Rubicon Beach (7 page)

At first I couldn’t see if the space was big or small; standing there I was just aware of this void in front of us. It was pitch-black and cold. Over to my right I could see one of those little narrow skylights next to the ceiling, so I knew we were at the top of the building. The window was open. The sky was black beyond it. There was the sound. It’s cold, I said, and immediately stumbled in the dark to close the skylight. What are you doing? I heard her say in the dark. Don’t do that, leave it open. I turned to where her voice came from. This feIt like Bell too, exactly like Bell, more like Bell than anything, in this dark room with one narrow high opening and everything cold. To hear her voice like that in the dark of a cold high cell brought back a thousand things I’d imagined when I lived in a dark cold high cell in Bell, imagining what it would be like to hear a woman’s voice, any woman’s voice, at that moment in that place. When I lived in Bell I’d found that if I could just imagine a voice, if I could just conjure that much, the rest was easy: I could make her look like anything, I could make her touch me in any way—once I had the voice in mind. Now I was standing here in the dark and I heard her voice and something ran up my back, everything feIt poised and alert and tense; and when she spoke to me she sounded Spanish in my head even though she wasn’t really Spanish at all. I knew what I was doing to myself. I knew what I was doing to her. This isn’t Bell, I said to myself. It’s cold, I said to her again. Leave it open, she said in the dark. I have to be able to hear it if it changes, that music that comes from the ground.

She turned on a light. Why are you looking at me like that, she said. There was a rumpled bed in the corner and a small table by it. There was a box of clothes and another part of the room, shaped like an L, that was unrevealed by the light. If there were bars instead of a wall and a toilet in the corner, it would have been exactly like a cell. Show me the picture, I said.

She shrugged and lit another roll of hemp. It’s over here with the rest of my pictures, she said, I have kind of a gallery. Some of them aren’t as good as the others, she explained. She walked across the room and brushed past me on her way to the dark part of the L, where she turned on another light.

I stood there staring at the “gallery.”

They were photographs, all right; the wall was covered with them. From top to bottom and side to side nothing but glossy prints, every one of them with a large black spot in the middle as if she’d taken them in the dark of night or the very dark of this room, or in the dark of her own camera, never uncovering the lens. The alcove of the L was filled with glossy black spots, all lined up in rows, each one looking exactly the same as the other.

I turned to her. I expected she’d be standing there in her blue-and-white dress laughing with a smile that wasn’t nearly goofy enough to make it funny. But she wasn’t laughing at all, she wasn’t even looking at me. She was studying her pictures, stepping up to one or another to check it out closely, looking from one black spot to another in comparison. She shook her head. Some aren’t as good as the others, she said again.

She took, from the third row from the bottom, the fourth black spot from the right. She handed it to me. I told you it was her, she said, looking at it as I held it in my hand, while I looked at her. That same strange feeling ran up my back again.

Is this a joke, I whispered.

She barely betrayed consternation at the question. But something jumped in her eyes when she said to me, You mean it’s not her? She looked at me suspiciously. Are you sure?

I stared at the black spot in my hand and swallowed. I kept trying to think what to say. There’s nothing in these pictures, I told her quietly.

She flinched a little. She took the picture from my hand and dropped it on the floor like an abandoned bride dropping a dead bouquet.

It was dark when I took them, she said coolly. It was hard to sec. But I can see these pictures and it’s not my fauIt if you can’t. She went over to the wall and ran her hands along all the pictures. What is it? I said as she gazed at the black blurs. She stopped and stood back from the wall. What are you looking for, I said. After a moment she answered, What I’m looking for isn’t here. The picture I’m looking for isn’t here.

She said, There was a tree on a hill, it was back east. In the no-man’s-land between Manhattan and the Maritime annex. There was a tree on the hill, and a fence behind it where he lived with the others. The branches of the tree curved into the sky like roads, and the leaves were intricate and patterned like subdivisions of houses and buildings. The bark was white. His hair mixed with the leaves perfectly in the wind. The hills in back were very white and the edge of their tops was only a line. It ran into the profile of his brow as though his face was the horizon.

