Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

He turned to look at me, and I pulled my hand away. I saw her there waiting for me as I came out of the water, he said. It was dark there on the peninsula, nothing else around; but I’d been wrong about one thing, and that was the light. The light that had called me across the bay. I thought it was the thing she hid beneath the folds of her skirt (as though at this point she could actually deceive me). But it wasn’t that at all, it was her eyes, they were the fire that had warned a hundred sailors.

Perhaps they were meant to warn me. I stumbled onto the beach, falling down on one knee but then getting up, and she walked up to me in the same dress, her feet bare as I’d always seen her, and her black hair and bloody mouth. She still held her hands behind her skirt. We stood inches from each other and she gasped slightly when I wouldn’t take my eyes from hers, when I held her stare with my own; I knew if I looked away, if I turned away, she would have done it to me, as she believed she had done it before, in other places, on other beaches.

Done it?

On other beaches, in other places. But I looked at her and she finally said in her bad funny English, “It is you, but it is not you.” I said, It’s me but it isn’t me.

We slept on the beach, not together, warmed by no fire because I knew the feds would come if I made a fire. Several times I woke in the night to see her leaning over me, right above me, her face in mine, and I could feel the thing she held against my neck. I’d look in her eyes a long time and soon she’d pull back. Several times I think she tried to work up the nerve for it. I didn’t care. I’d died many times in the city; there was nothing with which anyone could threaten me anymore. There was nothing that could be done to my life that had not been done already to my conscience or honor. Finally, after everything, the prison and self-torment and the larceny of my dreams, I was beyond the touch of every fear other than the fear I would lose her. I was in this place out beyond America One or America Two or as many Americas as they supposed they could invent. I knew she knew it. I knew she saw it in my eyes and understood I was not whoever she had believed me to be. I would not be surprised that men cowered before the things her face once dreamed, before the dream that destroys what is not fulfilled; but I wasn’t like them, and finally she left me undisturbed. When I woke she seemed to be watching me, sitting in the sand with her hands in her lap. But though her eyes were open, she was only sleeping.

Off in the distance I could see the boats coming. I could see him standing by the side of the boat, his black size diminished. I shook her until her open eyes blinked and lifted to me, and I told her we had to get away from there. We made our way up the side of the hill. By the time we reached the plateau I could see the cops pulling their boats up on the sand; he walked steadily across the beach looking up at me, even from atop this plateau I knew he was looking at me. I’ve long since forgotten his name. He was not a bad man. Circumstances made us adversaries but I don’t believe he was a bad man. He clung to his reference points, He lived in silly times. She and I continued into the hills and finally came to a cave.

We went into this cave that was clearly dug by men. At first I figured it as a shelter for the nomads of the area, or perhaps a mine. Thirty feet in we found old railroad tracks that came out of the ground, so we followed them for a while. I couldn’t see the end of the tunnel but cops were behind us, so it didn’t matter, there was one way to go. In the bare light, growing dimmer by the moment, the tracks before us rose and fell, and there was the hushed roar of a distant wind. I could make out graffiti on the walls. We were tripping over the tracks and the stones, making the best time we could, and at some point we were aware of another tunnel running on our left, parallel to us, and another tunnel running parallel on our right. Every few seconds we could peer through an opening to see the other tracks on each side of us, and running along, we could feel the wind of these other tracks. We were running among these three currents and I lost a sense of something. I don’t know. It was just a sense of something I lost, as though she and I could step into either of the other currents and be swept somewhere and somewhen else. It wasn’t that I’d never felt this way before. Rather it was that I’d been feeling this way all along, it was a wary exhilaration that I’d come to the geographical and temporal longitude where and when anything was possible, and that the accompanying latitude was in me: I was a walking latitude, finding its conjunction with the world’s last longitude, out there beyond America. After we had walked a very long time, after I had lost track of the when of it, we came to the end of the tunnel.

We were on the other side of the peninsula. It was gray twilight now and the cove was plain except for a group of trees down by the water. The railroad tracks shot out over the water suspended by old wooden pillars; in the distance they disappeared into the fog billowing in from the sea. We made our way down the tracks to the bottom of the hill and then crossed the cove to the trees. In the trees we decided to rest. Any moment I thought I’d see cops coming out of the tunnel in the hillside, but they never came. As we had done the night before, she and I watched each other a long time, her full gaze never changing beneath her black hair, until I fell asleep among the heavy forked branches where we waited.

When I woke it was morning. I remembered right away I was in the trees of the cove on the north side of the peninsula, and I dozed a while until I thought of something. I was thinking that the cops had never shown up, and as relieved as I was about it, it surprised me a little; and I turned where I’d been sleeping to look at the mouth of the tunnel. And that was when I saw the mouth of the tunnel wasn’t there. Actually, not only was the tunnel not there, the hill wasn’t there. The peninsula wasn’t there. The railroad tracks over the water were nowhere to be seen. I sat up in the tree and looked all around me and saw the cove wasn’t there; the tree I was sleeping in was the same, the small forest in which we’d camped the night before was the same, but the beach was altogether different. It was straight and flat, and the hills in the distance were green. I looked up to the top of the next tree and the girl was there with her eyes wide open; I called to her until she woke. I asked her where we were, what had happened to the cove and the peninsula. She gave no indication that she understood me, but when I motioned to the land scape with my hand she smiled slightly and then stared off to the ocean; after a while she went off to pick some fruit. I walked a little way down the new beach to see if anything was familiar, but of course nothing was. Finally I came back. Our small forest bobbed on the water like a boat. A single vine tied it to shore.

Every morning when I woke up, we were somewhere else. Sometimes we would be on a barren beach, sometimes on a rocky coast with a little fishing village in the distance. Sometimes there were towering mountains with snow on the crests. Sometimes we were on an island. Our forest went with us, or rather we went with it. The previous day always seemed beyond recollection, as though it were in another age; sometimes I would look at my hands to see if, in the course of the night, they had grown old. But I was not growing old; my memories were growing old. My memories were becoming my dreams. The only difference I felt physically was a little seasick.