“I think,” he nodded, “I prefer the noise to the heat.” He finished the drink and ordered another; he was sweating the alcohol as fast as he could consume it. His parachute shirt was turning into a white blotch.
“Any new developments on the other night?” I asked, and regretted it immediately. Initiating a conversation with him seemed a fundamental concession.
“What other night?”
I licked my lips. “The woman on the beach,” I said slowly, “with the knife.”
“What’s to develop?” he said. “No body, no head, no knife, no woman.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“You keep saying that,” he said, getting his second drink. “Nobody else has said it, just you. I wouldn’t presume to suppose what your mind is or isn’t capable of inventing. My understanding of your state of mind is such as to lead me to conclude it’s capable of anything, except an outright lie.”
“You don’t think I’m capable of an outright lie?”
He thought a moment as though to be sure, but he was already sure. “No,” he said, “no, if you could live with a lie you would have begun with lying to yourself. You have a lot to lie about. Where were you born, Cale?”
“America.”
“As I thought. America One or America Two?”
“I never could get straight on that. I think it must have been somewhere in between.”
“You’re what, forty-five? Fifty?”
“Thirty-eight or thirty-nine.”
“You look rather poorly for a man your age. I guess that’s to be expected.”
I took his second drink and threw it in the river. In retrospect it was rather comic; we both calmly watched the glass float out of sight into the tunnel. The guy behind the bar gave me a look, as did a couple of others. “Why don’t you get off my back, Inspector?” I said. “You already said something once about taking my own prison with me, don’t you think I take this sort of shit with me too? There’s nothing I can confess to you I haven’t confessed a thousand times to myself.”
“I’m not interested in your confessions,” said Wade in his cool whisper, though he was still sweating a lot, “I’m interested in either infuriating or humiliating you into staying alive and in a condition that would pass with most people as sane. You dead or crazy would be bad form from a government point of view, and my superiors don’t want it. I’m not a political man—”
“Horseshit.”
“—but I have my orders. You’re on our side now, Cale—”
“Horseshit I said. I’m not on your side. I was never on anybody’s side—”
“That was your problem.”
“Maybe and maybe not. I have to live forever with the fact that one moment of stupidity and indiscretion on my part hung a guy. But I don’t have to live with the idea that it was a political act or that because of it I’ve assumed a political role I never chose. That the powers-that-be can’t understand the difference between a personally stupid act and a politically willful one is their problem. All I have at this point is what I did and the real nature of it, and not you or anyone else is going to take that and make it something else. So leave me alone. There’s nothing to stop me from how I choose to live or die with my own particular sort of treason. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been living in a very high building these days. Your people put me there.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“If you haven’t noticed, the window of the room at the top of my high building isn’t so small.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“For people who are so worried about my life and sanity, it was careless of you to put me in such a high tower with such an adequate window, wouldn’t you say? For people who are so worried, I mean. The honor guards that follow me around have grown casual in the extreme—maybe they’re here tonight but I haven’t seen them, and I didn’t see them a few days ago when I caught that boat leaving town. That tether gets longer and longer after all. There’ve been a hundred opportunities for me to do almost anything drastic, starting with when they sailed me in the first evening.”
“You’re correct there.”
“So what it comes down to is I don’t think you people can make up your minds whether you want me alive or dead, murdered or suicided, sane or nuts or whatever, and I think that’s because for all this talk about me being on your side, you’re not so sure I’m on your side or that I was ever on your side, which makes me the most uncertain kind of individual for you to have to deal with. By your own actions or inactions, by your own contradictions, you’ve acknowledged my contradictions, and by your own insistence on my political role—a role your actions and inactions contradict—you’ve acknowledged your political role.”
“I’m lost.”
“Well don’t bother finding your way out. It doesn’t matter to me and I’m not sure you’re so lost anyway. I just don’t want to hear about how you’re not a political man. Where were you born, Wade?”
I stood up. I thought he might stand up too but he didn’t. He sat in his wet parachute looking at me and sweating but for the first time not aware of the sweat. The bartender still had nasty looks for me and the woman in the corner with the camera was gone. I put some money on the table. Wade had nothing to say, and I left the grotto and went back up into the caterwaul.
I was born in America. It was somewhere inland. At the junction of two dirt roads about three hundred yards from my house there was a black telephone in a yellow booth; sometimes walking by you could hear it ringing. Sometimes walking by you’d answer, but no one ever spoke; there’d either be the buzz of disconnection or no sound at all. By the time I was eighteen I thought I had outgrown the
