Rubicon Beach (40 page)

I watched in disbelief as the train went off without me; cursing, I went back to the bar and began berating the keeper. I ran down the steps to the platform below and stood there as though it would somehow bring the train back. I simply could not get it through my head that I had missed the train. The porter was still there and I berated him too: it wasn’t, after all, as though there had been a throng of passengers. I was the only one, and both the innkeeper and the porter knew I meant to take that train out. The innkeeper assured me I would have a room until the next train came through. I told him I didn’t want a room, I wanted to be on that train, and I asked when another would arrive. He said he didn’t know, that the trains didn’t follow a precise schedule and I must have realized that when I got on. All the more exasperating was the way neither the innkeeper nor the porter would look right at me when I spoke to them, and finally I got rude and snapped my fingers in front of the innkeeper’s eyes. And then I realized he didn’t see me. Then I realized the porter didn’t see me either. Neither of them saw anything.

I was given the room on the highest tier of the oak. There was no key; the porter directed me to the third bridge and smiled broadly as I went on my way. I expected to tumble off the tree into darkness as the railing in my hand ran out. A lantern hung from the branches; I took it with me. In fact the bridge did indeed lead to a room, where the night was warmer and the wind softer than it had been in the tunnel. Hanging in my room were two more pictures that didn’t show anything. There was a single bed and a basin of water on a stool. There was a contraption for bringing water up from the river that hadn’t worked in a long time. I slept restlessly.

I woke early. I looked out my window and just began saying to myself Oh no, oh no, over and over. I turned a complete circle, going from one window to another, gazing to the north and the south, the east and the west. There was nothing out there. I could see for miles and there was nothing at all to see: there wasn’t a sign of land, not hill or beach, and in the west nothing but fog, and nothing on the water but the long gleaming zipper of the railway tracks. The clouds weren’t more than fifteen feet from the reach of my hand. 

I made my way down the swaying rope bridge to the cantina. The innkeeper brightly bade me good morning but I still wasn’t in the mood to be civil. I demanded to know when the next train was coming; he explained I had to be patient. He begged me to have some breakfast. I left the breakfast sitting on the counter and went down to the platform, where I found the porter. I insisted that he tell me when the next train would arrive. “Can’t say,” he answered. I stepped out onto the tracks; the planks between were wide and solid. I can walk the rest of the way, I was thinking angrily to myself staring down the tracks into the fog, when the porter on the platform said, “I wouldn’t think about walking if I were you. Tracks are strong enough but what if the train comes? Nowhere to jump but in the drink.” For someone who couldn’t see anything he certainly saw a lot.

The train did not come that week. It did not come the next week or the next. The April page of the calendar behind the bar was torn away; nothing changed. I sat in the window of the oak looking at the fog at the end of the tracks; May came, but the train did not come with it. Exasperated by my exile, I finally asked the innkeeper one day why it was anyone would be living high in a tree. “We could never find,” he said, laughing, “the trunk of the sky.” I nearly said, Would you have found it even if there was one to find? before I was answered by the soundless silver gaze of his eyes.

One night early in June I woke in my room at the top of the oak to a ringing in my ears. It was high and sharp at the beginning and then trailed off for a long time, like the sound of someone firing a gunshot. The sound didn’t stop, as though the shot was always traveling closer and closer.  All the next day I heard the ringing. It didn’t fade but rather grew, gradually, almost indiscernibly.

On the next day, with the ringing still in his ears, John Lake woke to a head full of sixes. It was the first time in a long time he had thought of numbers at all. He got up and washed his face, then went down to the cantina. At some point he asked the innkeeper the date. The innkeeper told him it was the sixth of June and that the year, at least according to the calendar, was 1968—that is, Lake realized, it was the sixth day of the sixth month in the sixth year of his sixth decade since his birth in 1913. It was the first time in a long time, and one of the few times ever, Lake had noted so exactly the date.

The ringing was now very loud in his head, but it had also stopped growing; it had stopped growing sometime during the night. The growing had been so gradual for so long that he couldn’t be certain it had stopped at all, but after some hours he determined for himself that it was not growing any more. The only time it grew was when he would walk toward the gnarled twisted window of the oak and look down the tracks westward into the fog off the river. That was when it occurred to him. For a moment he indulged himself in believing it was the whistle of the train, but he knew that wasn’t it; he did not turn there in the cantina to ask if the innkeeper heard the sound since he had, after all, always heard the things others did not hear, like the music of fields, like the . . .

And then he knew what it was he now heard. Then he remembered the night he had heard it thirty years before. And for a moment he was furious with himself, and then he remembered that he had, after all, spent half the lifetime since he first heard this sound trying in vain to disprove it ever existed. And though he had never disproved it mathematically and empirically, he realized he had disproved it to his heart: even in passionate pursuit of it, he would not believe it.

He watched down the track westward into the fog off the river and listened as he had listened, paralyzed, on another beach at the end of a train of footsteps. Then he went downstairs.

When he stepped onto the tracks he faltered a moment; as he had done thirty years before, he was compelled to turn and go back the way he had come. But he did not turn. He did not doubt, on the sixth day of the sixth month in the sixth year of his sixth decade, that a dream destroys what is not fulfilled; what was rare was not that he had forgotten this dream, since he was born, after all, in a country that had forgotten the dream of which
it
was born: rare was that, once having for gotten it, he had come to remember it again. Rare was that, once having feared it, he had made himself brave. The porter ran along the platform in agitation. “Don’t want to go down there, mister,” he cried, “that train may come any time. Could come today. It’s long overdue, could come in the hour. It won’t slow down when it comes, you know that.” Lake walked on down the track. The planks beneath him were sturdy but pliable from the wet air. Some thirty feet down the track he was tempted to turn and look at the huge oak coiling up through the clouds; he could still hear the porter and he thought he heard the innkeeper calling him as well, both of them shouting into the twilight they couldn’t see. It was warm out on the tracks. When Lake reached the fog he continued walking, through the vapor and splattered sunlight, the spray and heat on his face. For a while he walked out of fog; the tracks curved gently; then he walked back into it. All the time he walked the ringing, which he now understood was not in his ears but somewhere down the tracks, became louder as he came closer to it. When he had gone three miles down the track he emerged from a swath of fog out over nothing but wide endless blue river, where there was only the track extending on into the clouds ahead and a figure kneeling in the distance before him. The sound suddenly stopped. He kept walking until he reached her.