Rubicon Beach (2 page)

At the library I closed the doors and slid the boIt without checking for squatters first. If there were squatters tonight, room and board was on me. I read at my desk awhile and went to bed. Not long after turning out the light there was a dull thud in the distance, so quiet I might not have noticed but for the way the tower shook. It lasted only a few seconds but I lay there half an hour gripping the sides of the bed so hard I could have broken my hands. Then I got up and took a shot of brandy and got back in bed and read some more and tried to fall asleep. There was the sound of sirens and shouting. Finally the music put me out—the city music, not my radio—and I noticed it was different music, the sound of the buildings in the distance had changed. The last thing I thought of was all those blind people watching me across the water.

Two or three nights later I was sitting at my desk and looked up and there was someone in the doorway. He was huge black man, a little under six and a half feet tall; a few more inches of him on each side and he wouldn’t have fitted the space in the wall. His hair was cut close to his head and speckled with gray, and his flat face looked as if it were pressed against a window, except there was no window. There was a step up into my room and he took it. He made no apologies for his sudden appearance, even though I’d been visibly startled. His voice was much softer than I would have thought. Are you Cale? he said. He might have been there to kill me for all I knew; that was a serious possibility. I was a little relieved that it mattered to me much. By now I thought I didn’t care who killed me; it had been months since I cared about being free or being alive enough to know freedom. Now, seeing this black monster, I cared a little, at least until the scare in me died. Then I didn’t care again. Let’s assume I am, I said, then what happens?

“Then,” said the monster, “I come in and have a seat.”

“You’ve already done half that.”

His head barely cleared the low ceiling of the tower. He admired the view of the harbor. He took in the bed and the desk and the small radio I’d gotten in Chinatown and then me. He sat on the bed and the mattress wheezed under him. “Mister Cale,” he said in this distant voice, “my name is Jon Wade. I’m a federal inspector. Would you like to see my credentials?”

“Sure.”

He took credentials out of his coat and handed them to me and I handed them back. “I came in from the seaboard last night,” he said, putting the credentials away, “on a special assignment. I thought that while I was here, we should get to know each other.”

“What for?”

“I will be seeing you and you will be seeing me. It’s an empty little town and we’re bound to run into each other. The police, as I think you’re aware, have you under surveillance. Personally I would rather use them for other things. My understanding of your case is such as to lead me to conclude surveillance isn’t especially necessary. My understanding of your case is such as to lead me to conclude you’re not going anywhere. I believe you’re a man who takes his prison with him—I think you follow me. But for me to take these officers oil your detail requires you and I getting our signals straight. Because as I think you know, or as you should know, part of that surveillance is not just keeping you on a long tether—”

“Not that long.”

“Not that long, all right, part of that surveillance is not just keeping you on a tether, but also making sure that, for the time being, for as long as the government chooses to keep you on parole out here in the territories, you do not get your brains smeared across any random urban edifice.”

“Does the government really care?” I said.

“Well, Mister Cale,” he said, sinking across the width of the bed into the wall, “it does and it doesn’t, you know. It does and it doesn’t. At some point it’s not going to give a good God damn where your brains are; the public-relations value of their whereabouts is short-lived. But for the moment the government thinks you’re a fine example. It likes the idea of a man who sells out his compatriots.” He stopped and waited for me to react. He shrugged. “My own understanding of your case is such as to lead me to conclude that the government cares more about your welfare than you do yourself.”

“If I’m ready to let someone blow my brains out, there’s not much you can do about it.”

“Exactly my own feelings,” Wade said. He laboriously unfolded himself from the bed, standing in midroom and fairly filling it. “But my superiors still want you alive for a while, and I don’t want to expend the energies of the local officials keeping my superiors happy. So I’m asking you to be a little careful, not embarrass me either by getting yourself taken out or by violating any of the local ordinances. For instance,” he said, watching the radio on my desk, “there is a local ordinance against radios. A misdemeanor of course, but in the case of a felon on parole even a misdemeanor is a lot of incrimination.”

“I didn’t know about the ordinance,” I started to say.

Wade raised his hand. “Don’t.” Watching the radio he said, “I’m sure you’ve broken no laws. If I knew you had broken any laws I’d have to arrest you, and it’s tedious. I have other things. If I knew you had a radio I’d have to take you in. Please, don’t. I know that I can assure my subordinates that your excursion into Chinatown the other night had nothing to do with any radio. If you had bought a radio,” he said, still staring at it, “by now you would have known enough to deep-six it in a canal somewhere. That makes life easier for me and for you.”

“It’s silly,” I said.

“We live in silly times,” he said. “In a town where music is the topographical map, radios are compasses of anarchy. The music of the earth is legal and the music of men is not. I don’t make the fucking laws.” He said, “Get rid of the radio, Cale,” Then he turned and went to the door. He said, “It’s enough I have to deal with guys messing with the music of the earth. You feel the shaking the other night?”

“I thought it was a quake.”

“That’s fine,” he said, “we’d as soon everyone thought it was a quake. Someone set off an underground explosion a couple miles northwest of here out on the peninsula. Redirected one of the underground rivers. Now the whole section of town other side of the harbor’s got a new melody. It’s a genuine subversive fuck-up. You want to tell me about silly? Of course my superiors on the seaboard think it’s political, because they think everything’s political. Because everything is political. So they wonder about you, of course. You’re not setting off underground explosions, are you Mister Cale?”

