I was set up in the Downtown library to live and work, even paid a small wage for doing it. It was one of the conditions of the parole. The library was a hundred-foot tower with a point at the top and the bottom running off in four directions like the wax of a tall gray candle—catacombs of words and dust, manuscripts that nobody read stacked in corners. The library and hall of records were consolidated to serve the urban L.A. population, such as it was. Running the library, I was guaranteed to have contact with almost nobody. I don’t think it was intended I should like it in the high tower of the Downtown library. I think someone figured it would seem a bit like jail. I liked it quite a bit; after all, it seemed a bit like jail. A narrow circular stairway led up to a small white room where a narrow uncompromising bed waited in the corner. Beside the bed was a small table. There was a desk, which I had not had at Bell, at the window, and the sight from this cell was an improvement as well, no doubt of that—not the wastes of the annex but the harbor four blocks north where I came in, and to the west in the distance the swamps and the angry blare of the sun muttering through the trees. In the spring and summer I heard the prostitutes lived out there and had their men on the banks, and the vines of the lagoon glistened with the sap of women’s legs.
My duties were threefold. The first was to make sure that in the files of the library all entries beginning with the letter A always preceded those beginning with B. The second was to make sure those doors that were now locked remained locked except to guys in suits with keys. Every once in a while a guy in a suit with a key would show up at the library and unlock a door and disappear inside. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of the books on high shelves. It should go without saying that I did not have any important keys myself, at least not yet. The third duty was to vacate the premises of squatters every night. In my first three weeks I found only one woman with a red sack that I suspect contained a small human being. I left both the woman and her sack alone. “But in the morning,” I said to her, “you have to be gone.”
I never closed up the building when I went out in the evenings; I wasn’t expected to. As I said, I had no keys. It didn’t bother me that I was followed; I knew it was routine. The feds weren’t trying to fool me, they were out in the open. I wondered why they followed me since there wasn’t any place to go; a few guards at the canal gates and bridges would have kept me in town. It was possible, I guess, that someone could vanish into the cracks of Los Angeles and drop out of sight. But you still weren’t going anywhere. You still had to come out somewhere in Los Angeles. I hadn’t been in town long before I noticed that music was everywhere, the music I heard out of Chinatown that first night. It came out of the buildings, a distinct and different melody out of each one. The few people you did run into hummed a lot. The addresses of the doors were scratched and defaced; there were no signs on the street corners. Ask someone how to get to this place or that and he’d sing you the directions.
I kept asking people where the sound came from and finally someone explained, The sea, the sound was the sea, seeping in under the city and forming subterranean wells and rivers. The rivers made a sound that came up through the empty buildings, and the echoes of the buildings made a music that came out into the streets. One day you’d see a building standing upright and the next day it was entirely collapsed, the earth caved in around it, the music turning into a hiss from out of the rubble. In Chinatown they called the shops along the water the Weeping Storefronts; at night you could hear them gurgling and howling in the dark all the way from the library tower. I went there one night after checking out an isolated hardware store for a radio. The clerk asked if I was a cop. I’m no cop, I said. He thought about it a moment and looked me over and then said, No radios here. I’m a law-abiding citizen, he said. He said, You new around here or what? and I said, Sort of, and he said, Check out Chinatown, bub, but watch it. I went to two merchants in Chinatown before the third led me into a back room and asked for the fifth time if I was a cop and sold me a transistor radio. He wrapped it in paper and had me put it in my coat pocket and let me out the back door. By now I knew there was something wrong. But I had the radio and didn’t notice anyone following me for a change, so after walking
