Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  She ran for the doors. Colliding with the other people, she could hear the fall of the ballroom behind her. She reached the lobby to see the carpets smoking and the chandeliers dripping like the colored ice of a cavern. Around her were the molten lines of people consumed and displaced by small eloquent puffs, dark glows left where the forms had existed moments before. Either there was remarkably little shrieking from those trying to get out or it was drowned by the fire’s roar, but the silence was tomblike and malignant; there was a dreadful smell. Only when Catherine reached the street did she hear the sounds of a world outside: footsteps, voices, sirens, wheels. She fell on the long grass outside the hotel with other people, and got up to run and fell again; it was impossible to get away from everyone else. The sirens came closer and closer and still seemed as if they would never arrive. The first of the fire trucks pulled up the drive by the time Catherine had crossed the lawn to the west knoll. Near the end of the hotel’s west entrance she heard the crash of a milk truck that had just arrived with the night’s delivery; the hood of the truck was burrowed into the corner of the building. Someone was caught between the building and the truck. Milk gushed out over the lawn; people ran through puddles of it and their shoes left white tracks gleaming in the firelight. Hoses were hoisted from the fire trucks and Catherine could feel the spray of the water turning to steam.

  By now the upper floors of the hotel had caught fire. Flames coursed up the sides of the building like veins. People were streaming out onto the fire escapes in nightgowns and pajamas, women carrying furs and men holding briefcases. The bottom level of the hotel shone a brilliant gold. Catherine heard a terrific crash and screams from the lobby, and through the glass doors she could see the hotel’s chandeliers crashing to the floor. From around the corner came a sharp dry crack and a resounding rumble and then a gush of white light and from the crowd its first and only collective outcry. When the air cleared, half the hotel had disappeared. Those who could still run ran everywhere. Catherine jerked from the electricity in the air, and around her people began running into each other and into the sides of limousines and fire trucks. They held their hands in front of them and called for directions. The firemen began aiming their hoses wildly, showering the dark with water. More fire trucks rolled up the drive, blasting their horns at the people who were holding their hands over their eyes and howling from the flash of the explosion. More women and men poured from the hotel, wandering down to Wilshire Boulevard in white robes, black soot falling on them like snow. Many people were perched high in the windows of their rooms. They shouted down to the firemen to tell them where to jump, and the firemen stood at the base of the hotel with a canvas in their hands listening to the cries above them. Finally the people just began dropping from the windows. Everything went silent, mute firemen and people dropping quietly from the windows. High on the sixth floor a woman clung to her window, gray hair blowing and her sightless eyes glittering like ice. Catherine watched the woman spread her arms and take off like a bird.

  At the bottom of the knoll on Wilshire Boulevard scores of police cars flashed red and blue lights; troops crawled up the hill as though in an invasion. In the middle of the drive Catherine saw a group of children in nightclothes screaming and crying; a tall thin woman with her hair in a bun was trying to calm them. They kept groping in front of them. Moving blindly in a group, they left one behind, a small blond girl who reminded Catherine of the Edgars’ child. Catherine picked the girl up and carried her in the direction of the group. Who is it, the girl said, where are we going? Catherine said something in her own language, and the girl reached for her eyes. You can see, the small girl said; and then, to anyone within earshot, she cried, This one can see! Catherine felt the child reach for her eyes again, as though she wanted to take them from her head. This one can see! the child kept screaming, and then someone else reached for Catherine’s face too. This one can see! yelled a man with black gnashing gums. Catherine pushed him away.

  Someone else had her nails near Catherine’s eyes, and someone else pulled at her; she felt a pain shoot from her elbow to her shoulder. It didn’t matter now that Catherine was possessed of a chameleon face; the only force her face could deceive now was the blinding explosion of moments before. She can see, she can see! they were all screaming at her, running into each other in order to get her. Catherine flung the child in front of her and struck back. People tried to tear from her head the face she had despised so long. Someone had his hands around her neck, someone had his arms around her chest. Backed against something solid and cold, she turned to hoist herself up onto it while people wailed beneath her. Where is she! they were screaming back and forth. She could barely stay on her perch, her arms and legs shook so badly. She had no idea how long she could keep from being pulled down. People around her were shoved and trampled; the children among them were laughing and chattering, their fingers wet with blood. The tall thin woman with her hair in a bun stood in the distance sobbing hysterically; none of her children paid her any attention at all. Then Catherine saw that the thing onto which she had crawled for safety was a police car: she recognized it from her nights in the Hancock veldt.

  The door of the car opened.

  It opened with enough force to throw many of the people on the ground; in the throes of hysteria, some of them laughed. Getting out of the car was a towering black mountain of a man, who turned to look at Catherine on his roof top. “Come here, girl,” he said quietly, and took her under her arms and lowered her from the roof, and then put her in the front seat of the car and got in, locking the door. He did it as though it were a picnic at the beach. She sank into the seat, looking at the faces of those outside, most of whom didn’t know or no longer cared that she was inside the car. The black man turned on his unit radio. “Lowery here,” he said to someone. “I got myself caught in a mob on the drive.”

