Steve Erickson: Rubicon Beach

Sitting back in the recesses of these back rooms I’d play the radio as loud as I wanted. Maybe Wade figured he was doing me a favor letting me keep it but I wasn’t going to let him get away with thinking that. I wasn’t going to let him or any of them think I was on their side just because they let me keep a fucking little radio. So I played it and every once in a while a cop would wander through and peer in the doorway in the direction of the sound. Then one night I woke abruptly to another thud in the distance and the tower shaking like the time I thought it was a quake. Then there was another thud and then another. Three, including the one that woke me. Outside the symphony of the buildings went berserk; I didn’t sleep that night for all the shrieking. The next day and night were the same. After that a cop came by one afternoon and peered in the doorway as usual; this particular time I wasn’t playing the radio but he came in anyway. He was the thin wiry little man with red hair who had driven me to the police station. “I got to take the radio this time,” he said.

“That ungodly wail outside and you’re worrying about my radio?”

“Got to take it, jack.” I gave it to him and that was the last I saw of it. One could ignore the constant din of the days, but the nights were impossible. L.A. turned into a town of somnambulists. I went walking the fifth night of it. I got up from bed and came down from the tower and out into the streets. In fact the sound was a lot worse in the streets, but I still decided I’d rather be walking around in it than lying in bed listening to it. I headed back in the same direction as several evenings before because I remembered the part of town where there were bars and people’s voices.

The sound wasn’t as had once I got past Spring Street.

Going into one of the small dives next to the East L.A. Canal, I could lose the sound aItogether. The clientele wasn’t exactly the cream of society. Most of the men were smugglers from down coast, along with some out-and-out pirates, bringing into town under the cover of night dope or cheap Sonoran liquor or bits of outlawed technology, whatever it was this month the feds had decided was dangerous. There were few women, maybe half a dozen, all of them in their late forties. The younger prettier ones did their business out in the mansions across the water where traveling merchants with some money could afford to sail.

There was one woman, however, who looked no older than her late twenties. You couldn’t help but see her and none of the other men could help it either. She wore a dress that was either blue spotted with white or white spotted with blue, and she had long amber hair. She sat in the corner of the bar smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and fooling with a camera. The men, by and large, left her alone. They’d talk to her and buy her a drink, but in the half hour I was there no one put the make on her. She was so rare to this place and these men, and her presence was so valued, that it was worth it to everyone to have her in the corner in the dark and not scare her away. She kept getting free drinks and she’d smile at the guys who brought them, but her smile invited nothing except drinks and no one overstepped the terms of her invitations. She kept fooling with the camera and I decided cameras weren’t on the blacklist with radios; unlike sound, the images of the earth were not in conflict with the images of men.

The bar was an underground grotto, descending some twenty feet in the earth and entered by one long winding stairway a little like the stairway I took every night up to my room. The grotto was cut in stone and dirt, and one of the underground rivers of the city came roaring through in a ravine. Most of the booths and tables were constructed on an overlooking platform. Sometimes the water would lap over the shoulder of earth where the bar stood, splashing against a customer’s feet. The air was thick with the smoke of cigarettes and hemp and wet with the heat of the river, the flat roar of which was a lull after days of screaming cities. I sat watching the woman with the camera awhile. The shadows around her seemed to stretch to the grotto’s ceiling, and my own shadow shot in her direction. Only it wasn’t my shadow at all. I had a drink of something vile and waited for him to make his move; he sat down across the table from me. He had discharged the tan coat somewhere and looked hot.

He ordered a drink of something vile too. “Cale,” he said, “can a man hate himself so much he`s not even alive anymore?” He wiped his face with a handkerchief and pulled at a white shirt that actually looked baggy on him.

“You sail into town in that shirt, or parachute?”

Wade pushed the sleeves up his arms and opened the collar some more. He put the handkerchief away and drank half his drink. “It’s sweItering in here,” he muttered, gazing around at the water. It was the first time I’d seen him ruffled; it was hot all right, but it really got to him. “What are you doing here tonight,” he said.

‘“To tell the truth, I was getting away from the racket up above.”

“So something gets to you after all.”

“I was just thinking the same about you and the heat.”

“I think,” he nodded, “I prefer the noise to the heat.” He finished the drink and ordered another; he was sweating the alcohol as fast as he could consume it. His parachute shirt was turning into a white blotch.

“Any new developments on the other night?” I asked, and regretted it immediately. Initiating a conversation with him seemed a fundamental concession.

“What other night?”

I licked my lips. “‘The woman on the beach,” I said slowly, “with the knife.”

“What’s to develop?” he said. “No body, no head, no knife, no woman.”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“You keep saying that,” he said, getting his second drink. “Nobody else has said it, just you. I wouldn’t presume to suppose what your mind is or isn’t capable of inventing. My understanding of your state of mind is such as to lead me to conclude it’s capable of anything, except an outright lie.”

“You don’t think I’m capable of an outright lie?”

He thought a moment as though to be sure, but he was already sure. “No,” he said, “no, if you could live with a lie you would have begun with lying to yourself. You have a lot to lie about. Where were you born, Cale?”

“America.”

“As I thought. America One or America Two?”

“I never could get straight on that. I think it must have been somewhere in between.”

“You’re what, forty-five? Fifty?”

“Thirty-eight or thirty-nine.”

“You look rather poorly for a man your age. I guess that’s to be expected.”

I took his second drink and threw it in the river. In retrospect it was rather comic; we both calmly watched the glass float out of sight into the tunnel. The guy behind the bar gave me a look, as did a couple of others. “Why don’t you get off my back, Inspector?” I said. “You already said something once about taking my own prison with me, don’t you think I take this sort of shit with me too? There’s nothing I can confess to you I haven’t confessed a thousand times to myself.”

“I’m not interested in your confessions,” said Wade in his cool whisper, though he was still sweating a lot, “I’m interested in either infuriating or humiliating you into staying alive and in a condition that would pass with most people as sane. You dead or crazy would be bad form from a government point of view, and my superiors don’t want it. I’m not a political man—”

“Horseshit.”

“—but I have my orders. You’re on our side now, Cale—”

“Horseshit I said. I’m not on your side. I was never on anybody’s side—”