Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  He went to town to look for her. She wasn’t in town. He went down to the docks to see if anyone matching her description had booked passage. They had seen no one like her. He asked about her everywhere; he was driven back to the moors by their reproach. He partly walked, partly hitched out to Land’s End so as to be there when the sun fell; he sat all night on the cliffs watching the lighthouse for the sight of her telltale eyes. The lighthouse was dark. He went back to the cottage and now turned the place upside down, what there was to turn upside down: a chair here and there, a deathbed. She was not to be found beneath chairs or beds. She was not to be found behind the walls or beneath the floors. He scoured the moors for the next week, and then a month, and then many months. He didn’t find her, and no one knew of her. He went back to the stone cottage again and waited there in the nights, foolishly trying to blot her from his sleep; sometimes he believed that if he slept long enough he would wake to her. Sometimes he believed that if he stayed awake long enough, he would tumble into her unconsciousness, wherever she had taken it. Those footsteps that once led to a river’s edge haunted him; he loved, as does every man who is born to a vision, that unseen future that his courage once failed. He hated, as does every man who is born in America, that irrevocable failure that his heart won’t forget.

  On the stone walls of the cottage he added things, he subtracted them. He divided things and multiplied them. Sometimes he used chalk, sometimes coal, scrawling the equations the length of the room. After a couple of weeks the entire inside of the cottage was filled with additions and subtractions, multiplications and divisions; he then moved to the outside of the house. When the outside of the house was covered, he began writing equations in the earth. When he went to work at the shipping company, he began filling the company books with this arithmetic and then the top of his desk. Soon the moors where he lived were filled with arithmetic; he then took to adding and subtracting on the roads leaving Penzance, down on his knees with his back to the end of the island, adding and subtracting himself into a corner of Cornwall. The townspeople noted this behavior. They consuIted among themselves and wondered what it was about this part of their country that attracted such preposterous Americans, one more preposterous than the other. Months passed, and when the spring gave way to summer, and the summer to autumn and winter, and when the year gave way to the next, Lake was still writing equations, new ones in the spaces between the old.

  His was not aimless adding and subtracting, however it might have seemed to the native people. He had determined to disprove, once and for all, the existence of The Number. He had determined to show that ten followed nine after all, that the only presence between the two was the debris of fractions and percentages, nothing more, and that The Number was only a terrible delusion, a personal fable he had told himself, and that there was no reason to follow the music across the river that night years before because there was no music: that The Number did not exist and the music of The Number did not exist and the passion of the music did not exist. In this way he would justify a private collapse. While he had tried once before to so disprove this thing, he had hoped then not to succeed; he had attempted to disprove it only in order to affirm it. Now, however, he laid siege to it.

  He failed. He could not disprove his number or his music or his passion. He disproved everything else. He disproved the existence of the very walls of the cottage on which he wrote the equations; he disproved the existence of the books and the desk at the company where he worked. Under his employer’s bewildered watch, he disproved the existence of the employer. He disproved the existence of Penzance. He dis proved the existence of the sea and the boats on it, and the castle in the middle of the bay. He disproved the existence of the moors and the sun in the sky. He disproved the sky. He mathematically and empirically disproved his memories, one by one, all the way back to the blonde he had loved whose name and face he couldn’t remember. But what he could not disprove was the love itself and the huge reservoir of hunger of which it was a part. In the end he hoped to disprove his own existence and the huge hungry place of which he was a part and which was a part of him. But he could not. When he had disproved one, two and three, when he had definitely ruled out four, five and six, when he had banished from all conceivable reason seven, eight and nine, and every exponent thereof, there was still his awful number left, the last number in the world, The Number of No Return. The next year passed into the next, and the next into the next. Five passed into ten, and he hurtled through his middle ages past his half-century mark. People around him came and went. In this time the company for which he worked declined and failed, a new company flourished and vanished. The Blue Plate Inn changed to some other inn, which did not matter because he had proved, certifiably, there was no such inn. All the things that he had proved to himself never existed passed in the manner of things that never existed.