  “We’ll come in,” came a response.

  “No,” said Lowery, “this bunch has spent itself, I think. But we’ve got a disaster here, and we can use more paramedics and ambulances. People in extreme shock, also apparent loss of vision among most of them when the hotel generator blew. That includes the fire fighters and people jumping from the upper floors. I got a girl here, they were trying to tear her eyes out of her head.” He snapped his fingers in front of her face and she blinked.

  “How’d she get so lucky,” came the other voice.

  “Good question. Maybe she didn’t see the blow. Maybe it didn’t see her. Anyway I have a few other theories about this one.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember,” said Lowery, “the Hancock Park business a few weeks ago?”

  “No kidding.”

  “Well, it’s a theory,” he said. He cut off the radio, and when he looked at Catherine again he sat up straight. Her eyes were still open but spinning in her head; he snapped his fingers again in front of her and this time she didn’t react. “Don’t flip out on me now,” he said to her, “I’ve got some questions for you.” He didn’t believe she had suddenly gone blind; he knew it was something else. He didn’t know that she was asleep with her eyes open, but he might have figured from the movement of her eyes that she was dreaming. He wouldn’t have any way, sharp detective though he was, of investigating where she went, of following her back through the hotel, which stood in her dream husklike and black, a mammoth tunnel ripped through the ceiling and starting toward the stars, lit only by a fire in the far lounge where a tall middle-aged actor waited for his last shot against failure while the other haunted incarnation of the poet approached her from out of the dark. “It . . . is you?” R. O. Lowery heard her say in awkward English.

  “It’s me,” he said, still snapping his lingers and waving his hands before her eyes.

  But it wasn’t to him she spoke.

  * * *

  Catherine was treated for shock in the emergency room of General Hospital, then taken after several days to a sanitarium in Malibu. There she had a bed on the second floor, next to a window that
looked toward the sea. Her eyes were always open and moving in a dream, and she answered to no one who called her. Doctors who examined her found nothing wrong physically. Psychiatrists, speculating on what might have happened to her, were at a loss to account for her condition. The police had no idea who she was or where she had come from, except that for two months prior to the Ambassador fire she’d been reported walking at night in Hancock Park, looking in people’s windows. There were witnesses who saw her start the fire in what appeared to be a dispute with an unidentified man in the ballroom of the hotel, and there were also witnesses who had seen her just prior to the fire on the fourth floor of the hotel, in the room of a man who had succumbed at some undetermined point to a toxic overdose, perhaps by his own choosing. The “Wilshire Holocaust,” as the papers called it (several other buildings in the proximity of the Ambassador had also burned), was one of the worst disasters in the city’s history. Catherine, a Jane Doe to the police until they determined differently, was charged with arson and one hundred and sixty-seven counts of second-degree murder.

  * * *

  Lowery’s case was at an impasse before he began. The logical starting point was the man found dead with the bottles and pills in his room on the Ambassador’s fourth floor; the statement of a bellhop and other guests on the floor put the girl in that room ten minutes before the fire began. She’d been carrying what looked to be a dead animal. But the body and identity of the man had gone up in smoke along with the hotel records. Two maids said the description given by the other guests sounded like that of a man who had been at the hotel a while—tall and fiftyish, polite but recently reclusive. The manager of the hotel, who was aware that two medics had been sent up to the fourth floor a few minutes before the fire, thought the man might have been one Richard Dale, who lived on that floor and had been in the hotel long enough to have not paid his bill in some time, which was the only reason the manager remembered his name at all. Over the course of a week Lowery’s detectives couldn’t find a single person in Los Angeles who knew or had heard of Richard Dale.

  The case didn’t break for another week, during which time the papers diligently reported the degree to which the police were stymied. Each day Lowery drove up to Malibu to see his suspect, to the disapproval of the doctors. None of these trips was fruitful. He’d returned from one such trip one afternoon and was sitting at his desk trying to think of all the ways one leaves tracks across the landscape of one’s life and how he could find those tracks and follow them, when his door opened and the tracks led to him. Bingo, Lieutenant, said one of his men.

  Lowery lowered his feet from the desk. The detective came into the office and laid an open magazine before him. Lowery found himself looking at a picture of Jane Doe in a bed sheet. For several minutes he sat gazing at the picture and the photo credit with it. When he closed the magazine he said to his man, Then let’s locate Mr. Crow and have a talk.

