But then was then and now is now, and after the night in the back room of the library there was nothing in my head, no punch lines at all but Spanish words and a trace of the voice that carried them. And after I heard those words and the voice that carried them there was nothing but more such words; I found pages of them. I found them the next day and it didn’t seem like an extraordinary coincidence; instead it seemed like perfect. The fog that morning hung like snow on the tall empty skyscrapers of Los Angeles and the gnarled little bridges that joined them a hundred feet above the streets. Men were there bright and early to clean up the archives, slopping wet mops on the dry carnage of the previous night and smearing the floor into a rusty red, packing up the manuscripts that were streaked with blood. The idea, I suppose, was to eliminate everything but the trace of a voice speaking Spanish words in my head. I came in as someone in a gray worksuit was pulling down the offending volumes from the shelf and loading them into a box. I took the box from him and took the manuscripts from the box and put them back on the shelf. He blinked at me in stupefaction. What do you think you’re doing, I said. We have instructions to confiscate this material, he answered. I don’t give a fuck what your instructions are, I said. You can clean up the floors but you’re leaving these manuscripts. He shrugged and signaled his crew, and they picked up their mops and pails and left.
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
