Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  “Yes,” I said quietly, “I know what that’s like.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I suspect you do.” He got up. “You were easier to deal with,” he said, “when you were paralyzed with guiIt. What’s gotten into you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t still paralyzed with guiIt. But not so long before, before I saw a woman with a knife and hair as black as a gash in the day, I didn’t care who was my spy, or who thought I was on whose side of things, or how many times Ben Jarry died. I didn’t care if I was crazy or sane, or dreaming or awake, or alive or dead. Now I just wanted to see her again, and take her next time, Spanish or no Spanish, knife or no knife, and seize the chance to save Ben Jarry’s life once, for the once in which his neck had snapped on my account. That redemption was worth any measure of sanity or, for that matter, my life itself. Wade had to have seen some of that.

  “Tell me when you figure it out,” he said.

  “What about the woman with the camera?” I said.

  “Stay away from her.”

  Like hell, I thought.

  * * *

  There is a tree by a river, it is out west. A man comes to the tree and looks up and sees among its branches a nation of men; they’re living their whole lives in the tree. The man calls to them and says, What are you doing living in that tree? And after some silence, from the deepest foliage of the tree’s highest limbs, someone answers . . .

  I forget. I forget the answer. It’s a good punch line and now I’ve forgotten it. I heard it in New York, I’d been living in a tenement where I had met a woman with whom I fell in love. She loved me for a month in return, until it interfered with her work. She was involved with a cadre of political outlaws. They met in secret among the tenements of New York and left their meetings carrying in their heads little bits of America One, to which they gave voice in the streets. I wasn’t one of them, I had never been one of anything. I distrusted being one of something; I knew it wasn’t real, I knew the only oneness that was real was my own, being one of me. I met Jarry relatively soon; the woman whom I loved said to me, You’re lucky, you met him relatively soon. She said, I was involved in the cadre eighteen months before l met him. He traveled from cadre to cadre; as the leader he was the only one who knew all the cadres and who knew all the people who carried bits of America One. He was the only person who could put all the bits together if he wanted. Of course he didn’t seem particularly commanding at all. My height, with light hair and skin like alabaster, translucent and white-blue; the expression of his eyes was elfin and amused. He was the sort of person who shook your hand and smiled and judged you all at the same time. Are you interested, he said to me then, in becoming one of us? I’m not good at becoming one of things, I explained. How long, he said, you think you can be neither one nor the other. Then he said, There’s a tree by a river, it’s out west. A man comes to the tree and looks up and sees among the branches a nation of men; they’re living their whole lives in the tree. The man calls to them and says, What are you doing living in that tree? And after some silence, from the deepest foliage of the tree’s highest limbs, someone answers . . .

  Damned if I can remember. It was a good line, but later, when I thought about it, l wasn’t sure it really proved his point. I sort of thought it proved my point.

  I was arrested with the cadre one night. I was there because she was there. The others in the cadre never really trusted me, but I had resolved that if I was not one of the cadre, neither was I one of those who arrested us. In the questioning I did not identify Ben Jarry. They tried many tricks, little things to slip me up. They knew Jarry was their man but they couldn’t pin him down, they couldn’t connect him with us. They sent me to jail with the others. They split up the cadre so everyone was in a different place. They sent me to Montana-Saskatchewan I think, they charged me with having a bit of America One in my head. I’d been there over two years, alone, without much contact with any of the other prisoners, who seemed to be there for similar reasons. The men who ran Bell Pen kept such contact to a minimum. I managed to make friends with a man named Judd who had an ingenuous expression in his eyes and the laugh of a little kid. He said he didn’t even know what he was in for, and if he was anything like me, I could believe it. His fatalism about his imprisonment struck the rest of us as something almost angelic; he did not seem to know malice. One day he was a little sadder, and at dinner I put my elbows on the table and said, to cheer him up, Well Judd, I heard a good one not so long ago. There’s a tree by a river, it’s out west. A man comes to the tree and looks up and sees among its branches a nation of men; they’re living their whole lives in the tree. The man calls to them and says, What are you doing living in that tree? And after some silence, from the deepest foliage of the tree’s highest limbs, someone answers . . .

  Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything. I looked around, and then I knew they had all heard it before, and they had all heard it from the same place. And I looked at Judd and he had this awful smile on his face, and I knew he had heard it too. And I looked in his eyes and he didn’t look so ingenuous anymore, he looked like a man who knew malice. And I knew he wasn’t a prisoner at all. He got up from the table and smiled the whole time and walked away. I never saw him again. What Ben Jarry and I had in common after all was that we were both stupid enough to repeat the same joke to the same wrong person.

  The other prisoners just sat looking at me. Later I would be astonished to learn how many of them thought I told the joke on purpose, how many of them believed I had just been waiting all along to finger Ben Jarry.

