Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

Catherine turned from the doorway and went back into the lobby. A number of people were noticing her and looking at her, including the manager behind the front desk. He kept his eye on her as she walked the entire length of the lobby toward the elevators. Madam, he finally said, a conceit meant to flatter the hotel more than Catherine, since in her plain dress and bare feet she appeared nothing like a madam. She answered him with a look of her own and stepped into an elevator; the door slid closed as she watched him come from behind the desk. She stared at the panel of lights to one side of the door, remembering how they had flickered the day Richard took her to his room; she tried to remember how many times they had flickered and which small map lit up when they stopped. Another couple was in the elevator with her. They moved to the other side. At the third floor Catherine got out.

She went to the place where she remembered Richard’s suite had been and found the door open. Inside a maid was changing some towels and turning down the bed; she stared at Catherine over her shoulder. It took Catherine a moment to realize this was not the room she was looking for. She went back to the elevator and waited with a man in a suit who whistled aimlessly; every few moments his eyes would rest on Catherine and he would stop whistling. He kept pushing the button on the wall. Finally he got into an elevator going down, and when he was gone Catherine pushed the buttons as she had seen him do. An elevator arrived, empty, and she got in and got out at the next place it stopped — the sixth floor. She went to the place where she remembered Richard’s suite had been and knocked. A strange man in a bathrobe answered the door. She backed away and returned to the elevator.

For an hour she traveled up and down in the elevator knocking on people’s doors. After a while she began to understand the numbers of the floors and took them systematically, one by one; rather than wherever the elevator randomly let her off, She had eliminated all the other floors when she decided to try the fourth. She went once again to the place where she remembered Richard’s suite to have been. There she heard a sound, like a baby crying. She knocked on the door and no one answered. She knocked on it again and the only response was the sound of the baby’s cry. Some people in the other rooms were peering out into the hall, aroused by the sound of her pounding. After a while a bellhop arrived to investigate a reported disturbance. When he came up the hall the guests were still leaning out their doors; the bellhop seemed a little uncertain how to handle it. He said something to Catherine. She grabbed the knob of the door and shook it.

He would have pulled her from the door except that he heard it too, the sound of crying. He took her arm and she shook him away, pointing fiercely at the door. The bellhop looked around at the other guests. She’s been making a racket for twenty minutes, said one lady. The bellhop nodded and listened to the sound in the room and sighed, then he took a key from his ring and put it in the lock. He opened the door.

Inside, the suite still displayed Richard’s fastidiousness. The only thing about it not fastidious was Richard. He was lying on the living room floor in his underwear. An open bottle of liquor sat on the table, a glass overturned in the midst of a stain. There was also an empty pharmaceutical bottle on the sofa. Catherine stood behind the bellhop, who softly called to Richard and then bent down to gently shake him. At the frigid touch of Richard’s body he jumped back. Oh shit, he said.

He nearly ran over her trying to get out of the room. Catherine remained staring at the body. She heard the sound like a baby from the other room and, not taking her eyes off Richard, she stepped around him. In the other room she made the discovery. Trapped in the window was something that had once been a white kitten. The kitten had been trying to get out the window; she was moving, animated, but not really alive, caught rather in a last nervous reflex, like something that continues to move several seconds after its head is cut off. The window in which the kitten was caught had several long horizontal panes of glass which opened to an angle by a latch on the side. At some point the kitten had maneuvered the latch, squeezing between the panes of glass and pushing herself toward a crack at the side of the screen. So desperate had she been to get out, so frustrated had she been by how securely the window was fastened, that she became determined to escape at any cost. Now Catherine saw the side of the kitten’s head pressed flat against the pane of glass and its emaciated body twisted in the window; she had no idea how long the kitten had been like this. She might have been this way before Richard’s death; she might have grown from a kitten into a cat within the panes of this window, and he might have sat on the sofa drinking and taking his evil medicine as he listened to her howl. The last sun of this June night was gleaming through the glass at this moment and the new angle of each pane cast a different hue while the trees of the Hancock veldt cried hideously in the distance. The cat was drowning in the colors of the glass and the noise of the trees, and when she moved, the glass moved and the colors changed. The more hysterical her capture, the more vibrant the light, until she was writhing in the dark red of the spidersky that was caught in the window with her. When Catherine put her hands on the cat, the creature was crushed in the light and din. Both girl and animal made a low and barely audible sound, this low hiss of refuge, like the familiar glint of refuge Catherine had seen in the animal’s eyes.

Dazed, she took the kitten in her hands and walked hack out into the other room where Richard’s body lay. Several of the guests from down the hall were standing there watching. The bellhop had not yet returned. Catherine moved toward the door with the kitten; the others moved out of her way. In the hall, momentarily disoriented, she began going in the wrong direction, then turned around and headed back. She got to the elevator and stepped into an empty one going down just as another arrived coming up with the bell hop, a security man and two medics.

In the lobby Catherine stepped out of the elevator, still holding the kitten. The manager behind the front desk saw her immediately and signaled to a man across the room. Catherine crossed the lobby toward the ballroom where it was shadowed and hushed and stung by candle fire. Two men came up on each side of her and grasped her arms. She flinched and they held her firmly. For a moment they were deciding which way to take her; they decided against the lobby and started her along the wall of the ballroom toward a back entrance.

Later, during the police investigation of the matter, the various accounts of what happened would all differ. It was agreed that there was a man, apparently in his thirties, with brown hair and a mustache, milling aimlessly around the ballroom. He had, according to those who noticed, gotten there some thirty minutes before, and those who watched him for any amount of time at all found him odd. He said odd things. He didn’t weave as though drunk or drugged, but he seemed lost and disturbed. At any rate the strange girl with the black hair stopped dead in her tracks when she saw him, and he dead in his tracks when he saw her. One of the security men tried to move him out of the way. The other security man insisted he heard the man speak to the girl in a way that was familiar even though it was prefaced by no sort of salutation or cordiality. I have this poem in my head, the security man heard him say.

You know this woman? the security man asked him.

I have this poem in my head, the strange man went on. Twenty years ago tonight I became a man who quoted poetry rather than write it, here in this place where they kill such men.