“So you knew who I was and that I was working in the library.”
“Yes I knew that.”
“You knew who I was the last time I was here in the grotto.”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean how you know me and why you know me and why what I do and what happens to me is important to you.”
“What did you say your name was again?”
“It’s too late for that line.”
“I should have used it before,” she agreed.
“Or not at all.”
“Would you like to see the picture?”
“Would you like to tell me what’s going on?”
“No. Would you like to see the picture?”
We left the grotto together. The other guys in the bar hadn’t stopped looking at me. Up above ground she was transfixed by the sound of the buildings; it stopped her in her tracks a moment as if it reminded her of something. Is it the same, she said to me, it’s the same isn’t it. What’s that, l said. The sound, if hasn’t changed has it? she said. No it hasn’t changed, I said, and I hope it doesn’t either. It takes me a long time to get used to it every time it changes, and every time it changes the sound gets worse. I don’t agree, she said. She said, I wish it would change every single day. l wish it would change every single minute.
We went to where she lived. It wasn’t far from the canals but in the direction of the library and the center of town. This was the former industrial section of Los Angeles; the buildings were lined up like bunkers, gray and windowless except for skylights near the roof some thirty feet off the ground. Janet Dart or Dash was living in an old warehouse where the merchants of Little Tokyo used to keep rice and fish that came into the harbors. The bulb in the warehouse doorway was the only light on the street; we could see it from three blocks away. Janet Dart or Dash had a possibly important key that, at the very least, opened up the warehouse; when we stepped inside and the door slammed locked behind us, I was for a moment back in Bell. The feeling didn’t change as we went up the stairs, and it didn’t change when she unlocked another door and it slammed behind us too. Then there was a long hall with no windows she led me down, and it turned left and went about ten or fifteen yards to another door, and through that we turned left again and zigzagged right. By this time I had no idea which direction was which, and that feIt like Bell too. She unlocked another door and it could as easily have led us into another hall; but here was where she lived.
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.