Steve Erickson: Rubicon Beach

Every morning she would be perched in the highest tree from where she could see all around her; her hair had grown longer and longer and sometimes I’d find she had tied herself to the trunk. Exhausted from the nightsailing, she would still go to look for food. During this time nothing happened between us. I guess we had decided that whatever was to happen between us had to wait until we arrived where we were going. Once I climbed up to her place in the highest part of the tree and sat there watching her, tied by her hair; I reached to touch her, as I had touched her once before in a far cell in a far jail in a far city. But I didn’t. I drew back my hand and slept another hour next to her, precariously sitting in the mast of the forest, and when I woke she was awake and looking at me.

I was in love with her. I had fallen in love with her long before, though I’m not sure when. I don’t think it could have been the first time I saw her, but it might have been the second, one night when I realized she was in the same room with me and looking at me, even as twenty other people were there, never seeing her. I don’t know what she felt for me. I don’t think she loved me, I have to say that. But we were bound by a dream that destroys what is not fulfilled. The closest we got was on one afternoon when I came back from exploring the landscape and there she was, out on a limb, looking into the water at the reflection of her face, as though she and that reflection were bound too. Without a shudder, without a sound, with no sigh of grief or rage, one long tear slid down her face to her mouth, to drop slowly onto the mouth of the face in the sea, salt water to salt water; and I reached over and brushed her cheek, And she looked at me sadly, and I turned and climbed to my place to sleep, wondering where she would take us that night. Before drifting off I looked down at her once more through the branches, just at twilight among the limbs of the trees, watching the sea. That was the last time I saw her, thirty years ago.

The next thing I knew, the cold sand was beneath me and I felt as though every bone were broken inside, as if I’d been thrown somewhere hard. I lifted my head to see our forest scattered across a stretch of cruel coast, jagged and strange; men were lifting me up and carrying me to the top of a ridge. I tried to tell them about her. I told them there was someone else, she was out among the trees, tied by her hair to the tallest one; I told them and passed out. When I came to, we were on the ridge and I could look down and see the remains of the forest sinking into the sea.

I was taken into town and put in the back room of someone’s store, then moved to an inn for a couple of months. The people of the town were very good to me. I don’t think I ever extended much of anything resembling gratitude. I kept asking them about her, and when they humored me, as I knew they were doing, I accused them of callous disregard, these people who had saved my life. I know they thought I was crazy. I don’t wonder why. In my delirium I talked of the nightsailing and the forest; soon I stopped talking of that. After almost a year I stopped talking of her too. I could have left, gone back to my country. Perhaps I should have returned to the city where I first saw her, assuming I could ever find her again. But I waited instead for some sign of her, because I was afraid that if I left I would sever forever the possibility of seeing her. It got to the point at which I would have settled for her body washing up on the beach; then, at least, I would have known my dream was over.

I moved out onto the moors with the twenty-eight churches. Time passed and I became the old man I am, hobbling up and down the overgrowth waiting to come upon her. Sometimes someone comes out to see me. There was a young woman who came, blond hair and widowed; they tell me there was a war a while ago. She brought groceries and took me for rides in a car, down to the place not far from where they found me once. Then she stopped coming. I heard she’d left. People in town still think I’m crazy, I know that. But they’ve taken care of me more years than I’ve deserved. I am sixty-eight, sixty-nine.

Then this American started coming, I had seen him with the woman a couple of times. A curious fellow, but then he thinks I’m a curious fellow. Dark, with sad blue eyes that his glasses magnify; there are ways he reminds me of me, but all old men are reminded of themselves by all young ones. When we talk of America, we. . I don’t know what he’s saying. The names are. . I don’t know the names. Anyway, we talk of America. He tells me things about himself without realizing it; I think he doesn’t believe I understand anything at all. He doesn’t feel compelled to be careful about what he tells me. I told him about the city I knew, I told him about the nightsailing. He nods in that way that says he’s going along with the cracked things an old man says. He has a few cracked things of his own. Not so much the story about his mother on the railroad tracks but other things. He made a mistake once. I don’t know if he knows it. He was standing on the banks of a river listening to something from the other side, something he had never heard but had always known . And instead of crossing the river, he listened for as long as he could stand it and then turned his back and returned the way he had come. And he’s never heard it again. He should have crossed that river. Little bits of his life come out the nights he comes to see me, sometimes the bits are cracked and sharp. Off they fly into the moor skies, and we watch them go. Tonight the moor skies are filled with rain and light, and he has driven through the heath in a truck he borrowed from town, dashing from the truck into my stone house. Tonight he said the only thing he’s ever said that’s made complete sense to me. When he said it, it got me crazy; I got this terrifying feeling that all these years something had been right under my nose and I hadn’t seen it. Something that only I could have seen, the way I saw it from the window of a tower one night in a city thirty years ago. Tonight the young American told me about The Number.

One night I told him about The Number. There’s a number out there, I said, pointing to the west, another number they never found. For a long time he didn’t seem to hear me; the rain was blasting the roof and the sky was filled with sound. And then he looked at me as though he under stood perfectly what I was saying; and I wasn’t sure what to tell him, I hadn’t thought of it in close to fifteen years because I didn’t believe in it anymore. Another number, he kept saying, another number, and the more he said it the more excited he became; and I was sorry I had told him, because I hadn’t thought he would become so excited. He just kept saying, Another number! over and over. The Old World, I tried to explain, is just a number off. Yes, that’s it! he said, and soon we were talking about church steeples and lights. The Old World’s just a number off, he kept repeating, and there are twenty-seven churches in the moors rather than twenty-eight, because here they’re a number off I nodded and smiled; I didn’t see that it made any difference. But he said it made all the difference, because he and I had counted twenty-eight lights and that meant there was another light out there, the twenty-eighth, that wasn’t a church, and it had been there all along.