Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

The water beneath me in the dark, it was gray and windowless too as we continued sailing out of the city. I just stood with my back to the broken bitter skyline fumbling with this stuff in my pocket, keys in one hand and the radio in the other, wondering which it was going to be. Clouds soared by overhead like the evil black birds in the streets at noon, and then there was nothing but the moon, mammoth and skull white, laughing light all over the boat and the riverbanks. The voices around me stopped; I feIt stricken by the stillness. No one else was in sight. I can go now, I thought. The banks were bare and distant for about fifty yards up canal until the bend ahead, where a small beach jutted outward. I stood watching the approaching bend and pulled the small radio from my pocket; I turned it on for a moment and then off. I looked to the right and left and behind me on deck, and the boat reached the bend and began to steer southward, out into larger water, leaving Los Angeles behind once and for all. On the jutting beach were two people.

One was sitting or kneeling in the sand. He was motionless and silent, facing away from me, and he held his hands behind his back. The other was standing before him as silent and motionless as he; with one hand she touched his head, as though she was running her fingers through his hair. Her face was as clearly visible to me as his was not. She looked very young; I doubted she was all of twenty. She wore a plain dress, and in the bright moonlight it had no color but pale. As the boat turned southward it came closer to shore, and at one point I could see her eyes though she wasn’t looking directly at me. She didn’t seem aware of the boat at all. Against the embankment behind her, white in the light of the moon, her black hair was like a cloud of gunpowder, which framed her brown face; she looked Latin or Mediterranean. I kept expecting her to acknowledge the boat but the boat had cut its engines. I kept expecting her to look my way, but she touched the head of the other man. In the moment I saw her I stopped grieving for my losses. It seemed impossible to see her eyes from the boat or to know her face that well. I despised the guy at her feet; I would have told at that moment any lethal joke that would have hanged him too.

He turned to look at me.

As his face shifted into the light of the moon there was another light, a flash that went off between his face and my own. It was soundless and instantaneous, and as it dimmed I expected I would get a good look at him. Except that his face wasn’t there to be seen. I looked again, and again, and nothing else had changed; there were still the two of them on shore; but his face was gone: and then I saw it in her hand, the source of the flash, a two-foot-long blade that had flown from beneath her plain pale dress and caught the light of the moon and very efficiently separated the head she held in her hand from the rest of the man’s body. It was all in an instant, and with her blow I turned to follow the orbit of a small human sphere launched out into the dark above the water.

Next thing I knew I was sitting in a car overlooking the quays drinking some coffee, and all over the beach below me were local cops and feds. The feds drove the large brown coats they wore as if they were army tanks. The car I was sitting in was the first I’d seen since getting on the boat in Seattle; it was unadorned and functional. I didn’t drink much of the coffee they gave me. I didn’t need it. After a while I saw him coming over and my throat tightened. My head and heart were already pounding. I kept seeing over and over that other guy’s head flying off into space, and how long it took for his body to drop in the sand, how long it took for his body to understand what had happened. I kept seeing her in that dress that had no color, and the whites of her eyes like fireflies beneath her swarm of hair, and the way the clean knife changed in an instant to something wet and red.

Wade made a motion to me to get out of the car. Unlike our first meeting we were both standing now, and I was even more aware of how he loomed over me. In the dark it looked as if he had no hands. “First of all,” he said in the same whisper as when I’d met him before, “you want to tell me what you were doing on that boat?”

I took the radio out of my pocket. “This dangerous instrument came into my possession,” I said. “I wanted to get it as far from centers of population as possible before it went off. I was ready to throw my body across it if need be.” It was supposed to sound clever but my voice cracked and when I held out the radio my hand was shaking. Wade didn’t take the radio; I put it back in my pocket. “I saw a woman decapitate a man tonight,” I said after a moment.

He didn’t miss a beat. “Yes?”

“ ‘Yes?’ It’s not enough?”

“It’s not enough,” he said. He took my coffee cup from my other hand and threw it on the ground. “Not without a body, with or without a head.”

“Meaning you don’t believe me.”

“Meaning maybe I believe you saw something, since the captain of the boat says you were stone quiet all the way down canal and then went off like a string of firecrackers. You remember that?”

“No.”

“So I believe something made you lose it, and someone getting his top lopped off might be as good as anything else.”

“But maybe I imagined it,” I said, “maybe it’s in my mind.” There was still a funny sound in my voice, I could hear it.

“Who are you arguing with?” Wade said, with something that finally approached irritation. “Were you heading for Yuma-Sonora, or contemplating the bottom of the canal?” He motioned back to the car and I got in, and then he walked away, heading back for the beach. Another cop came along, a thin wiry little man with red hair, and drove me back into town. I went to the station and gave a statement, but I had blank spots all night. Only later did I remember the sun coming up sometime before I got to bed, but when I went to sleep I could have sworn it was in the dark.

I did not dream. Later, thinking about it, I expected that I would have dreamed, since the next day and the day after I kept seeing it in my head. But when I slept there was nothing but a pitch-dark sweep of water before me, and then I’d wake to see her at the foot of my bed with her long bloody knife and him on the floor not yet bleeding. The head always rolled off somewhere in the shadows, and sometimes I got within inches of its face before the whole thing faded.

They came and asked me one or two more questions but that was it. That first month I presumed a rhyme or reason to the way they’d let my leash out and then pull it in, but now I saw there was no rhyme or reason. Now I saw they didn’t know what to do with me. They kept saying I was on their side now but they didn’t know that, because I didn’t know it. Sometimes you can know someone better than he knows himself but I wasn’t necessarily that guy, or at least no one could be sure. If you can’t be sure then everything’s a gamble, and I was their gamble. They were trying to decide whether I was of any advantage to them or whether the best they could do was neutralize whatever disadvantage I might be. After that night they must have thought long and hard about taking away possibly important keys — if they were possibly important at all.

I spent some time in possibly important rooms, arranging the manuscripts and writing files on each. Their significance escaped me. Letters between people never heard of, brochures and programs and articles, sometimes an extended piece of writing either factual or not; some of it was handwritten and some of it was in typescript and some of it was published. It was difficuIt to imagine that any of it was of any value to anyone. It all looked old but in this town that didn’t mean anything.