  * * *

  After that things fell into place, up to a point. Larry Crow sent the police straight to Llewellyn Edgar’s house, which they found with several walls missing, two new doors six feet off the ground, and a window erected out by the curb. Edgar himself was in the only part of the house still intact, a servant’s room in back, where he was trying to fit together a hundred bits of shattered pink glass over a black photograph, as though all the pieces of a puzzle had fallen out, leaving an empty hole. Over the next forty-eight hours the police also talked to Madeline Edgar, Eileen Rader, the guests at a party given by Eileen Rader three months before, and several workers at a local construction company who had, around the same time, done some curious work for Mr. Edgar on the house, the results of which were now so unmistakable. In return for a promise of immunity from prosecution Mrs. Edgar made a statement. Lieutenant Lowery asked for medical reports on both Llewellyn Edgar and Catherine, and received the preliminaries the next day in a phone call. “Don’t know that I have much for you, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. “You know the mental state the girl’s in, and Edgar isn’t exactly bowling with ten pins either. At this point it’s tough to make a case against him for assault. Also, molestation’s out.”

  “Yeah?” said Lowery.

  “Girl’s a virgin. Of course there might have been some other form of sexual contact, but somehow I don’t think so.”

  By now the press had gotten the photograph and were running it incessantly. When more details of the story came out, the district attorney’s office settled for slavery charges against Edgar and reduced the second-degree murder charges against Catherine to a hundred sixty-seven counts of manslaughter. Lowery drove up to Malibu to see her again on a shiny blue fin-de-June day. Sitting by her bed watching her dream, he said, Wherever it is you are now, girl, don’t come back. You won’t like it here if you do.

  * * *

  When she opened the door of the cell he was hunched on the floor asleep. She stood beside him and waited for him to wake. He stirred and opened his eyes; he looked as though he didn’t believe he saw her.

  She knelt and watched his hands, He held them open before her and then dropped them and said something to her she didn’t understand. Somewhere behind her a door closed, and there was a wiry little man with red hair outside the bars who appeared very startled to see her. He said something and approached the door and then turned and left.

  She looked at the prisoner; his face was bathed in the purple light of the sun going down. He moved toward her slowly: he’s afraid he’ll frighten me, she thought to herself—as though anything can frighten me now. He was very near her, and the shadows of black bars rose through the purple light on his face. Looking at him closely, she realized he didn’t seem so much like the other one. He was tired and gray and his eyes hummed with something sad; he looked at her in a way no man had ever looked at her, not held by her face but rather as though he was the poet of a different destiny, of a different choice made long before, who had never consumed so easily his own vision. His eyes said, I was born in America. They said, I believed one was guiltless as long as his faith was true; I thought the act of treachery was beyond those who did not know its name. I never thought treachery was like a face. I never thought it was something one wore whether he knew it or not.

  Better, she wanted to say to him, that faith betrayed you rather than you betray it.

  For a while he held her, just by the arm. Then he let go, and she realized she’d been cold from some ocean breeze through some open window. She pushed the cell door and walked to the dark end of the hall, where she turned to look at him once more. The cell door swung back and forth but he didn’t move from his place. She heard footsteps. Lieutenant, she heard someone say. Lieutenant?

  * * *

  “Lieutenant?” Lowery shifted in his chair, opened his eyes. Catherine was still lying on the bed in front of him, her eyes still moving. An orderly was touching him on the shoulder. “I think you nodded off, Lieutenant,” he said. Lowery rubbed his brow with his hand and said to himself, I thought I could investigate where every sharp detective would like to investigate. But the only place I went was cold, from a Malibu ocean breeze through an open sanitarium window.

  Lowery returned two days later. Nothing had changed. A week later, after the story had finally dropped out of the papers, he came back. Catherine was still lying on the bed. “If anything,” said one of the doctors, “she seems to have slipped further.” The dreams? said Lowery. “Her eyes are going a million miles a minute,” said the doctor. He looked spooked.

  Lowery went to sit by her again. He loosened his collar and examined her a long time, exploring her countenance for a clue. The sun dropped into the sea and, as had happened before, he dozed. When he woke it was dark outside and the bed before him was empty.

  He jumped to his feet. He called an orderly and the orderly came running into the room. Before Lowery said a word the orderly took one look at the empty bed and disappeared. In twenty seconds he was back with two other orderlies, a nurse and the doctor. “I fell asleep for about fifteen m
inutes,” said Lowery. “She was gone when I woke.”

  The two new orderlies took off. ln the hall the lights went on and another troop of nurses arrived. The first orderly went to the window by the bed and looked out. “Ten-foot drop,” he said. “She didn’t go this way.”

  Lowery wasn’t so sure. He went to the open window and stood in the Malibu ocean breeze looking at the edge of the Malibu cliffs. After a moment his eyes narrowed. “There’s someone out there,” he said.

  * * *

  There’s someone out there, she heard someone whisper, and she ran down the path of the cliffside to watch a ship not foundered on the reefs of her childhood but rather sailing past, teeming with the blind of paradise. When she reached the sand she found it empty, but she saw his form in the water, swimming to shore. The night was dashed with waves. If he were to crawl onto the beach and collapse on his face she would run to him and say, But nothing swims in the dust. But he did not crawl and he did not collapse. He sailed to her; he knew the water; he strode from the sea. She hid the knife in the fold of her skirt and walked out to greet him.