Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  * * *

  Later in Los Angeles, when the dreams began, she would remember, but only vaguely, the way the knife felt in her hands on that boat on the river while she was watching him. No vengeance coursed through her, and she was nearly beyond hatred, she was beyond the color of it, into something white. Rather she was caught by the necessity of it, as though by slashing the knife across the pale of his throat she would sever herself from a cord, through which she had once been nourished with food and air but by which now, at the moment of a kind of birth, she could only be strangled. He was not this cord of course, but her memory of him was a cord attaching her to what and where she had been before; and she wondered if every fetus regards the cord with the same sense of betrayal, as an attachment to something black, before memory, nourishing one’s journey to something white, beyond hate, until the journey only stalls in another station, where the wait between departures is a thousand colors that never end.

  For himself, one of the last of life’s revelations would be a smell in the jungle, a smell he’d never known, after a life in which the vocabulary of sensations seemed to have exhausted itself early. By the second day of the New Jungle it was all around him, this odor. It wasn’t fruit, it wasn’t a plant, it wasn’t the water, it wasn’t the fine blue mist of the air; it was human. Not human in that the jungle was filled with humanity, though it might have been, but rather in that the boat was always entering a small black round cavity where the leaves had the purple texture of flesh pulled over a mass of broken capillaries and the branches clotting the river passageway were webbed with veins. The boat drifted farther into the dark epidermal tissue of the jungle, the smell getting stronger and stronger until he was mortified to even consider hacking through it, he was convinced it would splatter blood across his eyes. Huge drops hung from the trees. At the other end of the boat Catherine said to him, The jungle mourns that it has to foul itself with your death. Shut up, he whispered to her, peering around him.

  The jungle got blacker. Have I been swallowed by a monster? he cried. She answered, You’ve been swallowed by yourself.

  The river was moving faster, the momentary beams of sunlight that fiItered through Hashing by more and more quickly. Where does it go? he said, not really to her. There’s a hole at the end, she explained, where the water runs in. You lunatic bitch, he snarled, rivers don’t have holes. He watched the river carefully and tried to make out what was ahead. Of course he constantly had to keep his eye on Catherine too, who still had the knife.

  Since she’d gotten the knife they’d been at a standoff. Coba had the oar of the boat, the reach of which was obviously a good deal longer than a knife’s, the same oar that had cracked the head of Catherine’s father. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure but that she couldn’t throw the knife; it seemed a more complicated skill than a young girl would have mastered, but cutting loose with her hands the very ropes that bound them was a complicated skill as well, and she hadn’t had much trouble figuring that out. It was to Coba’s credit that he didn’t underestimate her. So he stayed at his end of the boat and she at hers, each of them waiting. By their second day in the jungle neither had slept. You think you can outlast me at this? he said laughing, his bravado becoming increasingly transparent since the welcoming party had met them at Town Four. Do you remember, she asked calmly, how you came to my village? You came to my village because one night I climbed a tree and tied myself to it with my hair and signaled your ship till dawn. I slept with my eyes open that night. You never know whether I’m awake or sleeping, I can sit as still as sleep (she demonstrated this by becoming absolutely still) or I can sleep while I appear awake. How will you know? It’s fitting that having saved your life this way, I’ll end it this way too.

  You’re a witch, he said to her, his voice breaking. I did your people a favor when I took you from them.

  By the end of the second day he began to feel the mosquitoes; by the third day there were citadels of them, hovering over the river ahead. He might have taken refuge in the cargo hold, a blanket covering the open side; but to have confined himself to this space, without the advantage of the long reach of the oar, would have compromised his position of defense against Catherine, who wasn’t touched by the swarms at all. On the third day the vines of the trees seemed to be wrapping themselves around his limbs; he overcame his fear of splattering blood and hacked his way loose, no sooner loosening one than becoming caught by another. Of Catherine the vines took no notice. By the end of the third day Coba heard the sounds of the thicket, the crunching of grass and a distant haze of drums.

  On the fourth day the river was moving faster than ever. The hole in the bottom must be close, said Catherine. There’s no fucking hole in the bottom of the fucking river, Coba screamed. The boat was spinning wildly and he had to use the oar to maintain whatever control was possible. Frantically he was trying to direct the boat and steer it clear of the hungry trees while watching Catherine at all times; any moment she might hurl the knife at him. You know you can’t survive the river without me, he said to her, we’re in this together.

  We’ve never been in anything together, she answered.

  By now he hadn’t slept in three and a half days. He hadn’t eaten since the last of the fruit just outside Town Four. The drinking water was virtually gone. Catherine was also hungry and tired, but he could tell by looking at her that she was nowhere near his point of exhaustion; compared to him, she appeared refreshed. He knew she had dozed here and there, fooling him with that sleeping trick of hers. Also, he didn’t understand how she could have been so unscathed by the mosquitoes and the vines of the trees.

  At the end of the fourth day the river came to a sudden stop. It was in the middle of a clearing, framed by the jungle but with a distinct circle of sky above them, as though they were in a crater. The sun was shining through, not in fluttering rays of light but in a big soft ball. Coba began to laugh. He couldn’t quite tell where the river went from here, unless this was a lake; he didn’t care if it went nowhere. He was delighted with the clearing and the big soft ball of sunlight. Hole in the river, he said, laughing at Catherine.

