Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  It was you, wasn’t it. It was you on the other end of that line when I picked up that telephone out in the middle of nowhere twenty years ago, out in America, probably at the very moment you were somewhere being born. At the very moment you were somewhere being born I answered the phone and heard the silence of your dying in a bed. Sometimes one must live half a lifetime before he understands the silences of half a lifetime before—sometimes, if it’s someone like me. Sometimes, if it’s someone like you, one understands from the first the silences of a lifetime to come, the silences that come at the end; and one emulates them early, so as to recognize them later. I hear the call of your knife over the songs of a zombie city. I cast myself in flight for the decapitation of my own guiIt, to live where I once died, to resurrect my passion, my integrity, my courage from out of my own grave. Those things that I once thought dead. By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

  Later, in a Malibu hospital listening to a Malibu sea, she dreamed of the night of the shipwreck. She wasn’t certain this was her earliest memory but it was the earliest memory of which she was certain. She had awakened as a small girl of three to the sounds of her brothers outside her window; sitting straight up in the dark, she was too self-possessed even as a child to open her mouth and cry. Rather, typically, she waited to correctly place her own consciousness, misplaced during the previous hours of the evening. She heard four of her brothers talking. The fifth, a year older than herself, slept three feet from her side. She listened for the sound of either her mother or father or sisters. She rose from the bedding of grass in the middle of the hut and went to the window and gazed out. The four brothers stood on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the bay jabbering among themselves with a quiet heat in their voices, their father watching the bay and speaking only to silence his sons. They were five dark forms before her. Catherine went into the other small room of the hut and found her mother in the door, the other two daughters watching from their beds. Calmly the three-year-old girl slipped beneath the skirts of her mother so that by the time the mother saw her it was too late, Catherine was off down the path toward the bay, where now there stretched out before her blotches of sand and dark water in the glare of men’s torches, and unfamiliar people lying strangely on the beach, and also the scattering of toppled trunks and drowned lanterns, the splinters of the ship and the rags of its white sails washing in with the tide, and more motionless unfamiliar people who didn’t know enough to lift their faces from the sand. At the bottom of the path Catherine stood watching one such person gaze face down into the earth, in the way she had seen her brothers gaze into the rivers looking for fish. To the corpse at her feet the small child explained, Nothing swims in the dust.

  It was like Catherine that she did not exclaim joy at the freedom of being on the beach any more than she exclaimed terror at the night to which she woke, some moments before, in puzzlement. On the path behind her she heard her mother running and calling her name. The beach was covered with men poring over the sand and its bodies and loot, and the light of the torches was bright enough so that, as she wandered among and between them, she could distinguish only vaguely the form of the ship out in the water. It looks like a huge dead critter, she thought to herself. It’s a tangle of arms and extended things. She stepped out into the tip of the bay and stood several minutes watching the dead ship. The sights and sounds of everyone around her died away. It was the earliest memory of which she would ever be certain again, standing there in the middle of the night staring out into the dark of a dead ship, lights and voices somewhere behind her. Many years west of her, many thousands of miles to the north of her, she thought of it; and lying in a hospital bed in Malibu, as she slipped from the oppressive care of her attendants, she recalled last her father’s laugh in her ear as he came from behind and scooped her up from a white hooded wave. It’s time to sleep, she remembered him saying, for little girls of crazy courage. When he carried her back up the path from the tumuIt of the beach, her wet feet in his hair, they were met by her exasperated mother and all her older siblings, jealous of her recklessness. For the first time that night, and maybe in her life, she allowed her face to display delight.

  * * *

  Actually her name was not Catherine. She would be given the name of Catherine later, in America, when the speechless beauty of her face so resisted naming that the relative banality of Catherine was the best anyone could give it. Her actual name was an impossible sound, a mutation of Spanish, Portuguese and an Indian dialect, just as her people were an impossible social configuration for which the name Village suggested too much communal fabric and the name Tribe too much common blood. The closest translation for what they were would be Crowd. When Catherine was five, a couple of years after the night of the shipwreck, the rains washed away their cliff and the Crowd moved into the South American forests. For miles it was difficuIt to separate the forests from the sea. The Crowd traveled north to a place where the edges of a monstrous river slipped in and out of the trees and the air was constant clouds of water lit by the green light of afternoon. The people of the Crowd lived in nests. Overhead they constructed canopies of black wood. They did not consider themselves wild people. They didn’t live naked, and they did not love ritual. In the dim ambitions of Catherine’s father Colombia might be a place of uItimate migration; he’d lived there a little as a younger man. He remembered the bars. What wildness was in him was of a man-made strain.

