Steve Erickson: Rubicon Beach

“That was your problem.”

“Maybe and maybe not. I have to live forever with the fact that one moment of stupidity and indiscretion on my part hung a guy. But I don’t have to live with the idea that it was a political act or that because of it I’ve assumed a political role I never chose. That the powers-that-be can’t understand the difference between a personally stupid act and a politically willful one is their problem. All I have at this point is what I did and the real nature of it, and not you or anyone else is going to take that and make it something else. So leave me alone. There’s nothing to stop me from how I choose to live or die with my own particular sort of treason. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been living in a very high building these days. Your people put me there.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“If you haven’t noticed, the window of the room at the top of my high building isn’t so small.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“For people who are so worried about my life and sanity, it was careless of you to put me in such a high tower with such an adequate window, wouldn’t you say? For people who are so worried, I mean. The honor guards that follow me around have grown casual in the extreme — maybe they’re here tonight but I haven’t seen them, and I didn’t see them a few days ago when I caught that boat leaving town. That tether gets longer and longer after all, There’ve been a hundred opportunities for me to do almost anything drastic, starting with when they sailed me in the first evening.”

“You’re correct there.”

“So what it comes down to is I don’t think you people can make up your minds whether you want me alive or dead, murdered or suicided, sane or nuts or whatever, and I think that’s because for all this talk about me being on your side, you’re not so sure I’m on your side or that I was ever on your side, which makes me the most uncertain kind of individual for you to have to deal with. By your own actions or inactions, by your own contradictions, you’ve acknowledged my contradictions, and by your own insistence on my political role — a role your actions and inactions contradict — you’ve acknowledged your political role.”

“I’m lost.”

“Well don’t bother finding your way out. It doesn’t matter to me and I’m not sure you’re so lost anyway. I just don’t want to hear about how you’re not a political man. Where were you born, Wade?”

I stood up. I thought he might stand up too but he didn’t. He sat in his wet parachute looking at me and sweating but for the first time not aware of the sweat. The bartender still had nasty looks for me and the woman in the corner with the camera was gone. I put some money on the table. Wade had nothing to say, and I left the grotto and went back up into the caterwaul.

I was born in America. It was somewhere inland. At the junction of two dirt roads about three hundred yards from my house there was a black telephone in a yellow booth; sometimes walking by you could hear it ringing. Sometimes walking by you’d answer, but no one ever spoke; there’d either be the buzz of disconnection or no sound at all. By the time I was eighteen I thought I had outgrown the sound of telephone calls that weren’t for me.

I never understood the borders; they seemed to change all the time. They were borders of land and borders of years, but wherever and whenever they were, clearly, in that time and place I was born, it was America. Whether it still is I can’t be sure. I’m not sure I want to know. About the time I was eighteen and had learned to let the telephones ring, I saw my first body of water. It was a wide river that ran to my right. I heard later it was an American river, but I knew that was a lie. I knew there was no such thing as American rivers or foreign rivers; there were only waterrivers with waterborders of waterland and wateryears. Believing such a thing was my first step in the direction of danger. I never believed in American skies either. But it never meant I did not believe in America.

When I sailed from Seattle to Los Angeles, it was a nice idea to think I was in a waterplace and watertime. But there was no fooling myself, I knew I was in the place and time I’d brought with me from Bell Pen and that America was another distance; and I’d heard the legends of L.A. clocks and how the hour hands race across their faces while the minute hands never move.

I dreamed about Ben Jarry the night after I drank with Wade in the underground grotto. It was my first dream in a while, I’d assumed that when I dreamed again it would be of a woman. In my dream Ben Jarry, with his hands bound behind him, was led down a long hall by two guards and I was led up the hall to begin my parole. I saw him from far away and we kept getting nearer and nearer, and everything in me went dead. I realized when he was only a few feet from me that he was being led to his execution. He said nothing to me, he only looked. I was fortunate that nothing in his eyes forgave me. If his eyes had forgiven me I am genuinely certain I would have killed myself; so maybe that’s fortune for you. Or maybe it’s misfortune, since forgiveness would have provoked in me the courage to exchange my time and place for that of the water around me on a trip from Seattle to Los Angeles. And yet I never actually saw Ben Jarry walking down a long hall. Ben Jarry was dead before they ever released me. He was also born in America.

I began to notice that the archives of the library’s back rooms were filled with the recorded legends of murdered men, who may or may not have actually lived. The most striking was of a man murdered in Los Angeles in a kitchen. It was late one spring night and many people saw it; he bled on the floor and did not die immediately. They caught the guy who did it. The murdered man had been born in America One. Whether he’d died in America One or America Two wasn’t clear to me from the documentation. I wasn’t sure if this was something I was supposed to keep on file or not. I wasn’t sure if this was of value to civic interests or territorial interests. I would have somehow supposed the feds preferred not leaving such information around. So I kept the manuscript myself and after a while I found myself sequestering more and more such manuscripts, usually for reasons I could never have explained. I took them up to my room in the tower in the dead of night and kept them in a box under the bed. This particular legend stated that this particular murdered man came from a family of murdered men. I would have liked to have found the legends of these other murdered men; I was studying the distinction between murders that are acts of martyrdom and those that are acts of redemption.

The word was out I let the squatters sleep in the library halls, and as the nights went by there were more of them. Live squatters in the library halls seemed to muItiply with the documents of murdered men beneath my tower bed. A cop came by one afternoon and said, You’re supposed to keep these people out of here. I said, I understand perfectly, officer. There were more squatters and more cops that followed, but the cops knew they c0uldn’t threaten me with prison, they knew they couldn’t hurt me more than my dreams. When I taught myself to love the cacophony of the city, when I taught myself to sing along with the noise of the buildings, I began to dream less and less of meeting Ben in a long hall. Instead he became a squatter in the corner, a cut-off rope around his neck, and when he opened his mouth, out came the noise of the buildings.

Among the recorded legends of murdered men you can dream of almost anything. But it was no dream, what happened the night I woke still slumped in the chair where I’d been working in the back room, manuscripts piled around me in the dark. I didn’t know the hour but I couldn`t have slept long; I figured it was just past nightfall. None of the library lights was on; I had to do my work in the days because there was no power in this wing of the building. Only a glow from the street outside the windows made anything visible. I had that usual anxiety you feel when you fall asleep where you haven’t expected to, waking alone to a change of light. But I also had a feeling that clashed with the anxiety of being alone in spent light. I stumbled up from the chair. It’s not true that one wakes knowing someone else is in the room. No one ever wakes knowing that. People who believe that give too much credit to human instinct. They forget that as children they woke knowing something was beneath the bed or behind the door when in fact nothing was there at all. At Bell there were many nights I woke knowing someone was in my cell; in fact no one was ever in my cell. Now I woke feeling both alone in spent light and that there was someone else in the room, even as I knew too much to believe it. I kicked the manuscripts away and moved toward the back of the dark archives, and the glow from outside the window never changed. I passed one aisle of files and then another and then found the two of them in front of me as though they’d just appeared.