  She just blinked at him and held the knife.

  We’re through it, he said with satisfaction, though to where they’d come he didn’t know. He looked at her and had half a mind to risk the knife and get rid of her, just so he could get some sleep. Maybe later go into the jungle and see if he could find something to eat.

  Then he feIt the slow swirl of the boat beneath him and noticed the landscape beginning to inch past. Then he noticed the river was beginning to move again after all. At about the same time he noticed these things, a rapierlike flight of pain launched itself from his thigh. He was horrified to think he might look down and find himself bitten by a snake that had, unnoticed, slithered on board. Instead his leg had a small pink mushy puncture, out of which an arrow still quivered before his eyes.

  Another arrow sliced past his cheek, and he had barely distinguished the sound of a third when a new flight of pain took off from the side of his belly. Again he looked down; he had now been shot twice.

  He flung himself into the cargo hold out of a rain of arrows. The river was picking up speed with frightening velocity; the new blur outside reminded him, rather foolishly, of subways in Europe and the way underground walls flew by. The sound of the arrows was like that of countless orifices of the jungle each taking in a quick breath. The river was flying and yet the arrows kept coming, which meant the banks were filled with barbarians; there must be miles of them, he thought to himself. The pain of his thigh had grown cold while the pain of his belly leaked a flood of red. Between the cold below his waist and the fire above it, he expected he would divide in two.

  The next thing he knew, everything was still again. The sound of the arrows had stopped. For a moment he thought he had dreamed, but he still had an arrow in his side and an arrow in his leg; now all of him was cold. Nothing was on fire. He wanted the feeling of being on fire. He didn’t like feeling t
his cold. He feIt as though he were lying at the bottom of fear, waiting for someone to lower a rope. Then he realized something seemed sequentially missing from the last few moments; he realized he had passed out. For a moment he feIt great alarm at having slept, then great relief. He knew she was lying at her end of the boat in a torrent of red arrows; if nothing else he had outsurvived her. At least that, he said. He was wrongly cold. He wanted to go to sleep.

  He looked up to see her walk around the corner of the cargo hold, stand over him and look at him.

  There wasn’t a mark on her. Like the mosquitoes, like the vines. Fever inflamed him. She wasn’t smiling or superior. She was waiting. Ile looked again and she wasn’t there for a moment, and then she was. Damn witch, he cursed her; but it wasn’t that she disappeared and then reappeared, though that was the effect of it. He looked again, and then he saw it.

  It was like the puzzles he remembered doing as a child, in which one tries to find a hidden picture in a larger picture: you look and look and suddenly you see a cat in the wall, clear as can be, though a moment before you hadn’t seen it at all.

  They never saw her face. Not the Crowd, for a moment not the sailor, and not the jungle. 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. She lived in a place where she did not know her own face; and where she did not know it, the jungle never saw it; identity was something known in a way utterly removed from the vessel that carried it. Here, far from the men who gave her face its beauty, she was impervious to the view of the jungle and everything in it.

  Even the fever, he whispered. Even the fever doesn’t see you.

  So she waited for him to die. The boat drifted along peacefully now. He bled and he bled. When he tired of lying in his blood he pulled himself out onto the deck; wrongly cold in the cargo hold, he thought he might snatch some warmth from a big soft ball of sunlight. But there was no big soft ball anymore. She did not slit his throat. She would let the cord wither on its own, so that the memory might wither too. It would leave less of a scar that way. As he shed his life on the deck of the boat she went through his things in a casual, practical way, sorting out odds and ends. She thought of casting his coins overboard, but that seemed spiteful and overwrought. She came upon his cards and his scarves. Layering the sturdiest and plainest scarf twice, she wrapped a seemly number of coins in it. Then she watched him some more.

  The night passed. Before dawn of the fifth day something erupted from down inside him and filled his mouth and nostrils. He was astonished to notice that it was the smell he had first noticed four days before, the smell he had thought was of the jungle but which in fact was the smell of his own recesses.

  His head shot up from the deck. He gasped for a huge gulp of air, his eyes wide. She walked up to him and, putting her foot under the biceps closest to his heart, rolled him off the edge of the boat. His eyes were still wide as he sank, staring up at her through the water. There was a bubble from him. In after him went the cards, queen of clubs and all. Deal, she said.

  * * *

  The westward river spat her out somewhere in northern Peru. Since she was deposited on the right bank rather than on the left, she went in the direction of Colombia rather than Chile; by such accidents whole lives are determined. Bogota was the first city she had ever seen, though all she saw were its lights in the night. She didn’t stay long, entering at sunset and crossing through the middle of town; by dawn she had already come out the other end, and it was behind her.

