Then I began going through the manuscripts strewn at my feet where I’d fallen asleep the night before, and there it was; and as I say, it wasn’t much of a surprise. It was natural it should have been there for me just as it was natural she should have been there in the archives or on a passing beach as seen from the deck of a boat. Of course it hadn’t been there before, and it wasn’t even a manuscript so much as a sheaf of papers; but it was ageless like all the rest of it and splattered with blood like the rest of it. In fact it was more splattered than the rest of it and that made sense too. The paper was dry and brown and the writing was faded. It was a thin collection of maybe fifty or sixty verses and poems. I sat in the chair and read them the rest of the day. Some of it was hard to make out because of the blood and the faded words. All the pieces were concerned with one subject, and anybody could recognize her immediately, the hair the color of night and the rage to match, and her mouth the color of Ben Jarry’s blood. He wrote of her eyes as having the opaque rushing depthlessness of the blind, like the color of white skies and seas meeting at some point in the distance. The author said nothing of her body, just as her body when I had seen her had said nothing of itself: it was all about a face that was ignorant of its own image. When I finished the poems I realized I hadn’t been breathing; I was high-tuned and frozen like a thief in a room with a single way out, and through the doorway of escape come the footsteps of capture. It didn’t even occur to me — well, maybe it occurred to me but not seriously — that there could ever been another woman in another place or time with raging gunpowder hair and such eyes. That these poems hadn’t been here before this dawn was insignificant, except in the ways it was perfect. Finally the poet described the rorschach of her tongue and the accent of her past, the language of topsy-turvy question marks and its languid lustful music. He never understood Spanish either but he knew it when he heard it, and he preferred it to the broken English with which she sometimes violated the prison he made for her from his dreams. If he loved her, he never said. If he made love to her, he never told of it. If he lied about her, I would have known it. But someone knew her and said so, and somewhere left me his poems of it, written of her in a place where or when the woman I had seen could never have been.
I kept the poems in the tower with my hoarded documents of murders. I was constructing my own house of conscience with the transgressions of conscience on exhibit. I found myself poring over the verses for days and nights trying to break their code. There was another week or ten days of this snowy fog; the tide was up and the city became a cluster of dark lighthouses amid moats and rivers. About five in the evening a red mist came pouring out of the sun beneath the clouds. It got so you could set your clock by the moment the sun dipped beneath the clouds and the red mist poured out of it. I talked to a boatman one evening about navigating the lagoon; I’d been watching the Hancock Park mansions out there, their doors caught in the bare black trees and the ocean snarling around them. If there was a beautiful woman with black hair to be found in Los Angeles, she was out in the mansions with the other beautiful women. Can’t take you out in this fog, mister, the boatman said carefully. But he shot me a look while coiling a rope in his hands, and the look said not everything in this town was run by Wade and the feds, including guys who sold you boxes of music and guys who took you out in boats. The mansions in the distance turned to stars as the sun went down. I slipped the boatman some money and a look of my own that meant This conversation has been strictly between us.
I left him. I made my way through the high reeds that blew back and forth between the remains of two stone pyramids, rumored to have been buiIt by Chinese barons back before the marshes shifted. They gleamed a tarnished gold in the sun, and in all the gaping holes pocked by the sea burned the fires of nomads. I headed for this bar I knew over on Main Street. By the time I got there it was dark and a few of the streetlights were on. Old boxes blew up and down the sidewalks, and scurrying across my path were what I took to be huge rats until I saw the eyes of men looking out at me from under their black coats. I had come to this bar a couple of times before; it had a red door with no knob and a window smeared with siIt. The counter inside had a total of four different brown unlabeled bottles. There was no point being very particular about what was served to you in this bar. I wouldn’t have come back after the first time except for an old man who sat at the end of the bar talking to himself. The bartender called him Raymond. Though Raymond may or may not have cared that anyone listened to him, there were always three or four who did, and it was never the same three or four. The bartender explained Raymond sailed in from the desert every day to sit in this bar and talk to himself. More interesting was the barter1der’s claim that Raymond actually used to work in the Downtown library. I have no idea whether or not this was true. I have no idea whether the bartender knew who I was when he told me this. But I tried to imagine Raymond living and sleeping in the tower where I now lived and slept. Raymond looked to me about seventy or eighty years old but I knew from firsthand experience this meant nothing; like the buildings in this city there was no telling how ancient he really was. Raymond talked of the early days. He was a walking history of the town with the chapters out of order; but it wasn’t Raymond who had the chapters out of order, it was the town itself. I sat in the bar and listened to him tell of when the Asians first settled the blank little islands of Los Angeles: Chinese warlords with palaces in the Hollywood moors who rode the plains all the way to Nevada and clashed with the huns and samurai who lived in the caves along the coast where wild children now banded in tribes. A barbaric context, Raymond rumbled to himself at the bar, but at least it was a context, until the Portuguese gamblers brought in their South American slave girls. And now there’s no context at all.
I left the bar and wandered a while, waiting for someone with some sort of official responsibility to pick me up. After half an hour I realized I’d walked to the underground grotto where I had talked to Wade and seen the woman with the camera. There I overheard sailors murmuring about a score that night in Downey. I didn’t expect to see Wade. I didn’t expect to see the woman with the camera either, but she was at the same table as before. The bartender watched me casually. I looked around and sat at another table with my eye on the other side of the room. A few people straggled in and out, and after about five minutes I got up and went over to her. Like the first time I’d seen her here, she was fooling very intently with the camera. Sitting in the ashtray on the table next to her was a cigarette and two or three burned butts. The smoke smelled like Sonoran hemp, but when she looked up at me she didn’t appear narcotized; the distracted look in her eyes was something else. She also had three glasses sitting in front of her, all of them empty; she seemed just as impervious to the liquor. There was a pause in the way she looked at me. It seemed a long time — fie or ten seconds — after I said hello that she reacted, and then she gave me the same smile she gave the others; it was goofy, which was interesting because she didn’t have a goofy face. It was a sculpted face, high cheeks and eyes far apart except thinking about it now maybe her mouth was just a little off-center and that was what made it odd. At any rate the effect of the smile was calculated to be both pleasant and unpromising, and she used it with success. It got her many drinks and no trouble.