Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

With an accompanying detective, Lowery drove down Wilcox to the edges of the Wilshire Country Club, then east on Rosewood to Rossmore and Fourth. Arden Boulevard, Lucerne Boulevard, Plymouth Boulevard: only in Hancock Park, Lowery thought, do shitty-assed little streets like these get called boulevards. They patrolled the park three hours without a single report on the radio. At two-thirty in the morning the lieutenant finally decided to post a unit outside the house that had been vandalized, leave another unit for all-night duty, and go home. The rest of the evening was quiet. The following evening Lowery went on patrol again and it was also quiet.

He’d nearly determined the Hancock Park trouble had run its course when another report came in the next night. Lowery and his detective got in the car and headed for Fifth Street between Windsor and Lorraine (both, of course, boulevards) where someone had seen the girl, not staring in a window but gliding across the grass. “Gliding” had been the caller’s word, and the officer who had taken the report repeated it. Lowery was fed up. “I presume,” he answered dryly over the unit radio, “you mean she’s on roller skates.” Next thing, he said to himself, they’ll be seeing stigmata. Then, when they got to Fifth and Lorraine and the lights of the car swung across an oceanic lawn, against a brick wall that ran through the yard he saw her too.

Rather he thought he saw her, at first. So did the detective at the wheel. “Got her, Lieutenant!” he said, and then stopped the car, the headlight beams staring into space. There was no one at all. What they had taken to be her eyes were simply the large fiery insects that buzzed among the bushes. What they had taken to be her mouth was simply the red wound of a departed animal. What they’d taken to be the form of her face was simply the bend of a bough. What they’d taken to be her hair was simply that part of the night where there was no moon.

“Sorry sir,” said the sergeant sheepishly, “thought we had something.” Lowery didn’t tell him he thought they’d had something too. “Well let’s look around,” he said, and they got out of the car. An hour later, driving back up Rossmore, they got another report of the girl over the box, and Lowery reached down and flicked it off.

In the downpour of the glass and the wax and the roar, Catherine walked across the room, up the steps and out the front door as though through a blizzard of arrows and jungle and fever. She left Eileen Rader’s house and started down the hill. In the dark she saw the fog rumbling in from the sea like a herd of white horses. They trampled a path through the middle of the city, separating its roots from the spires that rose from the back of the fog like hooded riders. The black stone rivers of the city stood dry and hopeless, stitching America to the rest of the plains. She got to the bottom of the hill and walked east. She crossed a lone river of lights and walked south. At one point she came to an abandoned fair, where the empty mechanical rides were poised in silhouettes. She went into a tent to sleep and caught the whine of the white herd from far away.

She slept in the tent nearly a week, venturing out each clay to pick fruit off people’s trees. Occasionally the people who owned the trees would run out of their houses, having glimpsed the theft; but they always wound up standing on their back porches deciding they’d seen nothing at all. Finally she resolved to head back to the border of America, via a final net of justice. In the middle of the night she came to the edge of the Hancock veldt. She followed a wall of fog around till she came to an opening where, inside, she saw the mansions in their gorges, elephantine and languid. She walked into the first valley and up the first hill and then into the second valley; balconies floated above her like boats, as though she were at the bottom of a lake looking up. The lawns were blue and cool. The air smelled of wine and clocks. In the days, she slept in a part of the maze no one knew.

She looked for his house, that she might inflict her final act of justice. She made her way up and down the gorges of the Hancock veldt; it’s a matter of time, she told herself, till I find him. Behind the windows of the mansions people danced like the cartoon characters of music boxes. Several times she peered in; often they saw her. She continued looking for his house but to no avail. Once she thought she’d found it, a red brick house with white edgings, but it was all wrong, all different, the windows and the door in the wrong places. She continued looking until she was beginning to recognize houses passed before; and when she came to the red brick house again, about a week and a half later, it was even more different. The faces of the houses were changing, she realized: caught up in an America where people knew their faces, she now attributed to those faces the very chameleonlike qualities that others attributed to hers. Before I leave America, she told herself, I’ll replace the face of my treason with the face of my destiny. Only when she saw her reflection one night in the window of another house did she understand both faces were one and the same. This was the window through which she hurled a rock, shattering glass and reflection and peace of mind and the patience of local law enforcement, everything but her futility.

Then she had a dream: she again walked a beach on a night of moon, a peculiar and vaguely felt city ribboning the edge of the earth, her hands filled with what she now knew to be the knife with which Coba peeled fruit on his boat. Down the beach in the light of the moon, just beyond the water, Llewellyn knelt on his knees in the sand. As usual he would not look at her as she came to him. As usual he would not look at her as she stood right before him. Had he raised his face to her, everything would have been different. Had he raised his face to her, she couldn’t have done it. Instead he turned away, and she said to herself, Your turning from me is more obscene than all the faces that never turned; it’s a denial by which you believed you might own me. It’s an ownership by which you believed you might save something. It’s a salvation by which you believed you never betrayed yourself. Not another moment will I be the sacrifice by which America pre tends its dreams have never changed. My knife chimes in the moon.

She was watching his head sail off into space when she saw a boat drifting by and on its deck another man watching. He looked rather like the man who lay at her feet. Before she woke she said to herself, My life, it’s nothing but sailors.

She wandered the Hancock veldt two months of nights. On the evening she decided to leave America she woke to a red sky alive with a thousand flesh spiders. From horizon to horizon they spun silver webs that shivered with pain. Beneath these strange skies she left the veldt and traveled the road east to the border. She crossed Western Avenue and soon came to the swirling map in the sky that read Ambassador Hotel, where she remembered the morning she met Richard. On this evening the hotel was bustling with more activity than usual: a line of limousines stretched along the northern wall, and near the lobby were the white holes of television lights and the chrome and black of cameras. Guests shuffled with hotel management. Several security guards dashed back and forth. Catherine walked up the long drive and resolutely through the throng, through the doors she had passed before.

She walked with the throng down a long corridor lined with shops: ticket agencies and barbers, boutiques and small post offices, rental services and magazine stands. She went up the stairs at the end of the corridor into the lobby, where many chandeliers glittered above a fountain of water in the middle. There were also two elevators, a dining hall and a lounge. At the front desk the management was coping with a flurry of check-ins. To the left was a cavernous ballroom. No one danced in the ballroom, and the sullen dark was scarred with candlelight; across walls that held no windows hung curtains that reached the ceiling. The bar in the corner aspired to near invisibility. Only a few people were present but more brushed past Catherine in the doorway, and as the room filled, nothing changed but the presence of silent faces; no laughter was raised or discussion exchanged; people groped for facsimiles of discretion. The candles were kept burning as though to mask the smell of decay. When a flame went out it was urgently relit by someone in a hotel uniform assigned to no other purpose.