  I waited in my cell all night, eyes open, for them to come get me. After two days passed I had almost convinced myself that a joke could mean nothing, as it had meant nothing when I told it. I heard it years ago, I said, when they finally brought me in for questioning. I heard it from my grandfather, who told it all the time when I was a kid. Everybody’s heard that one, it’s a common joke.

  It’s not a common joke, they said.

  The man calls to them and says, What are you doing living in that tree? And after some silence, from the deepest foliage of the tree’s highest limbs . . .

  I don’t remember. Since that day I haven’t been able to remember; the bit of America One in my head was the punch line to that joke.

  But then was then and now is now, and after the night in the back room of the library there was nothing in my head, no punch lines at all but Spanish words and a trace of the voice that carried them. And after I heard those words and the voice that carried them there was nothing but more such words; I found pages of them. I found them the next day and it didn’t seem like an extraordinary coincidence; instead it seemed like perfect. The fog that morning hung like snow on the tall empty skyscrapers of Los Angeles and the gnarled little bridges that joined them a hundred feet above the streets. Men were there bright and early to clean up the archives, slopping wet mops on the dry carnage of the previous night and smearing the floor into a rusty red, packing up the manuscripts that were streaked with blood. The idea, I suppose, was to eliminate everything but the trace of a voice speaking Spanish words in my head. I came in as someone in a gray worksuit was pulling down the offending volumes from the shelf and loading them into a box. I took the box from him and took the manuscripts from the box and put them back on the shelf. He blinked at me in stupefaction. What do you think you’re doing, I said. We have instructions to confiscate this material, he answered. I don’t give a fuck what your instructions are, I said. You can clean up the floors but you’re leaving these manuscripts. He shrugged and signaled his crew, and they picked up their mops and pails and left.

  Then I began going through the manuscripts strewn at my feet where I’d fallen asleep the night before, and there it was; and as I say, it wasn’t much of a surprise. It was natural it should have been there for me just as it was natural she should have been there in the archives or on a passing beach as seen from the deck of a boat. Of course it hadn’t been there before, and it
wasn’t even a manuscript so much as a sheaf of papers; but it was ageless like all the rest of it and splattered with blood like the rest of it. In fact it was more splattered than the rest of it and that made sense too. The paper was dry and brown and the writing was faded. It was a thin collection of maybe fifty or sixty verses and poems. I sat in the chair and read them the rest of the day. Some of it was hard to make out because of the blood and the faded words. All the pieces were concerned with one subject, and anybody could recognize her immediately, the hair the color of night and the rage to match, and her mouth the color of Ben Jarry’s blood. He wrote of her eyes as having the opaque rushing depthlessness of the blind, like the color of white skies and seas meeting at some point in the distance. The author said nothing of her body, just as her body when I had seen her had said nothing of itself: it was all about a face that was ignorant of its own image. When I finished the poems I realized I hadn’t been breathing; I was high-tuned and frozen like a thief in a room with a single way out, and through the doorway of escape come the footsteps of capture. It didn’t even occur to me—well, maybe it occurred to me but not seriously—that there could ever been another woman in another place or time with raging gunpowder hair and such eyes. That these poems hadn’t been here before this dawn was insignificant, except in the ways it was perfect. Finally the poet described the rorschach of her tongue and the accent of her past, the language of topsy-turvy question marks and its languid lustful music. He never understood Spanish either but he knew it when he heard it, and he preferred it to the broken English with which she sometimes violated the prison he made for her from his dreams. If he loved her, he never said. If he made love to her, he never told of it. If he lied about her, I would have known it. But someone knew her and said so, and somewhere left me his poems of it, written of her in a place where or when the woman I had seen could never have been.

  I kept the poems in the tower with my hoarded documents of murders. I was constructing my own house of conscience with the transgressions of conscience on exhibit. I found myself poring over the verses for days and nights trying to break their code. There was another week or ten days of this snowy fog; the tide was up and the city became a cluster of dark lighthouses amid moats and rivers. About five in the evening a red mist came pouring out of the sun beneath the clouds. It got so you could set your clock by the moment the sun dipped beneath the clouds and the red mist poured out of it. I talked to a boatman one evening about navigating the lagoon; I’d been watching the Hancock Park mansions out there, their doors caught in the bare black trees and the ocean snarling around them. If there was a beautiful woman with black hair to be found in Los Angeles, she was out in the mansions with the other beautiful women. Can’t take you out in this fog, mister, the boatman said carefully. But he shot me a look while coiling a rope in his hands, and the look said not everything in this town was run by Wade and the feds, including guys who sold you boxes of music and guys who took you out in boats. The mansions in the distance turned to stars as the sun went down. I slipped the boatman some money and a look of my own that meant This conversation has been strictly between us.

