Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson Page B

turned to where her voice came from. This feIt like Bell too, exactly like Bell, more like Bell than anything, in this dark room with one narrow high opening and everything cold. To hear her voice like that in the dark of a cold high cell brought back a thousand things I’d imagined when I lived in a dark cold high cell in Bell, imagining what it would be like to hear a woman’s voice, any woman’s voice, at that moment in that place. When I lived in Bell I’d found that if I could just imagine a voice, if I could just conjure that much, the rest was easy: I could make her look like anything, I could make her touch me in any way—once I had the voice in mind. Now I was standing here in the dark and I heard her voice and something ran up my back, everything feIt poised and alert and tense; and when she spoke to me she sounded Spanish in my head even though she wasn’t really Spanish at all. I knew what I was doing to myself. I knew what I was doing to her. This isn’t Bell, I said to myself. It’s cold, I said to her again. Leave it open, she said in the dark. I have to be able to hear it if it changes, that music that comes from the ground.
    She turned on a light. Why are you looking at me like that, she said. There was a rumpled bed in the corner and a small table by it. There was a box of clothes and another part of the room, shaped like an L, that was unrevealed by the light. If there were bars instead of a wall and a toilet in the corner, it would have been exactly like a cell. Show me the picture, I said.
    She shrugged and lit another roll of hemp. It’s over here with the rest of my pictures, she said, I have kind of a gallery. Some of them aren’t as good as the others, she explained. She walked across the room and brushed past me on her way to the dark part of the L, where she turned on another light.
    I stood there staring at the “gallery.”
    They were photographs, all right; the wall was covered with them. From top to bottom and side to side nothing but glossy prints, every one of them with a large black spot in the middle as if she’d taken them in the dark of night or the very dark of this room, or in the dark of her own camera, never uncovering the lens. The alcove of the L was filled with glossy black spots, all lined up in rows, each one looking exactly the same as the other.
    I turned to her. I expected she’d be standing there in her blue-and-white dress laughing with a smile that wasn’t nearly goofy enough to make it funny. But she wasn’t laughing at all, she wasn’t even looking at me. She was studying her pictures, stepping up to one or another to check it out closely, looking from one black spot to another in comparison. She shook her head. Some aren’t as good as the others, she said again.
    She took, from the third row from the bottom, the fourth black spot from the right. She handed it to me. I told you it was her, she said, looking at it as I held it in my hand, while I looked at her. That same strange feeling ran up my back again.
    Is this a joke, I whispered.
    She barely betrayed consternation at the question. But something jumped in her eyes when she said to me, You mean it’s not her? She looked at me suspiciously. Are you sure?
    I stared at the black spot in my hand and swallowed. I kept trying to think what to say. There’s nothing in these pictures, I told her quietly.
    She flinched a little. She took the picture from my hand and dropped it on the floor like an abandoned bride dropping a dead bouquet.
    It was dark when I took them, she said coolly. It was hard to sec. But I can see these pictures and it’s not my fauIt if you can’t. She went over to the wall and ran her hands along all the pictures. What is it? I said as she gazed at the black blurs. She stopped and stood back from the wall. What are you looking for, I said. After a moment she answered, What I’m looking for isn’t here. The picture I’m looking for isn’t here.
    She said, There was a tree on a