Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  There is a number for everything. There is a number for justice. There is a number for desire. There are numbers for avarice and betrayal. But when the scheme becomes utterly one of avarice and betrayal, then there are no more numbers other than those that quantify what we possess and lose. It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.

  He was born in the northern heartland of his country in the year before the outbreak of the first world war. His name was his father’s, Jack Mick Lake, three cracks of gunfire that suited the father as the publisher of a small newspaper outside Chicago. For the son the name was apt less for its explosiveness than for its symmetry. When he was six, the year after the war ended, he discovered the family tree, reaching back to a great English grandfather on Jack Mick Senior’s side, and including two uncles who lived across the state line in Wisconsin. Though too young to understand the thrill felt by a peddler’s daughter named Jane Shear when taken in a London alley by an ancestral nobleman at five-thirty in the morning before the dawn of the Victorian era, Jack Mick Junior could still compute the equation of the illicit moment. As he was staring into the family scrapbook on the afternoon his seventh autumn lapsed into his seventh winter, his mathematical genius found its first expression. After that he closed the book and computed the equations of autumn and winter themselves.

  His mother’s past eluded recorded history. She was born to a woman of the Potawatomi tribe, also known as the fire Nation, or the People of the Place of the fire. Originally rooted in the northeast of the country, they migrated southwest. Jack Mick Junior’s maternal grandfather, by what accounts existed, was a white trapper or sailor, perhaps from Europe. Thus there was bastardization on both sides of Jack Mick Junior’s parentage, though it was surmised the union involving the Potawatomi grandmother lacked the thrill that marked the one involving Jane Shear. Precocious enough to compute a number for sexual thrill even though he did not yet understand the experience, he would nonetheless need several years to find a number for rape, let alone humiliation, let alone subjugation. As with avarice and betrayal, once these experiences became a part of the scheme, the scheme became so utterly bankrupt as to defy numbers altogether. Thus his mother, who assumed the name Rae in place of a Potawatomi name for which there were no English sounds, remained to him a woman of mystery as well as strength and depth, until she died at the age of forty-one or -two, when the son was twenty-two or -three.

  She was forty-one or -two. I was twenty-two or -three. I know I saw her on the tracks that night; the moon was too full for my eyes to play that kind of trick on me. It would have been better, I suppose, if we had found some remains, some body; yet no one particularly regretted that we didn’t. It had been a troubled time for my father, the ten or twelve years that preceded that night, and it seemed there was nothing left to happen to us.

  First his uncle died when Jack Mick Junior was ten. Jack Mick Senior was the youngest of three brothers: the middle brother, Dirk (a family of gunfire names, this was), had gone west in 1915, venturing back once the next year and then dis appearing for good. Eight years later Jack Mick Senior and his oldest brother Bart got a wire on a night when, as it happened, they were returning to Jack’s home together from a card game in Chicago, where Bart would sleep off the bourbon before going on to Milwaukee the next day. It would later strike Jack Junior how the influence of bourbon on this particular night was a harbinger of things to come. Of course Bart did not go to Milwaukee the next day but, looking odiously green, accompanied Jack Senior in his motor car out west where they would either bury their brother or bring him back. For three unnerving weeks no one heard from them, either at the Lake home or the newspaper office. The ten year-old Jack Junior waited hours by the dirt road running along the railway tracks, watching his own shadow shrink before him in the mornings and slither out behind him after noon, until finally one day he rose from his bed and came on his father and uncle sitting in the family room before an empty fireplace. His mother was standing in the doorway of the kitchen; she had found the two men the same way. She asked if they wanted coffee. She, made them coffee. She asked about the west; she asked about their brother. They only stared before them with their mouths slightly open. Jack looked at his mother and his mother looked at Jack; he looked out the window at the car crusted with dirt and there flashed across his mind the image of these two men sitting in the car and looking just like this all the way back from wherever they had been, never saying anything. By that evening Jack Senior had gotten out of his chair and built a fire in the hearth, which he watched until the flames died. He did not look like a ghost anymore, but he did not talk about the west. He did not talk about his brother Dirk. Bart went to Milwaukee.

  The boy was a bit of a runt, compared to his father and uncle, both barrel-chested and filling rooms. It was supposed his size derived from the Indians on his mother’s side. His hair had the coarseness of his mother’s and the lightness of his father’s. His temperament was his mother’s stony inscrutability, into which, as his father said, one dropped words and did not hear the splash for days. When the boy was seven the father noted, as did Jack Junior’s teachers, that his eyes were bad; the parents drove him into Chicago on a Saturday to get him glasses. As they left Chicago the blur that had accompanied him on the way in was transformed into a panorama of revelations: the blast of the lake in the distance and a great hubbub in the streets on behalf of a newly ratified constitutional amendment. Women carried on as men watched in silence from the doors and windows of the shops. Young Jack looked to his mother who smiled to herself. He looked to his father who looked to his mother and said something to the effect that he hoped her first contribution to democracy would not be the election of Harding. In her way she turned from the window with her knowing smile and answered without saying a word; in his way he smiled too, once she had turned back to the window. Jack gazed at it all through his heavy glasses, gladly bearing the burden of their weight in exchange for a thousand distinctions, colors that cut.

