I never understood the borders; they seemed to change all the time. They were borders of land and borders of years, but wherever and whenever they were, clearly, in that time and place I was born, it was America. Whether it still is I can’t be sure. I’m not sure I want to know. About the time I was eighteen and had learned to let the telephones ring, I saw my first body of water. It was a wide river that ran to my right. I heard later it was an American river, but I knew that was a lie. I knew there was no such thing as American rivers or foreign rivers; there were only waterrivers with waterborders of waterland and wateryears. Believing such a thing was my first step in the direction of danger. I never believed in American skies either. But it never meant I did not believe in America.
When I sailed from Seattle to Los Angeles, it was a nice idea to think I was in a waterplace and watertime. But there was no fooling myself, I knew I was in the place and time I’d brought with me from Bell Pen and that America was another distance; and I’d heard the legends of L.A. clocks and how the hour hands race across their faces while the minute hands never move.
I dreamed about Ben Jarry the night after I drank with Wade in the underground grotto. It was my first dream in a while, I’d assumed that when I dreamed again it would be of a woman. In my dream Ben Jarry, with his hands bound behind him, was led down a long hall by two guards and I was led up the hall to begin my parole. I saw him from far away and we kept getting nearer and nearer, and everything in me went dead. I realized when he was only a few feet from me that he was being led to his execution. He said nothing to me, he only looked. I was fortunate that nothing in his eyes forgave me. If his eyes had forgiven me I am genuinely certain I would have killed myself; so maybe that’s fortune for you. Or maybe it’s misfortune, since forgiveness would have provoked in me the courage to exchange my time and place for that of the water around me on a trip from Seattle to Los Angeles. And yet I never actually saw Ben Jarry walking down a long hall. Ben Jarry was dead before they ever released me. He was also born in America.
I began to notice that the archives of the library’s back rooms were filled with the recorded legends of murdered men, who may or may not have actually lived. The most striking was of a man murdered in Los Angeles in a kitchen. It was late one spring night and many people saw it; he bled on the floor and did not die immediately. They caught the guy who did it. The murdered man had been born in America One. Whether he’d died in America One or America Two wasn’t clear to me from the documentation. I wasn’t sure if this was something I was supposed to keep on file or not. I wasn’t sure if this was of value to civic interests or territorial interests. I would have somehow supposed the feds preferred not leaving such information around. So I kept the manuscript myself and after a while I found myself sequestering more and more such manuscripts, usually for reasons I could never have explained. I took them up to my room in the tower in the dead of night and kept them in a box under the bed. This particular legend stated that this particular murdered man came from a family of murdered men. I would have liked to have found the legends of these other murdered men; I was studying the distinction between murders that are acts of martyrdom and those that are acts of redemption.
The word was out I let the squatters sleep in the library halls, and as the nights went by there were more of them. Live squatters in the library halls seemed to multiply with the documents of murdered men beneath my tower bed. A cop came by one afternoon and said, You’re supposed to keep these people out of here. I said, I understand perfectly, officer. There were more squatters and more cops that followed, but the cops knew they couldn’t threaten me with prison, they knew they couldn’t hurt me more than my dreams. When I taught myself to love the cacophony of the city, when I taught myself to sing along with the noise of the buildings, I began to dream less and less of meeting Ben in a long hall. Instead he became a squatter in the corner, a cut-off rope around his neck, and when he opened his mouth, out came the noise of the buildings.
Among the recorded legends of murdered men you can dream of almost anything. But it was no dream, what happened the night I woke still slumped in the chair where I’d been working in the back room, manuscripts piled around me in the dark. I didn’t know the hour but I couldn’t have slept long; I figured it was just past nightfall. None of the library lights was on; I had to do my work in the days because there was no power in this wing of the building. Only a glow from the street outside the windows made anything visible. I had that usual anxiety you feel when you fall asleep where you haven’t expected to, waking alone to a change of light. But I also had a feeling that clashed with the anxiety of being alone in spent light. I stumbled up from the chair. It’s not true that one wakes knowing someone else is in the room. No one ever wakes knowing that.