I took his picture, she said, one day when he didn’t know I was there or who I was. Actually I had seen him many times before, from the other side of the fence of course, when I went to shoot the tree. He just blended the way some people blend. But I lost the picture. I don’t know how, it was just gone one morning. I went to see him the next day during visiting hours to tell him I had taken his picture and now it was gone. He came into the visitors’ room and sat behind this glass that divided us. Everything was dark and his face was like the white shadows of men’s faces you see in limousines with black windows. He kept saying Who are you, over and over, even when I’d told him. I don’t know you, he kept saying. You do now, I said. He jumped up behind the glass and ran through the door in back, and the guard looked at me. When I tried to see him again they told me he’d been transferred to another place, but that was a lie. I waited for him to get out.

He’s coming soon, she said to me, turning from the black pictures. When I hear the sound from the ground, I know he’s already here.

The thing about him, she said, raising a finger intently, was that when I took his picture that afternoon on the hill by the prison, it was without a flash in the very late afternoon. I knew I didn’t need a flash, the light was in his face. And I’ve been looking ever since for the picture that doesn’t need a flash and that has its own light. I know if I keep taking pictures in the night, his face will show up like a fire.

 I crossed the three feet between us and I took her by her wrist: she jerked in my grasp. You’re lying, I said. She looked up at me frightened, and when I pressed her against the wall she seemed to sink into it. Her face was inches from mine and she was watching the hollow of my neck, not my eyes. You’re lying, I said again. Are you trying to tell me you took all these pictures without a flash? What about the pictures in that back room of the library, what about that night with all the cops and all the blood? Are you trying to tell me you took all those pictures in the dark? She shook her head a little, then nodded a little. I shook her by her wrist and behind her on the wall some pictures loosened and fell; she stepped on them, trying to move with me when I turned her by the wrist. If, standing this close to her, I should close my eyes, I wondered if she could speak Spanish, I wondered if her hair would tum black; now she wasn’t looking at the hollow of my neck but at my eyes. With her free hand she fingered the top button of her dress. Is that what you’re trying to tell me, I said, that you took all those pictures in the dark? But I saw you that night, remember. I saw you because the flash of your camera kept going off in my face and it was driving me crazy. l kept thinking it was a storm, I kept thinking there was lightning in the room. It was that kind of light, like the sort you see only in the night, and I know that sort of light, I’ve had many nights without any light, and when you’ve had those nights you don’t forget when you’ve seen such a light—

And then I stopped. Not because I was babbling but because of the nights and the lights forgotten. And I saw it again, right then, that light, not in that room but in my head.

In my head, I was standing on the boat. In my head, the girl with the black hair was standing on the beach. The man was kneeling at her feet. In the light of the moon was another light, a flash of something soundless and instant, that went off between his face and mine. Then I saw the blade in her hand. Then in my head I was standing in the back room of the library archives and there was a glow through the library windows from the street. There were cops all around and Ion Wade standing in front of me. Looking just over Wade’s shoulder I saw Janet Dart or Dash with her camera. And just beyond the cops and Wade and Janet Dart, I saw her in the corner, hidden as deep in the dark as she could bury herself. I saw all this in my head as though I were looking at the enlargement of one of Janet Dart’s photographs, sharpening its background definition; and Janet Dart was right, some faces have their own light. Her hair was blacker than the corner itself so that only her face was a pale haze, and only her eyes shone with the glint of the weapon that caught the glow through the windows and cut me across my eyes.

She was there, I whispered. I let go of Janet Dart or Dash, who dropped her hands and rubbed her wrists. She was there all along, right in front of us, I said.

Of course, said Janet Dart.

I turned from the gallery of black spots and walked to the wall that would have been bars had this been Bell Pen. I waited in the middle of the room for a long time.

I thought, How could we have not seen her? Cops all over the room and she was right there in the corner; how could we have not seen her? But in fact I had seen her. I knew I had seen her because I could see her now, back there in the corner, flashing the knife in my face. And if she had not wanted me to see her, why didn’t she put the knife beneath her dress, why was she there at all? Why was she watching me and what was she waiting for me to do? How was it I never noticed anything of her but her knife and her face, not her dress or her feet or her very presence in a room filled with many people?

