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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 sound of telephone calls that weren’t for me.
    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