  He had eyes of a blue that vanishes with infancy only to return a lifetime later with old age; in all the years between, the blue journeys to some unknown place, presumed dead and, upon homecoming, is received with some resentment as it lays out a treasure of sights the eyes can never understand. That the eyes of the boy retained the blue didn’t mean the blue never journeyed, didn’t mean he more sensibly deciphered its treasure; but it may have explained the numbers. Behind his large thick glasses the blue took the form of dual spheres, as though his eyes were two moons that had always been in the sky but had never been seen because they were exactly the sky’s color, and now they had fallen to hover before the face of a child. He was also a little hard of hearing. This may have explained the music.

  I was out in the fields behind the house and I heard it. I don’t know how old I was, twelve or so; it was after Pop and Bart came back from out west. Part of the field was ours but a lot of it was no-man’s-land, where lived a few Indians the country tried to run off until my father made a thing of it in the paper. Not my mother’s people at any rate. It was early in the evening. The sun was down but there was still a cold light left, and from out of the ground came a music, cool and hazy and windy like the light, and in the music were a hundred numbers, sixes and sevens and threes waving back and forth in the sound of the light. It was the music and light of a person’s sleep, as when you dream in the morning and everything is very sharp except the background, people’s faces sharpest of all against back grounds that go nearly blank. There was a big burly Negro man who ran a mill down by a creek a couple of miles over the ridge, and in my dream when he laughed his Negro face was sharp and clear and the room behind him fell away utterly: he laughed a five. A deep full five. The light now in these fields was of that kind of sl
eep and the music of that kind of light. But no fives. Sixes and sevens and threes. Honestly I don’t think it was a dream when I heard that music; but honestly I have to say no one else heard it or admitted to hearing it. My mother and father hadn’t heard it. I asked Bart once and he hadn’t heard it. They didn’t laugh at it when I told them; l had never made up such a thing before. They knew about my numbers.

  It was true he didn’t make up such things. Even as a child he didn’t imagine things; he never feared the dark. Moreover his talent with numbers was already clear; he mastered the basics of mathematical deduction by the time he was six, geometric principles by the time he was eight. By the time he was “twelve or so” he moved into the realm of calculative theory, with the fledgling University of Chicago watching him closely. His other intellectual capabilities were above average but not spectacular. He read occasionally but not feverishly; geography interested him but not history. So mathematics was his genius, and that he heard numbers in music and music from the earth did not alarm his parents. They didn’t wish to make his talent any more of a chasm between them than it already was. Therefore he did not ask them and they did not ask him to take them to the fields where he heard the music; if they were to go together and he were to hear it while they did not, the chasm would only be wider: they did not need to confront each other’s distance. Fully aware of his son’s genius, Jack Senior, who in all other ways encouraged it, did sometimes wonder at its usefulness and remark to his wife, “Be nice if he lived in the real world now and then.” She gave him that look, like in the motor car in Chicago on that day of her suffrage. She knew (he knew) the numbers came from her, from a place back beyond her being born, traveling up through her to the son as though she were an underwater cave, the sunken burial ground of the Potawatomi tribe, the Fire Nation.

  It is interesting, given his proclivity, that everything in Jack Junior’s real world happened when he was “twelve or so,” “twenty-two or -three.” Later it drove his father a little crazy, a perfect example in the father’s mind of the exotic futility of the son’s abilities; this was a man who, every day of his life, checked the exactitude of the date on every page of his newspaper, who numbered his achievements by such dates, every memory recorded by a number of significant intractability. Ten. Thirty. One thousand nine hundred twenty-nine. On that date his newspaper announced the pending economic collapse of a hundred million lives. “Yes,” Jack Junior would remember later, “I was about sixteen.”

  He and I were different in a lot of ways, and as we got older he got more and more like who he was and I got more and more like who I was. He always needed people around him, he was always taking them into his orbit; down at his paper he’d be mixing it up with the printers or whomever, his sleeves up to his elbows and his hands black from ink and blue from the metal filings beneath the first level of flesh. He put up with things for which, from his own family, he wouldn’t have had the patience; sometimes I thought he had more patience with those he employed than with those he loved. By the time I was nearly twenty I felt as though I had no patience for anyone.

  If you’d called him a reformer or liberal he would have stared at you aghast. If you’d called him a crusader he would have been disgusted. Later after my mother was gone, close to the second world war, I’d hear people in bars call him a crusader. When they called him this it wasn’t meant as a compliment. But when I was younger, after I began hearing the music in the fields, I woke one night to a red glow over the ridge down by the creek; the Negro’s mill was afire. The Klan had come over from Indiana at the news that a woman in Gary had been affronted by a colored man in broad daylight. Given the broad daylight, you might have thought they’d have a better idea of who it was, but it probably didn’t matter; they picked on the first colored man they came across and the fact that he was in another state just made it all the more inconvenient in terms of legal prosecution. The Negro got out of it roughed up but alive. Pop ran about seven or ten stories on it and got copies into Gary. He shamed two states into extradition proceedings. He was always running stories about the Indians too. But call him a crusader, he had no use for it.