I turned to Janet. Of course? I asked.

Of course, she said again. I told you she went back in the library after I found her on the steps in front.

So you saw her there too, I said.

I have her picture, said Janet. She pointed at the black photos. But it’s not the picture I’m looking for, she said. For Janet Dart’s camera it was not the face with its own light. Did you think you would find it that night, I said, the picture you were looking for?

Yes, said Janet.

Because she was there? I said.

Because you were there, said Janet.

But I’m not the one you’re looking for, I told her.

You’re the one everyone’s looking for, she told me.

I left her. As I walked out the door I thought I heard her say, from a far place, She has such a hold on you. Whoever she is, it’s such a hold. I spent half an hour trying to find my way down to the street through all the zigzagging halls of the warehouse. Doors locked behind me. At some point all the doors lock behind you instead of before you. Every place has its point of no return. All the way back to the library I was followed by cops.

I was born in America. ‘Thirty-some years later a storm blew in from Sonora to lash the far outpost of L.A. where I lived in a tower that held the legends of America’s murdered men. The rain beat against my home. My tower rose like a secret passage into the maelstrom. At night I read the white maps of a woman as charted by a phantom poet, and in my head I carried the black spot of her photograph. The storm lasted five days and the water that ran through the streets carried doors torn from their hinges. The peaks of the waves took the form of birds, white foam extending into wings until wild white gulls were everywhere, flying into each other and falling into mauled heaps on the water. When the storm had passed, it took with it the fog that clotted the bay, and when I rose from five days and nights of rain and poems and black portraits and looked from the top of my tower into the blue city below, the sea itself was black. Thick white rain had fallen leaving a black smoking sea. The trees were bare and leafless, cold bald amputees after the white rain, and from the top of my tower Los Angeles was a seashell curling to its middle. The roof of the shell was beveled gray, the ridges pink where the clouds edged the sky, and as with all shells there was this dull roar, you know the roar, the sound of the sea they told you when you were a child.

I was born in America: and I have to finish this soon. I have this feeling of urgency, that penuItimate flush before the end, the last rush of blood to the face and light to the eyes. I once supposed I was bleeding in order to bleed myself dry; now I wonder if it was the flow itself I loved. Now I wonder if it was the spilling itself that held me speechless. It isn’t that my voice is failing; rather, it almost sounds familiar, the voice of a dead relative from the bedroom closet, from back behind his clothes and shoes I’ve been wearing since he left. I won’t delude myself that integrity can be reborn or that passion can grow young. But the maps I’ve stolen from the archives navigate more than just the face of a woman. And if she was there in the corner of the archives that night as I believe, then she knows it too, and she’s waiting for me with the light of her face and her knife.

The evening the storm cleared I went out to the lagoon. In the twilight and the smoke from the sea the mansions sat in a green and silver cloud threaded by a tangle of empty trees. I found the boatman I’d talked to the week before. I’ll put you out there buddy, he said, but I won’t hang around to bring you back. We run into any feds I turn right around, I don’t need trouble with them. Feds go out there much? I said. Every once in a while, he said. It’s not the girls they care about, the girls have got their system. It’s the others, the ones they don’t know. Guys like you, said the boatman, guys with their own reasons. The feds hate people with their own reasons.

As we got closer to the mansions he told me of the pimps who used to live in town and bring the men out there. The pimps had operated under the assumption that they kept the girls out there in the lagoon like animals in a wildlife sanctuary. As usual, such a mistaken assumption, said the boatman, leads to other mistaken assumptions. The girls put up with it for a while. Then one day someone noticed there weren’t any more pimps around. They were found by the cops on the banks of the Rossmore Canal, one of the three main waterways of Hancock Park. An entire beach of pimps, every last one with his throat slit, lined up along the canal, said the boatman, gulls perched on their foreheads shitting. The girls dawdling under the trees twirling their hair and smoking cigarettes, watching bored as the pimps were hauled away by their feet. Not a witness in the bunch of course.