RUBICON BEACH

the lines someone had once written about her from some other place came to me easily; I felt around in my pockets to see if I had the pages. It didn’t matter. I knew all the verses anyway; my brain was exploding. Sitting there in the cell I started doing something odd: I began composing in my head the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read but the poem after the last poem. Not a new poem, not my poem, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and page. So there I sat with the poem that came after the last poem, knowing I didn’t belong here in this jail, that I didn’t want any more jails. Knowing that now I was a free man trapped in the body of an imprisoned one.

There is a tree by a river, it is out west. A man comes to the tree and looks up and sees among its branches a nation of men; they’re living their whole lives in the tree. The man calls to them and says, What are you doing living in that tree? And after some silence, from the deepest foliage of the tree’s highest limbs, someone answers…

Suddenly I was exhausted. Suddenly I wasn’t fired anymore. I went to sleep and slept through the dawn and through the afternoon. Once I woke up to the daylight and another time I woke up to someone walking outside my cell. Both times I went back to sleep. When I woke again the sun was already beginning to go down again.

I looked up and she was standing right in front of me.

She was across the cell, and she knelt down and looked at me. She looked tired, and brown splotches of dry blood were on her arms; she looked at my hands warily, a little frightened. She was watching to see if I had the knife. I opened my hands before me and turned them to show her they were empty. I put them on my legs. She would start to say something and then stop; she would look at me and then down at the ground between us. I knew she was trying to explain it but she couldn’t. She turned her head to take in the dark jail around us.

“How did you get in here?” I said to her. “I know you weren’t here before.”

But I thought about it and now I wasn’t so sure. She could have been here, back in the shadows of the cell, when they brought me in, just as she’d been in the shadows of the archives that night. She could have been brought in by the cops while I was sleeping; once I would have jumped to such a conclusion. She cocked her head and watched my lips the way people do when they don’t understand the language. “You can’t stay here,” I said. “You understand? They found the body. They have the knife. They’ll check it out and they’ll see I couldn’t have done it.” I thought about that too and now I wasn’t so sure that made any sense to me anymore either.

The door at the end of the hall opened and closed, and she stood up. Mallory had come in to check things out, and now he stood there outside the cell looking in at me, and then looking at her. His mouth dropped a little and he got this queer look in his eyes. He looked at me and then back at the girl and said, Who the hell are you. I thought, We’re making progress. First the blood, then the knife, then the body, now the girl. Who is this, Mallory said to me. I didn’t answer. He was going to open the cell and then he thought better of it; he said, I’m getting the Inspector, and took off. He’ll be back, I said to her, with a man you don’t want to meet.

She didn’t move. I began inching to her across the floor and she watched me still wary and suspicious. I could make out small puddles in my cell now; the jail smelled like the canals outside. The windows were at street level and sometimes when the canals rose around the city, water came over the ground and poured into the jail. Steam was rising from the floor. She didn’t seem to notice it. She blinked at me and her mouth was fuller and redder in the dark; she sighed heavily. A great sense of pain seemed to go through her. Her eyes were dazed and precise ovals in the small pool at our feet, and I could actually hear the sound of her lips parting. She shook her head a bit, as though to wake herself. In the deepening blue twilight of the windows in the opposite cells I saw a candle go by; I wondered if the people of Los Angeles had come to wear fires on their shoes. The flame reared like the trunk of an animal and the puddles of the jail caught the reflection of the candle and still held it after the candle had passed. Every small wave on the surface of the puddles of water multiplied the color of the flame; a red and fiery sheen seemed to lie across the cell in the dark. She was a shadow framed by a ring of candlelight. At that moment I’d come too far down the white hourless hole of Los Angeles to give in to her so easily. Her face had smoke around it and she reached out to the bars of the cell when I caught her. I kept thinking that any minute someone would come to put out the flame of this candle, wherever in the city it was, so