Steve Erickson: Rubicon Beach

I jumped where I stood and feIt the percussive slam of my heart in my ears. She turned to look at me, as she had the first time; he turned to look at me as he had the first time, from his place on his knees. I waited for the image to come apart, like a fetus smeared into an ephemeral jelly, and then not be there at all. But this wasn’t an image of my aftersleep, like the other images of other sleeps; it didn’t go away. I’d lived in a cell too long not to know the real thing. Then I saw the knife.

Her blow was faster than I could speak. His head sat so still on his neck for a moment it was as though she had missed aItogether, and then it seemed to come floating toward me. If I had wanted I could have caught it, cradling it in my arms and pressing its face against my chest. It landed behind me with an awful soft smack, not unlike the thuds of the nights when the city shook and its sound changed. Like the first time, the body took a long while crumpling at her feet, and she stood and raised her head and watched me. She parted her lips and then said something in another language. I stepped toward her and she raised the knife to me, and the color seemed to go out of her face and her mouth was wet. Her eyes were wet. I looked to the body. She boIted from where she stood, darting for the aisle behind one of the shelves. I just stood looking at the body and turning to its head sitting some distance away on the floor. It was leaking slowly while the body erupted at the neck, deflating like a bag.

I had this momentary burst of composure. I had this momentary burst of composure in which I thought I would just walk over to the head and pick it up and look at its face; I was certain I’d see Ben Jarry looking back at me. But I never got that far. Suddenly I was sitting in a chair in the corner of the archives and]on Wade was standing over me and the glow of the street was still coming through the windows and another familiar light was flashing in my eyes like the electricity of a storm. All around me were other guys in coats and a lot of activity. It wasn’t as though everything had just changed at the snap of someone’s fingers; rather I was vaguely aware of a passing period of time during which I traveled through the things that happened around me without paying any attention to them whatsoever. I put my hands in front of my face and looked up. “Don’t tell me,” I said, not especially to Wade. I knew it was a little too convenient. He didn’t say anything, he was waiting with his hands in his coat. He didn’t look happy. “Like last time,” I said.

“Last time?”

“What are you doing here?” I said to him.

He still didn’t look happy. “What happened?” he finally said.

I shook my head. There was this damn flashing light.

“Nothing. I had a dream. It was nothing.”

Wade reached down and put five huge fingers around my collar. “What are you trying to hand me,” he said, and now I realized for the first time how angry he was. He took hold of my arm and pulled me across the room. The cops stopped and stood watching us, and I stood watching them, and then I saw it. There was no body and there was no head, but there was more blood than I’d seen in my life, as though it came from ten men instead of one. Blood where the body had been and a streak of blood across the pages that filled the shelves and on the floor near where I’d been working. A trajectory of splattered blood from where the man’s head had been ejected to where it had landed beyond me. I looked at it and looked at Wade and then at the cops and then at the raggedy crowd in the doorway, squatters from the halls risking eviction to peer in on the scene. I don’t know if any of them understood the relief I feIt seeing all that blood. “Then it wasn’t a dream,” I said to Wade.

He took me by the same arm and brought me back to the chair. “This is progress,” he said, “we’ve now established that all this blood is not a dream. Sit down.” I sat down. “Let’s see,” Wade said, “what other information you and I can glean from this. We’ll begin with your most immediate recollection. Whatever it was that preceded this timely catatonia you seem to lapse into whenever something interesting happens.”

I knew it was too convenient. “Like last time, I told you.”

“The headless man and the woman of the dunes,” he said.

He pissed me off and he knew it and didn’t care. “Same woman?”

“Same woman,” I said. “Same guy.”

“Same guy?”

There was another Hash of light and it was getting to me.

“Yes.”

“Same guy who lost his head last time lost it this time too?”

“Yes.”

“Is this man a snake?”

“Even a snake d0esn’t grow a new head,” I said.

“I know that. Do you know that?”

“Then it was a dream,” I said.

“It was a dream that bleeds,” he said. “Did you see this guy?”

“I know it was the same guy.”

“Did you see him?”

“Of course I saw him.”

“You saw him clearly? I didn’t think last time you saw things so clearly.”

“I haven’t seen his face. I don’t have to. I know who it is. I didn’t last time, but I do now.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Everyone has a name.”

“You’re a fuck, Cale,” he said, angrier and angrier.

“His name is Ben Jarry,” I said.

“Shit.”

I looked at the raggedy crowd in the doorway. “What about them?”

“This is my investigation,” Wade said. But he looked back at them.

“She ran out,” I said. He looked back at me and I thought of something else. “She also said something this time, she said something to me.”

“What?”

“It was Spanish I think.”

“Are you sure?”

“If I knew for sure what she said I would know for sure if it was Spanish.”

“Like you know this was Ben Jarry,” he said, “the man with the world’s unluckiest neck.”

“I told you it was a dream,” was all I could say, and then there was the light again, and that did it. It was no electrical storm. I jumped up from the chair. “What’s that damned light,” I said. I looked in the direction it came from and so did Wade.

“Sit down,” he said and pushed me back into my chair.

“Mallory,” he called, turning to the wiry little man with red hair who had taken my radio. I could see a form moving for the door and it set me off and I jumped up from the chair again. Wade saw her too. He called to his man again. “What’s she doing here,” he said furiously.

It was the woman from the grotto in the blue-and-white dress, with the camera. “She’s a cop,” I said out loud to everyone who could hear it. I turned to Wade and said, “She’s a cop and you’ve got her following me taking pictures. That’s why she was in the bar that night.”

She was out the door with that, pushing aside the squatters who were still watching. The red-haired guy named Mallory started after her and so did a couple of others. Wade was looking at me in absolute amazement and then back at his men and then back at me, all within seconds. “Wait a minute!” he bellowed, and Mallory and the others stopped. In the distance in the lighted hall I could see her disappearing around a corner.

“She’s a cop,” I started in on him again.

“Shut up,” he said. He turned back to his men and then back to me. He was genuinely confused and he wasn’t pushing me into the chair anymore. His eyes narrowed. “You really don’t know who that woman is, Cale?”

“She’s a cop,” I said.

For a long minute he said nothing, and then he shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, and looked back down the hall, “she’s no cop,” and he got tired all at once and sat in the chair I’d been in, sagging into it almost the way the headless body had sagged onto the floor twenty feet away. You want us to go get her, Inspector? Mallory asked. “No,” Wade answered quickly. The cops looked at each other and didn’t move. “Cale,” Wade exhaled to me softly, “I had high hopes that you and I would have a low-key relationship. It hasn’t been turning out that way. It’s disappointing to me. Now I’m in a situation where I have several imponderable circumstances and no way to resolve therm.” He said, “Tonight something happened. Somebody bled enough for an army. But I still don’t have a body, I still don’t have a weapon, I still don’t have a perpetrator, and as a witness you’re a bit on the unreliable side. But I guess you know that. There’s nothing I can do except take blood samples and a statement. In the case of your statement, I’d rather not have it. It’s the kind of thing where I’d like to pretend something never happened but I can’t. You know what that’s like.”