  The boats didn’t stop crashing into their lives. Rather than floundering on the beaches they caught themselves in the weird wicked roots of the forest. Sailors who survived spoke of spotting these roots slithering off the coast of England, licking the hulls of their ships with pink vulvalike mouths. If this seemed improbable even to a girl as small as Catherine, it nevertheless imparted to her a sense of the world’s smallness, which she never got over. She would think to herself, If I were the forests of my home, my face would be a cloud of water lit by the light of green afternoons, and my legs would cross the sea to England; she hadn’t the slightest idea what or where was England. The mornings of her childhood were of wreckage in the trees and the lies of sailors, and the dusks of her womanhood never forgot them.

  * * *

  When Catherine’s father was a young man of twenty-five he fell in love with women who made his heart stop. When he was an older man of thirty-five he fell in love with women who made his heart meIt. When he looked into the face of his small daughter she made him feel the older love that was characterized less by desire than the beauty of sorrow. In this way he might have been of the Orient. In the evening, after he’d hunted the family’s food or chopped it from trees, he took Catherine in a small canoe on the river where she sat between his knees with her back to his belly and he pointed out to her the visions of the forest. They paddled among a hundred green clouds hanging from the branches that crossed the water; these clouds were like the snow walls of northern countries which formed long spiraling mazes. Corridors of the river, framed by the green wet walls, hurtled off in wrong directions. Her father knew no wrong directions. Her father knew the mazes of the river as he knew the mazes of the trees. At dusk he knew the mazes of the sky as he knew the mazes of the river. His breath in her hair was as calm and steady as the current and left a small bright trail in the twilight, so clear that when they turned back Catherine could navigate the way, following her father’s breath fauItlessly and certainly home.

  One day out on the water, right before the sun fainted into dark, her father picked her up to gaze over the side of the boat. There, for the first time, she saw her own face. She thought that it was a strange and marvelous watercreature, like the roots of trees with pink mouths off the coast of England or the fish that dead men watched in the dirt. Had her father looked over the side of the boat with her, she might have understood it was her face. Rather she grew up believing that this creature accompanied her wherever
she went, that she could call to it in her mind and see it by her side when she walked along beaches. She claimed it for her pet. She threw it food it never ate, and when she tried to catch it, it swam from her so fast it seemed to vanish at her touch.

  * * *

  Their part of the forest, sitting as it did at the mouth of the sea, became a burial ground for ships, the Crowd waking each dawn to another skeleton caught among the trees. Usually no crew, or only the remnants of one, was to be found. The Crowd picked their way among each disaster with hard-headed consideration for what was of use. If there was food it was eaten and if there were clothes they were worn. The Crowd would not have objected to the honor of being deemed scavengers. They did, however, become impatient with the clutter of the boats themselves: only so much rubble of so many decks and cabins and cavernous husks could be absorbed into the thicket of the wilderness. They pushed the boats out to sea only to watch the water bring them back. Soon each tree in the village became a boat unto itself, draped in the cloth of sails and terraced with the plains of thirty bows. Sometimes on the high branch of a tall tree Catherine thought she might sail the whole forest somewhere east and north, where the mazes had walls that dwarfed the trees, and separate rooms for day and night.

  * * *

  By the time Catherine was twelve her father had come to believe she would never stop the hearts of men. She would in time, he believed, meIt the hearts of men as she meIted his, but by then he’d be gone. He laughed in relief at this, since it meant he wouldn’t lose her, and then he cried at his own selfishness, because it meant she would never be happy. That she was so composed and resolute as to survive unhappiness would not make the unhappiness any less. At any rate, as it happened her father was wrong, though he would never know it. He reached his conclusion and confirmed it to himself over the next five years of her adolescence, because her body, while strong and self-sufficient, was without the voluptuous gifts young men valued. So the boys of the Crowd pursued other girls while Catherine with her straight solid form watched alone. She was too proud, even at sixteen, to rage at the betrayal of her breasts.

  They did not see her face.

  They took her eyes to be the large fiery insects that buzzed among the reeds of the river. They took her mouth to be the red wound left by hunted animals or perhaps their own women each month. They took her chin to be the bend of a bough and her hair to be the night when there was no moon. Her father saw her face for the first time the winter she was eighteen; for eighteen years he’d loved her face because it belonged to her. But he’d never seen it as something separate from her.