  * * *

  She continued in the same direction, to the coast west of Barranquilla, where she decided, at the edge of the sea, to turn in the direction of the sun. Since it was late afternoon and the sun was on her left, she followed the coast to Panama rather than to Brazil, where she would eventually have stumbled on where she had started. Continually walking along the edge of the sea, she approached, after two weeks and another three hundred miles, a river she easily identified as made by men. She was shrewd enough to understand the value of her gold. With it she bought food and passage on a barge, which exited the canal on the side of the Pacific Ocean and sailed to a small merchants’ port in the Gulf of Tehuantepec.

  * * *

  She lived on the beaches of the gulf for two months, sleeping in a hole she dug with her hands and covering herself with the sand that baked so hot in the day it kept her warm in the night. Each morning she got up as soon as the sun rose above the trees to get wood for a fire. She went down to the ships to buy food from the boatmen. She began to notice the way they looked at her; it was the way Coba had looked at her when he’d first come to the Crowd. One day she got up to get wood and kept on walking. She walked ten days until she finally came to the pyramids of southern Mexico. They gleamed a tarnished gold in the sun, and in the gaping holes pocked by the heat burned the fires of Indians. It may be that the pyramids of Mexico were the first thing to fire Catherine’s sense of wonder since the night she stood on the beach when she was three years old watching the husk of a dead ship. For a while she lived with an old Indian woman in one of the pyramids where she would pass the time strolling among the catacombs. There were ancient pictures on the walls that told stories, none of which she understood since she had never seen pictures before. Some of the pictures looked alarmingly like the treacherous watercreature. She refused to believe that there might be a whole species of watercreatures, rather she preferred to think the one she knew was an aberration of nature. Sometimes she recognized the pictures of suns and stars, of mountains and waters. One day she came to the strangest picture of all, which didn’t resemble anything she had ever seen. She couldn’t make head or tail of it; perhaps, she decided, it was the likeness of a peculiar kind of forest or maybe the huge city she had seen in Colombia. The picture looked like this: AMERICA.

  * * *

  Sometimes people with faces the color of Coba’s came to the pyramids. They came in automobiles. By now Catherine had seen an automobile, moving isolated across empty terrain. But what she had not seen were the cameras the tourists brought; to her they looked like mysterious little boxes raised in ritual. One day Catherine met a couple. The man was a university professor in his late twenties and the woman with him was a postgraduate student. They spoke to Catherine in a language she didn’t understand, unlike any she had heard. They were fairer than even Coba had been. By now Catherine was tired of living in the pyramids, and she pointed up the road from where the couple had come in their automobile and asked, in her own language, which they could never have comprehended, if she could go back up the road with them. She kept pointing up the road and pointing at herself, back and forth. The man was absolutely amenable to this proposal; the woman didn’t say anything. They got in the ear and drove the rest of the day, Catherine in the backseat with her scarf of gold coins. They came to a hacienda where the couple was staying. Catherine assumed she would find a patch of dirt somewhere out by the house and dig a hole where she would sleep; the young professor, however, would have none of this. He kept pointing at Catherine and pointing at the house where he intended to have her sleep. The other woman looked off in the distance during this “conversation.” Catherine and the couple were together two days, continually driving up the same road and always staying at another hacienda or, as was the ease on the third night, a small hotel. By the beginning of the third day Catherine understood that the woman hated her. She understood that the man looked at her the same way the other men had. In the hotel in the middle of the night, as Catherine lay in a blanket in the entryway of the couple’s suite, she heard them have a terrific argument. She got up, took her scarf of gold coins and left. She walked up the road during the night and in the morning was still walking when a familiar automobile screamed past as though she weren’t there.

  * * *

  She continued through Mex
ico, living for a while in the back room of an estate outside Guadalajara, working in the kitchens of a territorial governor. She was surrounded by Indian servants and didn’t go beyond the large wooden doors that divided the kitchens from the dining room. Once, when she heard the sounds of many people in the dining room, she peered through the crack of the door at a large table covered with food, surrounded by elegant women and men. Sometimes the governor came into the kitchen to speak to the chef; Catherine had been there three weeks when the governor saw her for the first time. He pulled aside the Mexican woman who was in charge of the servants and spoke to her as his eyes watched Catherine the whole time. When the conversation was over and the governor was gone, the Mexican woman kept looking at Catherine with concern. The next day the governor came back into the kitchen and smiled at Catherine; he spoke again to the Mexican woman. After that the Mexican woman avoided the governor whenever possible, and the governor began coming back into the kitchens more often. The governor’s wife, a tall thin but not unattractive woman with light hair and a long neck, noticed this pattern as well. She also kept looking at Catherine and had her own conferences with the Mexican woman in charge of the servants. Catherine found herself assigned to chores farther back in the house, until she was confined to the laundry area and then the grounds. The governor developed an intense interest in laundry. He toured his grounds with new enthusiasm. His wife regarded Catherine with frosty resolve. There were more conferences with the Mexican woman, and the other servants watched this spectacle with amusement. Finally the Mexican woman came to Catherine. Go away, she said kindly. It’s not your fauIt, but for your own sake you should leave. Catherine didn’t fully understand all the words but nevertheless grasped the point. The Mexican woman drew Catherine a map of where to go; Catherine had seen it before. The map looked like this: AMERICA. “America,” the Mexican woman said when she handed the map to Catherine. She repeated it until Catherine repeated it back.