Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

Better, she wanted to say to him, that faith betrayed you rather than you betray it.

For a while he held her, just by the arm. Then he let go, and she realized she’d been cold from some ocean breeze through some open window. She pushed the cell door and walked to the dark end of the hall, where she turned to look at him once more. The cell door swung back and forth but he didn’t move from his place. She heard footsteps. Lieutenant, she heard someone say. Lieutenant?

“Lieutenant?” Lowery shifted in his chair, opened his eyes. Catherine was still lying on the bed in front of him, her eyes still moving. An orderly was touching him on the shoulder. “I think you nodded off, Lieutenant,” he said. Lowery rubbed his brow with his hand and said to himself, I thought I could investigate where every sharp detective would like to investigate. But the only place I went was cold, from a Malibu ocean breeze through an open sanitarium window.

Lowery returned two days later. Nothing had changed. A week later, after the story had finally dropped out of the papers, he came back. Catherine was still lying on the bed. “If anything,” said one of the doctors, “she seems to have slipped further.” The dreams? said Lowery. “Her eyes are going a million miles a minute,” said the doctor. He looked spooked.

Lowery went to sit by her again. He loosened his collar and examined her a long time, exploring her countenance for a clue. The sun dropped into the sea and, as had happened before, he dozed. When he woke it was dark outside and the bed before him was empty.

He jumped to his feet. He called an orderly and the orderly came running into the room. Before Lowery said a word the orderly took one look at the empty bed and disappeared. In twenty seconds he was back with two other orderlies, a nurse and the doctor. “I fell asleep for about fifteen minutes,” said Lowery. “She was gone when I woke.”

The two new orderlies took off. ln the hall the lights went on and another troop of nurses arrived. The first orderly went to the window by the bed and looked out. “Ten-foot drop,” he said. “She didn’t go this way.”

Lowery wasn’t so sure. He went to the open window and stood in the Malibu ocean breeze looking at the edge of the Malibu cliffs. After a moment his eyes narrowed. “There’s someone out there,” he said.

There’s someone out there, she heard someone whisper, and she ran down the path of the cliffside to watch a ship not foundered on the reefs of her childhood but rather sailing past, teeming with the blind of paradise. When she reached the sand she found it empty, but she saw his form in the water, swimming to shore. The night was dashed with waves. If he were to crawl onto the beach and collapse on his face she would run to him and say, But nothing swims in the dust. But he did not crawl and he did not collapse. He sailed to her; he knew the water; he strode from the sea. She hid the knife in the fold of her skirt and walked out to greet him.

There is a number for everything. There is a number for justice. There is a number for desire. There are numbers for avarice and betrayal. But when the scheme becomes utterly one of avarice and betrayal, then there are no more numbers other than those that quantify what we possess and lose. It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.

He was born in the northern heartland of his country in the year before the outbreak of the first world war. His name was his father’s, Jack Mick Lake, three cracks of gunfire that suited the father as the publisher of a small newspaper outside Chicago. For the son the name was apt less for its explosiveness than for its symmetry. When he was six, the year after the war ended, he discovered the family tree, reaching back to a great English grandfather on Jack Mick Senior’s side, and including two uncles who lived across the state line in Wisconsin. Though too young to understand the thrill felt by a peddler’s daughter named Jane Shear when taken in a London alley by an ancestral nobleman at five-thirty in the morning before the dawn of the Victorian era, Jack Mick Junior could still compute the equation of the illicit moment. As he was staring into the family scrapbook on the afternoon his seventh autumn lapsed into his seventh winter, his mathematical genius found its first expression. After that he closed the book and computed the equations of autumn and winter themselves.

His mother’s past eluded recorded history. She was born to a woman of the Potawatomi tribe, also known as the fire Nation, or the People of the Place of the fire. Originally rooted in the northeast of the country, they migrated southwest. Jack Mick Junior’s maternal grandfather, by what accounts existed, was a white trapper or sailor, perhaps from Europe. Thus there was bastardization on both sides of Jack Mick Junior’s parentage, though it was surmised the union involving the Potawatomi grandmother lacked the thrill that marked the one involving Jane Shear. Precocious enough to compute a number for sexual thrill even though he did not yet understand the experience, he would nonetheless need several years to find a number for rape, let alone humiliation, let alone subjugation. As with avarice and betrayal, once these experiences became a part of the scheme, the scheme became so utterly bankrupt as to defy numbers altogether. Thus his mother, who assumed the name Rae in place of a Potawatomi name for which there were no English sounds, remained to him a woman of mystery as well as strength and depth, until she died at the age of forty-one or — two, when the son was twenty-two or — three.

She was forty-one or — two. I was twenty-two or — three. I know I saw her on the tracks that night; the moon was too full for my eyes to play that kind of trick on me. It would have been better, I suppose, if we had found some remains, some body; yet no one particularly regretted that we didn’t. It had been a troubled time for my father, the ten or twelve years that preceded that night, and it seemed there was nothing left to happen to us.

First his uncle died when Jack Mick Junior was ten. Jack Mick Senior was the youngest of three brothers: the middle brother, Dirk (a family of gunfire names, this was), had gone west in 1915, venturing back once the next year and then dis appearing for good. Eight years later Jack Mick Senior and his oldest brother Bart got a wire on a night when, as it happened, they were returning to Jack’s home together from a card game in Chicago, where Bart would sleep off the bourbon before going on to Milwaukee the next day. It would later strike Jack Junior how the influence of bourbon on this particular night was a harbinger of things to come. Of course Bart did not go to Milwaukee the next day but, looking odiously green, accompanied Jack Senior in his motor car out west where they would either bury their brother or bring him back. For three unnerving weeks no one heard from them, either at the Lake home or the newspaper office. The ten year-old Jack Junior waited hours by the dirt road running along the railway tracks, watching his own shadow shrink before him in the mornings and slither out behind him after noon, until finally one day he rose from his bed and came on his father and uncle sitting in the family room before an empty fireplace. His mother was standing in the doorway of the kitchen; she had found the two men the same way. She asked if they wanted coffee. She, made them coffee. She asked about the west; she asked about their brother. They only stared before them with their mouths slightly open. Jack looked at his mother and his mother looked at Jack; he looked out the window at the car crusted with dirt and there flashed across his mind the image of these two men sitting in the car and looking just like this all the way back from wherever they had been, never saying anything. By that evening Jack Senior had gotten out of his chair and built a fire in the hearth, which he watched until the flames died. He did not look like a ghost anymore, but he did not talk about the west. He did not talk about his brother Dirk. Bart went to Milwaukee.