  A terrible rain came lashing the forest and he took refuge after a wild night with the Crowd of setting floating bonfires to sea. In the distance a huge black ship battled through the deluge. A huge black ship battles through the deluge, he told his wife under sheIter, a ship huger and blacker than we can know. One overpowering wave and the ship will come overpowering us like our own shadow gone monstrous: one ship too many for a forest of ships. He turned to look out at the bonfires sent floating out to sea to ward off the ship and now saw only sizzling embers doused in the rain. The ship loomed larger. Do we move? his wife said. Not in this rain, he said; we wait: and then he turned to look at his children and saw his favorite sitting and watching, and saw her face. Her eyes were the brightest lights he’d ever seen. For a moment they were something separate from her; for a moment her mouth, her chin, her hair were all something separate from her. He made a horrible sound. He was beset by the disassembling of his life: the upheaval of home, the visions of a deathship crashing down on them in revenge for all the other ships that had caught themselves in his forest, and now his favorite child with a face that had a life of its own. Panicked, he began to sob. His head buried in one hand, he reached over, groping in the dark, to lay his fingers gently on Catherine’s forehead and bring them down over her eyelids, in the manner of one who closes the eyes of the expired so as to keep the soul inside a little longer.

  * * *

  When he woke she was gone. He looked up and his eyes followed his own arm to the end of his own hand, to the tip of his own fingers that had touched her; and they were empty of her. He looked around him and she was nowhere to be seen. The rain was pounding the sheIter furiously. He woke his wife and she too looked for Catherine. They checked the spaces between each of the seven other children. Catherine was nowhere in the nest. Frantically the father ran to the base of their hometree to look for his daughter. The sea was in utter turmoil; the sky was black and the ship in the distance opened the night like a hole. Leaping from tree to tree, he called her again and again. His neighbors watched as he seemed to dissolve from sanity. All he could remember was the night of the shipwreck fifteen years before and how instinctively Catherine had rushed from their home to the edge of the sea, watching a boat die in the distance. Yet now it was different. Now they lived beyond the edge of the sea. Only the efforts of the others kept him from launching his own small canoe out into doom; they pulled him hack and held him pinned and listened to him shout himself into exhaustion.

  Over the course of the next few hours they noticed something. They noticed the boat turn dramatically away from shore, even as it was pillaged by the rain and the wind. By morning, when the wind was broken and the rain was a drizzle, the boat was in the distance, small and diminishing. That was when they found her.

  She was high in the tallest tree, where she had often gone in hopes of sailing her forest home to another place. She had taken her long ferocious hair and wrapped it around the tree where it held like a bond of wet rope. There she’d signaled all night to the ship with a light no rain could extinguish, the incandescence of her eyes. In any other circumstances she would have understood this to be futile; on any other night, after all, her eyes would only have been two more stars in the sky. But on this night, a storm-blotted night of no moon, there were no stars. The ship steered clear. Six hours she swayed in the tree, holding her eyes open against every force of nature that conspired to close them. She was battered, thrashed, mauled, pilloried by a night that hated her. Her flesh was beaten bloodless cold. But she had stopped, on an approaching ship, the hearts of men, and thus had freed their passion to survive. The men of the Crowd had to hack through her black hair to free her from the tree. Though her eyes were wide open, she did not hear when her father spoke to her. They knew she was alive by the way her mouth quivered with frozen shock. Her father grabbed her and pulled her to his chest, and he cried into her chopped thicket of hair. It’s time to sleep now, he whispered, for young girls of crazy courage. They took her to the nest. He closed her eyes and she slept. The people of the Crowd watched her, while somewhere else sailors read the memory of her face, the compass of mazes.

  * * *

  Another day passed before the first signs of him drifted into the forest: splinters of the huge black ship whose luck had run out; a chest of scarves, coins, a deck of cards; the crescent fragment of a wheel by which the boat had steered. He washed up himself some hours later, at the moment Catherine, in the nest, woke from her recuperation. She sat up looking out to where several men pulled the sailor from the water. He was laughing. Flung twenty miles by the storm back to the site of his ship’s averted disaster, half-drowned by the water and cooked by the sun, he was laughing. He had a shock of yellow hair. They hadn’t gotten him from the water two minutes before he’d rattled off three obscene jokes, which the men of the Crowd might have found amusing had they understood Portuguese. By the time they laid him across the roof of a low breakwater he had sung several sea chanteys. He laughed himself out of consciousness. Gazing around him, he fixed momentarily, before blackness, on the eyes of the most extraordinary face he’d ever seen. These eyes watched him across the short distance of a small slough, from beneath hair so black that in his delirium he took it for a mass of feathers, fallen from malevolent black birds plunging somewhere to their doom.

  * * *

  When he looked at her she caught her breath. At that m
oment she understood he was the instrument of destruction. When he laughed it was the sound of destruction’s motor, and his hair was the static of its reWing. As he slept she looked in the river for her watercreature, pointed at the sailor lying in the sun and ordered the creature to eat him. The creature didn’t move until she jabbed at it in the water and it disappeared.