  In fact Jack Senior considered himself rather a conservative, in that his values were unabashedly traditional, and his self-identification, when asked about his politics, was simply “Patriot.” This in an age mesmerized by the convulsions of the East, in which the vanguard held hopes that had nothing to do with countries. “Prattle,” said the father to one-worldism. Still, in the son Jack Senior saw an inner withdrawal that struck him as luxurious and irresponsible. This triggered an argument. It was late in the day and they were driving back from visiting Bart and his new fiancée in Milwaukee, and from Chicago where Jack Junior had applied for admission to the university. The road curled above them like a blue vapor and across the valley in the wet rust of twilight the wheat silos of the farms, burning moments before, were doused to silver. When the valley went dark the sky went riverblack, houses and barns cauterized in stabs of gold and slash-red. Into the dark father and son drove angry and speechless. Finally the father sighed. “I know you’re not like others. I know you hear things others don’t hear, I know you hear your music. But all the more reason, you know. All the more reason. You’re curt sometimes. You’re abrupt. You ought to think about other people sometimes.”

  “I don’t give a damn about other people,” the boy said. The older man was crestfallen. They got home and parked the car. The boy had a lump in his throat; hating himself, he said to his father as they walked to the house, “I didn’t mean that.” He had meant something else. He had meant he felt alone next to his father who knew people so easily. He had meant that no matter how hard he tried, he could not be who his father was, his father who got more and more like who he was. The father barely heard him. “I didn’t mean it, Pop,” the boy pleaded. At the door Jack Senior nodded.

  When he was admitted to the university, the month before the economic collapse of a hundred million lives, Jack Junior filed his papers under the name of John Michael Lake (no junior), which was a fiction, not so much to mute the gunfire of the father as to escape the symmetry of the son.

  Bart first married in the last years of the nineteenth century, when Jack Senior was still a boy; for that matter Bart was still a boy, barely twenty. By the time he was thirty the marriage had ended, the young wife having met a saloon keeper about whom she made no secret of her excitement. Jack Senior would later conclude Bart’s drinking started in those days as he wandered saloon to saloon looking for the man who had stolen the wild Mrs. Lake. One night he found the saloon, with the man, with Mrs. Lake, upon which confrontation the new couple demonstrated to the abandoned husband the full extent of their crashing passion, in a kiss that couldn’t begin to match the demonstrations Bart had seen in his mind time and again. Bart ordered another drink. He left only after the keeper went off his shift and took Mrs. Lake with him. Bart and his wife had had a daughter who was well into marriage and motherhood herself when he met his second wife; the daughter was two years older than the prospective step mother.

  The match was even more curious than this. Bart was now in his late forties, the edge of his masculinity dulled in a previous decade, a man of some ascendant means, and a large man of height and girth that bespoke recent fortune. Melody was a pretty blonde. She had much humor and was not wild like her predecessor; she didn’t want or need wild things. Given her own childhood, it was enough that she had a man who would care for her, it was enough to have an affectionate love rather than a passionate one. They lived in Wisconsin, a Wisconsin couple. It never occurred to Bart when he met her that he had a chance with her; when he got the chance it never occurred to him he could actually keep her. They married in 1921, quietly. Jack Junior knew nothing of it until it was over; later in his life he couldn’t even remember a ceremony, at which his father was best man. Every month or two Jack Mick and Rae and Jack Mick Junior drove to Milwaukee to visit; sometimes Bart came down alone, as on the night they got the wire
about Dirk. After the marriage the drinking did not abate but became worse as Bart waited dreadfully for the new wife, blond and pretty, to get wild and leave like the old wife. That she did not, at least not until life became intolerable for her and her love for Bart was rendered so clearly inadequate, only tortured him more.

  This business with my uncle and his second wife went on over some time of course. I was growing up through most of it. I never understood anything was wrong anyway, the insurrections and dashed treaties of the bedroom were beyond me, and mostly I remember Melody laughing all the time. Also I was at the university. Also I was in my own world, as my father always complained: I barely saw the soup lines, the liquored amber flash of gangland nights. I don’t think it occurred to me something was wrong in the country until one evening in the door of a flophouse I recognized a man from my bank, a man who’d been sitting behind a desk nine or ten months before, deciding whom to give money to. Then I noticed every road off the college grounds seemed to be an alley of sleeping men, and the yellow lights of the flophouses were dim not because the houses were closed but because they were so full that men inside were sleeping against the windows one atop another, the light from the bulbs barely seeping out between the fingers of their hands. I think one day I said to myself, Life’s different now. Meanwhile my family was coming apart too and I didn’t know it. In my third year, when I was nineteen or so, a couple of things happened. I met Leigh. I found The Number.