than a young girl would have mastered, but cutting loose with her hands the very ropes that bound them was a complicated skill as well, and she hadn’t had much trouble figuring that out. It was to Coba’s credit that he didn’t underestimate her. So he stayed at his end of the boat and she at hers, each of them waiting. By their second day in the jungle neither had slept. You think you can outlast me at this? he said laughing, his bravado becoming increasingly transparent since the welcoming party had met them at Town Four. Do you remember, she asked calmly, how you came to my village? You came to my village because one night I climbed a tree and tied myself to it with my hair and signaled your ship till dawn. I slept with my eyes open that night. You never know whether I’m awake or sleeping, I can sit as still as sleep (she demonstrated this by becoming absolutely still) or I can sleep while I appear awake. How will you know? It’s fitting that having saved your life this way, I’ll end it this way too.

You’re a witch, he said to her, his voice breaking. I did your people a favor when I took you from them.

By the end of the second day he began to feel the mosquitoes; by the third day there were citadels of them, hovering over the river ahead. He might have taken refuge in the cargo hold, a blanket covering the open side; but to have confined himself to this space, without the advantage of the long reach of the oar, would have compromised his position of defense against Catherine, who wasn’t touched by the swarms at all. On the third day the vines of the trees seemed to be wrapping themselves around his limbs; he overcame his fear of splattering blood and hacked his way loose, no sooner loosening one than becoming caught by another. Of Catherine the vines took no notice. By the end of the third day Coba heard the sounds of the thicket, the crunching of grass and a distant haze of drums.

On the fourth day the river was moving faster than ever. The hole in the bottom must be close, said Catherine. There’s no fucking hole in the bottom of the fucking river, Coba screamed. The boat was spinning wildly and he had to use the oar to maintain whatever control was possible. Frantically he was trying to direct the boat and steer it clear of the hungry trees while watching Catherine at all times; any moment she might hurl the knife at him. You know you can’t survive the river without me, he said to her, we’re in this together.

We’ve never been in anything together, she answered.

By now he hadn’t slept in three and a half days. He hadn’t eaten since the last of the fruit just outside Town Four. The drinking water was virtually gone. Catherine was also hungry and tired, but he could tell by looking at her that she was nowhere near his point of exhaustion; compared to him, she appeared refreshed. He knew she had dozed here and there, fooling him with that sleeping trick of hers. Also, he didn’t understand how she could have been so unscathed by the mosquitoes and the vines of the trees.