“Not lately.”

“Not of the geological sort anyway,” said Wade. “Well, all right. Consider yourself grilled and interrogated on the matter. My own understanding of your case is such as to lead me to believe it will suffice.” He paused a moment, looked at me sideways and nodded a bit and walked out. The dark of the library blotted him up; soon he was a tan coat floating in space. Then the dark of the library blotted up the tan coat too.

After I’d been in Los Angeles a month it seemed like a long time. Not forever: forever would preclude the days in a metal truck, and I hadn’t been anywhere so long as to forget those. Forever in Los Angeles would have precluded the experience of my conscience, the life of which stayed with me like the flashes of previous incarnations. Jon Wade did not come up to the tower again. It was the nature of the way and time I had been here that every such incident became a landmark. I left the library more and more. I don’t think the police appreciated it, but nobody said anything. Their understanding of my case was such as to lead them to conclude I was beyond the persuasion of threat; and they were right. Large black birds covered the town streets in malevolent flocks. The canal waters were always filled with artifacts—chairs and framed pictures, masks of gold leaf and music boxes in which cartoon characters danced behind small windows. The sound of the buildings had indeed changed since the night my tower shook. Blasted abandoned eateries and black doorless taverns gurgled and hissed in a new key. To most of the town’s population, which was largely old men and frightened indigents, it made life all the more disorienting. For myself it was one of the things that made a long time seem less like forever.

Another little landmark in my routine came about four or five clays after Wade’s appearance. A couple of guys from the town hall came to open up some of those locked rooms in the library. I was up in the tower when it happened. They poked around a while and then came up and brought me down to outline some of the new duties of my parole. Someone had decided it was a good idea for me to go through all the old manuscripts on the shelves, read them and file them and offer some estimations as to their value. Value to whom, I asked. Value to civic interests, value to territorial interests, they said. Value to the annexes or the government. Of course it was clear to me at once that none of this could have any value at all. I was supposedly a political subversive; if this were work of value, why would they have me sorting it out for them? I was right in thinking these people would not be giving me any important keys to important rooms; this was work to keep me occupied. I took the keys and thanked them for their profound trust in me. One of them laughed and said, That’s all right, Cale, you’re on our side now, right? Then the keys feIt like the proverbial silver in my fingers, one piece for each day of a month that fell short—by virtue of what silver buys—of a redemptive foreverness, forevermoreness.

I am thirty-eight, thirty-nine. I look in a mirror and it tells me I’m fifty, fifty-five. My hair is the same color it has been since I was seventeen but my beard is white and my eyes are red. How did I get so damned tired. When I was young I despised those who gave up so easily, I couldn’t imagine anyone could ever feel that old and that tired. In a musicless tower above an empty waterworld I grieve for what I feIt and how much I feIt it. Once I supposed I recognized my own voice when I spoke to strangers; it was something to know your own voice, to know it as well when you finished speaking as when you began. How is it I’m so old now I don’t know my voice anymore. How is it I’m so exhausted by what I once believed that the things I love affront me with the effort to love them. Prison was a good place to be tired. There I taught my conscience the art of fatigue, as a consequence of which passion and integrity died immediately, without protest.

I went walking that night, the day they gave me possibly important keys to possibly important rooms. I took the radio with me as well as the keys, zigzagging the streets eastward past Broadway. The city became deader and deader until I reached the quarter before the canal, where I found the rare sights and sounds of a half dozen bars going and guys laughing; I realized I’d been in L.A. a month and not heard anyone laugh. I didn’t go in any of the bars but instead to the boat landing where I caught a boat going down canal. All this way no cops followed me, there was none of the usual company. A big mistake on their part, I thought. Let down your guard once and those like myself who are genuinely depraved will rush to betray a trust: they can’t betray it fast enough. The canal would come out on the coast near San Bernardino and then the boat would drift down to Riverside. If I were still alive the day after tomorrow I might then get another boat and slip into port somewhere near the Yuma-Sonora annex. On the deck of the boat this night I feIt the last of me fading away. I was barely aware of the land gliding by or the cold of the wind, or of voices around me talking about the pirates hiding in the Downey coves waiting to take cargo of value. I had possibly important keys in a coat pocket, I had contraband radio in the other. I might cast one or both overboard. I might or might not remove them from my pockets before doing so.

The water beneath me in the dark, it was gray and windowless too as we continued sailing out of the city. I just stood with my back to the broken bitter skyline fumbling with this stuff in my pocket, keys in one hand and the radio in the other, wondering which it was going to be. Clouds soared by overhead like the evil black birds in the streets at noon, and then there was nothing but the moon, mammoth and skull white, laughing light all over the boat and the riverbanks. The voices around me stopped; I feIt stricken by the stillness. No one else was in sight. I can go now, I thought. The banks were bare and distant for about fifty yards up canal until the bend ahead, where a small beach jutted outward. I stood watching the approaching bend and pulled the small radio from my pocket; I turned it on for a moment and then off. I looked to the right and left and behind me on deck, and the boat reached the bend and began to steer southward, out into larger water, leaving Los Angeles behind once and for all. On the jutting beach were two people.