  When fifteen years had gone by, and the mathematically disproven end of the empirically disproven Old World was mad with his numbers, he had no choice but to believe that which he had spent a life trying to disbelieve. One morning he woke, closed the door of the old stone house behind him for the last time, and went down to the sea where he bought a ticket for home.

  There was a number for everything once; there was a number for justice. I remember men half-crazed with it. They counted to it in their sleep and went no higher because there was nothing higher. It was a number that couldn’t be divided by any number other than itself even though every other number was a component of it. Mathematically this is impossible but that’s the sort of number it was. That’s the sort of place it was, where dreams had the precision of numbers and passion was a country, and the country was called . . .

  It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what it was called. It’s like forgetting the last line of a joke and trying desperately for a lifetime to remember; and then it comes at the end, right before you go, and it isn’t the same. It isn’t the same because in the forgetting of it, it has changed to something else. It’s hard to decide what’s the worst thing, whether it’s that justice does not have a number anymore or whether it’s that those who lived where passion was a country forgot their dreams and so scrambled to invent the memory of insomniacs, the small stingy arithmetic that counts no higher than avarice and betrayal.

  I’m going back. I ‘m sorry it’s taken me this long. I don’t pretend to be strong enough for it. I don’t pretend to have the passion my dreams once had. I don’t pretend I’ll hear the music I once heard or that I’ll even reach the place where I heard it. Entering the last half of my life I could feel myself tire; entering the last quarter I feel myself succumb. I’ve tried every way to disprove what, in my heart, I knew to be true; I suppose it’s in the nature of most men to spend lifetimes trying to do this. I cannot watch, sitting on the shores of the Old World, the ripples of my country going down for the third and last time. I would rather know, when I die, that faith betrayed me than that I betrayed it.

  In the mornings, as Lake was shaving, he would look up from the white round sink to the blue round hole in the wall which was the sea; the boat slipped slowly to America. Sometimes at night he woke with the urge to fill the walls and ceiling and floor of his cabin with equations; he resisted this. There were no equations left, and he didn’t want trouble with the ship’s crew; he imagined being put in a small boat with a compass as the captain pointed vaguely back in the direction of England. So he simply sat on deck facing the west waiting for the sight of land and always listening carefully, should he hear something.

  He spent no time in New York except what was necessary to cross town and get a train out of Penn Station heading west. Within the hour the train was past Newark. During the night the train came to Pittsburgh. The train continued across country; the morning of the third day Lake arrived in Chicago. In Chicago he found the buildings painted with pictures of human parts. On the side of a store would be an open hand and on the back of a gas station would be an open eye. There were human parts set against
backgrounds of rainbows and ocean waves, desert plains and outer space. Walking to his old room between the railway tracks and the university, Lake went down a street of mouths painted in wilted colors, and from every mouth came bright splotches of sound like electric word balloons. None of what he heard was the music he was listening for; none of what he saw that he remembered was anything but a trapdoor for him. An old store sign, a familiar archway, the perennial sound of a bus stopping at a certain corner, the smell of beer in the wind, sometimes even a long-forgotten face now many years older: these were all trapdoors, opening beneath him and sliding him down a chute to 1934, 1935. I should have been more careful about time and dates. Crossing an old bridge, he would feel the falling black rush and find himself standing where he had stood thirty years before, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines playing “West End Blues,” and a dead blonde lying at his feet.

  He went back to the station. He asked for a train west. They gave him a schedule for Rockford. They gave him a schedule for Peoria. Pressed, they found a schedule for St. Louis. I said west, he told them. Finally they gave him a schedule for the West. One train that left at no particular time; one had to wait for it at the station. One train with no signs of destination on the side; one had to know the particular train. On the fifth night he saw it, a white eye roaring out of the dark from somewhere above Lake Michigan. At first it seemed very far away, rising and falling; then suddenly the rhythmic huff of it became an overwhelming howl, barely stopping at all. Just before he jumped on he had this funny light-headed feeling, right at the end.