  I left him. I made my way through the high reeds that blew back and forth between the remains of two stone pyramids, rumored to have been buiIt by Chinese barons back before the marshes shifted. They gleamed a tarnished gold in the sun, and in all the gaping holes pocked by the sea burned the fires of nomads. I headed for this bar I knew over on Main Street. By the time I got there it was dark and a few of the streetlights were on. Old boxes blew up and down the sidewalks, and scurrying across my path were what I took to be huge rats until I saw the eyes of men looking out at me from under their black coats. I had come to this bar a couple of times before; it had a red door with no knob and a window smeared with siIt. The counter inside had a total of four different brown unlabeled bottles. There was no point being very particular about what was served to you in this bar. I wouldn’t have come back after the first time except for an old man who sat at the end of the bar talking to himself. The bartender called him Raymond. Though Raymond may or may not have cared that anyone listened to him, there were always three or four who did, and it was never the same three or four. The bartender explained Raymond sailed in from the desert every day to sit in this bar and talk to himself. More interesting was the barter1der’s claim that Raymond actually used to work in the Downtown library. I have no idea whether or not this was true. I have no idea whether the bartender knew who I was when he told me this. But I tried to imagine Raymond living and sleeping in the tower where I now lived and slept. Raymond looked to me about seventy or eighty years old but I knew from firsthand experience this meant nothing; like the buildings in this city there was no telling how ancient he really was. Raymond talked of the early days. He was a walking history of the town with the chapters out of order; but it wasn’t Raymond who had the chapters out of order, it was the town itself. I sat in the bar and listened to him tell of when the Asians first settled the blank little islands of Los Angeles: Chinese warlords with palaces in the Hollywood moors who rode the plains all the way to Nevada and clashed with the huns and samurai who lived in the caves along the coast where wild children now banded in tribes. A barbaric context, Raymond rumbled to himself at the bar, but at least it was a context, until the Portuguese gamblers brought in their South American slave girls. And now there’s no context at all.

  I left the bar and wandered a while, waiting for someone with some sort of official responsibility to pick me up. After half an hour I realized I’d walked to the underground grotto where I had talked to Wade and seen the woman with the camera. There I overheard sailors murmuring about a score that night in Downey. I didn’t expect to see Wade. I didn’t expect to see the woman with the camera either, but she was at the same table as before. The bartender watched me casually. I looked around and sat at another table with my eye on the other side of the room. A few people straggled in and out, and after about five minutes I got up and went over to her. Like the first time I’d seen her here, she was fooling very intently with the camera. Sitting in the ashtray on the table next to her was a cigarette and two or three burned butts. The smoke smelled like Sonoran hemp, but when she looked up at me she didn’t appear narcotized; the distracted look in her eyes was something else. She also had three glasses sitting in front of her, all of them empty; she seemed just as impervious to the liquor. There was a pause in the way she looked at me. It seemed a long time—fie or ten seconds—after I said hello that she reacted, and then she gave me the same smile she gave the others; it was goofy, which was interesting because she didn’t have a goofy face. It was a sculpted face, high cheeks and eyes far apart except thinking about it now maybe her mouth was just a little off-center and that was what made it odd. At any rate the effect of the smile was calculated to be both pleasant and unpromising, and she used it with success. It got her many drinks and no trouble.

  I didn’t offer to buy her a drink. I’d given the boatman out by the lagoon too much money and now I was short. I told her my name and she smiled again in a way that said she already knew it or that it didn’t matter. Her own name was Janet Dart or Dash or Dot; Wade would tell me later. Come here often? I asked. She laughed; it looked like I was putting the make on her. I decided I should say something that would change that. “Are you a cop?”

  She looked down at the camera and then back up, sort of surprised. “No,” she said.

  “But you were over at the library, the night of the murder.”

  “Was it murder,” she said, “I didn’t hear anything about a murder.” She looked at me cautiously. I hoped she wouldn’t say something like What did you say your name was again?

  “But you were there at the library.”

  “I was taking some pictures.” She picked up the hemp and took a drag.

  “Been in Los Angeles long?” I said.

  “No.” She looked at me evenly; she was remarkably composed for all the dope and liquor and questions. “I got here not
long after you did,” she said. That was when I knew she knew who I was, and she knew I knew it.

  “Where you from?” She still looked at me evenly and didn’t answer. “Did you come to take pictures?”

  She thought about it. She wanted to be precise in her answer. “I don’t go anywhere,” she explained slowly, “with the primary purpose of taking pictures. The primary purpose is always different. But everywhere I go, taking pictures is the secondary purpose. Which makes it the thing all places have in common for me.” She smoked some more hemp. She picked up the most recent glass and stared into the bottom of it as though something might be there that wasn’t easily visible to the naked eye. She put the glass down and glanced at me wondering if I was going to buy her a drink. I bought her a drink with the rest of my money. “Aren’t you going to have one?” she said.

  “No.”

  “I don’t like that.”

  “We’ll share this one.”

  “I don’t like that either,” she said, but we did share it when it came, at least for a while; then it became her drink.

  “I’m looking for someone,” she finally said after it had been her drink for a while.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” she said. The camera sat in her lap and for the first time she seemed completely unaware of it.