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.