Rubicon Beach (41 page)

She hadn’t changed so much. Older, of course. No longer the girl who had evaporated among the moors fifteen years earlier but a woman; there was a line or two around her brow, and the lips were not as deep red but a bit weathered in color. Yet her eyes were the same, incandescent and depthless, and her hair was a wilder swarm than ever; it glistened with the mist of the river. There was no telling how long she’d been kneeling here in the sun on the planks of the railway. She watched as he came to her. She did not pull away as he knelt down before her and, his hands shaking, shredded her dress down the middle. The dress fell on the tracks behind her and she fell too. His hands ran down her arms to her wrists, down the sides of her body to her hips, down her legs to her ankles. He hovered over her. Her hair hung across the edge of the tracks and blew in the wind. Above was the drained and livid sky and beyond was the long black rip of the monstrous oak; in her a weary clock still ticked. She shuddered with the bedlam of unsounded chimes. For a while neither of them seemed to breathe. Then she felt him exhale across her thighs and taste the red ribbon of her black curls; a new wetness exploded in her. The hot rail of the tracks ran against her face. His glasses fell from his eyes and bounded across the wood. He tried to bring her into focus, and when she grabbed his shirt and pulled him into her, he took in his hands her hair, splayed across the track behind her so as to fix on her eyes; he somehow knew he could not look away. He somehow knew that in the bond formed of their mutual vision he could not be the one to break it: he sensed the doom of it. And then he laughed at himself and she, perhaps misunderstanding, laughed too. The sound of her laugh was foreign to her in the way she had found foreign all the things in a country of face-worship, where the visage is not the slave of the dream but the dream is the slave of the visage. And released into this foreignness that had become her foreignness, joined to the strangeness that had become her strangeness, she surged beneath him, ravening and abandoned, and pulled him wrathfully into her over and over, never severing the look between them, so as to pull him into her new communion with foreignness: she had decided long before she would not be the slave of those who aspired to be dreamers and then only cowered before their dreams. She moaned in his ear. She did not close her eyes. When he tore the virgin tissues of her she bit down hard but did not wince. She stared into his face and dared him to balk at his own vision. And then, for a moment,
he looked and she wasn’t there, brown and naked she was gone before me, as though she had slipped through the tracks into the black river far below, even as I felt her in my hands, even as I felt her legs around me, even as I felt myself in her: I couldn’t see her. I think I closed my eyes. No, that isn’t it: it wasn’t that I closed my eyes: it was that I had to turn away for just a moment. For just a moment. It was too much to see that light; I turned from her just at the moment I climaxed to see two blue moons the color of the sky there on the tracks right beyond my reach, and I was thinking, Now where have I seen these moons before? and I was squinting to make them out, two blue moons. And I emptied myself in her; and maybe, for just a moment, I even fell asleep.

“Lieutenant. Lieutenant?”

And then there’s the sound, the sound I followed out onto these tracks: it’s huge, the sound I can’t bear to hear or disregard; huge, like the night of the shipwreck and the little girl on the beach; huge, and close. And I have this funny memory, of all things to remember; I have this memory of Melody Lake sobbing in a mortuary. What a thing to think. What a thing. And I say to myself, A memory, is it only the dream of the wandering blind? And then it’s there, huge above me, the sound, coming from a light so sharp and white that at first I think it’s the sun until I realize the sun’s on the horizon; and then I think it’s the train until I realize the tracks are absolutely still but for the fading pandemonium of our bodies, and then I’m thinking it’s her eyes like the old man of the moors saw them the night of the lighthouse until I realize the light’s in her hand, loud and white and sharp, in her hand as though to sear her fingers with it, as though to extinguish it: and then almost faster than I can see it, it comes to me

“There’s someone out there.”

and it sings to me. It
sings