  The train flew west. Lake stood in the aisle of his dark empty car watching the passing small towns while the cold air came through an open window. There was a field in a flood of stars; he had known it once. There was a house beyond the field; he had known that once too. The train flew past all of it. For a while he heard the sound of a dog on the ground below; it ran along barking until the train passed a wooden fence by a road and then the dog was left behind. Soon they were at a river; he knew this river. As the train flew past, as he turned to look toward his destination, he parted his lips as if to say something or cry out or simply breathe a little. The train wound its way into the open red mouth of the moon.

  He fell asleep in his compartment by the window to the sight of the black river beneath him. When he woke several hours later it was morning, and the river was still there. He decided they had stopped a while on the track during the night; he looked back in the direction they had come and strained to see the banks of the river behind him. He wasn’t sure whether he saw them or not. The train hurtled on, a moving tunnel unto itself, the space of the west clearing before it and collapsing behind it. Lake fell asleep again; occasionally he would wake with a start, only to determine the train was still moving and had not yet reached the other side. When he woke again at dusk, he sat up abruptly to stare out the window; the river was still beneath him. He was certain the train had not stopped for any significant period of time. The horizon looked utterly different from the way it had looked that morning, and now Lake was sure the riverbanks behind him were far out of sight. The train seemed to him to be moving fast, though it was difficult to tell since there was nothing but river and sky against which to measure.

  He languished in and out of a stupor, overwhelmed not simply by the weeks and months of his journey but by the fifteen years he had lived on the moors disproving everything of his life except for a sound he had heard once long before from the other side of the river he was now crossing. As he dozed he dreamed only of the river and how he would wake to the white banks of the other side. People went west all the time, he reminded himself in his sleep; this is not unusual. It’s in the nature of the times to go west. But when he woke the next morning the train was still moving and the white banks of the other side were still not in sight. Lake explained to himself that it was one of the world’s major rivers.

  Sometimes an islet would appear or something that resembled the early stages of a marsh. By the end of the second day there were more islets; the water was magenta and the clouds were low and rumbling, barely a hundred feet above him and rushing ahead like rapids to the edge of the earth. On one of the islets he spotted a red windmill spinning against the sky, and then on another islet another windmill; within the hour there were waves of them as far as he could see, red windmills slowly spinning against the sky on a thousand islets spotting the water. The clouds rumbled on. We are approaching the other side of the river, Lake told himself with some relief. But within another hour, before darkness fell completely, the islets began diminishing, the windmills began disappearing, until there were only a few left on their outskirts, and then just the river again, as before.

  He sat up through the night, dread weaving a cocoon inside him, and collapsed at dawn into exhaustion. When he woke that afternoon the larva of dread had burst forth into full blown terror. The river was still beneath him and the sky sagging onto him closer than ever. The sun was white in the west; and as he sat watching it, he saw a geyser erupt from its middle, first a small spittle of black, then a trickle in slow runnels up over its face. My God, he said, and raised himself feebly into the window of the train and held himself there, as he had held himself in the window of his college room many years before, thinking of her and contemplating before him the very track on which he was now stranded. He did not consider going to another car of the train to find someone else; he did not want to find that there was no one else. He didn’t want to walk on looking for someone until he got all the way to the front of the train, to find no one was even running it. He didn’t need to discover this. It was no wonder, he told himself, his mother had disappeared without a trace, standing on these tracks, riding this same train into the dream of America. It was a wonder, he told himself, his father and uncle had ever returned at all, had ever returned to look aghast into the empty fireplace. He was thinking all this and watching the black geyser of the sun when he heard the door of his cabin open behind him.

  He whirled around. There, in the door, was a conductor. It was a rather common thing to see a conductor on a train, but Lake stared at him in astonishment. For a moment he closed his eyes, then opened them. The conductor was still there, looking at him questioningly. “You all right, sir?” the conductor said. He had a white mustache and a blue conductor’s suit with red cuffs.

  Lake closed his eyes again; he opened them again. “Yes,” he smiled weakly, “I guess I am all right.”

  The conductor nodded and stepped back out of the compartment. “We’ll be pulling in before dark,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Angeloak is the station.”

  “Angeloak?”

  “Before dark,” the conductor repeated, and tipped his hat.

  I still could not see the end of the river. From both sides of the train I looked for it in vain. But as the sun set fast into the sea, its geyser continued to spew higher and higher, black and coiled, branching out beyond the star’s outline until the sky filled with it. Even after the sun was gone the eruption grew larger and more powerful. Then I saw it wasn’t a geyser at all. Then I saw it wasn’t from the sun at all but out of the river: a colossal oak that spread in all directions against the billowed ceiling of the clouds, the waves of the water pounding its massive scorched-black and bleached-white trunk. As we came closer the tree became more and more huge. Its top was mostly naked in the wind; on the water below I could see passing leaves, bits of bark. In the frail pink glow of the sun-stained west there was only this tree webbing the horizon until the sky seemed a sea shell curling to its middle, the roof of it beveled gray; and there was this roar, the dull sound of the sea they said when I was a child. . . .

  Soon the train began to slow. A blue fog drifted over the river. By the time the train came to a crawl it had reached the monstrous tree; the trunk was some forty or fifty yards wide. Lake could see it from both sides of his car. A tunnel was cut through the middle and lanterns hung from the archway. The train reached a complete halt insid
e the tree; it was no surprise at all to Lake that he was the only passenger to step onto the station platform. A wet wooden smell was in the air, and through the trunk roared a gust off the water. The platform beneath his feet still had a rhythm; he wasn’t certain if it was the sensation of the train in his legs or the tree buffeted by the constant crash of the waves. A porter came up to him and asked if he could take Lake’s luggage. “I have no luggage,” Lake told him; the porter nodded and touched the rim of his hat. He looked at Lake in a way that was a little off-center. In the light of one of the lanterns Lake could read a cawed wooden sign: ANGELOAK.

  Lake stared through the tunnel toward the front of the train. Through the smoke of the engine and the fog off the river he could see the railroad tracks continuing on over the water into the dark until they vanished from sight. “Will we be pulling out again soon?” Lake asked the porter.

  “Not for a while, mister,” said the porter, still not quite looking at him. “You got time to get a hot meal upstairs if you like.”

  Lake cleared his throat a little and said, “How far to the other side of the river?”

  The porter pursed his lips and after an uncertain moment answered, “Oh, still a ways.”

  Lake nodded. “It’s quite a river.”

  The porter got a look on his face of almost vicious delight. He began to laugh. “Quite a river indeed,” he said. He kept laughing, “That’s it, all right, it’s quite a river.” He continued laughing as he turned from Lake and walked on down the platform.

  Lake walked up a series of winding steps to a level constructed above the tracks. In the hollowed core of the oak was a small cantina and inn: a few tables and a bar in a dimly lit wooden cave, with misshapen gaps in the trunk staring out into the night. Hanging on the inside walls were several odd pictures, all of them the same; behind the bar hung a calendar. The inn consisted of half a dozen very small rooms perched on individual tiers in the most formidable of the upper branches; these tiers were reached by four long rope bridges that draped the branches from the trunk. The innkeeper was a friendly fat man with ruddy skin, clear-eyed but looking at Lake the same way as the porter had, as though he was not quite in focus. He asked if Lake wanted a room. Lake said no, that he would be pulling out with the train, but he would like something to eat. He asked the keeper if many people came through and the innkeeper said, Not as many as there used to be. The innkeeper asked Lake where he was headed and Lake said west, and the innkeeper nodded agreeably to this, but he seemed to nod agreeably to everything. Finally Lake said if it was all right he’d just sit over on the edge of the cantina next to one of the open knotholes where he could look out over the river. The innkeeper said this was fine and to let him know if Lake changed his mind about the room. Lake sat over by the window of the tree and for a while studied one of the odd pictures on the wall: it was nothing but a black spot, framed and lit by a nearby lantern. The other pictures on the wall were exactly like this one except for variations in shape and size. Lake decided he would just as soon get on with his journey. He closed his eyes and listened to the seashell roar, which pulsed and expanded around him. Somewhere in his slumber something struck him, and he suddenly jumped to his feet to see that the roar was not that of any seashell but that of the train, which had just pulled out of Angeloak and was slithering off into the fog.